I am spending a week with my olde dad (90). It is a very hot day. Must be 26 degrees. I am sitting in our little square of garden on a deck chair. Half the garden disappeared when the extension was put in. Now there’s just this bit. What time is it? I ask my dad. He is inside wearing a vest and thick shirt and thick socks, long johns and a pair of thick trousers and heavy duty slippers. It is about three o’clock. I’d dropped off in the deck chair after lunch. Dad says Ah. I repeat the question. The clock is in the house. What time is it? Dad says Ah. I can’t see the clock from where I am on the deck chair. What time is it? This time he says What type of what? I repeat: What time is it? and point impatiently at an imaginary wristwatch on my wrist. This is not for anyone’s benefit. He can’t see me. Ah! he says after a minute (really. A minute!) He emerges into the garden. It’s a quarter to twelve. I know it’s not a quarter to twelve. It’s not a quarter to twelve, I say. How can it be a quarter to twelve. It was half past one when we had that salad. Ah! My dad goes back into the house. He comes out after about five minutes (really. five minutes!). It’s a quarter past three, he says. Right. I’ve got the time now. That took about fifteen minutes. I get up and go in the house. Time to go out. I glance at the clock as I pas by. It’s not a quarter past three. It’s a quarter to three. Let that be a lesson to me. Next time just get up from the deck chair and go and look at the clock myself.

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Oh, you are nowhere without a tatoo these days. As a little exercise on the bus in Manchester I thought I’d try and find someone without a tatoo. Not easy. All the young people have tatoos. All the single mothers have tatoos. The students have tatoos. There was an old woman. She won’t have one. But wait, there it is, a serpent sneaking up her ankle. And that woman over there won’t have one, will she? Oh but she will. It’s creeping up her neck from out of her collar. There’s a baby in her pram; she hasn’t got one. Yet.
What are the functions of the tatoo? One, it is decorative. Two, it signifies apartenance. You post up your tribe to the world. Three, it signifies your creed. Three reasons to exhibit a tatoo. As a tatoo-wearer you are committed to aestheics. You are tribal. You need to define and publicize your beliefs. It was traditionally a working class aesthetic. The patricians would not look to define themselves. The patrician did not commit. He hedged his bets. The patrician was a diplomat. A Hermes. He held himself in a number of loci. His identity was slippery. He had a bank account in Switzerland or on the Isle of Man. Just in case. For the tatoo-wearer there is no just in case. You only define yourself if you are committed to remaining fixed. What is the old woamn saying? I may look a bit thick round the waist these days, but I’m still basically a sleek and serpentine individual. I have not changed.
But what is this blog of mine if not an attempt to define? Although I do find that much of its material is the impossibility of definition and how changeable identity is.
I confess I am not a lover of the tatoo. Neither as a decorative feature nor as an idea. Of course, this is mostly a generational, cultural thing. I am not for a moment claimimg that I can transcend my own particular tribe and hold an individual opinion on the matter. Oops! Crown Point Denton. Time to get off the bus

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How did it come to pass that I find myself sitting here in some fancy restaurant looking out over the Caspian Sea, being introduced by my minder as VIP, given the best seat in the house so that everyone stands up as I walk by? How did I get here? These are usual existential questions that arise from time to time. But I could equally ask myself next week: how did it happen that I find myself sitting in this armchair at home in the specific location of Kennington London England picking my nose?
The truth is that all specifics seem too random. Why this and not that? Our life should be universal not particular. The particular always seems unlikely.
Much the same instinct comes into play when we think about the unlikeliness of the specialness of, say, the historical Jesus Christ. A bloke with a beard in an iron age tribe in some desert region in the back of beyong 2000 years ago. How could that specificity be universal enough for us today, here?
I suppose one job of art over the years has been to aggrandize the specific.
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Footballers, especially those from South America and Africa, are religious people. Catholic or muslim, before they start a match they look up to the heavens and pray. With God’s help, they say, we will win this match. The trouble is, even god can’t make both sides win. You sometimes think that at the end of the match when Brazil have lost, say, what are the players thinking about god’s participation. Did he forsake them in their hour of need?
It is at such times that we turn to St Augustine, who explains about suffering, deserved or undeserved: “For even in the likeness of the sufferings, there remains an unlikeness in the sufferers; and though exposed to the same anguish, virtue and vice are not the same thing. For as the same fire causes gold to glow brighter, and chaff to smoke, under the same flail the straw is beaten small, while the grain is cleansed…so the same violence of affliction proves, purges, clarifies the good, but damns, ruins, exterminates the wicked.” (City of God)
So, the same suffering is imposed on virtuous and evil alike, but for Brazil, losing 1-7 against Germany, the suffering is there to purge and clarify them. In brief, it is all part of a greater good. Augustine of Hippo himself would have been an Algeria supporter. I wonder how he would have reacted to the painful exit at the hands of the Germans.
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Better than sex, says the amply tatooed haircut of a footballer at the World Cup, referring to the goal he has scored. I suppose the moment the back of the net ripples or bulges or shimmers is tantamount to the orgasm. Reminding me of George Steiner on chess: “As one breathes in the first scent of victory – a musky, heady, faintly metallic aura, totally indescribable to a non-player – the skin tautens at one’s temples, and one’s fingers throb. The poets lie about orgasm. It is a small chancey business, its particularities immediately effaced even from the most roseate memories, compared to the crescendo of triumph in chess, to the tide of light and release that races over mind and knotted body as the opponent’s king, inert in the fatal web one has spun, falls on the board.”
Not wrong as far as the moment of release is concerned. Why even I myself have on rare occasions experienced difficulty in… no matter… no matter. Though perhaps the metallic sensuality might be an acquired taste.
More conventional evocations of performances of the brouhahha of orgasm surface perhaps in the gorgeous explosions of late 19th and early 20th Century symphonic music. Wagnerian climaxes were specifically interpreted as sexual at the time, and Brahm’s tendancy to evade that moment has been frequently linked to his repressed libido. For me, it is Mahler’s crystalline, shattering dread climaxes, shot through with imperfectly sated desire and the forlorn attempty to capture that fugitive instant that best recreate culmination. One-nil!
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Coriolanus as a piece of writing feels very close to Macbeth. They were probably written within a year or so of each other; 1606; 1607; 1608? Not only are they both bound by blood, but in both there is an almost glutinous concentration of language. The words stick to each other; refuse to disadhere; as though there was a desire to arrive at inarticulacy; an impatience with exactitude and pernickitiness.

“Screw your courage to the sticking place” says Lady Macbeth. Sticking place does mean something, though there is dispute about exactly what (a viol’s strings? a crossbow cord?) but Shakespeare chooses these words because it has the feel of language being battered, bludgeoned into existence. He is jamming stuff together,purposefully making it hard for us to disentangle the skein.

“If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well

It were done quickly. If th’assassination

Could trammel up the consequence and catch

With his surcease success.” (Macbeth 1 vii)

Compare

“In a rebellion,

When what’s not meet but what must be was law,

Then were they chosen. In a better hour

Let what is meet be said it must be meet

And throw their power i’ th’ dust.     (Coriolanus 3 i)

This is like Beethoven’s Great Fugue. Living on the edge of our ability to contain it. Key words colliding and ricocheting back into focus. Just about organised but pretty close to disorganised. That position on the ridge between understanding and confusion. The place where words are most thrilling.

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My friend Emma tells me that they use the word softener for that supposedly clever thing when someone puts out a negative message but starts with a positive softener. As in: Esmerelda is certainly a bright student but she has difficulties engaging with her work or Thank you very much for your response which was very useful in many ways though I was hoping you might have given me the information I was actually asking for or BigUsuryCorporation is pleased to report that we aim to create five hundred jobs in the South East of England (or The Home Counties because only the South East if home). There will also be the creation of a more flexible work force environment in the North of the country.

Anyway, I heard a good one the other day as I was pulling into Clapham Junction on the train: We are now arriving in Clapham Junction. An excellent service is running on all underground lines (there are no underground stations at Clapham Junction), as well as on the Docklands Light Railway (which is five miles away in East London). At present due to signal failures there are delays of 45 minutes on trains running to East Croydon (they do run from Clapham Junction).

When someone starts up with their softener now I just go yeah yeah yeah and make a turning motion with my hands as if to say can we cut to the chase please. My aim is to reverse the softener. Make it into a hardener, as in Esmeralda is a rubbish student who hasn’t done a stroke of work all year. she did get me a nice present though.

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I read how the Brazilian fans in the crowd at the match between England and Italy were unhappy with English fans for not joining in with the Mexican wave. The English position, as propagated and engendered by the media, is that we are serious football fans focused on the match and so are loath to engage with a Mexican wave. The view of most other nations, also serious football lovers, is that the Mexican wave is part of the event and should be respected. The game is a cultural event and not just a result, especially at a World Cup.

The French call the English ‘hypocrites’ when anglo-saxons avoid confrontation by, say, not complaining in a restaurant. I think it is a different use of the word from the English understanding. We see the avoidance of confrontation as diplomatic, rather suave and civilized. For many other nations it can be spineless and pathetic. My sympathies are in both camps. Sometimes the creation of conflict over a nothing makes no sense, but it can also be a lack of engagement in the moment, the refusal to have a stake in things.

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Last night I watched Germany playing in the World Cup in a German bar. They drew. I supported them. Supporting them – normally when they play England I am against them – but supporting them this time, they looked a bit rubbish. Maybe it is my support that makes teams look rubbish.

In Oxford the other day I was spirited back to when I was an undergraduate there and how ill-at-ease I sometimes felt in the presence of that upper middle class English drawl. Again I felt unable to cope with it. And yet in London now I cope well enough with the upper middle class.

I remember sitting in as a student on a trial Maths class for a trialing teacher some years back. When the poor guy started up with his x and his y and his axes and stuff like that my mind immediately and faultlessly wandered off to another place, as it had done when I was a boy at school trying to learn Maths for real.

A context is reconstructed or reappropriated and we are easily sunk again. Back in the old trap.

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Work as leisure and leisure as work. Today is the first day of the second half of that handy maxim which keeps my house in order. The structured part of my year ends and an empty zone of ten weks begins. This is holiday; a painful time of year; an April with its cruel roots. Every morning I wake up to a desert.

Today I aim to slice the period up into units of work: bits of writing; bits of reading; bits of travel; bits of money-making if that becomes necessary. Making leisure into work. Does that make me a masochist? But no because, remember, I also have the competence of making work into leisure.

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