I have bought a new raincoat and am looking for the right moment to wear it. It is a green rubberised mac (amazon green the brand calls it) which looks ridiculous if it is not raining. I wore it yesterday when I thougtt it was going to pour down. It didn’t. On Sunday it had poured down and I’d left it at home hanging forlornly on its hanger looking ruefully out at the sheets of water that were lashing the windows panes. When I wore it yesterday in the dry weather it gave rise to a litany of comments. ‘Goin’ fishing?’ was one wiseacre. ‘That’s really green’, was another, as though a euphemism for a crime against beige. ‘Where did you get that?’ someone asked. ‘In a big store,’ was my answer, keeping it intentionally vague. Actually and to my shame, I bought it in Harvey Nichols. I had only gone in there to see what kind of things were available and with the aim of going off to a cheaper shop or on-line. But then in a moment of unguarded what-the-hellism i just bought it.
Rain is always a source of confusion. Take umbrellas. I have a nice umbrella, but it’s too nice to take out because what happens mainly with umbrellas is they get left on buses or trains or in desolate waiting rooms. That is their primary function. The secondary, peripheral function is shielding you from the rain. When they interview umbreallas for the umbrella job most questions concern how they secrete themselves in the interstices between seats and the crannies of the intermediate zones of life (rooms you will never go back to; vehicles that can never be relocated). Of course, the upside to this is that one can acquiire a new umbrella at any moment, as though dropped from heaven. Why, only last week I found a vry handy little umbrella that folds up neatly and pings open on pressing a little green button. Amazon green.

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When I am walking down Kennington Lane I have a choice of pavements: either I cross backwards and forwards at two sets of lights to avoid a wiggle in the road where I would have to cross to a traffic island and and then nip past unstopping traffic, or use my wits and do the wiggle over the traffic island. The first is a pre-structured itinerary; the second a negotiation. Depending on my mood and my energy, I might choose either option.
I have an on-going disagreement with a friend about walking through the passageways of busy tube stations. She maintains that you should stick to the right (or is it the left?) and follow the recommended track. Actually, she even thinks there is a correct line on a public pavement. For me, not just the pavement but also the tube passageways, are a spontaneous negotiation, and the spontaneous negotiation saves time for the collectivity.
Many of you will be familiar with the staple or paper-clip debate that has riven society in reecent weeks, setting friend against friend, son against father, a debate for which (although I say so myself) I take some credit (see March 8 2015 Stapels or Paper-clips) The staple is the pre-structured option, the paper-clip the negotiation. We believe that some societies prefer the pre-structured option (Germanics); others the negotiation (Latins). Negotiation may, of course, be just another word for a terrible row which might be pre-empted by the non-dialogue of the pre-structured option, and negotiation is often only useful when you have time to consider what you are negotiating about, which is not the case in a busy tube station and impossible with a ten tonne truck. It might be more relaxing to side-step tiring negotiation sometimes, though perhaps it is healthier for ourselves and society to engage in it.

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I was privileged to receive an invitation to a private concert in a private house the other day. It was musician I know a little who is first violin in a fairly well-known string quartet and they wanted to rehearse a couple of Beethoven string quartets in front of a few people in their living room before performing the full set of quartets in a series of concerts a week or so later. There was a tiny audience of five and it was a terrific event. What interested me, though, apart from the music, was the lead violinist’s apologetic introduction to the Beethoven opus 130 quartet which includes the demanding ‘grosse fuge’ movement. In advance she apologised for its uncompromising nature, as though it were somehow a slight on civilized company to perform such a beast. She sounded almost like the Germans at the time who had not understood the movement and bullied the ageing, now deaf Beethoven into writing a more polite alternative movement to bring the quartet to a more refined conclusion.
It is, I confess, difficult to know what to do with a high-brow preoccupation. Some people tone down the high-brow nature of their preoccupations; others tone them up. Toning down might be seen as a modest act. I remember one person I knew insisting he had never heard of the Spice Girls at the height of their fame, the implication being that he was too high-minded to even notice such manifestations of popular culture. This type of boorish behaviour is now, thankfully, more common in the older generations where popular culture was more readily sniffed at. Nowadays, the civilized man looks to extend his range from Bach to Beyonce. and this is mostly good. But there is no worth in denying the high-brow out of a sense of modesty. The high-brow often smells more of the beast than the low brow. Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge reeks of it.

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I don’t know how this happened. I was sitting on the floor with my back propped against the wall in the Turner show exhibition at Tate Britain London. This is my habitual pose in art galeries. I had noticed a nice family going round the exhibition talking snaps of themselves with the exhibits. They’d done a funny pose in front of a huge sculpture of a pair of buttocks. There was the husband (forties), his wife (forties), a friend (female, forties) and three girl children (ten, fourteen, sixteen). As I sat on the floor by the wall, I noticed one of the girls (the fourteen year old) looking over at me. I smiled back. After a minute the girl came over and sat near me in the same pose. Then her sister sat on the other side of me. The mother took a picture of them with me. There were more selfies of them with me necessarily in the middle. I’m not an installation, you know, I said cheerily. Are you not part of the show? said the mother. Are you the artist? asked the mother’s friend, not joking. I said no. What do you do? asked the mother’s friend, intrigued by me for some reason. Give us a clue. I gave an easy clue and they guessed my main occupation. One of the girls said, Can I have a selfie with you, just me and you? I said why not? The mother’s friend said, guess what I do? I said, give me a clue. She said the word leather. After a moment I guessed. You’re a milkmaid. I was right. The mother’s friend was astounded by me. They were all astounded by me. I was the most remarkable piece of contemporary life they’d seen all day, art or no art. The friend lived in Suffolk. She was an actual milk farmer. More selfies followed. I was a phenomenon. Then they asked me where they should have lunch. I said, just don’t have pizza. It starts tasting like cardboard after two mouthfuls. The girls said, that’s soooo true. And they said to their mum and dad, that’s soooo true. They said they’d go to Wagamama. On my advice.
A few minutes earlier when I’d arrived at Tate Britain I had been spontaneously embraced by the seven year old nephew of my friend Isabel, a boy I had never met. And then his seven year old class mate embraced me too. Maybe the Tate Britain gives me aura. A couple of hours later, as I was waiting at a bus stop in the rain, my umbrella sagged and refused to go up. I looked at my mobile. 7.23. The moment the spell was broken. My bus stop was out of service. I walked down to South Kensington in the pouring rain with a faulty umbrella. My day as a celebrity was over.

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I have had a week of varying dress. At work I often wear a suit and did so this week. No tie. On Wednesday I irritated my left eye trying to take out a contact lense which had already dropped out, so on Thursday I had a day wearing glasses to give my eyes a rest. I say: it’s so you realise that I am an intellectual really. And it is remarkably true that people see you in a different light when you wear glasses. If I wear glasses I have to shave and have clean hair. I cannot combine glasses and scruffy. Maybe a few years ago it might have worked for me but not now.
It is astonishing the degree to which we block into simple concepts our view of people. If you are light-hearted in your manner you cannot be seen as organised in the work place; if you like football you can’t like Proust. I am constantly amazed how even the most sophisticated of people are unable to allow certain ingredients to mix. It is as though we are resorting to the idea of the Medieval humours; only a limited number of temperaments make up the range of human character. Everything pushes in that direction because that way computer programmes can bracket people for marketing purposes. This imagification of human types is an insidious development of modern life. Complexity of form; nuance; surprising compounds: all out the window. It is a standardization of human typology. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to be as paradoxical as possible. Confound those who think they understand you. Understand me? Over my dead body!

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On the 360 bus the currency is dogs. They bring people together, all kinds of people: nationalities, languages, classes, ethnicities, generations. An old woman with a poodle makes friends with a young Polish couple with back packs. A cockney women sporting a whole parchment-worth of tattoos is talking with a posh Chelsea mother about their love of whip-its. The whip-it sits there, uninterested. It is a great leveller, the dog. Heartening, in a way.
I, however, who am indifferent to dogs, turn away. You see, I do not accept this currency. The single currency does not attract me. The dog, with its bark, its yap, its nervosity, its ready tongue, its wet snout, its constant business: these qulities I can do without. In fact, I’m a kind of Brexiter.

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There are some words that, for whatever Freudian reason or other, I just can’t remember. One of them is ‘placebo’, though I’m making progress on this one. The other one, the major one, is the word ‘autism’. In the general way of things, I just can never find this word when I look for it. It is as though a mechanism has been constructed which snaps into action whenever I look for this word and I am trapped in a closed circuit. I should say that the word autism comes up quite a frequently in my professional life. The other day I tried to find the word and couldn’t, it was suggested to me and within twenty seconds I had forgotten it again, and twenty seconds later I forgot it again. This is pathological.
My friend Christina suggested I think of the word ‘auto’, as in automobile, as people obsessed with cars can suffer from being on this spectrum, and this would nudge me into remembering the word. Auto – Autism. Should work. And it mostly did. Except that now the word that is suddenly jumping up at me from auto is not autism, it is ‘autopsy’. I’m back trapped in the machine again.

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On the bus with a six year old and an eight year old (my goddaughters) I make conversation. We pass a musical instrument shop. What have they got in there? I say, and Clara (six) says something about guitars, and then I say what’s that there? And Clara and Emilia look and search for the right word, but before they can say anything a man sitting next to me says “a trumpet”. Do people not realise that your conversation is strategic and aimed at particular people for particular reasons and spun in particular ways? The same thing happens when a journalist asks a question and a politician does not understand that it is feigned ignorance so that the politician will explain something to the viewing public. You see pompous politicians get angry with what they see as naive or ignorant questions like this.
But then, is not all our conversation strategic in this way? Are we ever working with pure matter? We are always coaxing material out of people: giving them a chance to show off; tactically nudging them in a certain direction; giving a speeded-up impression of who we are (when you are dating for example) because there is no time for the natural acquisition of understanding, you have an effect to make, which will ideally be an accelerated truth rather than a fabricated untruth. It occurs to me that this is something I perform badly. I do not manage to short-cut the truth about myself (the truth as I see it), am unable to package myself adequately. It should be a skill we all learn.
Anyway, it wasn’t a trumpet, it was a french horn.

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On the back of my Saturday Guardian magazine was an advert for a skin cream that claimed to fight the ‘Seven Signs of Ageing’. There is a photograph of what is frequently referred to as a ‘handsome’ woman, which means a woman with short hair who might be older than 21, sporting a glowing complexion. The seven signs of ageing are not enumerated but she seems to have none of them. Is there a concensus as to what these seven signs are, as there is for the Seven Deadly Sins or the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World? I’m not sure what they are but, for the record, here are my Seven Signs of Ageing.

1. Being unable to keep your mouth shut.
I remember once in a conference on child protection there was a woman from the RSPCC talking about about a man who had a flat on the groundfloor of a block that looked out onto a children’s playground from where he would watch the childrn play. He gradually got to know the children. He even bought toys to intice them into his flat. One toy he bought for the boys was an action man, together with a range of different costumes and accessories. When I heard this I could not stop myself from piping up, interrupting this moving and tragic story to ask if he had bought a frogman’s outfit. The room fell silent.

2. Refusing to keep your mouth shut.
Insisting on telling the bemused Tesco staff about Zola’s late 19th Century novel ‘Au Bonheur des Dames’ (The Ladies Paradise) which tells how the early big stores devised the ruse of shifting all the products around in the shop every few weeks to disorientate the customers in the shop and so discover new products. A technique that Tesco continues to apply, though when you instruct them of that they tell you it is to make life easier for the customers. As I tell the poor put-upon store representative, who is trying to get away from me, I wasn’t born in 1882.

3. Deciding not to go out on Saturday night.

4.Fleeing places where they have what they call ‘atmosphere’ (ie noise). This includes stand-up ‘nites’ and ‘live’ bands.

5. Being against the all-night tube.

6. Only going to art galleries when there isn’t a special exhibition

7. As a matter of principal, not believing anything anyone tells me, EVER.

Are these the Seven Signs of Ageing of which the handsome older woman (about 24) with the short hair speaks?

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My relationship with the simple housefly continues to develop over the Summer months. I try not to kill the fly when he gets into my flat. This may surprise some of you (see Killing a fly July 28 2015) but I have never been an active killer of insects. My conscience was further piqued a few months ago when my 16 year old niece Vassia reminded me that he might only live for one day. ‘This is his life’, she said. So I couldn’t kill it. Men are great fly murderers. They just cannot bear to have things unsettled. They want the world still and this confounded thing keeps flitting into their eye line. Now where was that ‘Top British Trucks’ magazine? Just perfect to swat a fly. Women are less concerned by flies than by wasps. When a wasp arrives on the scene women go beserk. They are convinced the wasps want to fly into their mouths, so they hold their hands there, like Premiership managers disguising strategy. My present issue with the housefly is a philosophical one. A fly gets into the flat. You don’t want to kill him because this is his life. You usher it towards the front door to let it out. You open the front door. Chances are another one will slip in even as you escort the first one out. And so our philosophical dilemma arises: does every potential solution not carry within it a potential aggravation of the initial problem? I shall call this the housefly connundrum.

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