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and write, filthy and know nothing of the digital world; Victorian poverty; strange corrupt interface with similarly outdated landowners who grant them their pitch.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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My Shopping List

Quinoa

Spelt

Amchur

Creme Fraiche but no fresh cream

And 3 red herrings

Seaweed

Hijiki

Sugar free

Goose fat but no fat

And 3 red herrings

A vegetables (Aubergine Apparagus Artichoke)

No C vegetables (Carrot Cabbage Cauliflower)

Caffeine free

Saucisse de Toulouse but no Saucisse de Cumberland

And 3 red herrings

Seeds

Kokum

Ask your local gamekeeper*

Pancetta but no bacon

And 3 red herrings

Pulled pork

Coconut oil

Charred A vegetables

Sourdough

And 3 red herrings

And 2 lbs of Gluten

Good Appetite!

*Advice given in The Guardian

In the gym today a man called across to someone going into the changing room: Trying to sneak past me, are you?  They laughed. They were friends and greeted each other. I make this kind of remark too. Here he is! I say, as someone comes in the door, as though we had just been talking about the new arrival. Or talk of the devil! Even though we weren’t talking about him. Your lot got battered the other day.( Arsenal losing 1-0). All we are doing is creating colour, drama even, where there is probably none. We just want something to be going on while we’re standing around.

However, when there is really something going on, something difficult, something embarassing, something awkward, we suppress the drama, we don’t mention it. We say All right Jeff? (Jeff’s wife just left him) or Good morning Sammy (Sammy’s in trouble with the boss) or Hiya (Julie’s got cancer). We skirt the drama, if there is one.

It might be there is an optimum colour we want in our everyday conversation. There may be a mathematical formula for this. Nothing too vivid but with a dash of story, preferably fictional.

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I am disappointed in Mark Rylance. He has let us all down. Mark Rylance likes to wear his hat indoors, even at Oscar ceremonies. It is normally a trilby. This doesn’t look right to me. For an actor of his ilk it can’t be right. The trilby is too jaunty. You can’t be jaunty all the time. If he wore different hats this would at least reveal a playful quality rarely apparent in his mostly ponderous acting. He could wear a fez now and again, or a bowler. We would look forward to his hats. At his death it would be Hat man dies. Hats, in any case, are suspect. They are worn by men unhappy about hair loss or artists (artists in the fine arts). For artists in the fine arts, which includes art teachers, hats, preferably brimmed, represent creativity.  I once saw Daniel Barenboim in a hat on a record cover. This was ill advised. He is a musician not a fine artist though he is and was losing his hair. It made him look like a show-off, which is the last thing you want going through people’s minds when they are listening to him playing Beethoven. Hats are mostly dubious, politically. As a politician, a hat might well cost you your career. There would be speculation. Why does he have a hat? What’s he covering up. In this, it is much like having a personal trainer, a guru or a personal astrologer, though the latter could work in America. You could never trust a politician with a hat. Much like a beard in that respect. Or facial hair in general. Much frowned upon. In deep winter people wear wooley hats to keep them warm as the head is where 80% of the heat goes from. That last fact is nonsense, by the way. Where else would the heat leave from, as it is the only uncovered part of the body? If you pulled your trousers down over your buttocks, 80% of your heat would go from there. Perhaps even more.

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After thirty years it’s finally come round. The realization that the right brain left brain stuff is mostly bollocks. You remember how they said things like that if you get to an appointment early you are analytical and if you get there late you are creative. And there was me thinking you were just bad-mannered. Maybe that’s a creative act too. Well, apparently, as I heard on Radio 5 Live yesterday, it’s not that simple. The brain is a bit more complicated.

Of course, not being a brain surgeon, I never had any proper authority to speak on that matter. But the real issue for me has always been the word creative. In many ways Shakespeare, whose working method of collecting and collating major sources as well as interpolating bits and bobs of fragments and vocabulary he had heard around town or in official or non-official documents,  seems to have been that of a magpie. One might easily see this as a civil-servantish, mostly analytical working method. Anyway, now the secret’s out. Right brain left brain was bollocks anyway, notwithstanding how you define creative and analytical.

I don’t know if I’m happy or not that the thing I’ve been ranting about for twenty years has suddenly dispersed in air, into thin air, as Shakespeare that faceless analytical pen-pusher would have said. I suppose I’ll find other things to fret over.

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Ever feel that you have entrusted all your hopes to the person least equipped to shoulder them? That it is like handing a key to a man with advanced Alzheimers and saying: Here is the golden key. It is very precious. Put it somewhere private where only you know it is and when somebody asks you for it don’t give it to them, but when I ask for it hand it over to me. Do you think you can remember that?…About the golden key… That’s right, the key that I’ll be giving you… The one that you have to look after for me… The golden key… The golden one… No, it’s a key… The one I’ll give you… No, you have to look after it… No, you mustn’t give it to anyone else… It’s a key…  That’s for you to hold onto… In a secret place… No, not on the table…  Somewhere secret… Golden, like gold, gold coloured…

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In our own micro-ways we all participate in the high Hollywood of everyday life. Recently I have been dealing with the troubling presence of a new cafe on the high street. Now, I have always remained faithful to another cafe where I have a certain privileged reception (oh, nothing too grand you understand, a place by the window, the preparation of my preferred coffee type without me needing to order it, table service where less favoured customers are required to queue at the counter to make their order). Yes. I am a kind of petit bourgeois notable of the establishment as they would say in a Flaubert novel. But now a new cafe sails into my formerly smug, untroubled life. A new cafe next door where the coffee is better and where in winter the heating is actually switched on. Now pressing questions of allegiance arise. Firstly, moral: do I transfer my allegiance? Secondly, material: how do I sit next-door without being seen by the staff of the first cafe, the staff that cradled me for so long with that remarkable set of privileges? Fortunately, there is a block I can go round to enter cafe number two without passing by the shop front of cafe number one. There is also a downstairs area to the new cafe where I would be invisible to the street should the waitress of cafe one pop out to adjust the sign adverising coffee and croissant for the special price of £2.5o. But the moral dilemmas do not stop there. What if I should meet in the new cafe customers of the old cafe, potential informers like myself, spies playing for both sides, collaborators with the enemy? I can only hope that their desire for their identity to remain unknown accords with mine and that we both tacitly agree that the terrible knowledge of our infidelity must remain undivulged. These are the same issues as you find in the more rarefied echelons of the world of espionnage. We are all playing roles in a domestic version of Tinker…Tailor…Soldier…Waiter, where for a better blend of black americano I and many like me are willing to trade our past, our conscience, our peace of mind, yea our very soul.

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