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.

peoplearerubbish.com

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.

peoplearerubbish.com

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.

peoplearerubbish.com

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.

peoplearerubbish.com

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.

peoplearearubbish.com

I am time. It has taken me a long time to realise this. If you ask me the time, I can normally guess it to a couple of minutes. I can know how many minutes it will take me to shower, wash my hair, shave, get my stuff together, dress and go out. This is a much underestimated competence. I know instinctively how long it will take me to walk from Edgware Road to Covent Garden or from Smithfields meat market to Holborn station. I am rarely late.

But I am not space.When I come out of the tube and the stairs turn me about I start  automatically walking in the wrong direction. On the tube I can never negotiate in my mind the way in which getting out of the train on the right equates with my instinctive memory of getting out of the train on the left. My notion of a short-cut will often send me haring in the wrong direction until I bemusedly realise I am arriving back at the same church steeple I started from seen from another, less flattering angle.

A Time person should get together with a Space person. All dimensions would be neatly harnessed. It would be the perfect package. But imagine how difficult it would be to coincide at the right pub. I’d be there on time at the Red Lion all right. She’d come dashing in half-an-hour late, hoping I’d be nursing a pint having given her some margin for manoeuvre.  Unfortunately, I’d be consulting my watch in the Red Lion on Lion St and she’s be looking round the empty bar in the Red Lion on Scarlet Square.

peoplearerubbish.com

The difference between a television star and a film star is in the access; the frequency of our glimpse is key. The film star lives or dies by his/her lower periodicity count; they must be rarefied creatures. He or she must be a fugitive presence on a flickering screen. This is why having Twitter accounts really shouldn’t be part of their activities. Or maybe the world of the television star and the cinema star have now melted into each other. Netflix would back this up.  What then is lost is the notion of the rare sighting of the rarefied beast. The mysterious traces of a Salinger or a Samuel Beckett. Omniverous media now make the pleasures of discretion an impossibility. Everyone is expected to jump into the dirt pit and fight for their gloire. Any writer is expected to have a Twitter account to pronounce his or her presence all the time. We have eschewed the delights of the intermittent trace. We really shouldn’t want to see Vivien Leigh in the chip shop.

peoplearerubbish.com

Last night I had a modular meal, as is my wont these days. I started with some popcorn and fizzy water; next it was an omelette (two eggs) with orange juice and sugar on it as though it was a pancake; then some blocks of cucumber; then a few lebkuchen form the packet and finally an apple. I managed to keep my hand out of the Quality Street tin. I have put the Quality Street tin on the other side of the kitchen under the bread basket where it doesn’t catch my eye. What do you think? In the modular meal you are calibrating as you go along. I hadn’t had enough fruit and veg by the time I finished the lebkuchen which explained the apple. I have become adverse to the full plate of meat and two veg plus gravy or sauce. I am against the glutinous agglomerate as meal these days. I look at it and my appetite goes. A twisted face of food confronting you from a big plate. No. Like with human relations, I prefer to deal with it all incrementally, as I go along.

peoplererubbish.com

I have never had a birthday party. My birthday being 24 December helped to save me from this, but it was never something I yearned for. I can see why Harold Pinter chose the motif of the Birthday Party for one of his most menacing plays. Indeed, it is an institution which is fast becoming as sinister as the phenomenon of the clown which is now a by-word for all that is most threatening in the universe of leisure. Here then are just a few of the elements of the traditional birthday party that combine to now give it this lugubrious status: the candle-laden cake lighting the twin deities of mother and father from beneath Hammer horror-style; the infiltration of outsiders onto your territory (what mayhem may ensue from their encroachment? What secrets of your domestic life uncovered and used against you in the world of men?); the total attention on you (only a pathological case could enjoy such focus, given its intensity how can this be anything but ironic?). Yes, the Birthday Party is the new clown.

peoplearerubbish.com

We know that risk occurs in investment, in gambling, in skiing, in Formula One. It also occurs in everyday life. Sometimes I start an answer to a question and I find I have taken too great a risk thinking I will find a way to articulate something rather vague that I had in mind when I started my amswer. This happened to me a few days ago when I was answering a question about history in front of a group of people. In my mind I had the word acoustic and I thought I could find my way through to a full answer with just this word. What I wanted to say was that something that seemed one way many years ago often seems different today because the acoustic had changed. What seemed moral in 1938 now seems thoughtless. There are all kinds of topics where this applies: racism; sexism; classism; ageism. But also the basic words and assumptions that people had and now have. The acoustic has changed; we hear things differently. Unfortunately, the only example that came into my head as I was scrabbling around for my words was Top of the Pops and the way the DJs in the 1970s were often surrounded by a collection of underage girls. What seemed part of normal healthy celebrity behaviour at the time now seems unpleasant and creepy. A moment of inadvertance had me seeming to sympathise with the likes of Jimmy Saville. I had taken too big a risk in thinking I could plot an answer on the hoof and had to retreat into a safe place. Jacob Rees-Mogg, not I admit my favourite person, has just fallen foul of this principle by letting his mouth run away with him and mentioning in the same breath a lack of common sense and the victims of Grenfell. This risk of an unprepared response may well cause his downfall.

peoplearerubbish.com