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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Last week in a children’s playground I saw a little girl turn a cartwheel. It was such a light easy charming revolution that I thought it can’t be that hard. So I thought my summer’s task could be to learn to do a cartwheel.
That was about ten day’s ago. I haven’t given it a go yet. In the park yesterday I felt the urge to step out onto the grass and follow my instincts but I didn’t. The problems crowded in upon me. I don’t want to bang my head. |I don’t like banging my head. And imagine the momentum required to push my 82kg over. And imagine the ugliness of a grotesque flailing cartwheel. I’ve come unstuck on stuff like this before. Once, leaping over a fence, confusing how spry I used to be with how less spry I now am, and my foot snagging on the top of the wire. Which me will emerge when I attempt that cartwheel? Maybe I’ll see over the next few days…

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In Bristol there is a city-wide exhibition of, I think, 79 statues of Gromit the dog from the Wallace and Gromit animation films. These are scattered throughout the city in various public areas, squares, gardens. One is even inside the cathedral as though catering for a new type of worshipper.
I am wandering round the city with my friend Chris and his three-year old daughter Clara and each time we come across a Gromit she wants to touch it, kiss it, be with it for a couple of minutes. Other city visitors, Gromit tourists, are more systematic. I think there is some kind of ‘be photographed with every Gromit in Bristol’ challenge going on. I do not know whether the rules of this challenge specify that a three-year old girl cannot also be in the photo near the Gromit or on the other side of its six-foot body. In any case, we witness considerable impatience with the three-year old. Why doesn’t she understand that modern people, not just kids but adults too, need to be photographed alone with these plastic effigies? We are confused by this desire to document an exclusive relationship with the imaginary dog. Last week I came across a similar compulsion when a grown man told me he had come all the way from Israel to be photographed alone repeat alone in front of the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens. Again children had to be cleared away from the background, this time a five year old as well as a three-year old, before I took the picture of him ALONE in front of the Peter Pan statue. His committment to Peter Pan was such that he could not bear having any children sharing the frame with him.

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Proust writes a lot about what psychologists have termed the ‘misattribution of arousal’. The way in which you think you are aroused or excited by someone when, in fact, it is the context or a peripheral detail in the meeting that excites you but you pin the arousal onto the person. Note: if you are stuck in a lift with a glamorous stranger for three hours it might be the lift you are falling in love with and not the stranger. So in Proust’s novel Marcel the narrator is often fascinated by material marginalia that surround Albertine (her hat or her golf club or the mystery that is where she keeps popping up from). Marcel is like an anthropologist analysing the cultural material around her. He is particularly struck by her obsessive use of the word ‘parfaitement’. I myself remember thrilling to a prospective mate’s use of the word ‘absolument’. There must be an erotic perfume that comes off a French adverb somehow.

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Our personal behaviour with and towards others tends to the Venn Diagram Principle. If two people are trying to decide what to do they tend to do what is in the shaded intersection area, what both will accept. This will be the least extreme or risky of the activities. When there are more than two people involved the shaded area gets smaller, less risky. We can see how this can make coalition governments unable to take radical action and why large groups of Italian tourists will always stand around blocking the exits to shops and tube stations. In government, consensus makes sense but in our private lives where we are looking for thrills one can see why things get boring pretty quickly and the attractions (perhaps only temporary) of someone who imposes him or herself and overrides the consensual position. Someone who acts from the unshaded zone. I suppose the solution should be for each member of a couple to take it in turns to dictate from what lies in their unshaded area, though this is tricky. Firstly, do I dare to tell you about my unshaded area, and secondly, if I do, it might put you off me forever. Thirdly, you might be so dull that you don’t have an unshaded area.

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We can all fight against the fetichisation produced by unthinking Capitalism. The inane mantra that ‘time is money’ can be inverted to ‘money is time’, through which you put greater value on your life than on your Halifax cash Isa. Equally, I like to say that for people with well paid, time consuming jobs money has ceased to be a currency that has any value. If you do not have time or energy to consume, the money in itself has no function. It is a mere fetish. On the same theme, I read about the money shredding alarm clock this week. This clever device will tear up your bank notes if you do not get up and out of bed prompto. Your early morning will play out the debate between Time and Money in high dramaturgical form. Of course, we are so rubbish. I dare say you have to put notes into the alarm clock the night before, a requirement many will not respect.

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