The solar system

We get off the train and meet Philip and Sharon halfway up the stairs on our way out of the station, and as we exchange a series of hugs I think that it’s ages since we saw them last, even though it feels like only yesterday. We drive to their new house taking what Philip calls “the scenic route”. Leaving the dual carriageway behind, we pass through a tunnel of trees and everything is green and fresh, the sun making fascinating patterns through the leaves. “This is where it gets beautiful” Philip says, and as usual he’s right; roundabouts and roadside Harvesters give way to fields full of lavender, tiny farms glimpsed from above as the car makes its way round the gently bending route towards the valley.

We all catch up in the car and fighting his way through the banter and interjections Philip takes us through the itinerary for our stay. It largely involves food, drink and mooching around, which sounds pretty perfect to me from where I’m sitting. “Of course, we can change any bit of it if you don’t like it” says Sharon from the driver’s seat, and I’m momentarily sad because I know how much thought she’ll have put into everything and I wish she had a little more faith. But that’s rich, coming from me. “Oh! And we can show you the solar system!” says Philip as, at the end of the journey, the car pulls into their road. It’s such a surreal, cosmic sentence, rich with baffling ambiguity, that I half hope the moment will pass and nobody will ask him to elaborate on it.

After lunch and a leisurely stroll, we reach the middle of Otford and the full meaning of Philip’s words becomes clear - it boasts a scale model of the solar system, with all the planets represented by plinths scattered throughout the village. Later on, for instance, we discover Neptune on Philip and Sharon’s road. Somebody has placed a bottle of Sprite on top of it, showing little respect for astronomy; at least we assume it’s Sprite, because although the bottle is full it doesn’t look much like the original contents. Most of the planets, though, are close to the village hall, somewhere on the flat green space where a game of cricket is playing out. As contests go it seems half-hearted but cricket always has done to me, so I have no way of telling how seriously they are taking it. It doesn’t matter anyway; this is what weekends in England are supposed to be like.

As we stand idly by the boundary taking things in, the ball clicks off a bat and pelts towards us, larger and heavier than I remember from school. Philip deftly stops it with his foot and picks it up as a fielder walks over to fetch it, in no hurry at all.

“Be careful, or they’ll ask you to join the team.” says Sharon, as he lobs the ball underarm to the man in white.

“Not with a throw like that.” I say. This too is rich coming from me.

“So where are these legendary planets then?” I ask Philip. I know the whole thing is likely to be underwhelming, but my curiosity has been piqued now. This has always got me in trouble, if you show me a ludicrous tourist attraction I’ve always found it difficult to resist. After all, a scale model of the solar system isn’t something you see every day, even if there is a reason for that.

“Can you see that white pillar over there just past the boundary on the far side?”

“What, the thing that looks like a bin?”

Philip chuckles.

“The thing that looks like a bin. Yes, that’s exactly it.”

The moment they chose to capture the positions of the planets was midnight on the first of January, 2000 and the first planet we see turns out to be Jupiter. I was expecting it to be further away so I am surprised to find it here, like a random stranger you weren’t expecting in a photograph full of people you know. But of course it’s not really a planet, it’s just a squat white pillar with a flat steel top, JUPITER engraved on it in handsome, neutral letters. It is brilliantly nothingy, and somehow affecting in its modesty. I can’t tell you how disappointed I would be if it had turned out to be flashy.

Walking towards the middle of the solar system we notice a cluster of white pillars, close together, and looking down we realise that the paths of the orbits have somehow been mown into the grass. We cross the dark circles and make our way to Earth. It looks no more habitable than any of its siblings, though there’s no real reason why it should. I take a close look at the top of the pillar, wondering why the moment doesn’t feel more thought-provoking or significant. I also fight, successfully I’m pleased to say, the urge to break into a rendition of Planet Earth by Duran Duran.

The information board is a treasure trove of facts few people need or want. I take some photographs of Philip, Sharon and Kelly staring at it and looking perplexed, and then I take a closer look myself once they have moved on. The model, like so many white elephants, was built to celebrate the Millennium and the blurb on the board was written by someone who is very proud of the project, which is how it should be. This model is the only one of its kind on this planet. We don’t yet know about other planets! it says, before adding solemnly It is intended that this model will be here for the next millennium. I find that faith sweet and reassuring – in nine hundred and ninety years the world will have run out of food and countries will have been drowned by the melted ice caps, but the Otford Solar System will still be there to remind us of the bigger picture. Who’s to say that that is such a terrible idea?

Will anything survive of me in ninety years’ time, let alone nine hundred and ninety?

My favourite quote is at the bottom of the information board: It is said that if you wipe a pillar top with a soft tissue, it brings good luck. I didn’t know there was space in the world for new traditions and superstitions. I suppose they were all new once, that there was a first person who carried a four leaf clover or refused to walk under ladders and risked looking stupid, but I’ve never actually witnessed an attempt to fabricate one before. That an old wives’ tale like this sits mere paragraphs after facts like the diameter of Saturn and the size of Jupiter’s red spot is oddly touching in a way I can’t explain.

I love the Otford Solar System. It’s a folly, pure and simple, and I have a massive soft spot for follies. I try to imagine the meeting of the Parish Council where this grand scheme was agreed, and decide that I’d love to have been a fly on the wall. It strikes me that any village in the country could have done this but that only this village did. It also strikes me that any village that can attempt something so deranged can’t be entirely bad. I think that in Philip and Sharon it may have found two perfect residents, and that perhaps in Kelly and me it has found two suitable visitors.

Last of all, we are drawn to the sun. Unlike the others which are flat, this pillar is topped with a gleaming chrome hemisphere. The four of us approach it and look at the fisheye reflections on its shimmering surface. I get out my camera again and try to take a picture which captures us all, standing around it like some kind of prog album cover. There are many changes of position, soundtracked by chatter and laughter, as I attempt to fit everybody in, before I decide I am satisfied and give the others permission to disperse. I look at the photos I’ve taken. In them, we look tiny and yet I know we’re not, even though the point of this is to help us to realise how small we really are. It is the only thing about the whole project that doesn’t quite work: standing there, united by our emerging friendship, the cricket going on next to us and all manner of life beyond, it still somehow feels like we are at the heart of everything.

Grandstanding

The couple at the neighbouring table think I can’t hear them. They assume that because I am peering at my phone, or maybe they don’t notice me at all, but either way they’re wrong.

I can only see her properly - he has his back to me - but she looks hawklike in profile. Her hair seems brittle, and is carefully styled. It’s a combination of colours which doesn’t exist in nature but is often used to conceal those that do. Her clothes are neat, small and carefully chosen. Even the thin horizontal stripes on her tiny cardigan seem mean-spirited.

“What I asked you was -”

I know that choice of wording far too well. It’s what you say when you’re saying something for the second time, to somebody you think should have understood the first time. It’s an interrogation technique, better suited to politicians than partners, but everything about her suggests the weary contempt we usually reserve for the former. The spiteful tone is like a glancing blow, and I don’t hear the rest of the sentence. He probably doesn’t either.

I think instead that I once had a girlfriend who spoke to me that way, many years ago. She didn’t see me as potential, or a work in progress. She would never have said that I had my moments. To her, I was just a long list of alterations she wanted to make. We only really ever had one argument but it lasted, on and off, for the best part of three years. Why won't you learn to drive? Why can't we move to the Midlands to be near my family? Why are you friends with so many girls, now you've got me? When can we have a baby? In turn my unspoken question was this: if she’d changed all the things she didn’t like about me, what would she have found to be miserable about instead? I didn’t know the answer, but I’m sure she would have come up with something.

She always waited until I was with family or friends - a sympathetic audience, or so she thought, before she started. By the end of the relationship, they only had sympathy for me.

“What I specifically said was -”

The woman is speaking again, and again her language makes me wince. There is a place, even in relationships, for being specific. Without it, plans would never be made, dates would never be organised, holidays would never happen and shopping lists would be a disaster. But there’s no place for bringing attention to it. Nobody takes minutes in bed, and no marriage has a stenographer. The whole exchange reeks of cross-examination, and then I realise: this woman enjoys her husband being wrong. She wants him to be wrong. Saddest of all, she needs him to be wrong.

Looking up from my wine I see, but am not surprised by, the final detail I had previously missed. There, on the other side of the table, is a third person, her friend at a guess. The woman is doing what my girlfriend used to do, grandstanding in front of an audience. And her husband is doing what I used to do; sitting there and taking it.

Of course, it wouldn’t be like this if they were alone. If they were alone they wouldn’t be talking at all. They would be, as I once was, looking around at all the conversations at the other tables - sparkling from a distance in a way they surely wouldn’t be up close - and wondering why they had failed. They would be sitting at home in silence on a Saturday afternoon, watching the walls and thinking what I used to think: I know this isn’t right, but it won’t always be like this. One day there will be someone else. When that crosses your mind for the first time you should run like the wind, but it’s easy for me to say that now.

I try to imagine how much they both must have dreaded their children going to university. If I wanted, I could make up a whole life for these two and I might not be too far off the mark, but I decide against it. It’s too easy and besides, it comes unpleasantly close to a life that could have been mine. An unhappy father of two, living somewhere else, driving the boys to football practice every Sunday. A terrible version of myself; grey, jowly, thick-set and slow-moving. A catastrophic collection of compromises, defeated by life somehow.

No, I have better things to do. I finish my wine, pay the bill and head for home. I’m looking forward to being reunited with somebody who makes forever feel like paradise, the way it ought to, and not a punishment.

The hermit

I make the decision to come off Twitter on a Sunday night. It’s not a spur of the moment thing, but a growing discomfort with the stream of consciousness I’m throwing at a crowd of largely faceless people. A lot of it is spiteful or unkind, something which comes easily to me in a superficial, low-risk medium like that. Will those feelings now find other outlets by which they can bubble to the surface, or do they only really exist because they are so easy to vent? I realise I have no idea, decide I’d quite like to find out.

In my mind, it’s like some kind of holiday; getting away from it all, just me and my thoughts. It’s strange how over time it has become so natural to broadcast so much, such a creeping thing that I don’t think I’ve ever stopped to consider whether it was right to hand away small pieces of myself so frequently to anyone who was interested, whatever their agenda. And I realise, too, that by contrast I put so much thought into what I write here and what pieces of myself I give away in my “proper” writing. I’m not sure what effect the one has on the other, and I decide I’d quite like to find that out too.

I could be a twenty-first century hermit, perhaps.

I’ve seen plenty of other people leave Twitter, and I’ve watched these things play out carefully enough to know that when people make a big grandstanding exit it’s because they want people to notice and beg them not to go. They invariably return within days, either because people have implored them to or because they are miffed that nobody has registered their absence, or because they were lying to themselves and can’t cope without it.

By contrast, I make my final entry on Twitter nicely non-committal. I don’t say when I’ll be back, because I don’t know, and I don’t say I’ll never be back, because I certainly don’t know that. While I’m typing it, I think of my mother and brother, people I no longer speak to, checking my Twitter feed and building up a picture of me from bits and pieces that I’ve said, taking the parts that fit with what they want to believe. I remember the mail from my mother suggesting that I have a drink problem, and that I should consider doing voluntary work. Then I remember my aunt, the previous weekend, coming round for dinner. I asked after my mother and the mood in the room curdled. “I don’t want to talk about that.” she said, clearly uncomfortable. “It’s just that… I can’t.” Those ties are severed, and yet my whereabouts and reactions to everything everyday are a matter of public record.

I finish the wording. It reads like a sign on the door; I’m gone, I’ll be back later and people can email me if they want me. The words come out of me as easily as pulling a plug out of the socket, and I don’t go back to check if there is a response.

The next day, I find my fingers twitching when various things happen. Something will annoy me at work, or a noteworthy detail will jump out at me and my instinct is to reach into my pocket and grab my phone, like a gunfighter who doesn’t know he’s retired.

At work Iain tells me about the kittens his wife is picking up that afternoon. He strikes me as a dog person - devoted, unconditionally friendly, seeing the best in everyone - but he says that his wife has her heart set on them, and he can’t refuse her. They are calling them Buzz and Jessie, because his son is a huge Toy Story fan.

“Iain, promise me you’re going to go home and call one of the kittens Randy instead.”

“Why?” says Iain. The prospect of interfering with the natural order, where his wife makes the decisions, or all the decisions they don’t let the children make, is unthinkable.

“What’s your wife’s maiden name?”

“Guy.”

“Exactly. How can you deprive your son of a porn star name like Randy Guy? Imagine how popular he’ll be when they first have those conversations at school.”

Iain properly loses it, and proceeds to guffaw loudly for several minutes with his head in his hands on the desk, to the extent where my boss looks over briefly in exasperation before going back to a very important email. I feel my phone gently burning in my pocket again, but I am finding it much easier to be strong than I thought I would.

The security guard in Sainsburys when I walk through at the end of the day is a swarthy white man sporting a moustache - as so many security guards do - and immaculate in his v-neck jumper and peaked cap. His name badge says Zoltan; I’ve walked past him dozens of times and never noticed that. He doesn’t look like a Zoltan, and I feel like a Zoltan should be plotting world domination or imprisoning maidens, rather than wearily patrolling by the self-service checkouts. Maybe one of his evil schemes was defeated, or maybe somewhere there is a criminal mastermind called Derek wondering if he is in the wrong job. And I want to tell the world, or that small section of the world that would read what I say on Twitter, but I don’t. I make a mental note instead, and think there must be other, better ways to tell stories than that.

At night Kelly and I cook dinner in our tiny kitchen, the radio on in the background. The onions sizzle on the hob as she finishes the washing up and I add pinches of chilli and garlic, listen to the tinkling of risotto rice being weighed out on the scales.

“Aren’t you sorry that I’m not on Twitter at the moment? I bloody hate this radio programme, and you’re the only one who knows it.”

I’m not sure whether the look I get from Kelly is meant to convey that she feels lucky, or unlucky, or a bit of both. I add it to the list of things I’d quite like to find out, which is becoming quite a long list, but I keep it to myself.

100 Words: Gemma

“I’ve been thinking, Gemma.” I say as we climb the stairs. “I think you should change your mind.”

“About the new job?”

“Yes.”

I mean it. It’s been three years; I can’t imagine her being somewhere else every day. Since she handed in her notice she’s been happy, relaxed and fun, like old times.

”I’m sorry, it’s too late now.”

“Oh.” I pause. “That’s the only reason you won’t change your mind though, right?”

Real life’s not like movies. People catch planes, move town, and last minute pleas in the airport don’t work. She smiles.

“Yes. That’s the only reason.”

[Blue Italics Of Housekeeping: I have a piece out today in The Pygmy Giant. I hope you enjoy it, and if you do please leave a comment and check them out again. They publish a lot of interesting stuff.]

Absent-minded

My recurring daydream always begins the same way. In it, it is a bright sunny morning and I have left the flat in plenty of time; enough to pick up a coffee and grab a newspaper for a change. The genie who makes my iPod work surpasses himself, rummaging in the depths of the hard drive and rooting out track after track I had forgotten I loved from dusty shelves not accessed in years. I cross the wide expanse of the market square, and everybody walking past me is smiling. I look up to the top of the redbrick clock tower, and I know I am in no rush at all. It is a textbook start to the day.

I make my way on to the bus with ages to spare before the half past eight departure, and all the familiar faces are there. Fiona, headphones firmly in, hair everywhere, looks into space, oblivious to everything. The man who is always fast asleep on the seat to the right is slumped, head precariously propped up against the window. Once we’re moving, any sudden foot on the brake or sharp corner would wake him up and knock him out seconds later. Wendy is checking herself in a compact mirror, cleavage prominently on display. Further back, the office bike puts the finishing touches to her make up. On Fridays she wears a garment emblazoned with the word “Superdry”, but everyone’s heard the rumours and we all think it’s false advertising.

Right at the back, Mikey is impassive, flicking through tracks on his phone. It is probably playing something by the Jam or the Style Council, because the genie who makes it work is looking out for him too. I get a cursory nod from him as I settle into my seat and open up my paper. I buy one from time to time but I never read it much because it only makes me cross, and yet the act of turning the pages and judging the contents makes me feel connected to the world. Behind Mikey, Phil sits there catching up on mails on his Blackberry. The genie in his iPod picks something with a lot of guitars that I would never choose, but it makes him happy, if anything ever does.

In my recurring daydream my favourite driver, the one who looks like Donald Pleasence, is in the driving seat. He pulls away smoothly and we all look out of the window as the bus heads out of town past all those familiar sights. The unlovely library I still dare not return to after a teenage indiscretion, the office blocks where it was all happening twenty years ago but are nowhere now, the technical college full of the blithe and thin, people who are years away from a commute like this and probably think it will never happen to them.

We pass the side of the park, empty except for the morning dog walkers, and join all the other traffic heading out for the motorway. The ugly office block by the side of the final roundabout has been steadily demolished over the course of the past few weeks and is almost completely gone now; in the years ahead it will be replaced by something shiny and new, and one day it will be dated just like the last one was, because that’s how things happen. I miss it already, but give it a couple of months and I may well have forgotten what it looks like.

So far, so normal, but things become dreamlike when we join the motorway. Because when we get to the first junction, Donald Pleasence gets on the tannoy and tells us all we’re taking a little excursion. Then he swings that silver beast around and takes us to the seaside. The monitors drop down from the ceiling and Donald plays something to get us in the mood; some cartoons perhaps, or a Queen DVD. A while back he decided to do this on the way home when the traffic wasn’t bad. “Does everyone like Queen?” he asked his congregation on the microphone. “I don’t.” said Mikey, but Donald ignored him. Everyone likes Queen, after all; Mikey must have been joking.

In my recurring daydream, there is a mounting sense of excitement as we come off the M25 and head for the sea. Some of the passengers are worried about their meetings and conference calls, frantically trying to rearrange things. The Indian contractors are so nonplussed that they don’t know what to do. But Mikey, Phil and I just look at each other and grin, a smile that says At last, because this has been our daydream for ages.

When we arrive, it’s like one of those cheap British comedy films from the 1970s, the sort where the English seaside always looks cheap and brown and cold. Donald parks the bus at the coach station and we all spill out, excited at spending a day on holiday from our lives with nobody looking for us. Mikey and I lead the way, because we know Brighton well; I’ve been there many times, and he has watched Quadrophenia so often he could recite the script. Behind us, the Indian contractors look baffled, hauling their rucksacks behind them because they didn’t want to be parted from their laptops, the only straight men in Brighton with moustaches.

We take them through the Lanes, have chips on the Palace Pier and look out to sea. The contractors have never seen the English sea, and don’t know what to make of it - even in the sunshine it’s a sort of murk they would never experience in Bangalore. In my recurring daydream, they mill round the amusement arcade in wide-eyed wonderment, and we all play air hockey until they are tired out, like hyperactive children. Donald, avuncular and indulgent, looks on. Because it’s my daydream, he is eating candyfloss and has never looked happier.

As the sun fades and the ruined framework of the West Pier starts to look threadbare and bleak, the process of rounding everybody up begins and we walk back towards the bus, past all the hipsters. I catch them doing a double take, because they have never seen anything quite like us. Donald is like the pied piper, or would be if the pied piper attracted hapless corporate types. And everybody falls asleep on the coach home as the daylight dims and Queen run out of crunching stadium anthems, but Donald doesn’t mind. He saves his microphone announcements to himself then, waiting until we come to a stop outside the train station, but I am still awake and when I make out his reflection in the windscreen I know he’s smiling.

This daydream is not unusual these days. More and more lately, I find that my body and my mind - never the best of friends at the best of times - are spending time apart. So today, my body sat there in a training session while a flamboyant man with magnificent hair told me about negotiating styles. The irony wasn’t lost on me; I was attending a negotiating course because I hadn’t been able to talk my way out of it. But my mind was somewhere completely different - walking down the rue di Rivoli on a slow Tuesday morning, wondering where to grab a coffee and a pain au chocolat and working out my plan of attack for Paris that day, whether to head to Montmartre or poke round the Ile de la Cité. If my mind hadn’t been there, it would have been somewhere else - looking at the grand crumbling townhouses of the Bairro Alto perhaps, photographing all the beautiful tiles, or peering at the graffiti in the Albaicin and planning the first tapas of the afternoon.

The place I always return to, though, is the place that beats any daydream, back in bed. Bed, that perfect space before the day is ruined. Bed, like a bath that never gets cold. Bed, that swimming pool of fabric and kind light where the world outside might as well not exist. Bed, with its beautiful neighbouring curves. Bed for the most magical eight minutes of every day, that moment between the final press of the snooze button and the awful point where you have to leave, wanting that time to last forever but knowing that it won’t, and knowing that if it did it wouldn’t be anywhere near so magical.

I feel like finally I am learning something new, at a time when lessons seem to be infrequent and painful, and it’s this: absent minded people have always frustrated me, but I’m starting to believe they’re on to something. Maybe they have realised what I never did, that just because your body is stuck somewhere undesirable doesn’t mean the rest of you has to follow suit. Ironically, as I write this, I am about to hit the sack. But even if I wasn’t, I will always remember what it feels like, and if you catch me not really focusing at work, or spot me walking past you in the market square tomorrow morning with a distant expression, now you’ll know why.