When you are young and know nothing, when you look forward, you look into a candy-coloured nebulosity. You do not quite know how that package of you-fragilities and uncertainties will react with the things you have encountered through films and books. You are not quite sure how your jellied, still hardening personality will negotiate the tricky chicanes to emerge as already seen-in-culture constructions, abstract sculptures like love, success, self-confidence. When you are older and somebody asks you what you are looking forward to, your hopes are thinner but more formed. You think of evenings out that are already planned, the sun coming out, those ten minutes you get to sit down with cup of coffee. This is what your hopes and dreams have amounted to. You might find this sad but, as a materialist, I’m a lot happier here. That cup of coffee is a step on the staircase towards fulfilment.

peoplearerubbish.com

In my role as teacher and personal tutor I had a conversation today. The mother on the phone said: do you have any children? I have no children. I am fed up of the implication that I know nothing about children because I never weaned one. In a moment of pique I said yes, I have four daughters. Colleagues in the office raised an eyebrow. Oh, How lovely, cooed the mother. What are their names? I took a deep breath and answered: Cordelia, Rosalind, Viola and … (I rejected Goneril) Portia. On the end of the line the mother gasped. How lovely! How old are they? I took another breath. Thirteen Eleven Nine and Seven.. How lovely and how nicely spaced out! I agreed that the equidistance was indeed pleasing. The mother was getting more interested in these four ficticious offsprings. What do they like to do? she said, audibly melting. She had just the one fractious and carbuncular eighteen-year-old son who gave her and her tiresome banker of a husband no end of trouble. They all play musical instruments, I said. Which instruments? I pictured the quartet in my mind. Piano; violin; cello and… trombone. She was surprised by the trombone. The seven year old. She’s the rebel, I said. Portia, she said. That’s right. She already knew them better than I did. How lovely! she said again. Fortunately, I said, warming to the task, they have their mother’s looks. Anyway, to get back to Alexander (their all too real scion), I think he really needs to get that coursework in by next Friday.

peoplearerubbish.com

My team was losing again: 0-1 to Everton. Why don’t you change your team, they’re always losing, my friend says. You can’t change your team, I say. The only person I ever knew who changed their team was that student of mine who was severely on the spectrum. My friend says: The only thing you can do is dissolve your friendship group, so that noboody knows you’ve changed your team. I expel air from ny throat volcanically and with exasperation. I don’t have a friendship group. I’m not an Italian toddler, I said. Italians do go around in groups in their Moncler puffa jackets (have you seen them clogging up the pavements?) with friendless outsiders who do not have the Moncler. Friendship groups is a term I never heard till a couple of years ago. It must be a younger people’s thing. Or maybe a Londoner’s thing. Londoners retain friends because they never leave their city. The rest of us leave our towns and cities to go to university and may end up in London, where we know nobody, for work. I lost all my primary school friends when I left primary school. I lost all my secondary school friends when I left secondary school. I lost nearly all my university friends when I left university. I lost nearly all my Paris freinds when I left Paris. In London I have picked up one or two strays along the way, but the idea of friendship groups (what does Shakespeare say, troops of friends) has never registered with me. The idea of a friendship group is a sign of sedentary behaviour .Or maybe I just don’t retain them. Or maybe they just don’t retain me.

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I went to the hyper-Catholic Brompton Oratory the other day for a service that we thought was Benediction. It wasn’t, but some non-descript ceremony that entailed fetching the Monstrance from the top of the altar, bringing it down to the celebrant priest, presenting it to him in a rather pernickety way and then him showing it to us in the congregation. One of the attendants then scuttles back up the thickly carpeted stairs and replaces it in its little exhibition pod behind a little velvet curtain which he rustles back and forward in the show of it, a bit like a Punch and Judy man before he gets Mr Punch out on stage.. We were actually lucky to get so much of a performance. The Brompton Oratory must be the most traditional, not so say reactionary, of the Roman Catholic churches of the entire country. Back in the late Sixties or early Seventies, just after the mass changed from Latin to English, a papal edict came through telling all churches to construct or buy in from Ikea a little table where the priest could handle his chalice and silver plate with communion wafers in full view of the gathering rather than with his back to them which had hitherto been the way, the real relationship being between God and the Church, not God and the people. The Brompton Oratory eschews these new fangled ways and keeps us mostly excluded from the action. It is also one of the few churches to sometimes host the mass in latin. For a multi-cultural Catholic congregation with some of them having no English, you could argue that this is actually a demotic and democratic gesture rather than a high-handed one. The use of latin was always justified, I recall, with the line that wherever you are in the world you would experience the same mass. This principle was, of course, picked up to great commercial effect, by less venerable institutions, the prime example being Macdonalds where the Big Mac should be identical the world over.

peoplearerubbish.com