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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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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