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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Metaphors can easily pull you off the straight and narrow.

Sexism: on why promiscuity amongst men is acceptable but not amongst women. A key that can open any door is a good key but a lock that allows any key to open it is a bad lock.

Racism: on national identity. Just because a cow is born in a stable, it doesn’t mean it’s a horse.

Ageism: When my screwdriver is worn out I throw it away.

Though metaphor isn’t all bad. Consider a favourite from John Donne.

Our two souls therefore which are one…

If they be two, they are two so

As stiff twin compasses are two.

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

To move, but doth, if th’other do.

And though it in the centre sit.

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt though be to me, who must

Like th’other foo obliquely run,

Thy firmness draws my circle just,

And makes me end where I begun.

Which has all the controlled serenity of a Bach fugue.

Not always rubbish.

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The other day there was a knock at the door. I was cooking. I had an apron on. I bought this apron a couple of months back. It also serves as a serviette when I’m eating. I also had flour on my hands. I opened the front door. It was a charity person. Would you like to participate etc etc.It was about 8 PM. I now have a principal that I will give money to charity only in my own time, so I trotted out my habitual line. I would have to speak to my partner about it and my partner isn’t here this evening. Ever the new man. I may in an earlier post have mentioned this little line of mine. I am rather proud of it. When you say it you are untouchable. The she said: when he gets back will you discuss it with him? In my apron and holding my befloured hands up at what must have seemed a precious angle I irritably corrected the charity woman. When she gets back I will discuss it with her. It is very annoying to have the gender of ones invented partner mistaken. Maybe I’ll drop the word partner for next time.

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I am, I realise, mostly unwilling to deviate in my virtual life from my general behaviour in my real life. Let me explain this. When I play chess or fantasize or invent stories I am unwilling to let the protagonists of my consciousness deviate from what my normal behaviour would be. That sounds as if I have no imaginative capacity to push away from my habitual functioning. This might be true. It might also be true that I am taking these fictional characters that partake of me so seriously that I refuse to invest them with unrealistic behaviour.

Recently I have thought about experimenting. In chess I see that the only way to be successful is by playing aggressively from the start. This goes against my natural instinct. Equally, it might be an idea to give the characters in a piece of writing that partake of me (I separate characters in stories into two categories: those who are bits of the writer/reader and those who aren’t)  action that places them outside the usual realm of my actions. What the hell! Let’s push the boat out. As they used to say, they can’t touch you for it!

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I remember quite a few years ago writing a sentence about some people smoking, saying they were holding onto themselves at the cigarette end lest they give folly a vent. Quite a pompous line but it was meant to express the way people need a prop. They always have done. In the Wild West a man had his gun and today we hold onto ourselves at the smart phone end or else at the ipod end. It is difficult not to have some pap or other. I manage to avoid the smart phone gesture, mostly because I don’t have a smart phone, but have a history of nail-biting and knuckle gnawing. I’m human; I need some succour. Get rid of that and I’ll be zen. Though there’ll still be those itches that need countering; nostril itches; bottom itches; wick of the eye itches. The itch is there to keep us humble.

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I have, I realise, a strange pathology. When I am travelling on the bus and coming close to Big Ben I refrain from looking at my own watch or mobile phone to find out the time but wait until I come into view of Big Ben. My thinking is that I should be sponsoring public time pieces. There is of course no extra expense from how many times you consult your own watch or phone. You do not wear out your watch by looking at it. Big Ben himself will not register when you look at him and respond with an appreciative nod. I am not really demonstrating my respect for public services by using the facilities provided. My devotion to public timepieces extends to other public clocks in shops or town hall towers. I prefer to use them rather than my own poor neglected clock face, which must be muttering under its breath, unloved, and raising its eyes to the heavens (I don’t know why I bother!)

Does this betray my naive faith in civic life? There is no reason to believe that a public clock would work better than my personal one. Quite the opposite in fact, as I monitor my own and have no control over the public ones. It is just another instance of the interference between the different bits of your mind that can set up instinctive reactions that don’t work. It also shows how we like to anthropomorphize the objects of our daily life. I like to give all my household objects a crack of the whip. Not to get equal use out of all of them but, rather, so as not to hurt their feelings. I’m nice like that.

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Fail again fail better. So notes one of Samuel Beckett’s relentless voices with characteristic grim humour and bleak stoicism. Discordantly I found this line printed on someone’s t-shirt in the gym the other day. A fellow Beckett-lover perhaps.More likely, the mantra of a muscle builder. Only by tearing the muscle through heavy training can the muscle rebuild bigger. Muscle is increased through failure. Fail again fail better. A perfectly logical mantra for a body builder.

And so we have the strange collision of Samuel Beckett and the modern world of weight training. Culture high and low. A collision I like. My own personal snobbery is to shun the middle brow. I like Coronation Street and Proust; Man Utd and Mahler; A way forward in snobbery. Le nouveau snobisme.

Today is the last day of the Daumier exhibition at the Royal Academy. I had planned going. I like Daumier. It rained today. I haven’t gone. I’m making a lentil soup instead. I nearly went on Friday. Friday is late night opening. I didn’t go. I put a chicken in the oven.

It’s not just the inconveniance of negotiating masses of people plonking their big heads flush in front of a little canvas or sketch. There’s my back too. My back mostly doesn’t trouble me much nowadays. Not since I started focusing on exercising it. But it remembers its role when I go to an exhibition. My assertion has always been that my back doesn’t like slow and interrupted walking, the stopping and starting of a museum visit. My back needs to be moving at a regular velocity. I don’t know what a back specialist would make of this. Though I think I am a bit of a back specialist myself by now. I think I’ve figured it out. My back also plays up on a shopping trip with someone who is more taken with shop windows than I am. It could be that these are activities I do not love and my unconscious, in the form of my back, is having its say. Maybe if I booked my back in for analysis it could really have its say, get the whole thing off its chest and never trouble me again.

There is also the little matter of payment. I am to pay the art gallery ten or fifteen pounds for the privilege of having it give me a backache for the rest of the day. Do you blame me?

Maybe I just don’t like art galleries.

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There is a mildly tragic melancholy about the ex-footballer. Footballers from the eighties and before you understand. They made money but not that much money. I remember asking my dad how much Bobby Charlton earned. £100 a week was what my dad thought. He was probably about right. When their career was over they put their savings into buying a bar in Spain or a garage in Stretford and that was it. Then, a couple of years later, you read about them selling their cup medal and England caps for a few quid.

Today money is not the issue. If you are earning £100,000 a week, you don’t need much of a career. But the melancholy abides. What do they do after the punditry gig falls through? Lots of golf, obviously. A fair deal of gambling. The purchase of a racehorse? But what do they do on a rainy Tuesday afternoon flanked by their twin garages in their dreadful suburbs?

I remember reading an article in the French newspaper ‘Liberation’ on the death of the legendary Russian goalkeeper Lev Yashin, the ‘Spider’.The modest, not to say poverty-striken, life he had eked out after his career as a goalkeeper was over. Peter Handke’s novel ‘Angst des Tormanns vor dem Elfmeter’ (The Anxiety of the Goalkeeper at the Penalty kick) evokes the emptiness of all that non-match time. When I was a boy travelling in the minibus to play a match after school, I remember looking out of the window at normal people in the street, people who didn’t have a cup match coming up in half an hour. What empty lives they had, I remember thinking.

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This is my 50th post on peoplearerubbish.com and as a kind of coda to the blog, I can view, as from a great height, the preoccupations which have littered the space. They provide, I suppose, a jigsaw profile.

I am interested/irritated by my routine (my cafe, my seats, my eating habits): by words and their imperfections; by contemporary culture; by the gap between the imagination and reality; by being unable to conclude; by class; by looking back at the past again (often childhood); by familiarity; by mistakes; by randomness.

So are they rubbish? The investigation continues.

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