The past invades us more and more, There is more of it. It is hard to keep out. The signs of its inundations are everywhere. From Talking Pictures TV, the channel of the year, with its nostalgic looks back at life in the 50s or 60s and focus on the films of the last century to today’s technology which allows us to reconnect with music or documents from before; the early Bowie albums, which not so many years ago were untraceable; old papers that could never have been unearthed but now emerge at the click of a key. You find the past everywhere. You can live there if you want. Can you think in the present without the interferences of the past? Writers can be so addicted to quoting or citing earlier writers to buttress their own authority. This doesn’t help. It mostly clogs the thought. History can hinder as much as it helps. The older you get, of course, and the more your past outweighs your future. It also becomes as mysterious as the future. Your old self is an enigma. Why did you act that way? Who were you then?

In his novel Time Shelters the Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov imagines a world where we become so addicted to the past that referenda take place throughout Europe allowing citizens to elect the decade they want to live in. The truth is that as individuals we are always living in a kaleidoscopic time that suits us best, a collage of moments from various pasts. We cherry-pick our contexts just to make today’s reality bearable.

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I have come across this phrase in two Victorian novels. Dickens’s Bleak House and, if I remember correctly, George Eliot’s Middlemarch, or was it Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd, I can’t remember. What must have happened is that either Eliot or Hardy copied Dickens, whose Bleak House predates the others, or it was a common, perhaps comic, phrase of the Victorian era. Whatever, I have appropriated the phrase and now use it liberally, for it is true of me. I like to do the same things all the time. I like the same routine on a Saturday morning, or any morning for that matter. In an Indian restaurant I always take Chicken Tandoori. I go to the gym on the same days every week and do practically the same workout only with unvarying variants. I never eat vegetables starting with the letter A. If you tickle my pressure points I will come out with the same pronouncements. I will try and herd most phenomena under the heading of hairdresser syndrome (the fact that hairdressers always have bad haircuts, that is, most people do the jobs they are least suited to do). I soak my feet in the bucket twice a week; Wednesday and Sunday. I never vary.

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I have never worn a moustache. They seem rather perverse to me. They are an odd mix: seedy yet dainty. You see young men with dirty smudges on their upper lip and you wonder what is going through their heads. Surely this object cannot attract a member of the opposite sex, you think. Or of any sex. It is a grubby little thing. If you kissed a man with a moustache it would be like negotiating a bit of shredded wheat on the way in. The only way I could have a moustache, it seems to me, is if I were playing a role. The only moustache role I could possibly play is the cad. Cads have a fairly long moustache that they stroke diabolically as they are plotting their devilish schemes. It might suit me; the kind of dastardly plotter you get in a Thomas Hardy novel sometimes. There are other moustache roles. The Hitler moustache, of course; mostly taboo. The RAF pilot moustache. The thin pencil line moustache; aristocratic. Most of these things are of another time. So it would seem to make sense that they only exist as a kind of fancy dress. And yet men do sport them as permanent features. One would like to get into the mind of such men and find out what their big idea is.

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The dangers from holding a conviction based on how you feel are clear. Our feelings shift. They depend on our age, our experience, where we live (which country, which class, which ethnicity, which sex), our mood. You understand why in the 70s and the 80s that cultural war took place in academia about theory. It was no longer enough to just react viscerally to Shakespeare or Proust because you were just using your own limited viscera; you had to filter your thoughts through Marxism or Feminism or any other ism as a safeguarding action. That was seen as a left wing act. You did not trust your own self.

These days, curiously, the people who trust their own feelings above exterior structures are seen as so-called ‘woke’ and left wing. They feel that they are not male, that they are female. They go on viscera. The argument from how you feel wins out over all others. A little humility might tell us that the human vessel is adrift on a tumultuous deep ocean of culture and it can shift direction at any moment.

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Sometimes odd coincidences happen. I spoke to a man on the street and he said he knew me. I was sure I didn’t but then we got talking and it turned out I knew his ex, now deceased wife and some of his other friends. But we had certainly never met before. That was just a coincidence. The other day, a rainy windswept day, I saw stray cucumbers on the rainy pavement at three different locations in the town. A coincidence? Or might it be that on a tempestuous day shoppers with a cucumber in their grocery bag might very well lose it on the windswept highway. You do, do you not?, put the cucumber in last, thrusting it into a gap left between milk and cornflakes, so it makes sense that harassed shoppers, fighting the hurricane, passing the shoulder bag from one side to another, might loose the cucumber, have it tumble headlong from his or her bag, one at South Kensington, one on High Street Kensington and one on Harleyford Road, Vauxhall. Lost cucumbers; just one more round in the eternal debate between the rational and the the mystical.

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The baby Jesus in his cot

Knows nothing yet of Herod’s plot.

The ox and ass are blithely dumb.

They know not from where this child has come.

Carpenter Joe picks at his beard.

This birth is all that he had feared.

The shepherds came in out of the cold.

Deaf to this greatest story ever told.

Three kings with gifts too, quite a few.

They’d brought them for some friends they knew.

And Mary sits, her eyes bemused.

Her thoughts on Jesus quite confused.

Where did this child come from in fact?

A father was the thing he lacked.

The Holy Spirit was to blame.

At least that’s what the gospels claim.

The babe doth mewl and puke and roar.

The same sounds as the inn next door.

Only one angel sits aloft in glory.

She, only she, can tell the real story.

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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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