When I am choosing a cafe to have my black coffee in, I peer in at the window to see whether there are proper chairs or perching chairs. You know the perching chairs; they are tall chairs where your legs cannot reach the ground, they ressemble the stools that many so-called stand-up comedians or crooners sat on in the 1970s. They are the kind of seat you sit on if you have an island in your kitchen at home. They are now all the rage in trendy cafes too. Personally, I do not like the perching chair. I want stability in a chair and a proper back to rest my back against. They seem to be flattering to the customer by implying that he or she is not really settled there; they are on the go; too important to be in this single place really because they are sought after by many. It is an extension of the desire to have a coffee to go, to walk around with it thrust out in front of you like some contemporary domestic weapon, the desire to be somewhere else than you are, probably because where you are you are not getting enough adualtion.

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Doctor Zhivago is a a mixed novel. Curiously amateurish at times (the frightened attempts to avoid any narration of dramatic events and the use of overhearing as a device like some 18th century picaresque novel) and engaging at others. It is Paternak’s only novel and shows. There is one deeply affecting moment when one of the two main characters, Lara, Zhivago’s major love interest in the text, is erased from the story. On page 447 of the novel in the translation we read:

“One day Larissa Fyodorovna left the house and did not come back again. Evidently she was arrested in the street in those days and died or vanished no one knew where, forgotten under some nameless number on subsequently lost lists in one of the countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north.”

It is as if at the end of the novel, after 447 pages of scrupulous attention to the character, the novelist loses interest. The character is permitted to disappear into the shadows of history.

These are always intriguing and mysterious moments in a novel where the character is left to his or her own devices and consequently ceases to be. The one other example of this that comes to mind is Alfred Doeblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Here, on page 731, after painstaking depiction of his trials and tribulations, Doeblin writes:

“Dem Biberkopf wird gleich nach diesem Prozess eine Stelle als Hilfsportier in einer mittleren Fabrik angeboten. Weiter ist hier von seinem Leben nichst zu berichten.”

(“Soon after this trial Biberkopf is offered a job as a porter in a middle-sized company. He accepts the job. No more about his life will be reported here.”)

Apparently, randomly, the storyteller just decides to stop the story and Biberkopf disappears from the pages of the novel, a little like Lara in the Pasternak. It reads as desolately bleak. These people, whom we have followed and lived with, cease to be. They are maybe living their life somewhere, suffering further in their particular cases, but we will know nothing more about them. It is terribly sad. The novel can no longer accomodate them.

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The first way to write a novel happens when you get an inkling of some kind of slime lurking just out of reach round a dark corner in your subconscious. So you put your hand into the hollow trunk and bring it out into the world. You quickly try and daub it onto paper before it dissolves. It does not spread through the whole book, of course, and it diminishes over time, but some of it remains somewhere and you can always look back at the smears of the original slime and use the smell to help you in the dark .

The second way to write a novel is what everyone else is told to do. You plan a plot and break it up into ten sections. You put a car chase here, a break-up there and a sad bit somewhere else. Then you get some ribbons and bows out and wrap up the package. This way is not much fun, but it is simple in a clever way. It is like folding a sheet of paper a few times until it becomes a paper airplane and you find it can fly quite a way.

The third way to write a novel is when you have a yard with a lot of old wrecks in it. There is a bit of old car engine here; there is a mangle there; then there is a rusty lawn mower near the edge of the concrete; there is a coffee grinder near the road. You need to be a bit of an engineer for this novel because you have to screw them all in together so that when you crank up the mangle the engine runs, the grass is razed and the coffee ground. If you are successful with this novel, all the bits make a creature.

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Many years ago I knew a young woman. We went out on a date and that very evening she asked if I would marry her. I suppose she was desperate to sort out her future, put it in a box rather than having it float around indiscriminately. Some people are like that, I find. They are desperate to put all potential future events into a box that will define them, contain them. They will chat with somebody on Twitter or Hinge and be planning the future before they have even met in the flesh. Bucket lists seem to be part of the same tendancy. Fix in advance and through the edicts of social convention what you need to do in the future to define yourself neatly and to your advantage. Maybe I am by nature not much of a planner, so don’t end up getting married or bungee jumping off some high bridge in a developing country. Following these terms I will never get anything done. I am what you call a trundler. I just trundle on with my nose to the dirt. I think it’s better that way.

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The evolution of my domesticity can be traced by what I do with my on-the-go clothes. On-the-go clothes, as you will know from former posts, are the clothes you wear but do not want to throw into the dirty washing. They are the trousers you just wear at the weekend; the jumper you will put on every few days when it turns a bit chilly; the shirt you wore for just a couple of hours. You need a place to put these on-the-go items. at first, like everybody, I just put them on various furniture: the jumper on the back of the settee; the trousers over the arm of an armchair. Then I acquired a special kneeling-chair from a specialist back shop. I knelt on it for a bit but soon got fed up of the posture, so the kneeling-chair became the on-the-go clothes venue. Then I got rid of the kneeling-chair as it was taking up too much space in the living room.On-the-go clothes shifted to the chair in the bedroom. Today we went to Streathham on the 159 to pick up a clothes rail for £9 from e-bay from a guy called Steve. We put the old chair out in the street to see if it would find a home and now the on-the-goers are hanging on a rail at the bottom of the bed. This may not be a permanent solution. People who plan their furniture solutions at the beginning of their setting-up in a flat are living a dead meat life. They are rationalists, not empiricists. You keep your solutions buzzing. It’s a good sign of life in the old carcass still happening.

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As I walked up Kensington High Sreet yesterday I noticed a man sitting on the pavement crosslegged. He maintained that difficult pose well, I mused. If he was homeless, he was a well conditioned homeless man. As I passed by I read his little placard. It said: I am not homeless. I am meditating. Indeed, his eyes were gently closed to the traffic and stream of pedestrian outside the Kensington High Street branch of Wholefoods. Why you would meditte for show, I don’t know. This was performative meditation. Although I supposed the Buddah himself went through the public phase, though he was probably dealing with public self-chastisement, stripping himself of all worldly lendings to reach ground zero in the human stakes. This guy probably wasn’t a prince, just a public meditator. To be fair, it’s not that far away from chess as a spectator sport. It could be the new fad.

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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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