If, like me, you are not a driver, you will find the world of the car somewhat baffling. Most conversations between strangers use the car and its discontents as a binding fluid. You know that you belong to the freemasonry of the car. Words like forecourt wafted in from the other room this weekend when we were in a B and B in Devon. Disbelief was shown that our three-day walking holiday in Cornworthy near Totness did not involve an automobile but featured actual walking. We walked five miles with baggage to the B and B; we walked for three miles to the ferry to Dartmouth and after walking round Dartmouth and past its castle to the beach walked the three miles back to bed after dinner in a pub. It was a walking holiday. The walking holidays of the other guests were mostly car holidays. I have never wished to drive a car, though I have always enjoyed driving an imaginary vehicule (I think it is a citroen). I perform an unconvincing pantomime version of the act of driving where I am manipulating an extra large steering wheel and then do something wiggly under the table with my hand to change gears.  I have now adorned this mime with some furtive looks in an imaginary mirror, looking out for overtaking traffic or stray bikes (whilst looking for bikes, look irritated). It has become a complex procedure, this Marcel Marceau version of the act that everyone does. The next addition to my drive mime will be the reverse back down a one-way street where you put your arm along the the upper rim of the passenger seat and look back down the road you just drove up. It looks like a relaxing posture and I look forward to performing it on my next imaginary drive.

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In summer I let time drift. A few weeks ago the battery in my alarm clock ran out. On a number of occasions I have passed batteries in shops and neglected to purchase the replacement. On my bedside table there are two alarm clocks now; neither of them have functioning batteries in. When I wake up I have no idea what time it is. I switch my mobile phone off at night and it is laid on the kitchen table. In the kitchen is the only source of time. This is a digital clock on the cooker. To get the time I have to get up, traipse through the corridor and the living room and through the kitchen. I have to approach the cooker clock because my eyes are not in. I bend down to see the figures. It is, say, 6.13. Quick calculation. That means that the actual time is 6.01. I am of the breed that do not like clocks to tell the real time. I know the cooker clock is twelve earth minutes fast.  Now I can traipse back to bed. Traipsing figures greatly in the morning in my house. I even translate this state of affairs into my speech. I say ‘What time does the clock say?’ rather than ‘What time is it?’ You see, exactitude at all times in this household. We do not brook infelicities of expression. On August 10th I have to get up early for a train. A clock with an alarm will be required by then. Use the phone alarm, I hear you say. No, sir! The requirements of the homestead dictate that the mobile phone is turned off after ten o’clock. These are the rules that enfold me.

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My local Tesco has closed down and been replaced with a temporary store. They are going to knock down the old Tesco because they want to build a higher-rise block there and make a lot of money from apartments in what they are terming the new Oval quarter. They had to choose this name because Oval village had been taken by an area not that close to Oval. But oval makes a good word to have on the front of your new residential area. I walked past the old Tesco the other day and looked in through the glass. Inside, it is empty now; aisles still subsist, but there are no reasons for them; shelves are gathering dust. It is a ghost store now. All the familar faces gone. My old complaints about the old Tesco seem trivial. They don’t stack up against the facts, the facts being that I was always in there picking up stuff, a wodge of cheese, milk, carrots, disposable razors. Tesco was actually my best friend. Now the criticims seem churlish. Now that Teso has been terminated, its life system unplugged. Soon the demolition will begin and the world can get on with the job of building the Oval quarter and producing more of those executive flats that nobody can afford.

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I am chatting with Rafaello on the computer. Rafaello is representing Shell Energy and I am questioning the hike in my monthly direct debit energy bill. I don’t know if Rafaello is his/her real name. Maybe it is Reg or Darren or Megan. Rafaello spells well. In a moment of weakness I decided to use the word ‘query’ (their type of word) instead of the word ‘question’ and spelt it ‘querie’ for some reason (as I say, it is not one of my words; why should I know how to spell it?). Rafaello also used the word but correctly spelt. So he can spell. Though I suppose it is one of the top three or four words when you are fielding questions on line. What disappointed me in Rafaello’s responses to me, other than his triumph over me in spelling, was the fact that, before I had even stated the issue that was troubling me, he said that he could understand and relate to my feelings about the concern I was bringing up. This, of course, will be a stock phrase that they select from their copy-and-paste data base. Rafaello, or Reg, or Darren, or Megan just clicks it out as a matter of course, not knowing how irritating it is for me to have my so-called feelings intuited. I would like to ask Rafaello, or Reg, or Darren, or Megan or Shell Energy what feelings they think they have on me. I don’t like anyone thinking they know what’s going on in my head; other people’s woolly empathy gets my goat and gives rise to other feelings which Rafaello can probably not sense from where he is in Hartlepool or Delhi.  We left it on a good note, Rafaello and me. Turns out they were wrong to hike my monthly payment; I am actually in good credit; they are just trying it on to get more money in their coffers for interest purposes but I am too wily for them. I went back to my egg on toast preparatives and Rafaello to his endless queue of queries (am I spelling the plural right at least?) and his overflowing chalice of empathy.

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The site is clean, said Gareth, my dentist. He was looking at the x-ray of the area around the extraction he had just made. My crown had severed as I was walking down Kensington High street, leaving just the roots of the tooth still anchored in my gum. The best solution, if not the cheapest, was an implant. First he had to extract the roots. He had done this. It was painless. I had asked , how do you extract roots when you have nothing to get a grip of? Apparently you don’t pull, you push. The bone is an elastic material and when you push the roots in there spring back and you pull them out. Anyway, it was a smooth operation. Now he was talking me through the remainder of the procedure. The gum would heal over a couple of months. Then he would put the titanium implant in. Unfortunately, looking at the x-ray, it looked as if my sinus was in the way, so I might need a bone graft to give me more leeway. As far as bone implants were concerned, most dentists use pig bone or cadaver ( I presumed he meant dead human), but he preferred to get the bone from me,  straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak. Don’t worry, he said, it’s done in the same session though it does entail a little more cost. I’ve done worrying about cost and dentists. It is the one realm of life where, because of anxiety about my teeth, I overspend. The other day at W.H.Smith’s in Marylebone station, I refused to spend £2.15 on a coca cola and stormed out. I had thought it was £1.99. That 16p was too much for me, whereas the three or four thousand pounds I’ll be handing over to Gareth in the next couple of months is water off a duck’s back.

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In my dream I was in Stockport library of the 1970s where I used to go as a child. There was an enormous six-foot high book and there was a photograph of me in black and white on the cover wearing a kind of Soviet uniform looking very upright. I flipped through the massive pages and there were other pictures of me there. I tried to read the text that accompanied them but it was somehow impossible to understand.

It was probably a dream that reconfigured a moment in the day when I had looked at books in a second-hand bookshop and for an instant imagined finding one of my books in there amongst the trove.

When I was younger I was annoyed not to be able to say to people honestly that my job was being a writer. Instead, I had to say I was doing other stuff, some of it glamorous to them though not to me. Working in the cinema was my most glamorous-sounding job, though actually the least glamorous job I have ever had. But over the years the desire to depict myself as such and such has diminished. Nowadays I like the little bullet of anonymity that I can expose in a conversation with strangers.  The pleasures of  anonymity get greater with age. When people get to know you they realise there is more complex stuff but, like the nuclear half- life of radioactive decay, the subterranean material emerges slowly.

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The effects in a Mozart sonata are both slight and far-reaching. Take, for example the sonata in F major K533 which I was listening to yesterday. The first movement is typical of Mozart: a simple figure, childlike in its simplicity, repeated with minor variation, at times with the Alberti bass. The Alberti bass is that left hand accompaniment to the right hand tune, a kind of flowing trill-like repetition that creates a running background to the melody. As you get halfway through any Mozart sonata movement, five minutes or so in, there may be a shift to minor or a tiny development like a wider more yearning kind of interval between a couple of the notes, the effect being the creation of a kind of delicate, domestic crisis within the music. A tiny crisis. I think of a 1780s chambermaid making an error in her sorting of the washing and being rebuked by the Lady or Master of the house. The reaction of the Lady of the house reveals to the chambermaid that she is no longer in favour and will soon be dismissed. A tiny crisis with deep, maybe existential repercussions.

Rousseau was writing his Confessions just a few years earlier in the 1760s. There is a heart-breaking anecdote he recounts from when he was a young man in service and stole a small piece of coloured ribbon, an item of some luxury at the time. The theft was discovered and the young Rousseau planted the ribbon on a middle-aged serving woman who was accused and humiliated, the implication being that as a middle-aged woman it was pathetic for her to be fancifying herself.  She was, if I recall rightly, dismissed. Rousseau goes on to confess that this was the act in his life (a life of many guilty acts) of which he was most ashamed. It is a moving anecdote and, much like the habitual thirty second patch of pathos in a movement of a Mozart sonata, the presentation of a trivial crisis with deep consequences. Any period of content can be shattered by the most trivial of incidents. The individual is fragile and vulnerable and can be shattered by as little a thing as a coloured ribbon or a shift from major to minor keys.

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I remember when I first went to France in the early eighties and noting the use of bottled water (Evian; Perrier; Vichy). In the UK I hadn’t really noticed people drinking bottled water rather than tap water. Gradually, of course, it became pervasive. Tap water is cheaper (two thousand times cheaper, it has been estimated); healthier (there are more health tests on tap water than on bottled water); less polluting (the fuss about plastic straws pales into insignificance next to the the mountains of plastic bottles). In fact, the industry of bottled water must be a classic case of how to create demand out of nothing. It is like selling air to hikers in a forest. Once, when I was going round businesses asking for old cardboard boxes to help me move house I inadvertently went ino a cardboard box seller; they thought it was a rather dull practical joke. Now the small bottle of water has become a fetish, like the phone, or the cigarette to smokers. It is the object that transmits your nervousness or anxiety. You can shake it, squash it (creating that familiar and ennervating scruching sound), hold it in any number of fun ways. In fact, there are any number of ways through which you can annoy people in cinemas, theatres, concerts, exams. And yet, the pervasive signifier of the bottle of water retains its virtue. It pollutes and impoverishes, and yet because of big business it triumphs. The business of water was solved at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century in the UK, most of Western Europe and the US. Pipes were put in homes and businesses and directed through plentiful taps. It was practically free. This means little in the face of a few images of teenage models having fun in Switzerland with handy bottles.

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It is a remarkable thing about the snore that it is almost impossible to hear oneself snoring. As a snorer myself (or so I am informed) I receive only tantalizing intimations of my affliction. This is how it works. I am asleep and am woken up by someone using the word ‘snore’. As I wake up I catch only the last fraction of my snore and am convinced in my half-sleep that what I was actually doing was merely sniffling or snuffling (any number of words with sniff or snuff in them) as I shifted in my sleep. I am furious as my waker has not waited long enough to see that this was not snoring, just snuffling. My waker has been Olympic-quick off the mark to snuff out the snuffle, too quick. Did my waker not see that this was a mere snuffle? What I am not understanding (apparently) is that I had in fact been snoring for ages but have been asleep and so unaware of the drone I was creating. The snuffle was, in fact, the full stop ot rather the three dots indicating ellipsis at the end of a long tedious paragraph of snore.

Can we take this phenomenon as a metaphor for life? When someone raises an issue with us about some particular aspect of our behaviour that they do not appreciate, we are often bemused by how such a tiny issue (brushing your teeth in the living room; putting vegetables and fruit cheek by jowel in the fruit bowl; grubby potatoes and pristine plum) could give rise to a complaint. What we do not see is that this is merely the final straw of a long liturgy of irritants tolerated in stoic silence, and that already, even as the issue is brought to our attention, it is too late to eradicate. Unbenownst to you, your snoring, or its equivalent, has been annoying the auditor for a life time already.

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My mum used to burn the meat, or at least cook it to a cinder. She mostly cooked meat in the oven. That way it was out of harm’s way. You could not see the blood leak to the surface behind the oven door. It was probably a squeamishness concerning the dead animal on her part. She would put some modest pieces of steak in the oven and three hours later, at the end of a long Sunday afternoon, the steaks would emerge, half the original size, very dark now, almost incinerated. The steak was now like a small piece of furniture or a blackened knuckle duster. And very hard. My mum and dad swore till they were red in the face that the longer you cooked the meat the more it became tender. This seemed to me to be patently not the case but there was no arguing with them.

This misconception about the need to overcook meat to make it tender was one of those notions that defined them, probably my mum (my dad just went along). We all have a number of these that live within us and somehow plot our identity. There is no logic to them. We cite them automatically and cease to think about whether we believe them or not. There may be deep subterranean reasons for them (my mum’s fear of the dead beast) or they may just be random. I, for example, will not eat a vegetable starting with the letter ‘A’. Aubergine; asparagus; artichoke. People see me eating an avocado and look to catch me out. Always one step ahead, I insist on the telling nuance: the avocado, my friend, is a fruit. Oh yes, you have to get up pretty early in the morning to catch me with an ‘A’ vegetable on my plate.

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