When I go to the Tesco and look at the pears I cannot stop myself from saying aloud to all the fellow-shoppers examining fruit these pears are like bullets. They are all like bullets. Nobody answers me or looks at me. It is as if I am a maniac. The maniacs are Tesco. I have not tasted a pear in decades. The closest I get to the taste of a pear is in a pear chew or a pear drop boiled sweet. Actual pears, like actual apples, all come under the title of generic crispy fruit now. There is also generic softer fruit like plums, peaches, nectarines and apricots, none of which give out distinctive tastes. You are living in George Orwell’s 1984. 1984 is such a long time ago. The power that we once worried about putting into the hands of the state has gone to the huge private corporations and, more worryingly, to the individual. In a generation or two individuals can be invisibly bled of all their reaction, all their rebellion, all their critique. They can even forget what pears once tasted like.

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I ordered ‘Heine:the tragic satirist’, a study of the poetry of Heinrich Heine by Siegbert Prawer which I have a fond recollection of. What came in its place was the autobiography of Lance Armstrong from the year 2000, before the revelation of his drug cheating. This edition was in German and entitled ‘wie ich den Krebs besiegte und die Tour de France gewann’ (How I beat cancer and won the tour de France). How this mix-up happened is unclear, but the upshot was me having a look at the Armstrong autobiography. What it brought home to me is the degree to which poor writing reveals most about the person who writes it. You only need to read a few lines to get the flavour of the man: a braggard; a control-freak; a man obsessed (for whatever reason, cynically or not) with the myth of America and Texas, with the sanctifying connotations of family and fatherhood. He is right out of a cheap Hollywood picture aimed at the middlest of middle America. The writing reeks of it from page one on. Sometimes, as a reader, you want to eschew the human. You want prose that is terse and monochrome, that does not reach for the standard, easily communicated junk myths. I am in that mood at the monent and I find myself reading the French new novel, notoriously flat, what was called at the time ‘chosism’ (thingism or objectism) because of its interest in complex descriptions of objects and mechanisms and rejection of facile human interest. There is a Cezanne retrospective on in London at the moment. He, too, in his portraits, was accused of avoiding the human, of painting people as if they were ‘still lifes’ (it was said he told his models ‘Be an apple. Be an apple’). And when you look at the portraits the figures in them give nothing away, they are inscrutable. It is ‘chosism’ applied to people. Is this anti-human? I don’t know. But sometimes you just want it. You want things to be uninterpretable, unsymbolic, unemblematic, just there. You do not want the equivalent of the self-obsessed Lance Armstrong autobiography, where every sentence is screaming hysterically its needs and desires and intenions. Too much meaning.

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At midnight on New Year’s Eve there are fireworks on the telly. People switch on to see the coloured lights on their screen. Even people who live round the corner from the actual fireworks and can hear the World War 2 detonations going on all around them switch the telly on to get the authentic experience of the New Year celebrations red hot from off the telly. It is another variation on buying a ticket to go out into the cold and stand and be jostled, sometimes crushed, by a load of atrangers in a confined space where you cannot get to the toilet. It reminds me of my one experience of the Notting Hill Carnival where you have the added pleasure of thousands of people blowing whistles into your ear. Finding a toilet again becomes the main aim of the festivities. Maybe festivities should be broken down into two types: those where the main aim is to find a toilet and the others where a toilet is available with no challenges to the act of relieving your bladder. Of course, New Year is no fun for anyone. You see groups of young men hunting in packs looking for the right party. There are plenty of wrong parties with the host looking forlornly out of an upstairs window with a flashing disco light behind his ear as illumination. It makes for a lovely cinematic tableau. Those in parties will be singing ‘Wonderwall’ together at the top of their voices or (something I heard last night from the neighbours over the way) ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’. Boyfriends have to give their girlfriends a good new year and girlfriends have to look better than Sharon or Tracey in their contending sparkly Topshop dresses. It’s goose-pimpled legs in a miniskirt eat goose-pimpled legs in a miniskirt out there. I had heard the phrase ‘drink a toast’ at some stage in the evening and so my tyrannical and moronically literal imagination forced me to bring in the New Year with three rounds of toast with apricot jam on. Only when the crumbs were wiped from my lips was 2017 finally seen out the door. Then we could get back to reading our books on the settee.

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Say what you want about Scrooge, he certainly had a nice way with words. Christmas day. A fine excuse to pick a man’s pocket every 25th December… Die? They had better do so and so reduce the surplus population… And so my affections have always gone out to him. Especially in this time of rife profligacy when the benefits of frugality are being reassessed. They call it saving the planet, but they will only do it when it is couched in those terms. I noted a worrying instinct in myself the other day. I was buying some trifle or other and it cost £3 and I paid for it without the slightest of winces. My instinctive reaction was: it’s ony three of those minor monetary units. Hardly anything at all. Do not let it register on my inner abacus. You can see this is the thin edge of a very dangerous wedge. The pound sterling as a negligeable unit. I remember when the French franc shifted into the Euro in the year 2000. People continued to talk and count in Francs for years. Some people still do. At the time of the Franc some people spoke in old francs from decades before. The day you transitioned from one currency to the other was the day your inner abacus ceased to work its checks and balances, the day its mechanism got unbalanced and couldn’t give you instinctive winces on key figures. A dangerous day. Relaxing about money is the renounciation of a key set of values about the world. If you do not wince if you are paying £3 for anything you are going wrong somewhere. Scrooge was right.

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I have always seen the dream as the wound left by the day. Greek: trauma = wound. German: traum = dream. Its shape is essentially backward-looking. Your day comes out through the mangle. Bit-part players cast as heroes. Inanimate objects get leading roles. Your free will, your agency, are all subjected to deep and constant sabotage. It’s like a lesson in life. Vladimir Nabokov had another take on dreams. He saw the dream as the one moment where the true nature of time is revealed. For him the dream casts backwards but also forwards. You can foresee events. In our waking lives we are unable to exist within this plastic multi-directional time but, instead, travel in a sorry apparatus leading us one way down a narrow gauge track, but in dream we are liberated, conveyed in a wondrous vehicle. Nabokov’s example, taken from Freud I think, is our experience of the following type of dream:
You are trying to save someone from the guillotine. This is a twisted version of revolutionary France. You are wearing a weirdly shaped Napoleonic-type hat. You are involved in a protracted conversation with a man who looks like, say, your brother-law, or a man you saw in a trailer for ‘Strictly Come Dancing’. All the while you are hurrying to try and save your friend, possibly a monkey, from the fall of the guillotine. You finally get out of the conversation. You see the podium on which the guillotine is set in the distance. You fight your way through crowds. You knock over someone’s Starbucks coffee and give the poor coffee-splashed man, who looks likea a famous weather forecaster, some coins as compensation. The coins look like nuts and as you give them the nuts turn to dust and stain the man’s hands. He is furious but you make a quick getaway, still focused on the guillotine. Your friend, the monkey, is mounting the dais and you are still fifty yards away. You push through the crowd. In any case, how are you going to save the monkey? Monkey is surrounded by guards, all armed to the teeth with muskets. You look in your pocket for a weapon. All you have is nuts. The dream accelerates. You are on the podium. You are struggling with the guillotine. The monkey is watching you from a safe distance, laughing. What are you doing? Oh no. The guillotine is falling. It is hitting you on the shoulder.
You wake up. Your bedside lamp has fallen and has hit you on the shoulder. How do you explain this dream? Could it be that the entire picaresque narrative telescoped into one instant when the lamp hit your shoulder? That lamp fall had been prepared through countless threads of narrative from the very outset of the dream when the guillotine had been revealed. Whatever the explanation, time being squidged into a pin-prick instant or set backwards in motion, time in dreams is flexible, supple, gymnastic in a way our geriatric waking-world cannot manage.
The big identifying feature of my own dreams is the lighting. My dreams are spare; in black and white, or, rather, charcoal grey. But above the characters are thick viscous clouds of dark colour, lumpy bubbles, like speech bubbles in cartoons, that may or may not be creatures in their own right. We, the characters in the dreams, do what we can, but there is a feeling that the sinister, dark bubble shapes are really in charge.

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I remember, as a five-year-old, the day I was expected to be able to write. We used to have a section of the day given over to what was called ‘News’. The teacher would write up on the blackboard the news for the day whcih would invariably be Today is Tuesday. It is sunny. The tadpole is dead.The day of the week; a bit of weather and a bit of actual news. There was, I recall, a kind of wooden slate hung up somewhere in the classroom with spaces into which we could insert wooden words like Tuesday and sunny, so we were used to these words. So the teacher would write today’s news on the board and we would painstakingly copy. Then one day she said today you are going to write your own news. The bafflement that spread around the room was massive. It was like the news of the Kennedy assassination. I looked to my right-hand neighbour. He started with the letter A. I copied him. I looked to my left-hand neighbour. He had started with Th. This looked more likely to me, so I crossed out the A and put Th instead. After 20 mnsutes the evercise books were collected in. Mine was a blank page with a crossed-out A and a Th. My memory now goes blank, but I do remember looking through my News book a few weeks later and the next page was written on. Soemhow the next day or next week I had managed something. Today is Wednesday. It is windy. We have a new tadpole or some such stuff. Somehow I had understood what it was to compose a piece of text. In a now forgotten space my mind had processed something and the main moment of my education was done. I was now ready for the world.

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The pianist in the piano trio introduced the Schumann saying it was a ‘tormented’ piece. Most of Schumann, he said, was ‘tormented’ but this third trio was ‘particularly tormented’. Then it was time for the Schubert. He said Schubert was also a ‘very tormented composer, especially in his late work’. This piece was from his late work but it was only ‘moderately tormented’. This was, presumably, a great disappointment to us all. At te start of the concert we had heard an early Mozart trio which was ‘not tormented at all’. I suppose the pianist saw himself as pretty tormented himself. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, so that probably proved it. The violinist, who had that red blubbery skin that can’t grow a beard at all, did not have a hint of torment about him, and the cellist was as cherubic as a schoolboy. So between them it was only the pianist who was bothering with the tormented vibe. Good luck to him. Torment sells.
I myself am pretty untormented these days. I think I grew out of it when I started taking an extra slice of cake. Torment wasn’t giving me enough back. These days I’m the harmonious type, at one with the universe. Here, cake helps. As I get older I find its the holistic, balanced role I play, which in many ways goes against my nature. I was born to be tormented. I can grow a beard and everything. But the older you get, the less the tormented look is attractive. I mean, when life gets going, you’re given the data, deal with it.

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i just saw Bernard Cribbins on the telly as I was flicking through the channels. He was singing in an Edwardian costume in an old edition of ‘The Good Olde Days’ from the 1970s. There was also Vince Hill on the show. Vince Hill was a crooner appreciated, I should imagine, by the ladies of the time. I don’t quite know where Bernard Cribbins’ talents lay. He was, I suppose, what you call an all-round entertainer. He did good work as a voiceover artist in children’s television. He’s still alive today, I see from Wikipedia. The reason I mention Bernard Cribbins is that when I was watching Bernard Cribbins singing ‘Where did you get that hat?’ and ‘I’m Enerey the Eighth I am’ in his chequered waistcoat I had a strange memory of my adolescent self. Bernard Cribbins represented to me a consciously articulated model of someone that I could model myself on, if ever the worst came to the worst. I don’t know why I focused on Bernard Cribbins. He wasn’t like me at all. He was short and squat with a certain neatness; I was tall and willowy with a certain gonkiness. Maybe that difference represented a kind of ideal to an insecure teenager. It is of some comfort to me, I must admit, that things have turned out better for me than my admittedly unambitious aspirations to resemble Bernard Cribbins. No. I did not end up like Bernard Cribbins, though I am sure he is a very nice man.

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You come out of a flat at seven o’clock in the evening and there is cooking going on. Today there is a leg of lamb in the oven. Last week it was a roast chicken. The week before that a steak and kidney pie. When you leave a flat or a house at the same time every week because you have duties there it is as if the people in that flat are fixed in time, unable to shift, like the Mad Hatter and the March Hare doomed to forever repeating their tea party for the rest of their days. You are surprised to see them remaining the same weight from week to week. How can it be? They are always shifting these huge sides of beef. It gets so that when you see them you see an organic farm-bred chicken coming across to meet you or a herd of oxen walking down the hallway. We judge people by the circumstances in which we habitually see them, circumstances which may be wholly atypical of them for the rest of the week. This is especially true if our engagement with that person is always at the same time or in the same place. If you see the local policeman in the street one day leading the life of a normal man without his high-viz jacket and his helmet on, you are astonished. I saw that policeman in the Tesco today, you say, he was just shopping like a normal man. What did he have in his basket? they all ask you. Kippers, you say, and people are amazed. What! Kippers! Humanity cannot bear so much reality. I remember seeing my primary school headmaster at a bus stop once. I stepped back, out of his line of vision. I did not know how to fit that meeting into my life. Some terrible spell might have shattered. Another person who could not have lived anywhere else except on the front doorstep of where we lived when I was a child was the insurance man who came round for our weekly payment of 7 shillings and sixpence. The pools man could also lead no life other than the one on our front doorstep. Many years later I saw him, not only elsewhere (he was in the Stockport shopping centre) but also older and with another person (his wife maybe). It was tragic. The man had been untimely ripped from our 1970s front doorstep. It was abusive.

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As I was crossing Hungerford Bridge today I heard a woman behind me say to her friend ‘When I got into the shower I was a student nurse, when I got out I was a nurse’. I tried to work this out. Maybe the allocation of the nursing degree happened automatically at a certain time with the degree being dependant on a period of inhouse experience. This was what I concluded. Things can happen in a minute. You can get into a shower in the red before your salary gets paid into your account and get out in the black when the transfer of this month’s pay has gone through. This, of course, has nothing to do with the shower itself. It is not hygiene that makes you rich, though your whole life can switch round in the duration of a shower without you lifting a little finger to implement any change. You can give the order for someone to be bumped off at midday precisely, so that when you step out onto the bath mat your nemesis has been liquidated. You can reach the age of twenty-one and come into your fortune, inheriting daddy’s or Uncle Joe’s millions. You can make a simple decision that will transform the rest of your life. Give up drink, or drugs or cigarettes. It is in the breaks that decisons are made. At half-time the coach will rejig the team or in your night’s sleep or your afternoon nap, when nothing should be happening, that a decision will suddenly fit into place. Life happens to us as much as we happen to it. Though when I step into a shower normally no major transformations take place. I wash my hair and make perfunctory washing gestures around four strategic areas: the privates; the bottom and the two armpits. These are the major crisis points of cleanliness, I find. I rinse and step out. I look in the mirror. No change.

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