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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When you are waited on hand and foot there is a trade-off. In a traditional family environment in deepest Greece, if you happen to be the tallest, most senior man in the family unit, elderly women will wait on you. They will push extra portions of patatas across the table and look sternly on for you to consume them, even if you already have ample portions of patatas on your already amply laden plate. I will hear the familiar assemblage of syllables that I know means in Greek ‘Does Paul want…? Give Paul some more… Make sure Paul has…’ My sister, who could understand the high servitude bristled with indignation. Well, I can only say in response that if you happen to be the tallest and most dignified of guests at the dinner table, certain engagements are entered upon. Though it would be wrong to see this as a one-way relationship. If you are in receipt of all this hospitality, you are required to fulfill your side of the contract. You are required to eat. Weight will be gained. If you decide to refuse hospitality, you must do so with authority, with grave hieratic dignity, the gestures of dismissal must be sovereign, your disdain colossal. Oh, it is no small achievement to be feted royally; you have to be up to the job. I do believe I was.

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When you are reading a novel or watching a film, you often become aware of the schematisation of the storyline, what in modern media jargon is called the arc. In a modern thriller you can almost set your watch for the timings of the first car chase; a story is plotted so that every detail has a subordinated relevance to the monolithic plot. No details are unaccounted for.
In fact, the pleasures of a fiction are in part the fact that the material is streamlined into the thrust of the dominant narrative, but also in part the randomness of material that does not fit into an overall scheme, the pleasures of what is not accounted for. The 19th Century novelist Emile Zola is often characterised as an overly controlling narrator with a didactic socio-economic programme behind every storyline, his version of ‘naturalism’ which aimed to document in a quasi-scientific way the culture of the time. But in Zola, as in any great creator of narrative, place is left for the random, the stuff that doesn’t fit, for it is often there that the most acute insight seeps through. In his early novel ‘Therese Raquin’ (1867) the central scene of the text is the murder of a husband by his wife and her lover. The trio have ordered a chicken in a river-side restaurant and taken a boat out on the Seine for an hour while it is being cooked. The husband is drowned during the boating trip on the river and the killing is passed off as an accident. In the description of this scene Zola tangentially notes the presence of a boat of rowers (‘canotiers’) a little further upstream. They are the ones who come to the aid of the victims of the apparently tragic accident that leaves Camille the husband dead. They help the two survivors, Therese and her lover Laurent, make it to shore. The charming random moment in the narration of the murder comes at the end of the chapter when Zola drily notes that it was the rowers from the rowing boat who ended up eating the dead man’s chicken. This tiny detail shows the range of Zola’s empathy. He is not just subordinating all the narrative to the admittedly key murder, he also sees the incident from the perspective of the peripheral characters of the rowers, who are (we imagine) left with the moral decision of deciding on whether or not to eat the roast chicken of a dead man, now going spare. Zola pans out and shows us the action from a wider, more quotidian perspective, which is also more realistic as we the readers mostly play the roles of the canotiers (the rowers) in life, peripheral observers of high drama. But we all have our own moral issues, however minor. Mostly the questions for us are not: do I murder a man who getting is in the way of what I want but, rather, do I eat a dead man’s chicken?

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The ongoing fad for clean and healthy food is a symptom of the condition it purports to address. The preciousness of the ingredients; the fastidiousness of the procedures; the ignorance of the cultural circumstances that most people live in: these are part of the problem. Aubergine, asparagus and artichoke (the A vegetable triumvirate) trump carrot, cabbage and cauliflower, but you’ll be paying four times as much for them, and, over and above the economic argument, most households have a tradition of the C vegetable (it’s the culture, stupid!). Hummus, for some reason mostly to do with convenience, is the king of the British fridge. It sits in splendour on the second shelf (the prestige shelf) and although in itself is mostly good for you, its reputation as a virtuous snack means that it is over-consumed. Prissy cooks, bully cooks, snobby cooks, entitled cooks and celebrities doing a bit of cooking all get their half hour of prime time, just enough time to make us under-eat or over-eat, to make us feel guilty or poor or unglamorous or ignorant or cowed. It’s rampant denial or rampant indulgence so that contemporary pathology now lives itself out primarily through the stomach. Denial is the new king of the iron throne (I refuse to mention gluten again because at this rate they will put it on my tombstone). Food is a sorry indicator of an infelicitous modern trend, namely, that health, mental or physical, comes by not doing rather than doing.

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I was walking in Kennington Park the other day and I saw a young man with a tee-shirt that sported an image of Oliver Cromwell with the text beneath it that read Down with Cromwell. I was bemused and, as so often nowadays, unable to read whatever signs were being put out. I went through a few options in my own mind. Cromwell was a Puritan. Maybe the young man is a great advocat of the Cavaliers. He did not seem to be such an extravagant dresser (jeans and tee-shirt). Maybe Cromwell represents government austerity, although if this was a political slogan I would have thought that Cromwell’s advocacy of the people against the aristocratic cavaliers would align him more with Corbyn than with May. I could very well be missing a reference to some DJ or hip-hop band. I recounted the incident to a younger friend more au fait with younger generation trends but got no joy from him either. The sign that is being put out is impenetrable to me and, I would imagine, to many others too. We live in an era of sign overload. Our skies are sign-spangled. Tatoos, tee-shirts, logos; signalling has exploded, and, because we no longer live in a monoculture, not everyone (hardly anyone) can interpret the signs that are being emitted. Or maybe there is another explanation. You have to emit a sign. granted. But you don’t have to know or be particularly connected to the sign that you are emitting. What is important is that you are signalling your signalling. You are participating but you are not quite sure in what. It’s just fun to be a part of a conversation. That could be a young generation issue. You see this in small children and toddlers who are learning the ways of the world. They will ape something a grown-up has done without knowing what it means. It is the performance that interests them. And, after all, nobody can catch all the meanings of an act. That’s why we have semiologists and cultural critics. Whatever, it was nice to see Oliver Cromwell getting his fifteen minutes of fame for once, even though, like some bewildered contestant on Big Brother, he wasn’t quite sure what he was supposed to be saying.

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I remember my sister telling me about a careers class she had at school in the late seventies. Helen went to a Secondary Modern School. She was aged fifteen and being prepared for working life. All the students were handed a questionnaire to be filled in with questions like Which job would you prefer to have? 1) Teacher 2) Doctor 3) Optician 4) Singer. The pupils excitedly filled out the questionnaires. The teacher gathered them in and then theatrically ripped them all up and dumped them in the bin. These are jobs you can never hope to have, she said. Then another set of questionnaires was handed out. Which of the following jobs would you prefer to have? 1) Laundry packer 2) Cleaner. 3) Cloakroom attendant. 4) Baby-sitter. She went on to explain: these were the kinds of jobs you could aspire to. Very cruel and demotivating, of course, though you see the idea behind it. Whether it was justified or not, the idea was to give pupils a realistic sense of what life could hold in store for them. Helen chose laundry packer because she wasn’t quite sure what it entailed..
We shoot forward to today and that notion has turned round 180 degrees. Now anyone can do anything. You can win X-factor and become a star. You can be on Big Brother and become a star. Your dreams can come true, no matter what your class, race, ethnicity, circumstances. Ther is no preparation for failure. There is only preparation for success. This is also abusive. The great sacred word ‘choice’, an inalienable human right, sits in splendour over all. Its self-evident dominion is illustrated by anecdote. Here, we read in a tabloid, is the story of boy who went from nothing to a fortune. What we are not shown are the fifty other boys who went from nothing to nothing or the ten other boys who went from being backed up by family assets to further success and fortune. The great swathes of facts would tell us that you do not, in general, escape easily, and, if you do, there might be some collateral damage.
Should we go back to the bad old days of hopelessness? No. But should we combat the tyranny of the American dream? Yes, we should. By the way, Helen isn’t a laundry packer. She made the jump to the first list and became a primary school teacher. But I wonder how many other members of her class made that same leap.

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