I was walking through the shopping centre next to Russell Square and I saw this gym out of the corner of my eye. It said ‘Train Alone’. And I thought that’s a clever marketing idea, the romance of the solitary trainer, pushing yourself to your limits. And I thought that’s the modern age, people alone with their headphones on their own regime. I was thinking of that film ‘Marathon Man’ from the 1970s and Dustin Hoffman running alone round the gritty streets of New York training for the marathon, with a line I remember from it that he had trained himself for pain and so was able to resist the torture he was put under later in the film. That’s right, I thought. I must get my running shoes out and beat a solitary path round the gritty South London streets again. I moved a little closer to the shop front of the gym to examine their original and off-beat strategy. It wasn’t ‘Train Alone’. It was ‘Never Train Alone’. Ah!

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It all started to go wrong with monotheism. One god controlling us all; one world view; one way of doing things. It was so much better with the multiple gods of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome with their suite of gods of the hearth and home, for love, for communication. It was even nice that you could create your own gods. Emperor Augustus given an upgrade. Caligula giving himself a (maybe premature) upgrade. The more you spread the power the better. In fact, so called primitive beliefs and superstitions often do a good job. I remember many years ago someone asked me where and when I was born. A week later she gave me a cassette with a 90 minutes analysis of my sun sign, rising sign, the situation of the moon and planets at the time of my birth. For the first time I was described as “difficult”. I had never seen myself as “difficult”, always seen myself as a simple open type. Just the proposal of another pointed alternative struck me hard. It made me look at my life in a different way. We do not have ways of looking at ourselves; we need a filter to examine our own behaviour. There are other ways of doing it. Reading a novel you live a vicarious life via the adventures of a protagonist. Identifying or not identifying with a character in a film. Subconsciously, through this process of identification, we undertake an auto-analysis. Without these filters it is difficult. Astrology is useful fun. Much more useful than the notion of the one Big Brother god.

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These days you have to be a master logician to unpick your own moral or ethical standpoint on most issues. You’ll be pleased to know that advertizing has got wind of this and is delighting in complicating the unravelling. I have never liked the National Lottery. True, you have a slim chance of winning a pile of money and the money goes to causes you might like (you might like shovelling money into that new opium of the people that is sport) but, on the other hand, it fosters a chancer’s approach to life and it takes its money from those people who do not have it to spare. Now the Lottery is blurring the tracks even more with its message that when you win you can help your mates (when you win, who wins with you?) and its suite of heart-warmers (‘Archie helped me when I was down. I’d give him a nice lump sum’. Who wants to deprive old Archie od some money to do up his old garden shed?). How can modern man shun Archie’s old shed? My advice to modern man: keep pouring an ice bucket onto your own heart. The other example of this that has always stuck in my throat is the Pudsie-style BBC-organised celebrity-led charities based on sport or entertainent that constantly constellate our Saturday-night entertainment schedules. Again, the money that members of the public raise or donate is for good causes, but the culture that produces it (celebrity-led, sentimentalized sponging of money from those least able to afford it) is deeply unpleasant. It’s also rubbish telly. Newscasters dancing and dancers newscasting; singers telling you about their favourite books and television actors playing football. The man who once played ‘Dr Who’ telling me off. Some comedian who put his money in an off-shore bank not smiling when he shows pictures of poverty in the world. It’s dystopia. Once again it is the business of a gentle blackmail telling us to give money or feel bad. Unpicking how you feel globally about issues that are intentionally complexified by various institutions is a fact of life these days. You get to feel bad for free. Or, rather, feeling bad has become the entertainment they feed us.

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The recent rise of me-too culture, a more analytical way of looking at gender is only bringing into popular culture trends that have existed in academia for decades. It has been a slow filtering process. It makes me wonder how much of the drifts of literary theory are applicable to real life and individual behaviour. What are the basic tenets of literary theory? Here they are, as I see them: politics is in everything; human nature is not as universal and unchanging as has been thought; language is a key problem zone for thinking; you need to get altitude to look at things clearly sometimes; nothing is sacred.
Most of this stuff is actually applicable to the self. The self is a shiftable shape and we need to see things from other points of view sometimes. It’s actually the same material of theory, of structuralism et al. Common sense.

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In the summer, insects take back control. It starts simply. There are too many flies buzzing around you, parking themselves on your forkfull of al-fresco chicken, kamikazee smashing into window panes, evading your swats (hard to outwit a fly). Underfoot more species present themselves, fatter, longer, highly tinted. You realize that it is they who have dominion over the earth, not us. Their reign goes on quietly through winter, but in summer it is incontrovertible. Then mosquitoes arrive. What had been a pleasant stay on the Mediterranean transmutes over the week into an attempt to limit bite damage. In the end you just want to go home to the darker north. There is also the idea of a snake. The snake is mostly an idea, but you know they are there. Lizards I can deal with. They are sudden zig-zags on the wall with very human shifts of their stance and centre of gravity, as if they were wearing boots and constantly needed to get onto the right axis. But the snake is alien. There is nothing human about a snake. There would be no compromise with a snake. A snake was seen as we hiked up a steep slope away from a river pool in the Cevennes. Not by me. But it was seen. I am glad I didn’t see it and only heard about it. If I had seen it it would have infiltrated into my dreams. I’m less squeamish about spiders though I don’t see myself picking them up. Whereas I am very happy picking up a daddy-long-legs to carry it over to the front doot and help it out into the fresh air. i actually enjoy the expulsion of a daddy-long-legs. It’s one small zone where my manhood can flourish. The other is opening jars. For the rest, forget it.

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My niece was giving me one of those reaction tests where you hit the knee just under it and the lower leg springs up instinctively. It struck me how little the knee being hit by a small hammer by a doctor now figured in popular culture as a motif. Time was when it was a perennial in sketch shows as a gag set-up. I even remember seeing it in one Norman Wisdom film where he wants to be a policeman but is too short so comes in to the medical on stilts. It all goes well till they do the knee reaction thing on him and the leg springs up and sends the stilt flying across the room. There are other joke set-ups you don’t see anymore. Scenes from Shakespeare. Alas poor yorick with a skull was forever being used on Morecombe and Wise, as was Romeo Romeo wherefore art thou Romeo? and Double Double Toil and Trouble from Macbeth. These set-ups don’t figure now bcause they have passed out of common currency. I remember a few years ago I asked a group of fifteen year olds to write down the names of as many Shakespeare plays as they could. You got Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth, but not much beyond that. You also got Rumplestiltzkin, as I recall. The common currency of culture has now become Disney and Pixall references. Scenes from Shrek or Toy Story or Frozen, which everone with kids knows. There is a Shrek theme centre in London, as well as, and I can’t even begin to comprehend this, an M and M’s museum. I would have thought, at least a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory museum or World or whatever, but M and M’s? What is the culture of M and M’s? Are there M and M’s characters? Sometimes I peer through the glass into the world of M and M’s. It is in the West End near Leicester Square. There is no evidence of any particular cultural engagement going on. Just families merrily walking through aisles of M and M’s. It reminds me of once when I passed by a Macdonalds on the South Bank, ironically next to where the new Shrek World now lives. There was a bright-eyed lad with a bucket and a Macdonalds uniform on asking for donations. Oh, what’s it for? I naively asked. Passers-by were happily dropping their loose change in. For Macdonalds<, he said. Am I missing something about the modern world? Please drop me a line at…

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I was in Paris when France won the World Cup. When they beat Belgium in the semi-final we were on a bus going back to the flat in Menilmontant. There was a lot of glee from the people on the street. France were in the World Cup Final. The more I got to see of it the less pleasant it became. As the bus travelled through the streets progress became more and more difficult. People on the steets stopped its progress. They hammered on the sides of the bus, smashing against the glass with fists or whatever metal they had on them. It got so that the bus was being rocked. You would think it was a revolution or a riot. Some people lay down on the road in front of traffic. It was dark now. This was tantanount to a death wish. I looked around at all the joy. This was joy coming out in a dangerous way. You wondered if all these people were really all that interested in football. You wondered if all these people were really so patriotic. You wondered if these people had anything else in their lives that this thing should be so important. The more thay got joyous, the less I got interested. That’s the way it is with me. I have little desire to follow the enthusiasms of others. This, I suppose, was like Carnival of old. A day when all was forgotten. You could run in the town square and the Sherrif of Nottingham would not haul you in for disturbing the peace. You can trash a bus and it is accepted. After the final a few days later there were over 500 arrests made. We didn’t take the bus that night.

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It is at this time of year that newspapers turn their minds to the compilation of their lists of good reads for the beach. The beach read is characterised by its light and airiness, by (I suppose) its happy ending, its themes (holiday romance oblige), the so-called ‘feel good’ quotient. The idea is that we have licence to shift down in our reading matter for the beach. You may well read Kafka during the year but on the beach you are allowed to read Jeffrey Archer or Robert Ludlum who in one of his novels has someone paying a London cabbie with a £100 note. Of course, if you are used to reading Kafka, Robert Ludlum (God bless him) will not be a page-turner; it will be unbearable. It will be like reading Proust if you are used to Harry Potter. It will actually be impossible. and yet, strangely, there is the assumption that your deep naughty-but-nice desire is to trade down and you have permission to do that on the beach. Awkwardly propping yourself up on you elbows on a beach towel at 32 degrees Centigrade while you flip through Jeffrey Archer is not my idea of a good time. And as a PS, feel good films don’t make me feel good either.

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We are propelled by the desire for another thing as much as the desire for a better thing. It can even be that the other thing is a worse thing but is still more desirable than the same thing. If it is different, in a sense it is not a worse thing, because we know it is doing us good and combatting the squat monster stasis. The trouble then is that we get used to the worse thing and realise it is worse and it also becomes stasis, and so you have the worse of both worlds. Then – let us imagine – you propel yourself into another change of state, equally blind. This must be how it is for those people who keep getting married. I am the polar opposite to those people. I leap cautiously from one state to another. In fact, I do not leap; I sidle surrepticiously. I make a movement such that I could also probably manage to slip back to my former position without anyone noticing. My desire for another thing is not as much as my desire to keep hold of myself. What I want to do is build a very complex edifice, ornate in parts but efficient and formidable to the outside world. It’s so good I don’t need to step out that much. I could have a tunnel to get me through to other places but I can always get back before midnight. That’s a way of understanding all those fairy stories and folk tales. Cinderella; werewolf narratives, vampire narratives. They are all about one thing. The anxiety of change.

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Young men in Europe in the nineteenth century all wanted to be Napolean. He was the Christiano Ronaldo of his day. In fact, he remained the Christiano Ronaldo for nearly a hundred years after his death. Beethoven hero-worshipped him till he made himself emperor. You see it in Stendhal in France in the 1830s as you hear it from Svevo in Italy in the 1920s. In England, of course, Bonaparte was the bogeyman, used to threaten children. Christiano Ronaldo, then, or Messi or Delli Alli is the model for today’s boy. I wonder who mine is. Sometimes people ask who your hero is or your life model. It arises in quizes in women’s magazines. It’s in the famous Proust questionnaire. I never know what to say. Maybe I’m too old for a hero. Rather, my heroes are fragmented. I don’t take the whole man. I like Proust’s insight but I suspect him of snobbery and I’m not so keen on his moustache. I like Nabokov’s prose but he was pretty snooty too. So you wander around without a hero. I wonder if this is a condition of modern adulthood. You may also wander around with nothing to believe in and this can be held against you. It seems to me the height of balance and sophistication, having nothing to believe in. You end up believing in small material things. Marshmallow; nice figs; oysters; Mahler’s 6th symphony; a nice pair of socks. Not Napolean but they won’t let you down.

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