I am inventing a new card game for Christmas. It is called Lecture, Grumble and Rant. This is not the name of a solicitors’ practice, but it does reflect the nature of modern conversation. You will pick a card from the pack and have thirty seconds to lecture, grumble or rant without hesitation, repetition or deviation. There will be a trump card, called Bemused. This card will reflect those very rare conversationalists who are able to transcend the three main techniques. They will be called upon to illustrate a quiet, tangential comment on the three principal protagonists. What do you think? I may even offer it to Radio Four.

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I am by nature not a very bitter person, but I found myself touched by the spray from a wave of bitterness last week. I had seen a poster for something on a wall in the tube, the type of thing that I had tried to promote about ten years ago only to be told that it would interest no-one. As so often, I have found myself ahead of the curve. It engendered a wave of bitterness that engendered some irritability in my habitually sunny disposition. These days I mostly avoid bitterness. It is a young man’s luxury. After extended periods of not getting what you want you have to just live with it and find a way of thinking about yourself in an elevated way (which is vital) without the adherence of much of the rest of the population. You still need some bitterness, of course, as bile keeps you kicking, but this will be controlled bitterness.

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We have a spider on an elaborate web outside the kitchen window. There is the web and a leaf stuck onto one of its corners where the spider goes sometimes for protection or maybe to lock out the light, I’m not sure. He’s a big spider. I have seen him with other insects trapped in the web. He knows his spider business. We thought: should clean those windows and get rid of that web, but I am torn. It is such a wonderful architectural product; it seems like cultural vandalism. so we are putting off the day.

The other day an enormous spider appeared on the living room wall. I am not particularly scared of spiders but this one almost took my breath away. I thought, if I kill it with The Economist or The London Review of Books, it would leave such a splatter on the wall and also, again, my better instincts prevailed, why kill? I managed to put a glass over it and then a strong piece of card under the champagne coupe and so was able to take it outside and let it crawl free in the courtyard. I wonder, is it my spider from outside the kitchen window whom I haven’t spotted recently. Maybe the storm dislodged him and using his wiles he sought refuge indoors. Anyway, the spiders or spider are still at large and I shall try not to kill them or him.

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You would think it would be an easy enough competence to listen, then speak, listen, then speak and so construct with another person a conversation, but this art is not always accomplished proficiently. Here are three types of incompetence I have recently come up against.

Monsieur A listens to what you say, then picks up on a detail and uses that as the impulse for his response. You gymnastically and skillfully re-formulate a response to adapt to the detail, whereupon he finds another peripheral detail from your latest response and picks up on that. Monsieur A can only converse through marginalia.

Madame B says something. You are in the middle of your response when you notice she is talking at the same time in an undertone, commenting immediately on what you are saying, so that two voices are happening simultaneously. Madame B can only converse through constant drone.

Monsieur C does not deign to engage in conversation unless he is a specialist in the matter and will come up trumps. If tricked into dialogue and revealed to be found wanting on some fact that should fall within his supposed province, he will crow I knew that!, as though he were a recalcitrant schoolboy. Monsieur C is in his late sixties. Monsieur C can only converse when he sees the imminence of his own triumph.

Yes, there are many ways to fail in the seemingly simple art of conversation.

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Tom from next door told me he had been to the Brexit cafe and had a nice cup of tea and a figgie cake. He was delighted. We hadn’t planned on going to the Brexit cafe but we were staying out to keep away from the cleaning lady and still had another half hour on the streets, so we thought, all right then, so be it, let’s try out the Brexit cafe. I call it The Brexit cafe but it calls itself The Tea House or something like that. It only sells tea, no coffee. It writes No Coffee up on the door in a panoply of fonts.. And it’s full of union jacks. So obviously you put two and two together. We went in. There was a man sitting reading Henry James. So far, so consistent. I fancied a nice pudding. Apparently, or so we thought, they did basic builder’s tea, but when we looked at the menu it said Earl Grey £7/9 (£7 for a cup/ £9 for a pot as I harrowingly understood it), Figgie cake or pie or pudding or whatever they were calling it £10. There was still time. Quickly, silently, we extracted ourself from this place. About 300 yards away, on Black Prince Road, we found another cafe where the bacon roll was £3.20 and the teas were £1.75 each. My relief was palpable. Next time I get to see Tom it will be a case of let me tell you what almost happened to us yesterday, young man. Talk about close shaves!

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When I was little I asked my dad, how much does Bobby Charlton earn? and he said £100 a week, which for me was about the most you could dream of. £100… every week. I asked that question because for me Bobby Charlton was the pole star. I sincerely remember wondering what I would do in some distant and unimaginable future when Bobby Charlton died. I could hardly imagine how life would go on. Well, he died yesterday and I suppose I can get over it. As I have said before, when a famous person who has marked your past dies or ages, the emotion you feel is not for them, it is for yourself, your own lost years, the time that cannot be brought back. Equally, the yearning for a simpler, more innocent time, or, maybe, and this is telling, a simpler, more innocent self.

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As I have mentioned before, I am a great dredger of the past and of past people. I locate them, from five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago, thirty even, and contact them. I note they are often loathe to connect back. Of course, it may be that they want nothing more to do with me. Fair do’s. But I am sure there are a host of other reasons. Some people are unhappy to reveal themselves to you; they are older, fatter, balder, more failed than before. Maybe some are more successful and they want me to keep my dirty mitts off them. As you get older there may be a truth that we shrink into our tiny unit: the family atom; those who know you as you now are. Maybe the you as you once were needs avoiding because actually you were never like that, you just got pigeonholed that way and don’t want to be so again thank you very much. For me there is a difference between meeting old friends and acquaintances in a group or one at a time. Personally, I don’t want the group experience. And, to be honest, isn’t my desire to re-connect not much more than idle curiosity. Though, why is curiosity idle? It’s actually industrious.

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My girlfriend came home exasperated with one of her yoga workshops. People are so busy putting virtue emogis up on the whatsapp that it’s become a self-propagating site for self-congratulation (prayers, hearts, love in all shapes and sizes). But when someone actually needs a bit of love or empathy it’s a case of turn the other way. The desire to post up your identity in a series of pictures thrives and prospers in today’s bewildering world. Consider the tattoo. What a rich array of hearts, axes, plants and greenery in general, noble invocations in foreign often dead-language tongues, creatures of all shapes and sizes, greet you as you happen to notice the highly-inked arm of your neighbour in the coffee shop. So many pictures on a frieze. Whence this desire to offer a print-out of your personality to a stranger, or a PR version maybe? Can I not make my own mind up about you from conversation and observation of your behaviour, from actual social engagement? Or must you be immune to this? It reminds me of the business boasts. We are considerate constructors. Let me, the customer, be the judge of that. May I be permitted to ignore your frieze and just have a chat?

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One of the tasks required of all of us is to have at the ready an adequate and witty answer to the question you know will be asked of you any number of times in the day, How are you? For quite some years now my stock response to How are you? has been I’m as good as I get. As from yesterday I am reforming that response. From now on my response to that query will be It trundleth on. The it could be life or a third person presentation of myself. Trundle is an ok way to depict the slightly broken nature of my physical and mental state and the olde worlde ending to the verb gives it a cheery tongue-in-cheek narrative quality. What do you think? I’ll be trying it out over the next few days. It needs to be good because I’ll be using it every day for the next few years. I find repetition helps.

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Walking down Brompton Road past the Brompton Oratory towards Harrods yesterday I experience one of those moments where the past associations of a place are stronger than the present experience. This is a phenomenon I have previously experienced in relation to places where I have lived when they are revisited. I go back to Paris to the areas I once lived in and find it difficult to be there due to the weight of the ghosts of the past. I find this to be true about Berlin also, even though I only lived there for a few weeks in my youth. Here I surmise that the weight of the pre-fall of the wall lived life just submerges the present, making it trivial in comparison. Experiencing this ghost feeling on Brompton Road was odd. After all, I still live in London and am still accumulating experiences here. My conclusion is that the older you get the more difficult it is to give weight to the present. The monster of the past becomes ever more voracious. The challenge to keep the present alive becomes ever more demanding.

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