In Tate Britain this morning I was interested to read the explanations that accompany the 16th, 17th, 18th and 19th century paintings with now multiple referencing to the slave trader and colonialist backgrounds of the sitters for the portraits. The Tate is of course constructed on the basis of the sugar industry and its connections with slavery, so it needs to broach the issues openly. One approves, of course, but at the same time at the back of ones mind one feels that what art should really be doing is posting up a set of portraits of the modern aristocracy, the celebrities and multi-millionaires accompanied by some deconstructive surgery on their exploitations of others, their cosying up to big business and big money, their hypocrisies on the environment, their embodiment of contemporary western hegemonies. This can’t be done, I suppose, because of their lawyers. The analysis of 18th and 19th Century colonialism in British portraiture is a safe place to tuck away your radicalism. The real debate isn’t happening that much.

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I was between books the other day, so I picked one off the shelf that had been hanging around for a bit. When I opened it up a bookmark fell out. It was a hotel bill for the Hotel des Artistes in Rome for 450.00 lira for April 9 2001, twenty one years ago. I knew immediatley what day that had been, apart from it being the last time I had tried to read Les Celibataires by Henri de Montherlant. I had arrived in Rome a little before my then partner, who, it turned out, had bumped into a relative at the Rome airport and gone back to spend the night with family. This was before we had mobile phones, so I was at the hotel, not knowing where she was. It was a miserable evening as I had a severe attack of sciatica. That was 9 April. On 10 April my partner turned up. When we got back to the hotel in the evening of 10 April there was a message left for me at the reception: would I call my brother in Manchester? This was odd, as my brother did not even know I was in Rome. I called and he broke the news that my mum had died the night before. Les Celibataires by Henri de Montherlant had been the book I had taken with me to Rome. My brother had phoned my job and heard I was in Rome in a hotel near the station, as I had informed a colleague at the time. My brother had rung round and tracked me down. So when the ricuveta per camera 508 fell out of Les Celibataires and fluttered to the ground the other day those events came flooding back to me. Strangely, the sciatica disappeared the next day and has never really come back again. I cannot believe it was a mysterious case of tele-empathy with what happened in Manchester, but it was an odd coincidence.

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I watched The Lost World on the telly the other day. This was the 1960 version of the H G Wells novel with Michael Rennie and Jill St John. I remember watching this as a child and how impressed I had been with the simulation of a dinosaur battle between a Tyranosaurus Rex and a Tricerotops (is that the name?). Revisiting it, I saw that the two dinosaurs were actually two little lizards scrapping in a miniaturised landscape. Another thing that struck me were the awful outdated attitudes to women and foreigners. Of the two women in the film, one was a primitive sexy indigeonous type, the other a sophisticated American who, we were told was tough as a man but actually broke down and wept at the first hint of trouble and needed the male to do the comforting. The foreigners (two South American types: one singing folkloric tunes to a guitar; the other with eyes rolling only for the diamonds). You wonder what the foreign actors and the women made of their parts in 1960. Fortunately, it is all now part of a lost world.

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After a whole day of religious ceremnony and religious music, it was refreshing to listen to something else this evening. We listened to some Joni Mitchell. I have only recently become aware of Joni Mitchell. I kind of knew her voice but had never really listened. As a very young man my New Zealand girlfriend liked Joni Mitchell, I recall, but I never really tried to get on board. I didn’t define myself by that kind of music and, as a 22 or 23 year-old defining myself was vital to my sense of self. I remember around the same time also convincing myself that you could not like both Beethoven and Mozart, again, I suppose, out of the urgent desire to inhabit a very specific space. Oh dear. These are the follies of youth, I suppose.

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The great sadness over the death of Elizabeth II is understandable. She was in all of our lives like a watermark in our text. And yet, the truth about any sadness goes much beyond this. When we are grieving for her, we are grieving for ourselves, our past, our hopes for a future that never materialised. The desperate self is that egotistical; it never grieves for others; it grieves only for itself.

I went to Blackheath today and was a few minutes early for my meeting so I went to look at the house where, a full lifetime away, my first crush had lived. I think I found it. I saw her last the day I left London for Paris. I had phoned her and asked if I could stay the night in her parents house where she was, as my train or bus to Paris went from London early and I was coming from Manchester. That was the last time I saw her. This is many decades away now. Even by that night I had ceased to be enamoured of her. And still the pull of a past self is bewitching, so I had to go and look through the garden gate, like the grown-up Pip looking through the weed-ridden grounds of Satis House where he had once played in the garden of Miss Havisham. You understand why so many middle-aged men and women are desperate to see old flames from many years ago. Of course, it has nothing to do with the past love, now an old and alien being, if they are even still alive. It is that lost flickering image of their past selves they want to glimpse.

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We got up early and went to Hampstead Heath for a walk. From there to Swiss Cottage and a Japanese cafe we had picked out to buy two Japanese cakes. Unfortunately it had become only take-away, so we put the cakes in a box for later and went next door for a cup of coffee. A man came in, maybe mid-thirties or forty. He asked for a cup of coffee and sat down. The waitress came over to clarify the order because, as you know, you cannot simply ask for a cup of coffee these days. She said Cappucino? He said a cup of coffee. She was confused. They agreed on white coffee. He waited a few minutes. Nothing came his way. There were about six people on duty in the cafe and it wasn’t very full. He got up and went across to the counter. Can I pay? he said, irritated. They were confused because it would be customary in this cafe to pay at the end, The white coffee was on the way though. It was £3. He paid in three pound coins. I was relieved they took cash. I was wondering what he was doing in this cafe when it looked like he was used to the habits of the so-called greasy spoon. As he left the cafe, muttering under his breath, I noticed he was carrying two big bags of Waitrose products. This was difficult to compute. An expensive supermarket but unfamiliarity with ways of a contemporary metropolitan cafe. He must have been living under a stone for two decades not to to know that you cannot ask for a cup of coffee without biblical retribution raining on your head. Old coin was also an iniquity that he committed. There are other crimes I commit myself; not keeping everyone waiting in queues while I get a big chunky smartphone out and pay with that; not paying with a QR code (which ironically stands for Quick Response). Today at work I wasted probabaly three hours trying to fill in some sheets that were only available in a hidden passageway of Microsoft Teams that wouldn’t open up for me. I also am available to be spoken to in life as I do not wear earphones in my ears. I play the role of social outlier and should probably wear a hi-viz jacket at all times that would set me neatly apart from the rump.

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Sometimes, when I am in a conversation with someone and I temporarily leave the space to, say, go to the bathroom, I find myself, when I am out of vision of my interlocutor, pulling a face towards a non-existent camera. This is to illustrate the disjunction between my direct reaction to the interlocutor and what I might be thinking at the time. Do not be concerned, if you are my interlocutor. I am only doing this because I have seen it on the telly. In reality, I am rarely fuming at how the conversation is going, and, if I am, I will probably mention it. What I am doing is just trying to artificially dramatise my inner life.

Moreover, even if I was repressing anger at something when talking to someone, this would probably better represent my true feelings, compromised and controlled and fitted within a temporal context, than a brute, spontaneous reaction taking the form a disbelieving gurning at an imaginary camera, because what you might call true feelings are best got at through an aggregated sampling of moods over a period of time. This model conforms less to the modes of drama and its generic embodiment through film and television and more to the modes of the late 19th century analytical novel.

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There is little evidence for many of the legendary scenes in folklore. Robin Hood (if he existed as an individual) probably wasn’t around during the reign of King John and Richard the Lionheart, so we probably never had the scene where the famous outlaw recognises the absent king in the greenwood. William Tell never shot an apple off his son’s head with his crossbow. St Paul almost certainly never underwent the conversion on the road to Damascus (it is never mentioned in those terms in his own letters and in Acts of the Apostles written many years after Paul’s death the text seems to be lifted verbatim from Euripides Bacchae). These old texts are all subject to the usual collage, bias, literary manipulation and ideological weighting that invisibly inform legend and myth. A nice one that has been on my mind this week for some reason is St Paul escaping the city of Damascus in a laundry or small cattle basket lowered down out of the city walls. This might be closer to the truth as St Paul mentions it himself in his letters. It is a rare moment of concrete picaresque adventure in what are otherwise rather abstract epistles. I wish we had a bit more of that kind of stuff from Paul. In Jules Vernes’ Around the World in 80 Days there is no scene in a hot air baloon, although most illustrations of the book show such a scene, simply because of its pictoral value, I suppose, and because there was such a scene in the classic film with David Niven. The other one I like in a similar vein to the Paul basket story is Charles II of England hiding in an apple tree with Roundhead soldiers below him. I remember it made a lovely illustration in my primary school history book with the perspective from Charles’ point of view looking down on the metal helmets of Cromwell’s troops.

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The Park Hotel in Vitznau on the Vierwaldstaettesee (Lake Luzern in English) must be one of the swankiest of swanky hotels in Switzerland. Three years ago we went in there and asked if we could play the Boesendorfer grand piano. The staff were very welcoming and let us play the instrument for a couple of hours (when I say us, I don’t mean me, you understand).Through the open doors of the hall we were in we could look out onto the drinks reception on the esplanade on the lake. This was during the Luzern Festival and many of the residents of the hotel were attending the concerts a few stops along the lake. Last month we were in Vitznau again and thought we might pop into the Park Hotel again to maybe renew that agreable experience. On the door was a Scandinavian hotel manager right out of a Stanley Kubrik film. He intercepted us and explained how the hotel had changed since the Covid years. It had become (I quote from the card we were given) a Health and Wealth Centre, no longer a hotel, no longer open to spontaneous visitors like ourselves. Customers had explained they were no longer comfortable with the ebb and flow of the life of a grand hotel; they preferred to hire suites within the hotel complex and have entrance to the place restricted to the hoipolloi. The place was now policed and controlled. It had become a kind of gated community, a bleak index to the post-covid world of the very wealthy. They are shut away from all public intercourse in a sterilised glass unit. Health and Wealth Centre tells it all. Where was the piano? I asked. It too had been put into isolation.

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When I am in bed, before my mind goes haywire and leads me into the perverse antechamber of sleep, I try and organise my thoughts. I read something the other day in one of those advice pieces that the internet is forever foisting on us that before you go to sleep you should assemble a to-do list for the next day. I do not do this. I think about money. On holiday I used to get all the bank notes out of my wallet and count them. I am a kind of Fagin, I suppose. Though I am not really taking any lascivious pleasure form these bank notes or from the figure I imagine in my current account when I am in my bed at night. It is more that I am creating a kind of relaxation by seeing that I am sufficiently well provided for for the next day at least. It was probably what was on Fagin’s mind too. This might put me into a state where I might be able to doze off, for I am not an easy dozer and need everything to be just right. The other thing I might do is think about the calender; how many days to my next pay cheque. As you see, another money matter. However, this is a less relaxing daydream, as I grow irritated at myself for wanting time to pass quickly to get me to that pay-cheque day. What am I doing? I think to myself. Just wishing my life away, because what happens at the end of all the pay days? You are just one month closer to the final due date, when the final pound of flesh has to be delivered (that would be Shylock) .

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