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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I like some tinned fish. I especially like tinned salmon. Red salmon which is pink, not pink salmon which is grey. Tinned salmon is better than fresh salmon which is mostly tasteless. At this point one should talk about farmed salmon but I have no opinion on this. Smoked salmon is a poor man’s poshness. Overrated. Tinned salmon is best. There is also tuna. For me with tuna it is the opposite. Tinned tuna I don’t like though I do like fresh tuna. The problem with fresh tuna is the price. I can’t concentrate when I’m eating fresh tuna because it feels like I’m chewing a ten pound note, which is what it can cost. My friend Emma says she has another problem. When she’s eating fresh tuna if she doesn’t concentrate properly it feels like she’s eating tinned tuna, which defeats the whole purpose of spending the cash in the first place.The key is to keep your eye on the fresh fish left on your plate as you are chewing. That way you remain convinced that you are eating something expensive. There are other tinned fish. Pilchards, now unpopular because of their rebarbative name. Who wants to eat a pilchard? Which is basically just a sardine. As for sardines, you have the choice of sardines in tomato sauce, which is what we had when I was little, so must be best. But there is also sardines in olive oil, which unnervingly leaves the sardines tasting like fish, which is a definite no-no. There is also brine. Don’t bother with brine.

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I don’t know who invented the anagram. Maybe it was Mr Anagram, which may not be his real name. His success has been great. He has figured in IQ tests and quiz shows for many years now and, like the emperor with no clothes, audiences have accepted him, pretended he is fully clad, and laughed at all his tedious jokes. For some reason they have imagined that the ability to rejumble a set of letters into a new word is a literary feat. In the IQ test it is practically the only task that concerns words but as a skill it has no interest and no application. Mr Anagram can also lick his nose with his tongue but that doesn’t make him a genius either. Mr Anagram, you’ve had a good innings for a terrible old bore. Now ucfk ofo!

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When I passed through Burgess Hill (just outside Brighton) on the train today, I was reminded of an old school friend of mine, Iain Bell, who left primary school aged ten to go and live in Burgess Hill or as his Scottish mum called it sunny Brighton. He was probably not my best friend at St Joseph’s. That honour probably fell to Christopher Hylands, but Iain Bell represented an alternative strand in my friendship network, less edgy than Christopher Hylands who lived on the Offerton estate. Iain Bell lived in a relatively posh house on Curzon Green. Christopher Hylands and Iain Bell didn’t get on. They fought for my favour. One Sunday morning, on a visit from sunny Brighton about a year later, Iain Bell appeared at my house. For some reason the question of jam butties came up. My brother used the term and my mum said we should say jam sandwiches and not jam butties. This was all in aid of Iain Bell who was a Southener now and posher than us. I was called upon to adjudicate. In the first of my class betrayals, I plumped for jam sandwiches.

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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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