Wapping is a fluvial area of London east of Tower Bridge. In the 19th Century it was a district of docks and wharfs inhabited by a largely working class population. We went for a walk there today. Now it has been gentrified, or, as I like to call it, Waitrose-washed. Blocks of executive flats with empty balconies span the area punctuated by one or two pubs left over from the 1800s. There is a pub once owned by the painter Turner who put his mistress there as landlady, Another devoted to Captain Kidd. But on the so-called Wapping High Street there are no shops to speak of. Wapping is a ghost town. There is a Waitrose somewhere to satisfy the new aspirant Wappers (Bankers perhaps; the city is one way, Canary wharf the other). You wonder about this kind of London quarter, there’s another one arising round the corner from me at Nine Elms west of Vauxhall. Wapping is soul-less, with no visible sign of life in the streets, an empty children’s playground on a sunny Sunday morning, a plethora of estate agents. This is the kind of area that London is beginning to specialise in, bleak, driven by short term profit and presided over by a mediocre political class that sees thousands homeless in the steets and continues to patronise the building of forests of executive blocks. In the Orwellian Newspeak of the time some of these apartments are affordable. Never mind. We wouldn’t want them anyway.

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On the bus in front of me a woman was vigorously filing her nails. The man sitting in front of her was half turned towards her as though ready to make a comment. His face looked aggrieved. When he went to get off he said something to her -I didn’t catch it- but she didn’t look up from her intensive manicuring. He shook his head before making to go down the stairs to get off the bus. Half way down the stairs he came back up and said something else. She didn’t look up. I didn’t hear it. In the end, he got off the bus. She continued filing.
I wasn’t sure where I stood on the public manicure issue. She clearly thought it was all well and good in a public space and he didn’t. In the public realm what is acceptable has now no common agreement at all. A couple of minutes later a girl started watching a TV programme on her smart phone without headphones. I did not get up to say anything as the other man had done, but this for me was further beyond the pale than the public manicure. More and more, as public behaviour expands in the space and decible count it needs and as people treat public space like a extension of the living room, dissent will increase. The monoculture is now smashed into a thousand versions of what is or isn’t acceptable. The range of action of an individual is now vast; encroachments on her or his freedom are less and less acceptable. You would think there would come a day when the explosion of public extroversion becomes intolderable. As it is, I am thinking of setting up a rule in my own life that all talk after eight o’clock at night be conducted in whisper. I will drift incrementally, gently, down the stairs of the declining day to sleep. Sounds blissful. But then there are other people. They tend to have their say too. they may refuse to whisper. How unreasonable!

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I was walking down the street and a young man asked me how to get to Farringdon station. I said, walk ten minutes down this road and then it’s basically on the right. He went off, waalking a little quicker than me but in the same direction. As we walked I noticed that he was slowing down. I did not want to overtake him so I slowed down too. Then he stopped and asked somebody for directions. He hadn’t walked ten minutes, as I had advised. I said to myself, probably audibly, because I can get audible, you haven’t walked ten minutes. He started up again, in the same direction, needless to say. I started up again. I had had to stop to avoid overtaking him. Then, after a couple more minutes, he stopped another person to ask for directions. This time they were both looking round as though to get themselves orientated. It wasn’t complicated. I’d told him ten minutes. I, of course, had to hide in a doorway so as not to be spotted. I peeked out sfter a couple of minutes. The young man was on his way again, now stopping at a road, waiting for the lights to turn green for him. I followed at a snail’s pace, taking the opportunity to look into shop windows. At this rate I was going to be late as well. He was a long time crossing at the lights. I got the same light but a few seconds behind him. Now I was dicing with death, just a few paces behind him. Danger. If he decided to ask another person it might be me again, so I had to stop and look into another shop window. Imagine the encounter. Would we both decide to pretend not to recognise each other, or would we attempt to negotiate the moment openly. At this juncture I had no confidence in my communication skills for such a conversation and this was one very nervous pedestrian, a mediocre pedestrian, probably unused to the trials and tribulations of pedestrian life. Although I say this myself, I am a professional in pedestrian matters and have no time for the neophyte. Eventually we came to the right turn for Farringdon. He missed it. I turned right and went into the station. Ah well, only so much aid to one’s fellow man is appropriate, don’t you think, even at Christmas. Happy X-day.

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According to James Wong in a useful Christmas present book about the relative goodness found in various types of fruit and vegetable, if you leave a mushroom in the light for a few hours before cooking the poor devil, its vitamin-yield will increase by 300% (I think this was it). And yet, I think to myself, the humble mushroom seeketh the dark, the obscure woods, the Brothers Grimm forest floor where light never penetrates the thick canopy of foliage. Therein lies all the Romantic literature and philosophy of the West. We value in the other one thing, but the other values the opposite. All unhappiness is there. Our uniqueness is our tragedy. Of course, it is a more complex metaphor than that. The humble mushroom must needs seek the dark, for too much exposure to the light will prematurely wither and corrupt it. More metaphors for life. We flourish in the spotlight but over-exposure will be our undoing. Like the humble mushroom, temper introversion with your extroversion. What else can we say? Heinz Cream of Mushroom soup is one of the classic soups of the range. When picked, cooked, processed, canned and stored, the mushroom continues to give. Mmmmm. More food for thought.

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At this darkest time of the year a snippet of merry advice from the usually morose Mr Peoplearerubbish.com. What he does to change the colour of his life is simple but effective. Change your words! The streets you trundle down can become so monotonous. If Mr Peoplearerubbish.com has to use the word Vauxhall one more time (it is his local tube station) he will lose the will to go on, so now he calls it Vauxinghall, as though it were an equestrian activity. He bought a tin of cornered beef this morning in Tescoid. He is now on the Interiornet and will later get the bus to the Western End and get the 59 bus back from Uselesston station. Try it. Change your words and the head will follow. This and more can be found in the Less of Mind collection from all Peoplerubbishington suppliers and purveyors.

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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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