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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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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