When you are single at a dinner party it’s not easy. Everyone else is there in a couple and you aren’t. They whisper secret confidences into each other’s ears and you sit there with a smile on your face, deprived of the private complicity. But as the years go by you find other people emerging as singles too. Divorces; break-ups; abandonments; whatever. And, of course, you are a professional single, your steely competences in the field honed over long years of experience. How to insinuate into the conversation of a couple; how to offer the enthralling alternative option; how to just walk off into the night, free, the charisma of the singleton intact. Those newcomer singles do not have the skills. I mean, you don’t learn the dark arts of the single overnight. In a play you might write about the subject, all the couples would disappear one by one over the five acts of the drama, and in the last act everyone would be single. Except the initial singleton who would turn up (coup de theatre!) with a partner. The wheel has turned full circle. From then the cycle might begin again.

peoplearerubbish.com

I was doing the Proust questionnaire and one of the questions was ‘what is your favourite journey?’ I wrote ‘when you get the last bus and it is waiting with the engine off. My favourite moment is when the engine starts and you will know you will be on your way home in a minute.’ Buses can be bliss. Getting the bus after rush hour, about ten o’clock, with all the morning chaos out of the way and trundling through to your destination in the sunshine. At such moments the bus is a good friend to man.
There is another side to the bus story. When you are trying to get somewhere and the bus driver is in advance on his timetable and he keeps hanging around for an extra thirty seconds at every bus stop. That’s when the bus is early. It makes you late. Then when the bus is late it won’t go to its terminus but stops at some earlier provisional terminus and you are all turfed off to wait for the next bus. All the passengers are inconvenienced so that the bus company can pretend it’s running everything on time. Oh bus, you are no friend of mine!

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Doch auf einmal kehrt sie, wie geweckt,
ihr Gesicht und mitten in das deine:
Und da triffst du deinen Blick im geelen
Amber ihrer runden Augensteine
unerwartet wieder: eingesclossen
wie ein ausgestorbenes Insekt.

(Scwarze Katze, Rilke. 1908)

And suddenly it turns its face
into yours, awake, alert :
and you meet your own image in the golden
amber of its round eyeball
caught off guard: you’re locked in there
like an extinct insect.

(Black Cat, Rilke. 1908)

We are all becoming extinct, gradually, as we understand less and less of the world, its vocabulary, its excitement and reactions. Sometimes we try and keep up with it but our heart isn’t in it. You end up like your dad with nothing left in the world that you recognise and the things that are left a bit rubbish.

peoplearerubbish.com

In the Seventies the world was not so rife with business-speak. The only thing that people used to trumpet, as though it was the latest in high-tec analysis, was that people at work were either people-oriented or task-oriented. It was the people who were task-oriented that most liked to make this distinction. The people who might be people-oriented didn’t quite understand the distinction. You don’t hear it so much nowadays, this fancy nuance. These days the term that bemuses me is problem-solving. It is a term that people who have studied sciences have always used to distinguish a certain type of question, I believe, but now it has made its way into everyday life to characterise a kind of no nonsense attitude to getting things done, and the new problem-solver types are a bit like the old task-oriented types. They are the kind of people who think that popping a pill will be a simple solution. They say things like: I’ve popped the pill. End of. Or I’ve popped the pill. Full stop. Or Period even. Or they use the prefix Job done. Or I’ve popped the pill. Next. Or Been there. Done that. Got the tee shirt. Oh, it’s tiresome stuff. Problem-solvers must have such manicured minds. But the worlds of ambiguity, ambivalence, compromise and complexity (ie the real world and the world that actually makes life worth living) are closed to them.

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Seeing a doctor these days is not like it used to be. First, I go on-line to check the phone number of the Medical Practice where I am registered. Before I can think about fixing an appointment I must answer a questionnaire. I am in too much of a hurry and mistype my date of birth. The red comment blocks me, saying You must be 100 years old or younger to have a consultation. Fortunately, I am less than a hundred years of age. But there are some who are not these days. Into the on-line questionnaire. What do you expect to achieve from this consultation? I don’t know. You’re the one who set it up. I’m just doing what I’m told. How much is your complaint bothering you? Well, I wouldn’t be bothering with this nonsense if it weren’t. Or, Quite a bit. Or, on a scale of one to ten, five. Is that really useful information? Next question: Is there any treatment you would like to try now? Just a minute. Who’s the doctor here. Or, Please give me some red tablets that look like jelly beans.
I am getting nowhere with this questionnaire. I go to the spontaneous drop-in option as an appointment would be four weeks away, I am told. It opens at 8 am. I get there at 7.30 and wait in the cold outside. At 7.55 two other people arrive and when the door is opened they run upstairs and get in before me. I get to see a doctor at 8.50. I explain what I can about my back. I am wary of saying what someone told me, that it sounds like a trapped nerve. I know doctors don’t like being told what it might be by the patient. Or do they? Difficult to know with this doctor, who won’t come near me or hardly even look at me. He is mostly on his computer. The doctor sends me off to get an x-ray at St Thomas’ Hospital. I go straight there and have the x-ray done. The results will be sent to my doctor, or rather one of the many doctors in the surgery. After a few days I get an email which says phone the surgery to make an appointment to see the doctor to discuss the x-rays. I phone. They say you must phone at 8 am exactly and the doctor will phone you back once you have phoned. I say, can’t he just phone me without me phoning at 8 am? They say no. I phone next day at 8 am. Nobody answers. I try throughout the morning. No answers. I try later in the day. They tell me the doctor has gone home. I don’t say, but there are seven of them. They can’t all have gone home. The next day I go in to the surgery and say Can’t we just pretend that this visit is the equivalent of a call to the reception at 8 am and the doctor can then ring me back? They are scandalised by the suggestion. It is a game whose rules nobody has told me. I have to take pot luck again next morning at 8 am. Next morning I get through. The receptionist is confused as to why I am calling. In the end she takes my number and says the doctor will call me back after 12. I say when after 12, or, rather, when-ish? They don’t like me making demands on the doctor’s time. But the doctor does ring me. It is a different doctor. She says yes, why did you want to speak to me? I say, you have an x-ray you wanted to talk to me about…? I put one of those Australian semi-questions at the end of the sentence. I am, after all, still feeling my way with the rules of the game. When I say you I mean the collective you of the six or seven doctors who work at that surgery. She says all right and finds it and reads me out the technical interpretation of the x-ray and then is silent. I hesitantly say, and what does that mean? She says, it’s difficult to say exactly. I feel as if I am driving the conversation. There is another big silence as if she just wants me to go away. I say, where do we go from here? She isn’t sure. I suggest an MRI scan. She says no. I suggest physio. She says I could go private. I say what about NHS. She says there’s a long waiting list. I say, how long? She says, 6 to 8 weeks. This is nothing compared to what I’d heard. Put me down for it, I say triumphantly and then remembering my place, if that’s all right. She says, all right. Will there be anything else? I say, can I still run? She says, the main thing is keeping mobile. She has never cast eyes on me. I feel she is speaking to me as if I were a very sedentary, not to say heavy, person. If she saw me she would see I was in pretty good shape. It’s all guesswork. It’s not satisfactory. And people are rubbish dot com, including doctors.

peoplearerubbish.com

There is a 1927 short story by Arthur Schnitzler called ‘Ich’ (‘Me’) where the main character goes to a park and notices a plaque on a tree with the word ‘Park’ written on it. This makes him laugh becuse it is so obviously a park and could not be seen as anything else. But he thinks further. This is such a lovely park it is like a paradise, but if it were a paradise people would start to take their clothes off like Adam and Eve, so it is just as well they put the sign ‘Park’ up. The character becomes obsessed by labelling. He starts pinning labels on people’s coats on the coat stand: ‘Mother-in-law’; ‘Cash desk operator’. The story ends when his wife arrives with the doctor to find her husband has pinned the word ‘Ich’ (‘Me’) onto his own chest.
The constant desire to define oneself is tiresome and debilitating.
I suppose much of its infiltration into our daily behaviour comes from the marketing of products. We are asked to market ourselves in the same way. I remember seeing a bench in a square in Paris that had just been been painted and the municipality had put up an elaborate signpost saying that the bench had been painted through the generosity of the City Hall of Paris. The pot of paint for the bench and the hour of labour would have cost no more than a few euros; the construction and elaboration of the signpost, with (no doubt) a communication company’s consultancy fee included, much more. We are asked to define and classify ourselves in the same way. Who am I and what do I stand for? Let my tattoo tell you. Let the brand I’m wearing explain. And yet, are the most attractive people not those who escape definition, people without qualities (‘ohne Eigenschaften’)?

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What has always put me off the idea of internet dating is the requirement that you define yourself as part of your sales pitch and I realise that my way of defining myself is through negative definition. This weekend in my block there is a courtyard party. I shall certainly steer clear of that. It is also the Notting Hill Carnival. I shall be giving that a wide bearth. I can’t easily tell you what I like, but I can tell you what I don’t like. I don’t like vegetables that begin with the letter A (aubergines, asparagas, artichoke); taxis (they are for weddings and funerals): bottled water; profligacy with paper handkerchiefs and dry cleaning (who believes you can clean things dry? My hands, for example? That was what I told my mum as a six year old. she didn’t believe it either). Was it the Mad Hatter who celebrated his unbirthday, thereby increasing the number of days of celebration in the year? This negative capability, looking at the negative space that would-be artists are told to focus on, can give unexpected results. When you focus on the negative, the positive appears in the unshaded zone. In my virtual internet dating blurb I shall sell myself this way. Hater of ‘A’ vegetables; un-hailer of taxis; dry cleaning agnostic; flees all street parties and performers; indifferent to dogs; psoh (poor sense of humour). My virtual date will be walking home in an unironed dress with a hankie up her sleeve for re-use, following a meal of carrot cabbage and cauliflower (C vegetables oblige) and tap water after an evening spent fleeing fun. Who says I don’t know how to show them a good time???

peoplearerubbish.com

Roy(ston) was how Roy (as we knew him) used to sign his first name. He was keeping his (and our) options open. He was a traditional type; always wore suit and tie, though no-one insisted on it. Once in the office I heard him berating some administrative worker at the other end of the line: “I’d like to speak to your manager,” he said. “Not someone in a tee-shirt in an open-plan office. A man in a suit in a proper office with a door that shuts.” I know what he means.  Sometimes in his phone conversations he would put the phone down and look at me. “It went dead” he’d say. He’d phone straight back. “The line went dead,” he’d tell his interlocutor. You know, the person who’d just hung up on him.

Roy had to leave in the end. You see, he’d broken his arm and was wearing a cast and his shirt was flapping open revealing his less than alluring belly. He was getting his Russian girl students to scratch his back with a ruler.

And so he left. I knew he was going in advance because I saw his cardboard box, the box where he put all his things, with his name scrawled through with a thick red marker. Yes, I knew his time was up when I saw that. And yes, there may have been more sensitive ways of breaking the news to him

peoplearerubbish.com

As I was running round the park today (eight laps, a long way off the 22 I need by end of September) I saw a man multi-tasking. He was doing sit-ups and reading at the same time. I thought at the time: he’ll do himself more harm than good. And: haste, make waste. As I trundled hastelessly round. I, as I run, do not multi-task. I just run. I don’t also listen to music or a pod-cast or any of that stuff. I just run. Women, of course, are meant to be exceptional multi-taskers, though in women I have known this reputation is not bourne out. I have a little thing in work when, as I’m eating a cream cake and reading the paper I say to Sally, the boss: Sally, ask me what I’m doing? and she obliges. She says: What are you doing? And I say: I’m multi-tasking. This makes me laugh, though probably not the other people in the room. Women probably multi-task in different ways. Why, my friend Emma only said to me on the phone a few minutes ago: I’m going to listen to Sibelius at the Proms on the radio and wash a quilt-cover in the washing machine at the same time. If that ain’t multi-tasking… No, my motto is, do one thing and do it well. So, after my run, I’m now going to have a kip. I will not be eating a cream cake at the same time. That will come later.

peoplearerubbish.com

I killed a fly. It was getting on my nerves. You butter the bread; put it on the table; the fly’s on the bread. It keeps fizzing at you like a mosquito. Flies spread germs. Don’t they? So I killed it, got it over by the window with my niece’s A level copy of Huis Clos and flattened it. Don’t worry, Natasha, I cleaned the Huis Clos off. After I killed it, Olde dad – Olde dad who once threw his daughter’s present to him into the bin in front of her eight year old eyes; olde dad who had the least empathy of anyone I ever knew – that Olde dad got all bleeding heart on me. Big man, he said and then Man with a gun. He delivered these two judgements with expert deadpan sarcasm. I couldn’t believe it. Where did he get this empathy for a fly? Since when was he William Blake? Where did he get this wit? Since when was I George Orwell? So now I, as I make him his prunes and custard, as I chaperone him across the main road, as I adminster his pills, as I jovially repeat the same conversation about the weather, his food or the time of day for the umpteenth time, I am the villain of the piece because I killed a fly.
It reminds me of once when a man I knew, a banker, bought an artwork, and I asked him how much he had paid for it and he said to me that some people knew the price of everything and the value of nothing and I said just a minute you’re the banker. By refusing to mention figures you sanctify money.
Whatever. What am I supposed to do? Usher the fly out the backdoor? I’m happy to do that for a spider but with a fly yo’re on a hiding to nothing. A fly would lead me as merry a dance as Olde dad has been doing all this week. No, Olde dad, I draw the line at flies.

peoplearerubbish.com