The business of purchase is a painstaking and psychologically taxing one.

When I was at the Zentrum Paul Klee in Berne last month there was a gaggle of businessmen undergoing in some annexe room to the gallery a training session on communication or creativity or something and they were, almost to a man (there were only men), wearing dark charcoal suits. I thought, that’s a rather cool look in the heat of the summer, I’ll look into buying a dark charcoal suit when I come back to London. When I returned from my travels I went onto Jermyn Street and looked at all the classic suit shops: Hawes and Curtis; TM Lewin; Charles Tyrwhit. They were all much of a muchness in dark charcoal suits. They were suits for middle management types, industrially mass produced, cut for work with a long jacket and unflattering trouser width, and the salesman treats you like a battery hen (one said What’s the occasion? as if I’d never worn a suit in my life and in another shop the salesman with a big red wine-sodden nose said Work or pleasure? as if everyone’s life was so clearly compartmentalized.) Neither, I amswered, which foxed him). I refrained from a purchase on Jermyn Streer. I went into John Lewis to see what was on offer in the odds and ends department. I saw what I thought was an attractive charcoal jacket (not dark charcoal and not part of a suit). After oo-ing and ah-ing I bought it. At home i looked on line to try and find the trousers that went with it. I thought I’d found them and ordered them. When they came they weren’t the right trousers and the whole ensemble did not look good. Grey des not flatter me. I looked like a grey man The shape was too fuddy-duddy. It slowly dawned on me the entire look was a mess. Could I get my money back? I extirpated the wrapping for the trousers from the bin just in time. I have had the returns label printed and will post the trousers back tomorrow. Some people are doing these returns every day, I know. Buying and returning; buying and returning. I am innocent in the matter, but that’ll be £100 saved. As for the jacket, I will go to John Lewis tomorrow amd try and get my £`150 back but I have no receipt. I have conflicting opinions on this. One tells me they won’t refund without a receipt (the receipt went thoughtlessly in the bin straightaway). Another say no John Lewis are fine, they’ll refund you no problem. Even if they don’t I have decided on my line. – No sir, we can’t refund without the receipt, I’m afraid Sir. – What! Even though you can see I bought this from here on my bank statement. – I’m sorry sir, it’s John Lewis policy. – All right, I’ll say. Here’s the jacket back. I can’t wear it. Sell it again for another £150. And with a theatrical yet sovereign motion I will hand the jacket back over the counter. They will receive the pristine garment aghast. This will be some kind of a victory. After all, I will never wear it. I am happy with this as a gesture. even though I’ll lose the money. I’ll feel somehow vindicated and might not feel the heartburn that insists on rising in my gullet when money has needlessly slipped through my fingers.

Yes, the business of shopping is a painstaking and psychologically taxing one and you must be ready to pick out any minor triumph from the ashes of your day.

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When you are sitting up to your neck in the cool water in a pool in the Gorges du Tarn in the Cevennes and your rest is disturbed by a teenager leaping from a height into the pool with a whoop, you curse the state of malehood. Why does the male always want to change the repose of things? I had spotted this mid-teenager a few minutes before. He had found or fashioned a long stick and was trying to skewer a fish with it. What if he had spiked a foot-long trout and came up with it all bloodied and wriggling? His father caught up with him, looked irritably and uttered that time-worn word Arrete. Men will always want to splash, noisify, alter. Women are happier with just being. Men will shift things along without worrying whether they are shifting to a better thing or not. They just want flux. But often you just kill the moment and the new state, unexamined beforehand, is not better, and there can be no going back. It’s everything that’s wrong with the world. We’re right to blame the men. I suppose there are some benefits from restlessness, but enough already. I called the boy Steerpike.

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When you are travelling around, on a bit of a budget, you find you have access to other people’s intimacies in a way you don’t when you are locked into your own routines. On a train as you sit behind someone you see what they are up to on their smartphone. One very correct-looking middle-aged Frenchwoman was conducting a very controlled conversation with her equally distinguished and impenetrable-looking husband, and then you see her looking at herself in the mirror of the smartphone interminably inspecting her eye wrinklage. Then suddenly she took out of her fashionably labelled handbag a ragged paper agenda branded Hello Kitty. In the youth hostel in Grindelwald when you share a dorm with four others you see the lot: there are of course snorers; there are thoughtless people who come in at three in the mrning and wear lights on their foreheads which they inadvertently shine in your eyes; the deranged fixated hikers intent on a glacier pursuing some absolute agenda (many of these characters in the mountains in Switzerland, like characters from a DH Lawrence novel). When you travel you are exposed to others. Instructive, but let me back into my closet now please.

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When you find yourself meeting a lot of people in quick succesion, like when you are on holiday when you might have brief and superficial contact with a range of people, you inevitably find yourself makng ad hoc decisions about whether you like the people or not. I find myself liking the people who are not doing any selling of themselves. When you are younger you are more inclined to sell yourself, you are more competitive, feel the need to impress. Hopefully you grow out of this. It is nice to speak to someone who remains inscrutable and, in general, these are the people I like. And yet, just being inscrutable is not enough. It is nice for people to be quirky, surprising, for them to take risks and try and make a contact. My advice, though, (if you are desperate to impress me) is to avoid talking about jobs. Recommended is to be able to be entertaining and warm but give nothing away. In other words, offer a vessel, but make sure it is an empty one.

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No posts for recent weeks as I was away with no computer, no smartphone no internet access for five weeks. Can you imagine? In all the places we went, France, Germany, Switzerland, people and commerces generally preferred payment in cash, much different to what I had been led to believe was the norm from living in London. Nowhere insisted on payment by card. Cash was always the most welcome. Most people were not forever on their screens or computers in cafes. I have seen that this media dependancy is most rife in London. I came back yesterday and looking through the tube everyone has earplugs in and screens out. This is a local emergency.

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I have a very cheap computer. When I get it going it says Welcome for a very long time. At first I thought, that’s nice, I’m getting a right royal welcome from my computer with a red carpet and everything. Then I realised what was happening was that the gatekeeper was checking my ID and my QR code. And then,when I think I can get in, all the hangers-on from Teams kick in and stop me getting over the drawbridge; then all the pop-ups from Google Chrome swarm around me for an autograph. I had to take steps on the autograph pop-up hunters from Google Chrome and joined the Firefox label instead but all the foxes snap at my heels there too and delay my emergence into the crystal city. When I enter that land of endless promise I am exhausted. My girlfriend with her fancy machine is waiting for me on the other side of the moat twiddling her fingers. I come trundling through.

I do not have a smart phone. When I flip up my apparatus and switch it on it produces a merry jingle like something from Breakfast Television when that first started in the eighties. Then my fingers need to engage in elaborate prodding to just get the thing awake properly. It doesn’t like getting up in the morning, my phone. When emoticoms come through on text messages they just show up as blank squares for me. We live a very austere life, my phone and I. We are like a crooked old couple from a nursery rhyme. Jack Sprat and his wife.There is no fun allowed. That’s why most of my messages consist of monosyllabic agreements or rejections: OK, I say. Or else. No Can do. People must be confused that I, normally so verbose, come over all shy on the phone.

Yes. I am wandering through the world with just a coat to my back. No armour; no mace and chain; just poor forked man.

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I found myself noticing a middle-aged woman on the tube this morning. She was reading and using a US dollar bill as her as her book mark. On her ankle was a Betty Boop tattoo. I surmised she liked American culture. I thought she probably wasn’t American. I wonder how Sherlock Holmes would have gone about the semiology. In his day society was more homogenous. He would just look at the quality of soil on the boot of a young lady and knew she had been to the Derby at Epsom. He would smell the type of tobacco on the coat of a gentleman and know in which establishment he had acquired it. You see, they didn’t have Tesco in those days. Today most people are emitting scores of signs at any moment: the clothes; the haircut; the post on TikTok or Instagram. They are desperate to belong to this huge variety of freemasoneries, or even sometimes to emit a sign without knowing what it means or that it completely contradicts what they think they stand for. You buy half a pound of signs like you used to buy half a pound of licorice allsorts and you just eat the whole bag. All we can do is try and be the person without qualities, to avoid falling into this pool of burning emblems and insignia. Semiology is pretty much dead.

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The Americans like guns; we know that. Practically all of their films feature extended shoot-outs where you just yawn and press the mute button. You might do as I do and press the mute button for the car chase sequence and all. This basically cuts the film down to about an hour. I also mute the scenes with the heroic ex-cop at odds with head of police or the FBI about his unorthodox methods of bringing a villain to justice (that’s another fifteen minutes gone), as well as all the Freudian backstory to one of the key chraacters (ten more minutes). That basically leaves shots of cars pulling into drives to set the location. Many of us are confused by this dull entertainment. When shooting goes on, you know they are not really killing each other. There is no truth in it, whereas in good dialogue there is always truth of one kind or another. We know all this, but one thing I noticed this week when half-watching an American zombie film on the Horror Channel is that often the heroes have guns and the baddies, zombies or whatever, often don’t. They are just picked off. It is a strange notion to designate the hero as the one with the gun and the unarmed underdog, whether that be zombie or humanoid, as the character we would not root for. It seems to designate a moral society as the one with the gun.

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I have seen, obliquely from my position on the settee, bits of two or three sitcoms on the telly this week. You note that they do not have canned laughter. Up until quite recently they were the staple of both American and British comedy. I noticed its obtrusiveness in The Big Bang Theory, I recall. Opinion generally approves of its demise. After all, why were we being told when to laugh by studio executives? This was a patronising and manipulative ideological instrument. It was invented in the 1950s in the US when a so-called Laff box with a huge range of different types of laughter from titters to belly-laughs was invented to add to the sound track of comedy shows of the moment. The type of modern comedy, in the UK particularly, has changed. Shows tend to be more tragy-comedy these days; we laugh at awkward situations; complex reactions are explored. You can see why laughter tracks can’t fit so neatly in contemporary comedy. But, you know, when you look at modern comedy, you are still being told where to laugh: through the intonations; through oblique looks to the camera in mock-documentaries like The Office. In feature films, music still tells you what to feel (the worst types are those where the music starts up even before the moving scene begins); music figures less in the sitcom. The modern sitcom is often dealing with intermediate states. You might not get many laughs. You just get some assurance about your uncertainties.

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A nice pair of shorts is difficult to get for summer. They tend to be too long, too tight, too branded. I found a pair on line that looked all right and ordered them. It’s always a bit of a risk but they weren’t expensive. I arranged to pick them up at AppleGreen which is a pick-up centre in the Greggs-cum-service station near the Tesco. I popped in this morning on the way to work. Imagine my surprise when they gave me an enormous package. After all, I’m only 33 waist. I said it’s only a pair of shorts! but the woman in AppleGreen said that’ll be the packaging. They always over-pack it. I lugged it into work and opened it there when I had a moment. Of course, it wasn’t a pair of gentleman’s city shorts, it was two pairs of white addidas trainers and a lumberjack shirt. My heart sank. Not because of the erroneous order but because I had ripped open the package, which, not being used to the on-line world, I would now have difficulty repackaging to send back. Now I am lugging these items around town and will see what I can do tonight. It is indicative of my relatively cloudless life that dealing with this erroneous order casts a thick shadow on the day. Rubbish really. At least there is no tube strike today, as there was yesterday, so you will not see me hopping form one bus to another with two pairs of unwanted trainers and a lumberjack shirt. That would probably have made for a better story.

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