At the very end of Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Doeblin we read about the hero of the novel Franz Biberkopf: ‘About his life is there nothing further to be reported’ (Weither ist hier von seinem Leben nichts zu berichten).  We are being denied access to further information about the life of this character after 700 pages of detailed reporting on his struggles to make ends meet in Berlin of the 1920s. Suddenly, and seemingly, randomly, the writer pulls the rug from under our feet and refuses to tell us more.

The writer can do this. He is the servant of the reader. All is done for the reader but the writer makes all the decisions. He is the dictator of his universe.

The reader is an obese god. He is served on a plate all the offerings of the writer. The reader cannot influence anything. He must consume, consume. It can be frustrating for the obese god at times. He wants to know how the life story of Franz Biberkopf continued but he must accept what the writer offers.

And then there are the characters. These are the slaves, sent hither and thither by the reader. Often they are sent home by the end of the sequences, as in And they lived happily after or And they all paired up and got married or And then he died and his life was over. But sometimes they are left in some indeterminate space beyond the eye of the obese god who does not know how those feeble traces of ink continue their existence. In what tiny closet of whose mind is Franz Biberkopf wriggling now?

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I can tell by the way he leans his bike against the wall that he must be a good D-I-Y man, said my friend. Good point. It’s an interesting intuition. Do seemingly unrelated acts reflect each other? This is also a good game I can recommend in these etc etc times. Does a man’s posture tell you if they are proud or not? Maybe they are terribly proud but have a bad back. Here’s someone with a range of elegant hand gestures as she talks. You wouldn’t know she picked her nose in public. And look at how this fellow writes; his beautiful italic script; he must be so precise and meticulous in private life. It turns out he leaves a trail of chaos wherever he goes. The moment an actor does something counter-intuitive in their depiction of a character is always the moment that rings true, the moment they do something illogical or against the grain of the cliche. I remember Gerard Depardieu in a Truffaut film running halfway up the stairs of his suburban house then back down again for no apparent reason, just to illustrate mental turmoil. Or the moment in another film whose title I have forgotten the Emperor of Austro-Hungary inspects the troops. He is grubby and ill-shaven, a figure of no glamour or substance at all. When you see that, you realise it’s true. One thing doesn’t mean another. We are strange mixtures of accomplishment and  measliness. You would not think the one went with the other. So: he’s tricking you by leaning his bike against that wall in such an accomplished manner. In fact, his D-I-Y skills are measly.

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In my block there is a guy who looks like he is married. He must be about fifty and wears pink chino shorts  in the summer. He is well built and looks as though he might represent a good catch for a woman thinking of settling down. I never see him with anyone, so I assume he is divorced. He looks like a divorced guy. I can imagine him having an extra-marital affair and getting booted out by a high-maintenance wife. In my block there are a lot of gay men but he isn’t gay; he has none of those gay characteristics. Nor is he a long term singleton. None of his fashion choices would put him in this bracket. There are no toothpaste stains on his tee-shirt or anything. He should really be living in Surbiton and have a car in a garage next to his family home. In my block we do not allow cars in the courtyard. People are mostly public transport people. What with the lockdown I have begun exchanging smiles and nods with him. The other day we exchanged words. He was standing in a queue for a toilet outside a pub that has started selling beer from its doorway as a takeaway drink. The main attraction of the pub was the toilet and he was standing there in the queue, again not with anyone in particular. I said hallo and he said something I didn’t quite hear and laughed. I laughed back. Maybe we can be acquaintances.

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In Rousseau’s Confessions, which I am reading at the moment, you encounter a litany of deviant or marginal sexual activity. In Book One Jean-Jacques confesses to the pleasure he derived from being spanked as a child. In Book Two he describes in graphic detail the horror he felt at seeing his first ejaculation when a man with a penchant for him masturbated in front of the him (‘je vis partir vers la cheminee at tomber a terre je ne sais quoi de gluant et de blanchatre’ – I saw something gluey and whitish shoot out towards the chimney and fall onto the floor). In Book Three we read how he used to expose himself to girls who went to a well to fill their pail with water. In Book Eight Rousseau recounts how after a little too much to drink he and two other men shared the favours of a girl, taking her in turns. We also learn in Book Eight of the five children he had that he immediately gave up to the Home for Lost children. I have four more books to read. He was no saint.There will be more revelations.

And yet, is it not healthy to reveal the misdemeanours of youth or even maturity? Would it be healthier to whitewash them out? In 2020 any errors in your youth might well disqualify you for respectability in later life. In the digital age we document them all the time. We confess without realizing it. We blunder into confession and self-revelation. Our fallibility has become a liability. I can see that we do not want to empower a monster, but the deep puritanical strain that I think comes from the US is growing. D’Alembert, a contemorary of Rousseau, had a term for the type of thinker that Rousseau was. Not Lberte, Egalite, Fraternite but Liberte, Pauvrete, Verite. Verite or Truth is sometimes a casualty of the frantic rearch for virtue.

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There are a range of techniques involved in avoiding questions in the five o’clock session where ministers do their level best to boast and say nothing to the public. Here’s one. When the journalist asks you a specific question starting, say, can you say when Dominic Cummings was in Durham in lockdown with his wife and child?, you say: What I can say is…and say something irrelevant. This is the What I can say response. The What I can say response proves you can say things, even though they may not be apposite. This is communications technique number one, right out of the Dominic Cummings manual. No wonder he is so indispensible. Technique number two is when you repeat the question in more detail and with greater rhetoric.This is called Just repeat the question, also from the communications manual. Question: Is it one law for the politicians and one law for the rest of us? Answer: Very good question. Is it one requirement for the members of the political elite who, even though they make up the rules (double Boris fist clench) don’t seem to feel that the rules apply to them, whereas the ordinary people of this country who have done a sterling job self-isolating to keep the R rate beloe one, which is what we all have to do, and this is the most important thing and something which will dictate how quickly we can get back to normal and drive to places like Durham. Very good question. The next question is from the Bradford Times. The quality of response from the politicians, including Lizard in a Suit (Dominic Raab) and the Whey-faced Loon (Hancock) and Boris himself do not even deserve to be called casuistic, as that would imply a certain complex skill. In what the French call Le five o’clock the UK cabinet is rubbish.

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Do you, like so many others, spend your working life logging? I recently made a complaint to my local council about the noise emmanating from a substation close to my flat. They eventually sent me a reponse and triumphantly announced that my complaint had been logged. My question as to whether they were going to do anything about it was greeted with disbelief. Was it not enough that it was logged in that great log-book in the virtual heavens? The power company have also logged my complaint. We have a record of your earlier complaint, they told me, it has been logged. Would you like to make another complaint? I considered for a moment. What would that mean? I asked, a mere innocent in all matters of logging. They are the experts after all; it was right I ask their advice on the matter. It would mean we log it again. Yippee! Double logging. Let’s go for it. Do you log? I am often asked to log at work for an imaginary day of reckoning. You know, I could always log something I haven’t done. Has that occurred to anyone? Does lgging get anything done? Probably not. Does it do any harm? Possibly. It stands in for doing something but protects you against legal action maybe. We are all lumberjacks these days.

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The great British queue is evolving. They have always prided themselves on queueing, the British. It has been part of their self-identifying story, like the stiff upper lip and keeping calm and pulling together in difficult times, all stuff that feels increasingly like nonsense and no more than a dossier of propaganda  pulled out of the hat for political purposes every so often. And so it is with queues. But the coronavirus queue reveals new  baroque strands. Outside the supermarket you have the two metre distance queue and the man who lets the gap grow. So that you are standing two metres behind a man watching a TV show on his phone who lets his gap grow to eight metres. This gives rise to anxiety in queue-ers like yoursef. When you turn a corner the strand of the queue could be lost. New people could slip in. You could be lost, become a mere pedestrian and not a queue-er, all that queue-time effaced, eradicated. And, in any case, you look forward to moving up in the queue. The moment you all shuffle forward. It’s one of the highlights of your day. What is this man’s motivation  for letting the gap grow in front of him? Is he oblivious? Is he a queue snob, refusing to recognize the strict regulations of queue culture, a queue libertarian? Is queueing beneath him? Does he see himself above the queue? He is like a car in a traffic jam that refuses to push along when the traffic creeps forward. What’s the rush? you might say. The traffic jam isn’t going anywhere. But no, there are streets that feed into the traffic jam and cars that insinuate themselves into the line and so take your place. Leaving a gap in a queue is never a harmess venture. When you vaunt your relaxation and casualness, your anti-queuenesss, what happens is that others pay.

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Before the UK Power Networks stands a gatekeeper. To this gatekeeper comes a man from the city and requests dialogue with the UK Powernetworks, for he has this buzzing in his flat which was certainly coming from a faulty substation in the Montford Place substation and was stopping him from sleeping nights. But the gatekeeper explained that dialogue was almost certainly imposssible with anyone in authority. The only people he could put the man from the city through to were the PR people. Even the man from the city knew that this was a waste of time. The gatekeeper explained that a scout could be sent out to the substation but that the scout had only limited authority and could only penetrate the outer wall of the substation and had no real competence to examine the problem. For that an engineer would be required and because of Coronavirus engineers were not available. The man from the city asked whether after Coronavirus an engineer would be able to come and repair the problem. The gatekeeper said that enginners never showed themselves. Why, he himself had only ever once seen a real engineer and that was through a keyhole and it wasn’t even sure it was a real engineer, it could have been a mere scout. The man from the city continued to ask favours of the doorkeeper but the doorkeeper continued to guard the door. This was only the first doorkeeper. After him the next gatekeeper was twice as strong and after him there was another one even more formidable, so there could be no hope of getting through to where the engineers were. After  a long time the man from the city grew weary. The light in his eyes dimmed and he was reaching his end. He gathered up all his strength to ask a final question. But you are insatiable, said the gatekeeper. what do you want to know now? With his final breath the man from the city mumbled: How is it that in all this time I am the only one who has tried to gain access through the gate to the UK Powernetworks? The gate keeper recognized the man was breathing his final breath and explained to him: No-one else could be granted access through this gate for it was intended for you and you only. I am now going to close it?

Yes, I have problems getting through to UK Power Networks to fix the noise that is stopping me sleeping every night. I feel I understand Kafka more and more every day.

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As I am walking around the streets and I come upon a pedestrian walking towards me there ensues a complex negotiation. Am I friend or foe, or maybe both? We are like medieval travellers on the path through Sherwood Forest. I could be one of the Sherrif of Nottingham’s men, one of those so-called Norman foot-soldiers with their functional, egg-shaped helmuts, or I could be Will Scarlet. The hips shuffle the centre of gravity away from my trajectory; I do like wise. We are like two lizards on a wall with our parallelogramic shiftings; or else like pieces on a chessboard. Our eyes register foe, foe first, then one of us remembers to smile, or if one of us is a mask-wearer, nod, accepting our fraternity faced with all the uncertain rejigs that are going on around us. We are suddenly on a chessboard but unsure of our powers. We are cribbed.

Headphones don’t help, you know. People under headphones think they are as able as us, but they are oblivious. In the supermarket on their phones they skate around. It is as if they have never heard of this new chessboard we have to go around on. I’m doing the Rook. That woman’s doing the Knight. Why is this guy passing Go?

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Easter sunday.The key day in the Christian calender. On the Friday before his death Jesus had shared a supper with his followers urging them to eat his body and drink his blood. He is later crucified on a cross to save the lives or souls of the rest of humanity. This vestige of cannibalism, the weird fetichisation of suffering, human sacrifice and the bizarre idea that one man’s death could stand in for the salvation of millions started to gain momentum through the political act of Emperor Constantine when he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. But how did this barbaric assemblage of superstition and horrific atavism gain traction and take over the world? And why do people who normally wouldn’t say boo to a goose remain in its thrall?

Happy Easter.

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