At this time of year minds turn to holidays. Does everyone really like holidays? They tell us that we do.   We have to decide if we want the familiar or the alien; if we need stimulation or respite from stimulation. Do you need to forget yourself or find yourself?  Sometimes the alien turns out to be too familiar: overly resourceful agents of exotic venues can sometimes spend energies making the exotic familiar; do we want coca cola and dominos pizza in Cairo?  But would we rather venture into a dark doorway and eat something we do not know amongst strangers speaking in an alien tongue? Or we might end up spending too much time with the ones we thought we wanted to spend more time with. Holidays teach the value of moderation. And anyway, as the man at Total Recall tells Arnold Scwarzennegger: the real holiday we all need is a holiday from ourselves.

There are places I find it hard to go to. Places where the wash of the past is too insistent. These are often places where I have spent a lot of time, where ghosts have been created by past life. When you go back there things have changed. Where once there was a charming cafe, now there is a Starbucks; where once you knew someone, now there is a stranger; people go on with their own lives and you play no role in this city anymore.

There are other places where a city has so many layers of history, so many palimpsests emerging one from beneath the other that it is difficult to deal with the polyphony. In Berlin it is hard to accept what is happening in Mitte now at the spot where the wall ran between east and west, which itself was the spot where Hitler sat in his bunker contemplating the end. Now there is a drum and bass party going on there.

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I had a heavy package so I took the bus from Royal Albert Hall. The driver’s machine wasn’t working so he waved me through. A free journey. A mere grain of pleasure but many grains of pleasure make a whole heap of pleasure. By the time we got to Sloane Square the bus was labouring and the driver called an early terminus, everybody off. The bus had broken down. I cursed under my breath. The one day I have a heavy package. The next bus came. The last bus broke down, I said as I skipped past the driver to grab a good seat by the window, not paying. You see, I had offered to pay on the first bus. My offer was (was it not?) rejected. The second bus is subordinated to the negotiation of the first bus. A fine legal point but, I’m sure you will agree milord, a valid one. In Pimlico a bus inspector got on. My argument about bus subordination withered. I was determined to carry the day by my acting abilities. I rehearsed the moment. The inspector puts my debit card on his little control plaque. You haven’t paid, he says. Yes. My last bus broke down, so I didn’t pay on this one. I dare to look boldly into the inspector’s steel blue eyes. But you didn’t pay on the last one either. His technology is formidable. I post up a puzzled mien for a couple of seconds before feigning a realization. Oh! I exclaim. The machine was broke on the bus that broke down. The driver waved me through. The ticket inspector, convinced by my acting abilities, allows me to pay retrospectively with no fine. The danger is negotiated. As it turned out, it wasn’t a ticket inspector. It was just a man in a high-viz jacket. Or if he was a ticket inspector he was off-duty and on his way home. He got off at Vauxhall, no doubt to take another bus into the far reaches of South East London where, on a ticket inspector’s wage, he could afford accommodation.

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Jose Mourinho finally signed for Man Utd yesterday. He appeared on MUTV looking slimline and contained, a controlled Mourinho in sober suit and tie with a placid smile on his lips. He is thinking, this time I won’t make the same mistakes as last time at Chelsea, when I bollocked the popular female team doctor in front of millions of viewers and so alienated my players and made the rest of the season impossible, or the time before at Real Madrid, when I poked a member of the Barcelona staff in the eye in front of millions of viewers. This time I am not the special one, I am not the happy one, I am the placid one. Think placid one. I am the placid one. And then he opened his mouth. I feel great. Well, I think I am in the right moment in my career because Man United is one of these clubs where you need really to be prepared for it because it is what I used to call a giant club. And giant clubs must be for the best managers and I think I am ready for it... Already the forshadowing of deep tragedy lurks within his first statement, the high vanity of a man who cannot remain in neutral , not for a moment, who must at every instant be promoting himself, hoisting himself upwards on his waxen wings. It is already Shakespearean. A case of And now we unveil our custodian of the kingdom, chosen to bring stability and harmony back to a troubled land. From behind the velvet curtains step forward Richard of  Gloucester, the Crookback.

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Yesterday on my way back home from the tube station, actually on the way to Tesco to buy some dinner, I was approached by a smiling gentleman who wanted to talk to me about my life. He could see I was in a hurry. He fell into step with me. Could he have my attention for some moments? He could, if he fell into step with me. I had designs on Fish Pie. He just needed to give me a leaflet. I would be most happy to look at it after my fish pie. He was pleased with my accessibility. I took the leaflet happily. He did not know I make a collection of such things and that what mainly interests me is their form rather than their content. At home I have a whole shelf full of such leaflets, all lovingly produced to melt my heart, all adorned by cute little drawings or lush coloured versions of a world that might appeal to a simple-minded eight year old. This too was a naive production. It said: God loves you on its first flap, clearly considered to be a fascinating enough opener to make me read on. I opened it to reveal the second flap where it said that no one is too bad to be outside God’s love. No one is so good they don’t need him. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you have done. God will accept you when you turn to him. I must be desperate. It goes on. Life can be different. you can start again. I must be unhappy. It goes on: God became a man – Jesus Christ- and allowed himself to be executed to solve the problem of our wrong. Yes, he was prepared to die for YOU. How many people do you know who love you so much thay would give their life for you? And so on.

I am fascinated by the alien nature of these attempts to reach out, as well as being puzzled by what it is that this god wants of us. This has never been adequately explained to me. In the catechism I learnt as a child it went: Who made me? Response: God made me. Why did God make me? Response: To know him, love him and serve him and be forever with him in this world and the next.  Judging by this, he must be a lonely God.

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The early Christian Church was much preoccupied by the relationship of Jesus Christ to God the Father. After all, a basic notion of the religion was that Jesus was God, so  you were on dodgy ground if you started watering down his divinity in comparison with God the Father.  But he was also the Son of God. As well as being human. So how could all these characteristics be defined within the framework of his relationship with the God of the Old Testament. Jesus was fully human and fully god, they claimed, not half and half but full and full, which made him a 200% man-god. Theologians spent centuries trying to have their cake and eat it. Tertullian came up with the formulation of three persons; one substance. That also included the Holy Spirit but let’s not go there. Some theologians were not keen on the of one substance formulation and of one essence was found. Substance and essence fought it out for decades. And then there was the issue of Jesus’s life span. Was he eternal, like the Father? Surely he had to be, if he was a proper god.The Creed has it that he was begotten not made, of one being with the father. How can you be begotten but not made, you may ask? Do not ask.  In fact, if ever you read the Creed it is a lattice of complex ambiguous formulations. At one stage there is something about sure and certain hope. As a child this had always puzzled me. How can hope be certain? And not just certain, but sure as well. In literature there was a word for that. Oxymoron.  But this wasn’t literature; this was religion.

Which brings me to trans-genderism and the business of gender reassignment. The early Christian Church spent hundreds of years debating the overlap between God major and God minor. In the end it said sod it, we’ll just used these words how we want and call it the Mystery of the Trinity. When someone says they just know they are a woman inside or a man inside, this is partaking of the same kind of mystery. I suppose that then it depends on how you feel about mysteries.

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I saw Diana Rigg today. She was sitting at the terrace of a restaurant eating a chicken lunch. She was on her own and on her phone. She looked like she does does on Game of Thrones though she was wearing a kind of cream Chanel suit and not a Medieval gown with chunky iron jewellry. The evening before I had seen her on Freeview channel 61 Tru Entertainment in The Avengers as Emma Peel in about 1968. Sometimes I watch this as I am a big fan. Diana Rigg as Emma Peel in 1968 is my favourite.  It is disconcerting to see the same person in two different stages of their life like that. It makes you see how hard it must be to be an actor, always revealed to the public. I thought I should probably say something but she was on her mobile. In any case, what would I say? You were terrific as Emma Peel when you were twenty eight. She must know that she is a bit of a disappointment to Emma Peel fans now. Diana Rigg is not the only person whose change has disconcerted me. Friends who you do not see for many years and who are suddenly old or bald or fat or grey or wrinkled. You know it happens but it’s always a melancholy moment. Sometimes I google names from the past, from my old school, and hope to get an image of them. Then you can place your mental image of a snotty nosed boy of fourteen next to the photo of a greying man who is named an executive headmaster in some local newspaper. Once on the site Friends Reunited I came a cross a photo of my contemporaries from school at a reunion in a pub in Manchester. The photo slowly unscrolled and there revealed to me were the laughing, simple-minded faces of a group of fat old drunks. I could place no face on no name although I had all the faces of them as schoolboys  in my mind’s eye. These old friends are now gone. I would brush past them on the street without knowing them and they, on their way to Tesco, would brush past me.

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Somebody has told me something that I feel I must not reveal to anybody. How long this will last I cannot say. We are social animals. We are not made to keep secrets. All secrets end up being revealed. To share intimacy with people we reveal others’ secrets. Failing that, there are other forms of betrayal we can perpetrate. All this, to win intimacy with others. I shall attempt to keep this secret but probably it will burn a hole in my pocket and I will end up spilling it.

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Somebody said I should see the Cirque du Soleil, their acrobats are amazing, and I pulled a face. I am not interested in seeing this type of circus which is a massive multi-national corporate franchise. For me, it is not what the circus is all about. For me, the circus is about backward, twisted, inbred circus families; wild animals kept in small cages and subjected to terrible cruelty; an acrobat sister and brother who have no schooling, are unable to read and write, filthy and know nothing of the digital world; Victorian poverty; strange corrupt interface with similarly outdated landowners who grant them their pitch. This, for me, is the romance of the circus. I am, of course, unable to express such fantasies in our real world; people would hate me. And so, it must exist only as the circus of the imagination. How many alternative cruel worlds do we all retain in the vault of our imagination?

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We have a suite of stories with which we regale  our friends. There are stories from the workplace; stories of the family; stories of the neighbours; stories of your own silliness; stories of your past life and so on. They are like a set of folders on the desktop of the mind. Normally in each of your friends one suite of stories, one folder from the desktop, is less popular than the others. For this suite of stories, which the storyteller may think his most popular story, you cut off, you just don’t bother listening. It is often the workplace suite, which may concern people and practices you are unfamiliar with and where the first mention of the word ‘spreadsheet’ or ‘hub’ causes the darkness to fold over your ears.It gets so that when you hear the word ‘spreadsheet’, in what has up until then been an agreable conversation, the light is automatically switched off in your brain. Of course, it might not be the word ‘spreadsheet’ or ‘hub’ that causes this electrical breakdown. It might be the conjunction of two words like ‘cute’ and ‘puppy’ or ‘cute and ‘kitten’ or any proposition involving their own children  whether they be ‘cute’, ‘intelligent’ or just plain ‘adorable’.Anything can trigger the powercut in a desktop folder.

I dare say it can work the other way. The other day I was just starting up on another hilarious anecdote when I looked across at the man/wife combo who were my audience. They had both suddenly and inexplicably turned their necks to look out of the window.Two perfect acquiline profiles absorbed in the goings-on on a bit of anonymous scrubland outside the cafe window. As an art-photo you would have called it ‘man and wife involved in not listening to a hilarious anecdore’ Go figure.

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There is a word in anglo-saxon (I can’t remember what it is) that means the relationship or kinship between two men who have slept with the same woman. In anglo-saxon times where relationships and status would have been codified and legalised more formally than today such a state of being would probably have implied specific rules or norms of behaviour. Today, depending on individual personality and behaviour, it could imply any number of relational modes. It could be unspoken or the subject of quip or resentment, depending on circumsatnce and character.

There is another word I know to exist but which I have forgotten and, despite my best efforts, cannot trace. It is the word for the noise that you make after you have farted to give the impresssion that the fart was not a fart but another noise, the squeak of a shoe on a floor, a sound emitted from your mouth. I cannot recall whether this word can also refer to burps or any other unseemly exhalation, or indeed whether it is a word that refers to any subsequent act or gesture made with the intention of reconfiguring other people’s interpretation of an earlier act or gesture.  Whatever the word was or still is, it highlights a very useful concept. In retrospect we often rework an earlier act and look to fool others or even ourselves that the earlier act was of the same nature as the latter. They are everyday acts of deception and self-deception that keep our world such a complex minefield.

In fact, like the anglo-saxon word for a co-intimacy-sharer, it is perhaps because there is no ready term that springs to mind for the phenomenon that such ideas are so fertile. A word can lock down a meaning and drill the life out of it.

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