In the Japanese cafe in Soho we heard a couple talking at an adjoining table. A young woman (we think she was Chinese) and a young man (we think he was Japanese) talking in English. We think it was a first date to judge by the types of question and answer. They explained their jobs to each other. Maybe they had come via a dating app. In a first date you are in the outer shell, still quite far from any core. The electrons have space to orbit. The other person is still a long way off. There were long expositions taking place. Polite nods. Good listening. Open faces. There was a moment when she looked away, having heard his introductory material. Her eyes drifted. Unimpressed.

If there is a second meeting they will look to move into the next orbit, closer to the nucleus. Suddenly, the listening will be less respectful. The swarms of electrons spinning round will be more chaotic. Interruptions in the dialogue will ensue. Collision may take place. If they make it to the next shell, there is more at stake. The nucleus beckoning. There will be gambits, provocations, pronouncements, revelations. There may then be strategic withdrawals. realizations. Or else, infatuation, bewitchment. And so on into the inner shell. Will the centre hold? Will the nucleus receive them both intact? We left before there was clear resolution. But that drift of her eyes seemed telling.

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People do a lot of hiding these days. Behind their screens or slipping past you in the street without acknowledgement. It happens more and more, I find. I had a leak into my kitchen from upstairs a few weeks ago. I got the plumber to come and stop it. I called the landlord from upstairs. I said I’d send him the invoice. It was his dish-washer that disrupted. I’m getting my kitchen ceiling redecorated. It was ruined. That’s another invoice for upstairs. No response to my email; no response to my Whatsapp. I think the term is ghosted, or is that just for romance. I got the firm that looks after the building onto him. Still no peek from him. He’s a hider. He’s hiding the £700 he owes me.

I am a hider too every couple of weeks when my cleaner comes and I go next door to Tom’s for half an hour when I come home too early. Obviously, I don’t want her cleaning round my feet while I’m sitting around drinking tea. When my cleaner leaves my flat I hide behind Tom’s window. There is an angle she can see into Tom’s kitchen where I am also drinking tea. I don’t want her seeing me avoiding her. I’m a hider too. But my hiding isn’t costing anyone £700.

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Everybody must know the kind of people who talk a lot about their lives but never ask you a question about your own. When you are politely listening to them rambling on about their preoccupations, you are nodding along, varying the quality of your light smile, adjusting your limbs. You ask them all the right questions at all the right times. From time to time you attempt to nudge the exchange into a more general zone where some neutral material might be considered. From there perhaps you might be able to lightly push the conversation off into a a different direction, but no, they come marauding into the space and drag you back into the them-zone. They will not accept the air of that abstract space which is the intermediate place where civilized conversation goes to find another subject.

It’s not that I want to talk about my life. I have nothing much I want to talk about. I’m not pushing anything in particular. If the narrow side-door that leads out from that big barn were to be slid open and I were to be escorted through into my little room of things, I would probably want to just point out my scant possessions and then usher my interlocutor out again. But after two hours of relentless clobbering I am ready to leave my little room where it is and just slip away into the night.

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On the radio a man was talking about being a magician and he said that what he liked most about what he did was the look on peoples’ faces when he bamboozled them with a trick. He said it was a mixture of hope and confusion. It is rare these days that we get two feelings going in opposite dirctions, or even tangential lines, that are actually owned up to. The brain immediately wants to kick it all into a direction that can result in action or attitude. I was always bemused by the pity and fear we were supposed to feel at the end of Greek or Shakespearean tragedy. The pity of the catharsis I got, but the fear I wasn’t so happy about. Awe might have been a better word. It is always nice when articulate people can place two concepts together in a description of someone. It shows that there is spontaneous analysis going on and not just a desire to emprison someone in a definition. Politician A is careful and emphatic. Politician B is thoughtful and distracted. The two ideas almost kick against each other, but not quite. They just remind us that people are not so easily situated.

One of the delights of fictional writing is that you don’t have to plump for a particular truth. A text can be open-ended. At the end of the perennial Christmas cartoon favourite The Snowman, the little boy wakes up and the snowman has melted and the implication is that the night’s fun had been a dream. But then he sees that he actually has the scarf that the snowman had given to him. Does that prove it hadn’t been a dream? It doesn’t prove anything; that the scarf had actually been given to him the day before by his dad and in his dream he’s mixed that up or that a snowman coming to life was true. The story stops there. We live in the space between the two. It’s an honest space because, even though in the real world a truth is mainly one thing or another, gaining access to that one thing is often fraught with peril.

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Je ne me trouve pas ou je cherche – et me trouve plus par rencontre que par l’inquisition de mon jugement, says Montaigne, writing in the 16th Century. I do not find myself when I look for myself, but rather through engagement with others than through self analysis. He means that you reveal your nature most when you are involved in random and spontaneous activity rather than when you meditate or look into your heart. The word he often uses for the fact that life reveals itself more when you are in flux and off your guard, which is the natural state of man, is branle, mostly meaning something else these days but in 16th century meaning wiggle or constant movement. He also defines our nature as the act of dessiner rather than graver, sketch rather than engrave. We are unfixed, impermanent, modifible at any moment.

Embrace the flux, I say. This morning in the cafe I bumped into an old friend from years back, with whom there is some distrust. To his question how are you? I replied with an anecdote from my present life about the water leaking into my kitchen from the flat upstairs. Lesson one: be in the moment of your life (dessiner not graver; no earnest conclusion; keep the other on his toes). Then, looking at my book, he said what are you reading? I said, showing the Montaigne: you wouldn’t understand. It was in French, so he wouldn’t, so only a semi tease. But then I added, it’s philosophical. More of a tease, as he sees himself as philosophical. This is all to destabilise. It’s how I function on conversation. It’s my true nature. En branle.

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I had a QR code on my phone offering two free drinks and two free cakes on the 5th floor of John Lewis on Oxford street but the deadline to claim it was next week. It said Invite a Friend very perkily, but I couldn’t think of a friend who’d want to trek across to soulless Oxford street on a Saturday morning for a cup of tea and a lemon drizzle cake. But I knew I’d feel bad about letting the January 31 deadline pass. I decided to go there on my own this morning and try and find a shopping trip to do at the same time. My anxieties were legion. First, I don’t trust a QR code. I don’t really know what they are. What if I was ridiculed at the counter and it was invalid? Would I then have to go through with buying an unwanted beverage and comestible? And how would I get two drinks and two pastries? How would I phrase it? I’m on my own today. Just the one coffee. Maybe two of those lemon drizzles. I’ll take one home for tea. This was basically what I said. Over-articulating, as usual. The woman at the till couldn’t care less whether I had a friend waiting at the table to share the treat with me. She said, Just the one drink? I managed to say yes, instead of my friend can’t swallow warm liquid at the moment, so yes. After all, what was I doing without a friend. In fact, I ordered two cinnamon buns and wrapped one up in serviettes to take home like a rather sad loner. When I had drunk my coffee, eaten one cinnamon bun, wrapped the other in serviettes and stowed it in my bag for later, I made to leave. I organised my tray and crockery in a neat and fastidious way on the table top, as if I was being filmed and to somehow assuage guilt. Then left. Operation accomplished. The good thing was that I popped into a shop over the way and got a nice cheap shirt in the Sales. So, you see, it was a perfectly justified trip out.

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I went to the cafe in the park yesterday afternoon for a coffee. In the queue I got talking to a man, who was probably middle-eastern. He said, is that tweed? about my jacket. I said, I don’t think so but it’s wool. We got to talking about synthetic fibers and natural fibers. He said, would it be right for me to buy you a coffee? It was as if he was asking about the correct protocol. I said, no, that’s premature. It would be like buying a dress for a girl on the first date? He looked at me puzzled, but then smiled. I went to my table and waited for my coffee to come. He went to another table where someone I thought was his mum was sitting waiting. I realized I had made that error I always make: taking on a jokey manner immediately before I even know the person. I jump too quickly into the ironic mode and when you are talking to strangers, it’s thoughtless.

This was a reference from experience. Once when I had just started going out with someone and we were looking in shop windows, we saw a dress. I said, try it on. She did. I had to make a quick calculation about buying the dress for her or not. I decided not to. It could well have been a foolhardy purchase. Who could tell how long the relationship would last. As it turned out, it didn’t. My callous calculation was right.

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When you are telling a story to a child of three, the key is to include them in the story. You do not say Humpty Dumpty went down to to the park one day. You say Remember that day when you and me went down to the park with Humpty Dumpty. At first she looks confused. She does not remember that day. But you goad her. You blackmail her with the promise of a great adventure and she says yes. Then you say It was really icy, wasn’t it? And she says yes. She is getting into the spirit of things now. And you say. You told him not to sit on that wall, didn’t you? And she says yes. Because it was icy, you say (reference to the weather of the moment; this is Christmas). and what happened?, you say. Now she has been trained she is ready to spread her wings. He fell off! she yelps. That’s right. You shake your head. He cracked. We called the ambulance. They couldn’t do anything. We called the doctors and nurses. They couldn’t do anything. We called all the king’s horses and all the king’s men. Here she repeats the mantra. They couldn’t do anything. It was just all yellow and white on the grass. Do you remember? She remembers now all right. She has been trained in complicity and deceit. It’s a skill she’ll need. You even pop in a little joke for mummy. You say, We were all upset, weren’t we? because Humpty Dumpty was our friend, wasn’t he? And mummy was going to make a nice omlette for us all for dinner and now she couldn’t. Mummy will have to make us roast pork instead, won’t she? Yes, says the three year old, as mummy slips the joint in the oven.

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For Christmas we had bought a smallish box from Hotel Chocolate to share between us. We devised a system. First, a diagram of the display seen from above was drawn. Then each chocolate was given a number. Roman numerals were chosen. There were eighteen chocolates. These were listed. Then one after another we chose our preferences, nine each. A letter was then added to the name of each chocolate on our list. Two of the chocolate selections contained two small chocolate items. That was easy; one each. But it required a different classification letter; U for universal. There only remained to choose a colour each, to colour-code the chocolates on the diagram; brown and pink. The business was done. Now we can eat them without guilt or the temptations of deceit.

See how easy Christmas can be.

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