fictional states

a beautiful goal

2008-04-18T14:04:00.008Z

I am at my mother’s in rural France. She has been ill. I am here to look after her. She is at the stage of her convalescence where she is not well enough to move, but is well enough to express opinions. We are discussing tonight’s TV. I have discovered that the second-leg of the Champions League quarter-final between Arsenal and Liverpool is being shown here. I am delighted: I had feared the urgent summons to my mother’s sickbed might mean missing the match. It is a crucial match. I ask my mother if she would mind me watching the football.

Of course not, she protests. There’s nothing else on. Except, she mentions quickly, a Claude Chabrol film. On the other side. At the same time.

Later that evening, we are watching the football. I should really have suggested that we watch the Claude Chabrol film. Ordinarily, I would have been very happy to watch the Claude Chabrol film. But I am still angry at having had to suspend my life in London – unnecessarily, as I see it – to come to rural France to look after my mother. I am angry with my father who refused to cut short a drinking jag in London to come and care for her. I am angry with my mother for not taking up the kind offers from neighbours which would have obviated the need for me to cancel everything and come here. I am angry with myself for cancelling everything and coming here. And I really want to watch the football. To distract my mother from the fact that we are not watching the Claude Chabrol film, and to compensate for the guilt I feel, I take care to share the experience with my mother, to involve her in the action, to explain the significance of the match given the result of the previous leg, and Arsenal’s recent poor performance in the Premiership. I talk about the players: how Adebayor seems to have lost form since cutting his hair, how I hate Gallas for his petulance and divaish behaviour which does not seem to be substantiated by divaish flair on the pitch and how Gilberto made the better captain – better even, than Henry, himself a diva but one whose right to act so could not be denied – and how I think Gilberto looks like a noble kind of dog.

My mother decides she is going to support Liverpool. She claps her hands with childlike delight and whoops gleefully whenever they score. Which they do. Often. We lose. I am clearly upset.

How did you get so interested in football? My mother asks. You never used to be.

Two years ago I experienced a period of depression. A rapid succession of emotionally demanding events, some of which I have written about on this blog, had left me hollow and exhausted. During this time, I experienced the typical symptoms of depression. I cried a lot. I felt weightless and adrift, and could see little point to anything. I became reclusive. I followed a regimented daily routine and would write out very detailed “To do” lists: 8.00am, Get Up. 8.05 am Brush Teeth. These periods of regimented existence would be alternated by bouts of wild and destructive drinking. There seemed little point in either mode of being. I feared going to bed and would stay up until 4 or 5 in the morning, trawling websites for effective and undetectable means of self-murder. I found a post on one site from a man who signed himself off as “Barry from Slough”. For a fee, he would assist in a client’s suicide then “dress the scene” to suggest a violent robbery, thereby sparing the deceased’s family the true facts of the death. I considered contacting Barry, until I thought that perhaps death by a violent intruder was possibly more traumatic for friends and relatives to consider than the fact that their friend or loved one had simply been too exhausted to continue with the business of living. I thought about swimming out to sea. Just swimming out as far as I could, but this seemed a lonely and frightening way to die. I wanted to be comfy. I considered doing it in the bathroom of a luxury hotel. I would write a note and pin it to the bathroom door. I would get the note translated into Polish, for the benefit of the chambermaid.

And then I discovered football.

I had often tagged along with P to watch games, and listened as he patiently explained (several times, in the case of the offside rule), the manoeuvres, the motives, of the players on the pitch, but I could never really care about the outcome in quite the way he seemed to. But now, suddenly, I could.

What had previously seemed a pointless past-time governed by arbitrary rules, valuing a specific set of skills which had no relevance to everyday life, suddenly made perfect sense to me. I found comfort in the statistics. I immersed myself in the dramas and the personalities. I mediated difficult emotions – rage and fear and frustration – through the actions of the men on the pitch and gave myself up to the pure life-affirming joy of the beautifully scored goal.

I would go to the pub and sit alone with a pint and watch game after game, comforted by the connection I felt with a group of strangers who demanded nothing from me. This is my third season as an Arsenal fan. After a glorious start to the season, we end it, after some painful moments of cruelly raised - then crushed - hopes, with nothing.

But you get up. You start again, with hope.

the things that wouldn't last

2008-03-25T08:45:00.001Z

Outside it is snowing and the trees look like broken umbrellas and it’s that odd kind of light which looks old, somehow. And that is how I always think of the light in photographs – old – as though the light will never look that way again and that is why, here in the study I share with P, the walls are bare. I won’t have photos on the walls. I cannot think that the light will never look that way again, when I write.

D’s office wall is covered in photos of himself, his friends, family, travels. He keeps them there to remind himself of who he is, where he has come from. I would feel crowded out by them but D is a cameraman. He thinks in images. Without them he is lost.

There was a time when, feeling a little lost myself, I took to taking long walks with a borrowed camera. It didn’t matter that the resulting photos were disappointing. The motive was the seeing; the walking around and the seeing. I saw huge, spiked jackfruit in the market, a man in a wheelchair inside a van - his mobile workshop - fixing broken electrical goods, a black cab all smashed up, the underside of a tree – the leaves like washing on a line, a misplaced trolley in the park which seemed as though it were grazing. But I began to feel self-conscious with my apparatus and preferred instead to look at other people’s photographs than to take them myself. That is, until mobile phones came with mobile cameras, after which I took to taking photos constantly so that it became a kind of mania for me – photographing the things that wouldn’t last – the flowers D bought me in Tallinn and the breakfast he brought me in bed from the hotel buffet (I am a big fan of hotel buffet breakfasts – they are the height of civilization, they make me want to fall to my knees and say grace). And D being a cameraman, would also take photos most times, but sometimes, he would refuse to: I want to remember this, he’d say, putting his camera away.

And then after losing too many mobile phones and the photos I’d taken with them, and now no longer spending time with D, I seem to have lost this compulsion to photograph, and the beautiful little digital camera he bought me from Tokyo goes unused. At least it seems that way until I realise that to try to write in the way that I do is informed by as desperate an impulse to record, to frame, to remember.

a writer's writer

2008-03-13T15:53:00.005Z

There is a space between waking and sleeping when I sometimes feel myself falling into what Douglas Coupland referred to in his first novel, Generation X, as “disasterbation”. Urbandictionary.com offers two definitions of this neologism, the first referring to the voyeuristic thrill experienced on witnessing natural disasters; the second, unintentional physical injury sustained after dangerous pleasurable practices, not necessarily onanistic.

Might I stress that I refer here to Coupland’s definition, which, not having the book to hand I cannot quote verbatim, but as the word – a contraction of disaster and masturbation – suggests, relates to the practice of indulging one’s neuroses by letting the mind explore dark fears relating to the self or loved ones: imagining my dog, if were I to own one, being run over, for example, or my best friend P falling off his bike and being killed; this being the “disaster” part of the equation, with the “bation” bit relating to a healthy mind’s ability to self-heal with consolatory images.

So, in the case of my hypothetical dog, after the image of him laid flat in the road, he is immediately upright and alive, his back legs replaced by those mini-trolleys you see sometimes on maimed dogs and which make you long to know how they cope with running downhill. Or, in the case of P – no backwheel scenario redemption possible in this instance, this being, in my nightmare visions, the way he meets his end - the moment when I step out before a gathering of his friends and family and deliver, through barely held-back tears, the eulogy at his funeral.

This eulogy comprises a single quote discovered in a Joyce Carol Oates essay, Reading As a Writer: The Artist as Craftsman, about the notion of literary influence in writing; or, rather, the notion of seeking out literary influence, the practice of a kind of applied or active reading, of reading, as the essay title suggests, as a writer. The quote is taken from a letter by Chekhov to a friend in which he writes of Tolstoy’s illness:

“I dread Tolstoy’s death. If he died, a large vacuum would be formed in my life. In the first place, I never loved any human being as much as I do him. I am an unbeliever, but of all faiths I regard his as the nearest to me and one that suits me best. Second, when Tolstoy is part of literature, it is easy and agreeable to be a writer; even the knowledge that you have not accomplished and never will accomplish anything is not so terrible, for Tolstoy makes up for all of us. His activity justifies all the hopes and expectations that are pinned to letters…”

So much of my friendship with P is mediated through our reading and our writing; so much so that we often give each other gifts of nice metaphors or lovely phrases. And sometimes, we give each other books. This Christmas just past, I found a book in our local shop which seemed to me the perfect present: an anthology of essays by writers on their friendships with other writers.

I bought the book and wrapped it up and hid it in my room. But I am terrible at keeping secrets: shortly before we were to exchange gifts (his to me turned out to be a jumper from ebay with a hole under each arm), we were browsing together in this same shop when I pointed out a copy of this same book. Wouldn’t that make a lovely present for someone, I said. P sniffed disdainfully. He has a big nose: it was a big sniff.

I unwrapped the book and returned it to the shop which they exchanged for a book voucher. P exchanged the voucher for a book by a writer I don’t much care for.

And Chekhov, I am happy to say, did not outlive Tolstoy.

fictional estate

2007-07-11T10:12:00.000Z

I have just moved to London Fields. I like the idea of living in a place named after a Martin Amis novel.

But the area of London Fields where I live bears no resemblance to the place in Amis’s novel: there are no Keith Talents here – except for the gallery of the same name in the street next to mine – only Freya Glints in bug-eyed shades or Josh Brokers in Carhartt. It’s the habit of a writer to fictionalise what they encounter, or to rewrite it at least - to reshape experience into something coherent, significant even – a reflex which explains my activities on this blog. But this reflex is redundant when it seems as though everyone around me has already fictionalised themselves, given themselves a character, a story. I do this myself. As we step out into Broadway Market we are all as aware of this as we are of our privilege which we wear with self-conscious nonchalance, slouching on battered leather sofas in cafes with our feet up on the furniture, trying to read one another.

It’s different on the estate where I live, a council-owned low-rise red brick block. The sections of communal walkway look like strips from a reel of film, I think as I sit out on my balcony looking across at people passing or down on the stories unfolding below me.

The other day some boys were digging in a mud-filled ditch. They found a dog’s skull which they stuck on a stick and brandished, charging into a group of small girls who scattered, screaming.

I watch the mothers of these kids, prematurely aged, young grandmothers already, hanging out their washing. I watch their teenaged sons, hanging around, on the watch for something I can’t see. I make up stories too about this – about what I can’t see out here: the men. The teenage girls.

P tells me that the idea of theatre balconies arose from the desire of the rich and powerful to put themselves on display. They were not so interested in the action onstage: after all, balconies afford only a limited view.

But when P and I sit on our balcony and watch the activities of our neighbours, to whom we have ascribed whole life stories, characters, relationships, names, we watch as though invisible ourselves: it has never occurred to me until now that people might be watching us in turn, that people might have names for us. Everyone on the estate looks too involved in the daily business of living to bother looking up.

Yesterday, very early in the morning our household was woken by a loud, jubilant calling. A man stood out on his balcony, calling out to nobody we could see. He might have been calling to God. It was so early in the morning we guessed he’d been up all night. We could not understand what he was saying but it seemed to make a kind of sense to him because every now and then he would laugh. It was like music. We went out on the balcony to watch him and found that our neighbours were doing the same. No one was asking him to be quiet. Everyone was listening as though he were performing for us. But then a police car pulled up. Two policemen emerged, then disappeared into the block, reappearing on the balcony alongside the man. He was quiet then, almost meek. And then someone on a nearby balcony shouted out to the police, Hey you, white boy. I’m watching you. Don’t you bully him, I am watching you.

The man and his police escorts disappeared from the balcony.

Then an old man, immaculately dressed, leaning on a cane, hobbled into view. P joked that he looked like an extra, that he seemed to have emerged in response to a director calling out, “Cue old man with cane”.

After that, a police-van pulled up. The doors were opened. The inside of the van looked like a space for holding animals. And then the doors were shut and the ignition turned on. Perhaps, we thought, the man had quietened down so that there was no need for the van after all. It looked as though it were leaving. But no, it simply reversed and backed up close to the entrance of the block, making it easier to get the man inside, making it impossible for anyone watching from their balcony to see the man being put inside.

I write this blog in order to exert some control over the things that happen to me and around me, or at least to give myself the illusion of control.

But sometimes stories write themselves and I can only watch.

rope-a-dope

2007-06-02T14:59:00.001Z

I like boxing.

Each man I meet who professes to share my interest in boxing checks out my stance then corrects it, so that in fact they are not correcting me, so much as correcting the last man who corrected me. Then they invite me to spar. I hold back but they laugh and ask for my best shot but when I land a punch that draws blood they hold their noses chins lips and wave me away when I rush up with tissues, upset. I am not in control. I am not a good boxer.

P likes boxing. He likes watching it, reading about it. He doesn't like doing it. The other day P told me how he'd used Ali's tactics against Foreman in the Rumble in the Jungle as an allegory for his periodic bouts of depression when explaining it to someone who didn't understand. It's like this, P had said. Ali knew he was a dancer while Foreman was a slugger. Foreman expected Ali to dance around him. Ali told Foreman he'd dance around him. But he didn't. What he did instead was just lie on the ropes and keep taking Foreman's punches, taking them round after round until Foreman had exhausted himself. Then Ali hit back. He finished Foreman off. He did not dance. That's what it's like, P said, when you're depressed. Dodging won't help. You've got to just lie on the ropes and take it and take it and take it. Then you hit back. Then you finish it off. But first, you've got to take it. You don't dance.

idioglossia 2

2006-12-06T14:57:00.000Z

I've started reading W G Sebald's Austerlitz.

The narrator, arriving at Antwerp railway station after visiting the city zoo, wonders if the main hall of the station shouldn't include cages for wild animals, given the fact that so many zoos feature miniature railways.

A while ago P had been staying at mine. Early in the morning he heard me mumbling in my sleep. Apparently I mentioned something about the mini-trains which run through zoos, and how there's always one kid who looks slightly too big to be riding it and how I was always that kid.

flint knapping

2006-12-05T23:26:00.000Z

This was explained to me by an archaeologist.

It's the art of working flint to make tools. It's the beginning of technology, he said, It's the reason you're here now. To knap flint is a skill that requires you to think several moves ahead.

This same archaeologist beat me at chess.

Later, I ran my hands over him, his biceps, his well-turned sides. Hard and shaped like a piece of worked flint.

master of irritation

2006-09-20T15:21:00.000Z

At the Berlin Literary Festival I met up with someone I hadn't seen for a while. We'd fallen out. Enough time had passed. He was there to interview writers. He told me that one of them, in an interview, had described himself as "The Master of Irritation".

Is he Jewish? I asked.

I don't think so, he said. Why do you ask?

I told him how it seemed to me that words which come to us from other languages untranslated, those words which stubbornly resist translation, are the words which seem most closely to define the culture from which they originate. Take the French word, "bouquin", the slang for book, an affectionate term, and one for which I can find no English equivalent: you might say this word, and the fact that there is no English equivalent, expresses something about the fundamental difference between French and English attitudes towards books; one intimate, the other, not.

And then there's Yiddish. All the Yiddish words I've been taught by Jewish friends, words for which they were unable to find English equivalents, all relate to some experience of irritation or agitation. Or perhaps my Jewish friends are just grouchy.

I remember the first time this person, the interviewer, read something I'd written.

So what do you think, I'd asked him.

Well, he'd said. It doesn't annoy me.

rien de rien

2006-08-11T21:03:00.000Z

Someone misunderstood me. This was frustrating.

I was listening to Jacques Brel when I remembered that this person speaks no French and would not understand Brel's lyrics.

I wondered whether or not they would find that frustrating.

alone again or

2006-07-18T09:50:00.000Z

When I was a child I remember looking at an orange on the table, and thinking, How do I know that is just one orange? A single orange?

Somehow I felt it would have been easier to conceive of a single orange if there had been two oranges next to each other: you could look at one orange, and see it as an individual orange, because it was not the orange next to it. Then you could look at the other orange and understand that this pair of oranges was in fact two single oranges.

I went to a festival on my own this weekend. I didn't feel alone. Walking around the fields by myself I felt I was everyone and noone. I would have felt more alone in company, I think.

last words

2006-07-13T19:41:00.000Z

J painted a caravan for a fashion company a couple of months back to promote their latest collection. It was called "From the cradle to the grave". They wanted a baby on one side and a coffin on the other.

At M's funeral her older sister told some stories about M as a kid. How, as a toddler, she disappeared from the back garden for ages and reappeared with armfuls of flowers she had picked from the neighbour's garden. And how M was first presented to her older sister and cousins, lying in the middle of their grandmother's large double bed, this beautiful baby with a shock of dark hair, large dark eyes.

One evening, a month before that, J and I were sitting with M. J was watching television. I was chatting with M. What was he like as a baby, I asked. Beautiful, she said to my surprise: she was always one for the knee-jerk put-down. Everyone said how the drugs had made M not M anymore. She'd lost her sense of humour, they said. I do know everyone says that about their babies, she said, but honestly, he was just the most beautiful baby, with these gorgeous large dark eyes, and I said, He's still beautiful. M turned to him with an expression too sad to call a smile and just stared at him. I don't know if J was aware. He just carried on watching the television.

I can't write about M anymore. Or J.

you do it to yourself

2006-07-13T09:30:00.000Z

This is a line from a Radiohead song which would play in my head everytime I looked at M in her industrial humming hospital bed that took up the whole of the front room so that noone else could sit in there comfortably with her.

It's true. She did it to herself. And I knew she knew that because at no point did I ever hear her complain or express bitterness about her situation, though I once overheard her - J put up a curtain between the front room and the kitchen to give her privacy, but she seemed to think that because we couldn't see her once it was drawn, we couldn't hear her either - I once overheard her say to a visitor, "I keep thinking - naaaaah! This ain't happening."

And that's one of the things she must have been thinking about as she lay there, before the morphine dosage shot up from happy to high, to terrified and terrifying. I know too that while she could still think at all, she must have been thinking of the other things she did to herself in her unhappy life, the things she did to herself that fucked up her children's lives.

After 3 months of working up the courage to make his decision, J is leaving me. Yesterday J came up to pack his things. He told me about a funeral his friend attended recently. There is a tradition in the dead man's community that at funerals the names of close male friends or family members of the deceased are read out. The people named are then taken to a place where all the other mourners beat them up. J's friend left the funeral with four broken ribs. J said, "It's to hide the pain."

mouse arrest

2006-07-12T12:29:00.000Z

I am being held hostage to a mouse, a big mouse - I hope it is a mouse - which is sitting on the steps outside my flat. I can see it from my window. I have knocked on the window. It is ignoring me. I am playing Roni Size with the bass turned to "defibrillate" in the hope that the vibrations will drive it away: I have heard that a mouse's heart beats many times faster than a human's. Perhaps Roni Size's vibrations will send its little mousey heart into a spasm.

I have not left the house for three days. Luckily, I work from home.

I have enough food to last until Thursday, when a friend is dropping off her dog Jess for me to look after. Jess, a terrier, is mad for mice. But I am running out of cigarettes. Perhaps this is a sign I should give up.

At the wake for J's mum, who died of liver and lung cancer, we all stood in the garden, drinking and smoking. I ran out of cigarettes. When I left for the shop to get more, a shop I'd been to before, I got lost. I passed a man working on his car, bonnet up, head buried in engine. I called to him and as he turned to me I saw that he'd had a tracheotomy. When I asked for directions to the shop he had to press a little button on his voicebox before he could speak.
"That way." he said.

mink

2006-07-10T09:29:00.000Z

This is P's favourite insult. He uses it of sleazy people, people who are disgusting or dishonourable.

P and I have just come back from one of the Scottish slate islands where we went on a writing retreat. Two dogs took us on a tour of the island one hot day, through tangles of wildflowers, over rocks, past abandoned quarries which had been flooded. We swam in one like the ruins of a roman bath. Sheer rock flecked with gold, the water slate blue, smooth, calm, shadowy. But this would be a bleak place in winter - exposed to wild winds with the great heaps of slate piled everywhere grey and unforgiving with no sun to pick out the metallic sheen. And half the island's population gone since many of the cottages were only holiday homes. The ferryman told us that the trend for second homes meant cottages went for six figures now and many local people could not afford to live there. He was a happy man, the ferryman. Every night he'd go out to sea to catch his tea and dig up veg from his allotment to eat with it. He had lived his life on the island and would tell us about it as he ferried us back and forth. One time he pointed out a group of black and white birds with orange bills. Oystercatchers. They were under threat, he said: some years before there had been a mink farm on the island. Animal rights activists had freed the mink who now lived wild and ate the oystercatchers' eggs. We asked if anything was being done to preserve the oystercatcher population on the island but the ferryman said no, they were not a protected species and that gradually they would just die out.

ghost in the machine

2006-06-18T14:57:00.000Z

P shares a flat with a young cellist who is studying at the Royal Academy of Music. Sometimes, when I speak to P on the phone, I can hear the young cellist playing in the background. P told me about the phenomenon of the young cellist in performance, his intense physicality, how he plays so hard that sweat drips onto his cello and strips the varnish, how one time the young cellist (known for his amazing bow technique), actually snapped his bow halfway through a piece and he told me too about the faces he pulls - I almost can't bear to look, P said, at the young cellist when he's playing. He looks retarded.

Then P made me listen - through headphones - to some of the music the young cellist had introduced him to, pieces by Bach and Beethoven. What was shocking was the presence of the performer in these pieces: in one you could hear the hard slap of fingers on strings, in another the cellist breathing so heavily he was almost snorting and wheezing like a horse. And then P played me the Goldberg Variations recording where Glenn Gould could be heard humming to himself in accompaniment. But it was a strange, unearthly humming that did not seem to exist on the same plane as the music, unlike the noises from the other performers which were very much part of the playing: it sounded like those recordings made by ghosthunters, interference from the spirit world.

When M was dying everything we watched or read or heard carried unbearable significance - it was a lot like falling in love for the first time, except that the significance was ironic rather than sincere. Once, in the kitchen, I found a Jamie Oliver recipe-card from Sainsbury's encouraging us all to Try Something New Today when I was roasting a butternut squash: M was sick of mashed potato so I was going to mash this for her instead (afterwards remembering that squashes contain a compound which help to maintain lung health). What's that? she asked, tasting it. I told her. She had never eaten it before. It's delicious, she said, I love it.

She and I were alone in the house together. She was too tired to watch television or read but not tired enough to sleep. Some music, I thought. I remembered that Radio 3 were playing Bach's complete works over that Christmas period, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of his death. I knew M had most probably never heard any Bach before. I remembered her telling me, the first time I met her, how on a trip to Glasgow with her husband one time she had lain in bed fully awake while he snored drunk beside her, listening to a saxophone player in the street, telling me how haunting it was and how it was all she could do to stop herself from leaving the hotel and following the sound of the music. I thought about that and I thought about the butternut squash and I decided I could not bear to play her the Bach.

idioglossia

2006-03-27T09:54:00.000Z

A word I learnt recently. It's defined as "a condition in which words are so poorly articulated that speech is either unintelligible or appears to be a made-up language". This is a prosaic description or explanation of the secret language some twins develop as children.

When my best friend P had his wisdom teeth removed, they gave him very strong drugs. He needed someone to look after him so I accompanied him home from the dentist's. The cabbie was a regular on the extraction run and just smiled in a knowing way when P lolled about on the back seat, mumbling. But I understood what P had said: that we had first met as baby monkeys, in the tree.

out of fashion

2006-02-25T22:37:00.000Z

As a passionate, committed, enthusiastic and proselytising smoker I have often felt that I smoke like it's going out of fashion. Which of course it is.

J's mum M, who smoked 40 a day for the last 30 years, was diagnosed 3 months ago with lung cancer. Her brand, until she gave up (sometime around the first cancer tests), was Mayfair. Funny how the cheapest, tarriest, dirtiest fags always have the fanciest names. Funny how I keep saying to myself, *secondary* lung cancer.

The other day I learnt a new expression, "Cheyne Stoking". Funny how this sounds like "chain smoking". Cheyne Stoking, or Cheyne Stokes breathing, refers to a particular breathing pattern exhibited by some dying people. People dying of lung cancer, for example. Lung cancer probably caused by chain smoking. I was there when J's mum was cheyne stoking, hours before she died of lung cancer. It was horrific.

And still I feel that by giving up cigarettes I am depriving myself (see under "Stockholm Syndrome").

final resting place

2006-02-15T23:22:00.000Z

On the corner of Earlham Road, right by the Grapes Hill bridge, there used to be a building. It was demolished over several weeks but I can't remember what was there before the construction company hoarding went up, advertising the retirement flats that are going to be built there. If you stand on the bridge and look down, you can see behind the hoarding - the computer-generated mansion block and the smiling elderly couples - down to the site itself, which for now is only levelled earth marked off into regular sections.

Crossing the bridge today, I passed an old couple who were leaning over to have a look. They were pointing a lot and getting quite excited. Perhaps they had put down a deposit on one of the flats and were trying to guess where their home would be but for a second there, looking down at the rectangles of roped-off earth, it looked like they were picking out burial plots.

two syndromes

2006-02-10T11:22:00.000Z

Mowgli:

where abandoned infants are raised by packs of wolves or wild dogs.

Stockholm:

where hostages come to love and respect their captors (as with domestic dogs and their owners).

backblog

2006-02-05T12:32:00.000Z

I haven't updated this for a while, for reasons I'll explain later.

I haven't told people I'm keeping this blog and I'm not even sure anyone's reading it.

The whole exercise feels like a very public but secret transgression, like walking around with no underwear on.

little blue cups

2005-11-18T13:04:00.000Z

The other day, my friend Y came round for dinner. I don't see him so often, we live in different cities. But he was staying with P, a mutual friend, so they both came by.

I think very highly of Y. He lives a good life, his critical faculties are well developed, as is his sense of the absurd. He's smart, funny, politically engaged. He likes dancing as much as he likes books, food as much as art, people more than politics. He's got a sure grip on life though not such a strong one on the crockery when he's washing up. Somehow, though, I never think of Y as clumsy. I think of him as innately graceful. Even though I've seen him dancing.

P's the clumsy one.

My blue teaset sustained a high number of casualties when Y and his wife S, another good friend, were staying with me for a while. But it was always P's smashes that I noticed. P, who claims he is only ever clumsy in my presence (why, I don't know - I'm always warning him not to drop/trip over/spill things).

P had always promised to replace what he'd broken. It proved difficult as the set was a second-hand find but the other day, he presented me with six dear little coffee-cups the same shade of duck-egg blue. He'd found them in a charity shop. I thought I'd leave them at his until I could bring them home safely but when I got to mine and opened my bag, I'd found he'd put the cups in there. One of them had smashed.

I don't know who's responsible. I felt inexplicably sad when I saw that cup in pieces. P has said he will glue it together for me. But it won't be the same.

tattooing pretty girls

2005-11-17T15:37:00.001Z

My boyfriend is training to be a tattoo artist.

I don't have any tattoos. I've thought about having one but realise they are not for the indecisive. I try not to think of him tattooing pretty girls but he tells me most of his customers will be hairy-arsed bikers, mostly male.

Here's a story I wrote about tattoos a while back:

I have always been fascinated with tattoos, other people’s tattoos, the tattoos you find on a new lover the next morning when you have the time to explore, for example. I have considered getting one myself but find their permanence daunting. A tattoo is a personal logo, something unique to you, which expresses how you see yourself, all the values you stand for. Perhaps for some people these values will never change and a tattoo is a testament to this, like the man I once saw on the tube with a spider’s web tattooed across his face, his features forever enmeshed in the conviction of his youth. Or like Lily and her unfinished tattoo.

I worked with Lily when I was 18. She was a beautiful young woman, passionate about piercing and tattooing herself long before these were considered mainstream activities. These days, the desire to tattoo ourselves is not considered threatening or bizarre, but instead is an acceptable form of self-expression, the same customising impulse that drives us to personalise our ring-tones or our desktops. At the age of twenty Lily’s upper arms, her wrists and neck, were already encircled with delicate filigreed tattoos. But she was not going to stop there: Lily had ambitious plans for the stretch of milk-white canvas which extended from just below her right breast down to the top of her right thigh. She was going to get it tattooed with a design she had created herself.

After much searching she found someone willing to undertake the project. It was a complex design and would take several weeks to complete. On her first visit to the tattooist he drew onto her body in black felt-tip pen and took Polaroids so she could approve his execution of the design. Lily brought the Polaroids into work and showed them to us at lunchtime, headless shots of her in her underwear, the tattooist’s drawing snaking across the right side of her body, licking her midriff like black inky flames. After each visit to the tattoist Lily would come into work and give us sneak previews of the tattoo’s progress. And then, one day, five weeks into the project, she announced that she was looking for another tattooist. When asked why, she pulled out some papers and began to read aloud: ‘Oh my darling child…’ It seemed the tattoist, like most men who met her, thought he had fallen in love with Lily. She cried with laughter as she read us every word of the letter he had written declaring his feelings for her. I sometimes think about Lily’s tattoo and if she ever found anyone to finish it.