Mr London Street

Fiction: Know-it-all

2012-01-25T19:09:00.003Z

Every morning, I go to the café at the end of the road and the man behind the counter tells me that he can’t stand me.

He has all kinds of reasons. For starters, he doesn’t like my outfit; my trousers are too short for his liking (something which hasn’t escaped my notice, believe me). I should get some new ones, but department stores make me nervous. I’m putting it off until a quiet weekend, or a Sunday morning when nobody is around. He finds my shirts cheap and nasty – no argument there, because they are. I’ve never had the time for ironing. He doesn’t like the way I ask for my coffee (always latte, skinny milk, no sugar). Now that is something I can’t help; I’ve got the kind of voice which makes questions sound like statements. A lot of people have told me that. If I had to guess, I’d say that it’s because I pretty much always know what the answer is going to be. It’s beyond my control, it’s just how I was made; people tell me things. They tell me everything.

It isn’t just my clothes with the man behind the counter though, it’s more than that. “The man behind the counter”, listen to me; if it was a proper café, or a proper machine, or my drink had ever tasted half decent in the last two years I suppose I’d call him a barista, but they’re not and he’s not and that’s that. He reckons that something went wrong when everything was being handed out, because he knows he’s better than me. He should be the one placing the orders and I should be the one on the other side, frothing the milk – which I’d do better than him, we have a machine at home – tamping the coffee, measuring things out. I like making coffee at home. The noises, the gurgling and gushing, take my mind off things.

If he was the one placing the order, it wouldn’t be a latte. He likes a mocha with two sugars, a triple shot of espresso and lots of squirty cream on top so it looks like an ice cream sundae – I know that, because he told me once. The radio on top of the counter was playing something upbeat and tiresome, and I wished it was just a bit louder, loud enough that I could tune him out. He told me that he couldn’t understand why anybody would drink the muck I order. He always looks like he’s been two days without shaving, and I see him every weekday. I don’t understand how he manages that. Some people are just like that, I guess, like Don at work. He comes in clean-shaven and he almost has a beard by half-three. Don’s one of my favourites – he doesn’t tell me much. It’s because he doesn’t have a lot to tell, but I like that; usually it doesn’t stop people.

The man behind the counter at the café doesn’t like his job, really doesn’t like it. He tells me that all the time. I have to say I can understand; I’d go insane if I had to listen to all those people, day in day out, every day. Half of them don’t know what they want and the other half just kid themselves that they do, and they’re always wrong. Fucking morons. I wouldn’t want a job doling out disappointment to others, I have enough trouble managing my own. But as far as he’s concerned, I wouldn’t know about that. He tells me that it’s okay for me with my cushy desk job and my incredible salary and my studenty lifestyle. He’s the kind of person that spits out the word “student” like it’s right up there with sex offender.

He couldn’t be much more wrong about me if he tried. My job entails chasing people for payment on orders, filling out forms and sending back forms that haven’t been filled out properly. It involves as little human contact as I can get away with. I deliberately picked it for that reason. Even my desk, in a room away from the main open-plan bedlam, has been carefully selected. My shared house hasn’t been vacuumed in months and I’m only there because I couldn’t find anywhere with a cheaper rent and because there’s nobody living there who I actively want to kill. That’s progress, actually. Alex hasn’t bought toilet roll in as long as any of us can remember, so now I buy my own – the good stuff, because I have standards – and I hide it in my bedside table. Every night, I sneak to the toilet with my own stash and when I’m finished I take it back to my bedroom, and it’s going to carry on like this until Alex puts his hand in his pocket. Which means it’s going to carry on forever; Alex told me once that he doesn’t care because he knows that if he waits long enough Steph will crack and go to the corner shop.

I could mention all of these things to the man behind the counter and explain how lucky he really is, the grass is always greener, blah blah blah, but I don’t. I never have much time to tell people anything, because I’m always too busy being told. Besides, I don’t like him. I don’t like a lot of people though, it’s hardly like he’s special.

He told me once about his unfinished novel, and it was all I could do not to laugh there and then. A novel! I bet it’s shit.

When people tell you things non-stop, you get tired of them very quickly. I wonder if people realise that. That’s why I like taking the Tube to work – you don’t often see the same people on there twice. Meeting people once is usually more than enough for me. The only thing that gets me through my commute is knowing that the faces change every day – and even that doesn’t help as much as it should, because the stories are always the same. The guy in the corner tells me that he fancies the blonde standing by the doors, one hand holding the rail, the other gripping a paperback. She doesn’t register the guy in the corner at all; I’m not sure how she could be less interested in him. Instead, she tells me she’s bored with the book. It’s not one I plan to read, she has carefully selected it to improve herself and look intellectual on public transport, and I doubt she’ll get past the hundredth page. Anyway, I don’t read much. I can’t manage that level of concentration. She doesn’t tell me any more about the book, instead she goes on about how worried she is about her mum. She goes in for her operation on Friday.

Does she ever bore herself, the way she’s boring me? I doubt the guy in the corner would fancy her much longer, if she told him half of what I’ve heard.

And then there’s the stocky man in tracksuit trousers and a paint-spattered t-shirt pretending to read the Metro (does anyone do anything but pretend to read it?) Oh my god, he comes out with such racist, racist hate. He rants away and nobody looks except me. In the early days I used to give a hard stare to guys like him: Look at yourself, it was meant to say, do you have any idea what you sound like? It didn’t last long though – they’re not mind readers, after all – so nowadays I just look embarrassed, peering at the names at intervals on the red stripe of the Central Line and acting like he isn’t there. I wish everybody on this train would just shut up.

At the other end, when I get to my stop, walking past the beggar is the worst thing about my morning. There are about half a dozen different ways to get from the Tube station to the office – past branches of Prêt and Eat full of hungry, disgruntled workers talking to someone for the first time that day, asking for a coffee the way I asked for mine an hour ago, or along side streets swathed in shadows, past the backs of buildings and the entrances nobody uses – but they all end up going past her and I can’t stand it.

Her face is creased, her body almost skeletal and her clothes worn and tatty. She smells terrible, and she could be thirty or fifty and I wouldn’t know. She just says “Spare any change?” to everyone, I know that, and yet every time I walk past her she stares up into my eyes, though I try to look away, and tells me the rest. She tells me about how her husband hit her, how he lost his job and how one day he just left. She tells me where she slept last night – or where she didn’t – and she tells me that she never knows where she will sleep tonight, or whether it will be the last night. She tells that every time she goes to sleep she doesn’t expect to wake up. The thing I really hate, the thing that makes me feel uncomfortable inside, is when she tells me that she’s cold; she’s been telling me that for months. I hear it all, every single word, and I wonder why I even bother wearing these headphones.

Things are better when I get to the revolving doors of the office. The woman on reception is worried that I’ve looked ill these last few days, but I swipe my pass at the turnstile, take the lift to the fourth floor and try to make my way to my desk without speaking to anyone. It’s been hard work finding a job I could stomach, and this one is close enough to ticking the boxes that I’ll tolerate the café and the Tube and the woman shivering outside, close to the front doors. I still don’t know why the police haven’t moved her on. I get to do nearly everything by email. Phone calls are few and far between, face to face meetings are almost non-existent and my boss is based in another office, so I don’t have to see her. My one-to-ones don’t happen and my performance reviews, once every six months, are a cursory chat over a second-rate video conference link. Mentally, I’m hardly there, but neither is she so it doesn’t matter (I met her once. She told me she didn’t much care if it never happened again.)

From my seat I can see out of the window into mid-air. Unless the window-cleaners are working on the office across the street, I can’t see anything at all, which is perfect. I sometimes see them up there and envy them their job, but that kind of job is always thick with camaraderie, and I don’t do camaraderie. I’m lucky – my office is cut off from the main area by a pair of double doors, and they’re like a lifeline for me. Nobody wants to work in my area. They call it “the library”, and they find me strange. I’ve learned not to take anything personally and I never say anything about it. What’s the point? People are all too busy telling you things to try listening anyway.

The funny thing is that if I wanted to, I could be so good at so many things. When people tell you as much as they tell me, you can do whatever you want. I could lead hostage negotiations, close deals, counsel couples. I could interview celebrities, or help with murder investigations. I’m sure there are other jobs. But I don’t want any of them, because I wish it wasn’t this way. You have absolutely no idea, I know that for a fact because this would never occur to any of you. If you knew, you’d call me the luckiest man in the world - but you’d be dead wrong like you’re wrong about everything else. That’s why people give me a headache. That’s why I don’t want anything to do with the lot of you.

If you want to imagine what it’s like to be me, follow me through the double doors into the main section of the office. Dozens and dozens of desks, all in an orderly formation, each with an occupant tapping away on their keyboard sending their futile mails, each moving their pointless mouse. Some of the people have a photo up, just to prove how human they are, how different. Some of them might have a cartoon stuck to their monitor, to show everyone that they have a sense of humour. Some of them swear, just so everyone knows they’re not like the others - irreverent, not corporate. They might be the ones I dislike the most. No, dislike’s the wrong word; they bore me. It’s all so boring.

Come with me, stand right in the middle. Next, I want you to imagine that you can read every single Instant Messenger conversation being sent by every single one. Can you do that? Imagine. Every single piece of gossip, every single complaint, every single suggestion that it’s time for a coffee, every single time a hot girl walks by. Every single piece of flirting, successful and unsuccessful, every single complaint about every single half-arsed piece of work someone gets asked to do. Every crappy escalation, every stroppy customer, every single piece of surfing people do because they don’t like the shit on their to do list. Is your brain up to imagining that? The noise? The fun, the gloom, the frustration. Thank fuck it’s nearly the weekend. Look at her tits today. This conference call is doing my head in. Don’t make me go and talk to the geek in The Library. Have you seen that email? What a loser. Every ROFL, every LOL, every fucking winking smiley. How long would you last, in that room?

Now I want you to go one step further (this is the bit that will blow your mind). Imagine all the Instant Messenger conversations these people are only having with themselves. All the things they don’t tell anyone, the things they daren’t. Imagine reading all those things too, and tell me how that might feel. You can’t even begin to. You get better at shutting it off, at turning down the volume, but it never goes away and what you realise is how banal everybody is. How predictable, stupid and vain. Everyone has a book in them, they say – well, I’ve read everybody’s and the answer is they don’t. Or if they do, nobody should be made to turn the pages. Have a look at the first twenty and then stop bothering, because there’s nothing worthwhile in the rest.

You still don’t believe me? Look around you. Darren tells me he fancies Kirsty, who I happen to know has the hots for Steve. Steve’s married – married and bored. He tells me, and himself, that he’s happy but there was the night with the prostitute on the stag weekend in Tallinn that he’s trying to forget. For someone who’s trying to forget about it he doesn’t seem to stop going on about it. His wife was pregnant, and they weren’t getting on, and he was abroad, and it was five years ago, and so it really doesn’t matter, or so I’m told. Paul is looking for a new job, but he’s worried that eventually he’ll have to mention his prescription for antidepressants on an application form. Tony is waiting for the result of some tests, and he’s terrified. Penny is worried that nobody in the office notices her since she came back from maternity leave – which is reasonable, because nobody does (they didn’t before she went away on maternity leave, either; there was a general sense of surprise that she had a man at all. Darren thought she might be a lesbian). She works in HR, she has no people skills and she’s decided that the company made a big mistake taking me on. No, I never hear a thing about Penny - with the exception of Adam, who had a wet dream about her a week ago which horrified him. Yesterday he told me that he’d thought about it that morning while wanking in the shower. I didn’t want to know that – not about him, not about her.

Can you imagine being me? I have a headache by noon. I spend my lunch break at my desk, headphones on, playing Minesweeper. Something repetitive, something distracting. By four pm, all the painkillers in the world can’t help and five thirty can’t come quickly enough. That second sentiment is the only thing I have in common with everybody else in the building. The only one who’s different is Sinead. She started two weeks ago, straight out of university, tall, awkward-looking, short dark hair. Her suits are a bit too smart, like she bought them expecting a better job than this, before she knew what kind of a place it was. She doesn’t seem to have made a lot of friends yet, though the three guys in corporate finance already have a bet on which one of them she’ll sleep with first (the answer, I get the feeling, is none of them). When she looks at me I don’t know whether I like the expression that dances round her green eyes. I know there’s something different about you, she tells me, Perhaps I’ll find out what it is.

Believe me, I’d like to see her try.

There’s no way I can cope with the clamour of the rush hour home, so instead I wander through as many side streets as it takes, at right angles to the rest of the world, until I find a quiet unfashionable pub where I can sit on my own. I’m looking for the sort of place without hordes of smiling drinkers out on the pavement, smoking their cigarettes and consoling each other about the days they’ve had, the sort of crowd scene which any other passer-by would see as the perfect advert for London life. I am after a pub where the only people in there are disappointed, silent old men who have been there since noon, where the sun fails to shed light on anything inside, literal or figurative. The sort of pub where the barman sighs as he takes your order – just like this one does, as he tells me how bored he is that his life has come to this.

I ought to be doing something else – going out and getting laid, perhaps, but getting laid is too easy. I know – too easy, you wouldn’t believe it. I never understood what people said about the thrill of the chase until I realised that it was an experience I’ll never know. There’s no fun in foregone conclusions, good or bad, and all the times I’ve been out with women are exactly that. It’s a shame about your teeth. I don’t want to hear about your job. You talk about your family too much. Why do you never talk about your family? Kiss me. Not like that. I’d like you to stop now. I’ve been told every combination you could come up with, sometimes all in one night, but the worst thing is how much it ruins it all to know how things are going to end. When it goes badly, I can console myself that there’s nothing I could have done, when it goes well it doesn’t feel like an achievement. Or maybe it does, but it feels like something unearned. Everybody else gets the delight of working these things out as they go along, never realising that what they say or do is a blunder or a stroke of genius until many months later when they are having the final, sad conversation or popping the question, moving in together or drifting apart.

But I get a running commentary, and nobody wants a running commentary on this kind of thing.

Would Sinead be different? I don’t know. When I talk to her, it’s almost like there is something she isn’t telling me, and that’s never happened before. But I know how these things end, and I know it’s pointless. I watch the couples sometimes, in busier pubs than this, and I know they are breaking up or getting together long before they do, long before they know it themselves. In some cases it’s obvious to everyone in the room, often it’s only obvious to me. They could save themselves so much time if they told each other what they’re telling me – but of course saving time isn’t what this is about. It’s about fun, the fun that they’re having and I’m not. I go up and get another pint, because the first one has gone down pretty fast, and that’s when my housemate Alex comes in.

Alex is my pub buddy – he works a little way across town, he’s easy to lure out for a drink after work and although he hates this kind of pub and isn’t sure what to make of me, he nearly always comes out these days. I like Alex, he’s the kind of guy most people would describe this way: you know where you are with him. Of course, that’s a cliché for me – I know where I am with everybody. But for me, it’s more about where you are than knowing where you are, and we’re in the pub, safe from the crowds outside shouting their hopes, their dreams, their commonplace preferences for soap operas and supermarkets and reality show contestants.

We normally sit at a table in the corner, a pint of cider for him, a pint of bitter for me, and a packet of crisps opened out in front of us. Alex reaches in with a hand like a claw, like one of those machines in amusement arcades that grabs for underwhelming prizes. Alex’s specialist subjects - which he talks about a lot - are West Ham United, his crappy job as a graphic designer, how Steph gets on his nerves with her holier than thou notes on the phone table and the Post-It note on her skimmed milk (which nobody would drink anyway), the gigs he wants to go to and his plans to get wasted at the weekend. He gave up asking me along months ago, though touchingly he’s still a bit disappointed.

Alex stopped coming out a few months back because of Chris, some girl he met at work. We didn’t see him around the house for ages, he was always staying at hers (somewhere more upmarket – Maida Vale or Swiss Cottage, I can’t remember where) and our paths never crossed. I met Chris once. She told me how filthy the living room was and that she planned never to visit the house again. Steph stopped writing the notes and didn’t feel the need to label her milk any more, and things were quieter for a while. And I would almost say I missed Alex, even if I didn’t miss hearing his masturbatory fantasies through the adjoining wall late at night (honestly, I’d sooner have heard him actually having sex), but then he came back and now he comes to the pub most days.

Alex’s specialist subjects are still West Ham United, his crappy job and Steph. But now when we sit down he spends all night telling me about Chris. About how she didn’t want to commit. About how they would go clubbing with her mates and he would want to go and she would want to stay. Go on then, go back to the flat, I’ll see you when I see you. He tells me about how they argued, and how she told him that enough was enough. I’m only twenty-three. I’m not old enough to be having this kind of conversation. It’s like you’re an old man these days. He tells me every word of their final, sad conversation and how they had sex for the last time. He tells me how he walked back into town, soaked from rain and wet from crying, and how now he’s just a failure in a shared house full of failures – with Steph the self-righteous virgin and me, and I’m just a freak and Steph’s just a freak and he’s no better. Last of all, he tells me all about how he finds himself taking the Tube to Warwick Avenue (it’s Warwick Avenue, I remember now) at weekends, sitting in a café, wishing he would bump into her again, walking slowly past her flat. All the time Alex tells me this he is talking about West Ham, his crappy job and Steph.

I don’t know why I do the next thing I do. I wish I knew someone like me, so they could tell me.

“You miss her, don’t you?”

It’s the oddest thing, sitting there listening to Alex – haltingly at first, and then more and more fluently – telling me things I already know. As he does, it strikes me that people have two voices; there’s the one they use, that everybody hears, and the one they don’t use, that only I can hear. And they always say different things. “Have a good day.” says the man in the café with the first, and Thank god you’re leaving with the second. “The coffee here is shit.” says Sinead with the first as we stand at the machine, and Why are you looking at me like that? What do you want? with the second. But both Alex’s voices are saying the same thing, and I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced that before. And the harmony – well, I’m not good at words for this sort of thing, but it’s beautiful. It’s the saddest melody, but the most beautiful sound. And we talk all evening like that, and get a kebab on the way home, and then there’s an awkward hug in the lounge when we say goodnight. He calls me “mate”.

I don’t know when I last hugged anyone, before that.

My favourite bit of the day is the last part, under the covers, 6 Music on my bedside radio. There are no people any more, just chatter and records that I can tune out any time I want to. I don’t know, based on the day I’ve had, if I’m changing. I don’t know why I said what I said to Alex; I’m not a people person, I’d rather not get involved. And I don’t understand what I felt on the way home, or in the lounge, and I don’t know whether tomorrow will be the same or different, or why I don’t have a headache now. I never remember my dreams anyway, and I know the moment I turn out the light I’ll fall asleep. I might as well do that now. It’s been such a long time since I was alone with my thoughts, just mine, only me, without all the other voices, that I wonder if I’d even recognise them anymore.

Evil

2012-01-08T01:37:00.004Z

Even though I have been thinking about doing it all day, I wait until the clock is close to midnight and my wife is yawning on the sofa. This is my way; if a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing far too late, a habit that has stayed with me for years, retained long after the need for last minute revision, deadlines and essay crises has passed. My wife slopes down the hall to the bedroom and I gather everything I need and make my way to the bathroom. By the time she sees me again, I will be somebody else.

The bathroom in my flat is a curious room – big but sterile, cold, uncomfortable and rarely used. It has a bath I must have been in a handful of times in the six years we’ve lived here, plain magnolia walls, a heated towel rail which is nearly never on and a shelf containing all the ornamental Christmas presents which are not attractive enough to put on display. It’s mainly used by guests (which makes it even sadder, given how inhospitable it is) or by me when the en suite is occupied. Once a year, I use it to do what I am about to do.

I look in the mirror, properly look instead of catching a glimpse of myself in the window of a train, or a shopfront as I walk by. When you have a beard, your face looks different – a different shape, a different silhouette, a different character altogether. Your mannerisms change; you scratch and stroke, actions which seem so much more purposeful than mere fidgeting. It’s a year since I did this last, but back then Kelly was standing over my shoulder and I’m not sure I even gave it much thought. This time, I’m alone with my reflection and I feel a year older, maybe even more than that. 2012. The future. I’m nearly forty. My moustache seems to have more grey hairs in it this time than before.

Nothing I see changes my mind, but it still feels like saying goodbye.

The beard trimmer hums and buzzes as it comes to life in my hand. The first stage is to attack my neck, the space under my chin. I never cease to be surprised by how easy it is to take off what takes so long to grow, even though I shouldn’t be; meals cooked in hours are demolished in minutes, buildings which took months to build drop to the ground in a single blast, relationships that lasted for years can be destroyed by a single word, a gesture or mistake. This is much the same - the things we do with care are undermined by carelessness or abandoned because we get bored. I have always been fickle; I grew a beard because I wanted to look different, I got used to it and now I am getting rid of it because I want to look different again. It’s just another kind of furniture to rearrange.

Underneath, I see my skin for the first time in some time, small stubbly hairs clinging to it, doomed like all the others.

The sink fills with clippings as I tackle one side of my face, then the other. It didn’t seem like anywhere near so much hair when it was attached to me as it does looking down on it, and there is still a lot more to come. I stop, attack the clippers with a brush to stop them clogging up, and continue. Both cheeks too now are covered in the ragged remnants of the beard, more gone than there, and somehow my face looks naked and vulnerable. I notice, too, that I seemed to have a stronger chin before I grew this beard than I do now that it’s on its way out – Christmas, no doubt, is responsible for that – and I understand why men grow beards that hug their jawline, lending definition where the years have conspired to take it away.

I stop at the top lip. I have been joking for the past few days about shaving it into a Hitler moustache for a day and wandering round town, just to see how people react. The feedback from my friends has varied. Some said they thought it would be in extremely poor taste. Some said that they would find it funny, but they suspected most others wouldn’t. One expressed concern for my personal safety. The thing is, I know that I’m a man who enjoys giving offence – my collection of t-shirts alone or my idea of acceptable behaviour on the internet are testimony to that – but also, I am curious. Would people stare? Would they verbally abuse me? Attack me? Is it right that one man has changed the way we look at this single superficial thing forever? I sort of wanted to find out the answers to that.

Using the clippers I remove the margins of my moustache, leaving the thick stripe down the middle, and I look at myself again. My face is stubbly, many scrapes of the razor from smooth, but the moustache looks enough like a calculated, cultivated choice that I can see what it would look like. I don’t look evil, at least I don’t think I do. I pull some comedy faces into the mirror, waggle my eyebrows, wonder if he ever did those things. No, I decide I look clownish rather than evil, though that might be because that is what I want to be. And yes, I know there’s Chaplin too, but somehow whatever people tell you his is not the name that springs to mind when you look at someone with a moustache like this.

How did it happen that nobody can ever have this facial hair because of one man? How many children get named Adolf now? Did all the Hitlers in the world change their surnames from shame, or did they just die out? Are these the right things to be thinking about well past midnight, my wife reading her Kindle in the other room, when I thought I’d only done this for a laugh? I look at myself again; I look uncomfortable but I don’t look evil, although I know that I am more than capable of cruelty. For a moment, I think about shaving the rest of my face with a razor, applying the cream, using the hot flannel and making the choice to look like this for a little while longer. When I started the process of shaving off my beard, I honestly thought I might do that, but here, confronted with the reality, it just isn’t possible. And yet I want someone to see this.

I walk down the hall. The bedroom light is on.

“Kelly, would you like to see me with a Hitler moustache?”

There is a pause.

“I don’t know! Hold on… no, come on. Come in.”

Originally, I had said that she would fall asleep and when she woke up I would be clean-shaven, the man she met again, but the curiosity proves too great. It’s not every day that someone offers to model a Hitler moustache for you. I go in. She is tucked up in the duvet, her favourite place in the world, warmly lit by a solitary bedside lamp. I know that she is minutes from sleep, if that, and that if I had taken slightly longer to get this far or begun a few minutes later she would never have seen this bizarre moment that almost never was. I move close enough so she can see me, and she laughs.

“What do you think?”

“It’s funny! Not threatening at all. Go on, say I’ll get you Butler.”

I oblige, shaking my fist and doing my best to impersonate a character from a sitcom I’ve never really watched. Odd, it was made in the early Seventies and was probably one of the last toothbrush moustaches anyone has ever seen – that and Mugabe, who is a role model for no one. I wonder if comedy is the only way we can reclaim that moustache. It sprung from comedy – Oliver Hardy, Chaplin of course – lurched into horror and tragedy and then lapsed into infamy and obscurity. And I know, even from wearing it for five short minutes, that the world isn’t ready for it again.

“Do you want me to take a photo of you?”

“No. It just wouldn’t feel right.”

Some things, I reflect as I stand back in the bathroom again, just aren’t funny and probably never will be. Trying to make jokes about them is a mistake. Perhaps I am growing up after all, perhaps that realisation is even more of a sign of age than the grey hairs in the sink, because I know perfectly well that a couple of years ago I would have kept that moustache for a day and enjoyed people’s glares, just as I enjoyed the looks I got from the American servicemen, proud in their regalia, at the Henley Regatta. I can remember that day, hot and busy on the riverbank, and I remember my t-shirt, a deeply offensive one about 9/11, and I remember their looks, because they looked as if they wanted to kill me. Yes, I must be changing – not too fast, not too drastically, but changing none the less - because I think back on that boiling afternoon and cringe. Just for a moment, I feel weary of shocking, criticising and conflict, although I know that the world (and I) will seem different tomorrow.

I have work left to do, so I run the tap and fill the sink with hot water. The time has come to finish what I started; rub in the shaving cream, wet the razor and complete the transformation from straggly to sleek. In the morning I will wake up; a new person, the old me and an older me all in one complicated combination. My wife will kiss me for the first time, oblivious to that, reckless where for months she has been tentative, and say “You’re back!” and everything will be as it was. And maybe I will be the only one who understands that ever so briefly, just for five minutes, I looked like the most evil man in the world.

Le Petit Marché

2011-12-14T17:45:00.002Z

9, rue de Bearn.

- Sesame seared tuna with sesame and sweet chilli dipping sauce
- Fillet of lamb with basil cream, mashed potato and mange tout
- Chocolate fondant with praline creme anglaise

The moment when you know you’ve arrived somewhere new is different for everyone. For some people, it’s when the train pulls up at the platform or the point where wheels hit the runway. For some people it’s when you first see signs in another language, or buy something in an alien currency. It can be when you take a sip of that first crisp, cold beer (as it is when I go to Prague) or the point when your mobile lights up with a text telling you how exorbitant everything is going to be for the duration of your stay. I think, for me, the moment I know I’ve arrived in Paris might well be when I take my seat in Le Petit Marché and look at the menu.

It wasn’t always like this. The first time I went to Paris with my wife, on honeymoon, we stayed in Saint Germain des Pres on the left bank. Our hotel room – sleek and minimalist, muted lime green bedding and clean-lined dark wood furniture – was more expensive than any we’ve ever stayed in, before or since. A short walk round the corner were the famous writers’ haunts of the Twenties and Thirties, Café de Flore and Les Deux Magots, now mainly full of Japanese tourists. Next to the latter, a Louis Vuitton store looked out across the square at an ancient church, the new religion juxtaposed against the old. The market on rue de Buci bustled with florists and grocers and the steam from my chocolat chaud smudged into the cold air. It was hard to imagine a more perfect part of the city, and back then the Marais was just an area on a map and an item waiting to be ticked off on a checklist.

Going there, towards the end of our honeymoon, was a revelation. We got lost in the narrow maze of streets, cool boutiques and tiny restaurants scattered everywhere, and couldn’t help but feel like we had stayed in the wrong part of the city. Everywhere we looked, we could see people we wanted to watch and views we wanted to exhaust. It was like the set for the film we wanted our lives to be. We sat under the elegant vaults of the Place des Vosges, sipping a sneaky glass of Moulin-à-Vent and planning our return. When we did, we knew we would stay in the Marais and we knew we would come here again.

When we did, a few years later, we did exactly that and Le Petit Marché was one of the restaurants we visited on that trip. I remember that I ordered badly – I always order badly – and I sat there in the atmospheric lighting trying, with limited success, to dissect a chicken that seemed to be more bones than flesh while Kelly looked on, ate her fillet steak and tried not to be smug, also with limited success. Despite that, I loved the place; cool without being intimidating, smart without being fussy and casual without being shabby. The menu was full of Asian influences without screaming anything so obvious or naff as fusion and the lighting, if not quite up to aiding a post mortem on poultry, was the kind that made people you knew look attractive and people you didn’t know look interesting. It was close to my ideal restaurant, and I wanted to pick it up and take it back home with me, even though deep down I knew that it wouldn’t have flourished in captivity.

Since then, any trip to Paris has involved a visit to Le Petit Marché on the first night and my most recent trip was no exception. As a precursor, we sat at the pavement tables outside Au Petit Fer A Cheval and polished off a couple of carafes of red wine while watching the evening begin and the streets fill with characters. We fell into a conversation with David at the table next to us, a perma-stoned American expat with little hair left, wire-rimmed spectacles and a strange multi-accented voice that always sounded on the verge of breaking like a teenager - or a muppet, perhaps. He had a keen interest in the opposite sex (which largely seemed to entail turning to Kelly and saying “will you be my wingman?”, despite my protestations that I was far better qualified for the role than she was) and a complicated personal life which doubtless would have made even less sense if I had had less to drink. It seemed to involve, as far as I could tell, an Iranian wife who lived in Morocco and saw David for a couple of nights every couple of months.

I could well imagine that an arrangement like this might well constitute David’s best shot at some kind of lasting happiness. I also imagined that David’s hangovers probably lasted longer than his happiness ever did, and when I realised this I felt a sort of tender protectiveness towards him, while simultaneously not wanting to spend much longer in his company. I also understood – too late, I’m afraid - why Kelly and had I got such a sympathetic look from the pair of pretty girls who had given up the table next to him as we’d pounced to grab their still warm wicker chairs.

David was very vague about what he did for a living. In fact, after a couple of carafes of white wine David was pretty vague in general, and his pretty vague pronunciation and diction hardly helped matters. The impression was that he was too rich to have to work, although he still did, and that at one stage he had jacked it all in to spend the best part of a year sailing around the Mediterranean. I really didn’t know whether that last bit was true. There were also stories about living in the same apartment block as Dominique Strauss-Kahn and being told to keep the noise down, but I couldn’t be sure if these were true. By that point I wasn’t even sure whether the wife in Morocco was true. David leaned over to me. “This is the best bar in the whole damn world.” he said. I knew that was true.

“We have to go I’m afraid. We have a dinner reservation at Le Petit Marché.” I said. That was true too.

We walked through the Place des Vosges, still as grand and gorgeous as ever, and passed under the archway onto rue de Bearn. It was odd to think that only the night before, walking through Reading, I had called the restaurant on my mobile and just about managed to make a reservation in my stumbling best attempts at French. Going through the door, it looked exactly the same as I expected from all my other first night memories. The tables were dimly lit and crowded with the handsome and the pretty, the expressive and the expansive, and we took our place in a room humming with the noise of conversations we couldn’t understand. It felt as much like home as a public place in a foreign country could be.

They sat us next to the table of Americans, something I suspect was deliberate on their part. I'm almost certain that, as some venues used to have smoking and non-smoking tables, the French like to have special zones for foreigners so that they are only polluting their own kind with any emissions. Many is the time in Paris that I have been right next to a table of Americans only to hear all the French speakers at the end of the evening as I make my way to the exit. But it was fine because they were nice enough; reasonably cultured, well enough travelled, not too loud and in no way obnoxious. Besides, we were making an effort to order in French and I was hoping that would set us apart.

Nights like our first nights in Le Petit Marché aren’t really about the food but I’m going to tell you about it anyway, because it was delicious. The starter has been on the menu for all the time we’ve been going there and I always order it: cubes of raw tuna, studded with sesame seeds and served simply with tiny ramekins of sauce – sweet chilli in one, soy and sesame in the other – and a handful of leaves, also dressed with sesame oil. You slice the tuna as thin as your knife will let you, dip the slices into the sauce for just as long as it takes to coat them, and enjoy. It’s the perfect dish in all ways but one; it’s over far too quickly. But I find the best starters are always like that. The main was just as good – thick, pink-middled discs of lamb served with a light, creamy sauce with a tinge of basil, with a generous helping of the best mashed potato I’ve ever tasted. Even the mange tout – a vegetable I’ve never liked – was so fresh and so terrific that I wasn’t sure whether mange tout was a name or an instruction.

Best of all, it was all washed down with a carafe of red. Everywhere you go in Paris you can get wine by the pichet or carafe - something which seems symptomatic of a culture where it’s acceptable to drink just enough, as opposed to back home where the only options seem to be not enough and too much, with an implicit predisposition towards the latter (“Are you sure you only want a small glass of wine?” someone had said to me at Kelly’s work leaving do, only the weekend before. It seemed somehow a very British thing to say.) I wish carafes would catch on at home, although I think I’m fighting a losing battle on persuading anyone of the benefits of that.

Dessert was disappointing. I made the mistake of ordering the chocolate fondant, even though I know I’ve never much liked chocolate desserts warmer than room temperature. And yet I wasn’t quite sure what it was from the menu, only that it contained chocolate, and I felt I’d been doing so well distancing myself from the Americans through my attempts to order in French that I didn’t dare ask. It didn’t matter though, partly because the praline crème anglaise - so far from the congealed English custards I’ve always hated so much – was so delicate and gorgeous that I half wanted to ask if I could take some away with me, or at least order a separate carafe full of the stuff.

That wasn’t the main reason why my underwhelming dessert was not important, though. The main reason was that I knew, as I watched the Americans gamely struggling with understanding the bill to my left and enjoyed the sight of the gangly French hipsters on my right talking about English film actors, a jumble of incomprehensible words and exaggerated gestures punctuated by the occasional incongruous famous name (an Alec Guinness here, an Albert Finney there) that I had arrived. I was in Paris, my favourite city, in my favourite Parisian restaurant, with a week of wandering and watching and meals ahead of me. I knew that when we left this place we could wander down to the Seine and take in the lights and the boats and the bridges. Best of all, I also knew that I might have better meals than this on my holiday, but I wouldn’t have one with greater significance.

Columnist

2011-12-07T20:41:00.007Z

I'm very pleased (and more than a little baffled) to announce that I have a monthly food column in my local paper, the Reading Post. It's called RG1 EAT and is mainly going to centre around eating out and restaurants. I like to think those are subjects I know a little bit about, as an enthusiastic amateur anyway. Don't worry, it isn't going to talk about cooking as that's a subject I know precious little about. In fact, I know people think that if you like eating out you must also enjoy cooking but I've never bought into that myself - after all, I love music but I have no desire whatsoever to pick up a guitar. I think I'll leave it to people who know what they're up to; those who can, do, those who can't make dinner reservations.

I'm not sure whether it's going to appear online (if it does, I promise I'll post a link) but in case it doesn't, here's the text of my first column which was published last Wednesday. I don't know how much interest it will have for people who don't live in Reading, or don't like restaurants, but I suppose we'll see. Let me know in the comments. I'm thinking of writing about food a bit more in the weeks ahead (a week on holiday in Paris will do that to you) so let me have your thoughts on that too.

* * *

When I tell people I’m from Reading they say one of two things. The uninitiated say “Oh, the festival” – as if my hometown only exists for five days every year. I can’t blame them; it’s a view shared by much of the country and most of the media (they obviously don’t know about the brass band concerts in the Forbury).

The more initiated say is “Reading’s very good for shops, isn’t it?” I always want to reply by saying: I suppose, if you view shops like stickers in a Panini album and your idea of a good town is one that has all the same shops as everybody else, only more of them. In that case, Reading’s brilliant. We have four branches of Burger King. We have three branches of Boots. We have four Starbucks. Nobody can deny that we have more shops than nearly anywhere else. Go Reading! (I don’t, though. You get funny looks.)

The thing I want to tell them and never do is this: “Reading’s okay for shops, but it’s magnificent for lunch.” I should, because I believe it; it’s a terrific place to have lunch, and there’s much more to it than grabbing a toasted sandwich at Caffé Nero.

Take Picnic, one of my favourite places in Reading. Their lunchtime salad’s one of the best things you can buy for under a fiver. It’s a plate of dressed leaves, couscous and fun stuff: tiny mushrooms; olives; capers; peppers; the occasional surprise flake of salt. But that’s not all, because Picnic understands that salad’s only enjoyable if you put something tasty on top of it which only pretends to be healthy - something, fundamentally, which is not salad.

Depending when you go, you might get Parma ham, creamy mozzarella and soft sweet wedges of peach, or you might be treated to roast chicken – miles from the dubious cubes in supermarket salads - with lashings of pesto. If it’s warm enough you can sit outside with your lunch and watch the world go by, on their way to all those shops everybody says are so fantastic. It’s perfect.

Don’t fancy a salad? The alternatives are endless. You could go to the Mission and have their carnitas tacos – soft tortillas full of slow-cooked shredded pork, lettuce, sour cream and red chipotle salsa which are indecently delicious and miles away from anything you could whip up at home with a tired kit from Old El Paso.

If you fancy going upmarket, head down the riverside to LSQ2 and try their cracking set lunch. I’ve had chicken liver parfait, top notch Thai fishcakes, moules marinière and one of the tastiest burgers in Reading (not all at once) – and it’s a tenner for two courses. God knows how they turn a profit, but I’m not complaining.

If you feel more adventurous, head to China Palace for dim sum. They leave the menu on the table, you tick what you want and hand it to the waiter. It’s like food bingo, and appropriately enough the menu is a gamble too; you have to wade through the tripe and chicken feet (not literally) but if you choose well – the roast pork buns and Japanese octopus, for instance – it’s lunch unlike anything else you’ll find in town.

The best thing, though, is that the list keeps growing. I need to try Pau Brasil and the sushi place by the Hexagon, and I hear Chan Cham’s not bad. So next time someone mentions Reading, I’ll tell them it’s great for lunch. Now I just need to find somewhere that does a decent breakfast.

Letting go

2011-11-28T18:15:00.003Z

“Jesus, I can’t believe it.” I said. “That shirt must be twelve years old.”

There was a pause and we looked at it there on the bed, on top of a heap of clothes, crumpled and sad.

It was my own fault for pushing my wife. A terrible hoarder, she keeps things long after the reason to keep them has gone, after the memory of what that reason was has long since disappeared. At the bottom of cupboards, in carrier bags hidden behind doors, in piles, on piles and under piles are things we do not need but never throw away. Our wardrobe still contains the suit jacket she wore on our wedding day, a beautiful pale blue herringbone, marred by a blob of jus from our first dinner as a married couple. We never got rid of the stain and she never got rid of the jacket, and after a few years I gave up asking her to. Recently I decided to lead by example and that’s how I ended up, late on a Sunday night (I always do these things late at night, when right-minded people are going to bed) looking at clothes I no longer wear and deciding what could go to the charity shop.

The early stages of the process were painless – work shirts that had never seemed like a good idea, not even at the time, Seventies patterns which were dated from the moment I got them home and soft, floppy collars that were more relaxed than I wanted to be in the office. Some were mistakes I didn’t realise until later – shirts that look respectable in the packaging but hate the iron more than I do, where after five minutes sitting on a bus you look as if you’ve slept in them. And then of course there were the t-shirts of yesteryear - some that had got a little too unforgiving, some that had got far too forgiving and some that just had slogans I couldn’t mean any more.

Then I got to the twelve year old shirt and, for the first time, I stopped.

“I remember buying this. I was living in Nottingham, and I went to a very cool clothes shop called Ark – I think it’s still there – with Dave. ‘Are you sure, mate?’ he said to me. ‘It’s not the sort of thing you usually wear.’ And I was so proud of it! It was forty pounds, I’d never spent that much on a shirt before, and it was by Mambo, and they were quite cool back in those days. This was the Nineties, remember.”

“It’s hard to believe, looking at it now.” said Kelly, and I had to admit she had a point. The rough check pattern had once been crisp and the dark blues used to sing, but now the colours had faded and the fabric seemed worn and waffly. Scrunched up in a ball it seemed like so much less than the shirt I’d worn on so many fantastic evenings in the old days, when I’d been someone else. Of course, back then I had dressed like someone who was far bigger than me and the shirt hung off me far too much, but back then I didn’t know anyone who would tell me that kind of thing. On the most recent times I’d worn the shirt it had felt a little tight and I know I wasn’t imagining it, because I have someone who tells me that kind of thing now.

I have a picture in the photo album where I’m wearing that shirt. It’s the summer of 1999 and I’m sitting in the back garden of my girlfriend’s dad’s house with my mother. It was somebody’s birthday party. I look so thin, shaven-headed, in this huge check shirt, only just turned twenty-five with no idea what the next twelve years have in store. They had put up a marquee and a DJ was in there, and he played Every Morning by Sugar Ray and You Get What You Give by the New Radicals, because it was the summer of 1999 and Mambo was a fashionable brand and I lived on another planet.

I looked at the shirt again. I knew that it was just an object, and that my memories were my memories, and that they would survive whether I put the shirt in the plastic bag or burned it out the back or buried it in the centre of the earth. So why did I feel sad about giving it away?

“It’s not in bad nick, you know. Don’t you think it has another couple of years in it?”

My wife smiled at me, because she knows as well as anybody that this sort of thing is difficult.

“No, let it go. Look at it, it’s not even all the same colour any more.”

“Look, only there’s only one shirt left. Do you remember how we bought this one?”

“How could I forget? We went to the shop and it was on a dummy perched above the escalator, and it was the only one in the whole store. You wanted to give up and leave it but I insisted on asking, so they got the dummy down and took the shirt off and it was exactly your size.”

“And you said it was an omen.”

“It was!”

I look at it, a light blue short-sleeved shirt with a combination of flowers and stripes. Some of my friends had never liked it, which because I’m stubborn had only made me like it more. I’d bought it before we went away on holiday to Canada in our first year of marriage, and it had fitted me perfectly. Being married, for me at least, means that I buy clothes that fit.

“This is the shirt I left in the wardrobe of that bed and breakfast in Montreal, isn’t it?”

“Yes, that’s the one. And you were convinced that all was lost and you’d never see it again. You didn’t stop going on about it. So I just mailed the couple that ran the B&B and they sent it by airmail, and they never even charged us.”

“And it’s the shirt I was wearing when I had that accident in Cal Pep, isn’t it?”

“The very same.”

Cal Pep is a magnificent restaurant in Barcelona where you sit at the bar and they don’t take orders, they just keep cooking in front of you and bringing plate after plate of seafood until you’re full. I was wearing the light blue floral shirt and wrestling, with no small degree of ineptitude, with some kind of clam when it opened and sprayed tomato sauce all over me. The surface area which that tiny clam managed to cover had to be seen to be believed.

“That was dreadful. I had to go back to the hotel room smelling of seafood.”

“You looked like you’d been shot! It was so funny.”

We soaked the shirt in cold water overnight, and I complained that everything was ruined and the stain would never come out. She told me not to be so stupid and that there was nothing that could go wrong that we couldn’t fix together. And that shirt and that story are emblematic of a conversation I expect we will continue to have, in one shape or another, for the rest of our lives.

“That was a lovely holiday, wasn’t it?”

“It was.”

I remember how we went to the rooftop terrace of the hotel, and she relaxed in the jacuzzi while I sat on a sunbed, reading an autobiography and smoking a cigar. I remember the smoke disappearing into the Barcelona skyline, and the traffic glinting in the sun on the roads below. I remember the shirt, soaking in cold water in the bath, waiting to prove me wrong. And there it was on the bed five years later, the last garment in the pile, rescued from Montreal, miraculously free of stains, ready to be disposed of. I thought to myself that the nicest thing about inanimate objects is the stories they accidentally become receptacles for.

And then I thought that I’m wrong, because it’s always been me. I’ve always been the receptacle for all those stories. Even so, I couldn’t help myself.

“Can’t I just keep this one?”

“Of course you can. I think you should.”

Barry

2011-11-17T19:30:00.004Z

Iain and I have sat next to each other at work for over three years now, and I realised the other day that it’s one of the longest relationships I’ve ever had. Much like a marriage, there’s something comfortable about knowing his foibles and routines – his propensity for having clementines after lunch every afternoon for instance, or the way he guffaws at the Reading Post website while he eats them.

I particularly like the way he perks up whenever an attractive woman walks past his desk. Once, several months back, a rather fetching lady crossed his field of vision and I caught him – and he’s usually so subtle – gawping at her, much in the style of Kenneth Connor in the Carry On Films. There was a pause for a moment, and then my instant messenger flashed with a message from him (we always chat on IM, even though we sit next to each other). I’d break her back was all it said. From that, I deduced that Iain must have been without for a few weeks, and I briefly considered taking him to the vet and getting him seen to; maybe it’s not like a marriage after all.

Iain does like a good rant. He swears at his computer all the time – either it’s going too slow or too fast, or it isn’t doing what he wants it to. None of our computers work as fast as our brains, to the extent where we’ve started to suspect that they are built to accommodate the idiots we find ourselves surrounded by. But none of it’s for show, it’s just what he’s like; one time I came in early to find Iain at his desk, the only person in our area, in the middle of a tirade directed at his recalcitrant mouse. Iain bangs his mouse on the desk a lot - I think it might be the only thing that stops him from banging his fist on the desk a lot.

Yet whenever I have a problem with my computer I call Iain over for help and advice, he stands over me and everything works without any problems. I think he missed his vocation in life; he should have worked in IT. Everything seems to magically function better with Iain around – even me. He’s one of life’s eternal dads: patient, capable, yet always on the brink of exasperation. When he says “bloody” he sounds like Prince Philip, and you can imagine him as a very posh old man, instead of the very posh younger man he is. But at the same time he’s every bit as childish and puerile as me, and I’m very lucky that through a series of coincidences we’ve shared a workspace for so long.

We have much the same conversations every week, but that’s fine. They punctuate the five days we spend together and help to give them structure. We find we need that, too, in light of the changes. Phil is leaving soon, for a new job in our bigger, uglier building down the road. We talk about clubbing together and buying him a Fleshlight as a leaving present, and he knows me well enough to laugh but not well enough to realise that I’m not really joking. I move some things in my calendar so I can make his leaving do, because I already know I’ll miss him.

Gemma is long gone, though even months after she left I still find I look up when I see a figure heading towards her desk or think of something to send her in an IM before I realise she’s no longer here. We swap occasional mails and talk about meeting up, but her diary’s very full - I’m told a date has been fixed for January, though I half expect her to cancel about a week ahead of time. I heard second-hand about Gemma’s engagement in Edinburgh, saw people congratulating her on Facebook and thought A few months ago we would have been among the first to know. We would have seen the ring. This would have occupied us at lunchtimes for weeks. Now it is often just Iain and me at lunch. He has a round of sandwiches, a cereal bar and a packet of Frazzles every day, and every day I envy his Frazzles even though nothing is stopping me from buying some myself.

One conversation which is a good barometer of how the week is going starts like this: “What are you up to this weekend?” On a good week, when the work comes in quickly and isn’t too unpleasant and you’re out and about in meetings it can be Friday afternoon before you realise that you’ll soon be at home and free of the ring of the phone and the bold print of an incoming email. On a bad week your mind turns to the subject of two days off very soon. I think our personal record is Monday afternoon, and it wasn’t that long ago.

It’s funny; Iain and I are the same age, with roughly the same views on a lot of things. We both have the same view of what constitutes “working hard enough”. We both like toilet humour and terrible puns. We share an interest in indoor ornithology. And yet our weekends couldn’t be more different; his, planned for him by his wife, seem to involve trips to petting zoos or farms, days out and fun excursions, occasional forays into the centre of town (always described as if it is a dangerous, crowded place). Iain does not control his diary and seems no less happy for that – and I suspect many married men are like this, delegating the logistics to their other half and going wherever the calendar tells them to go. I on the other hand just do what I like, slouch into town if I want, loaf around the flat all day, eat out all the time. On Monday mornings when we have the conversation we always have, the one that starts “How was your weekend?” I often wonder what it must be like to have a life like Iain’s.

It was one of Iain’s more unconventional weekends that got me in trouble a while ago.

“You’re on leave in a couple of weekends’ time, doing anything nice?”

“We’re all off to Scotland.” he said. Another endearing thing about Iain is that he believes himself to be Scottish in the absence of any proof – birthplace, accent, cautious financial outlook – to the contrary. “We’re going to visit my brother’s soon to be ex wife.”

“That’s a bit unusual, isn’t it?”

“Not at all.” said Iain, in a rather frosty and defensive way which suggested that he knew perfectly well that it was. “It wasn't an acrimonious split, and she said she’d like to stay friends.”

“Oh.” I said. One thing I love about the word “oh” is that if you say it right, it can mean or suggest all manner of things but that technically, you haven’t said any of them. On this occasion, I meant it to say My, aren’t you modern? I like to think the dubious look I got from Iain meant that I had succeeded.

“So she’s booked a cottage and invited loads of her friends to stay. We’re going up with the kids, and there will be other people there at the same time. I’m really looking forward to it.”

“Is your brother going to be there?”

Sometimes I think Iain should just adopt a continuous frown whenever he’s speaking to me, only stopping when I say something that cheers him up. I suspect it might save him time and effort.

“No, don’t be ridiculous.”

“Oh.” I said.

“It’s a lovely cottage, I’ve seen pictures on the internet – it’s got all mod cons. It’s got a games room and everything.”

“Is there a hot tub?” I said. Iain didn’t seem very impressed by this.

“Yes there’s a hot tub.”

“Oh.”

I meant that “Oh” to convey something like I imagine you’ll all end up in that hot tub like some kind of debauched swinging party, I know what you posh types are like, it’ll be “White Mischief” all over again, though I slightly blotted my copybook by then saying all that out loud.

“Anyway, she has a new boyfriend now and he’ll be there too.”

“A new man? How did she meet him?”

“Well, he’s known her for bloody ages.” said Iain. The bloody sounded remarkably like Prince Philip. “They were friends years and years ago, when she was first dating my brother, and we think he’s held a candle for her for years.”

We’ve all met men like this – the perpetual understudy, waiting for the situation to become vacant. Hoping against hope that the woman you want will go for coffee with you and complain about her useless, feckless boyfriend, daydreaming that one day she will realise what terrible life choices she has made. When I say “we’ve all met men like this” what I really mean is “we’ve all been men like this”. Or – more honestly – I mean “I’ve been a man like this”. I was secretly quite impressed by the persistence of Iain’s soon-to-be-ex-sister-in-law’s (someone really should think of a more elegant word for that) suitor. How many people’s lonely pursuit ends in success? And isn’t there always a risk that, like Gordon Brown, you’ll covet the top job for years only to discover that you’re rubbish at it?

“And he finally got the girl, did he? Hats off to him. What’s his name?”

“Barry.” said Iain, with a facial expression that seemed to say Go on, make something of it.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. His name’s Barry.” Iain’s expression was unreadable now, not one I had ever seen before. It could have been irritation, trepidation or amusement. It never occurred to me that if I could work that sort of thing out I would have far better people skills.

“You have got to be joking. Barry? You have a friend called Barry? But you’re posh! All your friends are posh! You have friends called Bunty and Biffy and Timmo! You know Tobys and Tarquins! How could anybody take a Barry seriously in those circumstances? I could imagine it if, maybe, he was called Barrington but Barry? You don’t get posh Barries. Name me one posh Barry, I challenge you. You can’t do it, can you? Because I’m thinking about it and all I can summon up is the fat car salesman from EastEnders.”

I’m afraid I may have carried on in this vein for several minutes more; once you start me off it’s very hard to stop me, especially when I’m on my soapbox and finding myself amusing. Iain just looked on, still impossible to figure out. He looked as if he both wanted me to stop and wanted me to carry on. Not that I was paying him that much attention by then, maybe if I had been it wouldn’t have been so disastrous.

“I happen to think Barry is a perfectly nice name.” said Iain.

The signs were all there, and they all said “TURN BACK”. Nevertheless, my conversational juggernaut crashed through the barrier and continued towards the abyss.

“And another thing. How could you possibly date a man called Barry? Just imagine saying I love you Barry. I love you so much You just couldn’t. There aren’t any pop songs about people called Barry. You wouldn’t call a romantic hero Barry. And that’s just romance, imagine when you get to the bedroom. Fuck me Barry. Do it to me Barry. Oh Barry, that feels so good. More, Barry, more. Oh Barry, I want you. Again. Again.”

By the time I had run out of things to say I had sort of lost track of time, but I did have a sneaking suspicion that my voice had got progressively louder as my monologue had gathered momentum. Iain just gave me another curious look and said “He’s a very nice chap. Now let’s get back to work.”

Back at my desk, my IM flashed with a message from Iain. Nothing unusual there, after all we talk all the time on IM even though we sit next to each other. It’s like a marriage, you see.

IAIN: Do you remember the guy in the audit department that sits next to me?

ME: Yes. Why?

What a stupid question. Of course I did, he was in every day. In his mid-forties, friendly, walks with a limp. Sometimes comes to the kitchen with us on our coffee breaks. Has a Brentford F.C. mug which never looks one hundred per cent clean. Has kids from a previous marriage and a new girlfriend. If I turned to my left and craned over Iain’s shoulder I could see him, tapping away at a complicated spreadsheet. How on earth could I forget him, had Iain taken leave of his senses?

Tap tap tap. Smirk smirk smirk. Then another flash.

IAIN: What’s his name again?

ME: Oh.

Old boys

2011-11-03T19:10:00.003Z

I am always late for everything. Dave, by contrast, is always early; early arriving for things and early leaving, early to bed, early to rise. When he comes to visit me he texts me at 10am saying “I’m here” while I lie in bed contemplating a shower, wondering how long it will take me to run the hoover round and make up the spare bed. The next day, he rises at seven (old habits die hard, and they can’t be broken just because it’s the weekend) and lets himself out. By the time I wake up he’s long gone and usually back home, with the solitary exception of the time he locked himself in my bathroom by accident.

So it’s no surprise when I make my way to the train station, all packed for the holiday, juggling a wheelie case in one hand and a polystyrene tray filled with coffee cups, sugar and stirrers in the other (a peace offering, to say Sorry I’m late, again) to find him already there, sitting in the departure lounge, bag all packed, tickets all bought, not quite out of patience but nearly there.

He looks thinner than I remember; diagnosed with high cholesterol like me, his doctor didn’t offer him a pharmaceutical easy way out the way mine did, and he’s been on a fun free diet for months. It shows. I think he’s thinner than he was when we were at university together. This rankles with me, because I am meant to be the one who’s lost weight. But there are consolations: early to bed, early to rise, no cheese – if that was my life I don’t know how I would cope. But then Dave loves his little boy, and I couldn’t cope with parenthood either.

Funny how we are so similar in so many ways, but the fundamentals of our lives are very different. I don’t know what the pair of feckless nineteen year olds we used to be would have said, if you had told them that almost twenty years later they would be going on holiday together, sharing a hotel room, drinking in the sunshine and talking about their respective ailments. Even back then I had ailments, I was a trendsetter in that respect. “Mate, it’s just a headache” he used to tell me. “You haven’t got cancer.”

Our holidays are often nearly scuppered by a last minute health scare. A few years back his son came down with chickenpox and we had a nerve-wracking run-up to our departure date, waiting to see if his wife would get it too leaving him stranded at home. This time the days leading up to our trip have been marred by Dave’s bout with explosive diarrhoea, something he tells me all about - in far more detail than I needed to know - as the coach trundles down the motorway. As he does so, the informative screen at the front tells me that we’re passing Windsor Castle, and that it’s the largest inhabited castle in Europe. I make a mental note never to tell anybody that fact at parties. I make a second mental note that there are very few people you can discuss your bowel movements with. Perhaps that’s what friendship is; it’s as good a definition as any.

“We’re going to be sharing a bedroom and bathroom for five days.” I tell him. “So I think we need to lay down some ground rules. No wanking. Not even in the bathroom. Not even in the shower.”

“Trust me, it’s going to be preferable to the stuff I’ve been producing in the bathroom over the past few days. Ebony or ivory – take your choice.”

This turn of phrase, I realise, is one of the reasons why I love him.

In the airport, we do all the things we always do before going on holiday. We hand over our cases and swear faithfully that we’ve packed them ourselves. I want to say “I packed it myself, but my wife printed off a checklist for me because she knows that without her I’m hopeless” but I don’t, because I want total strangers to retain a modicum of respect for me. We fold our coats into plastic tubs and watch them go through the x-ray machine, awkwardly putting on our belts when we get to the other side. That’s usually the point when I realise that it’s real and I’m going away, that soon we will be in the air and all this will just be a dot on a map, growing increasingly distant.

We look round the duty free and I spray my wrist with fragrances I have no intention of buying. We grab a bite in an Italian restaurant and talk about plans for our destination – where we’ll go, what we’ll eat, what we both want to see. What Dave doesn’t necessarily realise is that I’ve been on my own for half a week, the flat full of absences. Her books, unread on the bedside table. Her clothes, not yet taken down, hanging on the clothes horse. Her pile of CDs next to the sofa, never tidied away. Everything I see has reminded me of everything I can’t see, and the silence at night and in the morning is something I cannot make myself like. And so seeing Dave, and knowing that we will be like an old married couple for the next five days, makes me happier than he knows. If he wants to describe his toilet habits in detail, I for one am happy to let him.

“The worst thing is that I’m on Imodium” he tells me, fortunately after we’ve finished eating.

“Why is that bad exactly?”

“Because it’s feast or famine. Eventually I’ll go to the toilet and then it will play havoc with my haemorrhoids.”

Ah, the perennial topic of Dave’s piles. I remember the first time he told me about them - we were sitting outside the café in the sunshine, and I reassured him because I knew exactly what he was talking about. I never used to; piles were always a source of hilarity, something that happened to other people. I remember the time I went to visit my dad and found a shopping list written on the whiteboard in his study: Bread, milk, Anusol. I distinctly recall sniggering about it. I remember, too, that when I was much younger my friend Dan suffered with them and when we all took the piss out of him he turned to me once and said “What you don’t understand is that there are two kinds of people; people who’ve had piles, and people who will have piles one day.” If I was still in touch with Dan, I would probably tell him he was right.

The thing I could never get over about having piles is that moment when, after straining in agony on the porcelain, you look down into the toilet bowl. Based on the ordeal you’ve just gone through, you fully expect to see a bunch of rusty keys clanking in the water but instead, it just looks like the product of any normal visit to the lavatory. There aren’t even serrated edges. I remember telling Dave this when he first complained to me about having piles.

“I told my doctor that thing you’d said about the rusty keys.” says Dave as our minibus scuttles across the tarmac to our waiting plane.

“Really?”

“Yes. He laughed like a drain. ‘I’ll use that when I talk to patients’, he said.”

“Charming. Haven’t you brought any, you know…”

“…Arse bullets? Yes, of course I have. I just hope I don’t have to use them.”

I know that Dave’s bag contains suppositories and enough Gaviscon to fill a bath. I know that I have cholesterol pills, and pills for my acid reflux, and Gaviscon tablets, and painkillers, and Nytol in case I can’t sleep because my acid reflux gets bad and I worry that I’m going to die before I wake up. I know that we are the youngest looking old people on this or any minibus. I know I can tell him that I worry, because I know he will understand.

“I told Andrea that we’re going to be wandering round Lisbon like two old men, complaining about all our ailments. She was so sweet. ‘But you won’t look old’, she said to me.”

That’s very kind of her, and it may have something to do with the fact that I haven’t seen her in ages.

“You know what the worst thing about piles is?” I say.

“No, what’s that?”

“It’s the packaging for Preparation H. If you look on the tube, in big letters, it says Three way action. Honestly, it does. Look at me: I’m 37 years old and my only chance of three way action is sticking ointment up my arse.”

Dave laughs. Even after nearly twenty years, it still feels like an achievement when I get a laugh out of him. I know he feels exactly the same.

“Shit, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Just out of interest, how bad was your diarrhoea?”

“Put it this way.” he says as the minibus comes to a halt and the double doors crank open. “There was one point at the weekend when I could have jetwashed an entire patio.”

I get that feeling of revulsion and pride again. Dave will start getting jittery soon; he’s scared of flying, an irrational fear which has got worse as he’s got older. I in turn am working on an equally irrational fear of having a heart attack while the aircraft is in mid-air (it’s not enough to die in a screaming fireball along with all the other passengers, I have to be special). We haul our hand luggage and our neuroses up the steps – I don’t really know which weighs more - and prepare to board the plane.

I stop at the top, fish out my boarding pass and I think to myself My, what a wild week we’re going to have.

Cracks and flaws

2011-10-11T21:06:00.002+01:00

“I’m sorry if I’ve been a bit distant.” he tells me as we get ready to go into the meeting room. “I’ve been having some personal problems.”

I never know how to respond when people say this. Are you meant to ask? Say nothing? Is it an invitation to show an interest, or a get out of jail free card? Modern life can be complicated; I have personal problems all the time, but I don’t mention them. Perhaps I should:

Sorry I didn’t respond to that mail, but sometimes I have trouble being happy and yesterday was one of them.

Ah, the mistake in the spreadsheet. My apologies. It’s just that I’m not currently on speaking terms with my mother and I’m trying to decide how to reply to her latest email.

I should have picked up on that point in your voicemail, but you caught me on a day when I’d really rather not be here. I looked across at the trees waving in the wind, and paying attention to you was the last thing on my mind. Maybe if you’d been attractive, it would have been different.

Back in the present, I feel like I ought to say something.

“I’m sorry to hear that. Nothing serious, I hope?”

“It’s marital issues.”

I don’t know him at all well, so I’m very surprised to hear that. He’s always so bland and professional. Marital issues: he almost says it as if he’s having a setback in a project that isn’t going well, like it’s a problem that he could brainstorm his way out of. It sounds so incongruous; work is nothing like life after all, or at least mine isn’t. Arguments and fallings out escalate in an altogether more unpleasant way outside the office. You can’t solve them with whiteboards and slide packs, and you can’t hand them to someone else to deal with. In the end, it comes down to the two of you in a room, trying to sort things out.

We walk down the corridor to the kitchen to get a coffee. What must drive someone to the extent where they tell something like that to a complete stranger? How bad must things be before a tiny piece of someone’s inner life sticks out and is visible?

“That sounds awful. I really hope you can sort it out, because that’s the worst thing in the world. I’d be absolutely lost without my wife.”

And there, without me planning it, a tiny piece of my inner life is poking through the surface too, an emotional hernia, a sign of weakness. I wish it sounded anywhere near as comforting or sympathetic said out loud as it had in my mind. In theory it was supportive, in practice it reeks of rather you than me.

“That’s why I took a day off last week at short notice. Some stuff to work through.”

He always looks so dapper, I realise. Always a tie, knotted just so. Beautiful shirts and cufflinks that match them – proper cufflinks, not novelty jobs. I think about him making all that effort every day, having all that trouble at home, and I don’t know what I can say to him. There’s something so sad about the contrast between his exterior and interior, something nobody else round the table is going to see but me.

At that moment, I don’t feel like an employee, or a customer, or a teammate, or a manager. I feel like a human, and I know this is neither the time nor the place for that. But then the conversation is drowned out by the silence. Instead, I hear the repetitive tinkle of my spoon crashing against the side of the mug, the damp thud of the teabag in the bin, the deafening sound of the fridge door closing. We walk in silence down the corridor to the room. I have to tell him off for a lot of things he hasn’t done, and I don’t know how or whether to pull my punches.

Later on, business concluded, we stand in the car park and shake hands. I tell him to have a safe journey home, something I always seem to say to people when they leave the office. Like everything I’ve said today, it doesn’t sound right somehow. Does it still feel like home to him?

“Thanks for listening.” he says.

I don’t feel like I did, but perhaps it was enough. Perhaps it was just a small piece of kindness he wasn’t expecting that day.

“Please, don’t worry. Like I said, I feel for you. Some things are much more important than work.”

“I don’t think it was even an affair.” he says. Again, I am struck that some people just tell me things – on the bus, at parties, at times like this. Sometimes that might say something about me, but a lot of the time it probably says something about them. On this occasion, I imagine it’s the latter. “She says it was just a one night thing, and I believe her.”

“Oh. I’m so sorry.”

He gives me a rueful smile, a heartbreaking smile. I don’t know why, but I doubt we will talk like this the next time we meet. He will have got things under control and he will be corporate again. We both will be. That’s almost as sad in itself as the conversation we are having now.

“She was forty this year. We’ve been married for twenty years. It’s just… you know?”

I don’t. When I turn forty my wife and I will have clocked up just over a decade. And I don’t have children, have never had to reconcile myself to the fact that one day, out of nowhere, I might have more than one human being that I love more than life itself.

“I guess I can imagine.”

“We’ve talked everything through – more than I thought we would. I mean, she says she still loves me. I think you just take things for granted, and you – well, we – didn’t spend enough time together. It gets so difficult, there’s so much going on, and work as well. I think we need to try and get away more, book some hotels, get to know each other again.”

I don’t envy him that task. I suspect there are all sorts of unpleasant things he is going to get to know before he and his wife get to know one another.

“I’m sure that if both of you want to make things right then you can.”

As I watch him trudge to his car, I wonder whether it sounds different when you mean it. I do believe it’s true, but it still sounds trite hanging in the space between where we stood, like well-meaning fog. Nothing I’ve said has come out right today, despite my very best intentions. Sweep all those words away and all you’re left with is the truth: rather you than me.

The second thing I do when I get to my desk is look around me at everybody I can see. They are all being grown-ups, managing things, changing things, fixing things, complaining about things, presenting their best and most brilliant surfaces to everybody around them. And yet I think I know that beneath all that are cracks and flaws, failings and failures.

For instance, I know that the pretty girl with the jet black asymmetric hair and heavy-rimmed spectacles used to live with someone who worked in our post room, until he slept around and she had to chuck him out. I know that the man over there made a pass at the woman over there, even though both of them are with somebody else. She turned him down, and now everyone knows about it. I know that the man over by the corner got drunk at a party once and told a friend of mine that he had married the wrong woman.

There seem to be a lot of wrong women out there, and no doubt plenty of wrong men too. What happens to the right ones, do they all manage to find someone who’s right for them? Or are they at another party having the same conversation with someone else? I spend a few minutes wondering whether I could find everything that’s wrong with this picture, if I looked hard enough, and then it’s time to get back to work.

But that’s the second thing; the first thing I do when I get back to my desk is to mail my wife. She’s forty in a few years’ time. I don’t want her feeling taken for granted.

On the platform

2011-10-06T17:45:00.004+01:00

At Derby, Phil, Carla and I sit on the municipal-looking steel bench and we wait for something to happen, though I know it won’t. We have half an hour to kill, in a town where any time you spent would be a waste. The train station looks more like an airport, all bland concrete and metal rather than the Victorian iron and glass that I love. It is the kind of place where everything you can see is a different shade of no colour at all, except the bright neon yellow handles of Carla’s overnight bag and the blue pattern of my shirt.

The view behind the platform is an uneasy mixture of handsome old factories, long since turned to another use, and hideous new technical colleges. I suppose it’s what ignorant people like to describe as regeneration. We take in the vista, a slowly unfolding nothing. No cars go by on the roads beyond, no people walk past us. It’s as if nobody lives here on this hot weekday afternoon and we share a bench in silence, hands hugging our coffee cups, as we wait in a not-quite-silence which is not quite companionable. Phil and I, up since five in the morning for what has turned out to be a pointless meeting, are both too exhausted to attempt anything but the kind of conversation you have when you’re going through the motions.

“Derby’s minging, isn’t it?” he says.

It seems so true, so close to a rhetorical question, that it takes me a full minute to decide whether it requires a response at all.

“Yes. It’s not the most beautiful place in the world.”

We were both a lot more lively when the day began, chuckling with the absurdity of being up so early, a little high on sleep deprivation. We laughed at the weirdos at the next table, swapped iPods and played each other music, discussed the merits of the bands in his copy of Metal Hammer. “This is the shittest road trip ever” he said to me, somewhere near Burton-upon-Trent, but I knew he didn’t really mean it.

“Jesus, that must be the dullest branch of Argos ever.” he'd said, as the train slipped past a huge windowless structure topped with a solitary logo.

“Phil, that’s a warehouse.”

Sitting on the platform, some way through another long and awkward pause, I think that we could be in a western, if only there was a tumbleweed to liven matters up.

“I like this coffee.” says Phil. “I wouldn’t normally bother with Costa.”

“No, Costa’s not bad.”

If he carries on in this vein, I decide that I’ll just stop responding. It’s nothing personal, I’m just too worn out to pretend. At this point though Carla, who eschewed the delights of the early morning train in favour of spending the night before the meeting in a nearby hotel, starts to talk; about work, about her night in the pub, about her hangover, about work again. Phil and I make eye contact and both of us know that now that the seal is broken she is unlikely to stop until we part company at the other end of the line. Carla sits next to Phil back in the office, and she talks to him most of the time. Usually it’s about work-related matters; stuff she doesn’t like and can’t change, as if he can do anything about them, as if he cares. Neither of those things is true. When she isn’t talking about work, she’s talking about her dogs. We have all tuned Carla out far too often to know how many dogs she has, or their names, but we know she likes dogs.

“Her fucking dogs.” Phil says to me sometimes. “It’s worse than hearing someone talk about their kids.”

I look at Carla, waving her hands around, in full flow, and I know she has no idea that neither of us is really listening. Then I wonder who I might be a Carla to. It’s a subject far too close to home, and so I try to focus on something else. That something else turns out to be the horizon, and it’s still ugly.

I find myself thinking of a story which sums up so much about Phil. We went out for a team social several years ago, and we wound up in an unremarkable Italian restaurant, all dark wood furniture and cheerful (if inauthentic) Polish waitresses. We were getting to decision time, poring over our menus, when Phil – a few drinks to the good by this stage – decided to hold forth.

“Look at this. Italian burger with mozzarella and pesto. Jesus. What’s Italian about a burger? Nothing, that’s what. What kind of knob goes to an Italian restaurant and orders the burger? That’s just fucking ridiculous.”

As I recall we all agreed with Phil, because he was rather loud and very animated, although in truth none of us had strong opinions on the subject, mainly because we hadn’t given it any thought up to that point. Shortly afterwards, the prettiest of the inauthentic Polish waitresses came to take our order.

“I’ll have the Italian burger.” said Phil, to everyone’s disbelief.

“Why did you order that?”

“I just fancied a burger, okay? Get off my case, for Christ’s sake.”

When it turned up I thought it looked pleasant enough, and Phil didn’t waste any time tucking into it. Afterwards, we all shared that awkward moment when your empty plate has been in front of you a little too long without anybody coming to take it away, a moment I have always hated.

“How was your burger, Phil?”

“It was awful. I should have known. Jesus, what kind of tool orders the fucking burger? I never learn.”

I think that tells you a lot of what you need to know about Phil. He’s a man who expects to hate things and does them anyway because, in some ways at least, being right is more important than being happy. You might not remember that fleeting feeling of happiness, but you will always know you were right. And as I think that, sitting on the platform, Carla’s repetitive drone relegated to the background, I have the unpleasant realisation that he and I aren’t too different in that respect, which is my cue to stare at the horizon again.

That afternoon, as most afternoons, the world is divided up into things I know and things that I don’t. I know that Derby is a horrible place, and that if we had to wait here any longer I would go mad. But I don’t know yet, for instance, that I will wind up squashed next to an indomitable black woman in oversized designer glasses who is on a mission to batter my elbow with her five-day old copy of the Metro. I don’t know that she will talk to herself loudly (I’ve got a text. Who’s it from? Let’s read the text) like she’s trying to drown out other voices that I can’t hear, or in the forlorn hope that somebody will join in.

I know that no train could come for us quick enough, but I don’t know that when it does the carriage will be unbearably hot and I will press myself up against the cool window like a dog in a hot car, watching the tracks and the warehouses, the out of town supermarkets and car parks and graffiti-covered bridges rattle by me, stippled by the sunlight, in a constant loop like the inside of a zoetrope.

I will say this, though. As the train snakes into view on the horizon and we pick up our bags and walk forward to the edge of our platform on the edge of nowhere, I know one thing as surely as I know anything at all. When we get on board, Phil will take the seat next to Carla and they will talk about work, all the way home.

100 Words: Tea

2011-10-02T17:45:00.002+01:00

They punctuate each Sunday. The first one in bed, when I’m still groggy. The afternoon one as we look through the window at the weekend world outside. The very last, carried down the hall before the lights go off.

The big hand’s how long it takes her to finish, a half-gasp, half-sigh after every mouthful, still piping hot.

The little hand’s how long it takes me. I like to wait - when it’s lukewarm I down it in one go.

My flat’s full of clocks; flip clocks, digital clocks, several in every room. But round here we measure time in cups.

100 Words: l'esprit d'escalier

2011-10-01T17:45:00.000+01:00

We understood what l’esprit d’escalier was at school, before we learned much French, because of Michael’s socks.

In the changing room after our latest medley of athletic mediocrity, they were criticised by someone who knew better than us (back then, that could have been anyone).

“Your socks are square.”

The retort came to Michael as we unlocked our bikes, our lessons over: They’re not square, they’re sock-shaped.

He was so proud, we couldn’t bear to tell him it wasn’t very good.

The French have no phrase for a disappointing comeback after the event, but we did, because of Michael’s socks.

100 Words: Eyes

2011-09-30T17:45:00.001+01:00

Hers are brown. I never thought I’d wind up with a brown-eyed girl.

Mine are blue. She calls me her blue-eyed boy. I never felt like a blue-eyed boy before she came along.

I’m short-sighted, she’s long-sighted. She’s the only one that sees my eyes unobstructed by glasses.

At bedtime, I move closer so I can see her properly, she moves away so she can see me properly. It’s the only way we really dance together.

When I first met her, I fell so far into her eyes I thought I’d never get out. I’m not sure I ever have.

100 Words: Cupping

2011-09-29T17:45:00.003+01:00

When April says it, “cupping” sounds gentle. The plastic cloches she shows me look graceful, delicate.

She presses them against my skin and draws out the air with a pump. Under each bell jar, my flesh rises to fill the vacuum, golfball-shaped like a hideous experiment.

When April said it, “cupping” sounded gentle, but it's not. Chinese burns from ancient Chinese medicine; perhaps that’s how they got the name.

Once they’re all in place she turns and leaves the room. I stay behind on the couch, a steampunk porcupine, to contemplate what’s really important.

Was that red blotch always there?

100 Words: The pen in my pocket

2011-09-28T17:45:00.001+01:00

If you know our PA, you can access her secret stash of stationery. It’s an Aladdin’s cave: plush pads, velvety covered notebooks, Post-Its, the very best pens.

I no longer scratch with a biro - instead, I have a disposable fountain pen. You wouldn’t know such things existed, unless you knew our PA.

Such a difference; words curve on the page where once they were jagged, ink shines in beautiful trails. And the doodles! I make such gorgeous doodles now.

My pages, so pretty and so meaningless, are a salutary lesson. Owning a good gun doesn’t make you a great shot.

100 Words: The balance of power

2011-09-27T17:45:00.003+01:00

Sunday lunch at the pub: something other people do. The room’s filling up with friends and couples, the jazz band’s yet to arrive.

Kelly tells Wendy and Fiona that I hold the balance of power in our marriage, a fact nobody ever believes.

“It’s true! I run the house. I’m the one who plans what’s for dinner every night.”

“No, I run the household.” says Kelly scornfully. “I’m the only reason you have clean pants.”

“You’re the only reason I need clean pants.” I grumble.

No one’s convinced; it’s not about who wears the trousers, it’s about who washes them.

100 Words: The secret of her success

2011-09-26T17:45:00.002+01:00

It’s two a.m., the Christmas party’s over. On the coach back to Reading I'm talking to Sue, who I don't know well. Everyone’s either drunk or asleep except Sue, the driver and me.

"How will you get home?"

"My husband's collecting me."

"How long have you been married?"

"Twenty-six years." She doesn't look old enough.

“Twenty-six years! What’s the secret of your success?” I’m always keen to pick up tips.

She doesn’t pause.

“I have a lot of affairs.”

It’s two a.m., the party’s over, I’m on the coach home. Everyone’s either drunk or asleep, except the driver and me.

[Blue Italics Of Housekeeping: I thought I'd have a week of doing a 100 Word blog post every day. If you have any suggestions for topics, leave them in the comments or drop me a line. Thanks!]

Lotteries and plans

2011-09-20T18:45:00.000+01:00

When I go and see my acupuncturist April my visits always fall into two distinct halves, and during the first half we talk. We don’t just talk, of course, because that’s not why I’m there: the first needles always go into my feet, two or three in each, which I barely notice, followed by a scattering on both shins, somewhere below the spot where I have awkwardly rolled up both trouser legs. Meanwhile, we chatter away about all sorts. We usually begin by discussing my symptoms before moving on to wider topics; the weather, work, holidays, what we are reading. Today, though, we somehow find ourselves discussing the National Lottery: not a subject I ever imagined coming up in a conversation with my acupuncturist, because I thought she was above such things.

It all starts because April asks about work. She is convinced that I have a very stressful job, and it doesn’t seem to matter how many times I tell her that I don’t because she has made up her mind that I’m just being stoic. It just goes to show how little she knows about some things, because there’s nothing stoic about me. I tell her that my boss is leaving and that I have no desire to put myself forward for promotion.

“I’m lucky, because it’s not like I need to get a better job. I don’t have kids, so I don’t have to worry about the cost of them. Some of my colleagues have to think about how to get a bigger house, or the next car, or whether they can afford to have another child, but none of that is important to me.”

“So what is important to you? What do you want to do in life?”

It’s a fair question. There are so many things I could say in response, and so little time; I wasn’t expecting to be taken down such a philosophical path on a Saturday morning. I think carefully about it before answering because I know that April takes this kind of thing seriously, but also because, in the back of my mind, I wonder whether this is some kind of test.

”I don’t know really, just being happy I suppose. So I don’t care about having a new car or a big house, I just want to spend my time with people I like and care about and see new places and experience new things. I want to never stop learning things and discovering things and meeting new people. Oh, and eating! Eating Is particularly important.”

In the pause that follows, I feel like an idiot. What do you want to do in life? Just be happy I suppose is hardly the stuff of the great philosophers. It’s because the question ambushed me coming out of the mouth of somebody else, when it should be one I ask myself more often. The sound of ocean waves crashing against an unknown shore wafts out of the CD player somewhere behind me, uninterrupted by voices, for just long enough to be awkward. I can’t see what’s going on behind April’s eyes but they are twinkling, as they always do, with amusement, like she knows something I don’t. I suppose by definition everybody knows something that you don’t, but few people seem to get as much wry enjoyment out of it as she does.

“Yes. That is a good answer.” says April with a big smile, and I feel like I’ve passed.

“Anyway, if I won the lottery I wouldn’t go in to work the next day. I can’t bear those people who win the lottery and say It won’t change my life, I’m still going to keep up my job as a cleaner, I’ll just buy a slightly bigger house and take the kids to Spain.”

This is true. I think that kind of person shouldn’t be allowed to do the lottery, I think instead that they should be encouraged to put ten pounds a week in a tin which can be couriered across to me every year just in time for Christmas. But then of course I don’t do the lottery, because I know that not taking part doesn’t materially affect your chances of winning. I could rant about this to April for the rest of our session but I decide not to, because I just got a question right and I don’t want to blot my copybook.

“What would you do instead, if you won?”

“Loads of things. I’d write, and travel, and go on lots of holidays. I’d get all my friends to take time off work and I’d take them away on trips with me. And I’d buy lots of houses all over the world.”

“Where would you like to live?”

“Everywhere! I love so many cities. I’d buy a place in Montreal for the summer, when it’s beautiful and hot, and a place in Granada for the winter, when it’s still warm, and a place in Paris for the rest of the time.”

It’s funny, the things you think about in an otherwise innocuous conversation. I realise that April is Korean, and that every city I mention is very Western. I remember that April has uprooted herself to somewhere so different from home, going back to visit her family a couple of times a year, and that by contrast I almost couldn’t manage the culture shock when I lived in Nottingham for a year. Even if I won the lottery I would never have an experience like the one April is having, I’d just be a super-rich tourist who can spend enough money to fool himself that he’s seeing the real thing.

And yet it’s a tempting series of images. I can see myself wandering through the Parisian streets, jotting on notebooks in cafes, standing at my balcony in summer watching clouds of people roll past me, smoke from my cigar spiralling upwards into nothing. I can picture myself sitting at a mirador looking at the Alhambra, drinking mint tea and noticing how the sun takes its time to pick out every tree on the slopes.

“And would you do anything else with your time?”

“Yes, I think I’d take up photography. I mean properly. It would be lovely to have all that time to devote to it, to try and get good at something. That’s the problem, you see, I’m not really that good at anything.”

“What sort of photographs do you like taking?”

“People. I love taking pictures of people. I love the way that they change all the time. If you take two pictures of a view, or a building, they look very similar but pictures of people are always different. I think I just find people fascinating, and I really like the moment when you get a picture and you know it sums them up perfectly.”

“Very good.”

April seems to like this answer too. I am getting all the questions right today, though it helps that she hasn’t asked any tricky ones like Did you have anything to drink last night? I have told her that I’ve largely given up eating bread, which seems to have appeased her for the time being. It happens to be true.

While I talk away, April places needle after needle in my hand and wrists, the shaft of each one cased in bright pink plastic. I only feel some of them go in, though talking probably helps. Looking out of the window, I see the equally vibrant colours of the leaves on the trees in the square. This is the first day when I find myself thinking about how much longer I have before they start to turn and fall.

“You have pretty hands.” she tells me.

“Thank you! It’s because I’ve never done an honest day’s work in my life.”

Normally, this is the point where my visit to April would get to the second stage, where I stop talking, lie back and relax and let everything wash over me. But I’ve warmed to my theme by now, so I tell her about a similar conversation we were having over lunch at work the previous day.

My colleagues James, Simon and I had been sitting round chewing the fat, which turned out to be more appealing than chewing our lunch; fish and chips Friday, in our canteen at least, has never delivered anything more than fish and chip shaped disappointment. So we got to talking about the Euromillions, and what we would all do if we won, and then James started to tell us a story about his uncle.

“My uncle lives in Ireland, and one day there was a picture of him on the front cover of one of the Irish national papers holding a pint of Guinness, underneath a headline saying Is this the unluckiest man in Ireland?”

“What happened?” said Simon between mouthfuls. He’s a funny one, Simon; he joins us for lunch about once a month, mainly talks about his kids and the MA he’s studying for, but always makes you feel like he thinks he’s doing you a favour lunching with you at all. Despite that I rather like him, though I think that would change fast if he came to lunch more often than once a month.

“My uncle was standing in the queue at the local newsagent waiting to pick up a lucky dip for that night’s lottery draw. Just as he got to the front of the line, this woman he knew from the village hared into the shop, clearly in a hurry. Because my uncle is such a gentleman, he gave her his place in the queue.”

“And she bought…”

“…a lucky dip ticket. Exactly. She bought his lucky dip ticket, the one he was meant to have, and she won something like ten million Euros. And he got nothing except a photo opportunity on the front page of the national paper, holding a pint and grinning like a moron.”

Put that way, it was hard to argue. It wasn’t a glowing advertisement for chivalry, after all.

“Did she offer him a share of the money?”

“No. He wouldn’t have taken it anyway. He’s not materialistic in the slightest.”

When I heard that I found myself quite pleased that he hadn’t won. If he had, he would still have been on the front cover, still holding a pint of Guinness, under a headline saying It won’t change my life, says Ireland’s newest millionaire, still grinning like a moron.

”I’ve got a Lottery story too.” said Simon. “One day my mum was sitting in front of the telly holding her ticket watching the numbers come in. The first number was on her ticket. So was the second, and the third. When the fourth one came up, she couldn’t believe it, and when the fifth one was also there she nearly passed out.”

“What happened?”

“Put it this way, my mother’s never let me forget it. She says to me, If only you’d been born on the forty-third of June instead, we’d be millionaires today. She says that every time I see her.” He frowns. “It was only funny the first time.”

I felt a little guilty, because it was indeed funny the first time. But then I imagined, if Simon is anything like me, that getting that laugh when he tells the story to somebody is the only thing that makes up for having to hear his mother tell it so often. Then I remembered that I too had a story which seemed relevant.

”My friend Laura dated this guy for a few months when she was living in London. He was really sweet and good-natured, but she couldn’t help but feel it wasn’t really going anywhere. He wasn’t ambitious, didn’t really have any prospects and he was very unreliable. He just wanted to sit around smoking dope all day. So she ended it.”

“And?”

“About a year later he won eight million pounds on the Lottery. She still has to see him socially. Let’s just say that his lifestyle is very different these days.”

“That is terrible.” said James. I couldn’t blame him. It seemed like everyone who had a story about the lottery had a story about somebody else winning it.

“The worst thing about it is that, given that I know someone who knows someone who’s won the Lottery, my chances of winning it must be even slimmer than those of the average person. I always tell Laura that she’s jinxed me. That’s why I don’t play.”

Even as I said it, I knew that statistically it wasn’t true. But then, statistically at least, if your numbers are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 you have as much chance of winning as anybody else, but nobody in their right mind would pick those numbers. It had nothing to do with statistics and everything to do with luck, and ours was rotten. That’s why we were sitting in the canteen on a Friday lunchtime dreaming of speedboats, beautifully phrased letters of resignation and balconies in Paris. If we’d had the right amount of luck we would have been elsewhere. If we’d had any luck at all, the fish and chips might have tasted palatable.

All the way through my story about the conversation at lunch, April has been busy. I look down to see the handful of needles has been transformed into a forest, all placed with perfect precision by this small, slight, smiling woman who I think I could tell almost anything to. Later on, she will tell me that they are on a very important meridian which travels all the way to my heart. I realise that April didn’t laugh at Simon’s joke about his birthday being on the forty-third of June, and I wonder what she must make of me prattling away while she’s trying to do her job.

The last of the needles goes in, and April gives me a look of infinite patience like a mother’s, or at least like somebody else’s mother’s.

“The universe has a plan for us. It’s just that we don’t know what it is.”

When I go and see my acupuncturist April my visits always fall into two distinct halves, and during the second half there is no talking. So I lie back on the couch with my eyes closed, and the waves crashing in the background, a forest of silent needles up my arm, and I only just make out the door closing behind April. I’m too busy thinking about what I want and what I said that I want, thinking about what makes me happy and wondering whether I even really know. Last of all, I’m thinking about what April said just before she left the room. And everything is fine. I don’t know what the universe’s plan is, for me or for anyone, but at moments like this I’m happy just to let it have its way.

Busking

2011-09-05T19:10:00.003+01:00

I recognise the busker strumming away, standing outside the hairdresser, as I take my seat opposite him and wait for my coffee to arrive. He used to play the open mic night I went to every week. His usual slot was always towards the end of the evening, and it always coincided with me going to the toilet, taking my time, stopping at the bar on the way back, getting a round of drinks in and picking my way through the maze of smoke and occupied chairs, tray in hand, to return to my table. Of course, "coincided" is sleight of hand on my part; it was no coincidence that I left while he was playing, any more than it was a coincidence that he chose to take to the stage at a point in proceedings when the audience might have drunk enough to appreciate his efforts.

It must be seven years since I last saw him play. I don't think he's spent them getting any better at it. The check shirt he's wearing could easily date from seven years ago, although I'm pleased to see that he's shaved off the ridiculous patch of hair that used to squat between his chin and his bottom lip. There's something desperate about his performance too, the way he says "thank you", mid-song, to the handful of people dropping a handful of coppers into the vast space inside the boundaries of his guitar case.

Because he's playing for money the songs are all covers. I can't work out whether that makes things better or worse; from memory his original compositions were pretty awful but with covers you have a memory of what they ought to sound like. I inwardly tut, eating my salad, as he murders Maggie May but worse is to come. From that point onwards all his songs seem to have been chosen with the sole purpose of making mocking them far too easy - he plays That's Entertainment, which isn't, and Everybody's Talkin', which I suppose they are, though it isn't complimentary. A more appropriate title would have been Everybody's Left; I was lucky to get the last free table outside when I arrived, but since he started in earnest only a few people remain.

I sometimes think the worst fate in the world must be to have a dream without having the ability to back it up. You see those people all the time in the early stages of talent shows. They are going to be the next big thing, they tell you, even if you wouldn't know it to look at them, because when they open their mouth and sing all your doubts will melt away. Except then they open their mouths and sing and it's definitely beyond doubt, but it's a painful mess, and they don't understand why everybody is laughing. I don't understand why people laugh at that either; it is the saddest thing of all, and it makes me feel ashamed of the world I live in where this is an acceptable spectacle. That's entertainment, indeed.

A friend of the busker's walks past and they exchange enthusiastic greetings. Looking at him again, I think how patronising I am. He can play guitar and he can sing just fine, though he's not to my taste. Besides, who am I to judge what his dreams are. Maybe he just loves playing and singing, maybe this is exactly what he wants. Maybe the smiles and winks and thank yous to passers-by are all part of that too. I stop for a moment to think about all the creative people I know and like. Am I calling them all failures because they don't have a book deal or a record in the shops?

Perhaps I'm just jealous, the way I always am of people who have faith in their own ability. Because you can say whatever you like about the busker but at least he's out there doing it. And when he gets home at the end of the day and counts out all the coins, back at his house, will he think he's lucky? Will his guitar case be half empty or half full? Because if it was me, I would see every coin that wasn't in there, and I'd remember every person who walked past me without a look, their money hiding unclinking in their wallet. How long would the busker last if his attitude to rejection was anything like mine?

Next I try to imagine a world where I did what the busker is doing, standing on street corners reading out my work, or handing out fliers to disinterested strangers. But I can't picture it; even if it was the done thing I know I would never do it. Far easier to sit on the sidelines, watch somebody else and tell myself that I could do a much better job. Meanwhile, the busker has moved on to a rendition of Red Red Wine. It's not at all bad.

It's a few minutes before I register that it was his final song and when I look again he is crouched over his guitar case, folding up his setlist and putting his harmonica away. Much quicker than I intended I get out of my chair, walk across to him and throw in a couple of pound coins. I don't know if it's for the performance or the lesson, but I do know that they are the only pound coins in there. He looks up and his smile is genuine. "Thanks, sir." he says.

I'm not sure if he recognises me, but that's okay. I'm not sure I recognise myself.

Seven links

2011-08-29T16:41:00.003+01:00

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

2011-08-22T19:21:00.001+01:00

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

2011-08-16T17:45:00.002+01:00

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

2011-08-09T09:00:00.001+01:00

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

2011-08-02T20:50:00.004+01:00

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.

The solar system

2011-07-25T22:21:00.007+01:00

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

2011-07-14T19:15:00.007+01:00

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

2011-07-11T22:05:00.002+01:00

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

2011-07-08T14:34:00.006+01:00

“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

2011-07-05T22:47:00.003+01:00

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.

The suburbs

2011-06-30T22:27:00.011+01:00

The bus dropped me off in the suburbs and when I got off, I felt like I was visiting another country. It was a wonder the driver didn’t ask to see my passport when I boarded and put my exact change in the hopper. It was strange to be on a bus again, it made me realise how rarely I take them these days. The free coach from the station to my office doesn’t count, that’s a different experience altogether, always full of people you know and have at least something in common with. Buses aren't quite like that - half the fun is that mixture of people you see every day and new people whose paths cross yours only now and again. To the regulars on that bus that day, that meant people like me.

And yet I was suddenly reminded of all those years on the bus - different numbers, routes and stages in my life. The 65 from the Brecon Road shops into town in 1996, living at home with my mum and my brother and working in Reading for the first time. Trips to the supermarket en masse on a Friday, totting up who owed what on the weekly shop in tiny columns down the left and right margins of the Waitrose receipt. The horrors of the number 17 from that miserable house on Talfourd Avenue in 1999 where everybody but me took drugs all the time. I remember the windows steaming up that winter and the breath of all the shivering passengers forming in thick clouds like cotton wool in the air. You could have reached out and torn it into balls. The number 20 from the university in 2002, living with someone I didn’t much like in an area where I was constantly reminded of the student I still wished I was, gliding down the long graceful tree-lined hill that was Kendrick Road, taking me into town at nights so I could drink with friends and pretend I didn’t have to go home at the end.

Just like Jason Bourne, even after he loses his memory, can’t help but scan a room for exits and suspicious strangers, my knowledge of buses is still the same. Back then, it was all about women; I actually got several dates on buses, back in the days when women were far more desperate and the internet had not yet taken hold of everyone. I always used to find a seat where I could look at someone attractive, either straight on or (for the advanced practitioner) by checking out the reflection in the window. Old habits die hard; I found a seat near the back with a good view of the only woman on the bus who looked like a human. Of course, she was easily ten years younger than me. Old habits, like old clothes, can become embarrassing.

When the bus coasted along the long road that bisects the suburbs, past the big unattractive supermarket, past the police station, it reached a stage where I could hear the percussive sweep of the top deck pushing the branches of trees aside. I hadn’t heard that sound in years, and I’d forgotten how calming it could be. The smallest leaf made its way in through an open window and landed on my shoulder. I didn’t want to brush it off.

Twenty minutes early to see the dentist, I had nothing better to do than to go exploring. The sunshine was vast and unhesitant, baking the streets and casting every building in the most flattering of lights. If the suburbs were ever going to be beautiful, it would be on a day like today. They still weren’t beautiful, though; every house looked exactly the same, every unfashionable UPVC window or dark wood door-frame probably had the same widescreen television, Ikea Billy bookcases and dining table behind it. I remember when this suburb was built it was the largest housing development in Europe. We used to tell that fact to visiting relatives as if it was something to be proud of (of course, back then we lived in the suburbs ourselves).

I was shocked by how quiet it was - school would surely have finished and yet there seemed to be nobody around. The occasional child would go past on a bike, heading for the cycle path that presumably went to the signposted BMX park. Even the reference to a BMX seemed dated, but that might just have been because I remembered them the first time around. Suddenly I felt very old.

The bus shelter was deserted, although someone had scratched an obscenity into it in the glass, presumably someone less enamoured with the facilities for local cyclists. Everything seemed green yet characterless, as if this place only really existed at night. Next to the shelter was a notice board advertising the usual sad mixture of events that passes for community life in places like this - raffles, church events, amateur dramatics performances, tribute bands at the community centre. I looked long enough to realise that the majority of the notices were out of date, which somehow seemed fitting.

My dentist is in a parade of shops - I suppose that’s what we had, before malls came along, parades or shopping precincts. When I grew up in the suburbs, going to the shopping precinct was the major event of Saturday, and the shops there were important. Beatties, the only games shop, where I could order Dungeons and Dragons books and lead figures that I would half-heartedly try and paint in the garage, all fingers and thumbs and white spirit. Milwards, the shoe shop that, every year without fail, supplied me with an increasingly clownish pair of huge black sensible shoes for the school year ahead. Hong Kong Garden, the Chinese takeaway we went to for special occasions on Friday nights, serving fish, chips, acrid brown curry sauce for the rest of my family and an apocalyptic orange sweet and sour sauce for me, with huge chunks of pineapple floating in it. The video shop, our main means of escape from the suburbs (the multiplex wasn’t to arrive for years).

This parade, though, was a far more threadbare collection of establishments. A couple of almost stereotypical estate agents, with spiky haired spivs in cheap shirts swivelling idly in their chairs waiting for the day to end, collapsing under the weight of their immense tie knots. A gym called “Curves”, clearly hedging its bets in a way I didn’t know whether to find shrewd or endearing. “Caffe Med”, an Italian restaurant which looked a lot like a leisure centre with a menu in the window full of spelling mistakes. I spent a couple of minutes considering how frayed squid would actually taste.

The shops were even more forlorn. The chemist had a slogan saying We care! in a tacky cursive script, and as I took a photo of it the woman behind the counter scowled out of the window at me. “Mike’s Waterfront Warehouse” was long closed down, probably on the basis that it was nowhere near water of any kind. “Booze Bargain” threatened exactly that, though you could tell from the outside that it just meant cheap booze, which was hardly the same thing. The only other shops seemed to be trading on their inability to spell; “Pet Fayre”, “By-Wise”. As I slouched around, taking it all in, a couple of schoolkids wandered past. The uniforms said they must be around fourteen, the hair and makeup suggested they were in their early twenties and from the look they gave me, I might as well have been the wrong side of fifty. If I’d asked them to take me to their leader, what would have happened?

I’ve never been so pleased to walk into a dentist’s waiting room in my life.

On the way home, intact and undrilled, I sat at the front and pretended to drive the bus. I was too old for eyeing up women, and there were no women on the bus anyway. Besides, you are never too old to enjoy driving the bus. I watched out the front as the roads slipped by, an identikit maze of houses, cul-de-sacs named after cars, or local dignitaries, or other towns somewhere. The bus went past Sellafield Way, a clear sign that a local authority had run out of ideas. And slowly, the streets got less leafy, the driveways less long and the off-road parking less plentiful, and the world started to look like the world I knew. But I was still thinking about the suburbs.

Because the truth is that for many years of my life, I lived somewhere like that and I looked around me and thought This is enough. There was a park to walk the dog in, and a hill to go down in a sledge, and a video shop if you wanted to be somewhere else, and fried food covered in orange sauce on Friday nights. And there was a back garden, and a barbecue, and a garage with a lawnmower in it, and a driveway lined with lavender bushes. And there were only three pubs, and one of them involved a walk across the park and along the lake, and the other was right on the edge of town. And there weren’t restaurants, because we didn’t eat out back then, there was the pub at the edge of town and the Indian takeaway and that was all. And that was enough.

I don’t know when it stopped being enough. I don’t know what enough even means any more. I can go out whenever I like, do whatever I want, eat wherever I fancy. The world has changed so completely that, for me at least, the suburbs are like a living museum of how things used to be. It’s as odd for me to think people still live that way as it would be if you took me to Eastern Europe, or an Amish village.

On the bus home, I thought about the suburbs and I wondered why I didn’t feel sad. And I wondered why I did.

The unlucky ones

2011-06-27T19:14:00.005+01:00

When the phone goes off early in the morning at weekends I always know it’s my mother-in-law. Nobody else rings us on the landline, or not much anyway. More to the point, anybody else would realise that nine a.m. is an unacceptable time to receive telephone calls. The first time it happened I was convinced that there must have been an emergency, that we would be throwing on our clothes and rushing to an Oxfordshire hospital, but I soon realised that we just had different ideas about these things. Similarly, if you know what’s good for you, you don’t ring her when Coronation Street is on. Those have been the rules for far, far longer than I have been on the scene: it’s the only bit of the television schedules I know with any degree of certainty.

They talk on the phone a lot, more and more these days, and it’s always a cheerful chatter, often about nothing much. Sometimes Rose rings to get things off her chest, and I see Kelly curled up on the sofa moving the conversation along with a volley of quick, gentle syllables, a “right” here or an “uh huh” there. On the very rare occasion she’ll say “mum, you’ve told me that before”, but never with any frustration. It’s just nice to hear the voice of someone you care about, even if they say what you know they’re going to say. Sometimes knowing what they’re going to say is part of the comfort.

The phone calls can be for the strangest reasons – to ask Kelly whether she can pick something up from the shops, for consumer advice, for tips about the computer Rose now almost knows how to use, or just to say tell her to change the channel because there’s something on television Rose wants Kelly to see. The curious network that holds my in-laws together seems to work like that; many’s the time that Kelly’s phone has pinged with a text from her sister Heidi. “Put Radio 2 on! Put Radio 2 on now!” it will say, and Kelly will, and the soundtrack of their past will seep from the speakers into the kitchen like the incense of nostalgia.

My mother in law rings on Saturday morning and when I pick up the phone the first thing she says, apart from “It’s only me” (she always says “it’s only me”, even though it’s a special occasion for Kelly every time she calls) is “I didn’t wake you up, did I?” That counts as progress, I suppose. This call is to finalise Kelly’s visit – she is staying overnight and taking her to hospital the next morning for an MRI scan. I sit up in bed tapping on my phone and waiting for my tea to cool down, half listening to the back and forward of the two most organised members of a family which is not good at making plans, trying to do exactly that. It happens every time but that’s part of the comfort for me, too.

At the end, Kelly passes the phone back to me. “She wants to talk to you” she says. So we chatter away about my recent visit to the specialist, the latest in a long line of doctors to declare me beyond the help of conventional medicine. This one was private, which only really seemed to mean that the diagnosis was preceded by a wait in a nicer room and delivered across a more attractive desk. As so often, I found myself considered well enough not to require treatment, even if I was not well enough to find that helpful. “There are some experimental methods used in other parts of the country.” he’d said cheerfully. “But there’s no evidence that they work.” I hadn’t minded that so much; experimental and medicine, in my book at least, are not words that belong in the same sentence. At the end there was an embarrassing moment of expectant silence. I was waiting for him to come up with something else, he was waiting for me to thank him and tell him that I felt reassured. I can’t imagine he would have been anywhere near as disappointed as me.

I don’t tell Rose all of that, I don’t want to burden her with her MRI on the horizon, so instead I say “They don’t really know what to do. I could have the tests again and see if they’re different this time.”

“At least it’s nothing serious.”

“Well, I suppose so. Don’t worry about the MRI by the way, I had one last year and they’re nothing to be scared of. You just have to lie still and try and forget about the noise.”

“I don’t understand it. I was never ill, not for the last thirteen years, and now it’s all come along at once.”

I smile, because she’s not alone; I have exactly the same problem. We’re the unlucky ones where it’s one thing after another, and they’re always things – my RSI for example, or her tinnitus – that are the very edge of medical science, things nobody understands, things that just “go away” or that you’re supposed to learn to ignore. (“You’re a special case, aren’t you?” Kelly had said as we drove away from the hospital. If only it was the right kind of special). If you go to a doctor with a tangible problem with an obvious cause that they know how to fix, they’ll fix it. They may tell you off about your lifestyle first, but then they’ll fix it. But for the people like Rose and me, at the fuzzy edge of the graph where there are no straight lines and nothing makes sense, they don’t want to know. They don’t even consider us a challenge. Medicine is so clearly the creation of men.

”I know exactly what you mean, Rose.”

“I take so many pills now it’s a wonder I don’t rattle. There’s the ones for my dizziness.”

That’s another problem Rose has that they didn’t know how to fix. It’s a problem I used to have that they didn’t know how to fix either. I briefly remember the awful sensation of being at the middle of a giant turntable, looking at the computer screen and being unable to work out why it wasn’t moving the way it felt like it was. Perhaps I should offer her the rest of the tablets in the cupboard in the bathroom.

“I used to take those too.”

“And then there’s the ones for my cholesterol.”

“Yes, I’m on those as well, every night.”

We race through the contents of our medicine cabinets playing snap, me saying a mixture of “Yes, I take those”, “I tried them, they didn’t work” and “You should stay on those as long as you want”. Kelly looks on and smiles because bonding is bonding, even if you’re bonding through adversity. When we have finished comparing repeat prescriptions, I hand the phone back so that Kelly can administer the Love you, bye! that always marks the end of a phone call from Rose.

”What are you smiling at?” I ask her.

“You two. You’re sweet when you talk about your ailments.”

Later that morning, I throw my clothes on head out for my acupuncture appointment, another experimental treatment a specialist suggested to me when he ran out of ideas. Rushing through the leafy streets I pass the Polish church looking splendid in what little sunlight has forced its way through the clouds, if maybe a little too clean and new. The weather is confused; hot and muggy yet not at all bright, as if it hasn’t decided what it wants to be. I can identify with that.

I reach the main road, lined with grand houses. At the top of it, the church and the funeral director sit on opposite sides of the junction, seemingly in cahoots. The sun chooses to come out at this point and ribbons of floaters dance in front of my eyes; they are always there, unless I am looking at something important. Apparently they will eventually go away or I will stop noticing them - failing that I am told there are some experimental methods I might want to consider. I am just about to cross when I am brought to a sudden stop. In front of me an ambulance hurtles past, a dayglo streak, wailing sirens cutting through the thickness in the air. I watch it for a second, on its way to somebody with real problems.

The shops

2011-06-20T22:23:00.006+01:00

Blogs are like shops.

At the heart of it, that’s what we all are; a virtual nation of shopkeepers. We carefully choose what to put in the windows and what to place on the shelves, the best of us, the bits that we want everybody to see. The rest, what’s left, the things we aren’t proud of or stock we know we couldn’t shift is stuck out the back, out of view. Sometimes, when you come in, we may have made a mistake and left that door ajar so you can make something out that we’d rather you hadn’t seen, but never for very long.

And once we’ve got shelves and cupboards full of pieces of us, we all stand nervously behind our counters and we wait for something to happen. We look out of the window at the world going past, hoping that people will come in and like what we have put out on display. The busy days are the best days in the world, with people milling around, rubbing shoulders, talking to us and talking to one another. The slow days are the most horrendous torment. We know people are out there, and we don’t understand why they’re not opening the door and making that bell ring.

Some of us take to the streets, stopping at other places, handing out flyers everywhere we can find people who might like our wares. Some people practically dust off a megaphone, but we can all hear them coming and smell the desperation. Some of us stay indoors, confident that our time will come. And some of us advertise. Some people say they really don’t care and it’s just a bit of fun, but they are the lucky ones - dilettantes, probably doing it as a hobby. They’re not even full time, most of them.

Blogs are like shops. But the generalisation ends there, because there are as many different kinds of blogs as there are kinds of shops, if not more. They sell everything. I mean, everything. There are people dealing in music, films or art. You can see beautiful photographers, great musicians, wonderful chefs and people with an instinctive eye for fashion. Then there are people selling you a crisp, bright vision of the future or carefully, painstakingly recreating and packaging the past. You can learn something new about your neighbourhood, or visit somewhere you have never seen. You can find whatever you want.

It’s not just about what they sell, but what kind of wares they sell. You can find beautiful artisans, crafting small limited-edition pieces. Every one is a gorgeous miniature, a glimpse of something important. Or you can find shops where the goods are churned out on an assembly line, each one almost identical to the last one and the next one. They will fall apart in days, but they’re so easy to make that it hardly matters. But then there are big shops and small shops, too. You get the huge faceless franchises and chains where everything looks the same. They are bafflingly popular, with hundreds of people milling around, but every time you leave you find you’ve taken nothing away with you. And then there are the small friendly places where they seem instinctively to know what you need. Why don’t I come here more often? you think. They remember me, they know me.

If blogs are like shops then what they sell are brands, and some of these are more successful than others. Some are a particular type of shop - we’ve all been in them - where everything is too perfect. The way it’s arranged is like art, all precise lines, but everything is sterile. Maybe you are greeted as you go in, in that officious way that makes you feel awkward about looking around. You feel terrified of touching anything, and so nothing touches you. And then there are the places where you know you belong the moment you go in. But we have a complicated relationship with brands; some of them reflect the person you wish you could be, some highlight the person you really are. That is not always the good thing we wish it was.

The outsides are like shops too - some are beautiful but too perfect, some look dated, some have a comfortable, classic feel. Many are crying out for a facelift. There are some where all the signage is in a font that sends you running for the door. And of course the golden rule applies to blogs and shops - if the outside is blacked up, you’re unlikely to find much you want inside. Sex blogs are like sex shops - you have to prove you are over eighteen before you go in, but once you’re there you wonder why you bothered. You are surrounded by people who either never have sex or badly need to get laid, because everybody who does is at home doing it. They have no need of such things.

I wonder what kind of shop this is. It’s been two years and I still don’t know. The stock changes a little less frequently than it used to, and you might feel like you’ve seen it all before. The opening hours can be unpredictable, and some days my patter isn’t what it was. I can be a bear with a sore head, some days. But I still love it. I love that feeling when I have new stock in, that sense of anticipation when I see it perfect on the shelf. I like that moment when it’s all laid out and I can survey my work and wait for the first customer to come in. Because when it’s all there, as yet unperused, it’s perfect. It’s my favourite thing I’ve ever made, and I know you’re going to love it - or at least I want to think you will.

If you don’t like it, that’s okay. Because the other thing about shops is that they form areas and districts, little enclaves. And if you don’t find something you want at my place, you just need to try slightly further afield. Look at the sidestreets on my sidebar, and the streets beyond that. I’m proud to be in a virtual city of people who love what they do, and make terrific stuff. Don’t just stand here being disappointed by me: go exploring! You are bound to see something you’ll like.

The saddest thing, I always find, is going past the shops that have closed down.

We all start these enterprises with the best of intentions, of giving people something they might want, but not everybody makes a go of it. Sometimes there is a sign on the door. “I’m off.” it might say. “I’ve had fun, but enough is enough. Keep in touch.” And there will be some responses, and you’ll read them and think All those years, and it amounts to that? What will they do now? But the ones that get to me are the ones where they just stop - no goodbye note, no forwarding address, no future plans. These are derelict - sad monuments to a life that changed direction when we weren’t looking. I wander by every now and again, just to see if they’ve reopened, renovated, relaunched, but it never happens. They are boarded up, and all the while graffiti is appearing on the outside. Whole swathes of our virtual world are like this, sad and unloved, with broken windows, shutters down and doors locked and bolted forever. And sometimes, just sometimes, when I see those empty shells I think I liked that place, I wish I’d been there more often. And now I never will again.

If I think about it too much, it would make me sad. But every time one closes another two open - there is always somebody willing to give this a try, though it’s not a lifestyle for everybody. You are always on duty, always wondering about footfall, or rotating your stock, or deciding what to try next. Sometimes there are things on order for people, special requests or new visitors to impress. Besides, I can’t afford to get downcast, because I have work to do. I have new stuff going in tonight, and it has to be just perfect. I think it’s almost ready, and I can see in my mind how it’s going to look. I hope people like it.

Counting

2011-06-15T17:45:00.004+01:00

I’ve noticed recently that all the bus drivers have a different method, when they count us.

The dour-faced one at the start of the day has a handheld clicker which he presses as every head bobs past and every body descends from the step on to the pavement outside our reception. The number on the side of the clicker clocks up, the sound like a cricket, an incongruous echo of warmer climes amid the beige of the office blocks that seem to have fallen on to the landscape at random, clustered round the grotty junctions like concerned residents gawping at an accident.

At home time, it is the little Eastern European who says “thank you” without enthusiasm in a thick accent when I tell him to have a good evening, every evening without fail. I mean it, he doesn’t, and if he carries on like this I will stop. He has a clipboard on his lap and the paper fills up with five-bar gates as he tallies each of our escapes. Every line corresponds to one meal, one front door, one set of evening plans, one cocktail of disappointments and frustrations. Usually, I am the adjacent line to Mikey, or to Phil, united on a page if not in any other way. On Fridays the lines are reassembled in the pub - or would be, if anyone was doing a roll call there.

Today it was the grumpy man who resembles a Toby jug. As we all trooped past him I saw him counting on his fingers, repeating the running total to himself out loud, almost under his breath. I thought how easy it would be to distract him – to talk loudly on the phone at the top of the steps or call out random numbers and throw him off so he had to start again and could never finish. I was tempted to, but then I thought some more.

Because the thing is that none of us getting off that bus were counting the things that matter. Granted, we knew how many days were left until the weekend, or how many more rides there were until that first drink on a Friday afternoon, that next long weekend or long-awaited holiday. But I don’t think many of us had stopped to think about how many times we’d made this journey, or how many more times we would, or whether there were better things we should have been doing all this time.

We did what we always did as if we were sleepwalking - which some mornings we probably are - and you can’t complain if, while you are sleepwalking, you get reduced to a line on a page, a finger in the air or a revolving number on a handheld device. So I didn’t interrupt him because I appreciated the irony. He was counting us, and we were acting as if we didn’t count.

Hugh

2011-06-09T21:17:00.004+01:00

In my worst nightmares, I am like Hugh from work.

Hugh has been promoted twice in the time I've known him, but he still wears the same clothes as when we first met: mustard coloured pullovers, polo necks, moleskin trousers. He seems to pick his clothes purely on their ability to trap and hold the dandruff that drifts, in slow motion as if in a snowglobe, from his greasy dark hair. It is beginning to go grey.

He never seems to clean his clothes either. We spot an odd stain on a moleskin jacket, and track it over many, many weeks. It does not disappear, and we are disgusted by that but not surprised. We speculate about what it is; the charitable guesses involve food, or baby drool, the less charitable ones don’t bear repetition. Initially, we think he doesn't own a suit but we are proved wrong one day when he turns up in one for an important meeting. It looks as if it’s a lightweight polyester blend and it probably cost less than my cufflinks, though he earns considerably more than I do. Ironically it may well be machine washable, though he will never find out.

His chair smells; it never takes too long for people to notice. When he’s in the office, the person at the next desk starts to complain within fifteen minutes.

When he talks about his wife he never says her name, it’s always “the wife” and when he talks about his child it’s always “the baby”. You could be forgiven for thinking that he has forgotten his child’s name. It all sounds functional and efficient, as if their courtship was a merger or an acquisition. There isn’t even the slightest hint that there might be a life for him outside this network of meeting rooms and corridors, organisational charts and project plans.

We all assumed he was happy but then at one Christmas party he told one of us that he wasn’t, in a way that makes the listener feel uncomfortable. It's a secret that should never have come out of the box, a box we didn't even know he had. Now we all know, and he doesn’t know that, and everything has an extra dimension which is hidden to him. It makes him make more sense to us, it makes everything more sad.

He seems boyish, he has an almost endless desire to please and that puppy-doggish quality is most obvious at lunch. He is a messy eater. There is always something caught in the corner of his rubbery bottom lip. I have a feeling he eats with his mouth open, though I try my best to look away.

He likes to hold court when we sit round the table. He will talk about something that was on television the night before, or something in the news, and he has some jokes prepared on the topic of the day. It feels mechanical, as if he’s learned it from a book on how to relate to people. You can hear the grinding of the gears, or you would if he stopped talking long enough.

Perhaps the most painful thing is when he regales us with his impersonations. He can impersonate former bosses, former colleagues, famous people. Every lunchtime he finds a way to bring them into the conversation and it doesn’t matter whether it's relevant to what we're talking about, because he’ll showcase his skills none the less. His public expects it, and he can’t disappoint them. And because we can’t disappoint him either, we all laugh - not because we love his impersonations, but because he thinks we do. We are also doing an impersonation, but he doesn’t realise that.

It must be terrible to be Hugh. He has no idea that none of us like him.

Stopping writing

2011-06-02T18:45:00.004+01:00

I stopped being a writer during my holiday in Greece. It’s harder to do than you might think.

I used to think that being a writer was all about writing, simple as that: I write, therefore I am a writer. Provided, of course, that you’ve also fought and won the battle with yourself which makes you comfortable with describing yourself as a writer, but let’s not talk about that now. No, it’s all about putting in the hours physically writing - the “sit at a typewriter and bleed” school of thought popular with so many who are bleeding useless. It’s no surprise, I suppose, that I thought that way too, back before I started writing myself.

What I didn’t learn until much later on is that writing is just as much about what you do when you aren’t scratching at a notepad or scratching your head in front of a blank screen, if not more so. It’s also about how you look at the world, what you notice and how you try and connect it up to something, anything, everything else. It’s about having a sticky mind; the kind that images and ideas snag on to and can’t be shaken from.

If you start to look at the world like that, and think that way, the world is a very different place. It can be exhausting, hyperactive. Painful too, sometimes: every encounter, every conversation, every passing stranger gets appraised against the constant background noise of questions. What do I think of that? What do I really think? Can I use this? How will I describe it? When your attempts to live in the present are hijacked by thoughts of how you might package up events in the future, it’s a hard carousel to step off. So, for a week in Greece, I tried to give it up. I put down my pen, and I picked up my camera instead. I read words by other people, rather than turning over in my mind how I was going to choose my own. I lay on a sun lounger, only slightly uncomfortable on several levels, wrestling with the sort of thick, crowd-pleasing paperback I would never have considered at home. If you saw me in passing, you might have been fooled into thinking that I fitted in.

It was a partial success. What it means is that my memories of Parga - a beautiful, quiet, well-mannered harbour town - are a jumble of disjointed images, photographs rather than paragraphs. Lemons on the tree by the dusty roadside, seemingly the size of footballs. A field of long grass filled with abandoned pedaloes, once bright primary colours now faded and forlorn, haunted by the fun people stopped having in them. The fractal coil of grilled octopus on a plate, the slightly blackened outside giving way to the firm white core. The crackling dance of fireflies, seen through a wire fence on a dark walk home.

There are dozens more. The rain - on the solitary afternoon when it rained - pricking the glassy surface of the sea like goose pimples, as we all cowered under umbrellas which were meant for a different, happier purpose. The obscenely fat woman on an adjacent lounger, her lower back shaped like a fougasse, lifting a fold and picking something unmentionable out of it. The cocktail swizzle sticks at the Blue Bar - a naked nymph for me, a Greek god for Kelly, in brutally vivid colours. But when I think of all these things, there seems to be nothing to connect them and join up all the dots. The writer in me, the me that was missing, would have been able to do it, but I left him at home.

I say it was a partial success because one image snagged on my mind and I couldn’t shake it off, that of the woman on the steps.

We would see her as we climbed up the perilous road that took you from the glittering lights of the harbour to the castle that was the best place to view it from. There was a chair outside every house on that road, and each would be occupied come nightfall by a local taking in the evening air and watching the parade of out of breath tourists heading for the summit. I never worked out whether they liked or resented us. As you went past you could see, through open front doors, real life going on in the living rooms beyond; a family eating round a table, a man in a vest hunched over a bowl of something, bathed in the light of a television transmitting something incomprehensible. And halfway up the hill was the old woman in black.

She was there every night, and although it’s hard to describe her properly I suppose the right word might be grotesque. She looked hunched, for instance, though I never saw her standing up. She was always alone, and her door was closed so I had no idea whether there was any company for her beyond it or whether her days of company were far behind her. Maybe it was the latter, because in all the nights we walked past her I never saw her with a friend or caught her speaking to the others outside. I couldn’t have even guessed at her age, but there were plenty of lines on her face and hundreds of memories traced there. But what really made her hard to look at was the rug of thick grey hairs on her chin. I suppose I would call it a beard, though I would stop short of calling her bearded. For some reason, that seemed to be an important distinction.

The other thing was her eyes. They were cold, clear and mournful, and she peered at you as you went past in a way that wasn’t pleasant. I had a feeling that if I looked in those eyes for long enough I might have understood all her sadness and all her losses, and I didn’t want that. But when you climb up a steep set of steps and go past a woman with a beard and the saddest eyes you have seen, it’s difficult to know where to look instead.

On the first night, Kelly and I both seized the nettle, saying kalispera to her. She said it back, but I couldn’t decipher her expression; it could have been amusement, bemusement or the complete absence of understanding. There was something about her that made me feel uncomfortable, and I hoped that she wouldn’t be there the following night - but she was, of course, and we had to walk in front of her unnerving gaze again. It was impossible even to tell whether she recognised us, but there was a silent nod on the evenings when either of us greeted her.

Greece seems to specialise in mournful widows, because we saw a lot of them during our week in Parga - big, solid, black-clad woman, usually alone but sometimes in pairs, always looking as if they were waiting for their lives to end. Being just the right side of middle age, walking side by side with a woman who makes me feel like my life has only just started, they were a side of the coin I didn’t want to see. The woman on the steps seemed to be the embodiment of that; I hated seeing her, but I was ashamed of my reaction, too. On our final night I was relieved, as we went down the steps to the waterfront, full from dinner, to see that her chair was empty.

Out on the harbour, the night was still warm. Every restaurant was showing the football, tourists and locals angling their seats round the tables so they had a good view of a wide screen, united by the sport which succeeded where Esperanto had failed. There were cushions on the harbour wall and the teenagers sat there drinking and smoking and chatting in a buzz of syllables I couldn’t understand. The girls - all huge hair, makeup and cigarettes - were dressed like hookers, with their arms round what I suppose were their latest boyfriends. Their eyes didn’t hold even the slightest flicker of doubt or unhappiness.

As we walked past them, I thought about how these things really work. They seemed so impossibly young, and I wondered whether one day they would turn into widows on steps somewhere, or whether that generation had escaped that cycle and would turn into something different. At that age, nobody would have been able to explain half of this stuff to me, because I was so convinced that I already understood everything. I thought about how the thirty-seven year old me might seem to the me of twenty-one years ago, and I found I had more in common with the woman on the steps than I wanted to admit. So I thought for a second about what I had turned into, and what I might turn into one day, and then I stopped myself and it was time to go. But in the back of my mind, if I'm honest, I was also thinking about writing this.

Holiday snaps: Carcassonne 2009

2011-05-27T12:00:00.002+01:00

To take beautiful photos of your partner on holiday, ideally, you need two things. First, the sun needs to be shining and secondly, they need to smile. By the time the sun came out in Carcassonne, the smiles had left for good but because the sun had been so thin on the ground I took the photo anyway.

It was on our last full day in the city, by which time we were just wondering when we could go home. It had started out so promising; my mother, my stepfather, Kelly and I staying in the hotel at the airport the night before our flight, excited and happy about our trip away together. Even now I don’t completely understand how it all went so badly wrong in four short days.

The rain didn’t help. It started the day we arrived and it pretty much didn’t stop. At first it was funny, as we sheltered in cafes and waited for it to blow over, but it never did. It was the shape of things to come; a lot of what came out of that trip didn’t blow over. Of course, it wasn’t so bad for my mother and stepfather because they had come prepared - head to toe in waterproofs, they were ready for everything. With their bulky backpacks they were like nylon and neoprene snails, and I can still hear the smug, reproachful whiff, whiff, whiff of their trousers even now.

We walked along the battlements of the old city, lashed with rain, dodging through puddles, waiting for the moments when it would subside enough for our cameras safely to come out, and we pretended we were having fun in spite of it. I don’t know if they were convinced; I know we weren’t. My umbrella was nearly turned inside out, along with everything else.

On something like the second day, my stepfather had had enough and decided he wanted to take a flight home. We on the other hand, desperate to rescue the situation, decided we could take a train to Toulouse. I had no idea what Toulouse was like but at least we would be soaked somewhere new and besides, it might have shops. My stepfather decided he would sooner stay behind, so Kelly and I walked to the station, checked the trains and tried to decipher the timetables - only to discover that it would cost a small fortune to get there on a tariff we didn’t understand.

So we were thwarted and I learned another new thing; it’s hard to spend a day with people when you’ve recently declared that you’d rather be in a different city to them, especially when they’ve recently declared that they’d rather be in a different country.

There’s not a lot to do in Carcassonne when it rains. With hindsight, we should have just retired to the hotel room with a novel and written it off, but with hindsight we shouldn’t have gone at all. Instead, we carried on spending time together, like picking at a scab. We sometimes went our separate ways in the daytime but we always made sure we met up for dinner, an occasion designed to showcase our glaring incompatibilities. Them: into simple, hearty food, moderate eaters, teetotallers. The standard fare of the Languedoc - meat and lentils and beans - was right up their street. Us: fond of fine dining, big portions, a bottle of red with every meal. “Didn’t you do well finishing all of that?” my mother would say at the end of courses. You fat sods, the subtitles would flash at the bottom of the screen.

On our last night Kelly and I deliberately chose the finest restaurant in town. We enjoyed a five course seasonal menu in a tasteful, sparsely populated dining room with the same awful record by Seal on repeat throughout. Each course was delicate, pretty and miniature. If I remember rightly my mother and stepfather passed on the cheese course - it was all just too much - so we ate theirs with no shame at all. Things had got so bad that a part of our pleasure was their discomfort: food as revenge.

At first I thought the deep red room was formal and slightly sterile, but then came the horrible moment when I realised it was us.

Not that things hadn’t started to get niggly long before then. My stepfather, a keen photographer, took a fraction of the pictures we did but every one was stunning. Carefully set up, beautifully framed, tripod in place, he paid painstaking attention to everything. On the walk up to the south gate of the city, up the long hill towards the battlements, he would stop to get his equipment out and Kelly would dash in front, snap away on her point and shoot and say “It’s all right, we can move on now, I’ve taken the perfect photo of that.” It was childish and mean; funny, too, but a week before the prospect of being that spiteful would have been unthinkable.

At the very end - of the holiday and of something else - we touched down in Stansted Airport, early in the morning, and went to Pret for breakfast, just as we had at the start of the holiday, because it seemed like the right thing to do. But everything was spent. We just sat there waiting for it to be over so we could be sealed in the bubble of our own cars and start talking about what an awful time we’d had.

So the sun didn’t come out very often, and Kelly smiled less often still, but in any case there was a moment when the rain stopped and the clouds cleared and you got a momentary vision of what should have been: what the city should have looked like in summer, the ancient stone walls glowing and shining rather than damp and grim. You could imagine the hordes of satisfied tourists sitting in the square and drinking rosé, and an accordion player filling the air with notes. You could see why people came here, and why we came here. So I took the photo while I could, because it was the best it was going to get. But it was far, far too late to imagine how that holiday should have been.

Holiday snaps: Prague 2008

2011-05-24T19:00:00.002+01:00

We end up in the pool hall. We always end up in the pool hall when we come to Prague, those are the rules. Dave, who is a creature of habit, has been coming to Prague for years, and coming to the pool hall for years, and so when you visit Prague with Dave you go to the pool hall. It’s just how it works.

It’s not as if the pool hall is the only attraction by any means; there is an awful lot to like about Prague. The old town is still the stuff of films and postcards despite all the best efforts of marauding British revellers to mar its beauty. Narrow twisting lanes lined with jewellers, bars and intriguing looking restaurants are everywhere, the sort of maze that could completely take the stigma out of the concept of getting lost. The Charles Bridge, despite all the caricaturists and hawkers selling tat, is still a gorgeous, if crazy, thoroughfare. And of course the castle and all the steep, stunning streets which run down through Mala Strana towards the river have the sort of appeal that even cliché cannot detract from. The streets are thronged with tourists all taking the same photograph, but who could honestly blame them?

Walking across the bridge earlier that day, Dave and I had got stuck behind a phalanx of elderly people in some form of uniform, bright blue clothes like overalls with orange sashes round their necks. All of them were wheeling trolleys of some kind, but we thought nothing of it. Anyway, it meant I got a chance to pay attention to the jazz orchestra camped out on the bridge, on the side nearest to the old town. They played tirelessly, a mixture of standards and songs which, while unfamiliar, had tunes so right that I had to stop to realise that they were new to me. Dave ended up having to drag me away, because I could have watched and listened for hours. The trumpet player was in a wheelchair but had a pair of lungs that put mine to shame, even years after I stopped inflicting all those cigarettes on them.

We strolled up Nerudova, itself one of the prettiest streets, before taking a detour to look at the outside of the Church Of Our Lady Victorious. It’s a stone’s throw from the Ed Hardy shop, which is the sort of contradiction Prague excels at.

“What’s in there?” I said.

“A statue of the Infant Jesus Of Prague. It’s downright disturbing.”

“Shall we go in?”

“No, it’s not worth the money. Besides, you can see quite enough of the Infant Jesus in the shops round here.” said Dave. He quite enjoys playing the tour guide, and I am happy to indulge him. So instead we crossed the road and looked through the windows of a gift shop, filled with porcelain statues of the holy toddler in every gaudy colour combination known to man.

“Jesus.” I said. Dave smirked, and I could tell he was fighting the urge to counter with one of a dozen of obvious comebacks. I took some photos of the figurines, experimenting with my new lens because this holiday was its first proper outing. I quite enjoy playing the photographer and Dave is happy to indulge me.

“Shall we head for the pool hall?”

I smiled. You can’t fight progress, which in Dave’s case means progressing in the direction of the pool hall.

Heading back to the bridge, we noticed quite a congregation in a little square to our right, so we made a detour to investigate. Our blue-uniformed friends from earlier on were there, in a big group with many others, packing away instruments into cases and folding up sheet music. A crowd, which had assembled to watch them, was starting to dissipate, like the smoke at the end of a firework display. But there was time for one last hurrah - they all lined up for their official photographer to take a picture of them all, a motley crew of blue smocks, waistcoasts and naval uniforms. One was holding up a placard which explained everything: SHANTYFEST PRAGUE, it said. I was simultaneously thrilled that such a thing could even exist, and devastated that I had missed the show. The man put down his placard just as I trained my lens on them, and sheepishly he picked it back up and held it aloft just for me, the unofficial photographer.

“Shantyfest sounds like the best thing ever. We should see if they have a website and go next year.” I said as we escaped over the Charles Bridge in search of the real world we had temporarily become disconnected from.

“Why was one of them carrying a mop?”

“I have absolutely no idea.”

The pool hall is just off Wenceslas Square, and is a well-kept secret. It’s at the bottom of a dead end street with nothing else of note on it and it’s hard to imagine anyone finding it by accident. You open the door, head down the steps and take your slip from the unsmiling man behind the desk before going to your table. If you lose the slip, terrible things happen to you when you try to pay at the end. I have no idea what they are, but the threat of them ensures that I will never find out. If George Orwell had faced the man behind the counter at the pool hall, he would have scrapped Room 101 entirely.

Inside, the pool hall is just incredible. It looks like it used to be an old ballroom; massive high ceilings which are crumbling and threadbare, with ornate chandeliers hanging from them. The crowd, when there is one, seems to be mainly locals, often teenagers. There is an incongruous bowling alley down one side, which I’ve never seen anyone use, and apart from that it’s just rectangle after rectangle of green baize. We walk over to our appointed table, one of the only ones lit from above, and start to set up. Two huge foaming pints of pilsner are collected from the bar and plonked on the nearest side table and I know we’re going to be here for a while. Dave’s friend Gannon, who teaches English here and is ostensibly the reason for our visit, will be with us any minute and then we will spend a comfortable few hours doing what men do; lots of competing, a bit of posturing, a fair amount of drinking and general complaining about our poor luck or the unmerited success of others. Our chattering mixes in with the clacking of fluke shots, in-offs and half-chances.

I am terrible at pool but I play because it’s fun, and because I am in Prague with Dave and those are the rules. And besides, the feeling of fitting in far outweighs the feeling of being useless. In any case, if Dave wasn’t going to win at pool he wouldn’t play, because that’s the sort of person he is. I know that because I am that kind of person too, at least most of the time. I start out well, but as the afternoon wears on Dave finds his rhythm and I lose mine, and Dave flourishes after a few pints and I don’t, but best of all is that by about half-four I find I really don’t care whether I win or not. Instead I make the most of my rare flashes of competence, and laugh at Dave when Gannon trounces him, and head to the bar and bring back fresh full glasses. It’s a summer afternoon, and I know that Prague has all sorts of things to offer, but I wouldn’t be anywhere else.

I leave them bickering about who is having the worse run of form, like old women complaining about their ailments, take my Czech crowns and head to the end of the room, to the jukebox. It seems to have pretty much every song ever released, which means it takes the best part of a century to spend the money that I’ve put in it. I toy with all sorts of novelty hits, or songs I know that Dave and Gannon would like, and then my eye chances upon something I really want to hear. I queue it up first, rush through the rest, and walk away. And then comes that moment I won’t forget; as if by magic, with the afternoon sun shining through every window on the far side of the hall filtered out by the tattered gauzy curtains, God Only Knows by the Beach Boys rolls out across the room, rich and warm and glorious as I return, perfectly backlit, to my friends at the table.

And I’m happy. I’m as happy as I could possibly imagine.

Show and tell

2011-05-21T13:00:00.002+01:00

I am demob happy on my final day at work. Nobody is in, my boss is working from home and the list of things I have to do, while not getting any shorter, is starting to look a lot less important. Besides, it’s a red letter day because I am meeting my dad for lunch, something which never happens. He is between spells working out in the States and has realised - not a moment too soon - that he doesn’t live all that far from my office.

I get the call from him, rush down the stairs, scuttle out of reception and jump into his car. I feel a bit like I’m bunking off, though I successfully fight the urge to ask him to take me to the zoo. Lunch in a proper restaurant on a school day seems strangely decadent and we sit outside, even though it’s not strictly warm enough to do so, because we can. He orders a glass of red and I have a glass of rose, to get in practice for the holiday my brain is half on already.

“I brought my new toy to show you!” I tell him. This is true, I packed it in my bag specially, because he’s one of the few people I know who would appreciate it.

“Excellent, I thought I told you to. Let’s have a look at it.”

He coos over my new camera, raises it to his eye and enthuses. He’s always been a camera fan; I get that from him I think.

“You can see my latest toy too.” he says, reaching into his pocket and retrieving a fountain pen. My dad must have over fifty of these by now - fat ones, thin ones, ones with italic nibs, ones with oblique nibs, ones you fill with a pump, ones you fill by squeezing, solar powered ones, you name it. He’s never been one for doing anything by halves. I take the lid off, inspect the nib, try to look knowledgeable.

“How do you fill it up?”

My dad is beside himself with excitement at this stage.

“Twist the bottom of it!”

I do, and the nib slowly rises up out of the body of the pen, like an organ coming through the floor in an old-time music hall. The waiter, who introduced himself by name (“Hi, I’m Mark and I’m going to be your waiter today”) when we sat down and seemed a bit peeved that we were talking too much to show interest in the specials on his blackboard, must wonder what to make of us - two grown men getting excited about our new gizmos.

We talk about all sorts of things. My dad is impossible on the phone, he only rings you if he has information to convey and once it’s done you can’t keep him on the line however many questions you ask or tricks you try. But in person he couldn’t be more different; he’ll hold forth about anything. So we discuss his work, my work, my holiday, family and general gossip. This contract is the last one before he retires, and I can’t imagine what will happen then. My dad has worked hard all my life, somehow the image of him pottering isn’t one I can conjure up.

“What do you think you’ll do?”

“I don’t know. It was much easier a few years back when I had more stuff going on.”

“What, like the poetry?”

“Yes, I guess so.”

It’s a shame my dad stopped writing his magnificent poems. I don’t know whether he dried up, or gave up, or just got fed up. And the irony isn’t lost on me, that he owns all these beautiful pens but the words that come out of them are probably prosaic stuff - shopping lists, or notes of work meetings, signatures on cheques and letters. I can’t help but feel that they deserve better. It’s odd that he moved away from the act of creation and into the mechanics of the equipment. I suppose he’s never really stopped being an engineer.

“Do you think you’ll ever pick it up again?”

“I don’t know, I might do. I do try from time to time, but it’s not easy.”

“I know what you mean. I’ve been finding it difficult too.”

Instead my dad tells me that he can see himself fixing fountain pens when he retires, repairing and restoring them. I get an image of him squinting at a desk, looking at nibs and fillers by the light of an anglepoise lamp, and suddenly I can imagine my dad pottering after all. It is a very comforting thought.

“I suppose it’s the one time that the age gap between you and Tricia might be a problem, in that she’ll still be working.”

My dad makes a wry face, as if to say don’t be so stupid, kid.

“I don’t know, somebody’s got to keep making some money while I’m at home.”

I don’t think he means it.

The time passes much too fast, but there’s still enough of it for dessert. We make a pact that each of us will have dessert provided the other one does, and I have a sneaking feeling he’s using my gluttony as an excuse to indulge. I don’t mind, I’m happy to help him out. At the end he drives me back to the office, even though I don’t really want him to.

“I need to be back for this two o’clock call. If I’m not running it, it will just descend into anarchy.”

I never feel less like a convincing grown-up than when I’m talking to my dad about work. I wonder if he can tell.

There’s no big moral to this story, no magical denouement. We say goodbye in the car and I clamber across and give him a big hug. It may be months before I see him again. But later that afternoon I find myself thinking about how much things change. My dad was fearsome when I was a kid, then he was distant when I was a teenager, and now I’m an adult he’s something else, something I might struggle to describe. But when we sat in the sun, having lunch for the first time in as long as I can remember, taking a childish delight in one another’s gadgets, it was almost like we were eight year old friends.

The twenty-four hour robot

2011-05-17T22:45:00.003+01:00

I don’t do fancy dress, not on any account. The closest I ever came to embracing the idea was a fancy dress party at a stag and hen weekend a couple of years ago. Kelly went as a pirate – she had the headscarf, the boots, the frilly shirt and a plastic flintlock she bought from the pound shop. When you pulled the trigger, it emitted a synthetic “bang” (I know that, because I pulled the trigger a lot). She looked magnificent; I on the other hand wore a check shirt with a sheriff’s badge – also from the pound shop – pinned to the breast pocket. Nish, the bride-to-be, tapped Kelly on the shoulder at one stage. “Thanks for persuading him to make some effort.” she said (some effort, not so much effort), because she knew how much of a gesture it was. A one pound badge and my only check shirt, those were all the concessions I was willing to make. I don’t do fancy dress, because there is nothing fancy about me.

All of that makes my twenty-four spell as a crap robot particularly ironic.

Kelly and I arrive at the hospital and the nurse explains to me what they are going to do this morning. There’s a bit of me that always wishes they would skip this bit and just get on with it, but that never happens. She tells me she is going to pass what she describes as a “small tube” into my nostril and down the back of my throat. It will descend to different depths and they will measure the pressure on my oesophagus to work out whether the acid that is the bane of my life is rising up because the valve isn’t tight enough. A monitor – blocky green writing on a black screen – will tell them everything they need to know about my innards.

I wish I had a screen which could tell me what was going on inside me, because I never really understand that.

“Do you feel okay about it?” the nurse says.

She is friendly and efficient; I imagine she used to be quite a looker. That said, looking at her I’m also struck by how cheap and unerotic nurses’ uniforms always look. Another to add to the long and regrettable list of things that are better in theory than they are in practice, like family holidays, fast food after ten o’clock at night, and getting off with your friends. I hope that having a tube down your throat doesn’t fall into that category too, because it sounds horrendous even in theory.

“I can’t honestly say it’s going to be a highlight of my day.”

Kelly, perched on the chair at the end of the bed, gives me a small supportive smile. The nurse’s assistant – surly, swarthy and hairy – does not talk or react. The radio is on in the corner, blaring out vacuous chat and forgettable tunes; the nurse put it on, telling me that it might take my mind off things.

I wish I had a mind like that.

She reaches over to a nearby trolley and retrieves the ‘small tube’. I nearly pass out; it looks like a garden hose from where I’m sitting. The assistant stands to my left and holds a cup of water up to my face until my lips manage to catch the straw poking out at an awkward angle. I am instructed to take a few sips and then, once I am suitably lubricated, the nurse starts to feed the tube down, threading my throat like the eye of a needle. The next ten minutes are an unpleasant blur. The assistant keeps telling me to take a sip and then I have the awful creeping feeling of the tube descending a mere matter of millimetres. The nurse calls out a number: “forty”, “forty-one” referring, I assume, to depth measurements. Either that or they are all playing a game of bingo and I’m the only one not in on the joke. Then they take a reading, confer, tell me to take another sip and the process repeats itself.

My right eye, which started watering when I first saw the tube, can no longer open and my left eye keeps looking at Kelly. She gives me a series of reassuring half-smiles. At one point, the especially difficult stage when my gag reflex is being most tested, her hand reaches out and grasps the tip of the boot on my left foot, squeezing, desperately trying to feel my toes. She can’t make contact with any part of me, but I am touched none the less. Take it from me though, I am doing a magnificent job; I am a miserable coward in anticipation, but like anybody else I am a brave soldier there in the moment.

They reach the halfway stage, just before the tube begins its ascent. At this point I am urged to take bigger mouthfuls and swallow hard so they can take different measurements. Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now comes on the radio.

“I just want you to know that this has ruined this song for me forever.” I tell the nurse, between sips and readings. Nobody cracks a smile except Kelly, visible through the teary blur of my left eye. Finally, it is complete and everyone is telling me how well I’ve done, which is something I already know.

That’s only half of what I’ve turned up for today, because the second half involves them passing a narrower tube down my throat and leaving it there for twenty four hours to measure just how bad the acid gets. This tube isn’t quite so intimidating, although I’m still not looking forward to having it inside me for a whole day. I opt for the same nostril, and the process begins again but this time it takes nowhere near as long and involves nowhere near so many sips of water. Once it is in place, the nurse runs the wire coming out of my nose along my cheek and tucks it behind my ear before passing it down my chest, under my t-shirt. The whole thing is kept in place by huge slashes of white tape on my face and neck. The other end of the wire is attached to a plastic box which I wear on a belt around my waist. It looks as if it ought to bleep constantly, and I’m disappointed to discover that it doesn’t. The overall effect on my appearance is more than a little ghoulish.

The nurse explains to me that there are three buttons I need to know about on the device. I am to press the first one every time I start eating and every time I stop eating, and I have to record the start and end times, along with everything I eat, in the photocopied handout she gives me marked “Food diary”. The second one, the big button in the middle with the jagged lightning bolt symbol, is to be pressed whenever I experience any symptoms, and again these have to be recorded on the handout. Finally, a crude depiction of a horizontal figure is underneath the third button, which I have to press when I go to sleep and when I wake up. Simple, really. The other button has an exclamation mark next to it and is pressed when you require attention, but since I will be walking round with a wire coming out of my nose and taped to the side of my face, I have a feeling I won’t be needing that one much.

The nurse also gives me some guidelines. To make sure we get representative results, I am not to eat or drink anything which will produce too much acid. I am advised to avoid alcohol, although I can have a solitary drink with dinner if I really want (the tone of voice this permission is delivered in is strangely reminiscent of my mother). Fruit juice and squash are also discouraged, and if I do insist on drinking something like this I should do so quickly so that it doesn’t distort the results over a long period of time. But apart from that, I should carry on doing whatever I would normally do if I didn‘t have a wire coming out of my face and attached to a non-bleeping box tied to my waist on a cheap nylon belt. She does however advise me against driving. If she knew me at all, she’d realise that this particular piece of advice is unnecessary, but then if she knew me that well she would probably also give me a list of proscribed reading material.

In the spirit of trying to live as normally as possible, Kelly and I decide to go into town for lunch.

“I’m making a unilateral decision that any woman looking at me today is just using this wire as an excuse to check me out.” I say to Kelly as we head for the centre.

She grins indulgently, I think she’s just relieved that I’m being so constructive for a change.

My food diary records that I have a cheese sandwich while sitting outside Picnic, my favourite café. The process of eating the sandwich takes approximately eight minutes. What my food diary doesn’t record is that eating food when you have a tiny wire dangling down your throat is not an enjoyable experience. However much you chew, every mouthful you swallow jerks the wire, as if it has snagged an energetic fish. First you bite, then it bites. It’s not a sensation I would ever want to get used to, I tell myself at the start of lunch.

By the end of lunch I find myself wishing I could get used to it.

Towards the end of my lunch, my stepfather wanders past us with a work colleague. We haven’t spoken in well over a year and it would be bad enough to see him even if I didn’t look so freakish. So Kelly looks down and I look off to my right, hiding the side of my face with the wires, a ridiculous tableau of awkwardness until we can see his slim frame and the back of his bony, close-cropped head in the distance. I finish my coffee and write Coffee, 13:45 in my food diary. I am gratified to hear that it does make a beeping noise when you press the button on the device.

The rest of the afternoon I try to get on with my work as if everything was normal, which of course it isn’t. Keeping a food diary is an intriguing experience, something I’ve never tried before which tells me things about myself which I'd probably rather not know. For instance, on average I take twenty-five minutes to finish a hot drink, the majority of which time is spent waiting for it to cool down between the first and the second sips. Seeing that figure there in black and white on a page, it seems silly even to me. What will the nurses think?

It also acts as a powerful moderating force. When I write Cornetto, 15:45 to 15:51 it seems bad enough, but only the fact that I am keeping a diary and somebody will read it further down the line stops me running to the freezer and demolishing another one. I think of all the things I’m not writing in the food diary: I fought the urge to have a second Cornetto, or I just put “risotto” in the diary, but actually it had dressed crab and a dollop of mascarpone and it was bloody gorgeous. And then all the stuff I could write in there that has nothing to do with food at all: I’m scared this won’t work or I really don’t want to have an operation.

Obviously I play up my discomfort, because if you can’t feel sorry for yourself when you have a tube down your throat I don’t know when you can. At one point, I catch Kelly looking at me with what I like to think is fondness.

“What is it? Am I cute?”

“Well, sort of. You’re… kind of pathetic.”

My face falls. If it fell any further it might have tugged the wire out.

“No! In a good way!”

I decide not to make her explain, as she's clearly suffered enough, so instead I plan an assault on my stash of chocolate. It takes place, according to my food diary, at approximately 21:40 and lasts for ten minutes. What I don’t write in the diary is what I had, or that it was probably more chocolate than a person should consume that close to bedtime. I decide they don't need to know that.

Here’s another thing I don’t write in the diary: I’m dreading trying to get off to sleep. Actually, it’s not so bad once I unclip the belt and rest the box on the bedside table next to me, though it feels strange to lie on my back and not be able to turn round and curl myself around the figure next to me. The real challenge is getting undressed in the first place, juggling boxes and belts and wires and clothes. I probably make it much more difficult than it should be, but part of the slow awkwardness is hating that feeling of infirmity. The diary I didn’t write that day is far longer, and a far sadder read, than the diary I did. All the nurse will know from the diary I kept is that I take a long time to drink hot drinks and I eat lots of soft food. She might also get at least an inkling of how middle class I am; that word, risotto, screams bourgeois to me.

I wake up once in the night to press the symptom button. I scribble in the food diary by my bedside, squinting without glasses, hoping the light doesn’t wake Kelly up.

The next day I have breakfast in a last ditch attempt to fool the nurses into thinking I’m a better person than I really am. They told me to head back to the hospital and they would remove the device for me to save me yanking it out myself, but oddly by this point I’m quite comfortable with it and happily institutionalised into filling out the time I finished my Crunchy Nut Cornflakes or tackled a cup of tea. Bang on the twenty-four hour mark there is another bleep and the display says Recording complete, minutes before an unpleasant bout of acid. I have been off my medication for a week so they can observe me under “normal” circumstances, and of course my insides have been lying in wait for the recording to finish so they can go back to making my life uncomfortable. It’s much the same as the incredible effect a doctor’s waiting room has; sit in one for twenty minutes before your appointment, and your symptoms go away. If you’re there over half an hour, you can forget why you turned up in the first place.

I stroll to the hospital feeling grubby; you aren’t allowed to get the device wet, so I haven’t been able to shower. I take great pride in taking the busiest roads, hoping to scare some small children, but my luck isn’t in. With my outsized headphones on too, I look like a bad parody of a Cyberman.

My twenty-four hour spell with the wire inside me ends not with a bang or a whimper. The nurse sits me down, tells me to take a deep breath and… nothing. I didn’t even feel her pull, didn’t feel anything but the wire is in her hand and the tape has been pulled away from my face with only a slight feeling of tackiness to remind me it was there at all. She connects the box up to the black and green screen and we sit there looking at charts of my insides. There are lots of jagged lines, a lot of which correspond with moments when I pressed the button with the lightning bolt on it. I feel like it ought to have a profundity that is somehow missing, but I'm not the only one. She doesn’t know what it all means either, or what will happen next, but tells me the consultant will be in touch.

Leaving the hospital, I perversely feel like I will miss the attention. One thing I’ve learned over the last twenty-four hours is that it’s interesting watching people try to avoid staring at you when you are so worthy of being stared at. They tend to adopt one of two approaches; either they take a very quick but intense peek and then act as if they cannot see you or, if they’re braver, they properly stare but adopt a facial expression which suggests they mean nothing by it. But what it really makes me think about is how I must have looked in the past few weeks every time I’ve walked past the young girl in town with the bizarre swelling that seems to distort the whole of her jawline, as if she’s being seen through a funfair mirror. I assume it’s something like cancer, and I never know whether to avert my gaze or act naturally. When you see someone like that, it’s hard to decide what “naturally” even means. Or the old woman who’s always there when I stroll down Smelly Alley, sitting outside the internet café, wheezing away on a cigarette. The huge growth on her eyelid is so big she can barely open that eye at all.

I want to stop them both, next time, and say I’m so sorry. I don’t mean to stare. I know how it feels, but simultaneously I know that’s not really true, and I know I never will. So instead I make my way home unencumbered, enjoying the sunshine, dying for a shower, with only the phantom trace of the tube pressing against the back of my throat.

Kissing in pubs

2011-05-06T19:12:00.000+01:00

“I think he’s about to kiss her, look. He’s leaning in.”

There was a pause while we both stared across the room, watching intently for developments.

“Yes, they’re definitely kissing. Why has he got his hand behind his head, what’s that about?”

”Search me, I have no idea.”

There had been time for one more drink after dinner so I’d taken my friend Sarah to Sahara. It had seemed alliteratively like the right thing to do and besides, she was more of a wine bar person than a pub fan. The seats were muted beige leather and the music was the kind of naff jazz I’d thought only existed in clichéd dinner parties. It was quiet enough that you couldn’t make out the melody or anything of interest, but loud enough that you had to struggle to talk over it. I think sound systems in bars are fitted with a special button which sets the volume at exactly that level. Everybody seemed to be in their thirties, which made me more comfortable. Their early thirties mind you, which wasn’t quite so comfortable, but I was trying not to think about that.

The clientele was a funny mixture – a loud table of hipsters had congregated in the middle of the room, laughing at their own jokes and making us all feel less interesting by association. By contrast, dotted around the edge were couples on dates. First or second dates, most likely, because there was still the sheen of awkwardness about them. You could sense people still picking their words carefully, deciding what they could and couldn’t say, sending out and suppressing signals in equal measure. I suppose in their way, everybody in the place was trying hard except Sarah and me.

Three younger men came in wearing lumberjack shirts, all variations on a theme. The fineness of the pattern varied, so did the colours, but fundamentally they were all pretty much the same. So was everything else about them; slightly more stubble on this one, slightly more product on that one, slightly more weight on the other but pressed from the same unremarkable mould. I’m never sure whether the fact that none of us are really that different from one another is depressing or reassuring, which probably means that it’s both.

“I used to wear shirts like that at university.” said Sarah. I found that rather hard to imagine. She was neat, slightly built, almost birdlike, a pint-sized personification of Middle England; the conversation in the restaurant had covered garden centres, pushchairs, the contents of her iPod (which were of course an anathema to me - “I like Eliza Doolittle!“ she said. “She’s very perky.“) She wanted to think she looked like Helen Baxendale but in fact more closely resembled a young Glenn Close, which probably tells you more about Sarah than she would ideally like you to know.

“You don’t even want to know what sort of things I wore at university.” I said. She probably did, but I didn’t want to tell her; even the thought of those light grey jeans still made me wince.

“And I had this jumpsuit – well, it wasn’t a jumpsuit, more like a one-piece – from Laura Ashley, with flowers on it. My mother bought it for me, and I don’t even think it was a good idea at the time. There are some photos somewhere, I should try and track them down.”

I couldn’t really process the idea of an eighteen year old girl in a big floral baby-gro, so I didn’t know what to say. I pondered it briefly and decided to go for the suitably non-committal “Ah, the nineties.” I made a mental note to remember that non sequitur, I had a feeling it might come in handy in the future.

Anyway, we were paying special attention to the table nearest to us. He had a shaved head and was wearing a slim-fitted striped shirt, the sort that always looks crumpled whatever you do to it. She was considerably more dressy, showing off cleavage, pretty in the way that is almost entirely the result of considerable effort. On balance I thought she could have done better, but then again you could have said the same about the woman in the couple nearest to the door. Come to think of it, you could say that of most women. The man with the shaved head was holding a pint glass with a huge frothy head, like an ice cream. His companion had a bottle of wine in an ice bucket on the table in front of her. Either they had been there a long time, or they had only just arrived, in which case it was one of two things: a sign of her nervousness or a tribute to her ambition.

When the kiss eventually happened, I wondered whether it was the culmination of her ambition, or whether she just didn’t feel she could say no and had given in to her nervousness. There was no real way of telling, we were too far away and we had been spying rather than eavesdropping. The kiss seemed to go on for ages without developing into anything more, and all that time his hand stayed firmly behind his head rather than straying across the invisible line you always know is there. I didn’t know whether it was sweet or sad, but it certainly wasn’t erotic; watching people kiss in public never is.

“That reminds me of being at university. I had a boyfriend and all he ever wanted to do was snog in pubs. We’d go to a pub and he’d just want to sit there kissing all night.”

“And did you want that?”

“No. But I did it anyway.”

As if I hadn’t been feeling old enough already; somehow that exchange seemed to sum up an awful lot about the transition between the twenties and the thirties, that in your twenties you did all these reckless things and heartily didn’t give a toss, and then you hit your thirties and said things like “not here!” and “people are looking”. Or maybe there were just people who cared what people thought and people who didn‘t, because with a dash of hindsight I couldn’t remember ever necking recklessly in pubs whether I wanted to or not, and I probably did want to, back then. Besides, this couple were in their thirties and they weren’t letting it stop them. They weren’t letting anything stop them.

Over dinner, Sarah had been telling me about her fifteen year old stepdaughter.

“The worst thing is that I don’t think I’m old, but to her I must be ancient. I’m like a dinosaur.”

“Well, you probably are.” I said. I was mainly joking but not entirely; she had mentioned garden centres, after all.

“But I’m not old in my head. The thing is, I don’t feel old until I look at young people.”

“I know. The worst thing is that we refer to them as young people at all, that’s a sign right there.”

“It’s the hairstyle though! They all seem to have the same hairstyle, with their hair swept over from god knows where.”

I knew exactly what she was talking about, but I was loath to agree because I didn’t want to be the sort of person that refers to that sort of person as a young person. Because that’s where the slippery slope begins, but it evolves into you describing popular music with the wrong kind of alienated bafflement and culminates in an enthusiasm for compulsory national service which would previously have been unthinkable.

“Here’s something that shows how old I’m getting.” said Sarah, reaching into her handbag and pulling out a keyring. It was a small round disc emblazoned with a badly drawn white hand that looked like a breakdancing swan, and the words SELBY HANDS OF HOPE written along the bottom. If I’d stared at it for hours and had hundreds of guesses I would never have figured out what it was for.

“What is that?”

“You know when you go to the supermarket and you have to put a pound coin in the slot to unhook your trolley? That’s what this is for. It means I never have to fish out a pound coin ever again!”

I looked at her blankly. It was the sort of invention you expected to find in one of those catalogues full of inventions like this, the ones which proudly boast that what they sell is “not available in any shop!” as if that was somehow a good thing. It never was, of course; if these things had been any good shops would have been all over them. A more accurate slogan might have been “Even the pound shops won’t touch these with a barge pole”, though it would hardly do wonders for sales.

“Sorry, did you really buy this?”

“Yes! Don’t look at me like that, it’s perfectly normal. I’ve seen several old ladies with one. Though the worst thing is that it works at Tesco and Sainsburys but for some reason it doesn’t work at the Co-Op. It‘s just disgraceful!”

I couldn’t really think of anything to contribute at that point, so instead I took a photo of Sarah’s gadget and put it on the internet. That way, I knew that I’d be able to prove I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing. The waiter came to take our payment - a friendly, shaven-headed man with the thickest beard and the thinnest tie, prone to gesticulation but free of over-familiarity. He didn’t even call us “guys”, not once.

“I liked him.” I said as we left the restaurant.

“Really? I thought he was creepy. He was being nice because he had to be, not because he wanted to be.”

I had never met Sarah’s mother, and almost certainly never would, but I was starting to feel like I already had.

“Is this what your mum is like?”

“Oh no, not at all! She likes anyone who’s nice to her.”

The kissing couple soon lost their appeal and our wineglasses emptied, not to be refilled. We stopped drinking at eleven because we had meetings the next day and we’re grown-ups after all, so we left the bar and the couples and the hipsters behind and I walked her to her hotel. On the walk back to the flat, I passed the three men in check shirts again. Where they were on their way to was anybody's guess, a house party or a rave or a check shirt convention or something. I almost considered tailing them, in case they knew where all the fun was in this town and it was my only chance of finding out. And then I wondered how all those other evenings I had intersected with would end; whether the couple would work out and whether the hipsters would get old and complacent and find themselves sitting on the sidelines watching everyone else talking louder than them. And then I felt unworthy and ungrateful, because my evening on the sidelines had been fun, just a different kind. Would I have swapped places with them for all the skinny jeans in all the department stores in Reading?

It’s okay, because I don’t have kids. I thought to myself all the way home. I don’t have kids so I will stay young forever. I half believed it, too.

Hippocampus

2011-05-02T21:45:00.000+01:00

I’m hugely proud to be able to say that one of my pieces, Vaseline, has been published in the debut edition of Hippocampus Magazine, a new online publication devoted to creative nonfiction. You can check out my piece HERE - it might be familiar to long-time readers as a longer version appeared on the blog last year. If you like it, please leave a comment!

While you’re there, I think the rest of the first issue is well worth a look. The range of subjects, themes and styles in there is quite something and there are some brilliant pieces, including an excellent meditation on transience and permanence ("Everlasting Gobstoppers Aren’t Really Everlasting") and a lovely vignette depicting a dysfunctional father/daughter relationship ("Rig").

Hippocampus is accepting submissions monthly from now on, and I think a lot of you write excellent stuff which could quite possibly find a home there so please consider giving it a go. They also need people to spread the word about what they are doing - aside from the magazine they can be found on Facebook here and on Twitter here. I think they definitely deserve support as there are very few websites that accept creative nonfiction submissions, and fewer still that are dedicated to this kind of writing (I can‘t think of any others).

Personally I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the term "creative nonfiction"; it’s always struck me as an admission of defeat in the face of a general assumption that the only writing of literary merit is fiction. If I had five pounds for every time someone read my stuff and mentioned the N word ("do you have a novel?" "are you writing a novel?" "you should write a novel") I could self-publish from Bermuda and get on my private jet to plant copies in bookshops around the globe. All right, that’s not true, I’d have about fifty pounds, but the general principle’s still there. The suggestion is that the only way to give validity to the sort of writing I (and many good writers who blog) do is to package it all up as fiction and turn it into a novel; all a bit depressing and unimaginative, I reckon.

Of course, the flip side is to look on the bright side - not something which comes naturally to me - and to view the creative nonfiction genre as an attempt to carve out a niche for good non-fictional writing in light of that overwhelming bias towards fiction. So I’m going to try and see it that way instead. Anyway, I’ve never been too interested in writing about writing (it’s right up there with blogging about blogging, and that’s before we get on to the unique tedium of blogging about Twitter) so let’s leave it at that: I hope you enjoy Hippocampus, and I’m incredibly proud to be part of its maiden voyage.

Somebody else's novel

2011-04-26T18:50:00.006+01:00

I don't think I had seen anything quite like him.

I was walking home, along the street which runs parallel to the garish multistorey car park. The traffic went past me in blips, every passenger a different ethnicity, like a BBC mock-up of what it wants to believe society is really like. The couple in the brand new Mini looked nowhere near well off enough to afford a brand new Mini, but easily wayward enough to have chosen one in such an unsuitable shade of brown. And then, as I approached the traffic lights, I caught up with him.

He was a tall thin guy, surely no older than twenty-five, in long white cotton robes that came down to the ground. They practically shone in the sun so you almost had to look away. That intensity was matched by the glare coming off the fine white skullcap he was wearing, like a lace teacosy. A straggly beard stayed close to his jawline with seemingly no ambition to progress beyond it. On his feet were trainers - white again, the lurid white of trainers that have never touched a pavement. The whole ensemble fitted in perfectly with the pale complexion of his face, and I was struck because I would never have expected him to be white. If that wasn't odd enough, his right hand played idly with his Blackberry, a squat grey brick that might have been cutting edge six years ago.

The slobby middle-aged man walking in the other direction past us - striped t-shirt stretched by a belly that hadn't been there when it was first bought, beer can gripped like a thing far more precious than it was - stared at him as if he'd fallen to earth from another planet. Personally, I wasn't sure which of them had fallen from another planet. Maybe it was both of them. Maybe it was me.

Watching him fidget and wait for the lights to change I got that feeling I sometimes get, of being a minor character in somebody else's novel. Because somebody really ought to be writing a novel about the man in white - even just seeing him for a minute I felt like there was a story there and I suspected it was better than mine. I wanted to know what the attire was in aid of and where he was going, whether he was married, what his house was like. And nobody would ever have wanted to know that about the man in the striped t-shirt, the couple in the brown Mini or even me, boiling in my suit that's slightly too big these days, wearing my huge, absurd headphones.

Some people are like that. You meet them for minutes and you feel like you're in the presence of - not quite greatness, but noteworthiness. It made me think of the one time I met Paul, because that was the way with him too.

Last year Kelly and I went to visit my aunt in Bristol during her convalescence, near the beginning of that agonising period which started with the operation and only really ended with the all clear a couple of weeks ago. We strolled up Whiteladies Road, a long grand street I only recalled from childhood memories, most of them planted by stories my parents told and not things I genuinely remembered. So for instance I had been reliably informed that it was there that I saw and cried at ET as a platinum blonde eight year old, and if you asked me I would repeat it as gospel, but I only really have somebody else's word for that. So many things in our lives that we think are fact are only flimsy transcripts in somebody else’s handwriting, but we believe them anyway because otherwise we’d have to accept that we don’t know almost anything.

At the top of Whiteladies Road, the old department store had been converted into an indoor bazaar full of independent stallholders, and the three of us had a wander round. The wares on offer were much as you would expect: some retro porcelain here, the second-hand books even Oxfam wouldn’t take there, PVC handbags and tie-dye, clothes from labels no one had heard of. A Caribbean café offered jerk chicken and I was almost tempted to try it. And there, on the other side, was the oddest stall selling perfume. Under the counter a sign said “Spritz Fragrances… makes perfect scents”. I winced; the pun was bad enough, but the tacky font was even worse.

All the display stands were at forty-five degrees to everything else in the bazaar, which was presumably meant to make it look different but instead was only jarring. We wandered through, finding a selection of apothecary jars on the shelves in the corner, all labelled. “Calvin Klein – Obsession” said one, “Dolce & Gabbana” another. They all seemed to be knock-offs or replicas, in a bazaar which itself was like a low rent parody of the kind of fashionable markets you find in Spitalfields. That was the point when we hesitated too long, and the would-be perfumer descended on us.

He was a tall, striking-looking man with coffee-coloured skin and a close-cropped beard. The thing I noticed about him first was his suit. Some people only own one suit and virtually never wear it – it is bought out of necessity, as cheaply as possible, and often doesn’t fit. This man clearly owned such a suit and from the looks of things wore it every day. The trousers were shiny with wear, though they might have been like that even when they were first taken off the hanger several years ago. I don’t know what the opposite of luxury is, but that suit was it.

“Hi, I’m Paul. Can I interest you in anything?” he said, gravitating straight towards my aunt. He had a clipped accent which could have been American or could have been Caribbean, I couldn’t really place it.

“Oh no, we’re just browsing.” she said.

“Well, what sort of smells do you like?”

This seemed like an open invitation to have the sort of long conversation I had already ruled out. My aunt told Paul the sort of scent she liked, and he launched into a long complicated explanation of fragrances which appeared, as far as I could tell, to have very little to do with anything I had read on the subject. I allowed myself to drift to the edge of our tiny crowd, but there was something about the man that wouldn’t let me break away. He should have been a charlatan. The superficial judgments I’m so partial to told me he was a charlatan. But somehow my instincts were saying something else.

“I wouldn’t say I’m a healer.” he said, “But I can tell what you need. You might not know what you want, but I think I can see what you need. You need some healing, don’t you?”

I don’t know how he could tell, but he was so nice to my aunt, who was trying so hard to hide her nervousness in crowds and her baggage, figurative and literal.

“Yes, I suppose I do.” she said.

For the next fifteen minutes or so Paul was a blur; I don’t know which worked faster, his hands or his mouth. He dabbed her wrist with stopper after stopper, mixing and blending, and he kept talking to her. Did she want something a bit lighter? No problem. Or a grassy note in there perhaps? He knew just the thing. You can go into the centre of my hometown any given Saturday lunchtime and get harassed by a crazy, preached at by an evangelist or rendered guilty by an aggressively marketed good cause, but this was something altogether more rare; we felt kind of special.

I have a feeling, looking back on it, that Paul knew that my aunt wasn’t in the market for perfume and I’m not sure that’s what he was trying to sell her. I think what he was giving her instead, without charge, was kindness and attention. And for those fifteen minutes – though there was still an element of hustle about Paul, the suit and the accent, probably – my poor recuperating aunt felt like she was receiving an individual consultation in Liberty rather than standing in a tatty arcade in Bristol with fake fragrance building up on her skinny arm. He gave her something back that I hadn’t even figured out was missing, and it was quite something to watch.

When we left, we bought a soap dish from Paul which we didn’t really need, because I would gladly have paid him for what he did for her. For Kelly, too – he told her that her aura was so warm he could barely stand next to her, and that he had a sense that great things were going to happen to her over the next few years. And I was trying to look unconvinced, but I couldn’t carry it off.

Afterwards we drifted upstairs, where the more gentrified stalls were: a photographer, some painters, a lady making jewellery. And when we went back down my aunt tried on some clothes, eventually picking up a tasteful black and grey top which didn’t quite look like anything else she owned. “I can wear it for special occasions.” she said, and I found myself hoping there would be many of them. I didn’t know back then that she would move to Reading and be given the all clear, I didn’t know she would end up in a huge flat with more space than she knew how to fill, her own bathroom, an enormous fridge freezer. I didn’t know she would get her own washing machine, something she never had in all the three decades she was stuck in that bedsit. None of us knew any of those things, we just knew that special occasions weren’t something my aunt’s life had been full of, and whenever we talked about bucking that trend there was a feeling of putting a brave face on things.

Everything about Paul should have been wrong: the patter; the suit; the font; the professed ability to sense auras; everything. The other ninety-nine times out of a hundred, I would have thought he was a fraud. Even to this day, I don’t know why I didn’t. When my aunt was buying the top, Kelly was over there talking to him again - about their black roots, about where their ancestors came from (America in both cases, as it happens), about all the things we just don’t know. You got the impression you could have talked to him all day. That’s the thing about people with charisma; they’re dangerous, they make you forget yourself. This is how wars start I tried to tell myself. This is how vulnerable people get parted from their life savings. But it wasn’t working.

I still have Paul’s business card in my wallet. Kelly and I talked about how, when my aunt was better, we’d go back and pay for her to have a personalised fragrance made up. But then she moved to Reading and it never happened. When I type Paul’s website into my browser, nothing comes up. The domain expired and it hasn’t been renewed. I searched on his full name too. It drew a blank, and his was a far from common name. Even the website for the arcade has a different shop now in the location where his used to be. It’s almost as if he never existed, to the extent where I do have to stop and remind myself that he did. I can’t help wondering where he went, whether he’s plying the same trade somewhere else, trying something new or whether he’s given up. And I find I’m slightly sad that I’ll never know; I would definitely have read the novel he was in.

Exhausting a place

2011-04-18T18:25:00.002+01:00

In this room, there are six men and one woman. There are a number of voices coming out of the phone on the middle of the table, all of them indistinct.

There are three striped shirts – a blue and white one which screams deckchair, a black and white chalk-striped corporate gangster and a glorified pyjama top. There is one hairstyle from 1984, there are two men with no hairstyle to speak of and three men with no hair to speak of. There are two short-sleeved shirts, one bright yellow linen, one tired poly-cotton, like a school shirt which has never been thrown away.

There is a bright pink cardigan, and no, it isn’t mine.

There are two lip-chewers, two pen-fidgeters and a Coke-sipper. There are two cheap disposable biros bearing promotional logos, one posh silver rollerball (a leaving gift from a previous job, probably, or maybe a present from a spouse who had run out of ideas), one fountain pen – mine – and a clutch pencil. I admire anybody who wields a clutch pencil at work. There are two chunky watches with giant rubberised straps, saying I do sport, fraudulently sitting on the wrists of two men who do not do sport.

In this room, there are a total of twelve attempted jokes. Eleven of them are not remotely funny, the twelfth would only be funny if you knew the subject matter of the meeting back to front. It does not make me laugh.

There is one ulcer that I know of, though there may be more.

There are two people giving proceedings their undivided attention, three people giving them their divided attention and two people giving them very little attention. There are plenty of alternatives to paying attention; nose-twitching, scratching in pads, tapping on Blackberries. There is one doodler, and she draws her name on her pad in large, likeable capitals. She thinks better of colouring the letters in.

There is a man who sounds as if he’s talking over the phone down a really bad line, a disconcerting effect because he is in this room.

There are four pairs of glasses, mostly conventional enough. Only one looks as if it forms a joke shop combo with the wearer’s eyebrows and nose. There is one comedy accent, like a heavy in a Bond film. It goes beautifully with the Eighties hair and the clutch pencil.

In this room, there are two ears sprouting wiry white hairs, on a head with very little hair of its own; so often the way. There are two big noses, three small noses and one hook nose, but only two enormous nostrils. It seems, from the other end of the table, that you could fall into them and wait years for rescue.

There are three wedding rings, but they are not on the hands you’d expect.

There is one moustache, one goatee and there are four faces sporting the kind of light stubble which says that ten minutes longer in bed on a Monday morning is far more important than shaving. One of those faces belongs to me. There is one pair of surprisingly small hands, stubby fingers like baby new potatoes.

There is one mobile phone with Sweet Child O’ Mine as a ring tone, something we all loudly discover halfway through. Finding that out is my favourite thing. Apart from that there is no fun in this room, there are no dreams coming true and there are definitely no surprises.

There are twenty-four different three letter abbreviations. No single person understands all of them.

Nerve

2011-04-15T18:30:00.000+01:00

Gemma’s is the first desk I notice every morning as I head across to mine, so I always know from the outset whether she is in on any given day or working from home - or doing whatever it is she does at home which means she isn’t on instant messenger and takes several hours to reply to emails. We all have our theories, by which I mean that I have my theory and that by repeating it often enough I have convinced everybody to believe me.

Something was different about Gemma when I walked through the door of the office this morning and I couldn’t put my finger on what it was. She was sat bolt upright, looking straight ahead and her hair looked fuller, with more body, glam somehow. I didn’t give it any more thought and went to log on at my computer and begin the complex operation of figuring out which pieces of work I couldn’t put off any longer. Pretty soon, my IM pinged with an offer from Gemma to go for the first cuppa of the day and naturally I agreed, which had plenty to do with how much I still wanted to put off those pieces of work.

We ambled down the corridor and I noticed again that Gemma looked plain weird. She was still very upright, looking straight ahead and walking towards the kitchen as if she was on castors and being pushed by an invisible man. I’m not used to anybody I know having a bearing like that; you could almost believe that she’d spent the previous night doing a crash course at a military academy. We reached the kitchen, me shuffling along and her sedately sweeping through the double doors like a modern-day Queen Victoria, and then she came clean.

“I’m in agony.” she said. “I’ve trapped a nerve in my neck.”

“I thought there was something different about you.”

“It’s awful. I can’t move my head at all. You don’t realise how much you use your neck until you can’t.”

Phil was already in the kitchen, taking his regulation twenty minutes to make a cup of tea. None of us know how he manages to make tea making look so leisurely, it’s one of life’s insoluble mysteries. All we do know is that when we all descend on the kitchen en masse he always starts before us and finishes after us. All that time spent, and yet he’s never made a hot beverage I liked the look of. He peered over in Gemma’s direction.

”What’s up mate? You look like a robot.”

He had a point: I hadn’t thought of it that way, but since Phil mentioned it the way Gemma’s whole body swivelled when she turned round to fire him a withering stare was somehow reminiscent of an android. If laser beams had shot out of her eyes and he had crumpled smoking to the floor I wouldn’t have been particularly surprised. Phil didn’t even notice though because he doesn’t, not that kind of thing anyway.

“It’s not funny! I was in so much pain this morning. David had to drive me to work because I can’t turn my head.”

“Your hair looks different, have you done something different with it?” said Clare, stirring her peppermint tea in the corner next to the microwave. Clare always has peppermint tea and always in her own mug, which she bought at Sainsburys and scrubs obsessively every day. (“How can you drink from one of the mugs in the cupboard?” she once asked me. “They’re black. You can’t see anything on the inside. How would you know if they’re dirty?”)

“I couldn’t use my straighteners this morning, too painful, so I’ve just blow-dried it.”

“It looks nice!” said Clare, always one to focus on the positives. Meanwhile, I was deriving great amusement from walking round Gemma in circles while she had no choice but to keep staring at the notice board on the far wall.

”Stop being a bastard.” she said.

“I’m sorry, but it is quite funny.”

“No it’s not.”

We made eye contact. She looked mainly cross, but not completely. It seemed appropriate as I was mainly amused, but not completely.

“It is sort of funny I’m afraid. But if it’s any consolation, you look like your posture is incredible. You don’t look like you’ve got a trapped nerve in your neck at all.”

“Really?” said Gemma, brightening considerably.

”No. If anything, you look like your hair weighs a ton.”

Later on, no better, Gemma went to see the onsite beauty therapist who had offered to try and sort her out with a massage. I joined her, because the kitchen was en route and my tea was cold. Earlier in the week I had told Clare that my tea was colder than a necrophiliac’s girlfriend, a simile which would have been remarkably effective if I hadn’t had to explain what a necrophiliac was. “How do you know these things?” Clare had asked me incredulously, which was even more effective as I couldn’t begin to explain that.

”Stop staring at me.” said Gemma. She has a tone of voice she uses at times like this which I like to call her evil voice. It’s the tone which suggests that she expects complete obedience, tempered with a smidgeon of disbelief that she has to give the order at all.

“I can’t help it, it’s just that I’ve never seen anybody walking quite like this before.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to walk behind me, it’s just creepy.”

“Sorry Gemma.” We got to the door and I pushed it open for her. She had the sort of bearing that made you want to hold doors open, or possibly throw a cape on a puddle. Gemma and Clare had gone to the pub for lunch without me, and I imagined the lunchtime drinkers of Bracknell had probably never seen anything quite like it. They probably thought she was a visiting duchess or something. There was a moment of eye contact again, and I realised that I didn’t know Gemma quite well enough to figure out whether she had lost patience with me, and I probably never would.

“Have you ever had a trapped nerve in your neck?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Well, I can’t wait until you do. And when you do, I want to be there, and I’m going to rip the piss out of you about it.”

“That’s not very nice, Gemma. But do you know what really hurts? You’re insulting me like that and you can’t even bear to look at me while you’re doing it. That’s cold.”

”Get lost.” said the back of Gemma’s head, floating off into the distance, perfectly level. I didn’t need to see her face to judge her expression, but I was still relieved that I couldn’t.

Meetings and holidays

2011-04-11T22:09:00.005+01:00

In my meeting today, we get to talking about holidays. I find this is a common conversation topic in meetings I am running. I think it’s because the people round the table desperately need to remind themselves why they are enduring the meeting in the first place. But on a day like today I don’t mind; the sun is still shining outside and we are making good progress, working in co-operation, not competition, and my mind too is turning to the next chance I will get to jump on a plane and be somewhere else. The sights and sounds of Istanbul, only three months ago, feel far too distant.

Besides, it’s inevitable, an occupational hazard when the nearest station to the office is at Gatwick Airport. Everyone else on my train was grinning, showing off in shorts, pulling huge suitcases onto seats or wrestling them onto the overhead racks while I sat there, buttoned up and buttoned down, peering at bad news on my Blackberry and rejigging my to do list for the hundredth time.

The only exception was the glacial blonde sitting opposite, who kept staring over at me in between pages of the Metro. It’s the new glasses and the haircut I told myself with a certain smugness. I’ve still got that old magic. My left hand crept beneath my newspaper and suddenly with horror I realised that my flies were wide open. Shortly after that we stopped at Guildford and she got off, as all the attractive people did, but not before shooting me a look of mild contempt.

Thinking about holidays is the only way to stay sane on a journey like that, otherwise you would go mad and start shouting at strangers. I consoled myself by deciding that they were going to places I had no desire to see, and would have an awful time. Disappointingly, they showed no understanding of this.

I get off the train and walk through the station, trying to ignore the palpable excitement of practically everyone in the departures lounge. Only the other workers in the airport, my fellow sufferers, lift my spirits. Loitering in the Marks & Spencer Simply Food I see two hairy workman in reflective jackets grabbing houmous and choosing between tubs of olives and find myself oddly cheered by the incongruity. And then it is time to stand at the side of the lay-by and wait for Paul to pick me up, in his standard issue Vauxhall.

“I went to Palma a couple of weeks ago mate.” says Paul as we sit in the windowless room, poring over systems and screens. “It was brilliant, great weather, cheap, everyone was really friendly.”

“I bet the food was nice too.” I say, because in my world holidays are just trips to giant living restaurants and if you’re lucky there are some monuments or shops to look round between meals.

“Yes, just amazing - lots of tapas. Have you ever had those things, they’re called devils on horseback?”

“Yes, they’re prunes wrapped in bacon, right?”

“That’s the ones.”

The me outside work would quibble at this stage and point out that, technically, those are Christmas party food rather than authentic Spanish tapas. But I am at work and I’ve learned at least a few social conventions in the last ten years, so I nod and don't pick him up on it.

“My wife’s going to Egypt this year with my mother-in-law.” I say. “They’re going on a cruise down the Nile.”

“You not going with them?” says Eddie, looking up from his screen. He works for Paul, and he’s a lot quieter when Paul is around. I give a wan smile.

“No, I think I’ll sit that one out. It will be nice for them to have that bonding experience. And besides, if I don’t go with them hopefully I’ll get to go away on holiday with my friend Dave. We go away most years, usually to Prague.”

Paul makes a face.

“I’m not sure I fancy Prague, all those stag weekends.”

“I know a funny story about that, remind me to tell you later when we’re on our way to the station.”

We tap away and read more reams of notes on the flickering projector, back in work mode. Through the open door I notice a man in a wheelchair trundling past. Paul spots him and tuts.

“I tell you what, for a man on disability benefit he doesn’t half take a lot of fag breaks. I ought to disable the lifts, see how he likes that.”

I’m not sure what facial expression to adopt at this stage, so I settle for a mixture of contemplation and a lack of confidence in my own hearing. I’m not one hundred per cent sure he really said it. How to respond? I decide to surprise him, and myself, with compassion. I don’t remember until many hours later that Paul’s child is also in a wheelchair.

“I don’t know, if I was stuck in a wheelchair I’d probably take up smoking too. It must be pretty miserable.”

“He’s got ME, hasn’t he Eddie?”

“No, it’s MS.” says Eddie helpfully, acting as Paul’s built in spell-checker. Nobody is up to the job of correcting Paul’s grammar at times.

“What happened to that woman in your team with ME, by the way?” I ask Paul.

“Oh, she left in the end.”

“She was a bit wet, wasn’t she?” I say. I remember her well, drippy and pale, strangely without substance even before the diagnosis. I’d always thought she was awful at her job, and then felt awful when I found out what she was ill with, because nobody deserves that.

“What, wet between the legs?” chuckles Paul.

“No, behind the ears.” I say, unable to prevent myself from sounding curt. Sometimes I forget just how inappropriate he can be - even by my standards, and my standards are more forgiving than almost anybody’s.

At the end of the meeting we have finished our work and established that things are a little better than they were and a little worse, in a way that would be impossible to sum up in a single slide. It’s the worst possible outcome, because it means that explaining what we have learned will place too much of a demand on anybody’s attention span. But never mind: we have had a pleasant day and we know we’ve achieved something, even if only the three of us know what that is. I get my stuff together and head out with Paul to his car.

“You were going to tell me a story about Prague.” he says.

“Oh yes, that’s right. This is a good one. Have you ever met Posh James in our team?”

Paul pulls away, into the quiet industrial park. It is hours before these roads will clog up with people desperate to get home.

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, he went on a stag week to Prague with some friends. Not a stag night, not a stag weekend, but a whole week. And on their first night they walked down one of the streets in the Old Town which is lined with… there’s no nice way to put this, titty bars.”

“Titty bars.” said Paul in shock. I think he never quite expects me, with my posh voice, to say anything disgusting. It’s nice to think there are still some people who believe I am above that sort of thing.

“And there’s someone outside each of the bars trying to lure the punters in, hassling them, telling them how hot their girls are. So James and his friends walk down this street getting more and more tired of all the banter. So at the very end of the row of bars, this guy says ‘Come in, come in! We have beautiful girls.’ and one of James’ mates - fed up of all the attention by now and feeling a bit bloody-minded - says ‘Do you have any midgets?’”

“Jesus, mate.” chuckles Paul.

“And of course they don’t. So James’ friend says ‘Sorry, but if you don’t have any midgets we’re not interested.’ and on they go. The next night, they walk the same route and they get hassled in exactly the same way. And at the end of the row it’s the same guy and the same question. ‘Do you have any midgets?’ ‘No, my friend.’ ‘Sorry, if you’ve got no midgets, we’re not coming in.’ and so on.”

“Is this a joke?”

“No, true story, I swear. Anyway, this goes on all week; every night they go past the bars and every night they say the same thing to the man outside the last one. No midgets, no show. Anyway, they get to their final night in Prague and they stroll past, and their favourite front of house practically flags them down. ‘Come in, come in! Very hot girls tonight.’ And so they say ‘Do you have any midgets?’ for the very last time.”

“And?”

“And the man looks beside himself. ‘Yes! Yes! For you specially, we have found a topless midget.’”

“You are fucking joking.”

“I’m not! And so James and his friends look at each other, and they think, Well, it’s rude not to, so they went in and watched the topless midget on their last night in Prague.”

“That is quality.”

“I know.”

There is a slight pause, and I know Paul can’t hear my cogs turning. Because the thing I’ve always wondered about that story is whether a topless midget’s breasts are in proportion to the rest of her body or not. I can’t remember whether it’s midgets or dwarves whose extremities are built to scale. But, because I’m at least partly still in work mode, I decide not to share that eternal mystery with Paul. The car pulls up in the lay-by, and I check my watch; just enough time to make the hourly train.

“Good meeting today.”

“Yes, it was - and a pleasure as always. I’ll call you tomorrow.”

“Have a safe trip home.”

As the car speeds off, taking the second exit at the roundabout as smoothly as Scalextric, and becomes a navy dot in the distance I find myself thinking again what a funny man he is, and how surprised I am that I like him. But it only crosses my mind for a second - that and the realisation that the best of the sun has gone for the day, and maybe the week too. And then I have to make a move myself and catch my train so I scuttle in the direction of the terminal building past the yellow-jacketed workmen, houmous-powered, drilling through the tarmac.

The brace position

2011-04-07T19:10:00.004+01:00

We were driving back from the dentist and Kelly was telling me all about her plans to finally fix her wayward bottom teeth, provided it wasn’t too expensive and didn’t involve having a brace on her top teeth.

“Didn’t I hear the dentist say it would cost two grand?” I said. I had been sitting on the red leather chesterfield vaguely eavesdropping on them talking in the next room. I was only partly concentrating on them and partly concentrating on my phone. I was also concentrating on the red leather chesterfield and thinking This is where your money goes when you have a private dentist. And it was today’s paper - The Mail, but today’s paper none the less - and all the magazines were recent, too, no exposés from last summer dressed up as this spring’s news. But I was at least slightly listening to the sounds through the door, because something about hearing my wife’s voice in the next room always feels like the most reassuring radio station in the world.

My dentist is a tired looking man who’s been looking after my teeth since I was sixteen; I hope to goodness those two facts are unconnected. I used to go to see him with my mum, and when I got a clean bill of health – which I always did – my mother would take me to the delicatessen opposite and I would pick out a huge slice of chocolate fudge cake, topped with a substantial crust of icing, to reward myself for my good fortune. Back in those days I was always nervous even though I knew that deep down I had nothing to fear. The deli may have closed and my mother might be distant, but that feeling has stayed with me all my life; countless presentations, performance reviews and conversations I’ve been dreading are testimony to that.

When I took up smoking I was so ashamed of my teeth that I didn’t go and see him for years, but now those days are over I am much more relaxed about it. Anyway, he’s less intimidating than the dental hygienists - they are the ones who can make you feel as if you are a matter of weeks away from your gums turning to purple mulch and all your teeth coming out if you nod your head too vigorously. I wonder if they get special training for that. In any case, on this visit he prodded, scrutinised, and told me I had nothing to worry about, at least not this time. (“You don’t have bad teeth at all.” he said. “Not for a grinder, anyway.”) I said I should get round to making an appointment with the hygienist in a way which suggested it was a long way down my priority list, possibly tucked underneath taking up yoga or a wheat free diet. “Good luck with that.” was the response. “Our hygienist is harder to see than the Pope.”

“He said that two grand was the worst case scenario.” said Kelly as we pulled out of the car park, away from the grotty pub where my family had gone for a drink after badminton games when I was fifteen, during my parents’ desperate last attempt to hold their threadbare marriage together. My mum had been going through the motions and I don’t know which would have been sadder: if my dad knew that, or if he didn’t.

“Well, obviously we wouldn’t go for it if it cost that much.”

If I hadn’t said that Kelly might have done, but because I did I got that contrary look.

”We might do.”

“If you think I’m spending two grand on ‘improving you’ in that way…”

“Oh, because of course we never spend any money on improving you, do we?” The tone was light and playful but there was something unyielding beneath the surface, or would be if I pushed matters.

“All right, all right.” I said. I knew she was right, as usual. “You’ll have to let me take a picture of your wonky bottom teeth, so that if anyone at work asks me why we’re remortgaging the flat I can show it to them. Look at my wife, the uruk-hai I can say to them.”

That got a smile, to my relief. The roof was down, neither of us had a coat on and it was far too glorious a day to fall out about anything. I’ve been lucky for the last seven years because it’s nearly always like that, and the weather rarely has anything to do with it.

“Anyway, didn’t you hear everything we were saying?”

“No, not really. I made out bits and pieces, that’s all. I love your voice. You always sound so posh.”

That got a different kind of smile, a not-this-old-chestnut-again smile.

“I am not posh.” she said. It may not surprise you to hear that this riposte was delivered in a manner best described as posh.

“Do I need to remind you of the Christmas Eve incident again?”

I watched with a certain satisfaction as her brows knitted ever so slightly into a smooth but recognisable frown.

It happened one Christmas Eve and we had been out in town with my friend Laura. The topic of Kelly’s poshness – one of those popular discussion topics that comes up every now and again – had been a major theme of the evening and Kelly had spent much of the night denying it as usual. You could have printed bingo cards with the stock phrases Kelly always came up with by way of rebuttal. “I grew up in a two bedroom house, with my mum in one room and my three sisters and me in the other.” she would always say, along with “I’m working class!”, “My mum was on the social and used to work in the chip shop.” and her personal favourite, “She didn’t have central heating until after I moved out.” If Kelly was really pulling out the stops she might mention the way her mother used to liberate unwanted vegetables from the pallet outside the greengrocer, but she saved that for special occasions.

Although I knew all of this was technically all true, Laura and I made eye contact and I raised a quizzical eyebrow. Laura, as it happens, was living in her parents’ palatial abode in one of the most desirable parts of the suburb I grew up in, a house with a long drive and pillars outside the front door. We made constant jokes that her postal address began with “The West Wing”, which she always denied. And yet, if you didn’t know anything about their backgrounds and you just heard their beautiful, accentless voices you could think they met at the same finishing school.

At the end of the night, we found ourselves rushing to get Laura on the last bus home because taxis on Christmas Eve out to the greenest edges of town cost enough to buy presents for several relatives, even by Laura’s lavish standards. It was a race against time as we sped up from a walk to a speedier walk and – for the closing stages – into a bizarre kind of jog, a six foot tall man and two women taller still racing through the streets towards the station. We got to the stop just as the bus pulled up and, within earshot of all the festive revellers waiting to get on board (most of them far more full of seasonal cheer than anybody ought to be) Kelly came out with an exclamation which has since passed into legend.

“Hurrah! Hurrah!”

“Sorry, and you say you’re not posh?” I said. Laura tried not to laugh out loud, and failed. It may have been the best present I got that year.

Not long after, as penance, Kelly got a t-shirt printed. On the front, in purple letters, it said “I’M NOT POSH”. Only when you saw the back print did you spot the letters “HURRAH! HURRAH!” arcing along her shoulders. She used to wear it at badminton matches, and I enjoyed standing behind her, looking at a constant reminder that she could laugh at herself. After that it got relegated to nightwear, and eventually it was thrown out. But her ability to laugh at herself has stayed, and her lips broadened into a smile.

“No, you don’t need to remind me of the Christmas Eve incident.”

There was no weariness, not even faux weariness, just a comfortable call and response. The car zipped along the suburban roads, tree-lined, with wide pavements, an area both of us liked driving through but agreed we could never live in.

“Shall we go to the pub when we get home, sit outside, have a pint of cider and maybe play some cribbage?”

“Yes, that sounds like a cracking idea.”

When she smiled, I got a good look at her bottom teeth in the rear view mirror. They looked pretty near perfect to me.

Women, mothers

2011-04-04T21:37:00.003+01:00

My acupuncturist April’s latest wheeze is that I should consider a wheat free diet. She tells me this as I lie on my back on the couch, feeling the needles go in one by one - or rather not feeling them, but knowing they are going in all the same, it‘s a very hard sensation to describe - staring off in the general direction of the high ceiling above. I have to ask her to repeat herself a couple of times. Sometimes this happens because I can’t make out her accent, but this time it’s because I can’t quite believe it. I avoid laughing, partly because I know it would be bad manners but mainly because I think it’s unwise to mock somebody when they’re in the middle of sticking sharp objects in you. Not unless that’s what you’re into, anyway.

“I think it would involve too many changes.” I say, beginning mentally to tot up all the things I’ve eaten which would be off limits. I stop at the beginning of the previous day, because by then it’s crystal clear that a life without wheat would be no fun at all.

“Oh no, it’s very good. I have a lot of clients who have given up wheat and they all tell me what a difference it’s made. For someone like you, whose stomach is very weak, it could really help.”

I note that April hasn’t told me she has given up wheat herself. Although she may be loosening up a little; earlier in the same session she told me, with a glee I found charming, that she had discovered strawberry flavoured Swedish cider. “It’s very good.” she said, “But one bottle gets me really drunk.” From what I imagine about April’s regime, sniffing the neck of an open bottle would probably be enough to tip her over the edge.

I try to imagine the life of someone who gives up wheat, but it’s just not happening. If wheat was such a bad thing, would they really refer to people who can’t eat it as “intolerant”? After all, nobody gets described as “poison intolerant”, do they? I think about all those labels you could give people: mugging intolerant, earthquake intolerant. No, it doesn’t work. A wheat-free life is something I associate with going without, with the special sections of the supermarket full of alternatives to things, the sections nobody shops in unless they have to. It seems rude to say no outright, so I say what I always say to April when she suggests a drastic and unpalatable change to my lifestyle.

”I’ll think about it.”

“You should go home and ask your wife.” she says, which makes me wonder whether I’ve done a very good job of portraying my wife in the pleasant chats April and I have during acupuncture sessions. It seems rude to point this out too, so instead I bite my tongue and let the moment pass. That’s easily done, because we’re reaching the point in proceedings when the smalltalk stops. April swings the heat lamps over and they gently radiate comfort in the direction of my belly, like a concentrated burst of summer, and she moves further up, peppering my arms with tiny spikes. But my eyes aren’t even open by then, the sunlight streaming in from the big sash window just bounces off my eyelids. All I can feel is the warmth, all I can hear is the sound of the sea playing on her tiny stereo, and it’s as if I melt into the couch.

* * *

I always sit upright for my conversations with Ann Marie, and I’ve usually been to the pub first. It started because the bus drops me off at twenty to six, and I visit her at six, and it wasn’t quite enough time to pop home and change. And the Lyndhurst was so welcoming, so tastefully lit, and it was summer and there was just enough time to nurse a half at one of the outside tables and decide what to say, so I stopped there one day straight off the bus which conveniently stops right outside. It hardened into a habit, the way these things often do.

It’s been two years, and I don’t really know Ann Marie any better than I did on day one. I know that isn’t the nature of the conversations that we have, but it’s still strange to rattle on about your life to somebody and for it all to be so one-way. Occasionally, when the time is up, there is something like smalltalk but never for long. One time, I discovered that she was from Baltimore – I would never have placed her accent in a million years, so this was a useful piece of information to place in a very small file which was unlikely ever to get much bigger. “It’s not all like The Wire” she told me, with a small and uncharacteristic smile.

Some of our conversations career headlong towards the end and I feel like I could be there all night, feeling cheated when they finish. Some by contrast are painfully slow, trying to work out where to go next. Some days I don’t make any sense to me, so I’m not sure how it could make sense to anybody else. Some days I am bored, or boring, or both, or I catch myself talking about things I’m sure I’ve said before in exactly the same way and I get echoes of echoes of déjà vu, like being in a hall of mirrors. Some days I am so frustrated that what is supposed to be progress can feel so little like it. But she often finds a different angle or a killer question, and when she does she lights up a corner of my life I’ve been struggling to see into.

One time, we were talking about the situation with my mother, the one I don’t talk about much with everyone else. This was last year, when things were much less closed off than they are now, when everything was going to go wrong but none of us completely knew it yet. My mother had sent me another of those mails she specialises in, the short spiky message in which it was all my fault and I was invited, again, to apologise. They were all variations on that theme, at the time. It was like a weather forecast; sometimes they was angry, sometimes they were sad, then they went through another angry phase and finally there was nothing at all.

“What are you going to do?”

I knew the answer to this one. This was an easy question; I’d been thinking about it in the pub, had it all worked out.

“I‘m not sure. I suppose I could reply going into all the detail of why that’s wrong, putting my side of it again, line by line. There’s so much in there though that I think I might never stop, and it will make me angry, and it’s all been said before. Or I could say that it’s not something I want to discuss again, I could reply saying there’s no point in raking it over. Or I could sit on it for a few weeks, see how I feel.”

There was a long pause, and I could almost see her digesting what I’d said, chewing on ideas. She’s good at that, and the pauses are just long enough that you don’t know whether to volunteer more. I wonder what admissions she wrings from people in those extra split seconds of silence. Then she spoke.

“What’s your gut reaction?”

The ball had come back across the net at blinding speed and all I had time to do was stick my racquet in front of my face and watch it bounce off.

“My gut reaction is to tell her to piss off.”

One thing I’ve learned from these conversations is that I am not good at gut reactions, not in touch with them at all. I like to weigh things up, don’t like being on the spot. Sometimes she asks me how I feel about something, and I’ll tell her, and there’s a pause and a different kind of smile.

“Is that how you feel, or what you think?”

I think I can’t tell the difference. Or is that how it feels?

And when we talk about the relationship between my body and my mind, I wonder if there is a relationship at all. It’s civil rather than cordial if there is one. I’ve always been cerebral, and when my body goes wrong I don’t feel like it’s on the same side as my mind at all. Often my body feels like just another car I haven’t learned to drive. Anybody who watches me try to dance, or break into a run to get across a busy street before the lights change, would be tempted to agree.

Our latest conversation is drawing to an end and I say something about being lazy.

“Would you say you’re lazy then?” she asks me.

”Yes.” I say, without any hesitation. I can’t even be bothered to dress it up.

* * *

There have been adverts everywhere about Mother’s Day. I note them ruefully, and hear people at work talking about weekend plans. Mother’s Day’s one of those universal celebrations – either you’ve got one, you are one, or you’re married to one, and they’ve pretty much got you every way. It seems odd to tell my friends I’m not doing anything special. At the end of the working week I take a walk through town and stop at the card shop, buy something suitable - not too mushy, not in poor taste, and write it sitting on a bench outside the department store. I check the last collection on the postbox and calculate that it has a fair chance of getting there on time, and in it goes. Then I go off to the pub, something I’m pretty sure that most of the women in my life would not approve of.

On Sunday, the phone rings. It’s my mother-in-law.

“Thank you for my card!”

“That’s all right, it made it then?”

“Yes, it arrived yesterday but I didn’t open it. I knew it would probably be for today. And thanks for my presents too, the book and the CD.”

Obviously they were Kelly’s idea, and I will hand her over to Kelly in due course and she’ll hopefully say the same things to her, but it doesn’t change the fact that I’m enjoying the conversation. We chat away about my ailments, and her day yesterday with her granddaughters, and I tell her about our Saturday in London, arranged on the spur of the moment because we can.

“You’ll have to email me a photo of your new sofa.”

“I will Rose, don’t worry.”

I’ll need to, if she’s going to see it, because she doesn’t come to Reading if she can possibly avoid it. She’s not a confident driver, and she regards our one-way system as the outermost circle of hell. It was easier when we lived at the old place, next to the river. The directions would go like this: drive from Oxford to Reading and turn left just before the first big roundabout that sends you into a cold sweat. We’re on the right. And Rose could do that, but when we moved closer to the centre of town, many confusing roundabouts away from there, it started to get more difficult.

The first time Rose tried to find our new flat unaided we tidied everything, put the kettle on and got some nice food in. She was late, but that’s fine, because she’s always late. Usually late setting off, too - my in-laws make plans at the last minute if they make them at all, something which drives me to distraction. When the phone rang half an hour after she was due to arrive, Kelly picked it up and all I could hear was her impatiently asking question after question, trying to work out where Rose had wound up in her ancient Rover. She was round the back of the big shopping mall in town, right next to the depot where they delivered all the goods. Piecing things together, it soon became apparent that my mother-in-law had driven the wrong way round most of the one way system. As if Reading wasn't a hair-raising enough place for motorists already.

The second time, she brought my sister-in-law and a satnav to ensure that history didn’t repeat itself. All it meant was that history repeated itself as farce. Just as before, the phone rang half an hour late, and I was treated to the spectacle of Kelly trying to navigate her mother through the one way system, like ground control talking someone through landing a plane when the pilot has died in mid-air. Even from my spot, puzzled on the sofa, I could hear the noise of my mother-in-law having a stand-up row with her own satnav. We gave up on getting her to the flat unaided after that - instead, we would drive over to my old flat and wait there for her to arrive. She would pull up outside an address I haven’t lived in for years, and I would get out of the car, jump into her passenger seat and direct her through the roundabouts and lanes. With my navigational skills, the road awareness of a natural born pedestrian, it was always a case of the blind leading the blind.

All my in-laws are country types. For Rose’s sixtieth birthday, her daughters took her to London for a minibreak. It was a surprise, they planned it without her knowing and just told her to pack a bag and take a couple of days off work. They stayed in a hotel together, had dinner off Leicester Square, they went to a concert. It was Billy Ocean, because my in-laws all love Billy Ocean; they had t-shirts printed and everything. I remember that Kelly’s said “BILLY OCEAN FLOATS MY BOAT”, another one said “GET OUT OF MY DREAMS, GET INTO MY CAR”. I like to think he would have done it, too, even if it had involved taking a red Rover the wrong way round Reading’s one way system. They went on the London Eye the next day, and took tea at the Ritz and Rose even let the girls take photos, which was a great compliment because she detests having her photo taken. I told people at my office, and they all said things like “what a lovely surprise”, and then I hit them with the sucker punch: it was the first time Rose had ever been to London.

We chunter away quite merrily and Kelly, painting her nails on the sofa, looks up, happy but in no hurry to take the receiver off me. It’s Mother’s Day, after all, and we all need one.

“Do you want to talk to Kelly?”

“I suppose I better had, or she’ll only get jealous won’t she.”

“Yes, I bet she would, she’s a bit like that. Okay then Rose. Love you, bye!”

“Love you, bye!”

Marks out of ten

2011-04-01T18:10:00.002+01:00

The dynamic at work is constantly changing. Manga Dave is gone, off travelling before he returns to the country in the autumn. When he gets back the best of the weather we haven’t had yet will be gone. He will be living in London and working for a management consultancy, picking up his security pass and handing in his soul on his first day in the office. In the meantime, we get the occasional email from an internet café in LA or Australia, drenched with sunshine, reeking of good times and making us all feel drab and envious. I’m sure he is regularly tagged in Facebook photos, grinning in a vest on a beach somewhere and holding a beer bottle up to the blazing sun, young enough to think he has all the time in the world.

In his place, Clare has started joining us around the table at lunchtimes. She took a while to find her feet in our group dynamic, but she’s settling in nicely. She’s warm, funny, and human - not ashamed, like the rest of us, to admit that she’s having a shit day or would rather be at home reading a trashy novel or loafing in front of the telly. None of us like people who are on message all the time, they get found out and blackballed for lunch club very quickly. Clare only has a few foibles that we’ve worked out so far – the main one being a slight compulsion about obsessive cleaning. She has her own set of wipes, her desk always gleams and at the end of every day you could look at it and think nobody has sat there at all. If she took a close look at my keyboard I think she’d have palpitations.

She’s also a single girl about town. I’ve always thought single people are a lot more interesting than people in couples; they’re still trying, still making an effort and they always have interesting stories for those of us who like living vicariously – which is most of us. You get just enough excitement or embarrassment that you can remember what being single is like, but never so much that you feel wistful for the fact that those days are gone. If you ever want to feel happy about being attached, whatever your partner is like, just go on your own to a town centre pub at nine o’clock on a Saturday night. Even on the rare days when your other half is really getting on your nerves, it always works.

Anyway, it all started at lunch earlier this week when Clare made the mistake of telling us she’d got lucky at the weekend. After she broke the news, Iain and I shared a conspiratorial wink and Gemma beamed, clearly smug because she’d already been given all the gory details in one of those girly chats the rest of us aren’t privy to.

“So, what base did you get to? Second base, third base, home run?”

I was going easy on Clare because she’s still relatively new. Six months further down the line, I would be asking for a running commentary, or diagrams.

“Oh, we went all the way.” said Clare. This was so much more candour than I was used to; by contrast, Gemma was always extremely cagy about everything. It quite threw me off my stride for a moment, but I soon recovered.

“So who’s the lucky man?” I said. “Was this a nightclub conquest?”

“No. I’ve known him since I was sixteen, he’s an old friend of mine.”

“Oh, he’s definitely always fancied you then.”

“He has not! We’ve hung out together for ages and nothing like this has ever happened.”

“That’s not how men work, take it from me. I bet you he’s had a thing for you for years.”

Gemma looked on in disdain.

”You always say this, this is your theory that all men fancy all women yet again.” Those last two words were said with a worrying combination of boredom and exhaustion. How long had Gemma felt this way about my lunchtime repertoire?

“I’m just saying that men don’t make friends with women if they think they’re minging. It doesn’t happen. I don’t have any unattractive women friends, for example.”

“None at all?” said Iain, with evident scepticism. I decided to give it a bit more consideration - after all, this wasn’t a time for rash and unsupported arguments. There were important matters of sexual politics to discuss, and it deserved a measured and temperate response.

“All right, I suppose I’ve got a few rough friends. There’s one, for example, who I wouldn’t sleep with if my cock was on fire and her fanny was an ice bucket. But in those cases, they must fancy me instead: my theory still holds.”

“This theory of yours is total bollocks.” said Gemma.

“All right, you might not fancy them per se, but there’s always some kind of spark of attraction. Back me up here, Iain.”

Even my conversational use of Latin hadn’t worked; Iain was showing no interest whatsoever in getting dragged into the conversation, which I thought was rather disappointing of him. He certainly behaved very differently during the laddish chats which Clare and Gemma weren’t privy to. So much for male solidarity.

”No, I really don’t think so.”

“Oh come off it Iain, look at your friend Catriona. You definitely fancy her. Come to think of it, do you have any unattractive lady friends?”

Catriona and Iain went to university together and she swings by his desk about twice a day. Whenever she does Iain perks up considerably - but every time we point this out he then says “but she’s just a friend” in that hollow way which seems mainly designed to convince himself rather than us. It doesn’t even achieve that, if appearances are anything to go by.

“Well, I suppose I have one. But I definitely don’t fancy her.”

“And has she ever fancied you?”

Iain stopped, thought for a moment, looked peeved.

”Well, technically yes. But both times I slept with her were a mistake.”

“See!” I said, triumphant, “It completely proves my theory. Besides, all men do this. When we meet a woman for the first time we instinctively give them a mark out of ten, and if it’s good we also think about what they’d be like in the sack. Don’t we, Iain?”

Iain took in exactly what I was saying and decided he wanted absolutely nothing to do with it.

“Sorry, you’re on your own with this one.”

“So does that mean you’ve given Clare a mark out of ten? And me?” said Gemma, with all the trepidation of someone asking a question with no desire at all to hear the answer.

“Definitely. In fact Gemma, do you remember the day you came in for your interview?”

I remember it like it was yesterday. Gemma had been several years younger, very smartly dressed and keen to impress. My then boss walked her through the office and took her into the small glass room next to our desks and Phil and I desperately craned our necks, trying to work out if she was attractive. We were thwarted, because she was sitting with her back to us, but it didn’t stop us trying. Eventually we got a half decent look when she was on her way out, so we had to settle for that.

“Yes, of course I do.”

“Well there you go, we all gave you a mark out of ten that day. Iain would have too, if he hadn’t been out of the office that afternoon, he’s just too chicken to admit it.”

“You’ve gone wrong.” said Iain. “Men just don’t do this. Think about what you’re saying! I dread to think how your mind works. Does that mean you’ve given my wife a mark out of ten?”

I suddenly had an image of this conversation going horribly wrong, so it was time to make another convenient revision to my theory.

”Okay, obviously there are some exceptions. Your in-laws, for example, or family. But apart from that they’re all fair game.”

“Why do you always bring this up?” said Gemma.

“You just don’t like it because loads of your male friends fancy you and you’re in denial about it. Take Colin, for example.”

Colin was a friend of Gemma’s who I always thought had a bit of a thing for her. They hadn’t got together, mainly because of Gemma’s excellent boyfriend Dave, but knowing how men worked I still wouldn’t rule out Gemma having a prominent position in Colin’s wank bank.

“What about Colin?”

“Well come on, if you were single – let’s say Dave had some kind of tragic accident.”

“You can’t say that!” said Clare. “That’s an awful thing to say.”

“True, I’m sorry, I apologise. Say Dave was mysteriously in a coma – from which he would eventually recover, absolutely no harm done - and unable to attend to your sexual needs, are you really telling me Colin wouldn’t come round and offer you a shoulder to cry on?”

I knew this was just getting worse and worse, but I couldn’t seem to help myself. I was on a kamikaze mission, determined to keep talking until my friends had run out of patience, and I had run out of friends.

“That’s disgusting.” said Gemma. “Colin’s got a girlfriend and I’m very happy with Dave.”

“Yeah, but if you were both single you’d be rutting like stags and we both know it.”

Silence filled the space between the four of us, and even I realised how much preferable it was to the sounds I had been making. It was time to head for our desks and face the afternoon. I had a feeling I had achieved the almost impossible; making my friends glad to be going back to work.

One thing was rankling with me though: I was convinced that Iain had let me down. Even though men aren’t supposed to give away the inner workings of the masculine mind – you might as well just show women the secret handshake and be done with it – I still thought he might have backed me up a little. I couldn’t resist an opportunity to put my theory to the test.

“Phil, can you settle an argument between me and Iain?”

“Yeah. What is it?”

“I say that men always give women a mark out of ten when we meet them for the first time, Iain says they don’t. What do you reckon?”

Phil paused, mulling it over, then he chuckled.

“It’s not that complicated mate, it’s a mark out of one. You decide whether you’d do them or not, that’s all there is to it. I mean, sometimes it takes longer than others – if you look at a pensioner you can work it out in a split second, in some cases you need to give it a bit more thought, but it never takes long. Iain definitely does it too.”

“I do not!”

”Yeah right, mate.” said Phil. “I’ve got one word to say to you: Catriona.”

“Oh fuck off.”

Revenge was sweet, and as we all headed down the corridor to make the first coffee of the afternoon I took great delight in telling Clare that Phil had proved my theory right.

“Oh, and Iain? I’ve had a call from the National Union of Men. They’ll be coming round to your house at half-six tonight in a pick-up truck to collect your testicles. Trust me, you won’t be giving anything a mark out of ten after that.”

100 Words competition results

2011-03-31T12:06:00.005+01:00

I'm not sure I quite knew what I was letting myself in for when I agreed to help judge the recent 100 Words competition over at Her Melness Speaks. It was bloody difficult.

We got nearly thirty entries running the full gamut from letters about lost love, playful missives about a woman's relationship with her boobs or ones railing against the injustices of an unkind gene pool. Someone even managed to use 100 words to cover both Professor Brian Cox and fart gags, which takes some doing and probably deserves an award in its own right. There were also a few crackers which tragically crept just over the prescribed word count and couldn't qualify for the competition. That's 100 words for you; until you try it you don't realise just how little it is, and then when somebody does it well you realise just how much space it can be.

Getting it down to a shortlist of ten was hard work but sifting through a fine and varied array of stories to pick our winner and runners-up was every bit as difficult again. So, without banging on any longer it gives me great pleasure to announce the stories which finished in the podium positions. Oh, and just to stress (for rabid word counters like me), the salutation and sign-off don't count towards the 100 Words.

WINNER: Paul Kendrick, Wafers

Dear sympathetic nun,

A secular child at Catholic school; teased for being different. Too "unclean" to partake of the host during mass. "Demonic", perhaps (if catcalls can be relied upon). A hellish situation for a teaching assistant's first day, certainly.

Not for you.

You gave me a magic box: currency, a teetering pile of unconsecrated communion wafers to eat at break. "To shut them up," you said, with an unexpectedly impish spark, grinning... Those brittle discs carried more kudos than Quavers, I can tell you.

A soothing drop of compassion on the rough, cracked memories of my schooldays, even now eighteen years forward.

Better at remembering acts of kindness than I am names

* * *

1ST RUNNER UP: Travis Sloat, A Letter To My Wife

Dear Alicia,

The emptiness drives you mad, out of your senses with jealousy, anger, and rage. The emptiness clouds your mind, makes you bitter, makes you hate others for their gifts. It's something you've always wanted, yet you've been denied for eight years now. I want it too, for different reasons. I want it for you. I want you to be able to share the massive amount of love you've shown me over the years. However, the emptiness still exists, prominent in your mind, a barb that pierces your heart every time someone else gets to say, "I'm pregnant." I love you.

Yours forever, Travis

* * *

2ND RUNNER UP: Katy Scrogin, Contrition

Dear Soren,

A dozen years ago, floating on a confident wave of shared secrets and earnest discussions, you called to ask me for an official date. A dozen years ago, I tried to hid my freak-out, but you knew. Although I always say I have no regrets in life, that instance of caving to still-childish fears shows me up as a liar. I miss our friendship, and your goodness, and the lapsed possibility of sharing some of my life with you. I wish you joy and peace and unending abundance of the eagerness I spurned so flippantly. I've missed you ever since.

Katy

Congratulations to everybody who took part. I hope you like them.

Parallel universe

2011-03-28T18:45:00.006+01:00

[Blue Italics Of Housekeeping: The ten shortlisted entries in the 100 Words competition I am helping to judge have just been announced. Check it out HERE. Congratulations to all the finalists, we now have a tricky job ahead of us narrowing it down to the eventual winner.]

My working day doesn’t really start until 9 o’clock. The alarm goes off, always too soon, always an unpleasant surprise, and then I grab another ten minutes of precious semi-consciousness, only slightly disturbed by the gentle rushing noise of the shower. Then, in a relay race, my wife returns to bed for ten more minutes of warmth and comfort while I traipse into the bathroom to try and wake myself up. By twenty past eight I am out of the flat, headphones firmly in place, making a half-hearted attempt at facing the world.

It is at least a comforting world without too many variables in it. I always see the same people drifting past me as I make my way to the bus stop. The crowds of schoolgirls, propelled by their impregnable self-confidence. The very large lady in a tent of chenille, walking slowly, as if on the verge of falling over at any minute. The man who was electrifying as Petruchio in an amateur performance of The Taming Of The Shrew a couple of years ago but, off duty, looks somewhat shrewish himself. That last one always particularly disappoints me.

Then of course there’s my throng of disaffected fellow passengers at the bus stop, reading the Metro or leafing through paperbacks, clutching rucksacks and coffee cups and, in Mikey’s case, the electronic cigarette he seems to have become so attached to. Sometimes the pretty Swedish blonde with the big nose is there, her spring wardrobe matching her yellow patent handbag, a flash of bright colour opposite the deep red Victorian bricks, urging the summer to hurry up.

Friday, though – well, Friday was different. On Friday, I experienced a parallel universe.

Forced into an 8.30 meeting I couldn’t talk my way out of, everything started thirty minutes earlier. It was me, not my wife, sent hurtling from the cosy paradise of bed. Not only that, but I had to get dressed in silence without the lights on, stepping out of the front door with nobody to kiss me goodbye. The streets, already bright with the morning sun, seemed empty as I picked my way through town. Everyone I would normally see was just leaving their house or getting on their train and this was an altogether different cast of characters. If I lived in another part of town, or had another kind of work ethic, these might have been my regulars instead.

When I got to the bus stop, it was much the same story. The drab gathering of men and women there were keen, like the ones who turn up at a gig hours before it starts so they can stand at the front, endure the support acts, and grab the set list at the end without elbowing people out of the way. I shifted nervously from toe to toe, aware that I was sharing a coach with an alien species; people who liked their jobs thirty minutes more than I did. Some of them gave me a look which might have been judgment, but was probably just a blank lack of recognition.

If I’d been on the half eight bus, this would have been a prime opportunity to say Don’t you know who I am?. But I wasn’t, I was on the eight o’clock bus, and so the words were magically rearranged into You don’t know who I am - and they stayed in my head, along with everything else. One of the passengers tapped relentlessly on his laptop, putting me to shame as I gazed into the middle distance and contemplated falling back to sleep. Sleep didn’t come, but the office – early on a Friday, the motorway only dotted with traffic – did. It came far too soon for my liking.

Reaching my desk and hanging my coat – badly chosen, far too heavy for a warm spring morning – on the plastic stand, I realised that my early arrival at work had made this a parallel universe for other people too. Gemma glanced up from her screen, saw me, looked back at her work and then, a split second later, had to look again. She seemed baffled, which made a pleasant change from the expression of diffident boredom which characterised most of our recent conversations. Sarah, who had probably already been in the office for more than an hour, stuck her tongue out at me on her way to the kitchen. “Decided to do a full day’s work today, have we?”

Heading for the adjoining office for my meeting, the lack of people was even more telling. The site is sometimes described as a campus, a lazy way of describing a few buildings with green space between them but one which, for me, conjures up different images; loafing on a bench pretending to catch up university work on the summer holidays, sneaking into the Student Union bar in my early twenties pretending that I was still young enough to belong there. There was an awful lot of pretence and pretentiousness, back then at least and maybe still now. The sun was uncommonly bright, illuminating even more clearly that there was nobody around. The scene was like a town in the Wild West thirty seconds before the bad guys turn up.

At the side of the building was a pile of huge plastic sacks, each one full of shredded paper. I wasn’t sure if that was what happened to all ideas and plans, just how many scrapped projects and how much wasted rhetoric was stuffed into those sagging transparent coffins. They were brighter than I thought they would be – not just beiges and whites but reds and deep blues, like streamers. They looked like they shouldn’t be there, like someone should be up on the roof shaking the sacks so they drifted down as people trudged into reception, an impromptu parade to try and celebrate the start of the day.

The high noon metaphor was repeated as I strolled through the car park. There, slap bang in the middle of the tarmac was a mallard, facing down an oncoming Saab estate. The surface of the road shimmered in the heat, and the Saab slowed down and stopped in front of the squat shape blocking its way. The duck had obviously wandered over from the nearby lake and decided to explore, and there was something about how it stood there, splay-footed and resolute, that said it was in no hurry to go anywhere. I admired its single-mindedness, even as I tried to work out whether it was even possible to play chicken with a duck. The Saab gave up and sloped off to squeeze its elongated body into another less convenient parking space and the moment it did so the duck walked away, its work completed. It had done a much better job of sticking it to the man in a single moment than I had in the last seven years.

The other building looked even more derelict and once inside, it took a full ten minutes of loitering in rooms, wandering corridors, sending texts and leaving voicemails to discover that I had been stood up and my meeting wasn’t happening. Outside and blinking in the sun again, I saw a battered metal bucket stood in front of the wall full of squashed cigarette packets and dog ends. It was evidence that only the day before people had congregated here to smoke and complain about their days; even though it was years since I had smoked you never lose an eye for those kinds of spots, and every office has one. In a parallel universe I would have lit up at that point, in fact I probably would have had a cigarette before going in, but fortunately that was a reality I could not properly imagine.

So instead I retraced my steps, zipping across the shadows, all the while thinking that the morning so far had been a complete waste of time. It would be unless I could somehow write about it, anyway, but that seemed unlikely; after all, nothing had really happened.

Glasses

2011-03-24T18:30:00.003Z

Like a lot of things in my life, chocolate was the catalyst. That was the way that I found out I wasn’t the same as everybody else. I must have been about five years old, in a newsagent with my mother, and because I’d been good I was allowed a chocolate bar as a treat. That in itself would make the story noteworthy, as I was a troublesome child in general: always asking questions, full of opinions, horribly precocious. When I see children like that, chirping away on tube trains or acting up in restaurants, half of me finds them appalling and half of me feels oddly tender. I hope they have an easier journey to being a grown up than I have. I hope they know better than to read fantasy novels in a caravan on holiday rather than going out and exploring. I hope they make friends, talk to girls and don’t show off quite so much because really, nobody is impressed and one day they won’t be either.

“What bar would you like?” said my mother.

“That one.” I said, pointing in the direction of one of the packets on the counter, a paper wrapping in a primary colour with a cheerful explosion of letters on it. My mother wasn’t happy with that answer though, and this was back in the days when if my mother wasn’t happy there was probably a valid reason for it. Childhood is much more simple like that.

“What’s the name?”

I peered into the distance – except it really wasn’t much of a distance – and tried to make it out. I was a keen reader already by then, even if I hadn’t made huge inroads into the copy of The Odyssey I had won at chess club, and this shouldn’t have been difficult.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell.”

So it was very early in my life that I realised I was destined to spend it behind a pair of screens. My first glasses were the only sort of glasses you got back in the late seventies, aviator style with a thick plastic nosepiece. This was before fancy ultra-thin lenses, too, which is part of the reason why being bespectacled was such an awful tyranny in those days. It was all functional, and about as fashionable as a hearing aid or a leg brace. The exception – tragically – were the heavy tortoiseshell framed glasses you got free with the National Health Service. I wish I’d kept mine; they’d be all the rage today.

For better and for worse, glasses changed my life. I’ve often wondered about the link between needing glasses and your personality. Why are there so few nerds with twenty-twenty vision? Why so few shortsighted sports legends? Do we turn out that way because we wear glasses, or are the two things just an unhappy coincidence? Is there something about myopia we don’t yet completely understand that naturally draws the eyes to comics, liner notes on obscure records or the delights of the Dungeons & Dragons Player’s Handbook? Or is it, like so many things in my life, just a convenient excuse for choices I made that didn’t work out quite how I wanted them to?

It certainly felt, at school at least, like the glasses wearers were the victims of natural deselection, especially during what were cruelly described as physical education lessons. They were an education for me, in that I learned that I didn’t want to do anything physical if I could possibly avoid it. The worst thing was that I could completely understand being so far down the picking order when the captains were choosing sides; after all, who would want to get into a scrum with somebody who can’t really see anything? During football lessons as the popular kids picked their friends I would stand there on the centre circle with the dwindling band of rejects until there were only about half a dozen of us left, human lost property nobody wanted to claim. Do I belong with this lot? I would think in horror, looking around me, Is this my tribe? Of course, they thought exactly the same thing. Why wouldn’t they? It's like the myth that ugly people are attracted to other ugly people, and nobody believes that.

As it happens, I was never picked last for football, which means that I was usually on the winning side. The last person to get picked was Matthew Smith, a puny kid who made me look like a beefcake. He didn’t wear glasses, but from his coordination you would have guessed that he used to own a very thick pair before losing them in a playground scuffle with somebody stronger than him. A paraplegic or somebody with ME, perhaps. He was always picked last and always given the least glamorous job of all, stuck in goal. The popular kids didn’t really care who won, as long as they got to score plenty of goals and play the hero, so it was an arrangement that suited everyone. My misfit friends and I were put in defence, where our job was to part like the Red Sea every time a specimen of physical perfection bore down on us. It played to our strengths and anyway, half the time we weren’t even paying attention.

Our school playing fields were right next to the train line, running from Paddington into Reading. At school we were taught about the feats of Brunel and his army of navvies, hacking huge passages through the hills to open up his great network, and we were taken to see Sonning Cutting and the nearby station at Twyford in a desperate attempt to bring the past to life. The train line ran along the very edge of our suburban town, its main contribution to modern life being that the bridge furthest from the tracks below was known as “Suicide Bridge”. One time as a kid my brother and I wandered over the fence by Suicide Bridge and picked our way delicately down the slope to the side of the rails, led astray by my grandfather. On his command we tossed a two pence piece onto the tracks as an express train zoomed past, and when we picked it up it was warped, smooth and flattened like a Dali creation. It’s one of the only times I remember having fun with my grandfather, and when we got home my mother told us all off.

The reason why playing on the opposite team to Matthew Smith was a ticket to victory had nothing to do with his slight stature, but something even more surreal. He was a keen trainspotter. And so every time a train approached, on its way into town or off to the capital, he would run - at a speed he could never even approach when it was strictly necessary, during athletics for example - out of the goalmouth and to the wire fence at the edge of the playing fields. Once there, he would watch bug-eyed as the carriages clattered by, desperately trying to memorise the number of the train for later on, when it could be deposited in the notebook that saw more attention than his homework. As a goalkeeper he was a liability, but as a performance artist he couldn’t be faulted, and it was an early reminder that there are worse handicaps in life than being shortsighted.

In any case, the glasses seemed to be the perfect accessory to round off some of those awful childhood photos. There I am in my cub scout uniform, holding a trophy and gurning with something that might be pride. In another one I am scowling over a chessboard, hair combed brutally into meek submission. I was a very serious child; kids with glasses often are. My theory is that the pressure of keeping those heavy frames and thick glass lenses perched on your face makes it much easier to frown than to relax. If you could reach into those photographs and take the glasses off the picture would no longer make sense, because nobody with twenty-twenty vision would be caught dead doing those things. It’s a bit like covering the cigarette in the picture of the Hollywood idol and spotting what difference it makes.

It's taken me many years to be at peace with having four eyes. Some of it is about the way glasses have changed - from the popularity of tiny John Lennon spectacles in the sixth form to the kind of rimless frames I wear now, which would have been unimaginable then. There have been some missteps along the way - the rectangular television-shaped lenses I wore when I first went to university, or a rather natty set of plastic frames my friend Dave told me "make you look like a hairdresser". Thinner lenses have helped, too, so I don't have to peer through fishbowls at the end of my nose.

But really I think what changed is more about being comfortable in my own skin now and recognising that there's no longer any shame in it. Oddly enough, the best way of summing it up that I ever heard came from my friend Daniel. He was an inveterate spectacles wearer, the sort that gave us all a bad name, and many years later he grew a beard (he looked a bit like Gerry Adams, which is not a look anyone aims for) and gave all beard wearers a bad name too. He probably even gave people called Daniel a bad name, and a lot of them don’t need any help with that. But he said something about glasses that has always stuck with me. “It’s great being shortsighted. Because any time I like I can take my glasses off and the world looks just like an Impressionist painting.” I like that, but not because it sums up what needing glasses is like, or because only somebody who wears glasses would say it. That last one is just stating the obvious. No, I think like it because I have a sneaking feeling that only somebody who needs glasses would think that way at all.

In with the new

2011-03-21T21:53:00.003Z

It's odd how periods of our life come to be defined by physical possessions.

My iPod finally gave up the ghost last weekend, the thick white brick that, for a while at least, was access to every record I ever owned. It was until I bought more records, anyway, and then - as often happens with gadgets - it started to look physically bigger and bigger as its memory got smaller and smaller. About two years ago I thought it had died, appropriately enough on New Year's Eve, but it was just a minor collapse. Eventually the apple logo glowed feebly again and it chugged back into life, but it was never the same after that. It would run out of juice after seemingly no time at all while I was out on walks, like an elderly and much-loved pet. The problem is that it was so big and capable that I couldn’t bear to let it go. Besides, it was engraved on the back with my name and the words "Music Snob" underneath, and I figured that counted for something.

I know this is a pretentious thing to say, but by the time I had to put it down it was more than just a music player to me. It was a link to the recent past, too; I bought it around six years ago, not long after getting married, just after I moved into this flat. It kept me company throughout countless journeys to work, bus and train trips all over the country, sessions at the ironing board, even slow lazy afternoons on a sun lounger on holiday. It provided the soundtrack to hundreds of tiny moments that, taken together, made up a huge segment of my life; the era of mortgage, marriage and happiness.

One time I went to Bournemouth for my friend Glenn's stag weekend, an event I couldn't have been much less genetically suited to without different chromosomes. The Friday night was spent sitting in a very townie bar listening to the sort of songs which a crowd that wasn’t mine might have described as crowd pleasers. All around me orange women weaved past in varying degrees of intoxication and undress carrying giant test-tube shaped glasses full of luminous cocktails. I found myself wondering what my stag weekend might have been like, if I’d had one instead of eloping, and decided it would probably have involved a wine tasting and a seven course menu. This was very similar in some respects, except that instead it offered all the WKD Blue you could stomach and a branch of KFC which appeared to stay open until three in the morning.

Back at our accommodation, I was sharing a room with the groom and his brother. This was in many ways a great honour, but the facilities were best described as basic. I had the saggy single bed by the window, leaving them to battle over a small double bed and a duvet which was smaller still (one of them shivered in t-shirt and pants on the former, the other got a bad back sleeping on the floor covered by the latter, I can’t remember who did which). I didn’t realise the real benefit of my sleeping arrangements - being stationed underneath the open window - until the following night, when the horrifying consequences of the groom’s brother eating his own body weight in curry became brutally clear.

I drew the line, though, at the events planned for the following day. There are certain rules about what you must do, it seems, on a stag weekend. Riotous drinking, naturally, and probably some kind of curry. A nightclub of some description. Either a strip bar or a casino or, if you’re feeling really devil-may-care, both. But then during the day there have to be some kind of manly activities to keep the energy levels high, and I’m afraid a nice tour round a local vineyard wasn’t going to cut it for my fellow celebrants. They were going paintballing.

I feigned a foot injury to get out of it, proving in the process that not only wasn’t I man enough to go paintballing but I wasn’t even man enough to grow a pair and tell them I didn’t want to go paintballing. I remember waving them goodbye as they got into cars and headed off to don camouflage gear, bond and shoot one another to primary coloured smithereens, and then I went back to my room (at that stage clear of the flatulent fug that was to envelop it later that night) to make my plans for the day ahead. I had Bournemouth to myself, for the next six hours or so at least.

As I walked away from the grubby bed and breakfast and through the residential streets, in search of the seafront, I headed through a park - climbing frames naked and sad, roundabouts and swings inert and forlorn - and Rainy Night House by Joni Mitchell struck up in my headphones. I think it might be my favourite song of hers: glorious, beautiful and enigmatic. I’m not even sure the song is about much at all, but it does have a terrific line in it where she sings ‘You sat up all the night and watched me, to see, who in the world I might be’ which has always summed up completely for me that sense of wonder when you’re with someone new, and where there is far more about them which you don’t know than that which you do. It seems to capture that wonderful point at the beginning when you have glimpsed the cover, picked up the book and are starting that first chapter. But now I will always associate that song not only with that feeling, but also with that park, and my solitary walk into the centre of a town I had never really planned to visit.

I spent the morning, if my memory serves, loafing in the gardens watching the teenagers and pensioners go by. Bournemouth, it turned out, was a city where, unless you were on a stag or hen weekend you seemed to age overnight from the former to the latter. I half-heartedly did some shopping. I swapped texts with my wife, who was at the hen do (they were in Alton Towers, I had tried to get permission to be treated as an honorary girl for the weekend, without success). I explored until I realised - and it didn’t take long - that there really wasn’t much to explore. Despite the very attractive green spaces, it was a strangely unlovely town with very little going on before nightfall. There was a miniature golf course which I briefly considered as an option, but I didn’t have the courage to play on my own. After all, little looks more paedophilic than a stubbly thirtysomething man going round a miniature golf course unaccompanied.

Later on, I sat on a bench with a milkshake and had a long phone conversation with my friend Anna about why the man in her Frankfurt office wouldn’t leave his girlfriend for her, which consisted of six instalments of a single ten minute segment of conversation, on a continuous loop, analysing the same five minutes of non-exchanges between the two of them. I didn’t have the patience or the persistence to just explain that he was having his cake and eating it, and even if I had she just would have carried on as if I hadn’t said anything. So I just slurped and ummed and aahed, and wondered whether paintballing might have been the soft option.

Later still, my wife’s friend Sally, who lived nearby, took pity on me and came to pick me up in her insane jeep that looked like a toy car. It rattled me all the way to an unfashionable suburban carvery where I sat in the sun drinking orange juice and lemonade and enjoying talking in person to someone with ovaries and most of her marbles. And of course, far later still came the delights of being reunited with the rest of the stags, boasting about their bruises in that macho way where it’s disguised as a complaint, followed by the horrors of all the gyrating Eastern European blonde skeletons in Spearmint Rhino, the place you go for no other reason than because it’s the place you go.

But that’s not really what I remember about Bournemouth. If you asked me to sum up Bournemouth, and you only gave me a split second to answer, I would tell you without hesitation about Joni Mitchell’s perfect voice as I drifted past that playground, or maybe Brand New Friend by Lloyd Cole and the Commotions playing as I wandered through the once-grand arcades, not entirely convinced of the appeal of my own company. My iPod was responsible for that.

My new one is sleek, beautiful and black. It has a gorgeous screen, no scuffs or marks. My name isn’t engraved on the back. It has been trying ever so hard, randomly picking happy songs when I need them most and unearthing old favourites I haven’t listened to in ages. I still believe that random play is nothing of the kind but simply the choice of the genie that lives in these boxes, and my new genie is keen to please. But it’s not the same. And I say that knowing perfectly well that, all things being equal, I am likely to be speaking in equally glowing terms about this iPod six years from now.

Often these endings and new beginnings come in phases, and another era ended this week when our new sofa was due to arrive. The outgoing sofa was one of the very first pieces of furniture we bought as a couple, for our first home together, the second floor flat overlooking the river. We both loved it the moment we saw it, a grey felt loop on legs, simplicity itself. Because of my wife’s background, she loved it just that little bit more when she found out it was reduced - a value I’ve come to share as my in-laws have, over the last seven years, stopped being somebody else’s family and have completely become mine. I still remember her going up to the shop assistant, tongue firmly in cheek, and asking “Is there any movement on the price?” This was probably the raciest thing anybody had said in the Reading branch of John Lewis for decades, but it worked, and when we snuggled up on it on its first night in our first flat everything felt as if it had fallen exactly into place.

I’m still rather attached to it - even if it’s not quite as plush as it was that day, and it’s not quite long enough to stretch out on your own on a sick day. I love it even if, increasingly, we don’t snuggle up together but one of us retreats instead to the chair by the window to tap away in peace and quiet. I remember it as the first concrete evidence of our commitment to a life together, long before we bought a new bed, and wardrobes, and hung pictures and blinds, painted and re-carpeted and hunched swearing over endless mysterious piles of flat-packed particleboard. Dozens of people have sat on it - some I still see, some I like and miss, some who dropped me and some it just didn’t work out with. And somehow, the way objects do, it absorbed all of those events, changes and personalities and became more than the sum of them. But all good things come to an end, and we decided we needed something bigger, something new.

This week we were both at home on Wednesday, her to await the arrival of the new sofa and me for another trip to the hospital for another tick in a long checklist all doctors seem to use when declaring me beyond the reaches of conventional treatment. Lifting the sofa onto its front we unscrewed its tiny feet and Kelly labelled them underneath with a marker pen.

“The back ones are slightly longer, you see.” said Kelly. “Do you remember? When we first moved in, we had them in the wrong places and we couldn’t understand why it kept wobbling.”

“God, no, I had forgotten that.”

“And you were convinced that this living room was the same size as the one in the old flat.”

“Yeah, yeah, I remember.” I smiled. Kelly never lets me forget being wrong about that. “And this room is much bigger and when we got our wobbly sofa into the living room I couldn’t believe how much more space we had.”

I remember that as clearly as if it was yesterday. My friend Glenn - he of the stag weekend - was off that day and he helped us haul all our stuff the short distance from the old flat to the new. I remember us carrying the sofa up the stairs, round all the sharp and treacherous corners, and plonking it on the brand new carpet, facing the empty alcove where we already knew the television would wind up living. The room was huger than I’d remembered, all right; so much space, with nothing in it, and now everywhere you look there are things we’ve bought along the way. I wonder if I will miss any of them quite this much.

“I’m going to miss this sofa, you know?”

“I know, but the new one is going to be lush. Come on, help me move this out of the way so we’ve got the space for when the delivery men arrive.”

Struggling between us, we moved it over to an empty space by the doorway to the kitchen and looked at the things we’d been storing underneath it for ages, out of sight and out of mind. Her laptop, my laptop, an art set she got for Christmas many years ago but had lacked the discipline or time to use. One era ends, another era begins, I thought to myself, and then I had to smile. There on that virgin patch of floor, glimmering in the sunlight, were what must have been half a dozen white feathers.