I caught a few minutes of a BBC dramatisation yesterday when I was impatiently waiting for ‘Match of the Day’ to start. It is called ‘Atlantis’ and puts together different stories from the Ancient world in a friendly adventure Saturday-night format. The costumes look good, as ever with these television adaptations and what they call the production values are all fine, but why do they never try and push the dialogue out into a more alien zone. I know they would have spoken Greek, so whatever words are chosen are a compromise anyway, but the dialogue uttered by Pythagoras or Pasiphae or Ariadne make them sound as if they are in a suburban sit-com from the 1970s.  Breakfast is the most important meal of the day says some bearskin-clad heavy. Did they really say stuff like that in Ancient Atlantis? I should go, says what looks like a suitor for Ariadne’s hand, as though he were an embarassed public school boy. And best of all: you’ve tidied up, uttered by some proto-Feminist female to some warrior type (male). It just doesn’t work as drama if we are forever being thrust back to our own time. The producers may well claim they want to make it relevant to a modern audience, but if they think anything alien will be rejected by contemporary viewers, why don’t they get Pythagoras and Ariadne to live in a gated community just outside Harpenden. The Persians invaders or whoever are due to turn up later in the series  could be men in hard hats starting work on High Speed Two.

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Reading a biography of Mahler it strikes me that the person he most reminds me of is Jose Mourinho. Both are constantly on the move. Porto to Chelsea; Chelsea to Inter; Inter to Real and then back to Chelsea, for the Happy One. And Mahler was the same. The Prague Opera; the Budapest Opera; the Vienna Court Opera. A mixture of conscious intriguing plus hot-headed inability to keep their mouths shut sent these two special ones careering from one institution to the next. Both football coach and orchestra conductor (which is what Mahler’s main money-making activity was) are engaged on similar activities (I actually saw Fabio Capello at a Mahler concert a few years ago); they set the tone for orchestra or squad and represent the formation but don’t actually make the play themselves. Elias Canetti in his study of Crowds and Power says you can understand all you need to know about power by observing an orchestra conductor at work. He stands while the orchestra sits; he has the entire score in front of him where the orchestra members have component parts. His hands command and rebuke. And this infantile fascination with the law-giver, the oracle, has invaded the football pitch. Cameras now document every gesture, twitch and glance of the Special One. The term Special One clearly comes from Jose’s infelicitous translation from the Romance languages notion of ‘special’ which is more ‘particular’ in the sense of ‘different’, but its ongoing journalistic currency is significant.

There is an unpleasant line that runs Mahler – Furtwangler – Karajan. Hitler would be a branch off that line. One man (rarely a woman) is made to embody a collective aspiration, with a quasi-mystical power. Historically, the Germans have best embodied the tendency, though you could do another little Italian branch with Mussolini and Di Cannio. Hodgson is a kind of Chamberlain. Of course, what we must always say is that in the end it is the orchestra that plays the music, the players that score the goals and individuals (albeit in uniforms) that pull the triggers.

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On Saturday I went to Sluice, an anti-Freeze, art fair. Not my thing really. Contemporary art gets too much play time in this country for no good reason. But there was a little talk between curators that I attended, where the idea was expressed that curating was and had been for quite a time a part of the art product itself. I suppose it is. If it is, it parallels with another creeping phenomenon. In ‘The X-Factor’ the judges, who then become curators of the singers, have become the centre of attraction. Glamour accretes around them. It reminds me of how accountants, now (when they can manage this) called consultants, have acquired strange glamour, so that working for, say, Accenture is seen as a sexy job rather than the dull bean counter role it used to be viewed as. Those closest to money now have the power to also sex themselves up. It is the equivalent to an ape putting on false eyelashes and lipstick, and, many now seem to want to tart themselves up in that way.
Marx, in Prawer’s translation, says it well:
“What I am and what I can do is not at all determined by my individuality. I am ugly but can buy myself the most beautiful woman in the world, for the effect of ugliness, its power to repel, has been annihilated by money…Does not money transform all my incapacities into their opposite?”
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When I was on the South Bank yesterday I noticed a Charlie Chaplin looking rather forlorn. One of those performers who stand on a raised box and punctuate keeping deathly still with the odd theatrical gesture. It was drizzeling. Business was slow. This Chaplin was peeved.

Later, after the concert I’d attended, I was walking back the same way and found myself behind the Chaplin who was consulting his mobile phone as he went along the river promenade. I then heard him say sternly to a Frankenstein figure “All right. That’s it!” The Frankenstein, himself stood on a raised box and being observed, perhaps even tipped, by a couple of tourists, glared back, annoyed as only a Frankenstein’s monster can be. Maybe he had stolen Chaplin’s pitch.

As I passed them I looked back. The two were staring each other out and the embarrassed tourists were also staring, confused and disorientated, their trip to the South Bank soured.

It occurs to me now: was this confrontation between two such unlikely protagonists part of the show? Frankenstein versus Chaplin. Like the old horror films where Abbot and Costello met Frankenstein or the Wolfman. If so, the public will need to be educated in the genre before it can work.

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I have noticed that nowadays there is always a dramatic pause after This…. As in This… is the ten o’clock news. Or even on the underground or the bus where a computerized voice tells you that This… is Gloucester road ot This… is Oildrum Avenue.

My pledge is never to pause after this but to just run it on, as though I were uttering a bland bit of unshouting sentence that has no claims to grandeur. It may well be that greater dramatic force will gather around less portentous phrasing.

I have other rhetorical aims too. Never to say: the thing is… I shall, however, endeavour to start some sentences with: the thing isn’t... and see where that lands me. The other term I am actively trying to avoid at the present time is: the gay community or the teaching community. The word community is only ever used in a positive way. When did you last here the term the Klu-Klux clan community. I, of course, have no criticism of the invisible and probably fictional bonds that bind all teachers and gays together. However, words like community do, I believe, smuggle all kinds of nonsense through. Like any other words, their should have their visas checked.

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A new book is due to come out about the daily rituals of creative writers and artists, which will no doubt recount the routines of Proust, Balzac and Beethoven with their excessive or over-pernickety consumption of coffee, the precise timings of Emmanuel Kant’s walks and the early morning habits of any number of scribblers or tunesmiths. Rituals, of course, are the same as routines but doused in the whiff of incense by dint of being performed by grander folk. Routines are rituals minus the sanctimoniouness.

I often consider whether I am a person of rituals/routines or not. Living alone, I believe I have more free time than most people and know how easy it is to lose yourself in an ocean of freedom. A few years ago when I was unhappily freelance I understood I need a structure of sorts, although last year when I worked full time I realized you can have too much. My happiness lies between the two. At weekends I need some shape; the Saturday morning cafe; the Saturday morning newspaper; scrambled eggs for lunch. All little rituals of mine own invention. But nothing ruins a weekend more than chocabloc rituals.

Parents have their rituals/routines set for them by the requirements of their kids. Sitting bedraggled watching an offspring spring off a bouncy castle, they invest in the child as much as Proust with his night shifts over pen and ink was investing in his novel. The lives of parents are locked into rituals/routines. My scrambled eggs are the best I’ve got.

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Frank Ifield was a pop star in the early 60s. He had, I think, a No 1 hit with ‘I remember you’ and two or three more top twenty hits before disappearing into relative obscurity. As a baby and toddler I loved Frank Ifield. This I was told me by mum and dad, although I had no real recollection of him when I was older. Years later in the mid-Seventies when I was a young teenager my mum came running into the living room where I was doing my homework. It was ‘The Frank Ifield Show’ on the telly. I had to watch it because of the family story that I loved Frank Ifield. He sang ‘Would you like to fly in my beautiful balloon?’ which was what everyone was singing in those days. Then he had Ted Rodgers the comic on as his special guest star and was in stitches at Ted’s lame quips. It was a lamentable show and soon taken off the air. But what a betrayal of the family story it would have been to say I did not like Frank Ifield any more, the equivalent of Lear’s daughters rejecting the ageing king.
I remember a similar incident with Uncle Joe and Auntie Pegg. The family story was that I loved jaffa cakes, and when many years later jaffa cakes and marshmallows were on offer I had to choose the jaffa cakes even though I now preferred marshmallows. I watched my sisters eating marshmallows as I was stuck with the jaffa cakes that fate had ordained for me, observed by smiling Joe and Pegg, agents of this inexorable fatality; the family story was being fulfilled.

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L’amour c’est quand vous donnez quelque chose que vous ne possedez pas a quelqu’un qui n’existe pas.
Lorsque les gens tombent amoureux leur facon de voir le monde subit une transformation. Certains ont meme qualifie cette condition de maladie, tant la perception du monde exterieur est changee. Une fois la decision est prise d’accepter la condition d’etre amouteux, notre pauvre souffrant a tendance a voir seulement ce qui lui plait chez l’objet de ses affections. Tout ce que l’autre a ou fait devient l’ideal, et meme la notion de l’ideal s’adapte pour ressembler a l’image du bien-aime. Bref, premier perdant c’est la realite. La personne qu’on croit aimer n’existe pas.
Qui plus est, pour etre a la hauteur de cet amour d’un etre qui est la perfection meme, la personne qui aime ne peut pas rester toute normale. Comment sa realite pourrait-elle seduire l’objet idealise de ses sentiments? Il faut donc que nous nous equippions de qualites, de vertus et de charmes qu’on ne possede pas en realite.
La rencontre de ces deux etre ressemble donc a un rendez-vous de fantomes: celui qui se prend pour quelqu’un d’autre et celle qui n’existe meme pas. Pas etonnant que quand la realite se pointe et le couple se reveille de son sommeil maladif, la deception est grande.
C’est ca, L’amour, mon petit.

(Love is when you give something you do not have to someone who does not exist.
When two people fall in love their way of seeing the world undergoes a metamorphosis. Our perception of the outside world is so transformed that you might see this love as a kind of sickness. Now once the decision is taken to be ‘in love’, the poor patient tends to see only the good things in the object of his affections. Everything that the other person has or does becomes the ideal, and even the notion of what is ideal adapts to resemble the image of the true-love. So reality is the first loser. The person we think we love does not exist.
Moreover, to be remarkable enough to merit the love of this person who is perfection itself, you cannot remain your normal self. How could the truth about you succeed in seducing the idealised object of your affections? So we must equip ourselves with qualities, virtues and charms that we don’t really possess.
So the meeting of these two people is like a rendezvous of two ghosts: the one who takes himself to be someone else hitching up with the one who doesn’t even exist. It is hardly surprising that when the scales fall from their eyes and the couple wakes up from their sickness, the disappointment is great indeed.
That is love, my child)

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My friend knew a Turkish man in Istanbul whom she thought we could have a coffee with while we were there. We received the text from the Turkish friend.
‘We will pick you up. Don’t eat much this afternoon.’
Immediately Western European fatigue is ignited. ‘We’? How many of them are there? I envisage a Pride of Oriental cousins. ‘Don’t eat too much’? A seven course meal with the requirement not to insult the hosts. How to phrase the reply? How to dampen enthusiasm?
‘Sounds great. Don’t go to too much trouble. Feeling a bit tired. Will need to be back by 11.30.’
As we text the message back we feel a bit pathetic. Practically every word of the reply was an attempt to mitigate any potential experience. Well, I am tired. The call to prayer has woken me up at five every morning this week.
Anyway, it turned out quite nice in the end. We are a bit rubbish.
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I came to flying late. I used to go to Paris by the night ferry. When I could afford it the short flight was preferable. Less cruel hoarding of passengers into shacks in midnight ferry terminal rain. Less vomit. The plane remains a sober environment today. There is little space for commercial activity. Just a quick passage of a duty-free trolley which seems more symbolic than anything else these days.
However, it is at the airport where our worst dreams materialise. At the airport there is space for Man to work on his environment. Behind security the Circle of Hell is manifest: the brainless parade of air staff who all still seem to think this is the 1960s when flying may have been glamorous; the themed restaurants catering for every type of stereotype from sports bar to Latin pizza; the belligerent brands and their snob values all now twice the price of what you can get on the|High street; and, worst of all, the inane stamping and clipping of tickets perpetrated by certain uniform-loving lands (if I were an aspergic six year old boy I’d love it). Please show me to the airport mosque for some silent meditation.
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