I have just finished reading Camus’ unfinished text Le Premier Homme. The manuscript was found in his bag at the scene of the car crash that killed him on January 4 1960. It is a series of autobiographical texts that talk about Camus’ father and Camus’ own childhood in the suburbs of Algers. The term first man is enigmatic. It is only mentioned once and seems to refer to himself and also his father, both being people who constructed themselves without the cultural or economic assets that come from a family that is settled and well-off. At one stage in the text the child is contrasted with a another child at the lycee from a privileged background, whereas he comes from a single-parent family managed by an illiterate mother and grandmother. In this sense he is a premier homme. This makes the text a somewhat boastful and nostalgic one but it has some nice moments. I do not know that we can make this distinction easily between a self-made man and another. Self-made man is an imperfect translation but perhaps the only approximate equivalent, though the term tends just to refer to their making as an economic one. Self-made men tend to be a bit boastful. They take as their guide their own experience, which is neccesarily just anecdotal. I suppose in analysing people we need a bit of the anecdotal and a bit of the abstract. Some people do win the jackpot in the lottery but the statistics tell us it will probably not be worth playing the lottery all your life.

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In the block where I live, which includes sixty flats spread out over five floors around a central courtyard that admits no vehicles, there are few children. It is as if they cannot prosper here. This is a block of singletons, couples and members of the LGBT+ community. I realized this when I saw a boy playing in the courtyard. I have seen him a few times at weekends with his father. I imagine him a divorced fatherr who receives the child one weekend in two. This does not count. Four days a month is not enough for the poisonous breezes to contaminate the child. There is also a crying infant two floors above us. This is no baby but a toddler, still blaring out its pain through the night, the night fears of Strangemont house beginning to curdle its blood. No, the only flourishing child in Strangemont House is the daughter of a Polish couple whom you see departing and returning in her school uniform every day. She is regular as clockwork and could indeed be an automated child wound up or somehow regulated every morning. This is the only child in Strangemont House and she has somehow evaded the sulphuric fumes that would contaminate a normal child. Now perhaps you see why I like the place.

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The Eurovision song contest is an excellent gauge of the shifting preoccupations of our culture, as well as a revealing indicator of the gap between ordinary folk and the chattering classes. A few years ago the environment was the great exploitable topic that was deemed viable to appeal to the groups that tune in and vote for the various songs, these groups being, I suppose, ordinary telly watchers, the young, the LGBTq community. This year it’s identity and mental health that carry the day, as though we have crawled back into ourselves after Covid. Nobody cares about the environment anymore. The way the show works is that first juries from each country vote, which count for 50%, then the telly watchers vote, another 50%. The Australian entry, an awful, self-regarding, feeling sorry for itself victim song got a decent mark from the juries, before the telly viewers put the boot in. An interesting insight into how unrepresentative the media is of the population’s instincts. In the end, Ukraine, with a decent song and a real cause, won out over a UK entry that for once was not an embarrasment. Even France gave them douze points.

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I, of course, know none of the facts. The trial between Amber Heard and Johnny Depp continues with its steamrollered coverage. I do not know who abused who and in what proportion. The coverage, however, seems massively to favour Mr Depp. Out of curiosity you click onto a news item titled Johnny Depp’s Lawyer Owns Amber Heard or Johnny Depp Has the Court Laughing Along with Him. When you watch you are at pains to connect the headline with the video. On the comments under the video all-comers seem to agree with the headline.

This understanding that people are so easily led by the noses was borne out last week at the Royal Festival Hall concert of Mitsuko Uchida, the renowned pianist, and particularly Mozart interpreter. It seemed to me she created a terrible hash of the Fantaisia in D minor. Just my opinion of course. But seemingly everyone else in the hall were up on their feet in an act of cult reverence.

Viewing both Johnny Depp coverage and Mitsuko Uchida reverence my conclusion is, just make your own mind up, nodody else knows any better.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Yesterday I went to Macdonalds. I tend to go to Macdonalds only before going to the theatre, which is rare, maybe once every six months, and I am going to the theatre tomorrow night, so I don’t know what I’ll do then. I can’t go to Macdonalds again. Last night’s trip was a freak accident. I was out in town and weak with hunger, so I stepped into the Notting Hill Macdonalds for my usual: the Big Mac meal with orange juice as the drink (£4.99). These days you wait a lot longer in Macdonalds. It is no longer what you would call a fast food. First, you have to order your meal on one of their big screens, choosing, amongst other options, whether you want table service or are willing to waddle the three steps to pick the meal up from the counter yourself. It takes quite a time for your number to pop up on their screen as being in preparation. Then you wait for it to be ready to collect. Staff scuttling out from behind to produce table service is one reason why it takes longer these days. That, plus the queue of Just Eat and Deliveroo delivery persons coming in. When mine was eventually ready the fries were cold, so I sent them back. They gave us a tumbler of cold instead of hot water, so that had to be changed too. Yes, I am quite the patrician in Macdonalds. When I got to the table I was too irritated to pretend to trick myself into enjoying the food. It ended up tasting just like it tastes at the end of the meal when I have understood what I am eating. i.e. not nice. Nor did it satisfy me, though at least it gave me strength to go into the next-door Tesco to buy more terrible food for later that night.

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It is not often that I don’t finish a book I’m reading, even when I’m not really enjoying it. One book I could not finish a couple of years ago was The Unconsoled by Kazuo Ishiguro. I started it because he was a writer I didn’t know what to make of. I had read two or three other novels by him: Never Let me Go I had liked; The Buried Giant I had not much liked; When we were Orphans I had like the first half of. The Unconsoled is a Kafka-like narrative. A famous pianist arrives in a city to perform a concert. At first he does not seem to know he has a wife and child there. He is buffeted this way and that into appointments and meetings which he goes out of his way to accomodate, though we suspect there is some blindness or memory-lapse in his behaviour, as he suddenly lands in a space or relationship he was supposed to know but has to rediscover. I never saw how it resolved. I suspect it never did. I suspect there never was a concert. I say it is like Kafka. Kafka is sudden, brittle and violent. This is distracted, biscuity and melancholy; more english in its tone. It is a more frustrating read, often tiresome. But like Kafka, it deals with other people as shattered, fragmentary figures. You re-meet someone after many years and it is as if literally they have fallen off the edge of a cliff. People, like in real life, are different every time you encounter them. They are misrememberd, have new motives, have a dark side you never noticed. Every time someone walks through a shadow towards you it is a novel confrontation with a reassembled creature. That’s a bit like a better lived life, life if you lived it properly, because that’s how people really are. It’s is only our lazy, approximate minds that makes us think they are consistent, and, following on from that, the state of popular culture that propagates this myth.

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