Trial separation

In seven years of marriage, my wedding ring has come off only once. Not after a row, or in a pathetic attempt to impress another woman, but through medical necessity on holiday in Paris.

It was in September 2008 at the end of a nightmare voyage; there had been a fire in the Channel Tunnel the week before and it was touch and go whether we were even going to be able to get to Paris at all. St Pancras had been crawling with people, in that disorganised chaos Britain seems to specialise in whenever there is the faintest hint of travel disruption, and we had wound up sitting on the parquet floor, leaning against our cases and waiting for an announcement, for something, anything to happen. All around us people were milling around in a state of frustrated disarray. There’s one photo of me Kelly took on that afternoon. In it, I look like I’m trying very hard to put a brave face on things and even somebody who didn’t know me from Adam would be able to tell I was failing, too.

Once safely aboard the Eurostar, our suitcases crammed in an emergency cupboard which had been opened especially to deal with the unexpected extra demand, the stress started to ebb away and our optimism had fully returned as we scuttled from the train and out into the Francophone cacophony of Gare du Nord. All that remained was to make our way to our destination, criss-crossing the Metro lines like experts until the Parisian network spat us out at the Place de la Bastille, the whole city going about its business all around us. The indifference of hundreds of French men and women getting on with their lives, totally unaware of us, felt like an enormous welcoming hug in a way it never would have in London.

We hauled our cases to the top of the stairs - the Metro in Paris is very short on escalators for some reason - and rattled our way down the rue Saint-Antoine, stopping every few minutes to gaze wistfully at the macarons and pastries in window after window. We had booked an apartment on rue Beautrellis, a stone’s throw from the Places des Vosges, on the very edge of the Marais. We reached the spot and stood outside the huge bright blue double doors, taking in our surroundings. The street was lined with tall, beautiful houses, a boutique here and there and the tiniest wine bar right opposite us. Even in the sunlight of a late Monday afternoon, people were sitting outside - drinking, chatting, making me want to be there too.

The letting agent turned up minutes later on a small rasping moped, handed us the keys and took us inside, into a dark courtyard with a single tree in the middle and up some perilous, winding stairs in the block in the corner. At the very top was our residence for the next week; a bright, quiet bedroom, a lounge with a breakfast bar and kitchenette and a little bathroom with sunshine flooding in from the skylight above. He showed us where everything was, got our signatures, wished us a very happy holiday in excellent English and then he was gone, his footsteps echoing up as he tapped his way down the spiral staircase.

We were in heaven, and once we had unpacked, we went exploring. Before long we were sitting in one of my favourite cafes in the heart of the Marais, planning the time ahead; where we would go, what we would do, where we would eat. The first night of a holiday is always the best, in my experience, because you have all that potential waiting to be realised. Every meal is going to be perfect, every photograph in focus, every shop full of delights you can take home with you and every wineglass full of wonders. So we drained some wineglasses of their wonders, sat grinning in the dark wood-lined comfort of my favourite Parisian restaurant and rejoiced at all those possibilities waiting to be unlocked.

It wasn’t until the next day that I realized something was wrong. Maybe I had bashed my hand hauling a suitcase from one place to another, maybe it was aggravated by the constant vibration of dragging wheeled luggage across seemingly endless cobbles, but my ring finger had swollen up to twice its normal size. For reasons I’ve never been able to fathom, it was the only one so afflicted; huge and puffy, it stuck out more than a sore thumb ever could. It took five minutes of swearing and slaving over a cold tap, slathering my hand with washing up liquid, before the ring finally eased free and sat gleaming in my palm. I had been worried – I never deal with stress well – imagining a scene where they had to saw it off in some alien hospital, or worse still remove my finger before the ring cut off my circulation completely.

"You’re just going to have to stop wearing it until your finger goes down." said Kelly. "Technically that means that, for now at least, we’re living in sin."

The rest of the week was pretty much perfect. Kelly took to life in Paris like a duck to water. She would get up before me, grab the outsized basket from underneath the coatstand and wander to the bakery on the corner, queuing behind the hungry builders to ask for a fresh baguette in French. I imagine it was as every bit as cute to them as a pretty woman asking you something in English with a French accent can be. I would come out of the shower to find her singing in the kitchen, cutting off a slice and covering it in butter, or maybe eating it with a thin white sliver of the brebis cheese we’d bought at the market the day before. Everything was ideal: everything, that is, except for the imprint on my swollen finger where my ring ought to have been.

I remember when I first started noticing that finger on women. Depressingly, it was early on - after my degree I worked for a year in the law library, my first and only step on the ladder of publishing. My friend Dave was still in Oxford too, finishing his degree, and as I tried to adjust to the uneasy void between town and gown I came to realize that women in the real world had something women at university had not, something you needed to keep your eye out for, namely a matrimonial status. The hot petite brunette behind the desk at the library had a ring on what Dave and I referred to as "the forbidden finger"; she was the first but she was by no means the last. It felt uncomfortably like growing up when I started checking that finger out early on, working out whether it was worth bothering.

Of course, Kelly had a ring on that finger too when I first met her, but by then I was far too far gone to care. That’s a different story altogether.

I didn’t realize quite how much I would miss my ring until it was gone. Walking round Paris without it, I wondered whether it seemed like Kelly and I were having an affaire, or whether she liked me but just not enough to make an honest man of me. I’d made jokes in the past about surreptitiously removing it before going to a nightclub, and I knew I unconsciously covered it with my other hand when talking to an attractive stranger for the first time, but not wearing it still seemed strange. Besides, didn’t I still look married? I had, after all, the face of a man used to deferring to somebody else, or at least asking them for advice before deciding to ignore it. The dent round my finger looked like the opposite of a ring, the absence of a ring, and knowing there was clinching proof of my good fortune hidden back at the apartment somehow didn’t help.

This last week couldn’t have been more different from those seven halcyon days in Paris.

Off work ill, I pad round the silent flat in my pyjamas alternating between being sick, worried, worried sick and sick with worry. I look at myself in the mirror, wondering why I don’t look as ill as I feel, fearing the day when one day I will. The blinds stay down, and so do my spirits. Staying in the cloying cocoon of the bed until well past noon, I wonder whether this is the way it will all end, and when. The doctor talks about more tests and I try not to look as frightened as I am. The only thing that hasn’t stayed down is the food, and there is nothing more unnatural than me being scared of food. My throat has been so poorly that the fridge might as well have been full of knives.

I drift fitfully from the laptop to the television to a book to a computer game, unable to concentrate on anything except how ill I am. But to give in to the thoughts of illness would mean being pulled down completely, maybe never to come back up. The bedroom is washed in shades of dingy grey, and it becomes unusual to see my face in daylight. Getting dressed, or leaving the flat, seems pointless.

She comes back from work on Tuesday bright and chirpy laden with shopping. But first things first, she plonks the bags on the kitchen floor and folds me into the hugest embrace. I feel like the flat is home for the first time that day and then - because she will not let me mope or give in - I help her unpack everything.

"I got lots of things you can eat, soft things. Look, two types of ice cream!"

I virtually never eat ice cream, it is a forbidden treat. I allow her a wan smile, but we both know that there’s a bigger one underneath the surface trying to escape, if only I will let it. And she is determined to coax it out, even if I don’t enjoy it. She likes a challenge; it explains a great deal.

"And soup – three sorts of soup. I thought you could have these while you’re at home this week. I picked them especially, they all seem like your sort of thing."

Something odd is happening, because I find I’m almost hungry.

"Are these stuffed vine leaves?"

"Yes, I remembered how much you love them. I thought you could have them for lunch one day, they’ll be nice and easy on your throat too. And here – scallops. I thought we could have them for dinner one evening."

"A Jilly Cooper book?" I say, noticing the top of a stack on the coffee table that had not been there an hour ago.

"Yes, I found one I don’t think you have. After all, all your novels look so depressing, you don’t want to be reading one of those this week. I got you Heat magazine too, something trashy to read in bed."

Funny, we have been married for seven years and even now I would feel silly about her knowing just how moved I am. She gives me a little grin.

"Go on, make me a cup of tea."

Later that night, her mother rings and as part of an epic natter Kelly ends up telling her all about my ailments. While this goes on, I am standing in the kitchen, stirring the bolognese sauce and trying hard to look forlorn, something which seems to be getting more difficult with every passing minute. As she approaches the end of the conversation, my wife shuffles into the room and with the telephone in one hand she beckons me towards her with the other.

"What’s this in aid of?"

"I have instructions to give you a hug from mum, come here."

So I do, and she holds me, and I swear I can hear Rose’s voice in the earpiece saying "Love you!" though, weak with hunger, I might have dreamt that part. And maybe I am fooling myself but it feels different somehow. It feels like family. Later on, I’ll joke that it was a turning point and I suppose it sort of was, but only as the latest in a long line of small but significant kindnesses.

So this week couldn’t have been more like that week in Paris, except for one thing; on a starvation diet for days, the weight has fallen off me and my wedding ring no longer fits. It dangles near my knuckle, and even a slightly energetic bout of jazz hands would easily transport it right to the end of my finger and beyond. But I understand some things a lot better than I did a couple of years ago; this time I won’t take it off, even if I have to walk around with my fist clenched until the day it is snug again. Without it, I wouldn’t be me. Without it, I’d be somebody I never want to be.

The umbrella metaphor

Some things are worth doing because, even if they are underwhelming, it’s somehow enough to be able to tell people that you’ve done them. A good example of this came up when I stayed in Istanbul at Christmas: We popped over to Asia for lunch. However forgettable the experience might be, it’s something you have to do just so you can say that you have. So on our final full day in the city we walk the tram line to Eminonu, where the tall ships set off to all manner of places we won't have time to explore. We get on the ferry and watch the grand palaces, hotels and office blocks on either side of us recede until it is just the slate grey Bosphorus and the seagulls following along the side of the ship, seemingly effortless, racing us to another continent.

Once there, of course, it feels no different. The markets have the same seafood, the traders are cooking the same fresh mackerel sandwiches as you come out of the ferry building and the hustling has the same good-natured character. We sit outside and have lunch on the main drag, and the awnings are pulled out to cover us as the first rain we have seen comes down in light, drizzly threads. The people at the table behind me are American, their accents cutting through the otherness, and Asia feels much like any tourist destination. But I have been to another continent for lunch, and it’s not often you can say that.

Back on the European side of the city we trek back to the hotel, again following the tram lines, and I find myself struck by how different Istanbul is to home. I’ve probably seen one or two Starbucks in the whole city, while my home town has four, all within a short stagger of one another. In addition, as in so many European cities, food in Istanbul seems to be a part of life in a way it never is back in England.

In Paris you see people wandering to or from work with a baguette under one arm, usually tearing off chunks and eating them as they go. You can’t pick up a drink in Seville or Granada without being offered something to eat with it, often for free. And here in Istanbul there are little carts by the side of the street at regular intervals. Some sell a hot, gloopy, milky drink smelling of wintry cloves, some offer freshly squeezed pomegranate juice. Many sell simits, the Turkish equivalent of bagels, a quoit of dough more unyielding than a porn star’s breasts and also, to perfect the simile, covered in seeds. And what does Reading have? A hot dog van that smells of death and a kiosk on Broad Street with a recorded voice shouting Lovely hot doughnuts, nice and fresh! again and again. From the smell, the doughnuts are probably about as fresh as the recording.

Other carts, always with the same striped red and white roof, sell even more bizarre ephemera. You can get your name written in Arabic, pick up some beads or - strangest of all, this - buy a Spirograph. I must have lost track of the number of street vendors demonstrating them, whizzing up those otherworldly jumbles of curves and lines that remind me of childhood. It is as if a spiv from 1977 had picked up a job lot and jumped in a time machine bound for Istanbul in 2010 to make his fortune. Nothing seems more incongruous. I wonder if, in ten years’ time, they will have discovered Transformers. And yet they have baked goods on every street, food everywhere and fresh fish sandwiches at the harbour for next to no money, so who am I to say they’re unenlightened?

There is another set of stalls by the mosque next to the docks. The pigeons flock there in droves, and the dour women in their booths sell birdseed by the plate, dipping into a bright red bucket and placing it on blue and white striped paper plates. They are glum opportunists, all chunky knitwear and floral skirts and patterned headscarves, nothing matching with anything. When I take my camera out, one of them flees the booth and does not return until I have put it away.

I think of the camera-shy seed seller again as we walk back through Sultanahmet and have to pause briefly at a street corner, obstructed by a local taking a photograph of her boyfriend outside an “Authentic Irish Pub”. More incongruity, and it makes me smile. I have been waxing lyrical over all those differentiators that must seem very ordinary to any Istanbul resident, and here they are having their photos taken outside the sort of cheap and tacky bar that are ten a penny in every town and city back home. It just goes to show that what is exotic is entirely relative.

The reason I am reminded of the lady in the booth is that hers is quite an uncharacteristic approach to portrait photography by the Turks. I’ve seen plenty of Turkish tourists on this trip, and one of the things that really endears them to me is the way they photograph. All around the city - by the Blue Mosque, in the grounds of Topkapi Palace, outside Hagia Sophia, the approach has been the same. They appear to like having their picture taken, or at least they don’t mind, but you shouldn’t expect them to smile. Instead you get glowering, or looking away, or better still catalogue model poses. They are happy to look down the lens, but only on the proviso that they seem to be sulking at it. And yet their companions never ask them to smile, or say cheese, or gee them up in any way; it is almost taken as read that this is an acceptable approach to somebody waving a camera in your direction. In this, as in so many things, they are a people after my own heart.

After the shutter has clicked and the scene has dispersed, I turn round quickly and prepare to cross the road.

“Steady!” says Kelly, “You just shook water from your umbrella all over me.”

I look, and it’s true. Kelly is not carrying an umbrella - her coat has a hood and she has decided to take her chances. I can see extra spatters of water over her coat, all because I turned round so quickly.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s okay, but you always do this. You’re so thoughtless at times!”

“There’s a metaphor in this, isn’t there?”

“What do you mean?” she says, sounding apprehensive.

“Well, the only way you ever get wet is because of my incompetence. The rain is like depression. You seem to be immune to it, but you still end up soaking up some of mine. You’re happy all the time, and the only thing that affects that is all the stuff that gets deflected off me.”

I’ve been feeling sorry for myself for a while by this stage, so it seems strangely appropriate to say this. Kelly looks at me, and I can’t pick out what the expression means. There’s a small amount of bafflement in there, along with some wry amusement and something else. It’s probably affection, or maybe sympathy, or perhaps it’s both. I suppose if you summed all of that mixture of adjectives up in a single word, you would probably call it love.

Then she smiles.

“Come on, you. Let’s get back to the hotel, and then we can both dry off.”

Two years

I remember two years ago today, on a Saturday evening, I sat in the chair next to the window in the front room, in front of a blank white screen, and I wrote my first ever blog post. It is the only thing I remember about that evening, and I only remember it because I have that first blog post as a permanent record that, whatever I did or didn’t do, whatever I had for dinner that night, whatever Kelly and I got up to that day, I wrote something. The first thing. Back then I wouldn’t have realised that that’s one of the powerful things about writing things down; it lends them the appearance of truth.

When I realised the two year anniversary was approaching I had all sorts of plans about what I could do to celebrate. At first, I was going to put up some of my favourite quotes from the blog, as a sort of retrospective, but I decided against that - mainly because the feedback I got was that it would be a self-indulgent thing to do (even by the admittedly self-indulgent standards of blogging in general). So that idea fell by the wayside, and I went back to the drawing board.

My next idea was that perhaps I could do a director’s commentary of my first ever post. I had that idea a while back and then to my horror somebody did it on a blog I read from time to time, so I shelved it. Picking it up again, I found the idea lasted about as long as it took me to read my first ever post. It’s okay, I suppose, but I don’t think it would stand up to much commentary; reading it back now, it seems like it was written by someone quite different to me.

Looking at it I’m also struck by how breezy it is, how breezy a lot of the early posts on the blog were. I wrote every day, on some occasions more than once, and it was very much a running commentary on what my life was like. And at first nobody was reading - some friends and family, but nobody beyond that. Then, from nowhere, readers started to appear and even now I don’t really know how they all found me.

Of course, a lot of the people who read the blog then don’t read it now, or do and don’t comment, in much the same way that some of you reading this now might not be doing so at some point in the future. That transience is strange yet reassuring, but that would never have occurred to me sitting in that chair two years ago deciding what to say and how to kick everything off. I don’t think I had any idea what the two years would hold, in terms of writing or indeed anything else.

It feels in a lot of ways like the longest two years of my life, given that so much has changed in that time. The shape of my life, my family, my friends and my health are all so different now. My world today has a big space in it which is filled by writing and putting ideas into words, such an important space that I wonder what I spent all that time on several years ago. I have a theory that time is a lot like money - unless you think hard about how (and on whom) you spend it you find you’ve frittered it away without even noticing and you haven’t got any left. So I feel glad that I invested it in this.

I’m also surprised by how much ground I’ve covered in the last two years. First there was the “here’s what I did today” phase and then there was “here’s a funny story from my past” phase, but those probably only took me through the first six months and after that things started to change. Or maybe I did; I can’t even put my finger on when that shift took place, but if you’d told the 2009 me the sorts of things he would end up writing about I’m not sure he would have believed you. I feel a certain kinship with him, only two years but thousands of experiences ago, with - in the nicest sense - absolutely no idea what he was doing.

What I realise, writing this, is that all my plans for celebrating this arbitrary anniversary are wrong because they’re fundamentally back to front. They are all about me when this should be about you. So thank you - thank you for reading and coming back, whether you’ve been doing it for weeks, months and years. Thanks for keeping me going and being encouraging. There have been times when I needed more encouragement than others - I still have a note in my notepad, scrawled on a train back from Oxford some time last year, which was the beginning of a post saying I was quitting blogging. I hope it’s the only post I never finish.

Thanks too to anyone who has sent me an email, mentioned me in a post, given me an award, sent me a recipe, sent me fanmail, visited a blog I mentioned as part of “That Was The Week That Blogged” or picked up any of the ideas in here like 100 Words or the “Seven things” meme I ran last year. Thanks too, to anybody who's commented. I'm very lucky with the comments I get, and all the stories and threads in those comments are every bit as much a part of my narrative as anything I’ve written. Knowing that we are all part of a community makes me feel oddly moved - in fact, this may be one of the only communities I properly feel I belong in.

I don’t think I have managed to avoid self-indulgence, have I? To be honest though, it was only to be expected on a day like today. The first birthday of my blog passed in a fairly downbeat manner, and I’ve never been one for doing the navel gazing reviews of the year at the end of December, but I hope you’ll forgive me for this one. You are, after all, probably the best reason for writing there could be - people who read it. Well, read most of it anyway; you probably deserve a medal if you've got to the end of this one.

So in terms of how I celebrate two continuous years since I sat in that chair and typed, all glib and pleased with myself, "I blame Doogie Howser, M.D.", well, I think you lot are the best possible celebration of that. So if you want to say something in the comments, or tell me what your favourite post was, or unlurk and tell me how long you’ve been reading for that would make me very happy indeed. And if you don’t, that’s fine too. We’ll all just carry on like this post never happened.

100 Words: Snapshots

Love is seeing the sides of somebody no photograph will ever show.

The morning sun filtered through her hair as she turns to me half-asleep in the precious, all too narrow window between awake and up.

The crinkled nose and narrowed eyes of the helpless laugh I know would vanish if I pointed a camera at it.

Her face fitting into the crook of my arm last thing at night, in dim light no lens could open wide enough to soak up.

No album will ever contain these snaps, nor will any wallet. But I carry them with me always.

My favourite restaurant

Life is full of accidents – people you meet at parties, people who happen to work in the same office as you, people who are put in the same form at school all become friends through a mixture of coincidence and chemistry. Another party, another office or another school and the shape of your life could be unrecognisable; different faces in your photo album, different Christmas cards on your mantelpiece, even different notches on your bedpost.

An awful lot is down to chance, and favourite places can be like that too. So it's appropriate that I encountered my favourite restaurant completely by accident, on the way back from going for a curry with my family in a part of town I didn't often visit. There it was at the corner of the street, windows looking out on to the world and Kelly and I perked up in that way you do when you notice something new somewhere familiar, a shop or a café that wasn't there last time you passed by. We call it civic awareness but that's just a respectable way of dressing up our nosiness.

And this place was new; we could tell immediately that it wasn't the grubby Italian that used to be there, where we'd spent an uncomfortable evening cramped in the basement, eating something forgettable and vowing never to return. This was an altogether different proposition, in fact when we crossed the road to take a closer look it seemed to have been dropped into the neighbourhood from somewhere else entirely. The postcode may well have said Reading but the décor and the feel of the place said Brighton. The menu, too; it looked less like a bill of fare and more like my dream to-do list.

"We need to try this place." I said.

"I agree. I'll book a table tomorrow."

The second time we saw it we were going through the threshold rather than standing outside with our noses pressed against the glass, and that's when things fell into place. The proprietor used to run the front of house at our previous favourite restaurant, the one that was never quite the same after he left; it felt like coming home. The moment we took our seats for the first time, right from the start, it already felt like we'd been going there for years (even though it's only now that we actually have been). Countless meals, from romantic evenings to raucous nights with friends, from family birthdays to spur of the moment suppers, have all been just right; it seems to have exactly the atmosphere to accommodate all of these hugely differing occasions. That said, I do sometimes feel sorry for whoever is at the next table along.

I particularly enjoy the tasting nights, when they show off the new season's produce with menus enthusing about the new season's asparagus, or strawberries, or spring lamb. They always have our names at the top, a lovely little touch, so little extra effort but making you feel like so much trouble has been taken. Those evenings, you can hear the tinkling sounds of the jazz pianist in the corner playing classics and standards; one of these days, Kelly will be just drunk enough to get up and sing something. She will do if I keep trying to get her that drunk, anyway.

On those nights, you feel like part of a select club, invested in the restaurant's success. Actually, you feel like that most nights you go there because that's what a neighbourhood restaurant is all about. And that's what this is, even if it rather inconveniently happens not to be in my neighbourhood. I also love the way that whenever you book they ask you if it's a special occasion, and it doesn't seem to matter whether you say yes or not because it feels like it always is, when you're there.

Another thing I love about them is that they're thankfully immune to the disease which afflicts a lot of restaurants nowadays. My friend Mikey spotted it first, and I coined a name for it: Guy's Syndrome. You can tell that a restaurant is suffering from Guy's Syndrome from the moment you first take your seat. “Can I get you guys a drink?” beams the waitress as if she knows you, even though she doesn't. “Are you guys reader to order?” comes the robotic incantation as you finish deliberating over the menu, and then finally “How was that for you guys?” as your plates are taken away. It irks me, that familiarity. I don't want them to call me “sir”, but it seems matey; they are trying to manufacture the feeling I always get when I go to my favourite restaurant. At my favourite restaurant, I would let them call us “guys”, because I feel like they know me. But because they know me, they never would. They'd use my name, because they don't need a substitute for it: they know it.

Having a favourite restaurant is a bit like forming a friendship in some ways. The excitement when you first meet is gradually replaced, over time, by a steady familiarity, the fact that you can stop showing off and be yourself. But also you get to try something new from time to time, because you trust them – it's no coincidence that I was there when I first tried more esoteric dishes, sweetbreads, heart and gizzards. Those are only some of the dishes I remember, though. I remember huge fluffy-centred doughnuts like asteroids from heaven, served with a ramekin of the sweetest lemon curd. I remember spiced poached pear, all the mulled tastes of winter caramelised on a plate. I remember stilton ice cream, one of those things you wouldn't believe worked unless you had gambled on it at your favourite restaurant. Except of course, then it isn't a gamble.

And it's also like forming a friendship in other ways, because the nicest moment is when you realise they like you too. For me, that was when they contacted me recently and asked me to write a piece about them for their website. I was hugely flattered, and I said yes on the spot. Based on what you've just read, you might think that that is what this is, but it's not. It's just the preamble for the piece which is below. I hope you like it; I'm really pleased to say that they did.

* * * * *

The story that sums up Mya Lacarte for me is about mozzarella, although of course it's really about far more than that.

When you go to a restaurant, choosing from a menu can be a tricky business. It's meant to be, because it's an important decision, like putting a cross in a box at the polling station. The first sweep of the menu is how you rule out the joke candidates, the things you would never eat in a million years. For me than usually eliminates salads, the vegetarian option and anything involving sweetcorn. That's the easy part. Then comes the hard bit: choosing between the serious contenders. It's never the same two times running; what you're in the mood for, what you've eaten recently, what you've always wanted to try are all factors.

It's easy to criticise vegetarians, fussy eaters or the pregnant when you're choosing somewhere to eat, easy to say “There's one thing they can eat on the menu, how many options do they need?” But they're right about wanting more than one choice, because picking what to eat isn't just the difficult part, it's the fun part. It's one of the most enjoyable things about eating out: the decision itself.

Sometimes it's the only enjoyable thing; in disappointing restaurants it's all downhill from the moment you've placed your order. No such worries with Mya, but it remains the only place where my approach to a menu has gone awry.

One evening, I was comfortably settled at my table, taking in the chattering buzz of the room when something happened which definitely wasn't in the script: a waiter went past carrying a starter I had ruled out from the off. Mozzarella and basil with tomato consommé and basil sorbet had, on paper, been easy to discount, if only because nothing with a face had died to produce the dish. In the polling station analogy I used earlier, this was Screaming Lord Sutch.

Yet the moment I saw it presented smoothly to a happy diner at a neighbouring table which had committed the cardinal sin of not being mine, I knew I had to order it: so pretty, so different, so imaginative. A while later, when the wine had been poured and my polling slip was in the box, no chance of getting it back, my own segment of heaven turned up. It was a long thin slate with a shot glass of consommé, a neat sphere of sorbet and perfect slices of creamy mozzarella, separated only by bookmarks of basil.

If looking at it was a joy, eating it was a revelation. Cheese and tomato, the cornerstones of dull sandwiches in packed lunches around the country every weekday, had been transformed into pure flavour. The consommé was a miniature miracle; how could something so watery-looking taste of quite so much? Whose idea had basil sorbet been and could I shake their hand? And then there was the star, like no mozzarella I'd eaten before. If someone had tried to melt it on a pizza I would have wanted them arrested.

I used to tell foodie friends I'd eaten out and ordered badly and they'd say “in a good restaurant that shouldn't be possible” and I never understood them, but I do now and it's all Mya's fault. That is Mya in a nutshell: there are no joke candidates on the menu.

One last thing about the mozzarella: when someone came to take away my empty slate I told him how much I'd loved it and his eyes lit up. “Really? I'm so pleased. It's from Laverstoke Park, just down the road from here. Great, isn't it?” He absolutely came alive talking about that one ingredient and where it was from, but the best thing is that he didn't tell me because I asked, or because he had to. He told me because he wanted to, and that is Mya in a nutshell too.

Dickens and Brown

Great Expectations is one of the strangest public houses in Reading and, quite possibly, Britain.

You don’t get much of a hint of this from the outside, looking at its grand façade, the graceful columns the height of the whole building either side of the black double doors and the handsome sash windows laid out in a perfect grid. It sits on London Street as one of the only remaining reminders that this was once one of Reading’s oldest and most exclusive thoroughfares. Back in the eighteenth century, this building would have been the norm rather than the exception; the regulars there would have rubbed shoulders with Messrs Huntley and Palmer a few doors along busy baking the biscuits that would briefly make my home town famous.

Centuries later it sticks out like a sore thumb amidst the offices on the street. You have the suggestive white collar firms - a surveyor called "Chadney Bulgin", (which has always sounded like some kind of venereal mishap to me) and "Vanderpump and Wellbelove", which would have made an excellent gay crimefighting Dutch duo in 1975 but is in fact a reputable estate agent in 2011. Further up the hill are the delights of the trendy Christian bookshop (which has unwisely rebranded itself "Quench" and has posters all over its window begging you to add it on Facebook) and the delights of The Knob Shop, which sells exactly that - or would if it didn’t spend most of its working days answering prank phone calls from students.

London Street is a street of oddities, but even by those standards Great Expectations is first among equals. The name, in gold block capital letters over those doors, ought to give you a clue but really you have to step over the threshold to realise the full extent of its strangeness. That is because Great Expectations is - of course - a Dickens themed pub.

Dickens' link with Reading seems tenuous at best. It appears that he may have done some readings here back in the nineteenth century and the residents tried to talk him into standing as an MP here without success, but that appears to be pretty much the extent of his association with the town. Even when he left London to consort with his mistress it seems he ended up down the road in Slough, which I imagine was (then as now) quite a colossal two fingers up to my little town. Reading has that effect on writers, it seems: they don’t want much to do with the place and the only way they can be persuaded to spend any appreciable length time here is through the medium of incarceration.

Quite what Dickens did to justify naming a pub after one of his finest works I’m not sure, but if he did happen to have a look round I wonder what he would make of it. Inside it appears normal at first. The front room looks like a library, bookshelves lined with copies of the Dickens' finest works and walls covered with pictures of the great man himself. In one of them he looks like he's sporting an erection, which could have been an accident in a photograph but which starts to look deliberate in any picture which requires a longer sitting time. Perhaps it was drawn by a disgruntled resident who had taken the rejection badly. I can just imagine him muttering "Member of Parliament! I’ll show him what a Member looks like." as he scratched away over his easel.

Things take a turn for the surreal when you enter the main room. Along the left is the bar - looking much the same as any bar in the south of England, the same monosyllabic serving staff, the same unremarkable range of crisps and snacks, the same beers and ciders as everywhere else and the same food menu littered with typos and poor value for money. Truly, you could be anywhere.

It is only when you stand with your back to the bar that you can take in the full insanity of the pub. Because there, in front of the seating area, are what can only be described as a series of fake Victorian shop fronts. What this means is that once you are ensconced with your pint glass full of yellow mediocrity you appear to be gazing out through the chintzy bay windows of "Mrs Bumble’s Grocer’s Shop" or "Pickwick’s Tea Rooms". With hindsight, it’s a shame one of them isn’t called Vanderpump and Wellbelove, which with sounds rather Dickensian itself. Just to add to the ambience, the walls are covered with printed handbills advertising Victorian institutions like carbolic pies and mutton soap (it might be the other way round, I’m usually drunk by the time I'm paying them much attention).

That’s as far as the Dickensian theme goes, in my experience. I’ve seen the food, for a start, and even a starving orphan would be hard pressed to ask for more. Not only that, but the bar staff aren’t at all wenchlike - itself a bit of a shame if you ask me, the one thing most pubs need is more wenches - they don’t shift a lot of gin and I’m not quite old enough yet to think the youth of today resemble urchins. Even so, it does make the world look a little strange when you come back from the Siberian toilets at the back, four pints of Strongbow to the good, to find your friends sitting under the awning of Mr Crabcrotch the Fishmonger. You feel like you’re in a low budget remake of Doctor Who.

At first we were all very dismissive of Great Expectations, but over the past few months the centre of power in Reading’s publand has been shifting, thanks to Mikey. He has grown tired of the thumping hipster noise of the Oakford Social Club after work on Fridays, and finds himself gravitating to a pub where you can hear yourself think, where there isn’t a mullet in sight and where you can always find a couple of Chesterfield sofas to plonk yourself down on after a gruelling week at work. And it’s appropriate, given the bizarre surroundings, that I was there when I was told one of the strangest stories I’d heard in ages.

Mikey and I were propping up a table between us, on one of those unusual Friday afternoons after work when nobody else had come out. We were minding our own business, chatting away about our plans for the weekend, when Mikey looked up to see a tall familiar figure approaching our table.

“Tom Brown! Come join us, yeh?”

Tom Brown removed his ubiquitous khaki parka and sat down with his pint. A Friday without Tom Brown at the pub always seems like less of a Friday, because he always has something funny to say about someone or something. I have to say though that the story about his friend Joey and the bad thing was exceptional even by his standards.

"You should tell him the story about Joey and the bad thing." said Mikey to Tom Brown, off the back of some smutty exchange I can’t really remember.

"Not Little Joey?" I said. Little Joey is a lovely chap, often out as part of Mikey’s floating cast of semi-regular pub goers; a small energetic type, always smiling and pleasant to everyone. The first time I met him down the pub on a Friday night he sent me a Facebook friend request the next day, whereas some of Mikey’s drinking buddies still don’t know my name about a year later. That’s Joey all over, he just makes friends everywhere he goes. It was more than a bit incongruous to think of anything bad happening to Joey, he was the sort of guy nobody could be mean to. Even Hannibal Lecter would have just bitten his nails and sent him on his way.

"Yes, little Joey.” said Tom Brown, leaning forward in his chair and steepling his fingers. "Do you want to hear it?"

"Of course!" At that point I could no longer hear the unwanted music video blaring out from the widescreen television, and looking away from Tom Brown’s long face would have been impossible. There was something in the air.

"It all happened when Joey went travelling in Thailand a few years back. He was out one night with some of his friends, and they went clubbing together, but then Joey ended up losing track of his friends and got very drunk. You know Joey; when he’s pissed he’ll talk to anybody."

This was true. Mikey grinned and nodded; not in agreement, but with the air of someone who’s heard a joke before but still enjoys the punchline each time as if it was the first time.

"This is going to involve a ladyboy, isn’t it?" I said. I always do this, I just have to ruin everything. But Tom Brown was far too skilled a pub raconteur to be thrown off his tracks by my sort of heckling.

"Anyway, it didn’t matter, because Joey soon made a new friend…"

"…a ladyboy friend?"

"Patience. Joey made a new friend, and he," - there was a brief pause of triumph at this point, and Mikey looked at me, wordlessly saying Told you so - "invited Joey back to his place where he said there was a party going on."

"And Joey said yes, because he’s a friendly kind of guy?"

"Of course: you’ve met Joey. Except there was an unpleasant surprise in store for Joey when he got to this man’s apartment."

Carried along by Tom Brown’s effortless drawl, I suddenly realised this story might not be as innocuous as I had suspected. Poor trusting Joey was drunk, alone, and a stranger in a strange land. You read awful stories that begin like this in the news every day. Tom Brown had me exactly where he wanted me as I started to fear for the well-being of a man I had probably met less than a dozen times.

"Oh no. What was waiting at the apartment?"

"Nobody else was waiting at the apartment. There was no party at all. In fact, it was just Little Joey and his new friend. His new friend, I might add, who really wanted to bum Joey."

At this point I burst out laughing, partly out of relief that Joey hadn’t stumbled into the lair of a serial killer but mainly because even now, over twenty years after I left secondary education, the word "bum" used a verb always has that effect on me.

"So he made his excuses and got a taxi back to the hotel, right?"

"I’m afraid not." said Tom Brown, completely in control of the narrative, "That was Joey’s next mistake. Because he was rat-arsed, he instead asked his new friend if he could stay the night on the sofa. Naturally, the man agreed. The next day, Joey awoke…"

"…to the splash of jizz all over his cheeks?"

Again, I got an admonishing look from Mikey, but again there was more than that; his smirk said we were getting to the best bit.

"Not exactly. Joey came round to find his new friend giving him a blowie."

It was a couple of minutes before I had finished roaring with laughter; I think the people at the neighbouring table must have wondered what was quite so funny about a handbill advertising carbolic pies.

"The guy was sucking him off? How did he get out of that one?"

"Well, the way Joey puts it, if you close your eyes and pretend it’s a woman it’s really not all that bad."

"You have got to be fucking kidding, he let the guy finish?"

"I’m afraid he did. The funny thing is that Joey must be one of the least gay men I’ve ever met."

I briefly considered saying Except me, right? but decided against it on the basis that the people at the neighbouring table had suffered enough. Oh well, I suppose it’s one way to get room service.

"You know I have to write about this, don’t you?" I said to Mikey.

"Go for it." he shrugged. "He pretty much tells the story himself to anyone down the pub after a few drinks. I’m surprised you hadn’t heard it before."

All in all, it was just a typical Friday evening after work in the oddest pub in Reading, if not Britain. If Dickens had, by some bizarre miracle, arrived in the present day I’m still not sure he would have liked Reading. I suspect he would have found Great Expectations tacky, quibbled over the authenticity of the shop fronts, turned his nose up at the cheap and nasty plate of nachos for four pounds ninety-five and would have been both offended and flattered by the priapic portrait in the library. But I like to think, if nothing else, that if he had visited the pub that winter’s evening he would at least have left feeling like his legacy for storytelling might be in safe hands.

100 Words: Wedding ring

My wedding ring is the symbol of a marriage which began seven years ago today. The room was nearly empty: two witnesses, six smiles.

Not because it's endless - that's a cliché, did you expect me to say that? No, it's not about its shape but because of how it looks.

The outside, once shiny, is now matte, scuffed by all my knocks, accidents and mistakes, seven years of accumulated clumsiness.

But when I look, the inside, the side closest to my pulse, still gleams exactly as it did that cold day when my life began: perfect, pristine, incapable of disappointment.

On Paris

[First published as a guest post at A Lady In France.]


Imagine for a second that you are by the banks of an ancient river, looking at stand after stand of second-hand books, the banal and the fascinating in front of you. What’s really in front of you is something else altogether: the absorbing joy of sorting one from the other. All around you people are doing exactly the same, art students, hipsters, young families. Boats chug past, momentary interruptions to the iconic view on the other side and the glorious tall buildings, still there despite the war of almost a century ago. Everything is perfect and your day is nowhere near finished; after this you could take in the attractions of gallery, drift round the quiet whitewashed rooms scratching your head and trying to work out whether you should be inspired, amused or irritated.

Next I want you to imagine you are in the grid of sloping streets further from the river, closer to the end of the day. Everyone is sitting outside the bars on an evening which is not cold and not quite dark yet. Everywhere is chatter and bustle, waiters coming out with trays of drinks and a haze of smoke pervades the scene, thick but somehow not unpleasant. All it really does is diffuse the twinkling lights and lend an attractive bokeh to everything. All the angular metropolitans going past will soon be seated and part of this experience, not apart from it, and it makes you realise what this is all about; belonging to something bigger than you could ever be on your own.

Now let’s move on to the next day, still sitting outside but this time at a small rickety table on the pavement, with a notebook, a delicious cup of coffee and a rich, buttery pastry in front of you, possibly three of the finest things you can place on a small table outside a pavement cafe. As the plate and the cup empty, the notebook gets filled – with the sights and sounds of a city waking up. People off to the market, or to the shops, all of them that odd mix of familiar and strange. Being here you know you could make up stories about every single one of them, if you put your mind to it, because there’s something magical about this place.

When I was asked to write a piece about Paris, I thought about how easy it would be. There is very little I don’t love about the place, from the boutiques and bars of the Marais to the grand sweep of the Seine, from the serenity of the Sacre Coeur to the bedlam of the Metro at rush hour (and I’ve only been there as a tourist, I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be if you actually need to get somewhere). Then there’s the delight of watching the French at lunch and seeing all that passion for people and food colliding in a hand-waving interrupting maelstrom that the English, all confined to the rectangular prison of their own placemats, could never match.

I could easily have written that sort of piece and, believe me, I nearly did, but this is not that sort of piece.

Before I did, I looked at some of the other pieces people have written about Paris in Jennie’s blog and one sentence stopped me in my tracks and made me change my mind. There are many cities in the world to love… but to me, there is only one Paris. And I remember thinking: why should it be that way?

Then I found myself considering the tyranny of perfection. Because we can’t all live in Paris, or travel there every year. Many fantastic people will never see it at all except in photographs, movies, novels and daydreams. Why should we all beat ourselves up about it? Not everybody gets to live in a mansion, not everyone becomes a film star or publishes a novel and not everyone gets to live in Paris. And that’s fine, because the thing I almost feel it’s blasphemous to say here is this: Paris is only one example of the beauty of communities that you see all over the place.

So, rather than rhapsodise about Paris – easy though that would be and much as I adore it – I’d rather do something slightly harder, which is ask you to fall a little bit in love with the places nearer to you and the things you might not always notice. Because there can be a little bit of Paris in Wellington, or Oxford, or Des Moines, or anywhere, if you want to see it there.

Think about it: your favourite spot, that peaceful green space where the sun shines just right and lights up everyone, where the ice cream tastes perfect doesn’t have to be the Tuileries. The buildings that always lift your heart when you see them can be a shimmering, curving plane of glass, a golden crumbling cloister or a Victorian classic of redbrick and wrought iron. It’s not written anywhere that it has to be a pylon, not even the most beautiful pylon in the world. The restaurant where you always feel welcome, where they know you and are happy you came to see them again can be a million miles from Saint Germain. And the small shops owned by people who love what they do so much that they can make you love it too are not the exclusive property of the Marais.

They are everywhere, and they are the best of what makes us band together, put a line round a group of buildings on a map and give it a name to itself. Celebrating that is far more important, and if we don’t do it then who will? And although I’ve said it’s harder than you think, it’s not as hard as all that. Look back at my opening three paragraphs; none of them are about Paris.

The first one is the South Bank in London on a spring afternoon, in the perfect spot between Waterloo Bridge and Tate Modern. The second one is the Tunel district of Istanbul on a warm winter’s night. And the third? Well, that’s a cafe called Picnic in my hometown of Reading. When the weather gets better, and you can see the promise of brightness out of the window when you wake up, and the farmer’s market has come to town, that’s where you’ll find me on a Saturday morning. Come and say hello, if you do.

See? You can find it anywhere if you’re looking. And if I never see a series of posts from people on anybody’s blog telling the world what they love so much about my home town I think I can cope with that. But I’ll tell you this: in the right light, on the right day, Paris is just like Reading.

Resolutions

Phil and I enter the room, two walls made of glass, one covered in a huge whiteboard, and the long wall the dayglo shade of fluorescent orange you normally only see in highlighter pens. We take our seats, nodding at the others around the long surfboard-shaped table. There is the flip and rustle of a dozen A4 pads springing into life and it’s that point where I think that this isn’t the most successful New Year’s resolution I’ve ever made in my life. But then I’ve always had a patchy record where they are concerned.

The third best New Year’s resolution I ever made was on January 1st 1996: “buy a telly”. For years it remained my best attempt at using the arbitrary break in the calendar as an opportunity to transform my life. And if it doesn’t sound dizzyingly ambitious, you need to remember that by 1996 standards it was: it sat in the corner of my threadbare rented room in Jericho in what used to be a pub and it beamed out images of happiness and prosperity to remind me that those things might one day be possible. Buy a telly, silly though it might sound fifteen years later, was specific, measurable, achievable and realistic in a way which exposes most of my objectives at work as the demented proclamations they really are.

It was many years before I had another crack at the whole resolution thing, and you have to wait until January 1st 2007 for the second best resolution I made: “stop reading tabloids”. This was a genuine attempt at self-improvement; I used to love my weekly dose of The News Of The World. Every Sunday I would pore through the pages with unalloyed delight to find out which celebrities I had barely heard of had been caught with their fingers in the knickers of some vacant pneumatic blonde only famous to a select clique of West End nightclub bouncers. “How can you read that muck?” Kelly would say to me in exasperation. “You’re not stupid and that” - she could barely bring herself to say its name – “that is not news.”

Stopping is, or was, a little like stopping watching a soap opera. For a couple of weeks, you feel twitchy and irritable because you want to know how it’s all going to work out: will they ever get together? Will they find out who the murderer is? Does she leave her husband? Who’s the father? The next stage is when you happen to catch an episode again a few months later and feel like you don’t recognise anybody in it. Who’s the new guy running the shop? What happened to what’s her name, the fit one?

Finally, a few months further down the line comes the eureka moment when you stumble across the soap again. That is when you realise you could pick it back up whenever you wanted to because, although the names and faces of the heartthrobs, the jokers and the bombshells might all change, they are all that ever will. The plot remains exactly the same. That’s the crucial moment – you could pick it back up any time, but now you know that you no longer want to, because the spell is broken. Mass entertainment does seem increasingly reliant on the ten second memory.

I’m afraid it’s just as easy to stumble across a tabloid newspaper, because people seem to leave them everywhere. Partly as a result of that, I subtly changed the wording of my resolution so that rather than refusing to read them I refused to buy them instead, a morally convenient piece of revisionism which meant that abandoned rags on the seats of trains or strewn across the table at the barber’s magically became fair game. And, if I dawdle long enough in a supermarket, I can still usually work out who’s having it off with whom on any given Sunday.

This year my ambitions are a lot more modest, though my resolutions might be even harder to keep. The main one is to stop reading things that I know are going to make me cross, be that Twitter feeds that make my teeth itch or the same sneering metropolitan broadsheet columnists week in, week out. And I’m making progress – slow progress, but progress none the less. Now, when Kelly says “Do you want any of the Sunday Times before I take it to the recycling I just say no, and my life is immeasurably better. Think of all those hours I’m saving!

I’ve also stopped reading blogs I don’t like. Why did you read them at all? is the obvious question, and the answer, which makes no sense at all to anyone including me, is “Because I really don’t like them.” There’s so-bad-it’s-good, which is a splendid use of anybody’s time, and then there’s so-bad-it’s-bad, which is best avoided. I used to read an especially diaphanous blogger who didn’t make resolutions but instead chose a single word each year to sum up the three hundred and sixty-five days ahead. Last year it was “shed” – get it? – with its twin connotations of letting go and stability. My resolution means I haven’t checked this year but I’d put money on it being something like “uterus”, though in all honesty it might as well have been “gush” every year. And what would mine have been? 2009 would probably have been “ill”, 2010 could have been “antagonistic” and I could be warming up to have a crack at “ungrateful”.

My other small attempt at a resolution this year is to become a more productive employee. So each morning I am trying to do those unbelievably worthy tasks which are the working equivalent of eating your five portions of fruit and vegetables every day, like phoning people instead of hiding behind email and looking at my to do list just before hometime to work out what the following morning will hold. I’m even – and this is the trickiest one – trying to bite the bullet and do that really horrible thing that has been on my to do list for months; cut, pasted and moved to the bottom every single day, held back until the moment when it has to be done, the sort of task that makes you idly daydream that the apocalypse might come along and save you from having to tackle it after all.

It’s in that spirit that Phil and I traipse into the room of doom for the weekly session of the Really Dull Project Meeting.

Phil attends it without fail and I – although I really should – never do. It’s become a bit of a running joke that every week I have something conveniently arranged which gets me off the hook. It happens with such regularity, in fact, that Phil has begun to suspect that I am doing it deliberately, which just goes to show that you could say a lot of things about Phil, but you could never accuse him of being born yesterday.

“I’ll go next week” I say to say to his retreating back as he trudges off to the most turgid room in the world, and to add insult to injury I then walk past fifteen minutes later with Iain and Gemma on the way to the kitchen to get a coffee. And Phil always sits there, looking dolefully out through the glass windows at me like an abandoned dog in a hot car, suffering without me, begging for rescue.

Anyway, no more: new year, new leaf, for Phil if nothing else. As the meeting starts, I soon come to realise that despair is like a nearly odourless gas - it’s hard to put your finger on it but you know that it’s there. I look round the table and all around me is the personification of corporate disappointment, everybody doughy and complacent with all the drive sapped out of them. Maybe this room is where ambition goes to die, or just a middle-management parody of Easter Island. They are all in one or another form of smart casual, the only way I can really distinguish between them. One has a shirt and a v-neck, another a shirt and a roll neck, a third is sporting the casual shirt and chinos combo that either says he stopped trying years ago or works in IT. I’m not paying anywhere near enough attention to work out which. A fourth gentleman is wearing what might have passed for a smart shirt were it not for the silk knot cufflinks prominently on display. I inwardly judge him when I really I ought to be listening to whatever it is he’s saying.

The door opens to admit latecomers, another manager type and a strangely familiar face.

“This is David, who’s going to be shadowing me for the day. He’s a recent graduate here and we’re looking at some future opportunities for him.”

My lunch buddy and funbus companion Manga Dave sidles into the room and takes a seat opposite me. It’s odd to see him in a working context for the first time. He doesn’t look like anybody else around the table; they are curves and bulges, he is all angles and lines. In his jet black suit and narrow striped shirt, he sits in the corner absent-mindedly picking fluff and threads of his jacket. Dave is the only person in the room apart from me with a full head of hair and despite that, looking at him I feel very old indeed. He looks like the future from where I’m sitting.

Dave’s presence here highlights something I’ve tried to ignore about him; he is ambitious. His contract expires in a couple of weeks and he’s off travelling, but he’s already lining up interviews with consultancies in London for when he returns. And if that doesn’t work out? Well he might deign to come back here, provided they can find something good enough for him.

Occasionally, he fiddles with his Blackberry, oblivious to all the jargon bouncing off the glass, talk about lab rebuilds, testing specs and training rollouts. Like me, he doesn’t understand anything anybody in the room is saying, but unlike me he doesn’t need to. He’s only passing through, and eventually he’ll get to a level where you don’t need to understand anything anyway, the level where you have people to understand things for you. Sitting in the meeting, I’m beginning to wish I had one of those people too. People who have those kinds of people normally read mails on their Blackberry while you’re talking to them, just like Dave is doing in this meeting now. But he can get away with it, because he exudes the aura, without even trying, that one day he might manage - or fire - everybody in the room.

I take out my fountain pen. Writing in a fountain pen at work has been another of my new year’s resolutions, and I got a beautiful miniature fountain pen for Christmas from my dad. Scribbling underneath my notes of the cast of characters in the room I write an asterisk, to show that someone has taken an action, followed by Phil’s initials:

* PC to lick my balls.

I push the pad across to Phil, sitting next to me, in the hope of making him corpse. It doesn’t work, he’s made of sterner stuff than that. Instead, I see him pull a face, gurning and unimpressed, and mouth something to me. Green ink? That stings - I know it has associations with the sort of people who write a daily letter of complaint to national newspapers but I love writing in ink the colour of racing green. I always have, since I got my first fountain pen when I was eighteen and started wasting gallons of the stuff on diaries I still cringe too much to read even now. This just won’t do, I decide, so I wait a suitable period of time, until a disembodied voice on the star phone in the middle of the table starts saying something irrelevant and everybody in the room pulls faces at them, and then I scratch out a quick addendum so it reads:

* PC to lick my balls. Repeatedly.

It is all Phil can do not to laugh, so instead he shakes and puts his head in his hands as if he’s about to fall asleep - the perfect cover in a meeting like this. I keep a poker face, something I’m really good at when making people laugh unprofessionally in a serious meeting. Over the other side of the table, stuck with the grownups, Dave is roused from his torpor. He looks over quizzically at Phil and I, trying to work out exactly what has gone on but he doesn‘t have a hope of working it out. And then the conversation moves on to the finer points of system drops and downstream reporting, whatever they are, and a beautiful moment is gone forever.

At the end of the meeting I considered putting Dave out of his misery, but I decided against it. I like to see this as another part of his training; he knew that something funny had happened, but nobody would tell him what it was. If I were him, I’d get used to that feeling. I imagine once you make it to senior management, you must experience it pretty much every single day.

Running mates

Today's post is a bit different.

As you know, I've been nominated for the Bloggies - don't worry, I'm not posting the link again, the button is at the top of the sidebar if you're interested in voting - and so has a blogger I very much admire, The Kid In The Front Row, for Best Entertainment Blog.

He won it last year and I remember being really thrilled by that - not just because it meant I actually knew a winner but because it was a victory for absolutely the right sort of blog. Not shitloads of "monetised content" and links to BlogHer (though that would be pretty odd - I mean, I'm pretty sure The Kid is a guy), not hilarious transcripts of conversations with his long suffering spouse covered with block capitals like pimples and certainly not some kind of corporate operation. No, it's just a guy in a room with no whistles and bells writing beautifully about what he loves; something for us all to aspire to.

Anyway, he contacted me and suggested that he interview me on his blog and I interview him on mine and I agreed immediately. We are quite similar actually, we're both quite crabby and curmudgeonly (me completely in line with appearances and him in spite of them) and we cross words and swords from time to time, but I still respect him hugely and enjoy his blog a great deal. So his interview, answering questions of my choosing, is below and I hope you enjoy it. In particular, I'm quite curious to know what all your answers to my last question would be. Afterwards, I'll give you the link to my interview at his place, and if you're looking for other categories to vote in in the Bloggies, his blog comes highly recommended by me. Without further ado, the Kid In The Front Row:



One of the things I find fascinating about your blog is that although it's ostensibly about film, I think it's every bit as much about creativity. You have written some of the most beautiful posts about creativity and the role we can all have to play in it that I can remember. I'm not just saying that because you mentioned me in one of them (How We Fit In: The Future Of Our Art) but I remember reading your post 2011: Our Odyssey when I got back from my holiday in Istanbul and really wanting to be part of a movement like the one you described. Is there any kind of writing you wish you could do but just can't or writers you envy?

My blog is about film because it's the only thing I'm good at. If I was great at poetry, or painting, I'd blog about those. But I think the rules are the same. Creativity is creativity. So I think my posts about it are often interesting for non-film people (like yourself).

There's a lot of writing I can't do. In fact, most writing I can't do. I am at a disadvantage professionally because, if a Hollywood studio offers me ten million dollars to write a superhero movie, I couldn't do it. It's just not in me. I can do two things - I can write dialogue based comedy, and I can write heartfelt stuff about people connecting, without it being too cheesy. That's basically all I can do. And if I researched enough, I could maybe do something a bit political. But that's it. So when people ask me to write a film for them or to pitch in on their project, I struggle, because I'm clueless. It's partly a limit in talent but it's also a kind of narcissism. I can only really write what I know. And it bugs me because I know it has limitations. As amazing as Woody Allen is, or Cameron Crowe, they have a tendency to be only one thing. And it's limiting. I think only maybe Chaplin was able to consistently keep his singular voice so fresh.

When did you first realise you wanted to be a writer and when did you decide that you could start calling yourself a writer? What has to happen, do you think, in the transition between the former and the latter?

The way I remember it is that I wanted to be a director, first. But I didn't know where to find the scripts. So I began writing. But now it's the other way around. I value writing above everything. It's what I am good at. I guess I was about 17 when I really began taking it seriously. I realised I could write a scene, or a little story, and have it not suck. That was a big deal.

It took years to call myself a writer. It was always "oh, um - I work in a store, and um - I do some shifts at the pub, and, well, I'm kind of, sort of, trying to write a thing, um - yeah, like a script." But I don't think you'll ever be a writer if you do that, because that's how you feel about yourself. Your writing gets so much stronger when you admit you're a writer. You need that boost. It's better to be a writer who works in an office, or a writer who cuts hair, than a hairdresser or office worker who tries to write. And I think that's one of the biggest things any writer has to do: admit they're a writer. We often get scared of people ridiculing us or talking down to us when we speak of writing aspirations, but we make it easy for them when we feel shy and scared about it ourselves.

I think I started calling myself a writer in my early twenties, way before I had a legitimate amount of work to make it seem plausible.

So to answer your question about what has to happen -- I think virtually nothing. Just a change in inner attitude. I think if you truly stand up for being a writer, and feel strongly about it, people will get it. It helps if you won a writing award in Swindon or an online poetry competition, but you don't have to. You can just start saying it today; that you're a writer. It's not easy, but it's important.

A common question is that old chestnut about who would play you in a film of your life. I won't ask you that, it's far too easy, but if you got to live any role in any movie as your life, what one would it be and why?

I love the question. I wish I had a film-geek answer about some obscure black and white film - but the truth of it is, I love movies like Beautiful Girls and Adventureland that are about friendship and relationships. I like the idea that people turn up. That relationships are the most important thing. It's like an episode of Friends - I love how the doors are unlocked and they always have time for each other. I wish I lived in that world. But the truth of it is that most of the time people are busy, or make excuses, or they're just plain grumpy. Me as well. Half of the time my friends want to hang out I just want to stay at home reading a book.

But I like the idea of life being more fluid and joyful; where you meet up with your friends every night after work, like in Diner or a New York gangster flick where they all hang out on some stoop in Brooklyn.

I like the fact that you are quite honest about how difficult you can find the creative process. More widely, what are you good at that most people find difficult? What do you find difficult that most people are good at?

I am good at writing with speed. If my writing switch is ON, I write quick, and the quality won't suffer. My creativity has always been speedy and random. For a while, I struggled with it because all the wisdom of writing is that you need discipline, and you need to take your time, and that the best writing is in the second draft. But in the last couple of years I've met some wonderful, profound people, who've been really great at helping me stick to what suits me, to follow my own process, and it's been helpful.

What I am not good at is brainstorming. If you get a bunch of writers in a room coming up with ideas, I just get bored and have nothing to say. I have to go off into the quiet and do my own thing. But paradoxically, if I'm directing, I am good at coming up with ideas with actors on the set. So I dunno.

If I had asked you the old interview question ten years ago, Where do you see yourself in ten years' time? what would you have said? What have you been most right and wrong about?

I have, weirdly, always been very sure about my path. I was never good at education, and I never fancied 'working my way up the ladder' in the industry. So I knew, by the age of 17, that I needed to create my own path. And that path was just being creative and believing in what I wanted to do. And I always saw that the people who do what I do broke at similar ages. Like, if you look at Spielberg, Kevin Smith, Steve Martin, Charlie Chaplin - like, there's a real similarity to the ages that things came together. So I think, from those mid-teenage years, it was about making the choice to do what I wanted to do. I am not particularly clever or intelligent in a conventional sense; you would beat the hell out of me in a conversation or argument about almost anything. But I know my very small niche of filmic stuff and creative stuff as well as anyone I know, and that's what I'm dedicated to. So the last ten years has been a fairly smooth creative growth. A growth filled with setbacks, failures, and missed opportunities. But that's how it is for everyone.

I guess though, I did think I'd have a bit more money by now. But again, that's part of the journey. Recently I was talking to the creator of one of my favourite TV shows - and he was talking about how, until that show broke, he struggled, he had no money. And now, because of that one show, he's a giant in the American TV world. That's how it is for everyone.

I have a theory that every film enthusiast has at least one film they feel evangelical about which practically nobody has ever heard of. Off the top of my head I love Whit Stillman's Metropolitan and an obscure Australian romantic comedy called Love And Other Catastrophes. To finish off, would you like to pop on a soapbox and pitch about yours?

I don't have a movie that jumps out. But, for the last six months I have been SO in LOVE with Adventureland. It comes out of Hollywood, it's made by the guy who directed Superbad and it stars the girl from Twilight and the guy from The Social Network - so you can imagine why it could easily suck. But it doesn't. It has so much heart, and wit, and more heart - and it's just sweet and lovely and meaningful. And sure, it's just about a bunch of college age kids falling in love and its tone is that of a middle-of-the-road coming of age comedy. But it hits the right notes. And the director kept all the producers at bay who wanted more sex scenes and monsters and whatever. It's just a perfect little movie.

I blogged about the movie about six times in a week. People either completely agreed with me and were ready to worship it, or they thought I was a complete idiot who should go back and re-watch Casablanca. But I love it.

Thanks to The Kid In The Front Row for being such an excellent interviewee. And finally, you can head over to his place HERE to see him returning the favour by interviewing me.

Chemistry

I’m surprised when he picks me up in his car to see a copy of a compact quality broadsheet on the dashboard. It’s pretty much the first thing I notice as I step inside, out of the miserable cold, and we pull away from the lay-by, outpacing a grim municipal bus. I’ve always assumed, from his engineering background and Estuary accent, that he would read a redtop.

“I like it.” he says when I question him about it. “It tells me everything I need to know, without going into too much detail.”

I make a mental note that the covers of some books are more deceiving than others. I’ve been working with him for a few years now, in a relationship littered with colossal disagreements. I have lost count of the number of times, on conference calls, that I’ve had to cut across him and say “Let me finish”, often more than once. He’s small, wiry, terrier-like. He cares, and takes things personally. He could start a fight in an empty room, and I could easily start one in a room which is empty apart from the two of us. But we chatter quite easily in the car; over those years we’ve hammered out a way of working which, if not quite a friendship, is something like an understanding.

He always picks me up on my grammar. I will be on a call with him about something, normally disagreeing about something, and I’ll say “Paul and me” and, not mentioning it over the phone he will ping me an email without skipping a beat: Paul and I, how many times. I admire his cheek for doing that, it’s the kind of pedantic impertinence I also specialise in.

On the way to our meeting he tells me that he listens to Radio 4, another surprise.

“Really? It’s always bored me to tears.”

”No, I love it. It’s good to know what’s going on out there.”

If you met us both, side by side, you would put me down as the Radio 4 listener without hesitation, for my accent if nothing else. But you couldn’t be more wrong. I am the well-spoken graduate who rots his brain watching Hotter Than My Daughter, he is the one who has risen from the foot of an organisation, does an MBA in his spare time and is enthusing to me about the World Service.

“There’s something about listening to the news on there and knowing people all over the world are listening too. And when they play the beeps before the news… well, I don’t know. It’s magical.”

I nod; this is a rare occasion where I feel like I absolutely know what he’s talking about. He looks older and more tired than I remember. I make jokes about how I’m difficult to work for, and he always earnestly tells me that isn’t true, probably a little too earnestly if you pay close attention. I bet before he got promoted he was cheeky, one of the lads, but now there is always lots of nervous energy. On the bad days it manifests itself as aggression and defensiveness. But I understand something about these things, and on the worse days I bet he takes it out on himself.

He’s not altogether a cultured man, I wouldn’t want you thinking that. One time we were out for dinner in a posh restaurant, on a team building event with our bosses. He was the only one not drinking and the only one who seemed drunk. He turned away the offer of wine from the attractive waitress, saying “I can’t. I’m driving and I’ve got an eighteen year old girlfriend to get back to.” She looked stunned, our managers looked gobsmacked and I couldn’t help but smile at just how wrongfooted he looked. Later on this morning we are talking about a colleague, in a professional capacity, and he says “She’s a bit of all right, isn’t she? Very curvy. And I didn’t notice the pierced tongue at first. You know what they say about them.”

People like him are called loose cannons, always said as if it’s an incurable mental illness, but I think it’s kind of marvellous.

Halfway through our meeting, he says “Excuse me, I’ve got awful wind.” I hadn’t noticed, but think better of pointing out that he could have got away with it. Instead we talk about his ulcer and my hernia and he tells me all his symptoms and I say “Me too!” I take his pad and write down some medication he ought to ask his doctor about. The other two people in the room look baffled at us. “It’s okay.” I tell them. “We’re bonding about our ailments.”

When I leave, I thank him for the lift and I notice the rosary strung over his monitor. He is, as I said, full of surprises. But then I remember that his mother-in-law has had a stroke, and is in my local hospital, and that his kid is in a wheelchair, and how he bears it all with incredible patience, and I think that maybe he prays after all. I wouldn’t blame him if he did.

I can be a hard task master at work. I think in terms of tasks and resources, successes and failures. The goofing around at lunchtime or at coffee breaks does a good job of concealing that, but I’ve always seen things as right and wrong - and I never think that I’m wrong. What I all too easily forget is that for every action in a set of minutes or set of initials on a project plan there is a person doing their best. And sometimes they have a shitty day, or better things to worry about, and that’s not wrong either; I do it too. So no, we would never be friends, but through the random chemistry of working life he is at the edge of an org chart, like a molecule, interacting with me on the edge of mine. I don’t know what I would call it, that reaction. But I’m glad that it happened.

Crispbread

Everything about this Ryvita is wrong. It’s not the sesame seed variety, the only variety I like, but some other kind. It has lumps and clusters of sunflower seeds like moles on its pockmarked surface. And that is not all, looking on the box I see that it expired in November last year. Eating anything beyond its sell-by date is totally alien to me; staring in disgust at her has become second nature as she joyously demolishes out of date yoghurt (“Don’t look at me like that!” she always says, “It’s just off milk anyway.”)

Everything about this Ryvita seems wrong. My knife makes a squeaky noise as butter scrapes across the craters. It’s a noise that is only natural with one food I can think of, halloumi, and there’s no halloumi in the house. If there was, do you honestly think I would be eating this? We have cupboards devoid of temptation and in any case dinner is in the oven and practically an hour from ready. She is at work, stuck in a meeting which started long before hometime, continued long after hometime and sounds like it could run later still. I keep receiving apologetic text messages from her which make no sense. Why apologise? She’s the one at work at half seven at night, somebody should be apologising to her.

Everything about this Ryvita could be seen as wrong. It tastes funny, which originally I put down to it being out of date, or maybe having some odd seeds in it which I hadn’t identified - caraway seeds, or something more exotic. A quick rifle through the poorly stocked cupboards reveals the truth. The packet of Ryvita, which is not in an airtight container, is sitting next to the box of mint teabags, also not in an airtight container. We are not very good at airtight containers. What this means is that I have a cupboard full of mint flavoured Ryvita and conversely the only thing less appealing on paper, Rvyita flavoured teabags. The latter could never catch on in a million years.

Everything about this Ryvita should be wrong. But I am standing there in the kitchen, next to me are the dirty dishes I can’t face, and all I can hear is the patient hum of the oven. This is the sort of silence I rarely experience and even more rarely enjoy. Soon she will be back, chattering or whistling in the kitchen. “You still recognise me!”, she’ll say when I see her again, the moment she gets home, the joke we always do when she is back late.

Nothing about this Ryvita is wrong. It ought to be but I am standing by the worktop, dusting crumbs on the granite, eating my second piece. It’s thick with butter, the salty taste completely hiding the hint of mint. And I know that this is as close to perfect as I can possibly get until the handle turns on my front door and she bursts into the flat and back into my arms again.