I hear one of my nieces was confirmed last week, confirmed in the Catholic church I mean. Apparently, she chose the confirmation name Matilda, after St Matilda, who is a new one on me. Must look her up. Normally female saints in particular are only known by the specifics of their lurid martyrdom: stretched out on a wheel; hanged, drawn or quartered or all three; drowned in a river; crucified upside-down, rightside-up, inside-out or back-to-front; dumped in a cauldron of scalding oil. Dark age persecutors were out doing each other on a daily basis to do the female Christian to death with an ever more novel twist.

My confirmation name was John. As in John the Baptist. We had to know the story of our saint and be able to tell it to the Parish priest. Mine was easy and fun. He had his head chopped off. Looking back now, he was a pretty good one for me. The messenger of the Lord. Always seen myself as a kind of Hermes. Also a wild man, they say about John the Baptist. That suits me less. That would be my brother, rather. Though I think he was a Francis, who is the Dr Doolittle saint. That probably suited him too.

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It could be that the greatest invention of Catholicism is the sacrament of the Mass. Not its content but its form; not its message but its medium, which is ritual. In every church in every country the same words are spoken; the same act ( the transformation of bread and wine into flesh and blood) supposedly accomplished. The congregation know where they stand. Rich or poor; foreign or domestic. The product is standardised. For comfort; for familiarity; for control of the maverick.

Macdonalds has learnt this lesson. As far as possible, brand identity requires the BigMac or the Chicken Macnugget or the MacMcMuffin or the MacMonkeyburger or whatever it is they’re up to these days to be the same all over the world. The colours, the tags: “I’m lovin’ it”. Give or take a dodgy translation or two. Take this and eat it, in memory of me. Take this and drink it, in memory of me.

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When the England football team gets beat in a friendly the manager says it was a useful lesson on the way to the World Cup. When they get to Brazil and are knocked out in the group stages, they have learnt a lot about the players, who have gained valuable experience  on the way to France 2016. When they get to France and suffer a humiliating defeat at the hands of some so-called minnow, it was part of a useful learning curve. No individual match seems to matter. Each game is a look at options for a future game, and that future never comes. Surely the healthiest way to play the game, any game, is to invest in it as much as you can.

Of course, this fetichisation of the ultimate outcome is part of Western civilization. The truth is there is no end product. Each end product is each moment. So when we get to the end of a week and say “Phew! I’m glad that’s over”, what ultimate goal do we think we are striving for? Godot’s not coming. Get it, Roy?
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On the train they said ‘the train has been delayed because of trespassers on the rails, so we are ten minutes late. We apologise etc etc‘. They love apologising now. Then a few minutes later they say once again that the train has been delayed by ten minutes because of trespassers on the tracks’. The they say it again a few minutes later:’Once again the train has been delayed…’ What this does not mean is that the train has been delayed three times by three separate set of trespassers or the same trespassers managing by some remarkable feat to get to three different places on the line three times to delay the train. What they want it to mean is that we are telling you this once again. I wonder what they think the once again contains: world-weariness? Self-awareness? It makes for a cleverer train announcer. If he actually communicated efficiently it would have to be something like: I repeat trespassers have been on the tracks. More formal; more hectoring.

In France they also manage to get my goat with a train announcement when they say that the bar will be open for dix minutes supplementaires when they mean to say dix minutes de plus. Ten minutes more, not ten extra minutes. Here I suppose they want to translate a sense of festivity, as though for this special occasion we are letting you buy another bottle of kronenbourg before we pull into Lyon station. But that would be the shadow of a meaning carrying weight alongside the critical meaning, and both meanings being in more or less direct contradiction of each other.

In both cases it is a case of sacrificing precision for tone. I shouldn’t worry. I do a lot of that myself.

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When I sleep in my dad’s house as I did two nights ago I sleep on the floor in the living room downstairs. When I want to go to sleep I have to try and get my dad to go upstairs to bed. He doesn’t go to bed till one or so normally, so that can be difficult. It reminds me of Samuel Beckett’s character Watt from his novel of the same name, who spends much time rearranging limited numbers of items in limited numbers of positions. In a famous scene he does this will pebbles (or are they coins?) into a set of pockets. My dad is like that. I am stretched out in the floor in sleeping position.

Dad:       I’ll switch the lights off

Me:         Right dad.

Dad:       I can’t see to go through now.

Me:         Put the hall light on.

Dad:       I haven’t locked the back door.

Me:        Right dad.

Dad       I’ll have to put the light on again.

Me:        Right dad.

Dad       I need that hall light on again.

Me:       Right dad.

Dad:     I didn’t take my pil.

Me:      Right dad. What’s it for?

Dad      Old people’s things.

Me:       Right dad.

Dad:     I’ll put the hall light on again.

Me:       Right dad.

Dad:     I can switch this light off now.

Me:       Right dad. Remember to switch the hall light off when you go up.

Dad:     Did I bolt the door?

Me:      Don’t know dad.

Dad:     I’ll put that light on.

And so on.

Martin Creed should live with my dad for a few nights. That’d sort him out.

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In music great moments are often those where an instrument or a voice does not sound like itself. In last night’s symphony (Mahler 9, beautifully played) a long note from a basoon felt like a creaking door, a blast fron the tuba like an old boiler about to shatter or the fog-horn of a sinking Titanic. There is a particular Schumann lied from the Eichendorff Liederkreis (Auf einer Burg) where Fischer-Dieskau makes the whole song sound like a long, existentilal yawn (yawn in a good sense, a natural sinuous exhalation). When an orchestra sounds like itself, a load of strings and a set of brass, it is at its least interesting.

I suppose we always want things not to be themselves. It is why we love surprising  metaphor, which spirits us away to another place. There was a lovely one in Coronation Street the other day when a character turns up out of the blue and someone says he’s like a dog in a playground at primary school. This recalled the sudden glee that some children felt (not me, I don’t love dogs) when a strange dog somehow got into the playground at break time. It’s like when you see someone out of context, nurses or policemen without their uniform for example, dressed in civvies. At such moments you say: Hallo. I didn’t recognize with you clothes on.

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Exclusion is part of life. It is the negative space we may choose to focus on. Poignantly, when you hear, say, a group of chattering Russian children it is difficult not to feel a deep sense of being outside a world of beauty, of wit, of spontaneity, along with the illogical though instinctive sense that these children must be of high intellect to be able to converse in this tongue that is a mystery to me. Fortunately, they are often dullards.

George Steiner wrote of the Icelandic language lying “like a thorn hedge around those who can neither understand nor speak it”. Does this minority tongue represent an elite space to its initiates or a shameful under-tongue?

Proust’s child protagonist undergoes similar exclusion:

“Une langue que nous ne savons pas est un palais clos dans lequel celle que nous aimons peut nous tromper, sans que, restes au dehors et desesperement crispes dans notre impuissance, nous parvenons a rien voir, a rien empecher.”

(A language that we do not know is a closed palace in which the person we love can deceive us and,where, locked on the outside and desperately stressed and impotent, we are unable to see or do anything.) 

Characteristically, Proust gives it an erotic charge.

Well, nobody can be included everywhere. The older we get, the more we feel excluded from beauty, from fun, from unthinkingness. And the crime of youth is often to desire too much to be included everywhere. There are so many spaces and understandings of spaces, it is wise to opt out of a broad slice of them.

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I gleam with pleasure when praised by my dentist this morning. He said you are keeping these teeth in very good condition. I modestly refrained from acknowledging the praise (my mouth was open at the time). He then said: Are you seeing a hygenist on the side? as though accusing me of marital infidelity. No, I wasn’t, I hastened to reassure him. Well, they’re looking good, he added, as he reopened my mouth for another look. It reminded me of a time at the doctors a couple of years ago when I had gone in for a breathing complaint and I did some test to check for asthma and had to blow into a mask that registered my puff. After a moment looking at the gauge the doctor stepped back and said: Well! You have remarkable lungs! Again, I beamed with pride. Maybe it is that I never get any other praise from anyone else, maybe that’s why I beam with pride at praise from a dentist and a doctor. Ah well. Better than no praise at all, I suppose. They’ll put it on my tombstone. Admirable buccal hygiene and remarkable lungs.

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Twenty-five years ago Francis Fukuyama wrote his essay on the end of history. Communism was on the way out and Capitalism had won. I remember heads of the European Union talking about the construction of Europe, monetary union and greater political integration as a historical inevitability. I have friends with backgrounds in literature who have stopped reading at Samuel Beckett, believing the discourse that the dribbling away of the Beckettian voice into silence is the final outcome of fiction; all gibbering diminishing into silence.

And yet life goes on. History goes on. New ideologies spring up (religious or social). There is no inevitability about Europe. Even at the time I remember shaking my head at the outdated and unhealthy notion of inevitability expressed by someone who must have had no conception of what history actually lands you with, and it isn’t inevitabilities. And writers go on writing. People go on gibbering. Sorry if that’s all it is, but if it’s all it is now, it’s all it ever was. And those other plotters of our destiny, the economists, have been proved to have no clue about inevitabilities either!

The fact is that all this teleological fetishism about the end and the inevitable are in flagrant contradiction of the facts that go on all around us; people living, plotting, striving, engaging, having a pint of beer. Shakespeare knew that things don’t end; there are no conclusions. At the end of his history plays , his tragedies, the seeds of the next new tragedy are there. A new king is on the throne and he ain’t perfect either and there’s this younger nephew with ambition in his eyes. A serious mind will find  it is impossible to predict his own next action or instinct, let alone the end of Fukuyama history.

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The following does not necessarily mean that I am miserly, but it might.

In my wallet I carry the minimum amount of money. On my Oyster travel card I put the minimum amount so that I can travel for just one day. When I go to the supermarket I shop for just one meal. I do not like having plans (this was something my mum always used to say, I recall. And while on the subject of my mum, she never liked telling people she was going to visit. She did not phone Aunty Molly to see if she was in. I used to say, just phone her.  But no, we just travelled six miles and when she was out we went back home, not even particularly disappointed. It was just the way of things. The idea of a call was as though blasphemy to my mum. As was the idea of knocking on the door of Auntie Molly’s house. Or Auntie Peggy’s. And never use the front door. Always the back door. And just walk in.) I digress, but it may be relevant.

So how do I analyse this short-termism? On the few occasions I have gone out with wads of cash on me my confidence has risen. I am generally not short on confidence but more could do no harm. Or maybe it could. I suppose I like to feel the specific connection between a purchase and my cash. Maybe that reins in my spending. But I’m not a big spender anyway. My big problem is creating and maintaining an appetite, not curbing one. Ce n’est pas la nourriture qui comple, c’est l’appetit, as I like to say. As you get older, the main job is exploring your appetite. It goes against the grain, but it has to be done. For example, I’d like to find some courses on Ancient Babylonian.

I suppose I just like inching forward. I’m an incrementalist.

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