In the service industry (restaurants, hotels, stations)in France you are mostly served by attractive, smiling people. In the station at La Rochelle the other day there was a delightful, smiling beauty with a face right out of a fashion magazine, bright, alert, poised. And in the restaurants in Bordeaux charming hostesses lead you to your seat, serve you the grated carrot or the bloody steak with elegance and grace. And you think: I wonder what they’re earning, these accomplished performers, these convincing agents of the tourism world? But then you see them in the wings of their employ: at the back door to the restaurant; on the margins of the station, having a cigarette, looking bleaky out at the rest of the world going by. Sometimes they have their head in their hands or are striking an unintentional archetypal pose of despair, as though they are woodcut extras in the Passion of the Christ by Georges Rouault. Or they assemble in gaggles and mutter, never looking each other in the eye. Their complaints are old news to each other. This is the sorry fate of sevice personnel when their service is not required.

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I note that I find it harder and harder to sleep in a foreign bed. This is the latest development in my history of sleep. We all have our own personal history of sleep (often chequered) that plots our life history. Today I am sleeping on a settee in Bordeaux. My nieces Vassia and Natasha are on a matress on the floor on the other side of the coffee table. I prepare for sleep meticulously. The height of the pillows for my long-suffering neck; the sheet under and over. I go to the bathroom as though it really were the last visit before I go to sleep. Who am I kidding? I will visit the bathroom four or five times before setting foot in the land of Nod: for a cold shower; for another pee; just to have somewhere to go. I will also visit the fridge for a glass of cold water. I adjust the window to let the right amount of air in. It is all as if these preparations were leading up to an event. They are not. I will not sleep before four in the morning. First I lie on my back. I know I won’t sleep lying on my back but I have to do it first as the foundation to the edifice of my night’s sleep. Sometimes after 45 minutes I realise I’m still on my back and scold myself for spending too much time on the foundations. Then I’ll turn onto my side. My method is to have the lower leg in front of the upper leg. This also stretches my back to click it neatly into what I imagine is a better position. When the first side doesn’t work I heave myself onto the other side, face against the back of the settee. This won’t work either. If the two side positions have not worked, I’ll have to go back to lying on my back because the sleep foundations will need to be laid all over again. In all the to-ing and fro-ing they will have crumbled. Time for a cold shower. That feels better. Now back for a quick foundation before attempting some side work again. In the end I’m so exhausted that when I fall asleep I don’r realise which side it’s on. I may even have fallen asleep on the foundations.

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When I first came to live in Paris as a 21 year old, I put a notice on the wall of the British institute looking for a room. Within a day I received a call from a Dutch girl called Haneka who wanted to rent me her little maid’s room on the top floor of a block near Republique for 400 francs a month (£40). All the other maids rooms on the floor were locked up and used for storage by residents of the apartments below. There was a Turkish toilet on the landing, no hot water and a mean trickle of cold water. It was perfect.
I lived there off and on for a few years. I worked a lot around France and so stayed in hotels often on weekdays. When I moved to a nicer place I kept the room and sub-sub-let it (at the same remarkable price!) to a catalogue of different tenants. There was Marie, the pretty air hostess with the Marseille accent; the Italian whose name I can’t remember who never wanted to pay the rent but loved to show me his collection of silk ties. He wanted to pay me in ties and was scandalised that I had the poor taste to refuse this contract. The room became a bit of a pain to manage, especially when a homeless man started squatting on the landing and traumatising my Italian. Eventually, I got a call from Seamus, Haneka’s ex, who said he needed somewhere to live (Haneka had kicked him out). Seamus took control. My relationship with the room was over.
Today when I walk past 10 rue du chateau d’eau I look up. That entire floor of central Paris real estate will now be worth millions and must surely have been transformed into two or three sophisticated penthouse apartments. In my day the room was a random space that had escaped the lock-up (I never knew who owned it), home for few years for the young jetsam and flotsam of metropolitan life. Where the young jetsam and flotsam go now I don’t know.

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As if by necromancy or some occult adherence to kabbalistic signs, I am pulled through the same Parisian streets that I aways walk. They are the streets I knew and lived in years ago. It is as if a forced walking cure obliges me to confront the past every couple of years through the new filter that a couple more years of life gives me; each time a new distance to what held me in thrall years ago. In Paris, something to do with the culture there, every one is held in thrall. One day I will attain emancipation.
This time I am staying in ‘jourdain’ which is astride the 19th and 20th arrondissements. It is on a hill and is a kind of Montmartre without the tourists or the kitsch. ‘She’s cake’; purveyor of, yes, cheesecake. Now,though, I tread through the customary axes, take coffee in my customary cafes and pop into my customary shops and parks, intent on exorcism. They should give me an encroachment order for the rue vieille du temple or put an electric bracelet on my ankle so that i am electrocuted every time I step over the threshold of the’pick-clops’bar. It might also delay the onset of Alzheimers.

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The Eurostar have upgraded since last year, they have a screen in the aisle now telling you about the journey. There are some attractive cartoon characters showing you how to go about stowing your luggage or plugging into wifi. These characters are wafer thin and mince down the aisle like ballet-dancers. The girl character who has hair the colour of raspberryade has poorly stowed her valise and the male character with his trim and trendy beard has a slight mishap. The minor accident brings the two together, as in some charming romcom moment. Another female character applies her seductive lipstick in a mirror on the back of the seat in front. In the next scene the girl with raspberryade hair is nimbly typing a document on her ultra slim laptop. All the cartoon characters are smart casual in a range of buoyant pastel.

Needless to say, my journey is not quite like this. I compare the legroom on the monitor with my legs jammed against the seat in front, where a bulky seven year old is rocking backwards and forwards. The scene on the telly seems to be taking place in a half empty train (Eurotunnel would have been bankrupt years ago if that were true). We are all packed in and there isn’t a wafer thin body in sight. Not much raspberryade hair either; mostly grey, mousey, balding, some honey blond French women. The kids have nice hair but they are all fat. There are Japanese families like little military squadrons. At St Pancras I sat near a dad who said something that was spontaneously applauded by his offsprings as though the trip were a political convention. I search in vain for the mirror on the back of the seat promised in the video to check my travel face. There is none, just a black plastic mould that holds no pleasures. A heavy man walking down the aisle falls into a sleeping woman and wakes her up. This does not bring them together as the minor mishap of the video had promised. They do not know what language to try and speak and just scowl at each other. Why can’t people be more like cartoons?

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I happened to see the last couple of minutes of The Saint with Roger Moore on the telly today. The Saint was a Sixties crime series that I remember liking when I was little. In the couple of minutes I saw Roger Moore saved a girl from a burning building and defeated a baddie. He exited the building after the fist fight with the baddie and escorted the girl back to town and, presumably, his bed. He left the baddie in the burning building. Saving him would have complicated the narrative. I remember watching an old adaptation of The Day of the Triffids from the early Seventies quite recently. In that production most of world is rendered blind over night, nearly everyone except the hero and his girl (handily). There is a scene near the end of the film where the hero abandons a group of blind people to their ignominious fate at the tendrils of the Triffids. Again, it would complcate the narrative to have him saving a bunch of blind people. These kinds of neglect are unthinkable in narrative in 2016, narrative complication or not.

In general, it is important for the tone of overall narrative not to condone unpleasant behaviour, although this does not mean that the main characters have to be blameless in their action. If that were the case we would have the anodine narratives of children’s and totalitarian literature. However, if you feel there is a gap between what the author seems to be thinking about his protagonist and what we think of the protagonist then we start to think that the author is not in control of his material. We can see this in some action movies. I remember seeing a film with Sylvester Stallone where he is on a bus and someone refuses to stand up for an old lady and he beats the refusnik into a pulp. We might  feel (and I did) alienated from the stand that the author/director wants us to take. A film, or a novel, always has a moral centre, even if the characters are immoral. Without that, it is difficult to see what is being done by the author on a technical level.

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Summer is here. A thousand little signs tell me so. The Tour de France on the telly, persisting with its culture of the pre-1950s. When you get the yellow jersey at the end of the day you mount a little podium and put it on and then get a coy peck on the cheek from two models dressed in yellow dresses; same for the white jersey but with white dresses and the other jerseys with other dresses. It is an idiotic throwback to dumber, more oppressive times. The British Open Golf Championship. A festival of tedium commented on by stuffed shirts who keep asking each other incredulously how it can be that golf is losing its popularity with the younger generation. The players sport the kit of their sponsors. A cap with KPMG on it; a shirt with Hugo Boss on it. Yuk! Then there is the cricket test match against Pakistan. As a boy I watched hours of cricket over the summer. I was a willing student as to the value of patience in the building of an innings. I’m afraid that now, a little like the England middle order, I would throw my wicket away by going for the big one over the top. My patience is shot.

Boredom is big in the summer, I find. But it is permissable, guiltless boredom. Somehow, when it is sunny, you allow yourself the freedom to potter around, to trail from kitchen to living room to fetch a glass of water as if that were the main chore of the afternoon. The little jobs of looking after the basics of your own body loom large. Your mind empties. You read a bit. You get a bit of sun. You make a fruit salad. Those are the jobs of the day done, more or less. In the background the Tour de France and, like the golf and the cricket, the relentless male obsession with statistics and charts and strategies and figures and averages and aggregates. All these blokes on the radio working out the world in their own personal matrices while I shuffle from room to room with a bit of melon.

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Most people have a number of basic back-drops against which their lives are played out. These are the leitmotifs that surface automatically, constantly, unavoidably. For a sick person it is their sickness; for a short person it is their height; for a poor person it is their financial plight; for someone with a big nose it might even be that. We all have a number of these. For me, issues with my back come to mind. Even the most handsome, cleverest and healthiest amongst us will have them. He or she will have weaved it into his sub-conscious out of nothing: an ancient, minor failing or deficiency spun into complexity by a secret spider. Sometimes over the period of a life time we manage to wash the back-drop clean of its florid markings, but even as the stage-hands of the mind are busy hoisting this out of sight, others will be lowering another back-drop into place, equally lurid, equally ghoulish. As we get older insecurities are replaced by illnesses, anxieties by scars, fears by traumas. There is no escaping; it’s part of our mechanics. The young fear the old but then the old fear the young; the have-nots envy the haves but then the haves envy the have-nots. Even a former hunchback looks fondly back to his hump as it sits quivvering and bloody on the edge of the operation table.

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I had a dream a couple of nights ago. I was watching a Marx brothers film with a group of people and trying to tell them how funny Marx brothers films were. Of course, this being a dream, it was not a Marx brothers film but some kind of surreal programme where flower arrangements were augmented and diminshed on the screen in time to chocolate box music. It was quite boring. Nobody I was with in the dream was convinced about how this film was as funny as I was professing it to be, and I myself was dismayed to see that perhaps they were right. But still, my fidelity to what I remembered of Marx brothers films made me continue to argue, ever more desperately, that if we just persisted we would seen see an uproariously funny scene. But still flowers continued to make elaborate but boring patterns on the screen.

This issue of fidelity to a clan is fundamental. If after a few minutes a film, or a person, or a political party, or a family, disappoints our expectations, do we reassess and change our mind or is a committment to a belief a fundamental part of our identity that we seek at all costs to retain? Sartre famously criticised Camus for saying that entre ma mere et la loi je choisis toujours ma mere (if it comes to a choice between my mother and the law I will always choose my mother). For Sartre this was the thin end of the wedge on the road to nindless adherence to what you know. We should always be prepared to reject our clan to follow our belief. In the past it has been true that revisiting a film that I thought I liked, and now realized I didn’t  (I’m thinking some Tarkovsky, some Antonioni), I had to strike that detail of my cultural identity from my cultural passport because my critical faculty would no longer allow it. I’m not a great one for clans, but we all need a few certainties. I will have another look at A Night at the Opera over the next few days. If the Marx brothers are forced to bite the dust too, my clan identity index will be looking increasingly threadbare.

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Script, I have noticed, has become very popular as a tattooing option. You have it above your left shoulder blade or across a swathe of belly; etched over an expanse of chest or scaling  a billowing of breast. Ideally you want it to be in foreign so that nobody can understand it or even in alien script so that you can’t even recognise the letters. If, by any miscalculation, you have decided to have yours done in English, it had better be good. Fail again, fail better was a good one. Samuel Beckett, I believe. Or believed, until I realized it was a mantra of the body building community. When you fail to lift a weight because it is too heavy, you tear a muscle  and it rebuilds, stronger. So much for Samuel Beckett. What you tend to get in English are gnomic utterances of the type What you see is what you get. Cue me looking at what I see. A bloke with a beard and a baseball cap. I’m none the wiser. Another one was I is what I is, which has the advantage of being both ungrammatical as well as redundantly circular in its argument, like a snake eating its own tail, which was  a motif the bearer should perhaps have plumped for in the first place. What you really want is something very opaque, like the first line from Finnegans Wake: riverrun past adamandeves from swerve of shore to bend of bay or whatever it is. That will keep your readers guessing. Or else Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall written backwards. With Humpty Dumpty you’ve got the lot: the Fall of Man; radical Maoist politics, Brexit and the recipe for omlettes. I’m getting my local tattooist to source me some Ancient Sumerian. Your urn of myrhh in exchange my two goats. Howzabowtit?

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