Tag Archives: writing

December 17: the ancient stream

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On Harleyford Road, a road that connects Vauxhall to Oval, there is a section of the pavement in front of number 29 where, whenever there is a period of rain, a little stream occurs across the pavement. I like to say it is the stream that comes up from the earth that is the ancient boundary between Vauxhall and Kennington. I have made this up but it is a little lie that I insist on to strangers and one that illuminates my dreary passage down that road which must been the bleakest in christendom. I like to lie. I have for many years maintained to all and sundry that the St George’s complex next to the MI6 building on the south embankment of the Thames is referred to by all the locals as Glory Towers. I like to think I am spreading this untruth around. A little lie can brighten up the world.

When I was a younger man in Paris I used to tell strangers that I was a stuntman specialising in falls. It made for a better conversation than being what I was, a translator or a teacher. Though this, of course, would also be a way of making myself glamorous, an index to the vanity of youth. These days, those illusions are past. My lies are not focused on me but on my environs.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

(And apologies to all my readers about this gap in transmissions. I have been preparing the book which will be out in February ‘Monkey Sausage Nose: an antidote to self help’ which is a compendium of curated material from this site plus a few other pieces, all put together in a charming bedside volume. It should be available from Amazon or Waterstones but I would prefer if you contacted me directly on paulbilic2003@yahoo.co.uk for a direct purchase.)

September 20: me at my most sophisticated

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On the TV channel SkyArts I read a little trailer for a documentary. It was a biographical programme about the famous and influential 20th Century poet T. S. Eliot. It said something like: The fascinating story of the life of T.S. Eliot, the man responsible for the poems that would inspire the Broadway musical Cats. I suppose they thought this would get more viewers in than the man who wrote the seminal modernist poems The Wasteland and Four Quartets. Barnard Castle was built during the Norman conquest and was was owned by the Duke of Gloucester, later Richard III. It was also, of course, the day trip venue of Dominic Cummings, advisor to Boris Jonson during the Covid period. Andre Previn, despite having spent his life devoted to Classical music as both a conductor and a composer, seems to be mostly remembered for his appearance on The Morecombe and Wise Show.

You cannot know how posterity will channel you or how others will see you. Of course, circumstances constantly force you to behave in a way suitable to the moment and away from your natural instincts and inclinations. Jobs push you away from yourself, make you act on behalf of the company you work for or more in keeping with your job title rather than your personality. It is a miracle that we ever emerge unscathed from the combat with the world. This act of shifting away from yourself for the sake of the circumstance is perhaps the most sophisticated act we have to perform as an individual. I consider myself fortunate that it is rare that I have to abandon myself to represent some other entity. Many people – mostly people with fancy jobs – just drift away, and when, later in life perhaps, they try and pick up that old lost self, they are not quite sure what it is thay are holding in their hands anymore. As I say, I’m lucky. The closest I get to abandoning my self is when I am just nodding along and pretending to listen to a dull interlocutor. That’s probably when I’m at my most sophisticated.

peoplearerubbish.com

September 2: colours

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I was in a second-hand shop in Southwold, Suffolk last week and found a pale green shirt that looked as if it might fit. Second-hand clothes are mostly in better condition than my normal clothes waiting for me at home. They’ve certainly been ironed more recently. I took it to the till to buy it and the young man there said , it’s the same colour as what you’re wearing already. I said, yes, I’m very predictable. Pale green is the colour I have learnt to buy. Different times of life dictate different colours. I can’t really wear red anymore like I used to, being high in colour as it is. I look like some Dickensian pie-eater if I’ve got a red shirt on. I have to have colours that compliment my high colour. By high colour I mean that as the day progresses I gradually move into the zone of spntaneous combustion. I start the day pale as an underfed vampire but as I move forward past midday the blood starts to flow. There is another batch of colours, I find. Favourite colours that I would like to wear but have learnt to eschew, whereby I am obliged to fight against my self. Brown is the big one here. I probably like brown so much as it was the colour my mum used to dress me in as opposed to the blue she gave my big brother. It must be that deep emotional pull that drags me into the magntic field of brown. Fashion, of course, is irrelevant, working on the assumption that we can all wear any colour for the benefit of their season’s profits. In recent years I have come round to the opinion that blue is about right for me, which, of course, goes massively against my deep-set identity, blue being my brother’s colour. My mind doesn’t know how to deal with this. It is just one of those things that keeps my sense of my own identity fluid, or, rather, dragged around a bit. I am not any of those things I once thought I was. Imagine that.

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com

1 march: funny jobs

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My friend Chris got a job a few weeks ago. He’d been sniffing around for one for a time. Freelance work wasn’t reliable enough. I remember I realised the same thing years ago. He explained his new job to me but I didn’t quite understand it. I thought I’ll get the gist as we go along. It’s an engineering/architectural firm that works with older buldings, sometimes of historical interest, repairing and renovating. Chris, as I understood it, as an art historian, was to be a kind of consultant on art and historical matters. He says he manages the gallery where they don’t really do any exhibitions. I think he said he makes the other workers fill in documents about the work they’re doing. Is he a kind of documentalist? I don’t know. One, not unconsiderable, thing he is doing is adding to the culture in the workplace.

People have funny jobs sometimes. There are jobs where you are the resident storyteller, which doesn’t mean you tell everyone nice stories as they get on with their day’s work. I’m not quite sure what it means, but I suspect the main function is to break the uniformity of the culture.. Of course, many years ago when I worked in France, I had probably the strangest job. Three of us would go into companies around France and work with a group from the company, (say, the director. the head of sales, the director’s secretary, a couple of people off the shop floor, someone from marketing). We’d make them sit on a rug while wearing a variety of masks and go through an exercise based on Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Moreno’s psychodrama and Grotowski’s ideas on spontaneous expression every morning for a week. There was a lot of theory we went over back at the Paris headquarters of CESDEL (Centre d’Expression Spontanee Dramaturgique et Linguistique). What we did was a method based on a methodology, not a mere procedure. The word procedure was only uttered with disdain. Dramaturgy was the investment of time and space, whch we tried to bring into the method, especially in the the triangle of space and time elements. We got into a lather about all this stuff. Of course, there was a lot of money in in-house training in France in those days and some companies were up for the latest methods. And, to tell you the truth, it taught me a lot. In the years of teaching that have followed, I have never worried about preparing lessons. If you are not working material through with students spontaneously, it’s dead meat. It’s not a method!

http://www.peoplearerubbish.com