In the school where I sometimes work the Principal has a little speech to the new students at the beginning of the year which she ornaments with marshmallows. She explains the idea of deferred gratification through deciding to forego on an immediate pleasure, presumably the enjoyment of a marshmallow, for a later but greater pleasure, probably passing your exams at the end of the year. I’m not quite sure how the explanation fits together but I’m sure you get the gist. The marshmallows are therefore set up as a pleasure to be passed over. What happens then is that the dish of marshmallows is put in the hall downstairs for anyone to just take and enjoy as they pass through the school. What always surprises me is that none of the kids seem to take them. Either they are still under the influence of the speech about deferred gratification and think that eating a marshmallow would refelct poorly on them, or, more likely, they are upper middle class kids who have never seen a packet of industrially produced pink marshmallow and look down their noses at them. I, of course, as an ex-working class kid of the industrial north, can think of nothing more extravagant than a gelatin-laden cancerogenic marshmallow, and I multiply my trips through the hall to stuff my face with the heavenly pink and white mush. Oh yes. No matter how you try to hide your roots, your past; no matter how distant it all appears to be; no matter how you look to cover it all up with opera and string quartets and fancy literature, the truth will always out. Picture me, as scarlet-faced as Mr Bumble, stuffed to the gills with the spongey, vile confectionary – marshmallows make no attempt to portray themselves as anything other than pads of toooth-decaying squidge – attempting to be taken seriously in front of a set of seventeen or eighteen year olds just back from their summer break in St Tropez. And so begins the instruction of these young minds. The truth will always out.

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We went to a private art gallery. It was a gallery tucked away behind some scaffolding. You had to know it was there. It was an exhibition of Dubuffet works from 1978-79. You had to know who he was. It was one of those doors where you press and buzzer and say you want to come in to see the the exhibition. You had to be unintimidated. In the gallery there were a number of guards and just one pair of visitors, two oldish, well-dressed men. We went round the pictures. We liked them. We talked about them. One of the men caught our eye. We got talking about the art. He was a Canadian man who owned a Dubuffet at home in Canada. He told us where he hung it and what kind of picture it was. He asked me if I owned any Dubuffets. I said I had a poster in my hall. He was not threatened by the fact that I did not own any million dollar pictures. He said what was it like in London for security. I said nobody had ever tried to steal my Dubuffet poster. We all got on like a house of fire. Then we went on with our own individual visits and our own individual days. Thinking later, what we should have done is gone for a coffee with him and his friend. Then he would have given us his address and phone number in Canada. We would have gone to visit him there. That’s when we would have stolen the Dubuffet and some of his other art works. or maybe just stolen his money. My advice to any budding burglars is this: meet people in places where only initiates go. There you befriend them easily. They think you are like-minded. They trust you. You are like-minded but a bit different. They like that. It is exotic to them that you own a Dubuffet poster and not a genuine Dubuffet. That way you are in a position to rob them of their assets. Ah well, there’s another calling left unexploited.

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I was too old to be seduced by the zaniness of glam rock. I was a boy with nothing much to kick against and did not see the point of men dressing up in bright silver costumes and wearing glitter on their face. It alienated me. I liked reassuring things like Val Doonican singing in a jumper on a rocking chair. The other day I went on youtube to see, out of curiosity, if Gary Glitter was there and listen to Rock and Roll part two, which in my memory was pretty good, though at the time I didn’t like it. The footage of him on Top of the Pops was there and had one and a half million views. I remember once Mr and Mrs Shield, who were a bald man and his blond wife with a face like a bag of spanners, told someone that Gary Glitter had been to their house and they had made him either a soup or a suit (there was ambiguity in the message that got through to us). Why would Gary Glitter be getting a soup or a suit from Mr and Mrs Shield of all people. It was unfathomable to me. I like all that glam rock stuff now. T Rex, Sweet, early Bowie, Slade. Somehow as a middle aged man I am more in tune with their playful devil-may-care anarchy now than I was as a not very rebellious child. It is odd when you listen to the soundtrack of your childhood. You love it for nostalgic reasons and pick up on the mood and intent more now than then. I must have been a puritanical child. Slade all seemed to have such a great time on stage, taking the piss out of the lip syncing they were required to do. These boys were not in the same business of the marketing men. They were just having fun and if the syncing looked like shit so be it. These days the stars do marketing. Riannah, Beyonce, Katy Perry are mainly business people. Gary Glitter, on the other hand, was a pied piper chanting elemental rhythms with people feeding off his sorcery. There was somethng raw and elemental about it. I wonder why Gary Glitter was round at Mr and Mrs Shield’s house that night. They didn’t have children I don’t think, and I had never heard of their proficency in the suit or soup department. Now if it had been Val Doonican going round to Mr and Mrs Shield’s house for soup or a suit I might have understood, but I could not think that Gary Glitter would be interested in soup and it wouldn’t surely be a silver jewel-incrusted jumpsuit that Mrs Shield had been tailoring. Who knows? Fom the depths of the Thai prison where he is purging his 16 year sentence for sex with an underage child, could it be that Gary Glitter’s dreams spiral round that remarkable soup he once tasted in the early to mid 70s on Woodbank ave, Offerton, Stockport.

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We know it makes no sense to think that you are moving somewhere in life. Maybe you can accumulate money but it is hard to accumulate friends and at any moment any life gains, material or other, can be reversed by something that comes from without or within. You must love the vagaries of the journey, then. And know that nothing is definitively acquired. But it is more complex than this, for if you do not defer some pleasure and accept some pain there is no way you can arrive at the appreciation of deeper pleasure. If you do not learn your French verbs, you will never read Proust and that pleasure will forever remain unavailable to you. So you juggle living for the moment with living for the future with what you hope is the right dose of both.
What becomes of us? As a child you look forward and try and imagine your face tomorrow. You try and picture where you will be standing in twenty years time, what scars you will bear, what you will know or have unknowed by then. I remember as a ten year old imagining what I would do as a sixteen year old: going to Old Trafford and knocking on the door and convincing the manager to give me a trial for Manchester United. It did not occur to me that the intensity of my desire was of no consequence. Weirdly, this still seems to be a myth evoked by televison programmes like X-Factor where all the preliminary interviews to the acts centre on the intense desire of the novice performers to become stars. Nobody ever endears themselves to the baying audiences by communicating disinterest, by saying ‘well, it would be nice to win but if I don’t I’ll find other sources of satisfaction, it won’t be the end of the world.’ No, nobody wins hearts with that attitude. Except mine.

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Wayne Rooney has apologised to his family after being caught drink driving in the Greater Manchester area. There was also another woman in the late night car. I don’t know if the apology was for her as well. Coleen, the wife, was away. I don’t know where. Dubai probably. That’s where they normally go, footballer’s wives. It would be nice if you heard she was away in Bayreuth listening to the Ring cycle or something. It would make a change from Dubai at least. The people Wayne should be apologising to, though, are not his family, in Dubai or Cheshire or Majorca, no, not them, but the other people who were driving in the vicinity of his car when he was pissed behind the wheel. They were the people put at risk, not his family. And yet, it is, as usual. at the altar of the sacred family that the modern equivalent of sacrificial animal innards are laid out. The evocation of the family (like some ritualised chorus in Greek tragedy)is transmitted through the sacred script of the tabloids. Wayne has let his family down. Wayne regrets his poor judgement. As though he had been deciding on the fate of Trojan envoys. Wazza shows poor judgement and the gods punish him with a two year driving ban. The Rooney tribe is shamed and will not be able to fulfil their sacrificial rituals in the Temple of Juno again before the new moon. There is a vibrant history of footballers and family. A footballer must never be without a wife or girlfriend; the idea of solitariness is anathema. What! On his own! No, he must be given the full set of wife and kid accessories. When Wayne brings home his £250,000 a week he refers to it as putting bread on the table for his wife and kids. The gap between the reality and the language has never been so cavernous. It is a wide as the minotaur’s jaw. The idea of what you are doing as putting bread on the table is a deep insult to all those working people who literally earn their zero hour bread and literaly put it on a literal table, if they have one, people who do not live in the Palace of Atreides or drive the chariot of Croesus. What Wayne Rooney puts on the table for Coleen and their kids is a foul blood-soaked mass. It is a filthy, unnameable organ; a sick trophy. Wayne Rooney himself is not totally to blame in all of this. He is just the poor beleagured agent blindly carrying out the ritual in the monster’s labyrinth.

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As I flipped through a fashion magazine in the dentists I came across an article about a black fashion model with what Chaucer called ‘gat-teeth’ (a gap between the two front teeth). The general drift of the article was that any kind of model can make it in today’s fashion industry. Mostly the features required to be a female fashion model are big lips, a little button nose and des yeux en amande (almond-shaped eyes). This has been the case for all my adult life. The problem with the button nose is that it is hugely unambitious. It has its tiny perfection and will not ruin a photo in the way a big nose can but the button nose is not taking ny risks, not drawing attention to itself, its own particularity, which you might think would be a plus in an alpha-beauty, though the fashion world mainly looks to draw attention to the clothes, so maybe this neutrality is a quality. Fashion model men come in two guises; the hunky-big man and the waif, though there is a wider range of face allowed for the male. A nose can be big, for example. The idea, I suppose, is that men are allowed to exhibit character, greater specificity than women, which may mean that men can come in all shapes and sizes but it is difficult for women to. I remember once a woman asking me whether the gym I went to still had the instructor with the perfect body. This was a bemusing question. It depends what you mean, I said. No, but you know who I mean, she said. Turned out that the perfect body she was referring to belonged to a tall bloke with glasses who looked and moved like a tax accountant. Thank goodness that, to a small extent at least, beauty and ugliness are in the eye of the beholder. Mostly, as I get older, I am only really moved by beauty when I get to the conversation of the person. I noticed this when I tried Speed Dating once.This does not make me deep. You should hear the conversation I require.

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Suspicions as to the true nature of the offence had been aroused over a period of time. The suspect had been invited in to cohabit with his victim a number of years previously and given a position of some standing and significance in the home. It had gradually dawned on the victim that he was being systematically and progressively subjected to a process of what can only be described as wholesale manslaughter. The perpetration of the crime made itself apparent through a number of significant symptoms; his limbs aching; his back stiff, almost set in place by some dreadful lock, as though he were being bolted into a medieval stocks. It was the beginning of a drip-drop over a number of years aiming to destabilise the whole organism. Gradually such an application of pressure erodes the resistance, erodes the equilibrium of the whole musculature. Ironically, it had been the victim himself who had hand-picked his own torturer, chosen out of hundreds of applicants as being the one best equipped to provide satisfaction. And there was something about that relationship, a relationship the victim was loathe to reject. Surely, he thought, this cannot be the problem, surely there must be some other root cause of my affliction. But no, all evidence now pointed in one direction. It really was time for him to throw his favourite armchair out.

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When you are in a queue and somebody pushes in, what is the most ethical and laudable reaction you can have? Do you just accept it, turn away and let the person flout the rules of the group or do you pipe up and say excuse me we are queueing here. everyone takes his turn. It’s how we do it here. The latter, surely. You take responsibility for the collectivity, your culture, the society you live in. The ethical position is not to turn the other cheek. Turning the other cheek is a renunciation of your engagement with society, it is a closing-in upon yourself. Do not turn the other cheek. As far as is workable for you, stand up for the rules of the society that protects you by supporting it. The Christian injunction to just do nothing and wait for death is rife in Jesus’ teachings. “Therefore I say unto you, Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat, or what ye shall drink; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. Is not the life more than the food, and the body than the raiment? Behold the birds of the heavens, they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them.” (Matthew) Actually the birds of the air are working all day long to get their food, make their nests, get on their bike to other climes when the season changes. Waiting for death is not an ethical injunction these days.

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I was sitting in a cafe this morning looking through a window and I saw a woman get off her bike and cross the road. She was a bike woman, a bit sporty-looking with a helmet. I looked away or back to my coffee or read a bit more of an article in the paper. A few minutes later I looked out of the window again. The Portuguese cafe was opening up on the other side of the road. A waitresss in apron was sorting out the shutters on the window. The biker-girl had become a waitress. It was the same woman, now in a different costume. A few minutes ago I was in the Tesco picking up a couple of things for dinner. In front of me down the vegetable aisle was a shopper. It was a woman. It was the same woman again. She must have finished her shift at the cafe. Now she was a shopper.I have experienced three snapshots of three different roles of one woman today and, like an ethnographer, accidentally broken her down into three emblematic functions. I suppose we all incorporate a number of roles in a day, although not always with a variety of costumes. For each of these roles we are viewed differently by outsiders. In the park cafe the young man who works there once came up to me and said ‘What is it you actually do?’ He must see me hanging around a lot, as though with nowhere to go. I was somewhat flattered by being unclassifiable and looked to find an answer that would preserve the mystery of my enigmatic self. In fact, I enjoy those contexts in life where you can emphasise your own anonymity. Travelling is a nice one. When in transit who can know who you are and where you are bound? You are just some random, existential hero shuttling between meaningless dots on a map. This is perhaps why in a survey I read about yesterday most people in the UK prefer not to be addressed by strangers when travelling, because when you open your mouth you give the game away, and not even by what you say. Your accent or the tension in your voice may be enough. How much better to turn your head away from your eager questioner, look out at the landscape flooding past the high-speed train window, to blow out the smoke of a forbidden and imaginary cigarette and to keep the alluring secret of your identity intact.

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My friend Robert’s book The Last Wolf is apparently doing good business on the best seller lists. A catchy title referring to the last wolf killed in England some time around 1200. A wolf is always a good beast to have in a title. The other good word of recent years is ‘girl’; The girl on the train; The girl with the dragon tattoo; The girl in the spider’s web; The girl who fell from the sky. Girls are tops in the publishing industry. A few years ago it was snow. You had to have snow in your title to get noticed. The key to success might be as simple as that. A title with a magical word. Television certainly believes in the power of the title and will twist everything to a risible degree to get the snug fit. Rosemary and Thyme. Rosemary Whatever and Jackie Thyme; two gardeners with a knack for solving crimes. Isn’t it something like that? It’s so absurd it would make a cat laugh. Belt and Braces. Billy Belt and Braces McGowan. Two no nonsense cops with a taste for real ale and old fashioned policework. Trajan’s Column. Julie Trajan is a lonely hearts columnist with an interest in ancient Rome and an unlikely knack for solving crimes using her classical expertise. You could spend hours making the stuff up. I dare say they start with a title. It’s like putting the cart before the horse. Oh, there’s another one. The Cart before the Horse. Frank Cart and Bill ‘Horse’ Horsely, two insiders investigating corruption in the gambling industry. The question is what will next year’s word be. I’m putting my money on stag as the new wolf with fog as the meteological word and instead of girl knave. Here are my titles for 2018: The Stag on the Train. Jack Stag investigates a murder on the Virgin pendelino to Runcorn. The Knave of Thrones. Jack Knave; an unlikely rise to the heights, Jack Knave will stop at nothing to quench his thirst for power. Fog in the Casino. Jack Fog mixes it with the glitterati in St Tropez and reveals an unlikely cover-up.

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