Johnny Depp is getting some bad press from ‘The Daily Mail’ I see. He’s looking bad; he’s drinking too much; there is rocknroll: drugs are involved; some are not soft. Pictures show him looking his age: sometimes drawn, sometimes flabby. We are surprised because normally we see him in films on the telly where he looks Peter Panish. But, of course, many of the films we see repeated constantly on Film 4 or on the Movie Channel are twenty years old. This is time lag glamour and all film stars are subject to it. Once I saw an old man on the tube and I thought that must be Jonathan Millar’s dad until I realised it was Jonathan Millar himself. i was just used to seing him as he had been in the 70s and 80s. I say all this because I saw Grant Mitchell of old Eastenders fame in Victoria Station the other day. What struck me was that he looked like Grant Mitchell, not Grant Mitchell’s dad, or even Phil Mitchell. He looked like himself. It was very unreal.

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My plate has changed over recent months. I was always a traditionalist; a meat and two veg. The meat dark, unstained by any sauce or gravy, potato in any of its guises, a green or a carrot, maybe a green and a carrot. Maybe some cooked apple with that, for pork or even for chicken. When you have this kind of plate before you, you try and make each part of the meal last so that you finish meat, potato and veg at the same time. You alternate forkfulls of each, so that your forkfull of cabbage is followed by a piece of chicken, followed by your favourite, the roast potato. This way you inch yourself through to a clean plate. Then there would be the pudding smothered in custard. These days my plate looks mostly different: a bed of brown rice topped with some heavily peppered vegetables. No meat. My heart sinks when I see it and I think how can I get through this? Where are my tiny morsels of reward, my mouthfuls of roast potato? And yet, I do get through it. There is a gap between the promise and the result. My mind isn’t keeping up. It is like when you buy a pizza because of some memory and then half way through find you are eating cardboard. I must be in transition between various plates, their promise and their reality. Unlike many, I do not take snapshots of dinners. Why would you do that? To preserve a memory? But then, after some time you find yourself with long scrolls of meals and birthday cakes on your computer file. When was this one with the red velvet cake? Oh, that must have been the Christening that time when it was raining. No, that was when we had leg of lamb. Look, here’s that leg of lamb here. Correct. There is that leg of lamb. Still whole on the screen, looking unappetising as only photographs of food can do. Looking like a club. No, all my plates are in my head, where they belong.

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The footballer who is not selected for the World Cup squad is a forlorn individual. At this time of year you will find him in Florida. He is on holiday. The World Cup squad has just taken the plane to Volgograd. The tabloids are taking us deeper into the psyche of the players. The tattoos; the stats; the depressions; the stepdads; the motors; the fiancees.The players are giving press conferences, wowing the public with their avowals of committment. The say things like ‘there is no reason why we cannot win this World Cup,’ the double negative telling. But the footballer who is not selected is baking in the unnatural heat of a Florida afternoon, in a place where nobody’s mind is on Russia. He is thinking: they are there, the 23. What number was I? Would I have made the 38? Or the 47? No matter. Here in Florida the number 23 has no resonance. He is by the pool. The painted sky is a sheet of blue. Sometimes he hears a German, or a Frenchman. They too may know what is soon to happen in Russia. But they did not get close to the 23. Maybe even as close as 28, or 29. In Florida they will fill your coffee cup as many times as you want for no extra charge. But this is irrelevant. His place is not here. It is there. And then, when the competition starts, he will find a bar with the match on. And at Tunisia 0 England 0 after 67 minutes of play he will decide to turn away, to leave the bar and find his loan car parked where he left it on the street. He will pull out onto an empty freeway. The summer stretches long and empty ahead of him. He is, he supposes, free.

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I bumped into one of the directors of my appartment building yesterday who urged me, not for the first time, to register to the building facebook page to receive all the latest information about what’s happening in my block. I responded with a knowing raise of the eyebrow, as if to say Facebook? No thank you. Surely that has become contaminated now. All that data hoarding and deployment is making Facebook look distinctly old school. And for the first time I felt that rather being behind the curve with my distrust of social media I was actually ahead of it. In fact, my sceptical world view which has not changed over the years is making me say all the right things for once. The other day someone told me I should ‘get on board’ about some new movement or other and I found myself telling them that getting on board, as he put it, was exactly what you don’t do. You take a critical look at any movement and stay off the vehicle over which you have no control. On board is the last place you want to be with anything. Could it be that I am ahead of the curve. Even the old-style shorts and sunglasses I have been wearing for years seem to have come full circle. Could it be that by some unlikely conjunction of events I find myself, for the first time in my life, actually on the curve. But don’t quiz me too closely; this curve-balancing act won’t go on for long.

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The BBC aired a new production of King Lear last night. ‘Aired’ as in let the air into it, took it out of the stuffy self-congratulating rooms where they do their business. It wasn’t bad, I suppose, though I did turn it off before the end, so it couldn’t have been that good. I suppose I was mildly enthusiastic. Different then to the announcer who introduced it as a ‘brilliant’ new production. I don’t know why the BBC, or ITV or Channel 4 for that matter, trail their own shows as brilliant. This is for us the viewer to judge, isn’t it? Enthusiasm, in general, gets me down. The less enthusiastic you are, the more more enthusiastic I am. This my rule. I call it: The Enthusiasm Quotient. By media, this is a rule more adhered to in its breaching than in its respecting. The announcer will be given her script to call ‘King Lear’ ‘brilliant’, I suppose. You wonder about the ethics of a chain of command whereby a subjective reaction is scripted for someone who has probably not even seen the programme. One day soon this kind of dissemination of false opinion (fabricated, the lazy construction of enthusiasm) will be called into question by important people.

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American teenagers shower four times a day and squeal with disgust if they touch anything that hasn’t been whooshed through a laser cleaner unit. But we are not very interested in noise hygiene. In the gym you have to put up with the the general music booming out of the gym speakers as well as any number of tinny personal music sources that gym-users need for their own personalised experience (for some gymsters headphones don’t do it). At the gym you can be involved in cacophony. The world isn’t much better. Recently I had a couple of wax-blocked ears and went to the doctor to have two huge lumps of wax sucked out of my ears. They emerged like two frightening bugs from up the auditory canal. The nurse put them in a test tube for me and I regaled and horrified a number of colleagues with the exhibit. When I came out of the doctors I suddenly experienced the noise-ridden universe like a new-born: the roar of the traffic; the sound of my own footsteps. The ear produces wax naturally to protect the inner zones, but why does it overproduce? Is it a subconscious desire to shut the world out? Or shut somebody up? Racket just gets louder and louder and we haven’t even started getting unhappy about it yet.

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It was First Holy Communion day today at the Holy Ghost and St Stephen’s in Chiswick with me in attendance. I have been a non-believer for many years, so I find myself torn when the responses are ringing out. There is something in the deep rhythms that makes me what to join in. Through my fault through my fault through my own most grevious fault with the hand beating the heart three times. I just have to say it, even though I know it’s not through my fault, none of this, the crucifixion of Jesus or any of it was my fault. I want to show I still know the rhythms, the responses, for some reason. I sometimes say it’s through respect for my past, through the people I knew when I was younger and was Catholic, though I know it’s also just a child-like enjoyment of the ritual. Of course, it all becomes more and more ridiculous in my eyes. We watch the priest eat his bread and wine. We watch him do his fastitious cleaning up afterwards. They must be taught that at the seminary. Make sure you are meticulous in cleaning the silver plater of host. Bits of Jesus must not be left for the cleaners on Monday morning. These days the congregation are more of an audience. They are wanting to clap at various moments in the ceremony when the seven and eight-year-olds take centre stage. and at the end of the sacrement the litany of photographs goes on forever. You can see the poor priest taking deep breaths as family after family step forward for the suite of photos. Child with parents. Child with priest and certificate. Child with godparents. Child with Auntie Molly. It is endless. Fr O’Reilly came in for the ritual. Now he’s doing children’s parties. You pity the poor Irishman. Though this one didn’t seem to be actually Irish. Good luck to him. Keep it going while you can, father. It won’t be long till the whole thing becomes the Disney parade that is its historical inevitability.

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Language is all. ‘Please, operational grid, give me the right language,’ urged David Cameron in a laughable memo to his strategy team when the old Etonian, Christ Church Oxford, PR man, Spad was plotting how to speak to the poor aliens who were his electorate. And this week too President Macron of France committed the translational infelicity of thinking that ‘delicious’ is always the right translation for ‘delicieux’ and so referred to another president’s wife as something tastier than ‘delightful’. The world of me-too et autres is increasingly sprinkled with the broken glass of language faux pas. In a class I teach, my 18-year-old students were unable to find a word that would be valid and acceptable for non-white ethnicities. All they had was a handful of no-goes. Like nutritional advice, language injunctions tend to promote the negative. No gluten; no dairy; no carbs; no meat. But advice about food, as language, as life, should aspire towards recommendations, not interdictions. Language recommendations tend to be fairly random, and dictated by the dominant power: the US, the centres of influence. London cannot speak for all. It cannot insist that micro-centres of culture that have nourished certain usages are necessarily mistaken. ‘People of colour’ has become curiously acceptable. In the same way as ‘world music’ still exists to denote all the also-rans that fall outside the English-speaking monster. We are all at sea. It will take more than an operational grid to sort us out.

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The bed sofa I ordered from John Lewis is arriving tomorrow morning between 7.19 and nine o’clock according to the text they sent. You wonder why institutions (John Lewis. governments) insist on the fiction of precision in their estimates. Given London traffic, given the vagaries of time and place; given the five pints that the van driver may have had the night before; given any number of changes to plans or weather or accidents or demontrations or road works, it is highly unlikely that the van will pitch up at 7.19 precisely. If it arrives at 7.18, will the driver wait a minute before knocking on my front door? Why not say 7.15 or 7.20 and have done with it? Why not accept that this is a rough estimate? Embrace the rough estimate. Who is fooled when you claim to control all variables? Do they think we believe that 7.19 is an accurate time? Of course, government estimates for the prices of public projects are equally pin-prick precise and equally way off the mark of the actual cost. The cost of transforming the Olympic Stadium in London into a football ground for West Ham United was £190 million but actually cost £320 million. The Jubilee line was estimated at £2.1 billion and came in at £3.5 billion. This is habitual blackmail. Once a big project contract has been won, you can’t turn back and leave yourself vulnerable to any hiking of prices, legitimate or otherwise. None of this explains the 7.19 estimate. Probably spewed out by a computer. What the John Lewis executives who manage this type of information fail to understand is that the customer can understand that an arrival time is a rough science and the pretence that all variables can be controlled is a silly boast. Why let the computer make you look silly like that.

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Some people feel the need to signpost their conversation as it is going along. Someone said to me ‘Can I ask you a question?’. We were already twenty minutes into the conversation and questions had been shutteling back and forth continuously. You would think this would then be a very personal or somehow a leading question. But it wasn’t. It was: do you like cherries? Not a particularly personal question I would think. We know other statement initiators. For example: ‘we need to talk’ when you have been talking for half an hour (prelude to the break-up). Then there is: ‘Can I just say something?’ (prelude to an insult). The insult needs special preluding. There is also: ‘I’m not being funny or anything but…’. As well as ‘Don’t take this the wrong way but…’ As in ‘Don’t take this the wrong way but you I’ve always thought you were a shit.’ Some people prefer the epilogue as a way of controlling your response. There is the classic ‘That’s just my opinion’ after an opinion. Or the even less rococo ‘I’m just saying’. And then there are those who like to label. ‘That was funny’ says someone I know after you make a funny statement and it has its desired effet, as though all off-agenda comments need to be classified. A great one that has emerged recently is the omnipresent ‘I’m not going to lie to you…’ as a cure-all prelude.
I don’t know how we are supposed to respond to these fillers. Probably not at all. We just nod and respect the rhetoric, because if they said ‘I’m not gonna lie to you’ and ‘you interjected ‘please don’t’ they might, for some reason known only to the inventor of language, take it amiss.

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