I have never been a wearer of so-called combat trousers. The idea that urban life is a combat where you need to keep your battle tools about you tucked into a variety of pockets and crannies woven within the folds of your trousers doesn’t appeal to me. What is this combat you fight? I wish to say. Then there are the hoods you cover yourself with as if your identity is a secret the evil state would wish to hound you for. Or the trousers you wear low slung to show your earlier experiences in a state penitentiary. These are all adolescent urban fantasies, and if your identity is being tracked it isn’t by the bumblers in the government, it is by the people you willingly give your life to, at Facebook and Amazon and co. You yearn to belong to an urban warfare, yet you cannot understand the stakes. And then, when for once a mild degree of war-like discipline is required, you cry because you can’t get a pint or a haircut next week or a public space where you can do your pull-ups. What war were those pull-ups intended for? This may be the closest we get to one.

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Language is fraught with difficulties. As an individual I want to use my own words. I don’t want to say yo or yay; I want to say hiya. I don’t want to say the movies; I want to say the pictures. I don’t want to be the slave of the on trend. These are the words of my youth; they are part of me. I am living the language diachronically, through time. But some words you cannot live diachronically; you have to live them synchronically, as though they are only of today. I cannot say the word darkie for black person even though it was a word my mum used for all the right reasons and also a term I remember Muhammed Ali using. Today we are forced by our culture (which is more powerful than us, and rightly so) to use the term person of colour, even though this term makes no sense to me, as if the two blocks in the world are white people and others. We must, however, bow to the stupid synchronic.

What I can do perhaps is maintain a critical discourse on usage, whilst remaining in its thrall.

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I heard the expression I kid you not used as I was travelling on the train this morning. i have not heard it for quite a time but I suppose its day has come as it takes its place with those other modern pre-affirmaton statements like I swear to you; I’m not going to lie to you. These prefatory insistences pepper modern speech (I’m sure you have noticed). Emphatic and declamatory, I live them as a boorish and boastful preface to mostly banal utterance. They are rhetorical features, I suppose, looking to convince us with stardust, all form, bullying the listener into better attention. What I would prefer is a complex utterance told modestly, rather than this, where we often get dull material given the big intro. It is so much nicer to devine complex material delivered seamlessly, articlately, without shout.

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Ouside the flat where I live there is a spot much favoured by idlers. they come at night and position themselves there just outside my bedroom window. It is on a corner, so it is a spot where there is no parking, which explains why the position is free at night and why the idler places himself there. There is no denying that there are drug dealers afoot in the area who might undertake their transactions in an idling automobile, ready for a quick getaway, but mostly these are just regular guys doing what a lot of regular guys do, getting out of the house at night, going into their favourite space, which is their car and driving off to another alien spot (outside my bedroom, as it turns out). Here they keep the engine running. For comfort? That warm throb must keep them happy. One is wary of confronting the idler by night. Who knows what kind of idler he is? And any night encounter is risk-laden. This nocturnal activity is an index to the life of the common man (it is almost exclusively men). They have to get out of the house, even when they should be tucked up in bed. The house or the flat is an oppressive locus. It needs escaping from. Once we found someone asleep snuggled up to the throbbing engine. Often they sit there listening to their music. Very existential and all that but I just wish they wouldn’t end up doing it five yards from my bed.

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I am preparing to go back to the physical reality of working with other people after about six months on screen. For me, this can not come a moment too soon. I shall surely grumble at getting up earlier and travelling on public transport but, on balance, I am happy to go back. I am maybe in a minority. Many people enjoy the virtual contact with others and will try and retain it, perhaps permanently. Notions of personal space and intimate space have stretched and perhaps elasticated for good. This proxemic sense has either become more or less acute depending on your point of view. In the Renaissance the art of body arranging was infinitely more refined. Their dances were a codification of hierarchies and allegiance. But equally one would think nothing of sharing a bed with another man. Montaigne always shares his bed with Henri de Navarre (the future Henri IV) whenever he is in town, just as a gesture of friendship. Personally, I do need physical human transaction, though I am not what you call a particularly touchy-feely type. I put this down to having shared a bed with my big brother when I was a teenager, which might put anyone off.

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I have four impressions when I see or hear the word Carcassonne. One: my own visit to this smallish town in south West France about twenty-five years ago. It is an ancient walled city with some gift shops inside but nice if you walk round the medieval walls on a sunny day. There is also a modern town beyond the medieval one. Two: my neighbour Tom tells me he plays a game on line called Carcassonne, which I suppose is about capturing medieval fortresses.  Three: at work in my room there is a framed poster of Carcassonne as it was in the 1960s (to judge by the one or two cars visible in the picture). It is less spoiled by modern tourism and you see the vegetation encroaching round it where now there is a big car park. Four: in recent days I have seen an advert by the French Tourist Board on TV trying to get tourists to come to France. The image they choose is that of Carcassonne. some images of the walls; some of trails of tourists in shorts; some of gift shops. It doesn’t look as alluring as it does on the poster in my room or even in my own memory from 25 years ago. What you think of something is a mix of memories, some personal, some collective; representations; transformations or translations into other modes or iconographies; interferences from extraneous elements (the sunny day I went round the walls; the evolution of the French tourist industy). It’s no wonder one can never be clear about stuff.

I don’t know what I think of Carcassonne now. If I go there again, maybe I’ll go in the winter.

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I did another survey. It must be survey season. This one was Mori Ipsos. There was a phone call out of the blue. Would I do a survey on my personal finance? The man had a fruity voice. Why not? I was hoping to get paid but no money was mentioned. They phoned me back at 4 pm but it was n’t the man with the fruity voice; it was a woman with an accent I could never quite understand. I had to keep asking for her to repeat the question, like an proper old-timer. I answered no to most of her questions. They had said the survey might take about 45 minutes. I’d wrapped it up after 20 minutes because of my negatives. Did I have a credit card? No. Did I have Life insurance? No. Did I have a smart phone? No. I said I bet that’s the first time anybody’s said no to that one? The woman grinned back, thinking what a freak! What kind of a pension did I have? No idea. Would I be taking out an annuity when retired? Haven’t thought about it. What kind of car insurance did I have? Don’t have a car.  Do I invest in stocks and shares. Nope. Do I have an Isa? No Siree. Then finally, do I think I manage my finances well? Answer Yes. There was a pause on the end of the line. How could I manage my finances well if I didn’t have all their shit? The answer should be implicit, I think. Oh, and their first question was: what am I? Male? Female? Other? A different tack from the ONS.

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We did a survey from the Office of National Statistics. They pay you £30. It’s worth it. There was a simple flow-chart telling you about its usefulness. You do it – you send it – we look at it – we collate the information – we use the information for decision-making. Basically, if you do the survey you’re almost running the country. First question. Gender. Three options. Male. Female. Prefer not to say. You imagine some boffin at the ONS dealing with the recent gender debate. I suppose we’d better put something in for all those people stuck in between somewhere. Prefer not to say should do it. As you go through the questionnaire prefer not to say figures greatly. You wonder why. Might one feel that information might be used against you in certain cases? Is this the worry? Or is it the fear of treading on the toes of the hyper-squeamish? In which case why are the hyper-squeamish banking £30 for the survey? Am I being anti-hyper-squeamish discriminatory? Further question – the survey was mostly about mental health attutudes to coronavirus – : on a scale of one to ten where 0 is not at all and 10 is greatly, how depressed did you feel yesterday? I got toothpaste on my clean t-shirt again. I prefer not to say. It could well be that Boris Jonson is running the country on the basis of my tooth-brushing ineptitudes.

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We took the coach to north Devon because it was a lot cheaper than the train. It was supposed to take six hours. This is a long time to be stuck on a bus but we thought we could manage it. The coach was due to leave a 1.30 from Victoria coach station. At 1.25 the screen suddenly posted Delayed, so we waited some more. They had said get there just ten minutes before the departure so there is not much waiting around in a confined space; it was covid thing. From 1.30 onwards we were all waiting around in a confined space and nobody was much bothered about it. They just love bleating out messages about safety, but when they should be looking out for it nobody’s noticing.We asked the guys in high-viz who were not letting us through the gates and they said they didn’t know when the coach would be ready to leave. The waiting went on. There was an old guy there with an ancient mariner look in his watery eye. The officials had found him a seat but there was a lot of close-contact milling going on, and a lot of whispering. The driver was still having his lunch; the coach was locked in traffic. One hour and fifteen minutes into the delay I went hunting for someone. I spoke to a man near the information desk, who was the station manager it turned out. He said he’d find out.  I went back to the milling and the old guy with the ancient mariner look. After five minutes the station manager came and told me the coach was here. He pointed across the station to a parked bus and smiled. I said It’s no good there. It’s supposed to be here, and in fact – I looked at my watch – half way to Bristol by now. We finally got going at 3.15, one and three quarter hours late. The old guy with the look of the ancient mariner  was, I gathered from eves-dropping, a former coach driver himself. He’d driven the Margate route thirty years ago, he said. He wasn’t waiting for a coach. He just came along to the coach station every day to relive former dramas. This happened on the Margate route every week, he grinned. We were two hours late but it was nice to know that things hadn’t changed in thirty years.

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When you read a bit of 18th Century literature you see the degree to which private letters have played a role in people’s sense of self, sense of worth, sende of belonging. They are forever hiding compromising letters, never for some reason destroying them. Also, given the precious nature of much 18th Century language, epistolary language is often ambiguous and can lead to fatal misunderstandings. I do not think that this is just the genre of fiction that requires quid pro quos and surprising reversals; it holds true for non-fictional work too (Rousseau in his Confessions was constantly undone by his inability to call a spade a spade in his correspondance).

Have we changed? I don’t think so. We retain this pathological desire to commit taboo thoughts to paper or, more likely, screen. We love to document, leave a record, take a selfie, write a blog, issue a tweet. And the trail we leave behind ourselves is more voluminous than it was in the 18th Century. And, like in the 18th Century, it will break you. Something you thought acceptable in 2010 will bring you down in 2020; culture moves so quickly. What’s more, everything is pushing you to participate. I do not possess a smart phone. For a range of reasons, the main one being that I don’t want to participate in this endless round of chat and counter-chat on any one’s terms other than my own. On Friday in Peckham we came across a pub that looked alluring. Not too crowded, with an empty spot outside. We thought we might try it. The first pub in nearly four months. But when I went in to order a drink I was banned because I didn’t have a smart phone. Covid 19 has brought this about, but not just. I have experienced situations where I was banned from buying a train ticket at a station from an actual human being because I didn’t have a smart phone. We are being locked into the labyrinth, and there will be no Theseus to kill this particular Minotaur.

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