Many years ago I gave a girlfriend a copy of a second-hand translation into French of David Copperfield. When she read it she said she liked it and cited the scene where as a boy David returns to the village where he had lived as a small child with his now dead mother and sleeps on her grave. I remember her saying she loved this moment. I knew that she had lost her own mother as a child and that her mother had in fact committed suicide, so I could see why. Forever after that I would always refer to the scene where David sleeps on his mother’s grave to other people as an example of a wonderful scene in what I think is my favourite Dickens novel. Recently, I thought I’d try and find the passage, but until now I have been unable to locate it. I have not reread the book from cover to cover but have tracked back and forth around the relevant area of the novel. Could it be that no such scene exists?

Reading and the recollection of reading bring forth all kind of fissures and fault lines, moments when our attention strayed and we lost the plot, misrememberings. There is the section in one of Stendhal’s texts – I think it is in his Italian voyages – where he recounts how it was when he was marching with Napolean’s army after the battle of Borodino, only to suddenly realize that what he was recalling was actually  his memory of an engraving of this event he had on his wall. Our life slides over the things we read and write and remember and foggs them, replaces them, rewrites them. We know, of course, that this happens in life. Most arguments I have are to do with flawed memories of what was said when. Did I say we would go out on Wednesday after you said you said you had to stay in to do some work or before? And when the dispute subsides we trace back and try and remember how the misunderstanding arose. Mostly, we are investigating our memory and concentration lapses and those moments when the mind has got confused.

All readings are false readings. All understandings are misunderstandings.

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We were walking towards the tube at ‘Chalk Farm’.There was a man at a bus stop screaming at a woman one inch from her face. As we crossed the road he hit her heavily and she fell to the ground. There were a couple of people sitting at the bus stop ignoring the scene. At the entrance to the tube there were five or six people watching. As we crossed the road I thought we have to intervene somehow. As I was walking across to the couple – they were still screaming at each other and the man was getting reading to thump her again – I was looking round at the people at the bus stop to see if there were any who might come with me to confront this big bloke. As I got closer to the scene and the abused woman noticed me bearing down, she suddenly rushed across and started hurling abuse and obscenities at us. In a word, our help was not required. We turned round and walked towards the tube. The woman continued to follow us and scream abuse. At any moment I was expecting a blow to the back of my head, from her or the man. Though it wasn’t the man; it was just her. It was a case of the abused protecting the abuser. The clan sticks together, no matter what. I heard the old term ‘family values’ again the other day. Families are often the site of abuse because they will often close ranks to protect their own. The victim will remain a victim rather than betray the inner culture. The suffocating circle produces drama in the shape of classical or neo-classical tragedy; there is no escape from the confines of the unities of time, space and action. You are bound to that place that is the family. You must defend it, its odours and its blood, though it reduces you. Greek tragedy works with this. They are dread family dramas set in the House of Atreus and other noble domesticies. Familial horns are locked in attrition. The great novel of this is Zola’s ‘La Terre’ (‘Earth’), where a man helps his lover escape an abusive and barbaric family. Whereupon, as retribution for wanting out, the family gang rapes her. Whereupon she sides with them against the outsider. If you utter the term ‘family values’ it tells us more about the sheltered life you’ve led. Family values depend on the family.

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At the Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens Medieval festival over the Easter weekend there was a medieval trio, the Princes in the Tower (‘party like it’s 1555’, seventy or so years after the princes in the tower but not to worry); a falconry man; some armed combat between knights in arms and some poetry performances. I cannot watch poetry. I run away behind a tree. I can be the same about theatre. I need to sit next to the exit. What I think I am getting embarrassed about is the histrionics and extrovert nature of performance. This time I did run away behind a tree but wafts of it came over to me. It had high performance, aggressive energy levels. It was unbearable. It foregrounded the performance, leaving the material in the shadows. Maybe in the poetry I like the performer is minor. The performer is like a good referee in a football match, invisible. The material just comes through. I suppose performance is one way of trying to make poetry relevant or engaging. The other manifestation of poetry today are the rhymed couplets we hear as trailers on the television. There is one trailing the coverage of the London marathon at the moment. I don’t like this stuff either. It is poetry of the type:

All kinds of sizes will run in the race

But only the best will keep up with the pace

The fat and the thin; the svelte and the chubby;

A wife doing her best to keep up with her hubby;

The ages they go from spotty youth to ninety-three;

They’re all on the way to get home for their tea.

The doggerel. the rhyme, the references to family, the sense of the cosy, the inclusivity of it all, the fake fraternity. It could be an advert for Horlicks. It’s that unchallenging.

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I was on the tube this morning sitting next to a man with an extensive selection of ironmongery through his face: a pin through his eyebrow; a sliver of steel through his lip and a whole trove of metal about his ear, including one of those wide studs enlarging the ear lobe that are at the very apex of metallurgical fashion these days. He was with a woman with no ironwork at all; she was just wearing an anorak. The lobe-enlarging stud was perhaps first noted by Sir Walter Raleigh on his trip down the Orinocco in the Sixteenth century where he went to try and discover the lost kingdom of Eldorado. When he came slinking back empty-handed he was duly beheaded. Voltaire referenced Raleigh in ‘Candide’where he has his eponymous hero being boiled in a pot by cannibals he calls the ‘Oreillons’, the ear tribe. Anyway, seeing this twenty-first century descendant of the Oreillons  on the tube got me thinking about the many lives I could have led. There was a time back in the Eighties as a very young man when I toyed with the idea of having an ear-ring. It never happened. It also never happened that I became a dusy gent in brogues. When you are young, for some reason, you need to find a genre, you are just aching to leap into a barrel with a load of other similarly dressed people. There were many genres I managed to avoid until finally ending up with what was left: the intersection of many sets from a complex Venn diagram and the idea that the more this genre is undefinable the better it is. A complex shaded zone that makes me, I hope, into the ideal of all right-thinking individuals, a man without qualities.

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I have a prejudice that, no matter how I try and shrug it off, adheres to me. It is my feeling that when someone ages prematurely this aging process derives from some kind of moral flaw. Nonsense of course. When people ask me how I’m looking so well (this has happened, I assure you) I say jokingly it is because of moral thoughts. Is this much more than the notion of spiritual or even worse inner peace having a hand in keeping you looking well on the outside. Probably not. These notions, like my notion, are pretty fascist. The truth is that life can ravage your packaging, dent your capsule, no matter how whole or harmonious you feel on the inside. Whips and scorns can break you no matter how many blueberries you eat. The constant refrain that we have the choice of this and that, that we make our own destiny (a deluded Capitalist lie) is not freedom at all because it flies in the face of everything we experience and see about us. Embracing the randomness is actually the greatest manifestation of your freedom.

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There is this book ‘Sapiens’ going round, being perused by a range of self-important folk in the tube and elsewhere. Sapiens, as in homo sapiens, man. It is one of those total titles. It covers the world for you. I don’t know who wrote it. It is surely a Professor of Something with a Chair in something somewhere. We live in an era of short cuts to learning and wisdom. Of course, there are the self-help books that cover most of the ground floor of any bookshop now, but also there are these more learned volumes that claim to take us through from bottom to top of the enterprise that is us. Then the reader goes off knowing everything. Job done. They can get back on Instagram. Totalising is, of course, a valid enough enterprise. You cut through to the essential. The danger is that in any business of this nature there are generalisations, short cuts. The writer will mention Rousseau for one little reference to a movement in the 18th Century but will never have read him. It reminds me of a friend at university who was once telling me about Rabelais. He had read a chapter in a book on literary theory about the Russian critic Bakhtin’s book about Rabelais. so, having read no Rabelais (no 16th Century French literature at all, not even in English translation) and having read no Bakhtin at all, he was spewing out the opinion of a writer, who perhaps himself had never really read them. In the process, ideas are coarsened. A couple of little generalisations emerge. This is a phenomenon you get a lot of in contemporary art. You read the accompanying text to a piece of conceptual art and it cites Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida et al. You know this guy hasn’t read any of these people. Lots of short cuts. When everyone reads Sapiens and depends on their view of a whole range of thinkers on this digest, they are opening themselves up to all kinds of potential manipulation, intentional or unintentional.

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The search for a toilet is fraught with difficulty these days. I was in the cafe of the Royal Court theatre looking for one. There were two doors. One said Cubicles and one said Cubicles and Urinals. This is the new way forward. That way intermediate genders can find their true home. Earlier in the day when I had been looking for a toilet on the street at the other end of King’s Road. I stopped a policeman. He and his co-constable did not know of any public toilets around. Have they all been made into executive flats? I quipped. They responded with half smiles, feeling no doubt tainted by the ways the streets are going. The Bishop of London was also confused by the evolution of the common-or-garden toilet. On arriving to give a talk he was told that G and T’s were available downstairs before the talk. Being a bishop he hurried down for some dutch courage. G and T’s? he nervously asked the lone official figure in an empty basement. The official showed him across the floor to the Gender Neutral Toilets. But don’t worry. If you ask me for the nearest toilets on the street I will willingly help you out. Turn left. Go a hundred yeards along and off in the sidestreet there is a low-roofed building. You’ll see the word Gentlemen on one of the doors. Don’t be put off by that, I’ll say. Go straight in.

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The papaya fruit is known as the queen of fruits. Why not? They are very nice and do no end of good to my digestive system. After a papaya my transit runs free. I remember years ago my Auntie Molly telling me without a hint of irony that James Michener was the king or was it the prince of novelists. I was a teenager. I nodded, as though to take at face value the objective truth of such an assertion. Is Paris the queen of cities? I think it probably is. In such a configuration Boris Johnson would be the knave or jack of all politicians or the Two of Spades of all diplomats; Theresa May would be the rook’s pawn of all communicators and Jeremy Corbyn the farthing or maybe the groat of all leaders of the Opposition.

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I was in the café in Peter Jones department store queueing for a coffee and I heard the woman in front of me ordering her cappuccino, extra strong, she insisted. But I mean really strong, she said. They agreed she would have two shots of coffee in her cappuccino. Then the woman behind the counter said, would you like chocolate on that? The customer, who was probably about sixty, a smallish woman with maybe some Lebanese or middle eastern heritage somewhere, said: do I look like I want chocolate on that? This was not said aggressively, more as though to start a playful conversation, but the woman who was serving her did not answer. The customer repeated her question, as though it was a good quip that had gone unnoticed. She said it again: do I look like I want chocolate? Again the serving woman chose not to respond. The customer went to a seat with her double shot coffee. I tried to understand the exchange. At first I thought the chocolate thing was because she was dark of skin and the serving woman did not want to be a drawn on such a contentious topic. Then, as I looked at the customer across the café, I thought that she wasn’t particularly dark. Maybe it was that her desire to have a double shot coffee was a macho signal and, following the same line, she had wanted to publicly poo-poo the idea of having a sprinkle of chocolate on the top of some frothy milk. I wrestled with the correct interpretation of the exchange for the ten minutes it took me to drink my black americano (pretty macho I reckon). Then I went down to use the toilets on the first floor.

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Am I alone in viewing the proposal for marriage as a strange primitive left-over from earlier times? In the days of nth wave feminism and metoo culture surely the etiquettes of this ritual could do with a make-over. Even in the most forward thinking of couples the business of a bended leg and a prize ring, sometimes hidden in a chocolate cream or strawberry blancmange, the sacred formula of the proposal itself, the high-kitsch setting (some fairy castle or secret bower) persist. The stellar confusion reveals itself most when the groom decides to enact the ritual in front of a Super Bowl crowd and the bride considers this to be romantic, or respectful, or something.
If somebody will pay me I will accept to draw up a procedure more in line with modern society and contemporary gender roles. Spoiler alert: what I might come up with for the two parties is something resembling a conversation.

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