When I put on the Father Christmas costume and beard and look at myself in the mirror I note that I make an overly Levantine Santa. My nose is too noble; my eyes too sunken; there is nothing jolly about me. The truth is that facial hair changeth the man. The charms of the beard have always left me indifferent. I think I could probably do a moustache all right. I would look like the dastardly seducer in a Thomas Hardy novel, a bounder. But I am confused as to what a beard does to a man. They are very popular these days with co-called hipsters. For young men it can give them gravitas and make them look less like twelve-year-olds. I see that. But the girlfriends must see through that pretty quickly. I fear I have never got over the old adage that you never trust a man with a beard. Some young men these days now sport elaborate beards, as though they are aspiring to look like one of the Seven dwarves. Once again, I am confused. Are our reactions to beards nature or nurture? I have always assumed they were nature. But if Sleepy, Grumpy and Angry are now the coolest looks in town, maybe I am once again mistaken.

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The older I get the more I am attracted to the surface of things. Patrick Modiano, this year’s Nobel Prize for Literature, does surface nicely. In his novel ‘Du plus loin de l’Oubli’ he tells us nothing about the inner life of his characters. They just turn up in the pages of the novel. We are not told of their backgrounds. We are not told of their motivations or psychologies. We observe them, as though through the wrong end of a telescope, moving, picking things up, wearing clothes, drinking coffee in stations or cafes, taking trains, driving cars, playing pinball, not knowing things. It takes enormous restraint and control for the writer to remain on the surface. The world the characters live in is the world of a De Chirico painting, a bland, mysterious cityscape of basic units of action and speech.
Depth is over-rated. Telling us why characters do things, what they think, what they feel. Leave me some space. I don’t want my chicken pumped up with harmful fluids. Tell me nothing!

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I must be typical of an increasingly large share of the population for which there should be a name. We, this unnamed group, are all familiar with the name Dominic Cumberbatch for example (or is it Benedict Cumberbatch; I know the name is based on an order of monks) or Taylor Swift, because if you consume newspapers and news programmes even only slightly you cannot avoid them. However, we have not viewed any vehicles that the afore-mentioned personalities grace, their tv programmes, films or pop songs or videos. However, I know their opinions on subject matters that are to say the least tangential to their field of expertise. I’m looking for a name for this type of personality. They are personalities who for me and my group have no core meaning but a massive peripheral weight; they are insubstantial spirits laden with considerable electrical fluids. This is an increasing phenomenon of public presence. Poor Dominic Cumberbatch. Poor Taylor Swift. I’m sure that one day, when I find myself transported to some alien sitting room watching an episode of ‘Sherlock’ you will make the transition from phantom drenched in electrical fluids to real media flesh and blood, but for the moment you wait in the antechamber like some errant soul in an unappealing limbo.

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When I was seven I remember going round the playground with John Brosnahan, one of my best friends of the time. We would introduce ourselves into little groups of kids, mostly younger, and ask for information. We want information, we would say. The kids looked back bemused. This was probably bullying. Information was a big word at the time, very trendy, a bit technical. We didn’t quite know what it meant but it was certainly a cool word.
Emma just told me a story of a family that was looking at a flat to buy and the seven-year-old or even six-year-old suddenly piped up and said: it’s got potential. That word potential was certainly a word she’d picked up on from the telly or her parents rabbitting on.
If you teach languages nowadays you will notice how the syllabus has changed as far as the type of vocabulary is concerned. These days students are asked to understand and use abstract words like development, evolution, economic growth. When I studied A level I was learning the word for door-handle and weeping willow, words for things not concepts. We have moved now bag and baggage into that abstract world that my childhood fascination with the word information had foreseen. Personally, I am dubious as to the potential of such a move. I think I prefer the old flat with that rusty door-handle.

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Am I proud that Guy Fawkes has recently become a world-wide media star? The embodiment of rebellion against the controls of the state, following a film made ten or fifteen years ago where a mask of his face was used by the protagonist. He certainly had a good face for it, and a good name. Guido Fawkes. Though it is ironic that the more the Guy Fawkes mask becomes a commodity around the world to represent the struggle against oppressive state, the less the feast that commemorates his act four hundred and odd years ago is celebrated. Bonfire Night has mostly been superceded by Halloween in the UK now. I suppose witches and ghosts and vampires are more user-friendly. There’s a wider stock of merchandise to flog. The business of buring a body on a bonfire was also properly scarey. And it is also a celebration that can set Catholics against Protestants. I remember as a Catholic child having ambivalent feelings about it. Wasn’t I supposed to be on Guy Fawkes’s side? Still, I liked the treacles toffee and the jacket potatoes and the parkin. It’s probably time the date was relaunched as Global Anti-State Interference Day. And we’d probably put what’s his name the guy with the white hair living in that embassy in London somewhere on the bonfire.
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When you watch TV or film cops in American shows you are struck by the amount of time the hero spends dealing with internal issues, dealing with his partner or dealing with his commanding officer or dealing with the D.A. or the FBI or quarelling over whose jurisdiction this is (jurisdiction is a big word with cops). There is very little time spent on the actual baddies, which is tiresome because baddies are the most fun. It has got to the point now that when I hear the word jurisdiction, or D.A., or assistant D.A., or subpoena, I just switch over. Who would want to know about the inner workings of my office? Brad Pitt having to deal with a trail of paperwork in the world of waste disposal, squabbeling with the sandwich man about a mayo-free ham and pickle; trying to understand the IT man’s explanation of the latest computer malfunction. Riveting stuff. And yet the cop show producers seem to think it’s what we want.

Either this shows the deep wound in the American psyche: the real enemy is the enemy within. Or (more likely) it shows the paucity of imagination of the movie-makers who go with the ready-make soap of everyday life rather than the invention of a new plot from a new exterior menace. New stories are hard to come by. Is it the beast within or just a case of a talentless hack in the script department?

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I don’t like snakes, or, rather, I fear them. If ever I drink strong alcohol, that night I dream of snakes. On Saturday night after a short party where I drank three cocktails made mostly of whisky and whiskey I had a snake dream. A very long thick snake was in all the low cupboards that ran round the walls of the room I was in. I kept shutting the sliding doors of the cupboards but as I ran to the next one the snake’s head would appear as it grew by the second. It doesn’t take much whisky to get me snake-dreaming.

When I was younger and drank more and my body was more volcanic I used to get a beer spot, in the dead centre of my face on my upper lip, or a wine spot, in the middle of my nose, or a whisky spot in the middle of my forehead. All these pimples were dead centre, an emblematic index to a night spent on the tiles.The body documented the preceeding night, as it now does through snake dreams. The body knows.

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In the gym those of us without earphones in are having to listen to the music beamed out across the space. I don’t want to go to school. I just want to break the rules, intones some teenage simulacrum. In the gym this Sunday afternoon we are mostly middle-aged. Thee are some people in their twenties. One or two oldsters. There are no schoolkids. Schoolkids aren’t allowed in our gym. So why are we listening to this? Come to think of it, why is the staple fare of all popular music and culture teenage rebellion? Why, twenty, thirty, forty years after leaving school and our spotty adolescent awkwardness, have we not found another mode for our popular culture? Ironic, of course, in that the companies producing this stuff, the music companies, the film studios, are the most conservative and reactionary of institutions. They peddle rebellion but they do not want rebellion. This music is the soft sop that keeps us all in thrall.

I remember thinking the same thing at university when studying Romantic literature. My university is the bastion of the staus quo. It has, I believe, produced every UK Prime Minister except John Major (no university) and Gordon Brown (Edinburgh?). Did the establishment (whatever that is) know that many of the heroes of Western literature we were meant to admire were marginals and drop-outs? We still live in the era of a form of late Romanticism. Our heroes are drunk, divorced ex-cops, the societies we portray in our literatures and music to evoke our world are dystopias.

It might be that many of us require the counter-balance of a leisure-life rebellion to tolerate the sacrifices of our working life. This is not an equation that includes me (remember leisure is work, work is leisure). I like my culture to be society-friendly I don’t want to pretend I want out. I want in. I want a voice to be genuinely realistic and include our compromises and compensations. I don’t want to break the rules especially, unless the rules genuinely need breaking. As we all pound along on the treadmills or accomplish another set of strokes on the rowing machines the fantasy of going back to school and breaking all the rules is enough to nourish many grown-ups. I am alienated by all this alienation.

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I teach languages by the pool of light method. It is a revolutionary method.You start with a small pool of light. In that pool you have your basic verbs: verbs of discourse (speak, say); movement (go, walk); sensation (see, look, hear), little gesture (take, put, prepare), routine (sleep, work). Just these small good things, as Raymond Carver says. They are in our pool of light. Beyond the pool of light is the dark. The dark stretches for miles. It is all the words we do not know. There are many of these. It is dangerous, the dark. You must learn to stay in your pool of light. People find it hard to stay in the pool. When they speak they immediately wander out of the pool of light into the dangerous woods. They want to say I pick up. They cannot. Pick up is not in your pool of light, I say. Take is in your pool. Say take. They want to say cook. Cook is not in your pool of light, I say, but prepare is in your pool. Say I prepare the steak, not I cook the steak. You can say I prepare the steak. Stay in the pool. They want to say combined harvester. Combined harvester, or for that matter any farming vehicle or agricultural accessory, is not in your pool of light. It is right in the middle of the evil forest. You cannot say combined harvester. You have been studying this language for half an hour. Stay in the f—ing pool of light. The pool of light I have built for you, painstakingly built for you. Do not step outside. The woods are perilous. They want to say saunter. I nod, hardly containing my exasperation. Yes. It’s that pool of light again. Saunter is in the forest, off the path even. Walk. You can walk. That is in the pool of light. What’s that? You have a question? Of course you can ask a question. Fire away! What’s that? You don’t understand the pool of light. All right. That’s fine. Shall we have a little break now and come back to this later.

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The word churlish is one I always like to use. It means surly, awkward, obdurate. It comes from churl, which was a serf back in the olden days. The other word in the same vein is refractory. I’m a fan of this one too. I picked it up from the TS Eliot poem on the Magi where he applies it to camels. The camels refractory. I think you might call camels obdurate. I don’t know if you could have a churlish camel. Maybe because the word churlish has something very human about it, whereas refractory comes from a phenomenon.

My question is what would you rather be: churlish, refractory or obdurate? It’s a question we should all ask ourselves. Why doesn’t it figure in one of those quizes in women’s magazines? As in: your boyfriend has left the apartment in a mess after a night in with the lads. You come back home after a hard day at your fashion booking agency on Madison Avenue. The next morning are you a) obdurate b) refractory  c) churlish.

That’s my kind of quiz. Would fit nicely with the two tattoos I’ve just had applied, one on each shoulder. On the left shoulder I’ve got ‘Taxis are for weddings and funerals’ in Ancient Sumerian and on the right shoulder it says ‘Say No to A vegetables’ in the Apache script. By the way A vegetables (Asparagas, Aubergine, Artichoke) are not proper. They were invented in the South East of England. C vegetables are more proper.

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