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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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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