Between sleeping and waking is that indeterminate zone where thoughts spin in uncontrollable eddies. Sometimes you catch yourself unawares in this whirlpool. You think you are awake, but then, as you emerge from the vortex you have an instant where you recall the chaos and realise you had been in that antechamber between sleep and waking. It is like this for olde dad a lot now. What he utters are wisps of the unconscious, unspoken preoccupations that seep onto the surface, elfin things. A conversation with him is like the meeting of two alien species across centuries.
Yesterday i was trying to talk to him about going to the barber. His hair has got long and his eyebrows are ferocious. He couldn’t find the word ‘eyebrow’; it kept coming out as ‘strawberry tart’. He eats a cartfull of strawberry tarts every day now. If there are six in the fridge he will eat all six. Strawberry tart has become the deepest, most emblematic embodiment of his heart’s desire.
I asked him what year it was. He muttered for a few moments and then said it was the sixth century. I asked him what month it was. He didn’t know. I said, is it Summer or Winter? He said it was neither. I said, what’s that over there? pointing at the Christmas tree. He examined it and couldn’t make it out. He looked again and said it was a tree. I said it was a Christmas tree. I said it was Christmas. He nodded a bit and looked worried. I’m not sure he knew what that meant.
There is no progress. Every hard earned minute of conversation exists only for and of itself. It is discrete; there is no construction here. The two species have little to say to each other.

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LENNOX: “The night has been unruly. Where we lay,
Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say,
Lamentings heard i’ the air, as strange screams of death,
And prophesying with accents terrible
Of dire combustion and confused events,
New hatched to the woeful time. The obscure bird
Clamoured the livelong day. Some say the earth was fev’rous
And did shake.

MACBETH: Twas a rough night.”

(Macbeth Act II scenec 3)

Yes. I’m back at Olde dad’s for Christmas. Vassia said olde dad was eating a fruit and nut chocolate bar. He ate it but took out all the raisins and the nuts so that he was left with a small collection of nuts and raisins in his hand. He looked at them forlornly like Jack looking at his beans when he’d gone and sold the cow at beanstalk market. Olde dad looked at them and said, how do I reckon them up? Vassia asked him what he meant and he said, how do I know if I’m winning or losing? And Vassia said, it’s not a game, grandad, it’s a chocolate bar.
Last night olde dad was back to his tricks. He was down in the middle of the night with all the lights on. I was lying on the settee in the extension area at the back with my arm over my eyes. I said, dad, go back to bed. He is walking up and down at snail’s pace, his slippers making a regular schlipp-schlipp-schlipp sound on the wooden floor. He made me wait for an answer and then said, no. I got up and went upstairs to see if his bed was wet, whcih would explain why he didn’t want to go back into it, but it wasn’t. No, this was just the deregulation of his inner clock, as usual. Aye,Lennox, twas a rough night.

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There are two reasons why I don’t like Christmas crackers. The first is practical. My major worry at Christmas is that the dinner isn’t served cold. Plates must be warmed! And ingrediets must be served in a timely manner! When you are sitting down to Christmas dinner and have just managed to get the food material onto your plate before it gets cold – the turkey (some prefer goose); the roast potatoes and boiled potatoes; the sprouts; the carrots; the stuffing; sausages maybe (though not for me a confusion of meats). On top of which the wine in the glass (red or white; who is wanting what?) Remember the confusion of St Nicholas? And there lying parallel to the cutlery or sometimes diagonally across the plate like a despised weapon is the Xmas cracker. And in a chaos of elbows they are pulled and the wine glasses are knocked over and people read out jokes or look for reading glasses and put paper hats on and insist you put a paper hat on, which I won’t, and through it all my dinner is gretting colder on the plate.
The second reason is ideological. I refuse to be processed through Christmas in the habitual manner. The xmas cracker is emblematic of this delivery system. I reckon Adorno and the Frankfurt school would have none of the Christmas cracker. The authorities will look to channel me through xmas via christmas strictly come dancing, the X-mas factor, Slade and Wizard and Dean Martin with his smug Xmas medley in Tesco. I know the counter argument: that the ritual of crap jokes and cold dinner is a meaningless sequence through which we construct more significant meaning, a radical overhaul of the habitual quest for material value; working against the grain. But sorry, I can’t be dealing with this post-modern version of christmas crackerdom.
When we go round to my other sister’s house on Boxing Day for what I refer to as the return fixture there will be more crackers laid out: so-called luxury crackers. The ideological struggle goes on.

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I saw my friend Nick eating a chicken leg for lunch yesterday. This got my imagination going. I needed a chicken leg for dinner. That night I went to Tesco on the way home and picked up a chicken. Popped it in the oven at 6.15. It was out and ready to eat at 7.45. I accompanied my chicken with roast potatoes, carrots, broccoli and also some apple sauce (controversial, I know, but it’s what I do). But as I sat down to eat the chicken gradually a terrible thought edged into view. I had committed a cardinal error. The chicken that my imagination had formed had been cold chicken and this was warm chicken. It did not fill the chicken shaped hole in my imagination adequately. Oh, I ate the chicken, the potatoes, the carrots, the broccoli, the apple too, but it was contre-coeur, against my better instincts. Tonight, of course, I have some cold chicken available (I hadn’t eat the entire bird). But where is Nick eating his cold chicken leg when you need him? In South Kensington. And I have been south of the river all day. And who’s to say he’s on cold chicken again today anyway? And who’s to say it would be Nick that my fickle imagination appointed to dictate the needs of my anarchic appetite? It could be any random individual called up to play the role of piper to my poor rat of a free will.

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When people come back from holiday, other people, they force you to worship at the altar of their holiday. You are obliged to listen to their litany, touch the relics that they bring back with them, pay hommage to their fetiches (photos on the ipad). You have no participation in the litany; your responses are limited to isolated Amens for you were not there; you cannot contradict and it would be blasphemy to tell of your own life in its unsanctified, mundane surroundings. The time period for worship is a week or two and then the holiness dies away. Sometimes, many years later, stories arise that the pilgramage was not as sacred as it had been portrayed; they actually hated it, or had a shit time, but then it is too late. You have already been tricked into unfair worship.

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As I was walking along Harleyford road on the way to the tube this morning I witnessed another irate exchange between drivers, a dialogue of expletive and honk. This cacophony of fury is a rush hour network as active and passionate as any instagram or twitter but one that goes on in the enclosed spaces of so many thousands of motors. The manly world of the car is a world I do not participate in. Lost to me are the pleasures of numerical nomenclature, that turning on the A4831 between junction 3 and junction 4; the secret delights of peering beneath a curvaceous bonnet; the carefree iniquity of gratuitous revving; the devil-may-care of drive texting or drexting; the plush erotics of leather seating, so lovingly rendered by Ballard in his masterpiece ‘Crash’; the secluded, air-conditioned interior as boy play room, a micro universe with everything at the touch of a button. Car world. As a no driver I can only dream of this. I cross at the lights and trip down into the underground. How nice to just opt out.

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Buses have cameras now. Loads of them. They have a screen downstairs and you can spend your time checking the different views and looking round to see who is where. Then you see some bloke from some angle you can’t quite work out craning his neck for some reason. Just a minute. It’s not me, is it, that bloke? Ouch. It is. It’s me.
That’s the way it is when you see yourself. It’s never really you. Photographs freeze you in unnatural poses. You see, I’m not photogenic, me. My charm only reveals itself in motion. You need to see me in action to get the full flavour.
With recordings it’s even worse. You hear your own voice. Who is that pompous twit? I remember hearing myself on a recording once pronouncing the word ‘self’ over-emphasizing the ‘l’ as though I were John Gielgud in a 1930s production of ‘Much Ado about Nothing’. Is that me?
When you look at yourself in a mirror you are never really seeing yourself. You see yourself as you once were, that time that you have fixed in your mind as being how you are, which may date from ten years ago. And when you look, you scan for specific details, the details you always check about yourself. My posture; my hair; that funny bump in my nose that I once saw years ago and that I always check for. With the result being that you never see the whole. How do others see me? This is an eternal question. Who in this gym or on this bus am I the equivalent of? I mean, that bloke on the bus, he looks pretty cool, doesn’t he?

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In recent months I have been boring people with my latest lament about the American cinema. What does it tell us, I ask, that half the mainstream American films that seem to come out these days are superhero films? What does it reflect about the modern American psyche? Does it say something to us about the over-weight, disempowered American populatiion that they need to see their escape in the form of the impossibly megacharged superhero and superheroine? It’s just escapism, they tell me. But when the escape mechaism is on the other side of the universe from the consumer, when the gap between the man and his fantasy is light years, there is a problem. The escape vehicle needs to be within shouting distance. The culture needs to rub close to the man. When you see Mr Universe or Mr Tornado or Ms Whirlpool or whatever they are called avoiding death from one thousand bullets and ten thousand assailants, anyone but a dim kid surely just turns off. Is it American society that creates the fictions it deserves or does the culture rub off on American society? It works both ways. Society feeds off its entertainment and entertainment feeds off society.
Enter Trump. The monster they have created. The superhero of their own construction. They ended up believing their own nonsense.
Whatever we might think, culture, entertainment is never mindless. It springs from needs and requiremnets in society, and it creates its own people, its own protagonists. Nothing is harmless.

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‘L’homme est ne libre et partout il est dans les fers’* says Rousseau in Du Contrat Social. At the time in the mid-eighteenth century the nature of that enslavement was through militaristic education, the tyranny of religion and high nationalism. Now the nature of our chains has changed. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple. Our chains are of our own choosing and exist in the world of entertainment. On the train you look round and see a million reflected screens, people lost in the labyrinth of their smartworld. Algorithms make sure you are locked into your own private purgatory. The world of critical culture is disappearing down the plughole: literary fiction; Classical musical experiences (a space of reflection); opera, ballet and theatre (because in performance they can represent a critical/analtyical view onto experience); complex film. These genres are forever characterised as elitist, even though they are cheaper to consume, much cheaper, than a Beyonce concert, and more significantly, they are marginalised by the hegemony of ‘popular’ culture, which is where real power lives. This popular cultural realm exists in a self-nourishing circle where the unwitting rat in the maze (us) is fed from one business model to another. The algorithms are the new chains that Rousseau was talking about. This cultural circuit is so self-serving that there is no room for oblique or critical views. Choice is the buzz work that keeps us enslaved. When choice is so available you can live in the world of your own algorithm produced ‘tastes’. You can live in the world of cartoon network. You chew the cud of your own taste. The world you live in is the vomit you have yourself produced.
This is a difficult view to have. It looks like all dissent towards this cultural closed circuit is a plea for authoritarian enslavement of another variety (paternalistic, condescending, ‘we know what’s best for you’; the high cultural model of Shakespeare and the Booker Prize). And this is not what we want either.
This is why, perhaps now more than ever, we need to create an education system that instils proper critical faculties in its users, helps them to try to see the world as dystopia. A view of things from altitude. Or we can just candy-crush our way through life.

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When I pop into Greggs to buy my cheese and ham baguette and treat myself to a bag of quavers as an hors d’oeuvre and an apple danish for afters, I’m very helpful to the vendor. I say ‘take-away’ before they even ask me if it’s for in or out. Sometimes I even say ‘to go’ because I know thet like that. And then they say ‘do you want a drink with that?’ I refrain from saying ‘if I’d wanted a drink I would have asked for one because I know they are just doing their job. But, I think to myself, that isn’t customer service, boring a customer with a superfluous, robotic question. Maybe one day a customer will say ‘oh thanks for jogging my memory, i will have a fanta with that, good job you repeat that phrase for every customer’, but I haven’t heard it yet.
In Cafe Nero the way with service is that they get a few orders in advance so that they can forget them. I’m helpful as always, ready with the order. ‘Small black americano for in. And an apricot croissant’, I say. They turn away and get the other orders and then come back to me. ‘Is Capucino, no?’ she says, the Spanish barista. ‘No’ I say. I repeat the order as concisely and helpfully as I can. ‘Small black americano for in, and an apricot croissant.’ They don’t like this order. The idea of a small drink is one of the things that gets their goat. Sometimes they show me a small cup and pull a face. ‘Small?’ they say, mouth contorted in a grimace. ‘Yes’, I say. ‘Small’, unrelenting.I use the word smallthough it has no currency for them. Small for them, I think, is ‘regular’, or is ‘regular’ medium? I’m not sure. Then they say: ‘you want milk with that?’ I just repeat my mantra: ‘small black americano for in’. Then they say: ‘Is to go?’
Really, all I want is just for someone to hear my words, and someone who doesn’t talk like a robot.

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