On the telly science is big. Especially stuff about the universe. If there’s a big bang or a black hole or some dark matter, the ratings go loopy. What’s more, the graphics people have fun. Metallic greens; burnt tungsten oranges; mercury reds; seventh dimension blues. And all kinds of evocations of the resonance of absence, the singularity of the singularity, the seep of dark matter. We’re listening to Xenakis, Nono, Ligeti on the sound track. Contemporary classical music has never been so popular. Sometimes I try and listen to what the professors in their zany offices are saying. We follow them on their bike ride into MIT or peer at them from behind stacks of papers. They are so loveable with their messy hair and dusty glamour. It’s nice to know someone is doing this stuff. And they don’t care about the money. Probably have dollar bills under their pillows and no proper bank account. But the problem when you watch these programmes is that they tell you nothing. The profs say things like. Dark matter is everything that isn’t there. It’s as if you spilt a load of oil all over your new suit and then put on glasses that don’t register oil. This isn’t useful. But it’s the only way they talk. If they’re from California the metaphor normally concerns Apple or Google or Macdonalds as if big corporations  were the only way we have of relating to the world. Imagine you’re CEO for Google and one day you get the wrong elevator and come out in a world where you’re picking up garbage. That’s a black hole. Oh dear. I suppose I’ll never know much about science. At school the science teacher spent a double period trying to set up an experiment with just one nerdy boy taking an interest and the rest of us throwing acid at each other. There must be reasons why they won’t tell me what dark matter is properly. Probably to do with algebra, which doesn’t make for great telly. Still, at least I get to hear some Ligeti on the mainstream networks.

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They are building the Northern Line tube extension right under my flat. I saw the plans last year and the line that connected Kennington to the new Nine Elms station west of Vauxhall went right under my corner of my building and, to add insult to injury, I live on the ground floor. The construction work has now started as all roads are dug up and signs appear hosting a raft of apologies for this and that. We apologise that you will be wading through mud for the next three years etc and etc, but don’t worry because lots of executive flats are going up and somebody’s making a lot of money out of it. That kind of thing. I have nightmares about how I’ll cope when the escalator emerges in my bathroom. How will I greet the queues of oyster card users without a ticket office? And what of signage? Will it be a case of mind the gap between my telly and that nest of tables from Argos or do I need to introduce a yellow line to keep the public at bay? I don’t want irate customers disgorging into my living room during Match of the Day. I see that at London Bridge station the chaos of the on-going works and the demands of a minister that the crisis be sorted out was countered by Transport for London with the response that staff will from now on be equipped with i-pads. Now they’ll be able to watch You Tube while coralling the public into the right pens. Nobody has learnt the lessons fom fifteen years ago when the government of the day looked to solve the education crisis in schools with the bulk ordering of computers for pupils with the result that now students can plagirize at will and teachers can tell students to get on with so-called research while they sit down and have another biscuit.

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There is a fragment from Kafka’s diaries that has been made into a short parable for collections of Kafka short narratives. It concerns metaphors. It says that a man spent hours every day observing the spinning of a children’s top, believing that if he could understand this one motion he would understand so much more about life. This is an idea that I too have a fondness for. If you are able to tell one story in, say, a foreign language, then you are able to tell any story. The differences between stories are just detail. Everything we do is a cypher for everything else we do. I remember my history teacher when I was twelve saying that the way we organsied our essay showed how we orgnised our life. I wonder. The alternative view is that people with an untidy desk or an untidy flat do their organising in their head in a more creative way than those who keep everything neat. I have an idea that achild sharing space with a sibling, a room or a bed, will be forced to find mental space in a more creative way than a child with a bedroom to him or herself. Which brings me to paper-clips (trombone being the cute word for them in French and German). I fear that in offices up and down the land paper-clips are losing their age-old battle against staples. Staples fix. With staples there can be no mistake. But with paper-clips you can change your mind, stay open to rearrangement. They are also more elegant, less totalitarian, accept the agency of randomness. Paper-clips give me a moment of pleasure; staples an instant of irritation. To what extent does the affiliation with paper-clip or staples say something about us as people? Kafka’s spinning top man would surely find a deep metaphor for life in the choice. It may of course be that it is only that the paper-clip man likes to see himself as a paper-clip man. It may be that deeply he is a staple man. In the same way as people often try to work in fields to which they are least suited because they aspire to do what they find difficult (look at psychoanalysts or nutritionists, almost invariably the least appropriate to their particular field). So I could well be a staple-man who aspires to the condition of a paper-clip man. And, when I think about it, I do have some staple man instincts, but please let us not linger on such things.

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Men like to boast. It is a disagreeable experience to witness. Probably, younger men boast more than older men. It is linked to their libido. In front of women it is like showing your peacock feathers, though at least a peacock shows its own feathers. Women, I sometimes think, quite like men’s boasting. Either, it is proof of men’s energy and virility or it means that  women can feel quietly superior. Women boast less, or they do what is termed a humble brag, which is a form of boasting accompanied by a charitable act to offset it, as in I don’t feel special just because I gave £100 to that charity. I dare say I too can be boastful, although my technique is to turn the whole achievement I am boasting about to derision. That way I have a get-out. It’s an ironic boast, but still valid all the same. I had a friend at school whom we all used to call Stan although his real name was Michael Keane.His were tall tales and we just humoured him as he explained how he had beaten up some men in a street in Manchester city centre. Sometimes you need to blow your own trumpet, although it is invariably ugly. It’s a case of choosing ugliness to get on. The enigmatic modest approach is certainly more attractive but probably less efficient.

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It turns out that less than 1% of the population are allergic to gluten, whereas whole swathes of middle-class Britain are shopping in the ever increasing gluten-free departments of the supermarkets. My suspicion is that it is the word gluten that puts them off. It sounds too much like glutinous and glutton. It is too ugly a word to be marketable. A bit like pilchards which bit the dust some time ago. No right minded aspirational family was going to continue buying something called a pilchard, though it might fork out for a wild sardine or whatever it was they ended up changing its name to. This is also part of a phenomenon that John Carey proposed in his book on The Intellectuals and the Masses. His thesis was that at the end of the nineteenth century once people had learnt how to read and write, the upper middle class intellectuals had to push further out by creating modernism, difficult art, difficult writing, so that they could remain ahead of the crowd. I’m not sure I totally subscribe to this, but you can never overestimate snobbery as a motivating force in cultural life. And so it is with gluten-free. The middle classes will always push out further to put distance between itself and the masses. Remember pashmina when it came out. Very fancy and very pricey. Now you can get three pashmina scarves for a tenner on any street market.

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We have just survived Bafta and Oscar season. This is a period of the year where I grip the remote of the telly with fevered intensity in case any footage of simpering, whimpering film people suddenly appears on the screen. I turn my head away from the culture sections of newspapers as though fleeing the Gorgon. There are Brit representatives, tasked with enacting all the standard cliches, to be versions of the stiff upper lip, the ineffectual fool, the mannered fop or the rampant jingoist. It could be a modern version of The School for Scandal. All we need are fake beauty spots, mice making their nests in hair-do’s and Keira Knightly arrving as a shepherdess accompanied by a retinue of goats. There are the weepers from I don’t know which Circle of Hell. The dreadful litanies of praise and remerciments. The selfie-itis. The fawning interviewers, dripping with the unctuous, viscid pus of self-abasement. I would find a particularly select zone of the inferno for these characters. The most vibrant fantasy that remains to me is that one day, for whatever far-away reason imaginable, I am interviewed at such an event, in the full glare of the flash bulbs, cushioned by the plush of the red carpet. How I would enjoy exhibiting my  monumantal disinterest, my monumental detachment. I truly believe there would be a market for such a reaction. Please, you neutral and unexcitable hoardes, let me be your champion.

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The richest man in Italy died the other day. He had a personal fortune of 15 Billion Euros. His name was Mr Ferraro. He made his fortune from two main products: ferraro rocher chocolates and nutella. I suppose it is nutella that is inside the ferraro rocher. Yesterday I noticed there was a reduction on nutella at Lidl, so I bought a jar for the first time in many years. I don’t know whether the reduction was an hommage to the late Mr Ferraro or just a fortuitous coincidence. I’ve had the nutella on my breakfast rye bread yesterday and this morning and just had another slice with a cup of tea. I think the charm has now worn off. It is a nasty glutinous substance. How melancholy it must have been for Mr Ferraro to look at the vats of this stuff and feel his identity subsumed by it. As a seventeen year old on my first trip abroad in a so-called youth camp in Southern Germany where I went to practice my German and helped build a kinderspielplatz (children’s playground) with about twenty 18-30 year olds – I had lied about my age to get in – nutella was on offer at breakfast. It was my first exposure. It was liberating to eat this goo for breakfast. At home it would have been frowned on. To a seventeen-year-old It represented the continent and doing what I wanted. There was also apricot jam, I recall. Mmm. Fancy a bit if that next time I’m in Lidl.

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More worrying trends at Tesco. On top of all the other problems that Tesco is facing these days comes the issue, which I unearthed this morning, of its clubcards not conforming to models of French grammatical syntactic constructional forms. When you are puting your clubcard voucher in to get your miserly gift (this time it was a paltry £2) and you free points vouchers for, say, a Tesco lemon-flavour washing-up liquid, the question that was preying on my mind and which I had never resolved was: do I deposit these vouchers before or after beeping my clubcard through? It turns out you do it after! I am, to say the least, shocked and dismayed by this turn of events. My only guide to what should have been the corect procedure comes from French grammar. Consider the construction: je ne le lui ai pas dit (I have not told him that). Here all the what I might call addenda (him/ that / the negative element) are enfolded within the warm embrace of the basic verbal clause (the je and the dit, I and told). So if the verb is the clubcard and the addenda (pronouns, negatives etc) the vouchers, it would make sense for vouchers to be posited before the beeping of the warm inclusive mother clubcard. But apparently not. Yet more incompetence from our premier store! Oh, I restrained myself from taking this up with the manager this time. After all, they seemed ignorant of Zola’s depiction of the regular shifting of goods through a store to keep customers confused that Tesco was still perpetrating almost 150 years after Zola’s big store novel Au Bonheur des Dames when I brought up this age-old malpractice. However, I don’t know how much longer this can go on.

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My upstairs neighbours were noisy again last night. Every few weeks they have a social get-together and even though they take their shoes off (my request; the clipp-clopping on the wooden floor sounds like a tribe of toddlers parading round in their mum’s high-heels) and don’t do music, they still find a way to keep me awake. What I have found is that as the evening progresses the main man shouts his jokes rather than makes them, his humour being dependent on volume, and his accolytes scream or shout their allegiance back. Listening to the sounds from the floor below give you a strange idea of what goes on up there. The parties, to my nether-ears, feature the shouting of funny stories, the rhythmic slamming of doors (it must be some kind of a parlour game), the dull thuds of large packages or boxes being dropped onto the floor (they must be sorting through their amazon deliveries) and the constant spilling of ball-bearings onto the parquet. If that is what they are really doing till two in the morning, they go up in my estimation. Anyway, in the end, I struggled up from my bed, went off to the little cupboard at the back of the bathroom where I keep appliances, and, as usual, treated them to some fierce shocks with the broom handle on my living room ceiling. The funny story from the main man stopped or must suddenly have been spoken at everyday volume and didn’t seem quite so funny anymore. I went back to bed.

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This is a guest blog from Boxette

The concept of going to the office is a bit 1980s these days. Habitual wearers of Stan Smiths are more likely to be found hanging out in places where the walls are stripped bare of plaster, manfully downing flat whites and broadcasting their achievements on the free WiFi, tweet by tedious tweet.

But what about the non-hipsters who also work virtually? They may not own a pair of rollerblades; they may not like Apple products; they may be sensitive to caffeine. But these refugees from Croydon, Dagenham and Merton still need a safe place to roost.

So it is for me, Nigel and Terry. For several years we’ve held strategy sessions in an eatery on the upper floors of Victoria Station. This café, named after one half of a 1960s pop/folk duo that is sadly no longer on speaking terms with the other member, is arguably the most dismal meeting place of its kind. No natural light; plastic booth seating you have to crawl in and out from; formica tables and wipe-down menus. All the atmosphere of an airport terminal. And service that can best be described as disinterested.

I used to ride the escalator to this place with a sinking heart. Here we would lay out our spread sheets, worry about Euro emissions legislation while I tried to catch the waiter’s eye to ask for green tea. They would never have green tea. Each time I toyed with the idea of bringing my own teabags for the next meeting, but would never remember. Within two hours I would feel lightheaded, suffering from sick-building syndrome, or too much hot chocolate. I would feel grubby. I would be questioning my career trajectory.

And then, one day as I rode the escalator past the mobile phone sellers, gold buyers and accessorisors, I had the shock of my life. The café was being ripped apart. Torn down. Remodelled. The one constant in our working calendar had closed.

At first I felt euphoric. That’ll show them, Terry and Nigel. Now we’ll have to go somewhere they don’t serve herbal tea with milk. Somewhere where we’ll feel in command of our destiny.

Real life isn’t like fantasy. The three of us were forced to traipse through shopping malls outside the station looking for somewhere to sit. Finally we found a popular café franchise with a French name. Magnifique? Non. The table was too small for Terry’s spread-sheets. We jostled for elbow room. The waiter cleared away our cups too quickly and the room was just too popular to hear yourself think.

That’s when I learnt to value what I had lost. The old café was so sparsely populated that you could have the table as long as you liked. It had all the ambience of a tired office building. Then I had an epiphany: an old-style office, with its broken ceiling tiles and tepid water cooler was what we had been subconsciously seeking all along, we peripatetic work-from-homers.

Out of nostalgia I climbed the escalator up Victoria Station the other week. A cosy little bistro had colonised the space, all soft fabrics and amber lighting. The kind of lighting by which you can’t read the small print menu. Background music that would distract from serious conversation, and a waiter with an expression that said ‘Come hither’. Not the kind of welcome I was hoping for.

I suppose they call it progress, but Terry, Nigel and I have been forced into a new kind of Odyssey as we search, in vain, for a new unfashionable space in which to ply our trade.

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