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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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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