I am loath to pick up new turns of phrase. The word yay! for example, which I have a particular dislike for. It is not my word; I don’t know where it’s been or where it’s come from; it’s a word that just materialised and has no meaning to me, no connotations, no associations (except that I feel it defines the desperate aspiration of the user). Why would I use such a word? A word or expression needs to mean something to me. It needs to be like a worn pair of slippers moulding to the foot or an old pebble from the seaside. This is why I insist on using words I used when young. I go to the pictures not the movies. It was the word we had at home. I can, at a pinch, go to the cinema. It was the word I did at another time of life. I remembered another one of these from my distant past the other day which I mentioned a few weeks ago and now try to remember to always use. The sands, not the beach. We always used to say that. Going to the sands.

This is a kind of nostalgia, I suppose. But it’s also a desire to inhabit the words we use. What am I going to do with the windy new barn I find erected in my town that is the word yay? I can’t live there, I don’t know what you do in that building. I’m not saying I’ll never go into a new edifice, but I’ll want to know the materials used to build it and have a pretty good idea about who was financing it and how it got its planning application approved.

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I remembered the other day what happened at a party I went to some years ago. It was an arty kind of party. After a drink or two I can, though I say so myself, be rather ludic at such gatherings. I am not adverse to extrapolating or massaging the truth to avoid the grey monotonies of conversing with people you don’t know. I was involved in one such conversation with someone who was being somewhat ludic too. She had startted with some playful offering and, in great style I had picked up the conceit and ran with it, elaborating and embroidering spontaneously. She was, may I say, unable to keep pace with my repartee but did her best. After ten or fifteen minutes the amusing bantering dialogue reached its natural end. Time to mingle elsewhere. At this point this woman produced a card:

You have just been entertained by… The Party Conversation Group. Available for hire.

The poor girl probably didn’t sleep that night. Bettered by an unwitting amateur. I just give this stuff out for free. I never realised there was a market for it.

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I have a terrible affliction. This is something that has pursued me my entire life, as far back as I can remember. It is a malady, let’s call it a pathology, that diminishes my life both materially, in wasting so many of my waking hours, and psychologically, imprisoning me in a dank cell from which there seems no escape.

My affliction is this: whilst accomplishing routine household tasks (peeing, washing-up, brushing teeth, pressing the button on my espresso coffee machine and HOLDING IT DOWN), I count. 60 seconds for the coffee, 100 seconds for the teeth. Units of 60 for peeing and 25 for the washing-up. My chores are measured out by internal chronometre. This dread pathology means that I annul whole swathes of life, processing it through the grey anonymity of numbers.

My resolution? Thoughts! Observation! Life! Reject the tyranny of the internal chronometre. Embrace the stuff of life. The delightful whirr of the coffee machine! The charming arc of pee-fall! The pleasures of hands bathing in the warmth of washing-up water! Who says the modern world holds no domestic pleasures for us?

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There is aversion to the suffix. We like to clean a word of all superfluity, streamline it, have it look like the dynamic verb. There is a disconnect; not a disconnection. Constructors are engaged on a build. We no longer witness a revelation, but a reveal. And writers no longer work on a new version of script, they work on a rewrite. These are all verbs masquerading as nouns. The -tion, along with many another suffix, is yesterday’s news.

The prefix works better. That lovely, surprising and classic translation of Freud’s Das Unbehagen in der Kultur (The Uneasiness in Culture) as Civilization and its Discontents gives us a terrific prefix. Discontents is a winner. Really clever. The suffix is dead! Long live the prefix!

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My friend Emma told me about some Scandinavian guy she met who was a kind of trendy lifestyle guru, a conflict resolution specialist I think it was (meaning, I think, conflict between people not nations) who said he worked a hundred days a year. This would be a boast. I thought about myself and worked it out. I work about 130 days a year. At a rate of, on average, about seven hours a day, that’s a about a thousand hours a year. How’s that! Probably makes me a life style guru too.

Of course, I have elsewhere in this blog noted that to me work is leisure and leisure is work, which would mean I’m working three hundred and sixty odd days minus a hundred and thirty. That’s two hundred and thirty odd. And the nurses think they have it bad!

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I remember I used to go to a cafe at Worlds End in Chelsea on Saturday mornings. My friend Andrew always ordered this particular type of sandwich that only they did only for him. Each time he came in the cafe he exchanged a nod with the lady at the counter and the sandwich was made up for him with all his favourite ingredients in it. What a sandwich! he said one day. It keeps me going the whole day. There’s just one thing. They will insist in putting raisins in it and I don’t like raisins. Why don’t you tell them? I said. It wouldn’t be nice, he said. It’s almost perfect. Why create a problem?

Anyway, this routine of the sandwich continued for many months. Until one day for some reason we were called upon to exchange a few words with the lady at the counter. When you make that little sign I know exactly what you want, she said. That’s right, said Andrew, After all, it’s so rare to get a relationship work so neatly and so nicely as this one. The perfect triangulation betwwen two people and a product. Yes, said the lady, turning to her co-worker. He wants some raisins put in. It makes all the difference, doesn’t it? We nodded and smiled back. Somehow the magic had gone.

There is something emblematic in this story. We set things up just right, but something, some confusion or misapprehension, will always come and puncture your perfect system.

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Mid-life crisis is a term I have never really believed in. I realized it was never a valid term for me. I didn’t have a regular-type job and a wife and kids and a car and a house in the suburbs. I didn’t ever think I was on a career path anywhere. Mid-life crises were for people with those kind of things who arrived at a certain stage and realized they weren’t going anywhere special after all.

Now I don’t believe in mid-life crises for anyone. I think it’s a made-up condition because our culture only wants young people doing certain things; driving fast cars and wearing tight jeans. If you’re old and wear tight jeans, it’s a mid-life crisis. Why can’t it just be an older, maybe fatter person in a pair of tight jeans? It is easier to pathologise those who don’t flatter the brands.

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When the Jehovah’s witness people come to my door I take them in. I like to explain where they are going wrong. They have a love of exegesis. They are literary critics manques. They love to pick apart the texts of the bible. That’s wonderful, I say. Come into my home. I too have a love of exegesis. I bring them in. They are already confused. You know there are other texts other than the bible. Look at all these books on my bookshelves. It is a world of analysis. Hours of discovery in the forms and shapes of texts, their cross-references, their sub-textuality, skirmishes in textual authority. Why only the other day I was looking at the Marquis de Sade’s Justine. Thay are unfamiliar with this text. They remain guarded. They are not doing what they came here to do, which is make me believe that all these texts are true. They leave me with a leaflet. Come again soon, I say. They back away. He was crazy, they must be laughing to themselves. He reads that stuff, but he doesn’t believe any of it!

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For a number of years now the expression I’ve have been aiming to post up on my face when I am reacting to nothing in particular is disinterested but alert. Disinterested but alert.This has seemed to me to be the right solution. This works nicely with one of my new mantras which goes empathy yes; sympathy no. In the gym you see a lot of poor choice faces. Men do angry in  the gym. It is allied to aggressive, which men like to do as a default setting. Women do preoccupied. Preoccupied is part of the business of avoiding men. Hence the great fuss with the smartphone and the i-pod. However, the other day I saw myself doing disinterested but alert on a series of photos and was disappointed to note that disinterested but alert was beginning to slide into what you might call vacant and confused. And unhappy. Vacant, confused and unhappy. If I do some trick with the mouth, give it the inkling of a smile (nothing too overt, just the ghost of a smile), I might get away with it. Unhappy would go. A smile would occupy the vacant. Confused would necessarily disappear if I’m inhabited. The only problem, looking in the mirror now, is that a new attribute has arrived. Smug. 

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I do understand the problems Man Utd may have fitting Angel di Maria into their starting line-up. It may entail switching from Van Graal’s 3-5-2 or 3-5-1-1 to a more conventional 4-4-2 or sacrificing Juan Mata. It must certainly mean pigeon-shooting down the birdbrained Ashley Young. There are any number of issues to deal with in guaranteeing that you retain the requisite amount of steel, pace and guile in the starting line-up when a new player is acquired. Why, I myself have been going through similar logistical and tactical heart-searching with my purchase of a camelbone chess set (one hump or two? This was one question I stupidly neglected to ask of the chess shopman). I chose the particular design over the Isle of Lewes set. It has an Ottoman or a central Asian quality of florid decoration and rooks that look like minarets that fits neatly into my mainly South Caucasian lounge. But how do I find a place for it on one of the limited number of tables and surfaces availablel in the living space. A simple matter of ditching the small coffee table usually used for supporting a selection of magazines you might think, but no, as these carefully curated Zeitschriften have a key place in the global aesthetic of the room. Like Van Graal, finding my top top formation may take some considerable time.

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