I remember a few years ago being suddenly obliged to move into temporary accomodation, bundled out of the comfortable flat I’d been living in by a reversal of fortune and ending up in a rundown, unpleasant part of town, maybe even a dangerous part of town depending on your experience of topology. At the time, in the winter outside the council block waiting for  key, I registered how little anxiety I was feeling and how that must be the deadening of the feelings that comes with ageing.

I remember vividly how painful it was to get up early and go to work in the cold, how alien the outside world felt, how unfriendly was the world of work. Now I hardly feel that at all. I have either accomodated myself to the work or my life has just got easier.

And yet tonight I could not take the anxiety of the Real Madrid v Man Utd match. I left the pub fifteen minutes in and couldn’t even bear the radio. That’s about the deepest anxiety I have at the moment.

The real unpleasantnesses fade, the false ones grow. I must be doing something wrong.

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This afternoon I worried intermittently about the location of an “unquote” left off by some commentator on Radio Five Live. He had said that Suarez was quote the third best striker in Europe. But where was that unquote? Hours later I am still fretting about the quotation, which, in my mind, is still ambling merrily on with the gate of the unquote left yawning wide open.

Language probably causes me more heartburn than anything else.

Many Americans say that are “blessed” instead of lucky. Clearly a religious thing, as divine agency oversees all in a Panglossian universe. I insist on being lucky, not blessed.

Seen in the window of a fancy pub: stunningly private individual dining rooms for hire! Stunningly private. How stunning can privacy be?

The Ancient Sumerians had a cumulative genitive in their language. You added -ak at the end of a clause for the number of genitives in the phrase. So the cat of the son of the king would be sa’ adamu lugal ‘ak ‘ak. (cat son king of of). You can imagine the one-upmanhsip of a king with a lot of stuff (wives, children, trinkets, sheep) who would have a suite of aks at the end of his clauses. Loadsamoney! Akakakakaak!

Two linguists of Ancient Sumerian have different definitions for a part of speech found in certain literary texts. One names it the ‘frustrative ‘ case, corresponding to the expression ‘if only…’ (If only we had more sheep in the herd) Another, clearly more optimistic, calls it a ‘rhetorical, interrogative particle’ and interprets the meaning as ‘why not…?’ (why not get more sheep for the herd?) Frustrative or rhetorical, interrogative particle? Lucky or blessed? European or America? What type are you?

Sometimes I find myself listening to some poor soud pouring their heart out, unburdening themselves of terrible problems, debilitating illness, financial impasses, when what I am most concerned about is their confusion of imply and infer or their insistance in making nounns into verbs (to impact rather than make an impact) or verbs into adjectives ( the engineering work is on-going rather than going on). It is generally attested that Ancient Sumerian had only a limited number of adjectives. Might suit me better.

Language is important, but sometimes I wish I could just find it transparent.

Oh and yes, I did get a book about Ancient Sumerian for Christmas.

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The man who says to me down the phone ‘we have heard that you or a member of your family have been involved in a minor traffic accident’ phoned agin today. Sunday. The last time he phoned I was angry and said ‘No. You are lying.’ and ‘Fuck off!’ and slammed the phone down. The poor guy rang back immediately and said ‘you motherfucker’ to me before slamming down his phone or clicking it off on his switchoard or whatever. I felt bad afterwards. Poor guy. It wasn’t his fault he had to lie. So this time I didn’t want to be so brusque. When he said the time-worn words ‘we have heard that you or a member of your family have been involved in a minor traffic accident’ I said ‘Oh? Which member of my family is that? He said he didn’t have that information. Anyway, I ended up using the word ‘lie’ after which he changed his tack uselessly and said ‘perhaps it had been a household accident?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘No accidents. I and no member of my imaginary family have ever had any accidents.’ End of conversation.

He’ll phone again in acouple of weeks. I need to try another tack. It is a strain on my inventiveness.

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My dad told me that when he was in the war (the Second World War) he was running away from the Nazis (or was it the Communists?) and with his friends they got hold of some bikes but one of them couldn’t ride a bike and he ran behind them, but he couldn’t keep up and fell behind and eventually he got caught by the Naziz (or the Communists) and killed. He used to tell me that story to convince me how important it was to learn to ride a bike, because I couldn’t ride a bike. Still can’t. Though it did worry me, that story. What if I found myself in that position. I was a good runner, but surely not good enough to outpace the Nazis.

A few years ago I read Gunter Grass’s autobiography where he told a story about what happened to him in the war. He was a young Nazi soldier trapped in a house outside Berlin with some other German soldiers during the taking of Berlin by the Soviets at the end of the war. They found some bikes and after a brief discussion, they decided they would make a break for it on the bikes. But Gunter Grass couldn’t ride a bike (or was it that there weren’t enough of them?), so the captain told him to cover them as they rode off. The young Gunter Grass knew it was tantamount to a death sentence as they left him alone in the house with the Soviet army advancing. But as he watched his compatrots riding off over the brow of the hill he saw them all, everyone of them, shot down dead, picked off by a Soviet sniper. Grass panicked. He ran out of the back door of the house and ran and ran until he found a railway track, which he followed for miles and miles, until, remarkably, he met up with a company of his own army.

This time not riding a bike saved his life. The moral is that being rubbish sometimes works for you.

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I remember a few years ago (2001? 2002?) I was given an invitation to the press opening of the Turner Prize at Tate Britain. It was one weekday morning. I was free, so I went. There were about thirty or so journalists milling around where the artists’ works were exhibited. I remember it was the year the artist who did different coloured lights coming on and off won. None of the journalists were particularly bothered about looking at the work. Then, after about half an hour, the PRs came in and took everyone round the work, telling us what the intentions of the artists were and what was so interesting about the pieces. The journalists all took notes or recorded it on their dictaphones. Nobody looked at the art. We all took in what the PRs told us and produced it for the next day’s papers.

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In a passage from Proust where the character first falls in love with Gilberte, he explains how when he first saw her he was initially struck by her dark eyes, but when he went away he carried off with him the information that she was blond and so in his fancy he assumed she had blue eyes. Once his imagination got to work over the next few days he found himself in love with her blue eyes, blue eyes she has never possessed, did not possess and never would possess.

“Si elle n’avait pas eu des yeux aussi noirs… je n’aurais pas ete, comme je le fus, plus particulierement amoureux , en elle, de ses yeux bleus.”

(“If she had not had such dark eyes, I would never have been, as I was, so particularly in love with her blue eyes.”)

Proust. Du Cote de Chez Swann/Swann’s Way

What flimsy evidence do we cherish as basis for our deepest convictions?

In a Stefan Zweig short story found amongst his papers at his death in 1942 the narrator meets the world chess champion on a cruise. He also meets a man who spent months in solitary confinement under interrogation by the Gestapo and whose only source of sanity was a book of great chess matches that he had smuggled into his cell.In his head herpeplays classic matches of the Grand Masters hundreds and hundreds of times. Inevitably, the world chess champion and the Gestapo escapee face each other in chess combat.

Nowadays, travel is less exotic. You might not find a world chess champion on a commercial cruise liner. In his place you would find a retired couple who thougth the best way they could spend their well earned cash was browsing through the same international brands, coffee shops and fast food outlets that are available to them in their nearest decent sized town in Bedfordshire or wherever. In place of chess, this retired quantity surveyor and his wife might be hunched over an i-pad or a blackberry.

Today the commercial world requires us to aspire to what is dreadfully, mind-numbingly familiar. The alien has been almost entirely eradicated from the landscape. Even our cinematic escape into Elizabethan London or Regency Cheltenham will have William Shakespeare saying that some wench was “awesome” and Jane Austen as some feisty post-modern feminist with attitude. We have been locked into a new confinement of persistant and tepid familiarity and we have no set of Grand Master duels to escape into.

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Computers in schools are rubbish. They were mass shifted in by naive, chip on the shoulder, middle aged politicians in the 1990s who didn’t understand them and thought they would solve the problem of education. Now pupils do not think, they google; they do not write; they cut and paste; they do not construct essays; they assemble them; they do not think about a mot juste; they pick it from the computer. When I hear the injunction for a child to do some research on line, my heart sinks.

And then we have too much information. It depresses us, slows us down, wastes our time, makes us less creative, punctures every conversation with someone wanting to check something on his smartphone. In the same way as jokes are for people with no sense of humour and Valentine’s Day is for those with no sense of romance, information is for people unable to do conversation.

The silhouette of youngster or oldster bent over a smart phone has become iconic. Like the Madonna and Child or Massacio’s version of th expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise, those shapes you would recognise through a glass darkly; you recognise also the fall of the shoulder of an archetypal browser caught in the flagrante delicto of information retrieval, the emblematic sorry act of the age.

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January 7

I sometimes wonder why I bother going into cafes. I have better coffee at home, the comfort of my stuff around me, use of radio and telly and I am allowed to move around freely there. In the cafe where I sit alone with a black americano reading the paper on Saturday mornings there are almost no advantages. The other customers mostly annoy me, or at best I am indifferent to them. I take no pleasure in hearing others’ conversations. Dogs get in the way or smell. Toddlers are an obstacle on my path and babies a noisy nuisance in their bulky vehicles. The waiters or waitresses have no privileged relationship with me. It may well be that what I inwardly prize is the superficiality. Surface as a quality is, of course, much undervalued.

Ideally, they would be huge wooden marionettes serving me, nothing too technological, but great lifesize dolls with painted features and just the slight differentiation in the genders, a fuller lip and longer lashes for the female. Though nothing to give rise to any lasciviousness on my part (this is too early in the morning and they are, after all, wooden marionettes, albeit lifesize). All the customers would be wooden marionettes too. Just one or two of them scattered around and none of them sitting in my favourite seat by the window. There would be a sound track playing, just in range, of some tinkling teaspoons and crockery and the hint of some birdsong behind. The soundtrack could be on a loop of such length that its familiarity would comfort rather than irritate. The crescent rolls and chocolate breads would also be made of wood. I suppose, to fit the mood, that my newspaper would also require a universal, archetypal set of contents. I would not like any breaking news to threaten my placidity. It would be in this place that I would ideally sit with my americano on Saturday morning.

Such a cafe would, I realise, be quite an enterprise to create, and not, I am aware, a workable business proposition.

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We are mostly in two minds when we are not in three. Five minutes later our three minds are forgotten and we have three different minds. We cross the room at speak to someone and we shift again, those other minds forgotten. This mutability is what we are.

“Je ne puis asseureur mon object. Il va trouble et chancelant, d’une yvresse naturelle… Je ne peins pas l’estre. Je peins le passage : non un passage d’un aage en autre ou, comme dict le peuple, de sept en sept ans, mais de jour en jours, de minute en minute. Il faut accomoder mon histoire a l’heure. Je pourray tantost changer, non de fortune seulement, mais d’intention. C’est un conterolle de divers et muables accidents et d’imaginations irresolues et quand il y eschet, contraires ; soit que je suis autre moymesme, soit que je saisisse les subjects pour autres circonstances et considerations.

(Montaigne. Du Repentir)

I cannot fix my object. It’s unclear and swaying with its own natural drunkenness… I don’t depict things as they are: nor even the shift from one age to another, or, a generational shift, as they call it nowadays, but from day to day or from minute to minute. I have to fit my history into time. I could at any time change not just through chance but also through intention. It’s a set of varied and changing accidents and unresolved imaginings, as often as not self-contradictory; either I am another, or else other circumstances and considerations shift my view on things.”

(Montaigne. On Repentance.)

Mutability is all. A person is not rubbish. He is legion. But that that does not help us when we want some certainty.

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