I got to the funeral an hour early. I’d though 11. In fact. it was 12. So I went into a cafe to bide my time. The talk from one table was whether their kid had got into their preferred school. A mother came in with two children who bought smoothies. Wow! said the mum with hyperbolic glee, they look amazing! The kids were just drinking smoothies. The mother repeated that the smoothies were really incredible. She wasn’t drinking one, so you wonder how she knew. How they looked, I suppose. At another table a small child was being spoken to by an oldster, maybe a grandad. The grandad was deliberately bamboozeling the four year old with words. Is it a driller or a gorilla? he said. I read the child’s thoughts. A gorilla, obviously. What’s a driller meant to mean anyway? How do we speak to children! It’s no wonder they get all gender-neutral on us.

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Deciphering is what we do our entire lives. In disputes we try and see which version of reality we agree with; we test our own versions of events in our heads all day long and wonder how we have behaved or how we have been seen to have behaved. We set up versions of reality against each other using weights ; the judgement of a fifteen-year-old might elicit some scepticism as he or she might not have the authority that experience can lend or maybe the judgement of an older person is too tainted by dullness, consevatism or the protection of personal or material assets. At every moment we are assessing the value of another’s account, based on our understanding of their personality, their vanity, what they have to lose and what they have to gain.

I wonder whether the study of narrative helps us in these judgements. Cheap literature probably not, as the values of the characters are too clearly laid out for a simple read. Complex narratives more so perhaps. Here characters are not so clearly sign-posted. Sometimes the writer cannot understand him or her or does not think the character through to the end. You cannot think the characters through to the end because they are limitless, just like the real people in our non-fictional world. It seems unlikely that people who have more experience in the deciphering of fictional lives would be more perceptive in this non-fictional world. Or might they be more sensitive to the non-binary, nuanced and mysterious motivations behind behaviour. Intellectuals used to think that an understanding and appreciation of the high arts lent the connaisseur a moral quality. This opinion held sway till we realised there were army officers who tortured Jews by day and listened to Mozart after 6 pm. You wonder what the qualities were that they found in the Mozart.

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I went to the barbers the other week. This is a more complicated procedure than you might think. It is a barbers, not a hairdressers. You don’t fix appointments; you just turn up and one of the three barbers will see you. There is a problem because I have realised that I want my hair cut by only one of the three barbers but the culture is that you just take the next one available. This is sacrosanct; you cannot say no, I’ll wait till Dinos or whatever he is called is free..Such a request would make me ridiculous in the eyes of the clientele. So on a rainy Tuesday night I stood on the other side of the street peering surreptitiously through my barber’s window trying to work out when to be next in line for my favourite barber. The calculation proved beyond me, so I got the bus home. I came back again the next morbing at 9.15. The barbers is open from 9-6. My guess was that the hour from 9-10, less frequented by punters, would be just one barber. I know my barber lives in Fulham. I knew the other two barbers lived in Bromley. Bromley is further away. They would prefer to start late and they were both married. My favourite barber was not married. He would be the one to do the first hour alone. My calculations seemed to prove correct. At 9.15 he was cutting the hair of an elderly man. There was no-one else on the floor. It was a risk because the door to the backroom was slightly open. It could be that one of the other barbers would stride out the moment I set foot in the cutting floor and envelope me in the barber’s sheet. But my calculations proved correct. When I was leaving the barbers with my new and satisfactory haircut one of the Bromley barbers was coming in. Hiya, I chirped jovially. I think I’ve cracked the system.

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The other day I sent an umbrella to Hong Kong.. There is an umbrella repair man there who can fix it.. I wrapped it with a brown paperbag they had put my bread in at the cafe where I buy bread, but it wasn’t quite big enough so I had to use some shiny brown sellotape at the ends. My package looked like a stubby cardboard baguette. I was worried they might not accept it at the post office because it wasn’t properly wrapped, but they happily took my £12. That evening on the News I heard that packages abroad were being greatly delayed because of what they called a cyber-issue. To illustrate the news story they had some footage of a package in a tub. It was my umbrella pakage sitting there on the BBC Ten o’clock News, sitting forlornly though unmistakably in the square bucket in a post office which must have been my local post office. It was clearly my package with its brown paper and shiny brown tips. I should be pleased that it has undergone the transformation from inadequate package to archetypal package, but it still won’t be getting to its destination any time soon.

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When I am choosing a cafe to have my black coffee in, I peer in at the window to see whether there are proper chairs or perching chairs. You know the perching chairs; they are tall chairs where your legs cannot reach the ground, they ressemble the stools that many so-called stand-up comedians or crooners sat on in the 1970s. They are the kind of seat you sit on if you have an island in your kitchen at home. They are now all the rage in trendy cafes too. Personally, I do not like the perching chair. I want stability in a chair and a proper back to rest my back against. They seem to be flattering to the customer by implying that he or she is not really settled there; they are on the go; too important to be in this single place really because they are sought after by many. It is an extension of the desire to have a coffee to go, to walk around with it thrust out in front of you like some contemporary domestic weapon, the desire to be somewhere else than you are, probably because where you are you are not getting enough adualtion.

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Doctor Zhivago is a a mixed novel. Curiously amateurish at times (the frightened attempts to avoid any narration of dramatic events and the use of overhearing as a device like some 18th century picaresque novel) and engaging at others. It is Paternak’s only novel and shows. There is one deeply affecting moment when one of the two main characters, Lara, Zhivago’s major love interest in the text, is erased from the story. On page 447 of the novel in the translation we read:

“One day Larissa Fyodorovna left the house and did not come back again. Evidently she was arrested in the street in those days and died or vanished no one knew where, forgotten under some nameless number on subsequently lost lists in one of the countless general or women’s concentration camps in the north.”

It is as if at the end of the novel, after 447 pages of scrupulous attention to the character, the novelist loses interest. The character is permitted to disappear into the shadows of history.

These are always intriguing and mysterious moments in a novel where the character is left to his or her own devices and consequently ceases to be. The one other example of this that comes to mind is Alfred Doeblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz. Here, on page 731, after painstaking depiction of his trials and tribulations, Doeblin writes:

“Dem Biberkopf wird gleich nach diesem Prozess eine Stelle als Hilfsportier in einer mittleren Fabrik angeboten. Weiter ist hier von seinem Leben nichst zu berichten.”

(“Soon after this trial Biberkopf is offered a job as a porter in a middle-sized company. He accepts the job. No more about his life will be reported here.”)

Apparently, randomly, the storyteller just decides to stop the story and Biberkopf disappears from the pages of the novel, a little like Lara in the Pasternak. It reads as desolately bleak. These people, whom we have followed and lived with, cease to be. They are maybe living their life somewhere, suffering further in their particular cases, but we will know nothing more about them. It is terribly sad. The novel can no longer accomodate them.

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The first way to write a novel happens when you get an inkling of some kind of slime lurking just out of reach round a dark corner in your subconscious. So you put your hand into the hollow trunk and bring it out into the world. You quickly try and daub it onto paper before it dissolves. It does not spread through the whole book, of course, and it diminishes over time, but some of it remains somewhere and you can always look back at the smears of the original slime and use the smell to help you in the dark .

The second way to write a novel is what everyone else is told to do. You plan a plot and break it up into ten sections. You put a car chase here, a break-up there and a sad bit somewhere else. Then you get some ribbons and bows out and wrap up the package. This way is not much fun, but it is simple in a clever way. It is like folding a sheet of paper a few times until it becomes a paper airplane and you find it can fly quite a way.

The third way to write a novel is when you have a yard with a lot of old wrecks in it. There is a bit of old car engine here; there is a mangle there; then there is a rusty lawn mower near the edge of the concrete; there is a coffee grinder near the road. You need to be a bit of an engineer for this novel because you have to screw them all in together so that when you crank up the mangle the engine runs, the grass is razed and the coffee ground. If you are successful with this novel, all the bits make a creature.

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Many years ago I knew a young woman. We went out on a date and that very evening she asked if I would marry her. I suppose she was desperate to sort out her future, put it in a box rather than having it float around indiscriminately. Some people are like that, I find. They are desperate to put all potential future events into a box that will define them, contain them. They will chat with somebody on Twitter or Hinge and be planning the future before they have even met in the flesh. Bucket lists seem to be part of the same tendancy. Fix in advance and through the edicts of social convention what you need to do in the future to define yourself neatly and to your advantage. Maybe I am by nature not much of a planner, so don’t end up getting married or bungee jumping off some high bridge in a developing country. Following these terms I will never get anything done. I am what you call a trundler. I just trundle on with my nose to the dirt. I think it’s better that way.

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The evolution of my domesticity can be traced by what I do with my on-the-go clothes. On-the-go clothes, as you will know from former posts, are the clothes you wear but do not want to throw into the dirty washing. They are the trousers you just wear at the weekend; the jumper you will put on every few days when it turns a bit chilly; the shirt you wore for just a couple of hours. You need a place to put these on-the-go items. at first, like everybody, I just put them on various furniture: the jumper on the back of the settee; the trousers over the arm of an armchair. Then I acquired a special kneeling-chair from a specialist back shop. I knelt on it for a bit but soon got fed up of the posture, so the kneeling-chair became the on-the-go clothes venue. Then I got rid of the kneeling-chair as it was taking up too much space in the living room.On-the-go clothes shifted to the chair in the bedroom. Today we went to Streathham on the 159 to pick up a clothes rail for £9 from e-bay from a guy called Steve. We put the old chair out in the street to see if it would find a home and now the on-the-goers are hanging on a rail at the bottom of the bed. This may not be a permanent solution. People who plan their furniture solutions at the beginning of their setting-up in a flat are living a dead meat life. They are rationalists, not empiricists. You keep your solutions buzzing. It’s a good sign of life in the old carcass still happening.

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As I walked up Kensington High Sreet yesterday I noticed a man sitting on the pavement crosslegged. He maintained that difficult pose well, I mused. If he was homeless, he was a well conditioned homeless man. As I passed by I read his little placard. It said: I am not homeless. I am meditating. Indeed, his eyes were gently closed to the traffic and stream of pedestrian outside the Kensington High Street branch of Wholefoods. Why you would meditte for show, I don’t know. This was performative meditation. Although I supposed the Buddah himself went through the public phase, though he was probably dealing with public self-chastisement, stripping himself of all worldly lendings to reach ground zero in the human stakes. This guy probably wasn’t a prince, just a public meditator. To be fair, it’s not that far away from chess as a spectator sport. It could be the new fad.

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