I live in a narrowing window. In the morning I am ineffective for a couple of hours. I stir gently. My eyes are gummed up from the business of night. The human body shifts awkwardly. First, weak tea. Next, a visit to the toilet. Later, coffee. By ten I can function. At night I need winding down. I start in early evening if I can because it takes time. My window of activity is getting narrower.

In the winter the seasons run a narrow window too. It is now my natural place. When the window opens wide in summer I am as if stranded in a desert.

Coffee, I realize, is very good for me. I may up my cupage to keep me functional.

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I am curious as to when the backlash on the extreme sport boast will begin. The mania for self-punishment is great these days. The running of multi-marathons; the self-exhortations to drive the self into the ground for some kind of virtue; the desire to feel the pain, as if this were the healthy option. It is difficult not to see much of this material as a variation on self-loathing, a form of masochism whereby you make the body hurt so much that the mind does not need to face other truths. Surely the best option for the body is the attainment of harmony, not some perverse form of self-punishment.

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There was an old advert on the telly many years ago where two women shared a complicity about another person’s body odour. In one version of the advert one of them wrote the letters B.O. before rubbing them off when the culprit came over and in another version she mouthed it to her friend. I saw a man today with a tee-shirt that said I never lose. I win or I learn. This is an example of the prevailing modern trend of B.O. or Boastful Optimism, which seems to have swept the board as the model ethical behaviour of our times. It is an ugly, hectoring braggart of a genre and seems to have taken over the world. When I see it now I mouth the letters B.O or write them on the steamed-up window pane.

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In the cafe Le Central where I went at 10.45 every morning in Golfe Juan three miles east of Cannes and three miles west of Antibes there was a bit of a scuffle for the cafe’s Nice Matin newspaper every morning. If I was lucky it would be lying on a table top and I could pick it up and scour the local gossip and the one page of national and international news. Sometimes a bloke would come over and asked if I’d finished and I’d say just give me a minute to look at the football report and then hand it over. Once he came over when I had finished with it and I said I’d been keeping it for him. We had a kind of cafe relationship.

One day I was reading it and I saw his face appear and I said I’d be five minutes, but as I was finishing, an elderly woman came over and pleaded with me to have it for two minutes to look at the weather forecast. She was so baleful that I handed over the precious script but told her she had to give it to my friend in a couple of minutes because he’d come hunting for the it. I turned my head for a minute and saw her delivering it to another bloke. At the same moment my man came over. It was chaos. It was the battle of Nice Matin. It only costs 1 euro 70. I bought it myself the next day but strangely the pleasures of a bought journal are so much less than those of the free cafe paper.

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In my time I have on numerous occasions built up a library of books and then facilitated their escape. As an undergraduate I accumulated a modest collection  but when I finished my time I went into the quadrangle of the college and broached half-strangers, asking them if they wanted to pop into my room and choose some books for free. That way I could go and live in Paris with just a travel bag.

I reaccumulated in Paris. At one stage I moved apartment and a colleague saw my boxes of books and said Can I borrow some? I said yes and she drove off with a couple of boxes. After six months I said Can I get those books back? She said Only if you come round for dinner?  That was a demand I was unwilling to comply with. Those books escaped.

When I moved from Paris to London after thirteen years I left my books in boxes in someone’s apartment. My friend Max ferried them back for me in his boot and dumped them in my flat in Bethnal Green Road. One or two of the boxes remained behind in Paris. Those books escaped.

Recently my flat in London has become overstocked with books and I had the idea to gradually transfer some of them to the library at work. I had shifted about fifty in the last couple of weeks and planned to move more. On Friday I noticed that the books I had moved to the library had been taken. Stolen is the word. At present there is an investigation as to who might have taken them, which will be futile. More books have escaped.

They are bits of you. They flake off like bits of you over the years. I suppose it’s all in the way of things.

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Memory is a big story in my life. If you work with language, you juggle with language, your own and any others you might have picked up, you are constantly scouring for words and expressions from the past, all drenched with the lived life of the time.. I no longer keep a diary of any sort, electronic or physical, with the intention of keeping my memory active. Is my memory less good because I am older and have more in the box to sort through when I look for something? Some words I block on. When I look for them I must panic internally and they just don’t come. They tend to be abstract words. For example: autistic; empiricism; casuistry; placebo. I have been trying to remember these words for years. When I look for them I suddenly get lost in an little internal labyrinth. I tend to remember the rhythms of words or quotes without recalling the words themselves. I have what you might call a musical memory. My partner has a photographic memory. She sees something and retains the picture in her mind’s eye However, she will forget something I say from one moment to the next. This could be because I am am easily forgotten Leave the door open, I say. All right, she says. Three seconds later she will slam it. She also has a poor emotional memory. She cannot recall how bad her stomach acid was after an argument. Her brain eradicates all memory of a difficult experience. You are what you remember, which means that you are forever being eroded and chipped at. In the end all your angles are ground down and you resemble a smooth stone like all the other smooth stones on the landscape.

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I am re-reading Great Expectations and the wonderful scene where Pip as a gentleman in London is visited by Joe Gargary the blacksmith, his brother-in-law and erstatz father figure from his lowly childhood on the Kent marshes. Pip has become a snob, or at least a young man having difficulties integrating his lowly past and grand present frequentations. He can see himself as a kind of monster but is unable to manage the situation to help Joe feel at ease. Pip is comfortable with Herbert Pocket meeting Joe, a friend he likes but does not fear, but wants to keep Joe away from Bentley Drummle, a contemporary he dislikes but fears. It is a marvellous evocation of our complex relationship with the past and our inability to put into practice what we know to be the right behaviour. There is even a secret allusion to Dickens’ own hidden past where Joe tells Pip and Herbert of the London sight he has seen, the blacking factory, where they make shoe polish from, amongst other ingredients, human excrement. Dickens himself had been forced to work there are as child but never in his life revealed this humiliating fact about his past. The shameful past is again alluded to in that Joe is a blacksmith and Pip had been his apprentice, blacksmith and blacking being the secret code of this hidden past. It is a remarkable piece of writing, comic and dreadful, walking that fine line of high control and yet also material that is mysteriously beyond the writer’s control because it is his own chaotic life. Once artistic material is totally controlled it becomes dead meat. Here is the reason why modern creative writing courses or manuals produce awful content, writing by numbers.

We are all constantly confronted by our past and our present colliding, moments where we need to manage what we think we once were and what we think we are now, moments where our personality is stretched like india rubber. If, like Pip, you come from one place and end up in a completely different place, you need to have a personality large enough to contain both. This is something Pip learns over the course of the novel (I don’t know if Dickens ever learnt it) and is a competence we all need to face over the course of a life.

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I went to a little concert alone this evening between 6 and 7. It was Schubert’s Quintet in C Major with two cellos. It is a well known piece; many people’s favourite. I used to listen to this piece many years ago very often, so it brought back memories of that time. The yearning strains of the second movement. How I would have affixed my desires and melancholies of a young man onto this music. The piece this evening acted to reacquaint myself with my younger self. These days there are yearnings, I suppose, but not so much. I don’t function the same way The melancholy now is about the passage of time and the people I used to spend time with, now mostly distant, out of my ambit, for whatever reason. As I was leaving my seat with the rest of the crowd there was an argument going on between two men. As I understood it, one of the men had tapped someone, perhaps the other man, on the shoulder during the music to stop them making a noise of some sort and the other man had taken umbrage at it. For him too, perhaps both of them, this music was some special resonance of their past that must not be interfered with. The music was a vessel that contained the normally unreachable past. The man tapping on the other man’s shoulder had broken the vessel.

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I was at a concert last night in the Royal Festival Hall. It was Messaien’s Turangalila symphony, one of the longest and loudest symphonies you could come across, a piece that is ecstatic, rhythmically-driven, very loud, relentless, with an enormous percussion and brass section, a piano, a celesta, various glockespiels and xylophones and an ondes martenot, a weird electronic instrument which gives out sounds as if from a1950s sci-fi film and lasting about an hour and a half. I was sitting on the side but close enough to the massive orchestra and also with a side view of the main bulk of the stalls. Halfway through one of the loudest movements I heard this tormented death rattle come form the centre of the audience. When I looked across I saw a man of a certain age with his head thrown back letting out what seemed to be his last gasp. Over the next ten minutes concert hall assistants, security men and finally paramedics arrived and he was eventually taken away, fortunately still alive, in a wheelchair. Throughout all of this the relentless concert went on.

Before the incident I had been thinking about the music. Did it represent our reality? Or would a more domestic modest texture best reproduce the everyday? The soundtrack to the life and death moment was rather effective, though. Some moments are pretty ecstatic and life-affirming or life-destroying. It’s just that they are few and far between or that we don’t face them. Still, he did not die, so we can all get back to the domestic now.

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In the cafe it’s large or medium for the coffee. I say small. That’ll be medium then, they say. I shrug the shoulders. Do you get my point? Large and small are not indicators of absolute size; they are indicators of relative size. Medium has no place in that binary scale. They are asking me to participate in their hype. In some places it’s large or super large, which warrants a guffaw. These days you are drawn into the nonsense, whether you like it or not. It’s hard to get a tee-shirt without a brand blaring out your unwilling adherence. My adherences are scant. They’re mostly to myself. Even the things I do adhere to are not for blaring out to the world. I like Mahler; I like Proust; I like Man Utd (in theory). But why would I want to sell myself through connection with them. They can do without me. And I must do without them. I know their glory won’t stick to me. What would stick would only be desperation. I probably have enough of that about me as it is.

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