Newcastle United F.C. has just been taken over by some arm of the state of Saudi Arabia. Most of the supporters are overjoyed with the promise of incalculable wealth to buy world-class talent on and off the pitch. The fact that Saudi Arabia has a reputation for its unscrupulous dealing with others including well documented evidence of its state sponsored murder of the journalist Jamal Koshoggi seems to worry some but not many. How far is a supporter prepared to go in his undying support for his team? I must admit I am a poor supporter of my team. I refuse to watch Match of the Day if I know they have lost, as they did 2-4 this weekend. I will support them in the good times but not the bad. I support them through the thick but not the thin. Genuine supporters would lambast me, no doubt, but the way I see it is that I sign up to the support thing for fun not for suffering. Is this masochism? If I don’t want to spent 10.30 to 11.45 pm on Saturday night with my head in my hands, why should I? This infidelity to a project has become more general in me in recent times. Time was I would finish a book I had embarked upon whatever, even if I was hating it. Now I’ll give them some of my time, but if it doesn’t please me sufficiently I am unwilling to give the author twenty hours of my life. Why should I? There are plenty of other texts in the ocean swimming around and plenty other football clubs other than Newcastle United, or, in my case, Manchester United. If I am strong enough to disassociate myself from my background which is the reason why I got railroaded into this support phenomenon in the first place, on a strategic temporary basis, then my mental flexibility should be praised not criticised. I’ll come back to Man United when they start winning!

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I was listening to Radio 5 Live and they were talking about an abusive relationship. A man was violent to a woman, hitting her, shouting at her, locking her up. The interviewer asked: did you love him? The abused woman said yes. And they continued talking. We should probably try and get away from talking about love in this way, as if it were a contamination in no way related to your respect or admiration for a person. I remember when Prince Charles was about to marry Lady Di and he was asked Do you love her? She was standing next to him at the time. He made an infamous response which was much derided at the time. Whatever love means, he said. I suppose it wasn’t very reassuring to his poor bride-to-be standing next to him, but it was a fair enough response to a daft question. One can appreciate that falling in love is a kind of virus that you catch, but to be complacent and satisfied with that state of affairs as an acceptable way of defining love is not useful and, as in the case of the radio programme, doesn’t help us when the infatuation snags on unpleasant behaviour.

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We all know a celebrity or two, but the best of us refrain from bringing this random acquaintance, some hangover from school or university or from some job we once did, into the conversation for reasons of discretion and taste. And yet, it can be that one feels compelled to summon up this celebrity acquaintance from the lower depths of ones memory, often for competitive reasons. I know, of course, that it in no way reflects well on me that I have a passing acquaintance with someone who may punctually pop up on the telly or the radio. It would reflect better on me if I just kept my mouth shut and let some other fool trundle on about how Dominic Cumberbatch is a friend of a friend of his sister. But faced with this intense pressure I could well come up with one of my sorry tales: being on Gordon Ramsay’s ridiculous restaurant show about shocking restaurants he turned round or being once seen naked in a shower by Iris Murdoch, for example. I do not feel better when these anecdotes are forced out of me. I feel sullied. I should just tacitly accept my role in the shadows. It would reflect better on me. Let others seek out the celebrity acquaintance limelight.

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There is a poster on London Underground with the message Nothing is Impossible or, rather I think, Impossible is Nothing, which is the highly conventional and untrue message of the contemporary world. It is being drilled into us by celebrities and sportspeople, as well as politicians at all hours of the day. Question: what is your message to the kids? Answer: You can be whatever you want. It is, of course, the great American lie. Anecdotally, the odd fish will slip out of the net and be able to escape the index that their class and upbringing has branded on them, but these are astonishing exceptions, which is why they get the coverage. Anecdote is not data. I’m sorry to be the bearer of this news and such a kill joy, but someone must deliver the facts. Most children dreaming of celebrity success remain in the obscure.

However, it is worth preserving this mantra as an aspiration. What you need is two bowers (Keats has a liking for this word). The bower where you house your aspiration where Impossible is Nothing and the other bower, truth bower, where you face the facts, some things are impossible, Impossible is Something, we do not live in Mickey Mouse world. There are two bowers which we must harbour simultaneously and they contradict each other. It is a kind of Schroedinger’s Cat episode. The bower that helps us get the best we can out of the world and ourselves and the other bower, the one no-one talks about, that refuses to make suckers of us all.

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In many of the paintings of Francis Bacon, especially the later ones, there are what appear to be glass cases or pods that enclose key figures in the drama of the painting. You may see an agonist slumped over a toilet seat or a sink unit, sometimes almost melded into the white armitage shanks porcelain so that they are one with the fixtures, and around them a clinical transparent box. It is something that has come into the world of contemporary theatre. The glass box is now a cliche of metropolitan production. I have seen countless Jacobean tragedies with on-stage murders taking place in a glass case where literally nobody hears you scream. Yesterday I spent the night in an unnervingly ill-conceived Bacon hotel in the town of Bedford. The modernisation of the rooms took the form of the installation into rooms of a glass pod for a toilet, through whose mildly frosted glass you could be observed and heard (there was a round hole the size of a big fist in the door) urinating and defecating. Add to this the fact that I was in the final stages of my recovery from a particularly violent case of food poisoning and you can imagine the fun. The tryptic of Hotel customer with bathroom fixtures will soon be up for auction at Sotheby’s. Reserve price £61 million.

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Bertrand Russel is known for separating people into hedgehogs and foxes. He is taking the idea from Archilochus, as he notes himself. The fox knows many things but the hedgehog knows one big thing. So, Shakespeare would be a fox and Patrick Modiano a hedgehog. Some people thrive as hedgehogs; some as foxes. I’m a bit of a hedgehog in many ways. I try and specialise in a limited number of fields, working within a narrow band width. There are a lot of things I don’t do and won’t try. Somebody said why don’t I learn to ride a bike, something I have never done, and I say no I do other things. My band width is wide enough. I think maybe in conversation I am a fox. I can switch through from trivial to serious and feel comfortable in both, even happy to mix them so it’s not clear what my intention is. I don’t mind it being ambiguous. My brother is the king of hedgehoggery. His band width has become a narrow strip. He is more like a snake or a shark. His focus on what his preoccupations are has become such that, like the snake or the shark, he will eschew almost everything for high performance or at least high focus in just one or two things. In conversation he is an efficient killing machine. It’s a bleak road but someone has to tread it.

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We were discussing which of the selection of shapes of Marks and Spencer’s crisps from their mixed packet we liked best. Both of us preferred the corrugated iron shapes. There is also a tubular shape, a little organic-looking shape and a kind of medieval wheel shape. In some similar bags of crisps (perhaps the one from Lidl) there is also a portcullis-shaped crisp, so we tend to refer to these shaped crisps as portcullis-shaped crisps. There is a category of person who, if I asked them which shape they preferred, would answer irritably, saying that they didn’t care. This category of person would view my differentiation-talk as nonsense out of a sense of themselves as being people who cut through triviality and/or had no time for meaningless nuance.

In the nice cafe we have found next to Seven Dials in Covent Garden we had a discussion about the coffee cups. I am looking to find a nice one or two for home with an attractive shape. This would equally get the goat of the above-mentioned category of people. They would no doubt prefer drinking from a mug. I conclude there are two types of people. Those for whom tiny aesthetic choices are unimportant and those whose day is cheered up by them. If you value aesthetic detail in your consumption of culture (football; good looks in people; the arts) why would you not value this in the workaday world that surrounds us at every moment of the day? Perhaps because you feel that here it impinges on your ideological values, though I don’t see why you can’t appreciate the variety of crunch in a corrugated iron shaped crisp and still retain your ruthless streak in the futures market. A training in nuance in whatever genre might hone your financial acumen.

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With the Olympics on the go we are hearing a lot of the national anthem. It is interminably droned out over the airwaves when Team GB or as I like to call it GB Team wins a Gold medal. On the telly they are still in the cast of mind that they must beam out live the medal ceremony along with the silly anthem, as if we are all still living in 1870’s Prussia. There will come a day (I’m hoping quite soon) when all this stops and the Daily Telegraph is replete with scandalised letters. It reminds me of the strange convention of the marriage proposal, something out of middle-age folklore where the man must formally ask the woman for her hand in marriage, rather than the two of them having a number of chats about the idea. If I were a woman and someone one day asked me for my hand in marriage I would have readily prepared a severed hand in formaldehyde preserved in a pickling jar which I would present to my aspirant spouse. In the same way all medal ceremonies should have medals presented by a man in frock coat and a huge handlebar moustache or at least some resplendent whiskers photographed with one of those old-fashioned cameras where you look down onto a plate in your apparatus and after much chemical manipulation produce a blurry melancholy black and white image of alien beings waiting to be blown to smithereens in the Great War.

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When you look down to your feet they seem a long way off, especially if you haven’t got your lenses in. You can feel like one of those enormous plant-eating dinosaurs with a small brain in the head and another one in the tail. I knew my feet weren’t great, which is why I went to see the chiropodist a couple of weeks ago. She confirmed I had a fungus on eight of my toe nails. This fungus has come up on me over the last two or three years making the nail yellow and brittle. I had the choice of pills from the doctor or a varnish over the counter. So now I am coating my nails every evening after washing them in a bucket. We will note the evolution. The shifts in the details of the human body that operate over the summer are a source of micro-pleasure or distress: the accelerated growth of eyebrow hair; the skin blooming rosy initially then settling down; the urge to nap. My feet are my great unloved. I had reckoned it was time I gave them some attention. Bits were dropping off them. Just because they are a few feet away from my eyes I shouldn’t ignore them.

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Humankind can only bear so much compromise, so much mitigation. It has an inbuilt desire to cut through the equivocation and (not to put to fine a point on it) the crap and take a stand that is black or white. Grey confuses the matter. And this is not just in our rhetoric; it is in our actions too. There are only so many months we can go on saying you can go into a cafe as long as you wear a mask on entry and when you stand up to go to the toilet and make sure you give your mobile number or better still use the ap. After a bit of this you just want to say oh let’s just not bother! In the end you just want to say people are rubbish or something like that. You want to polarise. Or, when you see the devastation, material and moral, after England’s defeat in the Euro final, that this is the Bacchae revisited, that when ecstasy is unleashed chaos will follow. But, the new heroic position is compromise, because truth isn’t simple. Faced with complexity, anyone can push out to the pole. It takes a hero to look at as much of the evidence as is possible, give due respect to those who know more or better, take into account political machinations and come to a balanced, considered position, which will not necessarily be sitting on the fence but may well be inhabiting a locality close to a fence.

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