When you go into the Steinway piano showroom in central London or the auction house at Christies or Bonhams you need quite a lot of courage to walk through the doors in your scuffed shoes and Zara jacket. It is because mostly the people who push open the sparkling glass doors are rather wealthy. They are the kind of people who might buy a Steinway grand bottom-lining at a couple of a hundred thousand pounds or so. What is required from you is an ability to look and talk at home in these places. You play the piano and the saleswoman comes across, seduced by the stream of notes and the possibilities for a sale of a Steinway grand. Are you looking to purchase a grand? she says. Here, obliquely, non-committed, you say maybe. You are spare in your articulations. She perks up at your sovereign and patrician manner. You had looked away when you said maybe, ignored her even. this dismissiveness of manner is in line with the ways of the very rich. She likes this. The saleswoman comes back for more. This is a lovely piano, she says, or something like that. It’s just a question of where to put it, I say. She has not noticed my scuffed shoes and Zara jacket, or maybe she has reinterpreted them as a feature of the casual eccentricity of the very rich. It must be that I am troubled by moving my collection of Cubist painings out of the drawing room of my London residence to make room for this grand. It would be so inconvenient and such a nuisance for the staff. Where are you from? she asks. Here, I say, non-committedly, remaining costive of words. In London? she says. I smile. We are leaving now. She wants to give me her card. I’m not far away, I say, as though I live in Mayfair. I am a potential sale, she feels. I’m pretty good at acting rich. Maybe I’ve missed my calling. I probably should really be a rich person, I think, on the 159 back to South London.

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I was on the bus and the woman next to me was looking at her phone. She was trailing down a list of feeds on facebook. All big culture coming and hitting you in the face on the 36 bus. She was looking at a video of a woman doing stomach exercises. The woman was a kind of top model type. And I thought: well, there you go, it’s not all bad, it’s good to exercise, big culture can be a nudging force for good. But then I thought that often it isn’t because the next post down will be some attempt to get you to spend £300 on a pair of trainers manufactured for a fiver in South East Asia so that a set of guys in California or Florida can put even more cash into their back pockets. And that model doing the stomach crunches will be sporting those trainers maybe. There is a constant discordant battle going on in big culture. Radio Five Live will run a piece about Mindfulness or How to get good sleep and with the next sentence they’ll ask you to tweet in or share some social media page or contribute to what they call the conversation, whereas if you really want to be in a position to get a good night’s sleep you really want to stop contributing to the conversation, cut it out the constant whirr of opinion and liking or loathing. Yes, on the whole, all things considered, I apply what I now call the mostly distrust what big culture offers you back stop. Join me here on…

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Another new cafe on Kennington Road. This one is called ‘Coffee and Plants’. They do coffee and plants. I went there today. It has replaced the Portuguese cafe which has now bitten the dust. This new one is a new type of cafe. They just do coffee and there are some plants there you can buy. It used to be the Newsagents before the newsagent retired and went back to India. We got on well, the newsagent and me, and had little chats when I went to get my Guardian on Saturday mornings. I don’t get the Guardian any more, not since they changed it to tabloid. I’d been looking for a reason to save that £2.80 or whatever it was. The tabloid was the trigger. Anyway, now it’s a cafe. In the cafe there were two other customers. They were examining their phones. I didn’t have a phone to examine or, rather, there was nothing to examine on my phone, apart from old text messages from last week which said things like ‘all right’ or ‘see you there’. I had the ‘London Review of Books’ to read. The ‘London Review of Books’ replaced the Guardian about a year ago, about the time my newsagent went back to India. In the cafe nobody was speaking. It was silent apart from one man swallowing his coffee. I could hear his Adam’s Apple going up and down as the flat white travelled down his gullet. There was music, kind of new age ambiant music, unbearable music really, music for an aquarium or fish tank. They have a cafe in Brighton, they said, and did research about where the best place was to set up in London and they found Kennington Road. It was a bit antiseptic, the new cafe. Maybe it will advance when it gets some smells and dirt in it. There are now five independent cafes on Kennington road, all within fifty yeards of each other, each with their own unique selling points, all part of a complex Venn diagram of customer appeal. Where you end up is a good gauge of your identity.

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I was reading a novel by Marcel Ayme, Uranus, which takes place in the compromised and mixed-up world of France after the Second World War, where many citizens knew their neighbours had been collaborators and denunciations were rife. One collaborator is being hunted in a bombed-out town and one man decides to give him shelter. As we read through the novel we see it is more out of a sense of the unevenness of life that he decides to help this Nazi-sympathiser. It is more because half the people who are so smugly chasing him had been collaborators too. As he says at one stage ‘les raisons ne sont que les facades de nos sentiments’. Our reasoning is merely the facade for our feelings. In other words, his irritation guides his judgement.
I was reading this in the cafe this morning. When I came out I was putting a five pound note back into my pouch when a youngish woman came up to me and began the round-about preamble to asking me for some money. I said no. Then she asked me for a cigarette. I said I didn’t smoke. Then, because she saw I was folding a £5 note she said, are you sure you can’t spare some money? I was so irritated by her attempt to manipulate me that I gave her short shrift. I escaped her manipulation of my sympathies but fell into the trap of my own manipulation of my own empathies. And then, as I walked home to make my fried eggs, I began the internal justification of my refusal to hand over any cash, my attempts at reasoning being the after-the-event unravelling of the magma of irritations and sentiments that had assailed me in the confrontation. Even the slightest encounter is too complicated to make sense of.

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It is astonishing the way in which tiny moments in the day can combine to provide the big feeling that you retain when you put your head on the pillow at midnight. This thought struck me as I sipped my morning coffee the other day and realized that the moment when I arrive at work, having left home with no breakfast, the moment I pour a coffee and sit down to scan the papers, the moment I put the coffee to my lips, is (it’s official) my favourite moment of the day. It is a moment with myself; a moment without anything very human about it, purely animal. It’s the best moment of the day. Once I get to the second sip it is gradually getting less good. By the time I finish the coffee the rest of the day is starting to wash up over me, its imminence contaminating me.
The microvexations of the day are mainly cerebral, irritations at modernity. The moment I switch my computer on and Windows trumpets its pompous proclamation of life-giving power and hegemony in its fanfare to the corporate man. Even my mobile phone has one of these banal jingles of false hope, a particularly disagreable one, sounding like the intro to a 90s TV Breakfast show, all cornflakes and light. These are vexations you can’t avoid, unpleasant punctuation marks on the long daily paragraph. The key to happiness would be to create some better punctuation. Look after the micro and the macro will follow.

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I wonder if politicians or politicians’ strategists have a kind of index above or below which they acknowledge that the electorate registers an idea or a feeling in their deep vote-bearing being. As we speak, it looks as if the Saudi journalist Jamal Kasooghi has been murdered in the Saudi embassy in Istanbul by agents of the Saudi regime. This barbaric act looks to have registered on the collective consciousness more than the killing of some tens of thousands of innocents in Yemen, mainly because it represents a personal narrative. Personal story scores higher than abstract statistic on the resonance scale. The question is whether there is a statistical way for politicials to appreciate this and integrate this disparity of perception into their machinations, some algorithm of dreadfulness. What is clear, though, is that some clever imaginer needs to find a way of talking about abstract figures of deaths in wars and bombings that can strum the heart strings or nervous systems of your everyday member of the public to gain the same reponse as the single, albeit bloody and awful, death of one person.

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These days you are nowhere without a lanyard. Is it lanyard or is it lanyon? Where has this word emerged from anyway? No matter, you need a lanyard. If you are wearing a lanyard around your neck, best to also have a collection of important keys on another tape clattering around as you walk importantly along. Some men, or women, wear keys, or lanyards, on their belt. If this is the case, they jingle around in the vicinity of your genitalia. Why not indeed? These, lanyards and keys, are signs of ownership. You are owned when you wear the lanyard. You do the owning when you wear the keys. Our whole life is owning or being owned, these symbols seem to say. Some people love the lanyard. They wear it when they are out and about town. It leaps joyously about their necks in the sunshine, clattering on their manly or womanly breasts. Though there are cheeky ways to sabotage its dominion. You turn it round so that the face offered to the world is no more than the plastic back with your jolly mug shot up sheer against your shirt, or else, and this is my secret way, you tuck its badge bit in between two buttons on your shirt, so that there is no way of identifying you, and if stopped you raise up your hands, present palms, guiltless as you like, and say, oh I’m sorry, I can’t think how my lanyard leapt into that gap between two shirt buttons to seek refuge. That’s the way it is with the lanyard these days. Like with so many things, it’s a game of high stakes cat and mouse.

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My teeth are going through a barren phase. That’s unusual, and good for me. Mostly with my teeth it’s a roller-coaster ride. I am driven from one crisis to the next, but for the last couple of years things have settled down. It all started when I was eight and smashed my just sprouted new second front tooth into Patrick Mangan’s head in the playground. We had gone up for a header and my tooth snapped straight across into his head and left him with eleven stitches. My mum took me to the dental hospital in Manchester and they gave me a silver tooth, waiting till the remaining stub had grown to fit a crown when I was eighteen. From that day on, people called me silver tooth, as though I were a gunslinger in a Western. In those days dentists drilled with gay abandon. They almost drilled the teeth right out of my head. When I went to Paris and opened my mouth to my first female dentist the first thing she did was laugh and say (I’m translating from the French) ‘Now that’s what I call filled!’. With your mouth open, prone on a dentist’s chair, that’s an uncomfortable position to be in. Things came to a head in London and I decided that my one luxury in life would be a fancy private dentist. I did not want them all to gradually disappear. I had some implants, let them drill into the bone, which is not as bad as it sounds, closed my eyes as the blood flowed into my mouth and got sucked up by the sucker. So, you see, having a barren phase in tooth work suits me just fine. The worst, for teeth at least, is over.

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My interest in sport has reached an all-time low. The football season has started up and I’m not interested. This may be the oversaturation that came with the World Cup mania this summer but it may well be something that runs deeper than that. It could be that I have reached the tipping point on old gits like Mourinho having every priceless word pored over by fawning or brow-beaten journalists. It might be the depressingly predictable selection of sleeve tattoos sported by the players, or their bleak collection of beards and haircuts. It might be the tiresome interviews and their PR vetted responses. It all seems processed, mediated, dull, ridden with commercial preoccupations. It could be that this year is the moment that I switch off. That appointment with Match of the Day no longer plays a role in my subconscious (as a boy it was the main date of the week). This would be part of a pattern. Cricket and I parted company many years ago. The idea of sitting for an entire day at the Oval watching distant young men in white, or in pyjamas, depending on which subset of the game we’re viewing, now seems senseless to me. I’d rather eat biscuits at home or have a walk some place or look at some shop windows. I really couldn’t care less about Anderson’s Figures or Cook’s Average or Broad’s Maiden. They sound more like a set of mathematical laws to me these days. There are other sports. The astounding monotony of Formula One. The dire smugness of golf. The unbearable dullness of the tennis interview. The awefulness of the fist pump. As a boy I was the sporty one. My big brother was the clever one. If I’m sporty now, it is of the Train Alone variety (see post of same name). The culture and communality of sport is fast losing its gloss.

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The other day I saw a man carrying a full-length mirror in the park. It made me think of the line by Stendhal where he compared the novel to a mirror you carry down a road. It was an allusion played on by Nabokov at the start of one of his novels (The Gift, I think), which starts with some removal men carrying a mirror across a street. Objects (household or other) are interesting when pulled out of their usual context. I suppose that was one of the things about Marcel Duchamp’s urinal when it was placed in an art gallery. The context resets our viewing of an object, makes us view it emblematically or mundanely. On the bus this morning a little boy was hammering a kind of plastic soldier on the back of my seat. When he dropped it the mother went to pick it up and I saw it was a figurine of Jesus Christ in the pose where he is holding his hands out to us and his heart, his so-called sacred heart, is revealed to us with the chest bone stripped away. Out of context you are forced to look at objects in a different way. That is why places are sacred. You should not be sexting in a church. One of the last football matches I went to was Fulham v Man Utd at Craven Cottage (this was when United were good) and while the match was going on I was talking about Wagner’s Ring with one of my friends. After United scored their fouth goal (Tevez scored a hat-trick I think) a steward came over and threatened to expel us as trouble-makers. We were bringing unsacred material into a sacred place. We were talking filth in the Holy Tabernacle.

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