We had a power cut last night. It was like the good old days. Between 8.15 and 10 in the evening all electricity vanished from some randomly selected flats in our and other blocks in the vicinity. I was watching The Day the Earth Stood Still on the telly at the time. Keanu Reeves was an alien come down to earth to confiscate the power that the human race had misused. I don’t know what happened in the end because of the power cut, but there were intimations he might change his mind because of the attentions of Jennifer Conolley as an alluring scientist wearing lots of white lab coats and her father, the Nobel-Prize winning scientist played by (don’t laugh) John Cleese. There was one particular scene where the alien came into Cleese’s office at home (Persian rug; lots of books, a blackboard with chalk equations on it and (get this) Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the turntable; Bach’s Goldberg Variations (not the English suites or the Partitas, mind) have been the semiotic indicator of genius since Hannibal Lector). The alien was stopped in his tracks by the Bach and said (I said it before him, it was so predictable) It’s beautiful. So I had a pretty good idea he might melt and save humanity at the end of the film. This became increasingly clear when he had some face time with Jennifer Conolley’s mixed-race stepson. Keanu Reeves couldn’t standby unmoved with a mixed-race stepson. Anyway, it was a bit surprising to feel how eerie things were with no electricity for ninety minutes or so. It doesn’t take much for us to feel that our civilization is a paltry thing. I went to bed. The lights came back on about ten. By then the film was over. I reckon the alien would have melted.

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We were passing by the front of the block and the guy from no 1 was cleaning his windows and the windows of no 2. I live at no 3. We said Oooo, hallo, you’re cleaning windows. Can you do ours? He said sure. I said we’ll bring you back some cheese. We were on the way to a cheese shop in East Dulwich. Do you like cheese? He said he did. How did you get out there? we asked. It wasn’t easy to get to the grass verge at the front of the windows. I climbed through the window, he said. Fair do’s. Climbing through the window had never occured to me. Afterwards, we thought: oh dear, we shouldn’t have put him on the spot like that. Never mind, we’ll get him some cheese. In East Dulwich we went in the cheese shop and got three cheeses: roquefort, fourme d’ambert and comte. When we got back to home the windows had been done. When we went round with the cheese, No 1 was out. So we brought the cheese back home. Oh dear! No 1 had probably been in  a hurry to go out and we’d forced him to do our windows. When we looked through the windows it was cleaner, no doubt about it. We had some of the cheese. Between us we got through a fair bit of it. I like the blues particularly. I had the fourme d’ambert on my pasta. We kept the cheese out of the fridge. It’s better that way, but it gets softer. Probably not really acceptable as a gift for no 1 anymore. I had a bit more after dinner tonight. When I next bump into no 1 I’ll have to have a strategy.

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A student asked me how old I was today. I said I can’t tell you my age; it’s against the rules. I don’t suppose it is, but I think it is normally a bad idea to reveal too much. One boy said; you’re either really old and look young, or really young and look old. I said: can’t I just be in the middle? No. The middle isn’t a place that fifteen year olds want to consider. I wonder what’s best: being old and looking young or being young and looking old?

If you are old and look young, you’re still old, and maybe old in places that are not visible. Still where’s the harm in being old? It has its advantages. If you are young and look old, you probably look old for a reason, which may not be good news. The index to our age is mainly numerical, but there may be others too. Your appetite for the future or your attachement to the past. As I get older, I find the past becomes a bigger and bigger resource. This may be another index of your age; how you look, forward or back? Having said that, sometimes I hear some fifteen year olds or eighteen year olds talking about their futures and I feel quite a bit younger than they are.

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As I was walking into the tube at Earls Court this evening I overheard a snatch of conversation between an elderly female Evening Standard distributor and a couple of bemused foreign tourists. You just had a minute, she was saying excitedly. Why just one minute? the Russian tourists were asking. That was the thing, she said. But you cannot explain everything about computer in one minute, the Russians replied, looking earnestly at her. No, you didn’t have to explain everything, said the news vendor. World of computer is complex, said one of the Russians.  And you couldn’t hesitate or repeat or go off topic, she said, carrying on regardless. Perhaps could explain in five or ten minutes or one hour lecture, they said. No, said the vendor, just a minute. The Russians were now looking for a way out. They looked at the cover of the paper.Who was this remarkable Nicholas Parsons? they seemed to be thinking. They exchanged looks and moved into the station as though into a strange now world.

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I will never have a personal trainer. You see them in the gym high-fiving or fist-pumping stick-dry businessmen who, puce with embarassment, are suddenly, randomly, embarked in a world whose rules they do not know. I, you see, could not do this. I would turn down the fist-pump, eschew the high-five. I am like that. I can’t use the word ‘movies’, as it was not the word I used in my childhood. I went to the ‘pictures’ and need to run with this even today. I have high-fived, though. Although ironically. Once, naively, I tried it with a six-year-old, who looked at me with high disdain. The moral is: don’t do things you’re not comfortable with; don’t do things whose culture you have not investigated. A fist-pump. I don’t even know its provenance.

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If I’m not reading serious-ish material I’m not getting the roughage required to keep me well in the head. At the moment I’m giving Knausgaard a go (volumes one and two of his autobiography); next it will be a re-reading of Michel Tournier’s Gaspard, Melchior et Balthazar, an imagining of the stories of the three kings, then I’m giving Penelope Fitzgerald a go with The Blue Flower and then Thomas Bernhard’s autobigraphy which I remember as a real dose of bitter stuff. On top of this, for work, I’m re-reading Sartre’s Roads to Freedom  trilogy. If I’ve not got this inner narrative going on the outer narrative isn’t enough. I think that he way popular culture processes the complexity of the evolved human mind is one of the contributory factors to mental health issues. We have this complex brain dealing with a society shifting at break-neck pace, and culture, which is our way of dealing with ourselves, offers us Marvel films, Love Island. Quentin Tarantino, James Bond. posturing rap-artists. The immediate upshot of this is that we vote for comic book saviours like Donald Trump. But the real issue is the mush that happens when we try and use this goo as processing liquid for our lives.

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Sixty -five million years ago when that asteroid hit the earth and killed off the dinosaurs most discernable life on earth was annihilated. Gradually, over millions of years, things started to develop. The forests regrew and for millennia went unmunched because no creatures of any size could live.There were blind snakes that lived under ground. Strange creatures evolved. Huge burrowing moles, the size of an elephant. Tall creatures with three metre skulls and long necks like giraffes, but with wings.

At the end of all this, the last full stop of a massive tome, came man. And we seem to be on the way out. In what way are we cleverer. In districts of China research is underway to develop flying motor-cycles, presumably so you can get your pizza or your noodles delivered a bit quicker to your armchair. A drone will soon do all these personalized deliveries. Just eat, you fat bastard! Millions of instants of hyper-egotism characterzse our world. Now do you understand me when I tell you that people are rubbish. Happy 2020.

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I slept in the bed without a hot water bottle last night it was so warm in the house in Manchester. The first night I got Helen to look through the cupboards for one. I told them I’m mostly hot all over but my feet are always cold. I like the air temperature cold at night but my feet warm in the bed. I don’t think I’ve ever had the heating on at night.  They have the thermostat in the hall. It’s no good there because it gets the draught from the front door. Upshot being the house is always overheated. When it’s 18 in the hall, it’s 23 in the living room. I said to Helen, why don’t you get a rug down on this wooden floor in the living room, then at leat I know where I am. I can keep my feet warm and just judge the temperature from the rest. As it is, I’m taking two readings. It’s like the weather forecast when they say temperature 23 feels like 18.  Helen said she likes wood under her feet. I said, wood’s overrated. Anyway Helen said can we keep this little window open in the living room. Fine by me, I said, I like the air on my face. Liz said she was chilly. I said what are you doing chilly in this house.? She said she has energy bills of £132 a quarter. Mine are £32. Say no more.

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For my birthday, my brother and sisters decided to drive me and them on a walk down memory lane to the area where we grew up in Offerton Stockport. In the pouring rain we walked past the house we’d lived in, peeked over the garden fence to note what a paltry affair the garden had become. We walked down Graham Road and saw how most of the corner shops had disappeared. Then we went into Woodbank park. David took us on a wild goose chase down the woods and we followed him. It was only when we were wading in mud that I remembered that this was what he had always done since childhood, led the way indiscriminately. Then we got into Woodlands Park where most of the facilities (tennis courts and outdoor paddling pool) had been replaced by parking spaces. On the way back to the car we stopped off at the Strawberry Gardens pub, where I was happy to pay the round (it’s cheap up north) and where the creamy beer made me wince with pleasure. Back via a local shop for some milk and eggs. David was dawdling with the eggs and the shopwoman said ‘has he had too much Christmas cheer?’ and I said ‘no, he’s always been like that’ and so I got to share a laugh at his expense with a stranger. So it was worth it after all.

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They are still working hard on the Northern Line extension near my flat in Kennington. This has been going on for many years now. When I say they are still working hard I am a little tongue in cheek. For the last year I don’t know what they have been doing. They have been milling around a lot in their high-viz combos. What with Brexit and sending all the Europeans back home, I have nursed a suspicion. They are not construction workers at all now; they are actors performing the signalling and semiotics of construction work. It makes perfect sense. All those out of work actors and no Poles left to do the actual work. Actors know how to mill. For some of them, it will be the role of a lifetime. It would explain the reason why whenever I look through the grill at them, their use of the space is perfect, their manipulation of props flawless, but they don’t seem to be moving the infernal project on in any way.

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