I have now had two weeks to ponder on the issue of my pipes and the aftermath of the affair, how it has irrevocably changed the relations between inhabitants in the block. For a number of weeks there had been rumblings coming from the pipes in my flat. The trembling would start up at random moments throughout the day and I had to open up the cold water tap in the kitchen for a moment to silence it. Sometimes when I came home in the evening the pipes were resonating freely. Had it been going on all day in my absence? After a couple of weeks I received an email from the block directors. A number of residents were suffering from rumbling pipes; some even referred to them as hammering. It was finally understood that the problematic flats all lay on an axis running from the general position of my ground floor flat and my neighbours up to the top floor on the fifth or sixth floor, about ten or twelve flats. A plumber was sent in to examine the problem. Keys were left to grant him access. When I got home that afternoon, one of the directors came round to see me. It was my flat that was the culprit. I had a leak in a tap and it was causing all the brouhaha. I called my plumber, had the taps changed and the rumbling stopped. I sent out apologies to the stack of affected residents. Mea culpa. It had been my solitary, weeping tap that had caused the chaos, the sleepless nights, the infuriating days. A tiny leak had led to communal impatience. I had noted the leak but thought that the rumblings were causing the leak and not vice versa, fatally confusing cause and consequence. And now, when I pass the residents in the courtyard they know me. I read the reproachful look in their eyes; they note my sorry hangdog expression. I will be forever known as the man who made the pipes tremble. It may well be the first step on the incremental and inevitable route to total exclusion. Invitations to the annual barbecue will no longer flutter through my letter box. I, of course, avoid these functions anyway. I will no longer be expected at the Annual Residents Meeting. I, of course, do not attend these dreary affairs. Neighbours will no longer merrrily drop off their key with me to let in the man reading the metre. I am surely the last man in the world for such gestures of trust and communal appreciation. Come to think of it, I am well down that road to eccentric loner already. No wonder my Amazon packages always get sent back to the depot when a benevolent neighbour could surely find a temporary shelter for them. Now, however, I know how to control the pipes. In neighbour wars, you never know what might come in handy.

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Derren Brown, the television hypnotist, says that the tranche of the population most easily hypnotised is ‘young men’, especially when they are hypnotised by an older man. Another point he makes is that when hypnotising groups of people on stage a number of the hypnotees actually pretend to be hypnotised. This may be a phenomenon more marked in certain cultures where group participants might be less willing to spoil a show for an audience and so play along, or less willing to stand out from a crowd by not fulfilling the demands of the hypnotist.
All of this throws up interesting issues that may well be relevant to, amongst other things, sports psychology. An older man on the touchline of a football match, a coach or manager, one who is a potent, virulent presence, will have an effect on the young players, motivate them, drive them on to better performances. Antonio Conte storming on the touchline at Chelsea is a real plus for the team. Equally, the presence of an orchestra conductor driving an orchestra on can have a significant effect on the orchestra. This mentor figure, be it a he or she, in football, music or in schooling, is a key performance driver. It is not just children who want to please a mentor, though I suppose it needs to be a respected mentor, one with authority or charisma. So when the coach, as they say, loses the dressing room, performance statistics can plummet. See what happened to Claudio Ranieri at Leicester. Is it happening to Arsene Wenger at Arsenal? Preserving the faith of the players in the coach or manager is vital and collectively a team can sink when that bond of belief is shattered. This is tantamount to a religious experience, but when the faith in the prophet is gone, the whole system implodes.
Insecurities can be expoited. Perhaps the greater the collectivity, the easier the exploitation. A group of spectators in a theatre is easier than an individual. And cultures or masses easier still.

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My dad, who died last week, was in his last months afflicted by what we might call lateral category confusion. He went round to see the neighbours with a bar of soap and asked them how he was supposed to cook it. He looked at a handful of nuts left in his hand that he was unable to eat from a Cabbury’s Wholenut bar and asked how much they were were worth and how he could spend them. He sat down down in the dentists chair and when asked by the dentist what was the matter told him he had a bad shoulder. His categories had all got mixed up.
It’s actually what happens when we create a metaphor where a mix-up of categories is seen as a creative interpretation of data. It’s also what happened to Jack in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ who swapped his cow for a handful of beans at the the market. Just what Jack was thinking when he bought the beans the fairy tale does not tell us. Was he thinking those beans would be a sound finnacial investment for his mother (this was, i believe, a one-parent family). The shareholders of the company (ie mum) were unimpressed but Jack knew better or was it that he just got lucky? The beans became a beanstalk and a route to a high yield investment, once the threats of the European Union (ie the giant) had been negotiated. Jack had made a lateral category shift from livestock to agriculture and it paid off. Dad was making those shifts all the time in the end. He should have been running the Brexit negotiations. Jean-Claude Juncker would have been stumped by him.

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So, I am talking to someone who is telling me about parking and about Asda and my mind is wandering because parking and Asda are not on my mind at the moment. The subject of universities comes up and my interlocutor tells me he was at Leicester Poly and its name got changed to De Montford University and I say, Ah Simon de Montford, what was he all about then? And my interlocutor doesn’t know. So I say, well Leicester’s been in the news a lot recently, hasn’t it? But my interlocutor gives me a puzzled look. So I say: Claudio Ranieri? No recognition from my interlocutor. Winning the Premership title? I say. Still nothing. And then there’s Richard III, I say. But he is not very familiar with that story either, so I tell the story of the body discovered in the car park. Ah, the car park! This rings a bell. You see how all stories go back to parking in the end. We had found a point of contact.

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One of my most ardent proclamations is that the bread at the Tesco is terrible. Never buy bread at Tesco, I say. When you cut it, it disintegrates into sawdust. It lasts about half an hour before it turns hard enough to crack a tooth on. Tesco bread is rubbish. Recently, i have been buying my bread elsewhere. In cafes that stock posh bread. In high-end bread shops frequented by shoppers for whom the difference between a 70p Tesco loaf and a £3.50 sourdough organic loaf is an irrelevance. I even bought one at a so-called farmer’s market once (scant change from a fiver!) Frugal is my middle name, so for me this is radical belief.
This morning I went to Tesco and there was one thing on my mind. A cheap so-called farmhouse white tin loaf (70p). This will go well with my tin of red salmon and cup of tea. How to explain this volte-face of my customer choice? At the supermarket the judgement I face is stark. Follow my belief or follow my appetite? Both, I know, can betray you. Has the python of my frugality suffocated the wolf of my appetite? All these things intersect. Food can taste bad in your mouth because you know how expensive it is. I know how that works with luxury. If you’re paying a lot for a fancy hotel room, you might suddenly start to feel less relaxed. There is also the business of deep routine. Cheap bread I lived off for years. My shift to sourdough organic with no sugar and extra minerals is relatively recent and not yet built on sturdy foundations. Deep routine is reasserting its power over surface routine. I bought the 70p tin-loaf. It’s a case of not denying a deep truth about myself: deep frugality.

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I bought some matches from Tesco. I need matches for my gas cooker, so I buy a big box of matches. There must be 500 matches or so in there. When I got home and went hunting for a match I drew out of the box the tiny shard of wood that is traditional in a match, but this time rather than the wood being topped by a little cap of red sulphur which you stroke on the abrasive strip along the side of the box to create the required flame, there was no sulphur. This was just a tiny shard of wood. I peered into the box and to my chagrin and astonishment about half of the matchsticks had no sulphur top, rendering them useless.
Next time I go to Tesco to buy a box of matches, I shall look into the box to check if there are once again a selction of the matches lacking in their traditional sulphur cap. If that is the case I shall approach a member of staff. I will explain: ‘Excuse me for disturbing you but I wanted to buy this box of matches but when I peeked in the box…’ Here the employee will look disbelieving at the idea of somemone looking inside a box of matches to check on the contents, maybe counting them to check that there are indeed the 500 matches claimed on the box. ‘…When I peeked in the box some of the matches didn’t have any sulpur caps on them.’ The employee will lead me across to his manager. By this time I will be starting to regret my complaint. What do I hope to achieve here? An extra box of complimentary matches? To be ever after called ‘matchstickman’ by the employees of my local Tesco? There is in fact no honorable way to proceed in this affair. Memo to self: do not peer into the box of matches you are about to buy. It can only result in humiliation. It is a perfect example of a case where ignorance is bliss.

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When you find yourself alone in a lift you are magnetically drawn to transgression. You magically become an arch villain. The simple closing of the lift doors turns you from Jekyll to Hyde and now you have eight or nine seconds to accomplish your secretest desire. Between the seventh floor and the ground floor can you say the word ‘fuck’ fifty times? Maybe you need to sing the line of your cheesiest pop anthem. Something by Queen perhaps. …Mama Mia Mama Mia. Mama. Mia let me go…! Or run around the four square metres of lift floor like some deranged hyena.
If the lift has a mirror the transformation is even more monstrous. Your image in the glass is phenomenological, existential. The lustre of your flesh is deeply real. These instants alone in the lift are moments of transfiguration. Here’s what to do. You approach the lift mirror. You lift your hands up to below the line of your chin and then you peel off the skin-tight latex mask you have been wearing all your life to reveal the mutant beneath. At this moment the lift door opens and a trio of blokes in cheap suits shuffle in.

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When you are watching shampoo adverts or beauty product adverts on the telly and you hear that a majority of women found that their hair felt silkier or their skin felt smoother after application of the product, there is often some small writing at the bottom of the screen saying that 53% of 38 women answered the survey positively as regards the product. This is research, but only just. And only just positive. What it relies on is us being wooed by that word research. Research is a sacred word. On the radio today it said that 9 million people in the UK suffer from loneliness. What kind of research can this be? I suppose we all feel a bit lonely sometimes, or fed up, which is my preferred term. Does this mean that I suffer from loneliness?
I have taken to compiling my own research. My favourite one is my ‘monkey sausage nose’ research which says that children under 8 respond better to a conversation with an adult if your conversation is peppered with certain words. ‘Monkey’ is the top word; ‘sausage’ is the second-placed word and ‘nose’ is the third-placed word. In a suvey of 38 children under eight that I have spoken to over the years, the responses to monkey, sausage and nose were more positive than to three other randomly chosen words. Say, spread-sheet, car insurance and help-to-buy housing premium ratio.

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In my dream I was explaining to someone (it is always me doing the explaining in dreams, desperately making it up as I go along) about how this particulat mirror functions. It retains the images of you over time like a photo album and you can flip back and see how you were reflected in it over the years. I knew when I woke up that this dream was a reference to the preoccupation I had about rewearing a pair of brown socks I had worn the evening before. Normally I will change socks every day but these socks I had only put on in the evening, so I thought I’d give them another chance to shine on Sunday morning. What the connection was between a mirror with the faculty to accumulate images and the micro-anxiety about rewearing a pair of brown socks was something to do with the process of going back to something from the day before, being able to reconnect with it. This abstract, functional reworking is how I instinctively feel dreams work for me; they recreate the past through an abstract metaphorical translation with no respect to how demotic or trivial the preoccupation or dream version of the event is. It is a democratic forum where high and low register rub equal shoulders. Anyway, don’t worry, I’m just wearing the brown socks for the daylight hours.

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When I go to get my hair cut in Westminster I go to the local cafe there and have 2 eggs, bacon, toast and coffee. It’s every six weeks or so, I suppose, but I know the cafe well as I used to live on the street and be a regular there. In this cafe when your order is ready the man behind the counter calls it out in a generous baritone voice and you trot up to the front to pick up your fare. Last Wednesday when I went in after my haircut there was a slight change to the procedure. This time he asked me my name and so when he called out the prepared order he prefaced it with my first name. This was perhaps to avoid confusion amongst the customers or perhaps a new marketing ploy to create a connection with the customer and so have you, feeling loved, coming back. In any case, as I left the cafe, my breakfast finished, I heard the call from behind ‘see you next time’ suffixed by my name. Now he has it, that name, and there is nothing I can do to retrieve it.
Giving my name up is not necessarily a thing I like to do. The publican in ‘The Blackbird’, the pub close to where I work four days a week, has also by some method recently got hold of my name. He does not know the name of any of my co-drinking colleagues. I don’t know his name. Why should he have my name? When he uses it, it feels to me like he has something on me, some key informaton, a tape with which to blackmail me or a set of my fingerprints on a murder weapon. My plan is to trick him into giving me his name so that I can get back at him. Why not ask him out right, you ask? Why not just say ‘And what’s your name then, seeing that you have mine?’ Of course, such a frank request would not do. I will have to learn it secretly through some cunning scheme and then, in a moment when he leasts suspects it, produce it and, as though a knife drawn out from where it had been wrapped in a pristine white magician’s handkerchief, wield it suddenly and shockingly against him.

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