I was at the physio for my aching back and numb neck the other (they mostly ignore the numb neck though that was why I came in the first place) and I was subjected to presssure to say that things were getting better. This is less tight than last time, said Ben, the physio. I did not point out that last time another physio had seen me (Flo) and this was the first time Ben had set eyes on me or my back. We can see improvements he said. Can we? I thought. I suppose over a three or four session block (this is the NHS) they are asked to create  what people nowadays like to call a narrative with a happy ending. If my back has a narrative I’d opt more for the Waiting for Godot option.
This reminds me of one time when I was in Paris and a man heard me speaking English and asked me to come to a restaurant where they were shooting a Gordon Ramsay programme for British TV. I went. Ramsay was standing gracelessly outside the place, scowling at everyone. We were served a rotten meal, offered by the waiter a choice of red wine or white wine (talk of dumbing down) and then I was even presented with a bill (I had at least expected it to be a free meal). I asked the waiter what the programme was called and was informed: Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares. Oh cheers, you might have told me. As I was leaving I could see cameras set up for interviews with diners. I asked one of the production team if they wanted me to give my opinion about what I thought of the meal. No thanks, they said. What I had just eaten was the improved menu cooked up by Gordon Ramsay. This restaurant had already been turned around. My opinion, if it were negative, would not have fit into their narrative.  The telly format is that the expert in cooking, personal makeover, house makeover, life makeover, whatever, operates an improvement. The implication is that our expertise is unimpeachable. We’re still asked to believe that the bankers know what they’re doing. Why this insistance on the inevitable upbeat outcome? I too am a believer in incremental effort as the best way forward to improvement, but only a fool or a propagandist would believe the narratives we’re fed. It is an example of form dictating content. We jam anything we do into the same brightly coloured  box. And Ben, my neck is still numb!

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Over the last thirty or forty years the definition of what it means to be a man or a woman has mushroomed. Now, as a man, you can wear a dress, wear make-up, fancy men, fancy women and men, dislike sport, do no DIY, enjoy fashion, hug and kiss other men without it meaning you’re gay, be touchy-feely, like ballet. Nobody bats an eyelid at any of this stuff. As a culture we have toiled tirelessly to create a gender category that can embrace all-comers. That has been a great achievement and one we are still working on, denouncing gender stereo-typing wherever we see it: in sport, in advertizing, in all cultural products. But now comes the sudden rush of gender reassignment. This may be a case of what what Proust calls a change of cultural acoustic that I for one am unable to follow. If the span of male attributes is now as large as I have intimated, what is it that makes someone want to say they need their gender to be reassigned? What is the elusive woman trait that this person has isolated within themselves? Might that trait not just be another way of being the complex 21st Century man that we have come to know and celebrate? I myself am an unable to put up a shelf; when the mandatory car chase comes on telly I go and make a cup of tea; action films bore me; I don’t drive; I am an ardent multi-tasker, though I do draw the line at Sex and the City. Tell me, will I too need to be reassigned?

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I was complaining about neighbours. I was saying I just don’t understand that when they get home late and all the building is quiet they think it is all right to be talking loudly and putting loud music on. And then I checked with my younger self. Did I ever do that? In Paris where I lived when I was younger did I never have parties in buildings that were quiet? I suppose I did. In fact, I absolutely did. And did it ever worry me? Did I think about it? No, because I was too busy worrying about my party. If people would come. If the right people would come. My preoccupations were busy elsewhere.

It is a fault of the imagination and an inbility to see that time has passed, that you have changed. When I was about twelve I used to steal chocolate bars from the Spar. That doesn’t sound like me either. And let’s not think about how I used to behave with members of the opposite sex. We change. Probably even things I did last year might now seem incomprehensible to me. Even last week. And our imagination refuses to take an interest in other people’s preoccupations sometimes. The neighbours. The members of the opposite sex. We are the ghosts of the person we once were. What is this new body we now walk round in? We are like the replicant in the sci-fi film that takes the place of our former selves.

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Legislated nostalgia might be defined as a phenomenon that forces people to have nostalgic feelings about things that they have not experienced. We see it around us a lot at the moment. Mugs and t-shirts with Keep Calm and Carry On splattered all over them. Jamie Oliver’s Ministry of Food chain of shops and book. Both of these cultural omnipresences create collective nostalgia for the so-called blitz spirit, a spirit that few of us now have experienced and the fictional world of Orwell’s 1984, a world no-one has experienced, and many people are happy to partake of these worlds as they feel they tell us something true or at least cosy about Britishness. As Owen Hatherley notes in his book The Ministry of Nostalgia, this may hold within it sinister political undertones. Equally, however, it tells us something about the nature of our sense of nostalgia. The other day I had fish and chips and mushy peas at home. The drink I have to have with fish and chips and mushy peas is tea. This is nostalgia for what I used to have as a child, and this is a truly personal nostalgia. But so many other nostalgias are collective cultural phenomena. I am a great one for insisting on using the words of my youth, even though they may be unfashionable nowadays. I go to the pictures, at a a pinch the cinema, but never the movies. Pictures is my childhood; cinema is my young manhood. Movies, though, may partake of a greater collective nostalgia than either of these, perhaps a legislated nostalgia, though personal nostalgia trumps the collective for me. I suppose we all live in our own worlds, with our own sets of saturated meanings immanent in the words that mean things to us. Sometimes for political reasons you have to force a shift in yourself, though sometimes your self cannot accept a shift too far away from your own past. My mum used to call black people darkies, thinking it was more resepctful. I remember Mohammed Ali on Parkinson refuting the word black and insisting on the word brown. I’m not clear anymore on whether the word black is acceptable or not in whatever circles, whatever cultures, classes or countries you mix. In a sense, when people get old, what happens is that they are unable or unwilling to leave the nostagic words of their youth and this insistance in clinging to the words of their youth, also the behaviours of their youth, has become toxic.

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In our house we eat Christmas dinner about five. This is because we have eaten egg and bacon about eleven. That means that we put the turkey in the oven about one. Liz said she wanted to do the vegetables. She lives on the other side of Manchester. So I said what time’s she coming round? Dinner time was the answer. Does she know when dinner time is? I said. Olde dad said she’s coming round at half past. Half-past what? I said. Olde dad changes his tack. Half past eleven, he says. It is now three-fifteen. Which eleven? I say. Half past eleven in the morning or half-past eleven at night. Olde dad looks bemused. Which one is closest? he says. We’re about in the middle, I say. Half-past eleven in the morning, he says. But that was five hours ago. Dad says she must be late. Anyway, Liz is here now. She won’t touch sprouts, though. I’m the only one who actually likes sprouts. When do you put the veg on? We all look at the clock. Time gets very hard at Christmas. That depends when the bird’ll be ready. I opened the wine with the idea that the bird would be done at five. It’s Gevrey Chambertin, I say. It was Napolean’s favourite wine. Nobody is much impressed.  It’ll be ready when it’s ready says Helen. Olde dad nods. That’s the most sensible thing anyone’s said all day.

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When you are old you are diminished and you need the aid of things to give you the power you once had. I am at olde dad’s for  Christmas again. And sleeping on the living room floor again. Olde dad puts his glass of  water on a coffee table next to where I sleep. At 2 in the morning, just as I am dropping off, he comes in. The light goes on. Are you awake? he says. I am now, I say. He takes one sip from the glass of water that has been set up on the table. It is the business of two minutes. The light goes off and he goes back up. It is not easy getting to sleep in olde dad’s living room. By three o’clock I am managing to doze. And then Sclack! The light’s on again and it’s olde dad. He’s back for another sip of water. Are you still awake? This time I don’t bother with a response. Why doesn’t olde dad put the glass of water in his bedroom? you ask. Clearly you know nothing of these things. The glass of water is his periscope. Through this feature he keeps some form of control: sleep deprivation in his counterparts; a panopticom over his domain. Olde dad will not renounce power without a fight. You will have to wrestle the crown from his brow.

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After four months and three GPs I finally went to my appointment with the physio today. Though it wasn’t the physio. It was another gate-keeper, or, as they call it, the Specialist Community Physio Practitioner. This is a step up, as, unlike the GPs, he will move away from his computer and look at me, even touch. It is, I realise, the practice for GPs not to do anything other than document the complaint. The Specialist Community Physio Practitioner asks me to take my shirt off. He touches me at various points with two strips of tissue. He then asks me to put my shirt back on. Then I take my shoes and socks off and he tickles my toes with the kleenex. I put them back on. Then he asks me to take my trousers off. After some prodding of the legs I put my trousers back on. I see this is the ploy for the Specialist Community Physio Practictioner. You do not ask the patient to take all his clothes off at once. It is only partial nudity. I am not to be revealed in all my Ionic splendour. That way we are not vulnerable before the doctor. Any specialist on the erotic will tell you that partial revelation of the body is more likely to incite arousal than total nudity, my hammer toes notwithstanding. But no matter, it is not to be. And I have no trouble with the business of my nudity. I am happy to reveal it in public arenas, certain public arenas. In the gym I make the trip from locker to the shower divest of all lendings with impunity. The willy, as far as I am concerned, is an anonymous beast. In a line-up no-one would pick mine out from a crowd. It plys its trade like any other, anonymous, a face in the crowd amongst so many others. It is, of course, the American paranoia machine that keeps the willy in thrall, like their hyper-hygiene, their hyper-hydration. Though I would not go so far as the Germans in their happy Naktheit. In Baden-Baden you will be expected to negotiate a business contract as unadorned as Adam (or Eve) in the public baths with some executive from Credit Suisse. We would shake hands on the deal and I would with great difficulty stop my eye from dipping below the horizontal. But these are doctors we are dealing with. If they can’t look at the merchandise there’s no hope. They have to see how the leg-bone’s connected to the shoulder-bone and the shoulder-bone connected to the back-bone. Let it all hang out!

As an addendum, I hear that the Finnish Foreign Secretary’s office often speaks to journalists in the sauna with everyone in the nude. This I hear from Alastair who heads the Brussels Reuters bureau. As my friend Christina says, it’s a case of debriefing without the briefs.

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I am no longer allowed to read in bed. This is one of the few pleasures that remain to me but I am unable to perform it in a way that is not detrimental to my overall health. This is equally true for the settee. I’m  not allowed on there either.  In bed my technique was to stretch out and prop my neck against the pillows whilst shining a reading lamp onto the page. This, of course, is neck-wrong! How do other people read in bed? I am unable to sit on my bottom  and read like a normal primate; the torso collapses; my arms  dangle ; my bum shifts on the swamp of the matress. What I really need is some contraption like the one that Hannibal Lector got put in after he ate that man’s tongue for supper, an elaborate mechanical harness with my back shuttered in and a trap for the neck. I’d be hoisted up like Boris Karloff as Frankenstein’s monster. I could read by the flash of the electrical storm.

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I am a partisan of the simple shake of hands. At the end of an evening out when friends are embracing or engaging in the elaborate forearm handshake, the blood brother handshake – these are men I’m talking about – I step back,  like some Prussian or Austro-Hungarian officer, from these shows of intimate bonding. It is perhaps generational, perhaps regional, but, as I point out when quizzed, I am happy to engage in displays of physical intimacy with continental  Europeans where I feel that the intensty of the gestures are more in line with the actual cultural norms. Here, in the YouKay, I don’t believe it. These are the semiotics of intimacy, a stage show to give the lie to the truth about British social mores, where little intimacy is actually shared, where conversations skirt around the peripheries of the leading questions and revelations, where discretion holds the key, even with the young. Alphonse the braying corporate man will engage in deep blood brother embrace with his old chum of twenty years past before going home and shifting his assets to a higher yielding strain, like Mime sitting on the hot glow of the Nibelungen gold, while his old buddy  Eric goes home to rented accomodation that strips him of three quarters of his income every month. Yes, they are such great mates Alphonse and Eric. You can tell by their semiotics. I’m not saying I don’t have any great mates that might warrant a flourish of externalised affection, but when the show is systematic and so out of step with the rest, you have to shrink.

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In the art gallery on a Sunday morning you are with a special group of people. They are here because they don’t go to church anymore. But they are still in their Sunday best. Today it is the equivalent of a brisk early winter walk, but one where culture might adhere to you. How you make you way through is up to you. There is a special route that the gallery organisers recommend, the stations of the cross round the top top artistic icons of the place. There is also a plan of the gallery that can lead you through century by century. Or you might just follow your own path. Some people might just follow a pretty girl round from a safe unimpeachable distance, or you might go from nude to nude (in each room there is at least one nude), or you might decide to listen in on one of the guides talking in front of a selected artwork which, I have noticed, will be a commentary mostly revolving around what the artist was doing at the period he painted the picture (invariably in love with someone or other or being influenced by some other one or other or living in some place or other). The word contemporary comes up a lot. Guides say it and visitors say it to each other as they wander round. It’s got so that I can recognise the word from fifty paces through lip-reading skills that have naturally accrued due to my exposure to this word in galleries. Naturally, it is a word I would ban. I sit down in a side corridor opposite an elderly man who is wearing sandles with no socks. It is cold today, the second day of winter. He must have feet that burn him that he needs to expose them in this weather. I feel impelled to ask him why he has no socks on, but before I can summon up my mode of approach he gets up and shuffles off. There are a lot of single old people here this morning, as well as the Sunday family groups. The elderly sit in front of canvases but mostly look down to their own knees or at their hands. This too is contemporary.

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