Seven links

As regular readers will know, I very rarely do memes; I make an exception about once a year when they look interesting and I’m asked by someone I have a lot of time for. I was very flattered when MiMi, who writes Meemalee’s Kitchen, passed this one on to me so naturally I agreed to give it a go. MiMi’s blog is well worth a read but is very hard to sum up – there are some cracking recipes, some excellent restaurant reviews, some extremely funny food writing (the pieces about Masterchef are worth the price of admission alone) and an awful lot more into the bargain. I think that the best way to get an idea of the range of MiMi’s writing is to have a look at her post about the 7 Links meme here, which rather neatly brings us on to the subject of the meme.

The premise is straightforward, you pick seven posts from your back catalogue that you think deserve to see the light of day again and then you nominate another five bloggers to take part. Easy as pie. So, without further ado, here we go:

1. Your most beautiful post

This feels like something for other people to say about your writing, but if I was choosing just one, I think it would be Goodbye, Natalie which I wrote about a friend of mine who died earlier this year. I still go to her Facebook wall several times a week, as do her many other friends. Sometimes I tell her I miss her, sometimes I post a link to a song that reminds me of her or that I think she would have liked, sometimes I just read what everyone else has to say. It has got easier, even if the sadness has never quite gone away. I’m not one hundred per cent sure I want it to.

2. Your most popular post

It’s probably Reading material; I didn’t realise when I put it up just how widely discussed it would be. It got circulated a lot through Twitter and all sorts of people who had never visited my blog before (and probably never did again) stopped by to recommend books or weigh in to talk about the classics and whether they were all they’re cracked up to be. I don’t think I’ve ever had a post go viral, but this is probably the closest I’ve come to it. Some of the recommendations were good, too – I read I, Claudius off the back of the comments on that post and rather liked it.

Nothing has really changed since I wrote it - I still struggle with finding things I enjoy reading, although I’ve gone through a very good patch of late. I loved Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively, thought Revolutionary Road was terrific and, most recently, thoroughly enjoyed The Rules Of Civility by Amor Towles. But for every book I love, there’s at least one that gets abandoned long before the final page. If you go to my local branch of Oxfam in a few weeks’ time you will see a copy of A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan and a copy of Something Beginning With by Sarah Salway. They are both in mint condition, and if you buy either of them all I can say is this: best of luck with that.

3. Your most controversial post

In the early days of my blog it was largely a repository for what I thought were funny stories, so it was very different from the beast it evolved into. Many of those stories were about goings-on at work, my incredible cluelessness or a combination of the two. One of those stories loosely revolved around 9/11 and with hindsight, publishing it wasn’t necessarily my finest hour. Compounding the offence by reposting it on September the 11th, with a pretty picture added into the bargain, was also not the masterstroke I initially believed it to be. The post was called Because you need to understand that it’s really all about me, and quite a few people never spoke to me again after reading it.

Never say I don’t learn from my mistakes; the following year, although I may have Tweeted a link to the post, I didn’t post it again. This year, on the tenth anniversary, I plan to keep my mouth firmly shut.

4. Your most helpful post

Although I’m trying to stick to one blog post per question, this one isn’t easy. Not because my blog posts are generally helpful – far from it, I suspect - but because there are different kinds of helpful. So in terms of blogging, I think my most helpful might be Various answers, which was an interview I did on someone else’s (defunct) blog about a year ago. Most of it isn’t useful at all, but it does feature a section on the advice I’d give to new bloggers, and I did get some feedback saying that parts of it were very handy. I’m not sure if my advice to bloggers has changed, nowadays I would probably just say “do what you like and for God's sake, whatever you do don’t listen to me”.

The other post which a lot of people told me was very helpful was the piece I wrote last year about depression, called Happy pills.

5. A post whose success surprised you

I’m not sure if “success” is the right word, but the real surprise has to be Hugh. What was intended as a throwaway pen portrait of an unpleasant, odd man who used to work at our place turned into a really heated debate in the comments field. I was criticised by a number of people for writing such an unsympathetic piece, was told by several that I hadn’t lived up to their expectations of me as a person or as a writer and, in one truly exceptional case, was compared to Leni Riefenstahl (I didn’t publish that one). It’s a truly odd experience wandering round Waitrose doing the shopping while your phone keeps pinging with emails telling you how disappointing you are. Still, even if it didn’t manage to get the reader onside it was much read, heavily debated and it definitely provoked a reaction, so it’s hard not to see it as a success.

Maybe I should have mentioned that Hugh, who was married, made a pass at one of my friends. Would that have made a difference, I wonder?

6. A post you feel didn’t get the attention it deserved

Last summer I went to a psychic show with my wife. It was an interesting experience because while I was in the theatre bar before the show I looked round at my fellow audience members and sent all sorts of uncomplimentary Tweets about the whole experience, but from the moment the show started I knew that it, and my reaction to it, were far more nuanced and complicated than that. I’m really pleased with the piece I ended up writing about it, called The medium, and it remains one of my favourite things I’ve done.

It didn’t attract an awful lot of comments and responses at the time, but the main reason I’m putting it in here is that I submitted it to a competition run by the Journal Of Creative Nonfiction. They were running a contest for blog posts, in an attempt to prove that blog posts can be Proper Writing too (the fact that they ran the competition, and published the eventual winner billed as a “blog post”, suggests to me they didn’t quite believe it). My piece made the final five, out of a shortlist of hundreds and hundreds, and I was unbelievably proud. But it didn’t win, which is a real shame, and of course I thought that it should because naturally I reckoned it was miles better than the piece that did.

The thing that really hurt, though, was the way I found out – they didn’t mail me to let me know, I just found out weeks later on their standard email newsletter confirming what was going to be in the upcoming issue which strikes me as a bit of a shoddy way to treat writers. So this piece is the one that got away – it nearly got published, and almost could have been read by a much wider audience than normally sees my writing, and it just wasn’t to be. Never mind, onwards and upwards (I certainly won’t be submitting to the Journal Of Creative Nonfiction again, either).

7. The post that you are most proud of

This is a difficult question, because the answer changes on a regular basis. I am proud of everything I’ve written on one level or another, either because it sums up something I really felt, or described something I really experienced, or captures an element of a person, situation or friendship in a way which is as good as any photograph. To some extent this is how I imagine being asked to choose between your children must feel.

My gut reaction, though, is to choose The girl from WH Smiths. I’m proud of a lot of the pieces that I’ve written about my wife and our marriage, but this one is probably my favourite. Not only is it my favourite post about her, but it’s probably also the best Christmas present she’s ever going to get from me.

Passing it on

I am passing this meme on to five other bloggers, and I really hope they do it. Some of them are very old friends, some of them are relatively new discoveries, but what they all have in common is that they have written a lot of blog posts and deserve to be read by more people. So in all cases, I hope they do the meme and I hope you jump over to read their blogs and get a really good introduction to the highlights of an excellent back catalogue.

Tales From Beyond The End Of The World - Robbie’s blog is a particular favourite of mine right now. He has a lovely dry view of the world from where he is, but also writes some beautiful, lyrical prose. He is prolific to a fault (in fact, I’m still waiting for him to slow down), so I’m looking forward to seeing his seven links.

Stuff From Ellen’s Head - Ellen would probably be the first to admit that her blog is a real mixed bag. You get some pieces about her family and day-to-day life alongside meditations and memories. I am a particular fan of the sequence of posts she has done around the letters of the alphabet.

The Victorianist - There are an awful lot of historical blogs out there, as I have discovered via Twitter, but The Amateur Casual writes one of my very favourites. The writing and research are truly excellent, and I’m selfishly looking forward to him doing the meme and giving me a further much-needed primer about the Victorian era. (To my shame, the only time I’ve Tweeted one of his links, it was about the history of the flushing toilet. I hope he can forgive me).

Bag Lady - Well, as many of you know, the eponymous Baglady is a close personal friend of mine. But I’ve picked her despite that because I think her blog is excellent – a real mixture of fiction, nonfiction, nostalgia, day-to-day life, long pieces, little 100 word palate cleansers and everything in between. She’s been blogging almost exactly as long as I have and in that time has gone from being a blogger who tries to write to a writer who happens to do it in a blog. I’ll be interested to see which seven posts she links to.

The Gravel Farm - The Jules is easily one of the most naturally funny writers I’ve come across (I still remember him describing trying to cut his baby’s hair as ”like trying to shave an angry cat on a roller coaster”) and his blog posts are often akin to being taken for a walk round his brain. The views are excellent, as you’ll see if he does the meme.

Right, now nobody ask me to do a meme for at least another twelve months. Deal?

False advertising

It’s not every Monday morning that I find myself standing there staring at a photograph of my colleague Phil. But I have a reasonable explanation: you need to swipe your security pass to pick up printing in our office and mine is on the blink so I am using his, and despite the humming and churning the document is taking ages to materialise, so with nothing else to do I peek at his photo ID.

The picture doesn’t look like him. It dates from when he first joined the company, before I knew him at all, many years and several incarnations ago. In it, his glasses are smaller, thinner and less imposing. His face, as a result, looks more open; I can’t imagine him glowering through these frames the way he does through the thick plastic-rimmed spectacles he wears today. There’s more puppy fat around his face and an almost gormless smile is in the process of beginning or ending, I can’t tell which. The hair is swept over to one side in a heavily-gelled quiff, not spiked up like it is this morning, and the overall look suggests a life of Saturday nights down the pub, bottled beer and nightclubs, mates and celebrations. Which is fair enough; I imagine that, in those days, that’s probably what Phil’s life was like.

I stop for a second and try to decide whether the Phil of today ever looks at his chubbier, cheerier, more townie friend and wonders what became of him. The face on the pass belongs to a man with no children, no tattoos and no ring on the finger you cannot see, somewhere out of shot. What would the Phil back then say if he was shown a picture of the Phil I see on the bus every morning? If they met, would they get on? Would I have got on with him? So many questions, and it’s not even midday yet. In fact, we’re less than ten per cent of the way through the working week, and I’ve already asked over half of my ration of difficult questions. It hardly bodes well.

Back at my desk, I take out my own pass and spend a minute looking at the face staring back. The first thing I notice is how much fatter I was when the picture was taken, over eight years ago. In the photograph, my chin and my neck are starting to resemble one another the way a dog resembles its owner. My head has been freshly shaved, which just contributes all the more to an effect I’m not sure I was aiming for; angry and intimidating. The name next to the picture is mine, but if it had been somebody else’s I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I used to joke that the photograph on my pass made me look like a Turkish drug dealer, but it was one of those jokes I told to deflect attention away from the truth. I also used to joke that the reason everybody looked fat on their security passes was that they were shot in the basement of the old office by the midget who worked in the cubbyhole by the back gate. That bit at least is true, and there’s nothing less flattering than being photographed from below by someone who holds a camera like they’ve never seen one before in their life. But in my case, they were excuses masquerading as jokes; I looked fat because I was fat.

We are all like this, we all carry round these false advertisements of who we are that really only tell you what we used to look like. We do it just so we can get through the turnstiles, print out slide packs, lift the barrier to the car park. Some of the people I work with have been in their jobs so long that their security passes are like relics. Archaeologists could use them, like debris in strata, to sort your life into phases; the moustache years, the perm years, the hair years, the didn’t-need-bifocals years. One day they will be a record of the alive years and one day after that they will be in a bin, and who knows what happens then.

It reminds me that my passport has expired, another out of date photo. That one has bigger hair, bigger glasses and an inconvenient shadow that has made it look, for ten long years, like I was sporting a mullet. But what I remember about that photo is that the day it was taken my mother went with me to Snappy Snaps, something that would never happen now. The me that my new passport photo depicts will be a different one: married, thinner, fiercer, happy but laden down none the less with a decade’s worth of tiny sadnesses. Not least of them is the knowledge I didn’t have then, that in another ten years this process will begin again and that those ten years will pass in no time.

I look one more time at the picture on my security pass, at the swarthy and miserable man, the bad photocopy of me. As if things weren’t bad enough, the peeling plastic laminate makes it look like he has vitiligo. What would I say to him, if I could go back?

I could tell him that he won’t feel this lonely for much longer. I could tell him that in a few short months, he will meet somebody important and it will all make sense, in a way he’s almost given up on. I could tell him, too, that there are many men out there who would kill to have as much hair as he does, and that shaving nearly all of it off is a terrible waste. I could take him for a pint somewhere, sit him down and try and stop his eyes from wandering long enough for me to say what I reckon he needs to hear. I could tell him that one day, years later, on an otherwise nondescript Monday morning he will look at himself and think for more than a second and less than an hour about everything he’s gained and everything he’s left behind.

Even if I did it wouldn’t make any difference. He is going to spend those years getting married and moving house, making friends and losing family, discovering things and trying to forget bad habits, loving and hating, worrying and writing, and he has absolutely nothing to learn from me. I could tell him all of that and more, but I know he wouldn’t listen. He never does; it’s one of the things we still have in common.

Smoking again

I keep having the dream where I am smoking again.

When it happens I can’t remember anything about where I am, which is how I know that it isn’t real. Every time I have the dream, I’m in a moment out of context, just me and the cigarette. That’s the giveaway, because even though I must have smoked thousands of cigarettes in my life they all had a context, a backdrop that makes them lodge in my memory.

I remember, for instance, the cold, cold winter I spent in Oxford after leaving university. I was doing my first proper job, and on my breaks I would take a short walk away from the law library and sit on the nearby steps looking out on the empty sports field, perimeter lines smudged into the frost. I can still picture the acrid smoke from a Marlboro Red spiralling into the air, fighting with the mist made by my breath, lost in the whiteness. I was poor then, and my rented room always reeked of tobacco. I had started out on Silk Cut a few months before, but they didn’t feel like smoking anything so I switched to Marlboro Reds, which didn’t feel like anything but smoke. I liked smoking stronger cigarettes when it was freezing outside, and I never understood why I always had a cold. Cause and effect are light years apart, when you’re twenty-one.

I was never a natural smoker. I’m told I held the cigarette oddly, more like a pen than a cigarette.

I remember, too, a Lucky Strike Light in the university parks the following summer, half-heartedly racing round a makeshift football pitch with Dave, Eric and Phil in the dog days of their final year at university. I would fire in the crosses, Dave would get on the end of them and volley the ball somewhere between the jackets and jumpers that marked out the borders of the goal. It was the first time in my life that I was conscious of not being thin any more; in my mind, I was like one of those portly midfield geniuses of the fifties who didn’t let smoking and drinking impede their legendary status. I was perversely proud of the fact that I was the only one smoking. The sun would streak through the trees, and when the ball went out of play so would we. We were playing at being kids in the few remaining weeks before we all had to start playing at not being kids any more.

I never smoked when I was a kid. Far from it, I was dubious and judgmental when my brother asked me to keep his secret from my parents. I must have been no more than eleven. But I was always going to become a smoker at some point even if I didn’t know it then; I can see that now. Addiction runs through my family like writing through a stick of rock – tobacco on my father’s side, alcohol on my mother’s. My dad’s study, walls yellowed with nicotine, or the bottle of vodka I found in my brother’s writing desk one evening are testament to that.

I recall the first Rothmans Royal of the day circa summer 2001, sockless on the patio in my Doctor Martens and my ancient dressing gown, squinting in the sunshine at eight o’clock in the morning, ready for a cigarette but not ready for a shower yet. I had graduated to Royals by then because there were twenty-four in a packet, but even then I usually had to buy more than one packet every day. The patio was littered with dog ends none of us could be bothered to clear up, just as the kitchen inside was full of dirty dishes nobody could be bothered to wash. But then, if we could have been bothered – if we were those sorts of people - none of us would have been living in Stanhope Road, and we certainly wouldn’t have been living with one another.

Photographs of me back then make much more sense if you cover the cigarette with your hand. Not that many pictures of me as a smoker have survived, it’s almost as if I knew that one day it would just be an embarrassment, a tiny detail which makes you do a double take, an erratum from a previous life. It is a previous life, too; I had given up by the time I met my wife.

I remember the last cigarette.

Actually, that isn’t true; I don’t remember the last cigarette, and that’s what it has in common with the cigarettes in my dreams. What I remember instead of the dream is the mechanics – putting it in my mouth, the satisfying feeling of my thumb grinding the wheel of the lighter and willing the flame into being, the crackling noise as the light takes. Cigarettes are the perfect analogy for the people who smoke them, pumped full of chemicals which make sure they never last as long as they should. In the dream, I remember too the sour spiking sensation of smoke hitting the back of my throat for the first time even though it’s been so long; I’ve been a non-smoker again for longer than I was a smoker. I shouldn’t be able to remember all those sensations, and I don’t know what it says that I can.

The cigarettes I smoke in my dreams are always perfect, and yet so few of the ones I smoked in real life even came close. It was always cold, or pissing down with rain, or I was too busy worrying about running out, or my hacking cough, or when I’d be able to have the next one, or the one after that. If you’re given to hypochondria and neurosis smoking is about the worst thing you can do, and it doesn’t help that you can only think of one thing that helps you to deal with the stress. I used to open a packet, tear off the foil, turn the first cigarette around and put it back, filter at the bottom and pale brown tip at the top. That was the last cigarette I smoked in each packet – for luck, you see, though it’s hard to see what kind of luck featured in smoking more than one packet of cigarettes every day.

On occasion, when drunk, I would put that lucky cigarette in my mouth the wrong way round and I'd set fire to the filter. The rotten, treacly smell would drift into my lungs and I would be disgusted. Maybe the good luck it was meant to bring is that one day, when this happened to you, you would realise it was the last straw and stop. But that was never the case with me, I just threw that cigarette away. Not always, of course, sometimes I would tear the melted filter off and smoke the rest. My dream cigarettes are never like that – I always light the right end, and I smoke the lot, and I don’t know how to feel about them or myself.

There was never a last straw with me, and god knows there should have been. Instead there were a succession of penultimate straws, all of which would have been the final one for someone with more self-respect. I have torn cigarettes in half, thrown them down the toilet and rushed to a newsagent minutes later. I have bought a single Superking from a man at a kebab van for fifty pence at two in the morning when all the shops were closed, after promising myself I had quit for good. The state of his fingernails alone should have been enough to deter me. I have laid in bed in the dark, in the small hours, with pains in my chest thinking If I get through tonight I’ll never smoke again, and I’ve celebrated the next day the only way I knew. I don’t even need to tell you how. I never picked up a dog end, but I came closer than I like to admit.

You might think that’s my way of saying that I picked up a dog end once, and you might be right.

When I’m dreaming, I know I’m dreaming, but when I wake up things are different. I worry that it was real, and that I never quit. I worry that the last eight years were the dream and that I’ve woken up as the smoking me, the unhealthy, sad, dependent me who thought he deserved so much less out of life and got exactly what he thought he deserved. I worry, too, that the dream meant something – that on some level I want to smoke again, or that I’ll never be free. The rest of the time, I like to think I am the sort of non-smoker the world needs; I never tell anybody off for smoking, or nag them about the health risks. I just tell people – and only if they ask - how lucky I feel and that I’ve never regretted a single day, but that they should do what they like. In the aftermath of my smoking dream, I always worry that I am only fooling myself. Look back at the word worry, running through this paragraph like the addiction spreading like rot through my family tree, like a word running through a stick of rock. However much I worry now, I used to worry so much more back when I was a smoker, when I had things to worry about.

That last realisation is what always breaks the spell for good, that and the sight of the warm body sleeping next to me. I told you before, I gave up smoking before I met my wife. She is not a smoker, the only addictions that run through her family are a hankering for bargains and holidays. If I’d smelled of tobacco when we met she wouldn’t have looked at me twice. I like to say - to other people and to myself - that she was my reward for giving up and, silly though it might sound to you, I really believe it.

I owe that to smoking at least: I understand now that when you have dreams, it helps if only some of them come true.

An ideal husband

Despite all appearances to the contrary, I am very far from an ideal husband.

For a start, nothing is ever my fault. I realised this very early on in my marriage; something unfortunate would happen and my automatic first instinct was to find someone to blame who wasn’t me. When you live with someone, and it’s just the two of you, this process never takes very long and there’s only ever one result. Strangely, the idea that things might happen by accident or for no reason at all has not really caught on with me.

”I just tripped over that pile of magazines! Who left those there?” I might say, throwing an accusatory stare in for good measure.

“You did.” will come the reply, with only a slight hint of weariness. Remarkable, as it’s probably the hundredth time I have asked a question like that and the answer is always the same.

“Oh. Well why didn’t you tidy it away?”

Of course, tidying away is only the right solution to things when I say it is. I want things that I don’t want or need tidied away (and not by me, either), but when they are things I want or need it’s a different story altogether. The heretical idea that objects might move from one category to the other as part of day-to-day life is another of my many blind spots.

“Where’s that letter from the hospital?” I might say the following day.

”I don’t know, why are you asking me?”

”I’m asking you because I put it on the table. And it’s not there.” Those final words will be deliberately weighted, as if to say without speaking that only one logical explanation exists for the object’s disappearance. This tends to be the point where I stand defiantly waiting for a confession - but one hasn’t come yet in seven years of cohabiting, and there’s no reason why it should start now.

“Did you properly look?”

I swear she says this to annoy me. It represents progress from the classics of my childhood, my mother asking Where did you last put it? or saying It can’t have gone far but none the less, it doesn’t fit with my clear picture of what has definitely already happened.

”Of course I properly looked. I always properly look. You’ve tidied it away, haven’t you? You always do this. Why can’t you just leave well alone? I know where my stuff is and then you tidy it away. Every single time!”

“Let’s have this conversation when you’re not being such a twat.”

I will find the letter minutes later on the table, underneath something else, in a location which would have been obvious if I had properly looked. When this happens, I will be shamefaced and penitent. I will try to pretend that it was invisible, or sneak it into my bag and hope she won’t ask about it. She does though, because I deserve to feel uncomfortable and we both know it. She will mention it the following day.

“Did you track down that letter from the hospital?”

“I can’t remember.” I will say, and then I’ll get a hard stare that says You’re not getting off that easily, I know perfectly well how good your memory is. “Oh, that. Yes, I think I did.”

“Where was it in the end?”

“Oh, you know. Around.”

“It was on the table, wasn’t it?”

“Yes, it was.” I will say, desperately trying to think of a way of saving the situation. I ought to just apologise, but I can’t help myself; after all, nothing is ever my fault. “I found it in the end after looking all over, and guess what? It was underneath some of your stuff. Why didn’t you tidy it away?”

Here is another thing I do: I start talking to her halfway through a conversation.

“So yes, we’ll definitely need to stop into Marks this afternoon.”

“Excuse me? What are you talking about?”

“Stop into Marks and Spencer. You know, to buy some salad to go with dinner tonight.”

“No, I don’t know. That’s the first time you’ve mentioned it. That first bit was just in your mind, wasn’t it? You do this all the time.”

It’s true; because there seems to be little or no boundary between what I think and what I say to her, sometimes it all blurs into one continuous conversation in my head. So I will be pondering something to myself while squinting at my mostly-shaved face in the steamed-up mirror, trying to work out whether I’ve missed a stubbly patch near my adam’s apple, and when her face appears behind my reflection telling her the next thought in my mind seems like the most natural thing in the world. Apparently this is not endearing, it’s just very, very frustrating.

The converse also applies. I sometimes share only the start of a conversation with her.

“So…” I will say on a Sunday evening, standing over the ironing board and trying not to think too hard about the fact that the weekend is coming to an end. Ages will then pass in comfortable silence before she speaks next.

“So? Go on.”

That’s when I’ll realise that I had started thinking out loud but decided not to share the rest of my thought processes with her. The cogs continued to grind but my mouth stayed closed throughout. The remainder of the conversation has been with myself, and meanwhile she has sat there on the bed taking off her make-up, looking up at me with the strange sort of expectant expression you wear when you absolutely know you are about to be disappointed. Some spouses have a whole list of conversation topics that are off limits; their in-laws might be verboten, or money, or work, but everything else is fair game. By contrast, I’m prepared to talk about anything with my wife but there are huge random holes where instead I have the discussion with myself. It’s not deliberate, just haphazard and exasperating. And yet it’s women who are constantly accused of wanting their partners to be mind-readers.

If only the problems with my powers of communication stopped there, but I’m also a shocking listener. Sound travels through the air slower when I am involved. The rustling of clothes being taken out of a basket, shook out straight and hung on an airer takes minutes to traverse our long hall and make its way to the living room, takes just long enough in fact that by the time I stand up and walk to the spare room the very last item is neatly laid out on the very last white rod. The same thing happens over shorter distances, too; the clatter of dishes going into cupboards, the clank of a forest of teaspoons being planted in the dishwasher, the rumble of the sink filling with soapy water, they all take an eternity to trickle through the open doorway and make their way to the sofa where I am ensconced doing nothing.

When I do eventually get up and make my way to the only room where something is happening, the question I ask is always the same.

“Can I help?”

The reason that my wife has taken to starting things without me is that I have to be asked to do something again and again before it will actually happen. I plan to do it, honestly I do - just after I finish doing whatever I’m doing, although what I’m doing is never anything important. Whenever I’m asked, even if I am asked for the first time, I describe it as “nagging”. This means that the moral high ground is guaranteed to be mine, which is important as good intentions clearly matter far more than actual attainment. When I do eventually do what is asked I go back to her with an expectant face, like a dog that has brought you a stick you didn’t even want.

”Do you want a medal? There’s a lot that goes on in this house that you don’t know anything about.”

I know she’s right, but half of the time I’m not properly listening.

It’s not a problem with my hearing, because I had it tested a few years back. I remember sitting in a dark room – it was more like a cupboard, really - with a big clumsy headset on and a button in my hand which I was to press it every time I heard a noise. And there were so many noises; long low beeps, little short blips, sounds that seemed to be right up close and ones that I thought must be coming from miles away, even though the booth was only small. Every single one led to a push of my thumb on the button, led to a dot on a graph and a cross on a chart and between them they built up another view of what was supposedly going on inside my head. Afterwards, the nurse sat down with me and told me my hearing was perfect. I was so expecting the answer to be different, ironically, that I had to ask her to repeat herself.

I start things at the last minute. I am late for everything. I dawdle. Those three facts are all connected. I have big ideas at bedtime, and the wrong ideas too. As the main light goes off and the paperbacks are opened, I will decide it’s time to reorganise the photo albums, or work out what needs to go to the charity shop. I will be lively and animated when it’s a time for soft, quiet words or for no words at all. Even writing this now I get a clear picture of how irritating it must be to be around, and yet I don’t mean anything by it. I have had a whole evening to talk to her and haven’t done it anywhere near enough, and as the day draws to an end suddenly I can see all the things I should have done and I don’t want to be asleep, because being asleep means you’re awake and it’s the next day and time to go to work and be parted, and I don’t want that. And I think to myself It’s okay, it’s not too late.

“Why do you want to have a conversation now? It’s bedtime. It’s far too late.”

I ask rhetorical questions all the time, which I’m told is especially wearing. The worst one is this: “Aren’t you pretty?”

“I wish you wouldn’t say that. There’s no right answer. I can’t say yes because that’s vain and I can’t say no because that’s fishing for compliments.”

“There’s not meant to be a right answer. I was just saying you’re pretty, that’s all. I’m sorry, I forget, you find rhetorical questions really annoying, don’t you?”

She looks at me.

“Ah. That’s a rhetorical question too, isn’t it?”

It would be funny if it was deliberate but it isn’t, and that makes it even worse.

My dad told me once that the worst thing about his marriage to my mother was the three little words she would say when they argued: and another thing. They would argue about something, and the argument would stop and then my mother would say those magic words like a coin dropping into a slot and the jukebox of recrimination would start up again. And another thing. And another thing. And another thing. Does it make it better or worse that I already know what my list of another things would be?

I mention to my wife that I’m thinking of writing a piece about how tiresome I am to live with. It becomes a running joke over the course of a week or so, whenever I do something she doesn’t like, which is quite often. “Is that in there already?” she says. In many cases, it wasn’t; this piece could easily have been four times longer, and maybe if I was a better listener it would be.

I can tell looking back on it that I’ve missed out so much. Doing half a job because the second half of the job is too difficult. Leaving the fridge door open when I’m in the kitchen doing things which do not involve the fridge. Putting off making phone calls or doing emails and pretending to be helpless when the truth is that I just don’t want to do things I don’t like the look of. Deliberately mispronouncing words for comic effect all the time when it wasn’t even funny first time around. Leaving my boots lying around in the living room, or in the hall, or anywhere else where they are an accident waiting to happen. Leaving the cupboard doors open when I’m in the kitchen doing things which do not involve the cupboard. I leave things open all the time, not all of them literal.

We’ve been married for seven years and she makes me so happy that I can’t begin to express it, but I find myself thinking about just how much happier we could be if only I was perfect. We would be in the Guinness Book of World Records and on all the chat shows, the official Happiest Couple In History, but we’ll never make it and it’s all my fault. We’ll have to settle for being extraordinarily happy, or at least I hope we will.

One night last week we were sitting side by side staring at something on my laptop, and the page was taking ages to load.

”Did you know that when you’re waiting for your computer to do something you constantly move your mouse pointer round in circles?”

“No.”

”You do it all the time. It’s not going to make anything happen any faster. You should put that in your list.”

I told her I would. It seemed like the least I could do.

The downpour

When it came, the downpour took everybody by surprise, including me, but I was fortunate. Outside the café, underneath the awning, I had the best seat in the house.

Like the best rain it was warm, and like the very best rain it came out of nowhere. One minute it had been dry and close, the next the pavements were gleaming and all around, people were acting differently. I witnessed every method of rain avoidance known to man. I saw people running, because they thought that meant they would be hit by less drops. I saw people picking their way through gingerly in the belief that the rain would hit them less hard. I saw winces, grimaces and grumbles, but I also heard carefree laughter and wry conversations between damp friends. I saw hoods up, bags held over heads and hats sacrificed to the contents of the heavens, never to be quite the same again.

One man walked past with an umbrella bigger than he was and I loved the expression on his face. It said that a day like today made up for the three hundred and sixty-four days when that umbrella, like him and like me, didn’t live up to its potential. He couldn’t believe his luck, and sitting beneath that awning neither could I.

The amiable geek at the neighbouring table chattered away to his wife on the phone. “Yes, I’m in Reading so I’m part of the way home. I stopped because I fancied a coffee and a pair of trousers, and I achieved both objectives.” I shamelessly listened in to the eavesdroplets and I smiled at what people give away, that the way some people talk and the words they choose tell you exactly how their minds work. He had a little list - 1. Coffee. 2. Trousers. 3. Phone my wife. - he had accomplished everything on it, and later there would be another list, and another. I found that kind of beautiful. I was reassured, too, to see a carrier bag on the chair next to him, and to know that he hadn’t been walking around in his underpants until item 2 had been ticked off.

The other spectator, on the table to my right, was a woman reading her plastic-bound library copy of The Corrections in silence. Every now and again she looked up, and something about her face said that the rain was reminding her of something she would sooner not think about.

All the while, the warm rain battered the awning above me. Such a beautiful sound, like a vinyl crackle in the background of day to day life. And I thought to myself that I love this space, this spot, these people I will never meet. It seemed particularly crucial that I would never meet them, because I probably wouldn’t love them if I did. Outside the pub opposite, the grown-up, serious, professional timewasters stood beneath a racing green umbrella looking out on a slightly different version of the world, one with me in their landscape, one in which I was not the lead character. One of them, pint glass in hand, was wearing a plastic horned Viking helmet with fake hair sewn into it and he caught me looking at him for just a second too long. I tried to make my expression say How about this rain? but I was too late, and I knew it hadn’t worked.

I thought to myself that I didn’t know the collective noun for umbrellas, and that I had seen such a wide range of umbrellas that you would struggle to fit them all in a collective anyway. The cheap black ones that fitted into handbags. The deckchair-striped golfing ones. The ones that came free with this job, or the last job, or the last girlfriend’s last job. The ones stolen from somewhere unimportant that had not been missed. The old tatty floral embarrassments, saved for the rainiest of days. The first choice umbrellas, the second choice umbrellas and the afterthoughts, the sturdy and the tattered and the turned inside out. All those umbrellas, all those people underneath them and a story for every one, a story I would never hear.

My reverie was broken by the man walking past in a shirt and braces, soaked even by the standards of all the other passers-by. His outfit was several shades darker than it had been fifteen minutes before but he wasn’t tentative, uncomfortable or cold. He skipped among the falling ribbons as if it was the hottest, driest day of the year and he looked happy, unflustered and alive. And I looked at him and thought, Yes, that’s who I’d like to be but I knew too that I’m not that person, and the closest I can get is to watch and write about people like him. I'm still waiting for some of it to rub off.

I stayed at my table like this, looking out, long after the rain had stopped and the umbrellas were put away. I could still almost hear the rain on the awning, though I knew it was just an echo in my memory. It didn’t matter; even without that crackle in the background it was still too hard to tear myself away from my town, that circus, that carnival, that glorious film with no stars.