At school I had a French teacher I liked. I was no good at French but I liked his manner. It was a Catholic school and he was atheist. He told me when I was in the Conti Club in Manchester one night drinking after hours that he had told the powers of the school that he would would never discuss religion with the pupils and on this condition he had got the job. As sixth formers we went to the Conti Club on Friday nights when the pubs were closed. For some reason I always drank rum in the Conti Club. I think I thought that was the existentialist drink. I believe I vomitted in the Conti Club toilets every time I went there. Years later when I lived in Paris we met up and he said he had been requsted to offer me a job at the school as a French teacher. I did not take up the offer and I said I could not easily do it because I was now an atheist. Ah! he told me. That would indeed have made it difficult as the school was now fervent in its recruitment of Catholic teaching staff. I said, how come you are still there then? He been converted, he told me. I was astonished. How had it happened? One of the priests who worked at the school (I shall call him Fr Black) had convinced him, won him over to the faith was how he put it. My old French teacher sang the praise of Fr Black, whom I had known myself. He had taught us religion with casual interest. The next I heard of my French teacher he had quit teaching and become a bookie. I met him once in a pub in Manchester, The Black Bull. The next thing, a few years later, was the news that Fr Black had been arrested for paedophilia. There was a picture of him on the front page of the Manchester Evening News looking like an degraded, snarling version of Hannibal Lector. My sister asked me had I known him? I said yes but not in that way. I wondered how my old French teacher fitted into this. A few months ago I googled him. There was a chapter in a book about 16th Century French literature he had written. It was the analysis of a poem by Du Bellay. He had gone back to teaching and had done a doctorat on Renaissance French literature. The whole book was on line. In the preface to the book the editor had singled out my old French teacher and his premature and sudden death at the youthful age of sixty. He would be missed.
You follow somebody’s itinerary from afar. There are more gaps than clues. Who knows how it all fits together?

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The past is a country that not only drifts gradually away from us but also one that becomes more and more mysterious. I remember when I was about twenty-two and I was living in Paris. I did some English language tutoring to make some money and I went to a flat somewhere – can’t remember where it was – and there was a single mother and a little boy called Fabrice aged eleven and I had to give him an English lesson. I did this for a few weeks. There was no dad. We got on well and the mum liked it that we got on well. And then it was the summer and it all stopped. Anyway, I must have left my address because many months later I received a letter from Fabrice in English telling some terrible story. The mum had got another boyfriend and the boyfriend used to beat Fabrice and the mum and her new man had Fabrice taken away to a home, some kind of institution. The English was so bad that it wasn’t really clear what went on. I sent a letter to the home address but got no answer. I don’t know what happened. I think Fabrice had invested in me and I, oblivious, hadn’t particularly invested in him. This disparity in investment crops up a lot in life. I find myself thinking about my life in Paris a lot more these days and the more I think about it the more mysterious it all becomes. Who was I then? How come I didn’t see things? Maybe I just saw other things. Is it that I was younger and blinder? Or do things just reveal their mystery from distance? Close up things all seem so obvious. I wonder what Fabrice is up to now.
There was Frau Maximovic too. In the early years I spent in Paris I met all kinds of strange people. We used to exchange English and German conversation. She lived in a large but totally empty flat near the Eiffel Tower. I remember whenever I came she let me in, then went off to the bathroom to put her make-up on, which I could see through a mirror on the back of the open bathroom door. She would have been about forty, I suppose. She needed to improve her English for some hoped-for bi-lingual or tri-lingual secretarial job that never seemed to materialise. One day, after many weeks of translating her Spiegel articles into English and Newsweek articles into German, she told me I had to come quite late one day for a special session before an important interview she had for an important company. Companies were always important to her. I said I would. This special session was built up and up. We would do this and that for her important interview in the special session. I arrived and she wasn’t there. I phoned back a few times but there was no answer. She had disappeared. I never saw her again. What happened to Frau Maximovic? It was mysterious. I suppose she was just part of the flotsam and jetsam of metropolitain life. Fragments of lives that just bob up to the surface for a moment and then drift out of our ambit. I never imagine it ending well for Frau Maksimovic.

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Got my hair cut at the barbers today. Women are bemused when I tell them I just turn up with no appointment and get it done for £11. I do leave them £12 mind. I’ve always been generous like that. And then they say: but don’t you have to wait? And I say: yeah, there might be three or four blokes ahead of me, so I might have to wait half-an-hour sometimes. They gasp. How long does a haircut take? It’s ten minutes in my barbers. Anyway, I don’t mind waiting. Where else am I going to read The Sun? And in any case, it’s mostly bald blokes whose hair they’re cutting. Though – I realise – barbers take longer with bald men. It’s with bald men that they are able to demonstrate their art at its most elevated reach. You see, the less hair there is to cut, the more the work of the artist recalls the work of the semiotician. Here we are in the realm of the theatre of hair-cutting, what Barthes in his celebrated work of popular sign decipherment, the hermeneutic masterpiece that is ‘Mythologies’ (Editions du Seuil 1957) refers to as ‘spectacle’. Indeed, the barber enacts the ritual of hair-cutting for the baldie and it is for this peacock performance that he is rewarded with £11 or maybe (if he is lucky) £12. Oh yes, it’s a semiotician’s wet dream down my barbers.

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I left my book in Lidl on Saturday. I had it in my jacket pocket and must have transferred it to the blue moulded plasic holders they have before forgetting it at the bottom when I was packing all my stuff up at the till. Or maybe I left it on the conveyor belt.
it was ‘la rue des boutiques obscures’ by Patrick Modiano. I went back today but it was gone, definitively snapped up by some discerning house wife or husband. I imagined it appearing amongst the cold cuts, rubbing shoulders with the frankfurters and smoked gammon, another innovation from this German market-leader. It is particularly annoying as I had nearly finished the book and now have to decide if I am willing to fork out another £8 for a mere 20 pages of unread text. I’m probably better off just chalking it down as a read book. Modiano is pretty enigmatic at the best of times. I’d probably be none the wiser if I completed it and I’ll probably best remember it as adrift somewhere amongst German staples and delicacies inthe Lidl of the mind. ‘La boutique des livres perdus’ is how I might retitle it. They didn’t have any rye bread either today. Which further proves how things are flying off the shelves at Lidl.

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If you watch the TV programme ‘Gogglebox’ where you see families reacting to what they see on the telly, you rarely witness indifference. You see shock, fear, disgust, outrage, joy but no indifference. The programme makers must think that cool indifference is not what the viewers of the viewers want to see. And yet, indifference, dispassionate and controlled, is such a rare and therefore attractive commodity in daily life. Passion has had its day. People being passionate about stuff is tiresome. We cannot be interested in everything, have an opinion about everything. The intelligent reaction to information most of the time is to say ‘I don’t know enough about this. I have no opinion.’ The next time you are in a passionate argument, be indifferent, have no opinion. As the argument grows heated and ramped-up to boiling point, with rhetoric overblown, the endless reuctio ad absurdums, the evocation of Nazi Germany as best paradigm and all tempers frayed, you are delicately sipping your green tea, above it all, secure in what you know and what you don’t know. You are superior.

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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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