It may seem strange today but back in the early twenty-first century the so-called smartphone held sway over the entirety of western culture. Back in 2022 when travelling about town any self-respecting citizen of the time would walk with one of these apparatuses in front of him and would apparently observe and experience reality via the minature screen rather than with the direct use of his own senses. Quite frequently, the citizen of the early 21st century would also wear headphones which would complete his or her act of intentional sensory deprivation. A teacher in his or her classroom would return after break time to find an entire class looking at their smart phones rather than conversing together like any healthy twelve or fourteen year old would do today. It is difficult to imagine what could have possessed the adults of the time to engage in such wilful child abuse as to raise their offsprings in this way, but back in the day such neglect was not punishable in any way and indeed seems, as far as we can judge by the documents of the day, to have been encouraged by the authorities of the time who apparently colluded with the private corporations who made vast amounts of money from the smartphone and similar devices. There is hilarious footage of the time showing young lovers at Valentine’s dinners sitting opposite each other, a long stemmed red rose in a vase between them, each scrolling down their own screen and oblivious to their partner sitting opposite them behind their bowl of steaming pasta. There is one exasperated report from an enlightened inhabitant of 2022 London recounting how conversation at a dinner party was constantly interrupted by participants in the dinner fact checking the most trivial details on their smartphone and then, as though hypnotically transfixed, choosing to show a list of photographs of children and pets or even snapshots of dinner plates from previous dinner parties. As far as we can understand the culture of the time, the obsession seemed to be to immediately log an experience on the smartphone without taking any time to savour the experience itself. The lesson only seems to have been learned when a few years later the generation that had grown up in the early century found themselves ill equipped to live and work in the society of the mid twenty first century (mid 21 as it was termed at the time). By then, the follies of the so-called smartphone era had been restrained.

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There is a little poem from the aging Bertolt Brecht written in 1953 after the uprising of 17 June. On 17 June workers in communist East Germany (DDR) went on strike. The strike was fiercely put down by East German police and militia with the aid of the Soviet Union. Brecht who had committed to the DDR after the second world war was torn. He wrote a number of delightful clever poems including the much-quoted one called Die Loesung (The Solution) with the memorable line “Would it not be easier for the government to dissolve the people and elect another one?” (Waere es da/ Nich doch einfacher, die Regierung/ Loeste das Volk auf und/ Waehlte ein anderes?).

Another poem from that little selction is called The Wheel Change (Der Radwechsel). It goes:

I sit on the hard shoulder.

The driver is changing the wheel.

I do not like where I’m coming from

I do not like where I’m going to.

Why do I view the wheelchange

With impatience?

(Ich sitze am Strassenhang/ Der Fahrer wechselt das Rad./ Ich bin nicht gern, wo ich herkomme./ Ich bin nich gern, wo ich hinfahre./ Warum sehe ich den Radwechsel /Mit Ungeduld.)

He had lived in America. He now lived in communist East Germany. Is the wheel change a plea to understand that the construction of a better society takes time or not to judge too harshly the imperfections of the regime? Or does it mean he would rather live outside both ideologies?

You can also interpret the poem in a non-political way. To appreciate the work or the journey better. Once you get somewhere it’s never what you thought it would be. We should spend more time out on the road.

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Fiction is a practice which creates a space where you can explore issues without taking moral responsibility for the views expressed there. Macbeth commits many crimes against humanity, such as killing another man in his sleep, but the writer Shakespeare cannot be seen as culpable for the events he portrays. In the real world the police and the law should arrest us if we behave like Macbeth. The world of fiction and the world of the law are thus two non-intersecting fields of authority or magisteria in a non-theological sense. They can only intersect, it seems to me, in two ways. The first is that certain texts or films are not made accessible to people below certain ages. This is difficult to impose, but, in theor,y a twelve year old should not watch a film with a 18+ indication. This is because children need to be protected against material they are perhaps not ready for. The second exception might be when words have attained a magical quality which makes them able to leap from one field to the other. Some commentators may reject this, and I may be one of them, but the cultural weight of a word like the so-called n**** word is such that even in context in a fictionalised narrative they have the magical power to transport from the fictional world to the actual. This magical exception is dangerous to recognise as it is the thin end of a wedge that annihilates the sacred realm of fiction.

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I popped into the little Sainsbury’s at Vauxhall station on the way back from work to buy a tin of sardines and as I was leaving a man by the door said are you a cat man or a dog man? Instinctively I answered cat man. It was a man from the Battersea Home for dogs and cats looking for a funding pledge. He told me about a kind of lodging place where a cat might be housed in the home and I could fund it with £10, £12 or £30. I would be informed of the name of the cat living in the lodge and get updates on his life. To be honest, I was mostly thinking about my tin of sardines. I was going to eat it with some sweet potato. My own recipe, I said what I usually say at this juncture. I’d have to talk about this with my partner. I even said this before I had a partner. He said he’d be in the Sainsbury’s every day that week. I said fine, I pop in here every day on my way home from work. I actually pop in there about once a month and certainly wouldn’t be in there again this week with him at the door. We parted great friends. At the traffic lights crossing to go down Harleyford Road towards Kennington I mildly scolded myself for my dishonesty. But then I thought, well if I want to give more money to charity it would be to the homeless – I had had three heartbreaking encounters with rough sleepers this week – and I resolved to do that. £5 a month. Haven’t done it yet. Might do it in a minute.

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At the end of my road there is a pub that has been closed for about ten years now. It was taken over by squatters and in recent times has been used as a kind of unofficial art gallery, although I don’t know how you would visit it, as the entrance seems to be boarded up. On the whitewashed walls of the building some stenciled utterances have been posted up. I call them utterances. I don’t know what the habitual term is for this kind of art product, but it has become quite commonplace now, no doubt inspired by twitterish pronouncements. They are, for the most part, existential type statements, often truisms, but no doubt formulated to make you think or, at the very least, disarm you. On this old pub there are about twenty such utterances. I cite five of them : Honesty and Trust, Freedom from the Man; Climate Change is urgent to me; Trying Greggs for the first time; Money it would solve a lot of Problems; I am too stuck in my ways.

Do you know what to make of this? I am confused. It is tempting to read these statements from a certain altitude and make of them things that the author(s) probably never intended. Climate Change is urgent to them sounds like a dreadful boast. Trying Greggs for the first time tells us more about their class than anything else (presumably their mum shopped at Gale’s or Paul for her baked products); If they are as middle-class as I suspect, maybe they are the Man of which they speak, which would explain why money as a useful thing would be such an epiphany to them. Maybe a Gregg’s sausage roll will help them to unstuck themselves from their ways. Language writes us rather than us writing it. Here’s some proof.

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I have never thought of Virginia Woolf as an existentialist, but re-reading To the Lighthouse this week it is clear that that is what she is. If she had been writing in Paris in the 1950s she would have been classed along with Simone de Beauvoir whose Les Mandarins I have also been reading in recent weeks. Both of them are forever having their female protagonists suddenly stopping in their tracks to ask themselves what they are doing in life, where they are, how they got there, is their life fulfilled, is this what life is. Often, their doubts are somehow hooked up to the men and children in their lives. That is just the pressure of middle-class society in the mid-century. The male existentialists weren’t that bothered about family. Sartrean and Camusean heros are macho loners, exposed to war, guns and prostitutes. It’s difficult to know whether that is nature or nurture. It’s also difficult to know whether the existentialists doubts and reveries are just a response to new ways of writing, in particular the stream of consciousness., which took the writer into the uncertain thoughts of the characters. When you look at Middlemarch (1870), George Eliot’s protagonist Dorothea Brooke thinks about life but it’s mostly in connection with her actions in society. Maybe there was a shift in the twentieth century from the enlightenment optimism of empire and society building to the doubt and introspection after the Great War. Another thing maybe is that the women were more educated, more confident, more inclined to doubt the social project.

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I always used to think that under interrogation I could trick the lie detector by not registering in any part of my anatomy when I tell an untruth. My logic was that the difference between true and untrue is often a foggy zone anyway. Recently, I have had to accept that my body does act against my will at times and does register micro-shifts in anxiety without my permission. This manifests itself, I think, in the business of name remembering when you meet someone unexpectedly in the street. Only when I encounter someone in an unusual context does this distraction afflict me, but I can only assume that it is a momentary anxiety which brings about that loss of memory.

Yesterday in Herne Hill I was passing the house of somebody I know and I thought I’d prepare myself in case I bumped into her in the street. Immediately I couldn’t remember her name. The prospect of anxiety was enough to freeze my recollection. What I then do is construct an elaborate scenario in advance to avoid having to introduce the person I am with to the friend whose name I can’t remember. I could say: I’ll leave you to introduce yourselves to each other (this is a facile and transparent manoeuvre that would be easily seen through). I could just do one half of the introduction (undemocratic). I could introduce them through description alone, as in This is an old friend from school. At least that way you introduce, if not by name. Names are overvalued anyway.

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With lockdown it has become a truism to vaunt the advantages of going into work or school; we require society and the screen won’t do it. The advantage of work relationships is that they have the potential (mostly fulfilled) of remaining superficial. Your intercourse with your co-worker tends to remain functional. You may well spend more time with them than you do with your life partner, but the co-worker may know next to nothing about your real life. It is a training in the art of discretion. You skate around on the surface of things and rework a number of functional conversations interminably; an exercise in theme and variations. I would not know how to do a statistical analysis of this, but I would lay a wager on the fact that a lot of superficiial relationships is healthier than a few deep ones. With the former you feel you are integrated into a meaningful quantity of others; with the latter it may just be a few crackpots who escaped the statistical norm. Added to which, sometimes you don’t want to get beneath the surface.

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I mostly don’t bother with New Year resolutions. I normally just say more of the same and leave it at that. If you are not regulating your life on the go throughout the year, there isn’t much chance it will suddenly happen on January 1. This year, however, I have decided to give them a little go, these resolutions. I am giving up bread for January, just to see if it can cure my sluggishness. Sudden changes are rarely good. You find yourself compensating in ways which are equally harmful. You give up chocolate and you replace it with crisps. You give up smoking and you replace it with cream cakes. In a rare alignment of the universe with human ambitions, on January 1 I paid my television license: the same day the television stopped working. This could be a useful imposition of telly-less evenings. Yes but the risk now is that I will be on the internet longer. There is nothing for nothing. It is human vanity to think we manage these transitions without other harms or without canny manipulative compromise. We shall see for the bread. It has only been two days.

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Today, Christmas Eve, is my birthday. It is low key, as it has always tended to be, being the day before the winter feast. I am happier in media res than on a bank looking at the rushing stream, or, rather, meandering trickle. The other day, through the efficient business of astrology, I learned more about my character. It said I ride roughshod over other people sometimes, due I think to my moon being in Libra. This was the first time this had been suggested to me. Normally they tell me my moon is at home in Libra, whatever that means. Astrology, despite being nonsense, suggests things to you, and once they have occurred to you, you think about it and sometimes locate that element in your behaviour. Because I can ride roughshod. In fact, I did it the other day in a card shop where we were buying wrapping paper. We couldn’st decide between a red one and an ivory coloured one with mistletoe on it. We asked an elderly gentleman what he thouight. I can’t remember what hi opinion was because we didn’t want it really, just a chat. In the ensuing conversation we used the word misconstrue and then looked for its noun and came up with the word misconstrual. The elderley gentleman, in his half of the converstaion, came up with the word misconstruction. I need to check which one is right. And then, trying to move the converation on, I did my roughshod work and said. you’ve got a rubbuish card there to him. He didn’t seem too offended and there was a little conversation about the dogs on the card. It was for his grandchildren, I think. What I am trying to do is hurry a conversation into a more interesting zone, so I admit I can sometimes jog it on a bit by pulling on the equine bit of the vehicle. Sometimes the horse neighs in pain and my intention is misconstrued (the verb is right). This time it passed off without rub. Still, nice to see there is progress in my understanding of my personality.

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