It’s a bleeder, said Gareth, my dentist, as he applied another swab to the gap out of which he had just extracted a recalcitrant molar. He was rather excited. Look at that, he’d said, holding up a bloody tooth with some straggles hanging off it. It’s all come out in one go. Normally you have to spend ten minutes scraping and drilling out all the bits. Not with this one. Everything in one yank. That’s very rare. I didn’t know whether to be proud or humbled. £240 later I crossed the road and dropped into the clothes shop Massimo Duti to kill a few minutes. The salesman was I really like your jacket. It was an old corduroy I had bought second hand over twenty years ago. Yes I said. It’s comfortable. He was still admiring. Saville Row? he said. I told him I thought not.

Still. From a bleeder to a leader in ten minutes.

We were in Paris last week and looking for a bench to sit on on the canal. They were all taken but there was just one man on one of them so we squeezed on with him. After a few minutes another man came over. Both men were black. The man who came over said it was good to see that we were not afraid to sit on a bench with a ‘negro’ (his word) and that he noticed that my friend had some Chinese elements in her look and that he liked to eat ‘nems’ (Vietnamese products) from time to time. In brief, we should all live together in harmony. I nodded along. The man on the bench said nothing. When we were about to leave I said ‘bonne continuation’ to the man on the bench who grinned back. He’s right. He just wants to get on with his life without every act being a political one. Sometimes just sharing bench is the best political act you can do.

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After the football last night I started watching a serial killer film. You know the plot already. They have been identical since Silence of the Lambs came out. There is a serial killer out there. He captures young women and puts them in his cellar. They are chained up in various cells. It’s quite a fancy cellar. A cop, an unconventional cop, is obsessed with the serial killer. He has a seventeen year old daughter. She is a difficult girl. One Thanksgiving she has a strop and goes out into the dangerous night. She is captured by the serial killer. Now it’s personal! At this key moment in the story the director or writer chooses to place the emblematic scene where the hero, the cop, smashes up his own office in macho fury or a fit of pique, as we might call it in English English. This is a common scene in American lore. It shows the cop is a proper man. It also shows that he has feelings, which is not a given. We are probably not meant to pity him, rather admire him for ruining the decor in his police station office. You know, the one, with the mood board with snapshots of the girls and little quotes from ancient wisdoms, often the Book of Revelations, because the serial killer is mainly a learned fellow with a great interest in the ancient texts. The serial killer thing is just a side interest.

Well, I watched about 45 minutes of the movie. I kind of got the gist.

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As we age, our attachments on all sides are loosening and drifting away. With the younger generation we look with irritation on the constant use of air pods and screens, let alone opinions. With ones own older generation it becomes more and more difficult to retain connections. In the natural way of things people drift away. they move geographically and they move into different social circles. They may have no reason to remain in contact. The past may be a barrier; they may not wish to show themselves in their altered state (physical or psychological); they may not deign to have you as an attachment any more. The healthy human wants to maintain his or her links with young and old alike. But everything frustrates this. Your circle diminishes. In the end it will be a mere single point. Then that goes out. Still, let’s keep pushing out to the circumferences.

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The past invades us more and more, There is more of it. It is hard to keep out. The signs of its inundations are everywhere. From Talking Pictures TV, the channel of the year, with its nostalgic looks back at life in the 50s or 60s and focus on the films of the last century to today’s technology which allows us to reconnect with music or documents from before; the early Bowie albums, which not so many years ago were untraceable; old papers that could never have been unearthed but now emerge at the click of a key. You find the past everywhere. You can live there if you want. Can you think in the present without the interferences of the past? Writers can be so addicted to quoting or citing earlier writers to buttress their own authority. This doesn’t help. It mostly clogs the thought. History can hinder as much as it helps. The older you get, of course, and the more your past outweighs your future. It also becomes as mysterious as the future. Your old self is an enigma. Why did you act that way? Who were you then?

In his novel Time Shelters the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov imagines a world where we become so addicted to the past that referenda take place throughout Europe allowing citizens to elect the decade they want to live in. The truth is that as individuals we are always living in a kaleidoscopic time that suits us best, a collage of moments from various pasts. We cherry-pick our contexts just to make today’s reality bearable.

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I have come across this phrase in two Victorian novels. Dickens’s Bleak House and, if I remember correctly, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, or was it Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, I can’t remember. What must have happened is that either Eliot or Hardy copied Dickens, whose Bleak House predates the others, or it was a common, perhaps comic, phrase of the Victorian era. Whatever, I have appropriated the phrase and now use it liberally, for it is true of me. I like to do the same things all the time. I like the same routine on a Saturday morning, or any morning for that matter. In an Indian restaurant I always take Chicken Tandoori. I go to the gym on the same days every week and do practically the same workout only with unvarying variants. I never eat vegetables starting with the letter A. If you tickle my pressure points I will come out with the same pronouncements. I will try and herd most phenomena under the heading of hairdresser syndrome (the fact that hairdressers always have bad haircuts, that is, most people do the jobs they are least suited to do). I soak my feet in the bucket twice a week; Wednesday and Sunday. I never vary.

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I have never worn a moustache. They seem rather perverse to me. They are an odd mix: seedy yet dainty. You see young men with dirty smudges on their upper lip and you wonder what is going through their heads. Surely this object cannot attract a member of the opposite sex, you think. Or of any sex. It is a grubby little thing. If you kissed a man with a moustache it would be like negotiating a bit of shredded wheat on the way in. The only way I could have a moustache, it seems to me, is if I were playing a role. The only moustache role I could possibly play is the cad. Cads have a fairly long moustache that they stroke diabolically as they are plotting their devilish schemes. It might suit me; the kind of dastardly plotter you get in a Thomas Hardy novel sometimes. There are other moustache roles. The Hitler moustache, of course; mostly taboo. The RAF pilot moustache. The thin pencil line moustache; aristocratic. Most of these things are of another time. So it would seem to make sense that they only exist as a kind of fancy dress. And yet men do sport them as permanent features. One would like to get into the mind of such men and find out what their big idea is.

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The dangers from holding a conviction based on how you feel are clear. Our feelings shift. They depend on our age, our experience, where we live (which country, which class, which ethnicity, which sex), our mood. You understand why in the 70s and the 80s that cultural war took place in academia about theory. It was no longer enough to just react viscerally to Shakespeare or Proust because you were just using your own limited viscera; you had to filter your thoughts through Marxism or Feminism or any other ism as a safeguarding action. That was seen as a left wing act. You did not trust your own self.

These days, curiously, the people who trust their own feelings above exterior structures are seen as so-called ‘woke’ and left wing. They feel that they are not male, that they are female. They go on viscera. The argument from how you feel wins out over all others. A little humility might tell us that the human vessel is adrift on a tumultuous deep ocean of culture and it can shift direction at any moment.

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Sometimes odd coincidences happen. I spoke to a man on the street and he said he knew me. I was sure I didn’t but then we got talking and it turned out I knew his ex, now deceased wife and some of his other friends. But we had certainly never met before. That was just a coincidence. The other day, a rainy windswept day, I saw stray cucumbers on the rainy pavement at three different locations in the town. A coincidence? Or might it be that on a tempestuous day shoppers with a cucumber in their grocery bag might very well lose it on the windswept highway. You do, do you not?, put the cucumber in last, thrusting it into a gap left between milk and cornflakes, so it makes sense that harassed shoppers, fighting the hurricane, passing the shoulder bag from one side to another, might loose the cucumber, have it tumble headlong from his or her bag, one at South Kensington, one on High Street Kensington and one on Harleyford Road, Vauxhall. Lost cucumbers; just one more round in the eternal debate between the rational and the the mystical.

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The baby Jesus in his cot

Knows nothing yet of Herod’s plot.

The ox and ass are blithely dumb.

They know not from where this child has come.

Carpenter Joe picks at his beard.

This birth is all that he had feared.

The shepherds came in out of the cold.

Deaf to this greatest story ever told.

Three kings with gifts too, quite a few.

They’d brought them for some friends they knew.

And Mary sits, her eyes bemused.

Her thoughts on Jesus quite confused.

Where did this child come from in fact?

A father was the thing he lacked.

The Holy Spirit was to blame.

At least that’s what the gospels claim.

The babe doth mewl and puke and roar.

The same sounds as the inn next door.

Only one angel sits aloft in glory.

She, only she, can tell the real story.

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