A few words before we go

2009-05-31T15:00:00.000+02:00

I love a happy ending.

In danger of being crushed by a dwarf

2009-02-02T10:50:00.000+01:00

Letter to the Guardian

2008-11-19T19:05:00.000+01:00

Dear Guardian

Phil Woolas claims* that "Spain is on its fourth one-off amnesty and the result of that is more dead bodies on the beach of people coming over from Africa."

Most of the dead bodies - those that are actually recovered - are, in fact, found on beaches in the Canary Islands, whose proximity to Africa is in fact the most likely reason why it is a preferred destination. If it were so easy to get into Spain, it is unlikely that they would pay a lot of money to cross dangerous waters in lethal boats. They would do what Western European migrants, like myself, prefer to do, and catch a plane.

Yours

ejh

I see

2008-11-09T14:40:00.001+01:00

Joe Calzaghe beat Roy Jones Junior on points last night, after taking a count yearly on when Jones put him on the canvas. "I didn't see the punch coming", he said: "it was like déjà vu".

The Socialist Fogey

2008-10-01T11:25:00.000+02:00

Guest post on the Cedar Lounge Revolution.

When did you last see your lawyer?

2008-09-27T13:25:00.008+02:00

One evening when I was in the unit, we were allowed to watch a video: somebody, either a patient with a good sense of humour or a member of staff with a poor one, chose Terminator II. Or perhaps they had just forgotten, as I had until it started, that part of the movie is set in a psychiatric hospital in which Sarah Conner is incarcerated.

Having stuck to her story about a robotic killing-machine sent backwards through time to assassinate her, she finds herself locked up and thereby facing a dilemma. Does she continue to tell the truth, which has caused her to be considered mad - or does she lie instead, in the hope that if she does, they will believe her? Eventually, seeing that while she continues to insist on the truth of her story, they will keep her inside indefinitely, she tells them that she's changed her mind. She now understands that it was all nonsense, no such thing ever happened, she had imagined it: but she's all right now, so could they let her go? It is of no use: as she admits she suffers from delusions, they decline to release her. There is no way out. Enraged, she attacks the psychiatrist.

I thought this was pretty funny even at the time. I didn't laugh a lot during the fortnight I was locked away, but it was far too close to my own situation to do anything else. The doctors believed that I intended to take my own life, which I did not. So they decided that the reason I wanted to be let out was so that I could kill myself: anything I said other than "I agree that I am suicidal" was therefore a front, a scheme to induce them to release me so that I would be free to kill myself if I could. If I told the truth, they would assume it was a lie, and I would continue to be locked up: if, however, I decided to play along and tell them they were right, they would consider me suicidal, and I would continue to be locked up.

I had read Kakfa, but I had never lived inside it until then. If it was funny, it was perhaps because there was no other way to make sense of it than to consider it absurd. If you tell the truth, you will be disbelieved. The only way to be believed would be to lie. That is funny: the world turned upside down. The absurd is funny, what's funny is what's absurd. It's funny to recount it: it was even funny, very briefly, at the time. But it's less funny to recall it, to recall the fear that it involved.

If to be mad is to refuse to accept reality, then this was madness: to live within it was to live in the power, the genuine and frightening power, of the mad. They can keep you there: they can do things to you when you're there. They can do these things not on the basis of anything they've proved, but only on the basis of what they've decided. They are not people who like to admit that they might be wrong.

How does one approach such a situation? Wait it out? What if you had to wait forever? Or wait for one's chance? I don't know if I ever would have run, though I thought about it often: it was a contingency rather than a contingency plan. Everybody who is sectioned is entitled to appeal to a tribunal: I was told this on the afternoon of my incarceration, and made the appeal that same day. If the appeal failed, I decided, then I would have to try and run. I say decided: I decided only in the way that you "decide" anything that you don't believe you will ever have to do. That is the thing about madness, you never really believe that it is happening. You can never quite accept it. You cannot never quite decide that you have no choice, that you must act on the basis of having no choice, because this is mad. How can you believe what is mad? How can you proceed on the basis of madness?

The need to take that decision was postponed by the existence of the Tribunal which, by law, should have taken place within seven working days of the day of my incarceration. This should have been no later than Friday the 22nd of September: having some sense of habeas corpus, I assumed that if it was not arranged by that time, I would, of necessity, be free to go.

But I assumed, at the same time, that I would not: just as one had to try and cope with the apparent fact that truth would be treated as falsehood and falsehood as truth, so one had to believe two opposite things at the same time, in the absence of any information to discount either one of them. Plainly, if the law said that a patient was entitled to a Tribunal within a certain period of time, and that period expired, they must perforce be released. Otherwise the provision of the law was without meaning and rendered that law an ass. But equally plainly, the Friday came, and I had no notification that any Tribunal was arranged: the Friday passed, and nobody came to tell me that I was free to go.

Nobody came, in fact, to tell me anything. Except, eventually, late on Friday, I was told that somebody from the relevant department had phoned the unit, in the afternoon, and said that no Tribunal had been arranged. They did not even ask to speak to me. I did not even possess that right, the right to be told, directly, that my legal rights were without meaning. I insisted on phoning them back, of course, once I had been told, and told them what I thought about it. But it changed nothing: I was still locked up, and the rights that were supposedly mine in law did not apply. Did not apply and did not matter.

Some years later, I found myself in an office of a legal firm, through whose window I could see, a few yards away, the wall of the house in which my late great-aunt had lived for fifty years. I was there because I had recently read about some people in a similar position to the one that I had once been in: denied a hearing by the time the law demanded, they had gone to court over the matter and - no small amount of time later - been awarded compensation.

Only small sums, a few hundred pounds apiece, but something, at least, for being treated as a person without the protection of the law. Holiday money, not disproportionate, something at any rate. I could see no obvious difference between their cases and mine, so I consulted a solicitor to see if a precedent had been set from which I could gain some small benefit.

It had - and it had not. A precedent had been set - and an important one - but it was not one that could benefit me. The lawyer explained why. The action had been taken under the Human Rights Act, which, although passed in 1998, had not come into effect until the start of October 2000. October 2000. And I had been inside in September.

I laughed again. One would wish for other things to laugh about than ironies. But even if that is all there is, one laughs at them nonetheless. Of course, of course, it would have to be that way. What other way could it have been?

It was futile to shout down the phone at a functionary just because they couldn't even be bothered to tell me I had no tribunal. But I did it anyway, and I was right to do it: when you can do nothing, you have to do the little you can do. I stopped eating, too, after the Friday afternoon: that was a contingency plan I did put into action. And it was futile too. But you have to do the little you can do. If you are deprived of the protection of the law, you have to do the little you can do.

I was not, however, deprived of the protection of a lawyer. When they informed me, on the first afternoon, of my right to appeal to a tribunal, they also provided a list of legal practices which specialised in the field. I chose one, for no reason that I can remember, and a solicitor came to see me. Over the following fortnight she did a lot of things for me. The most important was that she believed me.

I can remember her saying so, not straight away, but later. Perhaps even afterwards. She hadn't just represented me, she had believed me. It's a strange thing for a lawyer to tell their client. A strange thing for a lawyer to have to tell their client: a lawyer who said they didn't believe their client would be obliged to terminate their relationship. It goes unsaid. You assume that your lawyer is prepared to believe your story and act on that assumption. If they had to assure you they believed you, it would as likely mean they didn't, as they did. The spoken assurance is no stronger than the unspoken assumption. It merely raises the same doubts it aims to assuage.

But the rules are different, inside the unit. Normality is that you are not believed: the assumption is that what you are saying cannot be accepted. People lie: but normally we assume that they are telling the truth, if only probably, if only as a provisional position. In the unit, the provisional position and the normal one is that you are not to be believed. You are not normal: you are lower than normal. You feel it, you feel it. You feel less than human, because you are not free to move: because you are not trusted to move. You are deprived of the normal assumptions about your intentions and your integrity, the assumptions which comprise everyday human dignity. And you feel less than human because where other people are believed, you are not to be believed. As much as anything, it is absence of worth. And, this being so, when you are believed, it is transformative. Where belief is restored, the same is true of self-belief.

We did have a tribunal in the end and when we had it, I was sure that I would win. You always are. Even though you know, from practice, that you are not believed, it is impossible to accept it. What is true, is true, no matter how many times it is not believed. Where you know what is real, you cannot believe what is unreal, not unless you want to. There are always four fingers, never five: never five unless it suits you to believe that. And you can believe the truth indefinitely, provided only that one other person believes it too.

Once people have taken the decision to lock you, up, they cannot take the decision to let you go, unless something has changed. Not lightly. They have a stake in it: they cannot change their minds, or cannot open them, cannot accept that they might have got it wrong. For all the protestations that people do not do this lightly, for all the claims of professional integrity, once they have done it, it is not like that any more. After that, there is ego involved, there is face to be lost. It is human, perhaps, to wish to avoid to loss of face. But it is human, too, to feel anger, anger that has barely abated eight years on, when somebody keeps you locked up, and humiliated, rather than accept a loss of face.

Dear Christ - there is much that it is hard to remember, but it is so easy to remember how angry I was. They told me that I had a problem with anger: maybe I did. But maybe I was so angry because I was angry at them for what they had done. And that, they could not see. With their all-seeing eyes, that could look into my head and tell them what I was thinking, that could tell them what my plans and intentions were - that, they could not see.

But I got out. The minute that it was not their decision, I got out. On the 27th of September 2000, I got out. Nobody ever said a word of sorry and nobody ever paid a penny by way of compensation. But I got out. We had to wait a short time while they filled in the paperwork - and what an outrage that felt like, having to wait for the freedom that had already been restored to you - but I got out. I never lied and I never told them what they wanted to hear from me. And I got out. And in the struggle to get out, in the anger at my incarceration, in the sense of outrage that it set off inside me, in the restored sense of self-belief that it gave me when I was believed, I found myself alive again, I began to believe in myself once again. I beat them, I beat them! I was hopeless, in a cell, pinned down and assaulted, deprived of privacy, deprived of liberty, threatened with forcible medication, and I beat them! I got out, I got out! There is, there is a light that never goes out, even when you cannot see it, even when your eyes close in the cell and you believe you want to die. There is a light that never goes out.

There were friends who sustained me while I was in the unit, and there have been friends who have sustained me since. Friends I stayed with, friends I met, friends who I will never meet. The love of cats, the love of chess, and the experience, finally, of finding my second life. There is a light that never goes out.

All these people and all these things. There was a nurse, too, just one of them, who spoke to me, and began to believe me, and told the tribunal that she did not believe I should be there. But I remember that my lawyer got me out, and drove me, from the place that was no place, to the station, from which I took the train that took me away from there and to a place where I could rest. She told me she believed me, and she believed me. And I remember that. Often, I remember that.

But I cannot remember her name. I had her card in my wallet for years, but eventually, in one of my many clearouts, in one of my many moves, it was mislaid. I cannot remember her name. I remember the date. I remember all the dates. Eight years ago today, she got me out and drove me to the station. I am crying here, as I write this and I remember, in front of my computer, in a small shop, in a small town and very far from England, and every two or three minutes I have to go to the sink, and wash my face, and dry it with a towel. I remember. It was eight years ago today. And today, I am moving house, and going to the village. Today, I am moving house, and in May I shall be married. In May I shall be married. But if she had not believed me, I would not be here.

But I cannot remember her name. I would like to remember it. I would like to send her a card. To say thank you. To say thank you for believing me. To say all the thank yous in the world.

When did you last see your mother?

2008-09-13T18:20:00.022+02:00

On the 13th of September 2000 I was taken by the police, against my will, to a secure unit in Bedfordshire, and confined there for a period of two weeks, until an appeal tribunal decided that I should be released. Nobody involved has ever offered any word of apology.

I say, now, nothing more specific than Bedfordshire: I know exactly where it was that I was taken, the name of the unit both then and now, its address, its exact location, and perhaps one day I will go and look at the place from the outside. But at the time, I had no idea where I was: even when I knew the name and address, I had no idea. A place exists only in relation to the other places that adjoin it: a place without that context is no place at all.

Where I was, I knew only from the inside, as one knows a prison, and in the occasional moments when I tried to work out how I might escape, the absence of any knowledge of the world immediately outside was as much an obstacle as the doors, and walls, and staff. I could run, if the opportunity arose: I could climb, if I absolutely had to. But after that, where would I go?

They came while I was at my mother's house. I have not seen it since, though I have passed over it in an aeroplane, more confined, when I think about it, than I was in the unit, though rather more free. I had been half-expecting something like that to happen: I had been afraid of it, I had told people I was afraid of it, but although I had half-expected it, it was only half - the half which defers to the other half, the half which sees what is real but assumes that its perception is nothing more than pessimism. The half that knows, but never quite believes. The insufficient half.

I had thought that I should run - that if they came I should run as fast as I could, for as long as I was able, and only then stop to think what I should do next. But when they did come, because I had not really believed it, I wasn't ready. Not ready to see them, not ready to run. So I stayed where I was - until they hauled me out and took me to wherever it was that they took me. And I stayed there, still not really believing it, for those two weeks, all the time wondering where I should go if I should run.

I had a room. I thought of it as a cell, and although I told myself that this was anger speaking, it was a cell, or closer to a cell than to a room. I could prevent nobody entering that wanted to, and though I was free, most of the time, to leave the room itself, there was not much further I could go. Nor could I stay there whenever I wanted to. It offered only the sanctuary that they let me have, which was no sanctuary from them, which was no sanctuary at all. It was a cell.

I remember standing in that cell, for the first time, on my first afternoon. It was the only time in my life I have ever genuinely wished that I was dead. I was not afraid of dying: I was afraid of declining, of spending months and years locked away, an open-ended sentence, medicated, only half-remembering who I was or how I came to be there, trying to fix my mind upon a point before I forgot what point it was that I had chosen.

I was afraid. I was afraid of being taken for walks with people who I needed to be told were friends or relatives, afraid of the conversations that would take place beyond my hearing or beyond my comprehension, in which everybody would agree how sad it was and express an unfelt optimism that things might get better in the future: afraid of the shaking heads, the signatures. I wanted to die rather than have that happen, really wanted to, really desired the ability to close my eyes and command them never to reopen. At very least, I wanted to will that to happen while I still possessed the quality of will, before it was taken away from me for fear of what I would do with it. Most of all, I wanted to live.

It is impossible, I think, to communicate the distress a human being feels during the experience of confinement. Frustration, anger, fear: foreboding, resentment, hope and the absence of hope. These are words, collections of letters, collections of letters that have a certain shape. If you pulled and squeezed them, out of shape, they would become unrecognisable, apparently useless: but left as they are, they represent nothing that is not as orthodox as their habitual shape. Confinement deprives you of your shape. It imposes other shapes on you, shapes that you cannot understand. It demands of you, imposes on you a state of permanent incomprehension: you cannot, absurdly, do what you would normally do without question and without any thought. The words, the letters, make no sense. It makes no sense.

The door in the wall is closed and will not open. What then is the purpose of the door? You want to walk outside, but can't. Why not? Why are they doing this? How can that purposeless restriction possibly be understood? And just as one cannot walk beyond the wall, just as one's progress is unnaturally impeded, so is the expression of one's feelings. They do not make sense: they cannot apply themselves to an experience that makes no sense. They are cornered, just as you are cornered: you feel yourself not only powerless but in the presence of malign power. Your feelings are forced out of shape. Anguish at the incomprehensible expresses itself as an incomprehensible anguish. If they can do this, when they should not, what else, what further, might they do? You cry: you cry out. And because you cry out, they conclude that you are sick, and because you are sick, it means you need to be confined.

You are always afraid. Afraid of what might happen, afraid of decisions beyond your control, afraid of not being believed. You are afraid of the staff. You are afraid of the staff, and they are afraid of you, and the tension that this mutual fear creates results in incidents, assaults, the need to leave one another alone and yet the inability to do so. Because there are tensions, there are sides. Because there are sides, both sides are jumpy. But only one side has the power. Only one side has the capacity to act together, only one side has impunity, only one side possesses the impunity that derives from the knowledge that you, and not the other side, will be believed.

I witnessed several assaults, of patients, by the staff, in my two weeks inside the unit. I remember two in particular, in one of which I was the victim: though none of these assaults would have been seen as assaults by the law. Still less, much less, by the people who committed them. But they were. In almost every case they were committed without prior threats or violence, from the patient, and almost always the need to restrain, even if it existed, had been created because the staff had provoked a reaction. When they could, had they so wished, have left the patient well alone.

On afternoon, we were allowed out for a short time, within the grounds, to get some air. I went out, for a short time only, and then went back to my room, preferring my own company to that of the other patients and the staff. Almost immediately a member of staff came into the room: he wanted "the stone". The stone. Some sort of stone, he was looking for a stone, some stone, whatever it was he was talking about. What was he talking about? What was he talking about? I asked, he raised his voice, and I raised mine, and in they came, the staff, pinning my arm behind my back, throwing me face down in the way that kills several people in police vans and stations every year, rendering me immobile, stuffing my face onto my bed, going through my pockets, seeing what was there. There was no stone there.

The member of staff, I later learned, had decided that I had picked up a stone from outside and put it in my pocket. He hadn't seen me pick one up: what he'd seen, and all he'd seen, was me spinning a coin, a coin I'd found earlier, and putting it back in my pocket. He didn't know exactly what had happened, nor did he bother to find out. He could have asked me "excuse me, do you have something in your pocket?" and brought in his backup only if he didn't get a co-operative response. Instead he rushed in with a demand the patient had no chance of understanding, and inevitably, the patient ended up with arms behind his back and face against a pillow. Inevitably. Because that was the way they went about their work. And usually, nobody was hurt, or only temporarily, not enough to matter even if what the patient thought or felt had mattered. But it didn't need to happen, it was made to happen. And because it was inevitable, and because there was nothing you could do, you hated them. And you were afraid of them.

I remember how afraid I was. I remember what was said, and how terrifying it was. There was another patient, a woman. She was upset. I never found out what had upset her, whether it was anything in particular, or whether it was just the being there that had, for a short while and in undramatic fashion, become too much for her. But all she wanted was to be left alone. She said so: she just went to a corner, by herself, and asked them all to leave her alone. And they would not. They pestered her, and she asked them to leave her alone. They asked her what was wrong, and she asked them to leave her alone. They kept on at her, and eventually, as she was bound to, as they knew, most certainly they knew she would, she lashed out. And in they went, nearly all of them, and pushed her down, and twisted her arms, until she started screaming from the pain. Everybody could hear her. I was afraid that they were going to hurt her, more than temporarily, more than trivially. At that stage I was afraid only for her.

The most senior of the nurses was a violent, vicious man. He is the only member of staff whose name - Jim Chalmers - I have not forgotten. Everybody was afraid of him. I am sure his colleagues, too, were afraid of him. It is hard, to tell the truth, to think of him as a nurse, since he was so willing to use violent methods against patients, so little concerned to see those patients as anything other than a threat to be combatted and attacked. He saw the other patients, now, watching their friend suffering pain under the weight of this assault, and he ordered them to leave. I wouldn't go. I was afraid for the safety of the patient, and I said so. He ordered me again. I said that I would not. I said - and loudly, so that everyone could hear, so that there was less chance that later, everything would be denied - that I was not approaching the incident, and I would not, but nor would I step away until I was sure that the patient had suffered no harm. I looked at Chalmers as I said it. He looked at me, and then he said:

That man needs medicating.

He kept looking at me. It was probably this, in truth, that kept his threat from being carried out, because had he given the instruction to anyone in particular, I am sure they would have followed it. But nobody did. Perhaps nobody could believe - even there, even in the unit - that a nurse had ordered a patient medicated for nothing more than witnessing a incident. Perhaps they were afraid that there would be consequences if they followed his instruction. But I am sure that they were more afraid of him. I am sure that had he given the instruction directly, they would have followed it. But they did not.

She was medicated, in the end, and taken off to the isolation cell, or whatever they called it, the rubber room, the place where you were put to cool off, a place I only once saw from the inside, as patients were placed there routinely on arrival. And I remained unmedicated. On this occasion, unassaulted. I wrote a complaint about it, afterwards. The hospital investigated by asking Chalmers if he had made the threat. He told them he had not.

I say they have impunity. In a legal sense, of course, they do not, and in a theoretical sense, were enough violence done and were enough witnesses prepared to speak, then it is possible to imagine a prosecution against a member of staff in a special unit. But this would rarely happen: and even if it did, such a prosecution would nearly always fail, as the staff would always be able to claim, as the police do, that they felt threatened and acted to protect themselves. In practice, in everyday practice, they have impunity. Because they will always be believed.

Why not? Who is going to be believed? A psychiatric patient? Even this, this account written eight years later, is only one side of a story, the side of somebody who was confined in a special unit, whose mind must therefore have been disturbed. The side of somebody who therefore cannot be believed. And that is what it's like. That is the real state of madness, that is what is so incomprehensible, that is what causes you anguish. Nobody will believe you.

Nobody. Nobody. Whatever happens, whatever you may say, whatever you may see, whatever is the truth, nobody will believe you. Your word is nothing. And where your word is nothing, so your worth is nothing. You are nothing. That, if you can grasp at it, is what it's like.

Sometimes I find it hard to believe that these things happened, when I try to remember, when I try to remember what it was really like. What it must have been like, what it must have been like to be me, nothing, worth nothing, helpless in the face of disbelief, taken and locked up in a place that was no place at all. It is hard to remember, harder still to believe it, impossible to understand. Now, I think and pray, at this distance, eight years away, a thousand miles, there is some sort of peace, some rebirth, some perspective. But it happened. It always will have happened. That man needs medicating. It was madness, and the madness was not mine.

On the NHS it is, essentially, impossible to get assistance for mental health problems unless you have tried to kill yourself. It is hard enough even then: there are no resources available. Yet there are thousands of people, expensively imprisoned, in units like the one I knew. Most of them should not be there. I was sent there myself, on the 13th of September 2000, eight years ago. I could, had things gone differently, be there, still, today.

But not today the struggle

2008-07-18T10:50:00.000+02:00

I had a pupil yesterday for a class: after an hour of conversation I asked her to read aloud, from the opening chapter of Homage To Catalonia.

She speaks English well, her vocabulary is good and she also knows French: and yet the only words which she had never heard before were bourgeois and bourgeoisie.

Second life

2008-07-15T18:05:00.005+02:00

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

I asked and she said yes: almost immediately, the space between the question and the answer barely there. Long enough only for the fact of the question to be understood, for its meaning to register. Yes almost immediately: and therefore, almost without fear.

I had been afraid that she might say "are you serious?". I had been afraid of that when I first planned to ask - and having stepped back from doing so, and having, as it turned out, asked spontaneously and unplanned, I had forgotten to anticipate that answer. I forgot to be forewarned, to restrain my inclination to make a stupid, smart reply, that would have spoiled it, that would have made it cheaper. That path, at least, was never taken. Nothing was ruined. Just the perfect simplicity of yes.

That was eleven days ago, or nearly twelve: time passes, time passes, while you think about what you want to say and what the words would mean. But a simplicity is always the same however it is expressed: it explains itself, no matter how you may try to explain it.

Time passes. One uncompleted night eight years ago I closed my eyes and let the light go out: I fell, and kept on falling. A falling without movement, a falling which only came to rest eleven days later, as they allowed me to open my eyes and separate my way, slowly and confusedly, from the morphine and the hallucinations through which I had been living since my eyes were closed. It took days for me to be able to separate reality, outside my head, from the hallucinations that remained within: it took a long time for me to be able to understand where I was and who I was, and then to grasp hold of my memory, to let it settle back in order and tell me why.

Grasp hold, hold fast, cling on. Since I returned I have been clinging on, much of the time. Much of the time exhausted, without having done very much. When I am up in the Pyrenees I sometimes see a tree, stranded, high up on the mountainside. Sometimes in a convoluted shape, sometimes at a painful angle to the ground, all its energy consumed in the struggle not to fall, the tree itself partly consumed by its own efforts. They struggle, and consume themselves. But even on the mountainside, they still cling on.

I was up in the mountains eleven days, twelve days ago. And now I am returned once more: and I came back with this knowledge, as simple as a yes, as simple in expression but as hard to get to. An instant waited for, the knowledge earned: that if you cling on, if you cling on and cling on and still you do not fall, then - in the end - if you have struggled long enough, you get your second chance.

Village of the dreamed

2008-07-01T11:35:00.001+02:00

Last night I slept in the village and woke up with a nightmare, about milk and insects. We worry about milk: we have to worry, in the Aragonese summer, and try not to leave the fridge open for more than the shortest possible time. And the evening before a column of ants had discovered the cat's rejected biscuits and had to be sent on their way, with spray and mop and disinfectant, just before we went to bed.

I dreamed I was drinking coffee, and somebody warned me that the milk was off: then they lifted up a huge, huge transparent bag of milk, discoloured milk full of insects and maggots. I woke, feeling sick, thinking I had drunk the rancid milk. But neither the taste nor the image would go away, recurring every time I closed my eyes - so I had to make myself stay awake until the desire the sleep had gone.

While I was forcing wakefulness into my head, while I was trying to think of other things than crawling insects and rancid milk, I thought about my thoughts, about the process of trying to think of one thing in order to block out another: which brought to my struggling mind The Midwich Cuckoos, Gordon Zellaby thinking of a brick wall to hide from the Children the bomb he has brought. It had not occurred to me before a sleepless hour this morning: one of the great heroes of twentieth-century English literature is a suicide bomber.

I met him in the desert

2008-07-01T09:00:00.000+02:00

People in the know say this London-based credit derivatives trader is Matt Piper. So, another rogue trader? Let's not be too hard on Matt. He probably made a few mistakes, but not everyone who screws up is a rogue trader. I know Matt. I met him in the desert a few years ago, and he's a good sort.

Ninety seconds

2008-06-29T21:40:00.001+02:00

The match this evening kicked off late. Ah, I thought, the Spanish have already imposed their pattern of play on the Germans...

Away fan

2008-06-28T11:25:00.003+02:00

As usual for a Saturday, we came to Huesca this morning from the village, turning right in Angüés and going down the hill, on the carretera, our leaving of Angüés marked by a large sign by the side of the road.

All Spanish towns and villages possess these signs, or ought to - and indeed there may be more than one, as there is when we enter Angüés from the north, and have the choice between a sign that says ANGÜÉS, and another, immediately below it, that prefers to omit the accent and renders the name ANGÜES.

On the exit signs, there is always a thick red line, running from the bottom left-hand corner to the top right, crossing out the name of the place which is written on a white background: and therefore, seeing a red diagonal line on white, I can never leave anywhere without immediately thinking of the Peruvian national football team.

Hallucinations

2008-06-21T17:30:00.000+02:00

A little before two o'clock today I wandered out, briefly, into the Plaza del Mercado, and looked across it, distracted by a bright patch of green in a corner. Behind the building on the lefthand corner, where the road comes through, there's a tree, in a courtyard at the back of the building which houses the magistrates' courts. There is a wall, the top of which blocks one's view of the tree below its higher branches, and on the left, as I looked it, the ends of those branches went behind another wall - on the right, they were truncated by the building in the Plaza and thus the patch of green appeared essentially as a square, attached to the Plaza building about fifteen feet above the ground. And seeing this illusion, in the heat of an Aragón June during the mediodía, I thought, for a moment, that the patch of green that I was looking at was, in fact, a pub sign.

Aspirations

2008-05-27T11:45:00.006+02:00

A bloke who frequents a bulletin board I use has written a book about the Seventies: Francis Wheen seems to like it, which even now may still be a recommendation.

His review struck a chord with me, because those of us who remember the Seventies remember a mental world almost incomprehensible to those born later: nothing to do with flares and Spangles and progressive rock, but a world of capital and labour and of the corporate state that compromised between the two. He writes:

A couple of years ago I wrote a TV drama about Harold Wilson's last government. Although the thirtysomething producer liked the script, she found many of the allusions baffling. What, she wondered, was a "prices and incomes policy"? Or a "balance of payments crisis"? These appeared almost daily in British headlines during the 1970s; a mere generation later, they are as impenetrably archaic as Babylonic cuneiform.

When I emigrated, a couple of years ago, I met a friend beforehand in a pub outside Victoria Station and in the course of the conversation remarked that the world I knew seemed to have largely disappeared: the world of trades unions, a labour movement and a Welfare State, and one in which these were regarded as good things, where the idea of making sure that everybody was properly provided for was considered fundamental to the outlook of millions of people. I asked my great-aunt, once, whether she thought her Labour Party had achieved anything: oh yes, she said, these days you didn't see anybody sleeping in the streets of London any more. I don't think she said "homeless" - in truth, I don't think I remember even hearing the term until a few years later.

Not The Nine O'Clock News began in 1979. In one show there was a spoof of Just A Minute using news footage of trades union leaders: they were challenged to speak for a minute without using the term "aspirations". Naturally they failed the test and used a phrase like "our members' aspirations" within the first few seconds. "Aspirations" - who today, and who, born any later than I, would even connect the word "aspirations" with trades unionists rather than with hostility to them? In truth the world had changed already: the 1979 Election had already come and gone, decided on that very basis. In the course of that campaign I realised that I was a socialist - and so it was, looking back, that I got into the socialism market just as everybody else was getting out.

Continuing that strange obsession with BBC Online

2008-05-27T11:00:00.000+02:00

Picture report

Complaint form:

Can I ask - were the captions written by somebody who is not a native English speaker?

First caption: "for a position”. Should be "for a place".

Second: "10,000 less fans". Should be "fewer".

Third: "27 incredible league wins". Should be "an incredible 27".

Fourth: "has just keeper Casper Ankergren to thank". Should omit the word "just".

Fifth: "One of the early chances of the match comes from". Should be "falls to".

Sixth: "The fight continues in the first half with Danish keeper, Ankergren, stopping more goals". Neither "fight" nor “goals" is correct here.

Seventh: "After Leeds fightback at the end of the first half, all changes as the second opens, as unmarked Hayter heads home a 10-yard goal". Either "Leeds" should be followed by an apostrophe, or it should be "fight back". "All change" is not a plural unless you want to say "everything changes". "Open" should be "begins" or "kicks off" or something similar and it should be "a goal from ten yards".

Eighth: "Haytor ends a four-month goal drought in front of cheering Donny fans, as they step toward Championship promotion". The final phrase is wrong and should be something like "as they take a step towards promotion to the Championship". "Hayter" is the correct spelling.

Ninth: "Jason Price works the pitch remarkably in both attack and defence, making successful tackles". Neither "works the pitch remarkably" nor "making successful tackles" is good English.

Tenth: "Whites' fans watch scuppered chances". "Whites" is not apostrophised here as it's not considered a possessive. "Chances" are not "scuppered".

Eleventh: "The players are relieved and victorious as the whistle is finally blown". I don't think "victorious" is the word you're looking for here and I also think you want to say "final whistle".

Twelfth: "misery shares the pitch" is not really colloquial English.

Thirteenth: "Rovers have gladly secured a place in the second tier". We don't say "gladly" in this context.

I would be amazed if this report was written without the aid of an online translation service. Can the BBC not do better than that?

Crime and Punishment

2008-05-23T18:15:00.000+02:00

On the wall, at the corner where Calle de Herena meets the Coso Bajo, somebody has drawn a huge love heart with two names inside it. The names are Rodion Raskolnikov and Sonia Semyonovna.

Oh to be in England II

2008-05-09T13:45:00.000+02:00

The BBC today runs a story about the new Rough Guide, which, apart from many other things, says that Oxford's "dreaming spires" are "superb". It illustrates it with a photo which depicts not a single spire.

Oh to be in England

2008-05-09T11:00:00.001+02:00

I was in London for a few days this past week, mostly to play chess, partly to remind myself how horrible it is to come into Liverpool Street, your first taste of England other than the airport and the train, and the first things you see are the rubbish strewn all over the street and the drunkards strewn all over the pavements.

On Monday evening I went to my old favourite pub in Brixton, the Trinity Arms: the first thing I heard after I got through the door was one woman saying to another: "don't you think we've been overrun by other nationalities?"

There was a time - a time lasting about twenty-five years - when I would have had something to say to somebody who said something like that. But these days I'm trying to cut down on the hopeless struggle against ignorance in order to make it easier to struggle against stress. So I went and sat in the corner of the pub furthest from the victim of oppression, took out a book and reflected that one advantage of being an immigrant is that usually, when people are mouthing off in bars, you don't know that they're doing it. Because you can't understand what they're saying.

The title resembles a burger

2008-05-08T15:50:00.000+02:00

People's theatre

2008-04-30T12:30:00.001+02:00

They're playing the European chess championsips in Plovdiv. I've been there, in 1991: the amphitheatre in particular is superb, and you can actually see it.

You expect to, of course, that's what amphitheatres are for. Everywhere but Huesca. Two years ago they discovered an old Roman amphitheatre (Huesca originated as the Roman town of Osca) during the construction of flats inside a buolding just a few metres away from where I live. Experts came in and pronounced it a most promising architectural find, possibly extending a long way under the surrounding area, very important and exciting: the mayor came along to have his photograph taken with the excavators, to say how important the find was and how the Town Hall would assist the excavators' work. Then everybody went away again, the construction of the flats continued and nothing more was heard of the amphitheatre. The flats are finished now and they're for sale, competing with three million other unoccupied dwellings in Spain.

I suppose at least it's protected from graffiti - though not from other kinds of cultural vandalism - unlke Plovdiv, if the photos are anything to go by. I remember seeing graffiti on the walls when I was there: one of the messages said WEST BROM and another one said QPR.

What's in a name?

2008-04-26T10:45:00.001+02:00

Radio Clásica were playing Vaughan Williams at breakfast this morning, Valiant for Truth sung by the Christ Church Cathedral Choir. I love sacred music on a weekend morning: it makes life seem more contemplative and more relaxed.

There was a teacher at my school whose parents called him Vaughan Williams, after the composer. He taught PE, and maths.

Miller's tale

2008-04-19T13:10:00.001+02:00

There used to be a joke that an intellectual was somebody who could listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger. Perhaps a more contemporary version would be somebody who can hear the words The Crucible without thinking about snooker.

Everybody loves a Ryanair fax

2008-04-16T09:00:00.001+02:00

To: Customer Service, Ryanair +353 1 8121230

Date: 15 April 2008

From: ejh

Routes: Zaragoza-Stansted, Stansted-Zaragoza

Dear Ryanair Customer Service

Some weeks ago, I booked two Ryanair flights: on Friday 2 May from Zaragoza to Stansted and on Wednesday 7 May from Stansted to Zaragoza. There is only one flight a day between these destinations.

On 27 March I received an email from Ryanair Schedule Change (info@ryanair-schedule-change.com) titled 1st Notification of a change in departure/arrival time of your flight informing me that the times of the flights had changed. I accepted these changes by clicking on the link provided and indicating my acceptance in the manner requested.

I expected to receive some sort of email confirmation: but none arrived. Instead, on 5 April I was surprised to receive a second email titled 2nd Notification of a change in departure/arrival time of your flight informing me of the same change that I had already been informed of and requesting that I carry out the same acceptance that I had performed already. I did so, and again, no confirmation arrived.

Today, 15 April, I received a third email, though it was in fact titled 2nd Notification of a change in departure/arrival time of your flight rather than 3rd as one might have expected. I have accepted as well, and again have received no confirmation.

By this stage I had become a little nervous that my acceptances were not being confirmed because they had not been received, and I therefore attempted to call Ryanair Customer Service in order to check that everything was in order. However, attempts to call these numbers were in vain. I have tried to call both your Great Britain number (0871 246 0000) and your Spain number (807 220 032) but each instance, after the message informing me of how much the call will cost, there is a voice telling me that the number is not recognised.

I therefore urgently need confirmation, by email, that my acceptance of your flight changes has been received. I find it extraordinary – and extraordinarily frustrating – that, when you can require a confirmation from me for a change which you yourselves have made, that you can continue to send requests after I have done precisely what has been asked of me, and that when I try to call yourselves about it – on lines that would not be cheap even if I could get through - the numbers are unavailable. It puts me in an impossible situation where I neither know whether I am going to be permitted to travel, nor can check. Could you please urgently send me a confirmation that I am a passenger on these flights and if possible see why your phone numbers are inoperative. Thank you.

Everybody loves a bank letter

2008-04-10T11:35:00.001+02:00

Nat West
Collections Centre
Birmingham

0845 xxx xxxx

Dear ejh

Balance £266.53 DR
Limit £2000.00

As part of our continuing commitment to customer service we have taken the opportunity to review your account and note that there have been no credits to your account recently.

We shall be grateful if you wil ltelephhone us to discuss the situation. We would like to ensure that you are obtaining maximum benefit from your banking facilities. This may involve moving your borrowing onto a more appropriate lending product.

You can make payments into your account via our Internet payment facility. Log onto www.natwest.com/paybycard to make payments from your credit/debit card into your accounts.

If you have recently made a credit to your account, please ignore this letter.

Yours sincerely

Customer Service Manager

Dear Nat West

I am in receipt of your rather strange letter of 26 March observing that there have been no credits to my account recently and wondering whether I will telephone you to discuss the situation.

I do not think I will: in the first place, I live, as you are aware, outside the UK and unless you can assure me otherwise, my understanding is that such a call would be expensive for me to make. If you, on the other hand, wish to call me, you are of course welcome to do so and my numbers are appended below.

While I appreciate your aspiration to "ensure that you are obtaining maximum benefit from your banking facilities" I am perfectly satisfied with the present arrangement and do not remotely feel the need to move my "borrowing onto a more appropriate lending product". Indeed I am rather surprised that you raise the question at all. I am, by your own account, using only a small proportion of the overdraft facility which we mutually agreed would be appropriate: less than one-seventh, by my calculation. As your own figures above show, my balance remains at more than £1700 below the agreed overdraft limit.

Now, I don't actually recall making any agreement to make regular credits to my account. Not everybody who has a bank account is in receipt of a regular income and you were aware of that situation when we last agreed to renew my overdraft facility. I would not have requested its renewal had I not felt I might at some time need to use it and you would not have agreed to it had you not understood that this was possible.

This being the case, unless you're really under the impression that I propose to clean out my account to the full extent of my overdraft facility and disappear without trace – rather than, for instance, using a small proportion of an agreed overdraft facility with a degree of prudence and responsibility that could wisely be copied by many major financial institutions – would it be possible to cease troubling me with the suggestion that either my account or my financial conduct is in some way inappropriate?

I've been banking with NatWest for, I believe, a quarter of this century this coming October. If you think that's too long, then by all means say so.

Yours

ejh

Spain

2008-03-24T18:40:00.000+01:00

On the way back we went past the relojería at Lascellas: the digital clock hanging outside said, in bright red numbers, 20:21. I looked at my watch. It was 20:26.

Getting away with it

2008-03-22T18:15:00.007+01:00

On Thursday morning, coming into Morillo de Tou, we came around a lefthand corner, blind because of the mountainside around which the road was bent, and saw a car coming towards us in our lane, still trying to overtake although he had run out of time and room. I barely had time to notice he was there, let alone to take evasive action. I probably couldn't have done anyway - the road was protected on my right by a barrier, there was a queue of traffic on the left and in front of me, the other driver's car. No room, no time: in fact I didn't even have time to notice, though R did, that he was on the wrong side of a no-overtaking line.

By the time his presence had registered he had found some room, perhaps provided by some other driver braking. He had dipped back into his lane and I was past him, almost in the same movement, almost sharing precisely the same short section of passing time. At least it felt like that - but perhaps the absence of time to react, the absence of time to properly recognise what was happening, the absence of time between those two events, conflated the two and brought them closer to an overlap than they genuinely were. He was gone, as quickly as my life might have been gone: no sooner were we in danger than we were out of it.

They say that sometimes, when accidents happen, you see it in slow motion, as if you had plenty of time but could do nothing to change what was going to happen. Perhaps when the danger passes, when the disaster exists only briefly, only in an unrealised embryo, there is no such slowing-down. No meeting of eyes between you and the other driver - just the briefest space between our observation of potential danger and our observation of its end. Then it's over, gone, there's nothing left. Not even time to get properly angry with them. Not even time to ask yourself what you would have done, had they found no space to aim for on their side of the road and kept on coming, straight towards you.

I drive slowly, by most people's standards, certainly by the standards of Easter weekend in Spain, wanting to give myself more time to see what's happening, wanting also to drive within the law. From conviction or from caution, or from fear - or from observation, that people overtake on the other side of blind corners, on the other side of the brow of the hill, and from calculation that I want an extra second, an extra half a second, if they do. I do not know, quite, what I would do with it, but I know that I might need it. I might have needed it on Thursday. Or he might have needed it, since he was the one caught in the wrong place with little time to get out of it.

I say caught, but he wasn't really caught. He put himself there. It was only when coming back, much later in the day, that I realised quite how irresponsible, how unspeakably stupid and greedy the other driver had been. Neither the corner nor the end of overtaking could have taken him unawares: there was a long, straight stretch of road before the turn and a road sign, hard to miss unless one wished not to see it, announcing the start of the no-overtaking zone. He knew what was happening, knew, not just at the moment he found himself in no-man's-land and couldn't yet get out of it, but for a long time before, when he planned to overtake, when he surveyed the road and the traffic ahead of him and asked himself if he wanted to do this now. He knew he might be gambling and decided it was worth the gamble.

It was when I realised that, when I realised that he'd had so much time to think about it first, that I really became angry with him: that was when it ceased to be mere stupidity and became, instead, sheer wickedness, the taking of risks with other people's lives, the taking of risks with the lives of strangers. Presumably, he thought he could get away with it. Presumably, he thought somebody else would always brake. Presumably, he thought it would be all right.

But this is England

2008-03-19T12:20:00.000+01:00

It was a very English day this morning: a little cold, a little rain, the raindrops making thin lines on the windscreen like robins' footsteps in the snow. Not really rain at all, more a touch of moisture carried by the wind. That slight dampness, that is England: it's a dampness that I miss, particularly when I feel the hot wind in the morning, a dry wind, something that I never felt in England, where the wind always serves to alleviate the heat rather than intensify it. I do not think I have seen dew here and mist is practically unknown - fog, I've seen, and driven through, thick between Huesca and the village last December, as bad as anything I've seen in England. But even when you see patches of fog thinning out up in the mountains it never seems like mist. The dampness, the feeling of dampness, is not there.

The hot wind should soon start to blow, but not yet: we have been having el cierzo, the Mistral of Aragón, blowing cigarette ends along the edge of the plaza and into the shop doorway, tearing at our notices announcing cuentacuentos. Cold, but dry, too cold to be anything else, blowing into my cheekbones, wrapping me in my football scarf and making me hurry home. But this morning, it was less cold, and a little damp, not too much, just right like a sandwich and a cup of tea.

At which point, I stopped reading

2008-03-19T12:10:00.000+01:00

"HR consultancy People Risk Solutions"

[from, via, also see]

Mi entierro con María Callas

2008-03-18T11:40:00.003+01:00

It was International Poetry Day last Friday and there was a poetry recital at the Civic Centre. I went the year before: I performed Spike Milligan's There are holes in the sky - in English, following with a Spanish translation* that was not my own work. But I have been here two whole years now, two whole years this coming Friday, and I thought that this year I should try and exercise the little Spanish I have learned and write a verse myself.

I have learned little enough in those two years. It has been hard, hard, not only hard because I started from the very beginning, with no Spanish at all save the few words like matador that everybody knows. Not only hard because I started at the age of forty and forty is thirty years too late to start learning a language properly. Not only hard because I have no time, no formal lessons and no time to have those lessons, because I spend most of my day trying to run a shop and much of the rest of it trying to recover from the effort. Not only hard because of flooded flats and corrupt residents' associations, because of insurance companies that pass the buck to one another and take sixteen months to pay, because of water that does not work and post that does not arrive, and because of all the stress and anger that these things produce and the lack of motivation, the lack of a desire to be here and to stay here, that results. Not only hard because of the enormous, unanticipated stress of being without language, of being almost unable to make oneself understood and almost entirely unable to understand. I need to learn and I am not able to learn nearly quickly enough. And because of that, I am tired, and stressed, and angry, and because of that, I cannot learn.

But I have learned enough to write a short verse, to find some sounds in Spanish that chime together. It has taken two years to get there, and two years is two years closer to death. So the subject that came to mind was my funeral, and the music I'd like to have played when it happens. And so I wrote, and then I spoke, and then I left the stage.

A mi entierro
Quiero
El aria
"Casta Diva"
Cantada por María.

Me gustaría mucho
Como quiero que lloren
La gente

Y tengo
Miedo
De qué sin María
No haya lágrimas
Para mí.

I didn't say it was TS Eliot. I didn't say it was Joseph Conrad.

[*Hay agueros en el cielo
Donde entra la lluvia
Pero los agueros son muy pequeños
Por eso, la lluvia es fina.]

How are you kipping?

2008-03-17T18:00:00.005+01:00

Manolo asked me just before he cut my hair. How are you kipping? He asked me three times, I think, before I realised what he meant. Can't complain, I said. Musn't grumble. He had no idea what I was on about.

I've stopped teaching English, not in principle, but in practice. (Manolo's not my student. Somebody's, presumably, but not mine.) I'm still open to offers for the right student, but they'd have to be different to most of the students I've had previously. I could never rely on them not to cancel at the last minute: eventually I'd start expecting the text before it came. They couldn't see it: not that I had made an arrangement to see them, nor that I had organised my time to that effect, nor that I might have wanted to do others things in that time which I could no longer do. Nor even that the money they were paying for the class was basically my salary, money I needed and needed to rely on.

I looked around, after a while, for a colloquial equivalent for "messing me about": I couldn't really find one. Odd that the concept should be so difficult to express in the language of Spain.

I wonder whether foreigners are not looked on here as teachers are by younger pupils: who are surprised to see the teacher out of school, who must imagine that the teacher lives in the school and exists only there. Foreigners do not live, as other people live, and do not therefore have the same needs and requirements. They exist only when you see them in their employment. You are surprised to see them outside that role. You did not think of them outside it.

One thing I tried to discourage the students from doing, as it happens, was pursue their interest in learning colloquial English phrases. They all wanted to do so: they thought it would show how much they knew real English, English as it is spoken and therefore English as they wished to speak it. Of course - though I could never get them to understand this - the effect would actually be the opposite. Because to speak a language colloquially, you have to demonstrate your comfort with the language, your identification with it.

You can use and understand its many stock phrases, which do not mean exactly what they say: and you can understand (as Manolo, of course, did not) the responses too. You can ignore its rules of grammar and pronounciation, as colloquialisms do. You can express yourself precisely by avoiding the requirement to express yourself precisely. You can do this because you grasp, from years of living with the language and inside it, what the phrases mean and what they do not mean, when to use them and when they are not used. You demonstrate your confidence with the langauge. You show yourself to be an insider.

But use them wrongly, pronounce them wrongly, and instantly you achieve the opposite: you betray yourself. You show yourself to be an outsider. You demonstrate your lack of confidence. You do not show that you're trying, nearly so much as you show that you're failing. You make a fool of yourself. Naturally you do, when learning a language: it's your function. You are the outsider, the clown, the one who fails, the fool. But who would choose to make oneself a fool? What kind of fool does that?

I am spending too much time on the internet

2008-03-14T12:15:00.000+01:00

I took the weekly BBC Online news-trivia quiz. I got all seven questions right.

Grammar depreciation rates worsening

2008-03-13T10:40:00.000+01:00

Apparently:

The current economic uncertainty, coupled with green taxes, are making car depreciation rates worse.

Bloody waste of time

2008-03-11T15:25:00.001+01:00

I've had quite a few letters printed in the London Review of Books, though the one time they comissioned an article from me they changed their mind and never printed it. I've not had a letter printed since I moved abroad, quite likely for that very reason: by the time I actually recieve the magazine they've probably already had all the letters they want, from British readers or from overseas subscribers who read it on the internet. I don't: it hurts my eyes.

That's the way it goes. The latest issue contains a rather overlong and splenetic letter from Edward Pearce attacking a piece by Eamon Duffy defending (to a degree) the régime of Bloody Mary. Perhaps they should have waited for mine: it made a better point in a rather shorter fashion.

Dear LRB

In his lecture on the religious executions of the Marian Church Eamon Duffy writes, first, that "this was the most intense religious persecution anywhere in 16th-century Europe" and second, that "the case can be made that made that in 16th-century terms the burnings were inevitable". He does not, regrettably, explain how these apparently contradictory claims can be reconciled.

Yours

ejh

Guest post

2008-03-10T23:55:00.001+01:00

At the Cedar Lounge Revolution

Farewell to the Spanish working class

2008-03-07T12:50:00.000+01:00

Apparently the student vote is going to be crucial in the General Election on Sunday. At least, one assumes so, since judging by the cross-section of the electorate interviewed in this BBC story, five out of eight Spanish voters are students.

Memories in a box

2008-03-05T12:15:00.003+01:00

I played chess on Saturday in the Athletic Club of Huesca: the sets were nice, polished pieces on wooden boards. I have seven or eight sets at home, most of them pocket size or small, portable sets though I do have one expensive set, a marble one, in need of repair. In truth it isn't mine in the first place, though I have forgotten whose it is: I have carried it about, with my books, from place to place for years longer than my meory can cope with. I only play very occasionally with a good quality set: sometimes they have them on the top boards in a tournament, so if I've won a couple of games in a row and find myself temporarily close to the leaders, I can enjoy the privilege of playing with more expensive equipment until it's time to return, the next round, to cheap plastic.

In truth the standard of the pieces doesn't matter, provided that they're clean, unbroken and recognisable in shape. If anything, they were a distraction: they reminded me of the set my father had. For a moment I thought I saw a red mark on the top of one of the white knights, not, in truth, because there was anything there, but because I remembered the red kings that were printed on top of the knights on my father's set. Not on all of them, but only two, one white, one black, indicating the knight that should be placed on the kingside, and, later in the game, identifying the original square of the knight. It seemed to me a pointless affectation - the rooks bore no such mark, nor the pawns, yet one might as well know their square of origin as that of the knight. But I remember it, and for a brief instant on Saturday, I thought I saw it again, like Orwell seeing O'Brien's missing extra finger.

The set had an expensive board, and an expensive lockable box, a veneer outside, green baize within. I was impressed, and coveted the set: my father said that I could have it one day, the day I beat him at chess. I did beat him eventually, winning a rook ending a pawn down, and asked for the set: but he had either forgotten, or never meant it in the first place, and said no, what he'd meant was that I could have it if I beat him, not in an individual game but in a match. It wasn't what he'd said the first time. It wasn't the last time he lied.

Unhurried

2008-03-04T15:40:00.000+01:00

On Friday morning I looked out of the shop window into the plaza and caught sight of a stork, flying southwards, more than likely from a nest in the cathedral, across the plaza, descending gently, just as the ground descends from the Casco Antiguo towards the plain.

The flight of the stork isn't, to my eyes, genuinely graceful, but it is languid: effortless, unhurried, almost without flapping its wings. It seems almost half-asleep, unaware of its surroundings, unaware of the human life below. Or if it is aware of it, unworried by it, and unfrightened. I like that: not just the absence of fear but the absence of interest, the human world unintrusive, our sole significance to the stork the way our roadways function as a map.

When aeroplanes come over the Pyrenees to Zaragoza, they find the Ebro and follow it: I think the storks navigate in much the same way. At least, when I walked the other day along the Paseo Ramón y Cajal, which stretches long and straight eastwards out of Huesca towards Barbastro and Lerida, I saw a stork above me, flying straight and along its length, apparently, therefore, following the road. There is a crossroads some distance along and when I reached it, I saw the stork, some way off the road and to the left, much higher, and circling: as if it had become confused between the two roads and was trying to decide which one it had wanted in the first place.

Lost horizon

2008-03-03T05:30:00.006+01:00

We ran on Sunday, for the first time this year, up to the hermitage and most of the way back, until we stopped to avoid running into the pack of farmers' dogs who were on the road around the lower half of the village.

We ran around the hermitage, admiring the white blossom of the almond trees, and as we came around the building and started back the way we'd come, we could see the last remaining snow, the thinnest of strips on the very top of the Sierra. But beyond that, behind the next hermitage on the hill, just to our north, where there is a gap in the Sierra, we could see all the way to Monte Perdido, fifty kilometres away on the border with France. We came back to look at it again a little later, and caught a touch of sun, even though it was only the second day of March: but Monte Perdido was white as the almond blossom, still covered with snow, looking like a giant iced bun on the horizon.

Hand signal

2008-02-29T15:50:00.001+01:00

We were trying to siesta at about two this afternoon when my mobile bleeped, announcing an incoming text. This intrigued me for a second or two, since the only person who ever texts me is R, save people replying to my texts. But I haven't sent any for some while, so who could it be? The excitement abated when I realised it must be Vodaphone advertising something, which outcome I predicted to R, before picking up the mobile from my bedside cabinet and revealing that it was, indeed, a promotion from Vodaphone.

"Did you know it wasn't from me?" asked R. I did, I said. So R - having recently discovered that there are different ringtones for incoming calls depending on whether or not the number is in my address book - asked if that was how I knew. "Was it because of the tone?"

"No", I said. "I knew it wasn't you texting me because your hand was in mine."

Stone me

2008-02-28T15:05:00.003+01:00

If, instead of heading south from Angües, you go north towards the Sierra de Guara, you're more likely to see birds of prey than storks - kestrels, eagles, vultures, sometimes even sitting on a telepone pole beside the road, sometimes circling, not far above, their cloak-like wings astretch. I was once standing on a hill in Abiego, admiring an olive grove below, when I saw the shadow of an eagle sweep over the olive trees: it seemed enormous and practically on top of me, and for a second, until it left the grove behind, I almost expected to be carried off, like Sinbad by the roc.

I have never seen one, and quite likely never will, but in the Sierra and in the Pyrenees beyond them, there still survive a few pairs of Lammergeier, the bearded vulture or quebrantahuesos, shatterbones. These pick up smaller creatures and drop them onto rocks to break them open and gain access to their flesh. It's how Aeschylus is supposed to have died: not by being grabbed and thrown to his death, but by having a tortoise dropped onto his head from a great height, by a bearded vulture who mistook his bald pate for a stone.

Hasta la vista

2008-02-27T11:00:00.005+01:00

In the flat above the shop there's an old man, Mateo, who often comes round to talk to R about this and that. His home village, some thirty-five kilometres south-east of Huesca, is Pertusa: we drove past it the other day, travelling to the Civil War museum at Robres, through Angües, Bespén and then turning before Pertusa to go through Sesa and Grañén. The road goes up into the hills and R must have had a fantastic view from the passenger seat: the Somontano plain with Pertusa right below us, and above the village but below us still, the circling storks who make their homes in the churches and the water towers across the province in the spring.

I should have liked to stop and watch the storks myself, and enjoy the view: but I will never enjoy it now. A few days after our trip, R was talking to Mateo. She said we had been to his village and enjoyed the view from the adjacent hillside road. Did we know, he asked, what role the hill had played in the life of the village? When there was a dog that they didn't want, the villagers would take it to the top of that hill, and throw it to its death.

In my end is my beginning

2007-02-19T10:35:00.000+01:00

So you run and you run to catch up with the sun but it's sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in a relative way but you're older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death.

Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to naught
Or half a page of scribbled lines
Hanging on in quiet desperation
Is the English way
The time is gone, the song is over
Thought I'd something more to say

I shall have to stop again: to put this blog into hibernation. If I do not stop here, I shall never start again elsewhere: there is writing that needs to be done, in the sense that I have a need to do it. To start it, to complete it, to see what happens to it subsequently: to see what happens to me subsequently and to find out who I am now. What I have to write, I think I know. Whether I have still the words to write it - I do not know. I think I do. One loses confidence in words, loses control of them, as one gets older, changes, becomes less certain of oneself.

I wrote a book ten years ago, expecting it to be followed by another and another: but no sooner was it published than the world exploded and I fell through the fissures that opened up beneath me. I fell and kept on falling: and became so used to the fall that I could never be sure that it had actually stopped. When one cannot be sure of reality, or of oneself, one cannot be sure of the meaning of words either: nor can one be confident how they will be received. Or whether they will be heard.

So, lacking belief in the existence of an end, it is hard, hard beyond explaining, to begin, since one finds oneself changing ideas and intentions, putting off time and again the moment when one starts, searching for exactly the right way or expressing something of which one is no longer exactly sure:

Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.

I think I still have something that I want to say, or something that I am grasping towards saying. I think that I am disposed to say it, if I can find out what it is. I can start now or I can never start. I can write now or I can never know whether or not I would have written

You say I am repeating
Something I have said before. I shall say it again.

I shall say it again. I need to write. Or I need to find out if I can write.

It is done, it is enough. It will do.

[Note : I can occasionally still be found here.]

Honesty box

2007-01-23T12:35:00.000+01:00

We are considering moving to a larger place - almost anywhere would qualify - and in pursuit of this objective, we spent a few minutes, over the weekend, looking at the small ads in Diario del AltoAragón. But we were distracted from consideration of the accomodation to let by the discovery of a column headed Relax. Which, somewhat to our surprise, turned out to be where the prostitutes of Huesca are allowed to advertise.

No old-fashioned box numbers: the invention of the mobile phone has rendered that unnecessary, though two of the ads even carry fixed-line numbers, prefaced 974 as are all the fixed-line numbers in Huesca. One assumes these two numbers are for brothels: one is a box ad, for an establishment called Jaca Relax, which depicts a woman wearing suspenders and makes mention of Señoritas de Gran Nivel, while the other features servicio de bar and offer to connect you con señoras particulares.

Or you may prefer to contact the ladies direct, using the aforementioned mobiles. One hopes though that communication will not be a problem, because although the ads are written in perfect Spanish, many of the advertisers are brasileñas, or have Russian names, and are apparently new in town, por primera vez en Huesca. Their knowledge may however be less provincial than the town where they have arrived. One unnamed madurita, for instance, offers Francés completo, while others mention masajes, vibradores, a cuerpo caliente or make the attractive promise: realizo todas tus fantasías.

There is competition for the attention of chest fetishists: Natasha's 110 pecho is no match for Daniela (120 tetas) or Lucía (120 pecho) but neither of them have counted on Laura who lays claim to 140 pecho. She appears to have learned many things in her 20 añitos: strict honesty, one suspects, may not be among them. One imagines that any complaints about the veracity of the advertisement would be met with reference to the legal maxim caveat emptor. The Spanish language derives from Latin and in this instance the law may well do likewise.

Presumably there must, however, be some control over the placing of such ads, or else there would be an enormous temptation to put up the mobile number of some neighbour or other personal enemy. I'd guess that one would need to show one's ID card. Even if I had one, that would probably deter me from the otherwise almost irresistible inclination to victimise the builder who wrecked our flat more than months ago and has still not paid us a single cent for all the damages. Or his lying, corrupt grandfather, who controlled the residents' bank account and therefore ensured that his family got paid while their victims waited months for botched repairs.

I'd love to see to it that Víctor became Victoria and had his phone ringing 24 horas with people asking after his buen culo. Or that Eugenio were renamed Eugenie and forced to fend off queries about todos los servicios y masajes. After all, if I were confronted with my responsibility, I would do what they did. Shrug my shoulders, say no te preocupes or ¡mala suerte! and tell them that is life, that mistakes happen.

They may even have happened in this week's column. For Silvia, far from offering, with Paula, masajes eróticos or (as does Tatiana) posturas sin limites, wishes with apparent sincerity to meet a man:

serio y solvente para una posible relación.

Serious and solvent? You'll be lucky. But at least she didn't ask for honesty. Because in at least two ways that I can think of, Silvia, you're in the wrong place for that.

The plagiarism of Julie Welch

2007-01-21T11:25:00.000+01:00

I understand that the strange resemblance, previously noted here, between a recent piece by Julie Welch and another piece written six years ago has been picked up by Private Eye: not all that surprisingly, since it was I who sent it to them...

Aide-memoire

2007-01-07T14:35:00.000+01:00

Here's something that requires a little explanation.

I was browsing: browsing through the Observer's list of fifty heartbreaking moments in the history of sport. I remember some of them: I remember number 28 particularly, the French Cup Final, in 2000, between Nantes and Calais.

I remember little enough about the match, save that it took place, the result, and the fact that I watched it on television. There is a reason why I should remember this: I nearly died that day, or in the morning after, and watching that match, in the evening, is the last clear memory I have, perhaps the last entirely reliable memory I have for that whole month, since the next three or four weeks are all but lost to me. For that reason, I am sure of the date: the match took place on the seventh of May. Which made the piece, by Julie Welch, a little puzzling, requiring a little explanation. It claims that the match took place on the ninth.

So I Googled a little, and searched a little, and after a while came up with a match report from John Lichfield of the Independent, which confirmed, in its second paragraph, that the match took place on a Sunday night - which, as I had thought, fell on the seventh. An odd mistake, but not important: it was only because of the coincidence, because of old memory revived, that I had noticed it in the first place.

But, having located the match report, I read on - and I got a second sense of coincidence. Here's how Welch had described the late, extra-time penalty and winning goal:

Then Nantes's substitute striker, Alain Caveglia, got loose inside the box. Three times Calais's centre-back Fabrice Baron blocked him with clumsy lunges. At the third tackle, Caveglia flung himself optimistically forward and the referee pointed to the spot. Sibierski's spot-kick hit goalkeeper Cedric Schille on the knee and bounced into the roof of the net.

Whereas, reading the Independent's more contemporaneous report, it was described a little differently. A little, but not too much:

As the game meandered towards extra time, with the Nantes players looking increasingly jittery, their substitute striker, Alain Caveglia, got loose inside the box. The Calais central defender Fabrice Baron, a youth worker by trade, made three clumsy attempts to tackle him, all of which looked possible penalties.

At the third tackle, Caveglia flung himself theatrically forward. The referee, Mr Colombo, pointed to the spot - a courageous decision in the circumstances, with the whole nation, outside Nantes, supporting Calais. Even Caveglia said afterwards that "to be frank" he could not be sure it was a penalty, although he felt that he was fouled at least once.

Sibierski's spot-kick hit the Calais goalkeeper Cedric Schille on the right knee and bounced into the roof of the net. The dream was over, although Calais missed a good chance to equalise in injury time.

Got loose inside the box. That phrase of Welch's sounds familiar: Lichfield wrote got loose inside the box as well. He wrote Fabrice Baron, a youth worker by trade, made three clumsy attempts to tackle him: Welch has three times Calais's centre-back Fabrice Baron blocked him with clumsy lunges, which omits Lichfield's reference to Monsieur Baron's occupation, but otherwise retains his use of clumsy.

Lichfield describes the outcome of the clumsy challenges: at the third tackle, Caveglia flung himself theatrically forward: Welch has at the third tackle, Caveglia flung himself optimistically forward, varying only in the adverb and in no other way. Much the same can be said of her description of the penalty: Sibierski's spot-kick hit goalkeeper Cedric Schille on the knee and bounced into the roof of the net. Lichfield wrote: Sibierski's spot-kick hit the Calais goalkeeper Cedric Schille on the right knee and bounced into the roof of the net, reminding us of Schille's team and specifying which knee the penalty hit, but otherwise identical to the sentence later "written" by Julie Welch.

Perhaps this may help us understand the mistake in the date: because the original Independent piece appeared on the ninth of May 2000, two days after the game was played. If you copy in haste, you may not always spot that kind of thing.

One move behind

2007-01-07T12:35:00.000+01:00

I am in serious need of a game of chess. I have not played competitively for six months: not proper chess at proper time limits, with time to think (unlike the lightning chess that's popular here) and without access to computers (unlike the email chess to which I have resorted). I last played in the international tournament in Benasque, in July. It was a very Spanish experience. The tournament, in a small Pyrenean town very close to the French border, could not be entered in advance. One could put one's name down, which I did, but the instructions to competitors - the very long and detailed instructions to competitors - were clear. Payment had to be made on the day that the tournament began, and if that payment were not made, one's entry would not be accepted.

So I made sure I was in Benasque nice and early, my place booked at the campsite, the tournament office - next to the tourist office - safely located. With a safe couple of hours to go before the games began at four o'clock, I went to the office with the forty Euros that I needed.

The office was closed. There was no notice saying when it might reopen. Perhaps they were still on their siesta, which custom still persists in Alto Aragón? Perhaps. I went back half-an-hour later - and half-an-hour after that. The office remained closed. I went next door to the tourist office, but they could not help. I went, twice, to the tournament hall just down the road, but it was locked, save for the bar, and nobody from the tournament was there.

I was in a panic, but there was nothing I could do. So I went down to the hall again, not long before four o'clock, ready to plead my case. I need not have worried. It transpired that it really didn't matter after all. As long as you paid within a couple of days, nobody would complain. And everybody except me, apparently, knew this to be the case.

I paid, anyway, before the start, out of Protestant principle. While I was paying, I put my cycle helmet down, on the tournament controller's table. The controller informed me that the helmet should not, during play, be put on the tables where games were taking place. It was not during play. Nor was it on a table where games would be taking place.

It was classic Spain, although I didn't, at that time, realise it:

1. All the rules must be written down at as great a length as possible.
2. Once this has been done, they may be completely disregarded.
3. This applies to all the rules except the most trivial. Which will be insisted on even if they don't apply.
4. The office is closed. Unless it is the wrong office.
5. Everybody knows what is happening except you.
6. Nobody will ever tell you anything.

Classic Spain: my quintessential Spain story, I think. Although, it being Sunday today, I am reminded that one can buy the local paper, Diario del AltoAragón, which on a Sunday has a television supplement, a listings magazine, telling you what's on all the channels for the week. The listings start on a Saturday. The Saturday already gone.

Food and the gods

2007-01-06T14:35:00.000+01:00

We knew we wanted to lie-in this morning, so last night I fed Ichy a bit extra, in the hope that it would last her until lunchtime. She heard the scraping of my hand in the packet and came straight to the kitchen from her previous repose: and when she arrived she went, again directly, to the bowl and began to eat.

I liked that, its simplicity, its absence of acknowledgement. I am a Catholic by birth but Protestant in inclination: I like modesty and simplicity, the absence of decoration, the absence of effusiveness. If there must be social ceremony I would rather it were brief. The greater the show, the greater the feeling of insincerity. The more convoluted our declarations, the more they express obligation: the more extensive the ritual, the more one experience it purely as ritual. If one is expected to say "thank you", then how can one discern honesty? Where is truth, within the performance of an obligation? A refusal to say "thank you", that has meaning. But the declaration may have meaning or may not.

Often, I think, I would prefer its absence, as it is absent in the cat. Holst wrote, of music:

Never compose anything unless the not-composing of it becomes a positive nuisance to you

which is another way of saying that we should not speak unless we have something necessary to say: and necessary in the sense of valuable, of contributing something, not in the sense that it is necessary to observe an obligation. One might address that problem another way, by removing the obligation, or not observing it, as Quakers refused to observe the obligation to remove their hats. One should at least consider it, for if a social obligation is empty enough, it is surely emptier still if it goes unexamined, if it is performed without one even understanding why it might exist.

In a pause after conversation, the younger boy said in his small, clear voice, "Mr Shevek doesn't have very good manners".

"Why not?" Shevek asked before Oiie's wife could reprove the child. "What did I do?"

"You didn't say thank you."

"For what?"

"When I passed you the dish of pickles."

"Ini! Be quiet!"

Sadik! Don't egoise! - The tone was precisely the same.

"I thought you were sharing them with me. Were they a gift? We say thank you only for gifts, in my country."

In my country, if I had a country, we might do the same: or more likely, simply nod the head, acknowledging the gift, but make no comment on it. Since if we feel obliged to say we like it, how can they who give the gift believe that what we say is true?

Whatever you say, say nothing: it seems the opposite advice to Holst's, but it is complementary. Say nothing. Say nothing that does not need to be said. Write nothing unless you need to, not unless the not-writing of it would be a positive nuisance to you. And do not make a fuss. A cat, once fed, will make no fuss, but simply eats, even if, unexpectedly, the food is given earlier, or in a greater quantity, than the cat expected. She eats. But human beings, receiving unexpected bounty, invent gods and praise them. Manna from heaven has to be from heaven. It cannot just happen as exigency, as a stroke of fortune.

Why do they do this? Because they want to convince themselves that their fortune wasn't fortune. That they were rewarded for their piety or moral excellence, because the gods reward the good. It is the gospel of success, by which we live, that success comes because we work for it - and hence deserve it. That when we get a break, it was a break that we deserved. We cannot simply enjoy it, or observe it, but we have to make a moral lesson out of it, one that we disguise by calling on a god.

I do not like it. I do not like it because I despise the arrogant corollary, that if we fail there must be a lack of effort, or a lack of virtue in our failing. More and more the world in which I live appears to me divided in this way, that on one side there stand the successful, and on the other side the unsuccessful. In that great struggle I am with the latter. On the losing side. Because we are most human when we fail. Because it is when we fail that we find ourselves in need of one another. Of one another, not the blessing of a god. Of one another, genuinely, from no obligation but, rather, from need.

To err is human, and to fail, more human still. To call on god is futile: to link success with moral virtue is the law of dog eat dog. Which seems to me so foolish, when, if we are dogs, most of us are small and frightened dogs. Do not say thank you for good fortune: you neither deserve nor fail to deserve it. It would be better simply to accept it and say nothing. In the manner of the cat.

But thinking makes it so?

2006-12-22T16:45:00.000+01:00

1. Some years ago I was working in the library at Oxford Brookes University where one of my colleagues was a young German woman. One morning she said to me:

"I can't understand how the students can be late with their books. After all, they have very small rooms."

2. Yesterday I was working in the shop when a young art student came in - not Spanish, I think, but Latin American, and we carried on a conversation partly in Spanish, partly in English. She asked me how I was finding Spain ("me gustan los Pirineos", I said) and she asked what things I don't like. Being, unusually, in a mood to put things euphemistically, I said that Spain was not very efficient. "Efficient?" she asked. I tried to say it in Spanish - "¿eficiente?" - but as she still appeared to be struggling with my accent, I picked up the dictionary and showed her. Eficiente.

She said she still didn't understand what it meant.

Blair firm on early polls

2006-12-18T14:55:00.000+01:00

Guest post on Lenin's Tomb.

Love of life

2006-12-10T16:15:00.000+01:00

Ichy is fighting for her life. The more gently she struggles, the more certain we will be that she'll survive: what's crucial is that the stitches in her stomach should not burst. As yet, she doesn't have the energy to test the stitches, not after ten of fifteen minutes of activity first thing in the morning, which exhaust her and send her back into the cupboard for the rest of the day. Tomorrow, the day after, may be the time of real danger, when she's able to run, or leap, or stretch herself and stretch the stitches as she does so.

Now, she rests, and sleeps, either in the cupboard or on the chair, lying on her silver-painted tummy, only her head visible. She wears a bonnet, like a funnel, to prevent her from reaching her stitches with her teeth. The rest of her body is swaddled in blankets, some wrapped round her, some wrapped round hot-water bottles, so that, to me, she resembles a blasphemous infant Jesus. Every hour we feed her, filling a small syringe with food, mixed with a little water, and manouevring it around her mouth until she opens up. Two or three centilitres, washed down with water, similarly squirted if and when she lets us do it. Then rest, more rest, and visiting the vet, twice daily, for injections. The cost, when we are finished, is going to be enormous. But we are trying to save the life of a cat.

She ate balloons. We didn't know she was eating them, not until she vomited and shredded balloon came up with the liquid. We knew she chewed them, but she chews everything: balloons, books, wires, pencils, whatever she can get her mouth round and plenty that she can't. We didn't know she was eating them: we knew she had a hoard of stuff, under the sofabed, but we cannot properly clean the flat, hemmed as we are into one room, with one room still almost unusable, the plaster falling on our heads in pursuit of the water which dislodged it. It is a mess, more of a campsite than a home, small piles of papers, books, everything, cluttering every surface in the house, and Ichy had her little pile too. Her hoard must have included some balloons, left over from the ones I tied to our stall at the book fair. We played with them a couple of times, letting them fall on Ichy like Rover in The Prisoner.

She would run away; then, regaining her courage, would creep up to the balloon and begin to paw it, claws extended (as hers always are) until the balloon would burst and she would run away again. This was fun, at the time. But now it isn't, now it isn't funny any more, because it must have been these balloons which she kept, hoarded, chewed and ate, and which she vomited up last week.

She had been off her food for several days, which worried us, but I have seen cats off their food before: disturbed by a change in temperature, or furniture, or anything else that may have affected their comfort and security. Sometimes, they do not eat for days, as Ichy wouldn't, but after you have tried to change their food (as we did) or after a week of pleading (which we did) they will change their minds again and eat as if nothing had happened between their last meal and the present one.

But Ichy didn't resume. She vomited, shards of balloon, then water, then nothing. Still she wouldn't eat. We took her to the vet, who filled her full of a white liquid, so that nothing left might show up in an X-ray. When she was home, close to midnight, she vomited up the liquid, on the back of the sofabed. By this time, we were desperate. So we took her back to the vet, who took her in, injected her, and closed her in a cage, to sleep there while she waited for her operation. She moaned as she was put in the cage and I tried to catch her eye before I left, but failed - and tried not to cry, because I knew the reason I wanted our eyes to meet was that I might not see her again, not alive, not with the eyes of a living, thinking cat. I left her there, and went home, guilty, thinking about all the times I could have cleaned the floor, found those balloons and thrown them away.

For each man kills the thing he loves

You can think about it a thousand times, or only once: yet the answer each time can only be the same. No matter how true it is - that you could not have known - nevertheless there were different things you could have done, and had you done them, those who hurt would not be hurt and those who died would not have died. No matter how you look at it. There is always a choice, even if you were not aware that it exists. At any moment there are infinite alternatives, and not all of them can have the same outcome. I could have acted differently, and I did not: because I did not, somebody was hurt, and came within an ace of dying, and is not yet safe.

I do not have the facility, of refusing to see the truth because it does not suit me. That is my weakness, my propensity to guilt. Or my humanity, for weakness and humanity are, it seems to me, inseparable, identified with one another. We are never more human that when we fail, never more in need of other people than when we stumble, when we fall. But I do not want to fail, not for Ichy. I need it not to matter that I failed.

She was close. Her intestine, when they operated, was rubbed almost raw where it had become permanently blocked. They extracted a small plastic pellet, green, the remnants of balloon that had got stuck inside her and blocked the intestine, a pellet which had prevented her eating but would not let her get rid of it. It nearly killed her. It might kill her still.

It was not the first time she had been close. We knew, for instance, that she was rescued from a pet shop, shortly before the owner lost patience with her, as a stock line that wouldn't sell. Her kittens, from which she was separated too early, were sold quickly, she was not: and he was intending to have her put to sleep. She lay there, as cats do, waiting to die, while a group of children taunted her - and a friend of ours saw and rescued her, and so she lived. As she must live now.

We knew about that, her close call, the only part of her life, before we knew her, that we were aware of. But when they X-rayed Ichy, we discovered something else. In the X-ray, just behind her shoulder, bright and obvious in the X-ray, as clear as it was previously hidden, was a bullet. Somebody shot our Ichy. Before we had her, in her hidden life, perhaps outside Huesca, as there are many hunters in the villages. Somebody shot her. She has carried that bullet ever since, maybe hurting her, maybe not, maybe aware of it and maybe not, most likely aware sometimes, hurting sometimes, forced every so often to remember that pain and to carry it. And I know, I know, what that is about.

I love cats, and I have realised, as time passes, how much I identify with them, with their distrust of people, with their need to be alone. That is why I look, and why I need to look, into their eyes, to tell them I am with them, to tell them that they are a part of me and I a part of them. That some of what they feel is what I feel. I did not know, before, what I know about Ichy now, but now I do, and I am closer than before. I share, I feel what she feels. And sharing feelings is another term for love.

The Clockwork Ending

2006-12-02T11:35:00.000+01:00

It is cold, and sometimes wet. The clothes never dry completely on the line. They hang upstairs, in a shared attic, open to the elements: if I walk outside I can see them hanging. During the summer they dry in minutes - in winter, they take days, and even then they have to be taken down before the end, laid on a clothes horse and the heating turned on. If we don't, they feel damp, or cold, the one almost indistinguishable from the other, each feeling miserable, each feeling permanent. As if, you feel, if you put them on, even if you did not make yourself ill, you would walk round with the feeling of winter underneath your coat.

I touched the damp and thought of Newcastle. I remember the launderette in Jesmond. I used it while I was lodging in the YWCA, miserable as the weather, permanent nervous, confined most of the time, by cold and lack of money, to my room. Also by fear of confrontation. The hostel was full of people who were likely to pick a fight, with obscure cause but dire consequence: expulsion for both participants. To be that close to homelessness does damage to the nerves, which in itself makes confrontation much more likely. If you are one step from sleeping on the streets, that step is in your mind at almost every moment: and however carefully you may avoid it, there is always that dread, or that conviction, that should you avoid it ten thousand times, there will always come the ten thousand and first.

So my room was where I stayed, or where I hid, applying for jobs, waiting, trying to keep my mind within that room. Fortunately, when I did go out, the university had forgotten to cancel my IT access, so I was able to sit in their computer rooms, to stare at the internet, to read my emails, without having to pay for it with money that I didn't have. Which meant that I could play correspondence chess. Which meant that I had something to concentrate on, some goal to aim at, even if that goal consisted of no more than trying to win a game of chess against a man that I would never meet.

It didn't matter. If it was trivial, then it was trivial with some depth to it. If it was inconsequential, then so what? I was inconsequential too. The wider world is not concerned what happens to you: you have no weight, no meaning to the world. So if the chess game has no meaning other than itself and what you lend to it, that is all that matters. It fills your mind, when what you need is to occupy your mind.

We had been playing, I think, since June: it was now December, late November, cold and wet in Newcastle. Even if you put your clothes in the drier six or seven times, they still would come out feeling slightly damp, as if to say, this is you, and no matter how much you try, you are stuck.- You cannot put things right, you cannot finish what you start. You goal is out of reach. The job applications continued to be rejected. I stayed inside my room or in front of a computer, surfing without purpose, empty of enthusiasm. My damp clothes said, you never win. You cannot win your game. My rejection letters were of the same mind: all that effort and you will still get nowhere. Five or six months of trying. I had to win my game.

1.c4 e6 2.g3 d5 3.Nf3 Nf6 4.Bg2 Be7 5.O-O O-O 6.d4 dxc4 7.Qc2 a6 8.Qxc4 b5 9.Qc2 Bb7 10.Bg5 Nbd7 11.Bxf6 Nxf6 12.Nbd2 Rc8 13.Nb3 c5 14.dxc5 a5 15.a4 Be4 16.Qc3 b4 17.Qe3 Bd5 18.Rfd1 Qc7 19.Nfd4 Bxg2 20.Kxg2 Bxc5 21.Rac1 Qb7+ 22.Kg1 Bb6 23.Qe5 Rxc1 24.Rxc1 Qe4 25.Qxe4 Nxe4 25.Rc6 Rb8 27.e3 e5 28.Nf3 f6 29.Nfd2 Nxd2 30.Nxd2 Bd8 31.b3 Rb6 32.Rxb6 Bxb6 33.Nc4 Bc7 34.e4 Kf7 35.Kf1 Ke6 36.Ke2 g6 37.Ne3 Bb6 38.Nd5 Bd4 39.f3 f5 40.Kd3 fxe4 41.fxe4 Kd6

He was one of six opponents in the tournament, the last to finish, and I was, I think, without a win against any of the other five. I could not work on a game for months, and then not win it at the end, if it were winnable. I could not draw and find out later that I could have won. Good knight against bad bishop, I knew I was the only player who could win - but if I could win, I could not see how.

I worked and worked. I worked on the same position for a week or more, making no move, no move on the chessboard and no meaningful move outside. Forced to take advantage of my circumstances, with nothing much else to look at than four close walls and a chess set that I had bought some years before in a shop on Charles Bridge, on the Vltava in Prague. I went to Prague in summer: the Vltava freezes in winter - I saw it, iced up with people skating on it, in January, on my way to Prague from Marianske Lazne - and if the Tyne does not, it was still icy in the air, the window misted up, and if I wiped it and looked outside, the breath of reluctant pedestrians misted too, small puffs in the air as they walked past as fast as frozen legs would let them go. I looked at them sometimes, and then at my set, and thought about Prague, and the distances people travel, and the things that happen to them as they go.

I worked, and thought, wrote variations down on paper, slept on them, lost sleep to them, realised while sleeping what I had not realised while awake, woke up and crossed them out and started ocer again. I had meant to play 41.Kxe4, keeping my kingside pawns together and bringing my king closer to a breakthrough, but I could find no way to force his king away with checks, no way to manoeuvre my knight around to a square unprotected by the bishop. I took with the pawn, but that seemed to give my king only one way into his position and I could not, as yet, see how I could take that route and win.

I confess, I cannot remember exactly which position I worked on all that week. I recall the week, and I recall the work, the writing down, the waking up and crossing out: but whether it was the position after move 41 or after move 43, I am not sure: perhaps because I had looked at that position so many times since.

42.g4 h5 43.gxh5 gxh5

Finally, I saw it: it was beautiful, like a mechanism, like clockwork. One move by the king, drawing his king along behind. Then two little circuits by the knight, hypnotising the bishop, putting it exactly where I wanted it to go. Then - and this, this surely, was the beautiful part - reversing the original move, taking the king back to where it started, like a clock reaching the hour. I almost expected a little click when it returned, and then the thing to happen all over again: but instead, when it got there, my opponent resigned, because he cannot keep my king out any more.

Not from the queenside, where it feinted, from the square c4 - but the knight will go to that square instead, forcing the black king to stay on the queenside and do nothing. While my king walks over to the kingside, on the white squares which the bishop cannot protect, picks up a pawn or two and wins the game. With what pleasure I found the clockwork manouevre, wrote it, checked it and played it. With pleasure, satisfaction, purpose.

It was my moment, my small achievement, my encounter with creativity. In my room, penniless, nervous and fearful, one step from the street, my damp clothes drying slowly, with reluctance, I had a moment, small but real, where though I had no purpose but to keep my mind from worry, I made something that could give pleasure to others than myself. The Clockwork Ending. A mechanism. This is what I made.

44.Kc4 Kc6 45.Ne7+ Kd7 46.Nf5 Bg1 47.h3 Kc6 48.Ne7 Kd6 49.Nd5 Kc6 50.Nf6 h4 51.Ng4 Bd4 52.Nh2 Bf2 53.Nf3 Bg3 54.Kd3 Black resigns

On receiving a rejection letter from a publisher

2006-11-13T16:10:00.001+01:00

It should be hard to write after receiving a rejection letter. What's hard, in truth, is writing about anything other than the letter. I'm not new to it. It's not the first one I've received - I've had two projects turned down previously, by everyone I sent them to. One became a self-published book. The other, pace Samuel L Jackson, nothing. They were both to have been books on football: eventually I found it hard even to be in the sports section of a bookshop, where all I could see was shelfloads of books which should never have been written in the first place, and a space, after Hornby, where my name might have been.

That's how you feel, for a while. You tell yourself it's not the only publisher to receive your proposal - and there is, at least, one more to go - but in truth, you feel like you do when you get a job rejection letter. A rejection letter for a post you should have got. Logically, rationally, you can tell yourself it's just a matter of time, you'll get one in the end. But you feel, logically, rationally, that if these people, even these ones, turned you down, there's no reason you should be accepted by anybody else. It's ten years now, since I last wrote a book. I am not enveloped by optimism. We are interested in your proposal, but it's not quite the same as what we normally do. Yes I know, it's a bit different, that's the whole point of my writing it. Thank you for your proposal, best of luck in trying to place it elsewhere. It is too tiring a dance: too familiar a dance.

So I sit in front of the PC, browsing the internet, feeling sorry for myself, remembering when I last received rejection letters. When I was living in Newcastle, finishing my Masters, living homeless and cooped-up in the YWCA, trying to get a job in libraries. I had fifty rejection letters in the end. Each one expected, each one anticpiated, yet each one weighing as heavily as it would have had I expected otherwise. This stretched over a period of about four months. I couldn't write more than two or three application forms a week, as each fresh rejection letter sent me into gloom and made it impossible, for a while, to complete any new applications.

Even so, eventually, I had written so many application forms that I had perfected the content. Each fresh one was basically a copy of the last, adapted purely to the layout of the application form and the specifics of the job. The phrases, claims and self-description were identical: there was no further work to do, no further thought required. Eventually, motivated by gloom, motivated almost by its demotivating effect, I started composing a standard rejection letter too. Standard but bespoke, saying what a rejection letter really meant to say. Or what, when feeling sorry for myself, I thought they meant to say. Or what I thought I meant about myself.

Dear ejh

We are writing to express our delight that we are able to reject your application for a post within our organisation.

We understand that you may feel disappointed by this rejection and we would be extremely pleased, to the point of jubilation, if this were so. We wish to make it clear that causing you personal unhappiness is a goal towards which we attempt to strive and we are delighted if we are able to achieve it.

Frankly though we must tell you that we were extremely disturbed that you should have considered applying for a post here and we are conducting an urgent review of our systems, personnel and procedures to ensure that such a thing never occurs again. Even the thought that you might have liked to be associated with us fills us with a feeling of self-loathing that is only partially ameliorated by the joy we feel in turning you down. We feel slighted, but worse than slighted. We have been insulted, but worse than insulted. We feel dirty. But worse than dirty: we feel unwholesome.

Please stay away from us in future. Do not apply for any post with us again: do not even look at any job advertisment that we may issue. We will be changing the personal specification of all future vacancies, at all levels of our organisation, to make it clear that you (and you alone) are excluded from consideration.

We hate you. We have always hated you.

You are mediocre in everything except the degree to which you are vile. You are not worth the time which it has taken to compose this letter: yet if you received a thousand letters like it, the accumulated contempt would be less than you deserve. You are without merit. You are entirely lacking in admirable qualities and there is no objectionable characteristic which you do not possess.

We wish you no success at all in your search for another vacancy. We can think of nobody, no matter how loathsome, who has sunk so low that they deserve you as a colleague or an employee. Whoever knows you, goes near you or thinks of you is permanently damaged and discredited by the experience. The very planet on which, to its misfortune, you now stand, will forever have the fact of your existence as a blemish on its own. You, sir, are revolting.

We sincerely hope that you are no longer alive to receive this letter. If indeed your regrettable existence continues, let us at least hope that it is terminated as swiftly and decisively as was your application for employment here, which, as I say, we are utterly delighted, thrilled, excited - and gripped, by an intense and lasting sense of rightness, to be able to reject.

Yours etc

Another November 10

2006-11-10T12:10:00.000+01:00

I woke up suddenly, with a banging in my head, as if something were inside and fighting to get out. It was about three in the morning: at that time I often suffered from insomnia, but this wasn't the sleeplessness of nagging thoughts, of trying to read with sleep just out of reach. This was pounding, crashing, an unreleaseable scream.

It was the screaming that you make when you need to know an answer and there is no answer you can bear to hear. You need to grasp, and cannot grasp: you need to know and do not want to know. So there is a banging in your head, you flail about, lash out in all directions for want of a target you can hit: until you are exhausted, when you stop, and wait until your energy is restored until you start again. And as you sleep, your energy and your thoughts return to you, until you wake, three o'clock in the morning, with a pounding head and the need to shout and scream.

I went into the bathroom and began to hit the walls. When the walls would not move for me, I picked up objects, plastic bathroom mugs, toothbrushes, small things, pitiful things, and threw them at the walls. When they would not break, I ran out of the room and ran downstairs, and walked in circles in the sitting-room, clenching my fingers, muttering like a madman, speaking in rhetoric. I shouted why? and all its variations, as if it were a curse, as if it were a condemnation: as if it were the kind of mantra with which one fills the head, as if in saying it I could avoid hearing the answer to the question that it asked. I say I shouted: I do not know, in truth, whether I shouted or whether the world outside my head were silenced by the pounding of the thoughts within.

I paced and circled: she came downstairs and saw my circling. She spoke, not having spoken until then, not truthfully, not everything. There's something I have to tell you, she began, and told me everything I already knew.

A shock to the system

2006-10-28T18:45:00.000+02:00

Carlos came round this morning to install a new extractor fan above the cooker. I turned up just as he was finishing and he explained that the electrics weren't quite right in the flat: they weren't earthed. This would present a problem if anybody touched two metal panels at the same time, you will get a shock, he said.

You mean these two?

A slap in the face

2006-10-22T20:00:00.000+02:00

A critic in Story Magazine recently ventured that, in an article of the literary precedents for violence, that there is an "illiterate vocabulary for violence". That when all reason fails, there is always the sock on the jaw. It says precisely what it means. There is no arguing with it. It makes a clearly defined dramatic point. And as the most valid argument for that theory the author cited Melville's Billy Budd. When Billy, harried and chivvied by the detestable Claggart, finds himself literally unable to vocalize his frustration, or to deny the charges being brought against him, the injustice being done to him in all its monstrousness, his futile attempt to speak finds voice in only one possible way - he lashes out and strikes the First Mate, killing him with one punch. Any other solution to the problem would have been illogical, untruthful, fraudulent.

- Harlan Ellison, The Glass Teat.

My father is an evil man. I say that, meaning it and understanding what it means. It is only in understanding what my father is, that I understand what I mean by evil.

Last Thursday, I slapped his face. I had to. Any other solution to the problem would have been illogical, untruthful, fraudulent. Any other response, not solution - for it solves nothing and changes nothing, yet there was nothing else to do. Any other response would have been illogical, untruthful, fraudulent. Nobody can tell you otherwise, though everybody will.

Nobody can tell you how much hurt you should sustain: but they always will. Everybody thinks that they can tell you to accept it, put it behind you, walk away: everybody has a breaking-point and nobody recognises it in anybody else. Nobody can tell you what is right and wrong: there is no right and wrong. There is just an absence of alternatives. Why might you slap a father's face? Because he gives you nothing else. Because there is no other place to go. When your father hurts you, as a matter of course, deliberately, out of wickedness and guilt, hurts you to cover up his shame, then, eventually, you reject his hurt just as he rejected you. Enough: no more. See this, rather than feel it: for what matters is not the hurt you cause but the response you make. You will not do that again. You will not hurt me any more.

It happened at a funeral, or rather at the reception, more than two hours later, which I had largely spent avoiding my father and which my father had largely spent avoiding me. He has spent many years avoiding me, and my existence: for when it was convenient to him, when he decided he did not want to deal with the problems of a failed attempt at fatherhood, he chose to deny my existence and the existence of my siblings, because it would be easier for him, because it would be more convenient for his loathsome and ambitious wife. Confrontations should not happen at a funeral, it is not the time for them: and yet on the other hand this confrontation was about a funeral. It was about a funeral which happened twenty years before, when my father buried me. When I was not even dead and yet my father buried me. It makes me scream, with unabated anger and unwanted hatred. Because it was convenient to him, my father buried me.

Who would do such a thing? Only a coward. Only a particular sort of coward, only somebody dominated by moral cowardice, only somebody afraid of the truth. So afraid of the truth that he would rather sacrifice his children than accept it. And once that road is taken, the wrong, and thus the guilt, and thus the cowardice is multiplied. For the longer such a lie is told, the harder it hits when it is finally discovered. So the guilt is greater, for the hurt is greater, and as a consequence, there must be more lies, more evasions to escape the truth. Moral cowardice has this consequence: when we have wronged someone, we have to blame them for the wrong that we have done. We have to compound the hurt, to multiply it, and in doing so to recast it as a wrong done against ourselves.

He came up to me, a couple of hours after the reception had started: I had just suggested, to my brother, that it was nearly time to leave. Presumably he had been working himself up to this: presumably the effort involved had got to him, had caused him such difficulty that he had decided I was an enemy to be confronted. That is how he spoke to me. He pushed his head close to mine and asked me:

- Are you going to speak to me, then?

That then, demanding, confrontational, did not help: it said you are wrong, you are withholding something that I have a right to expect. I was off-balance anyway, having assumed, that if he had not spoken to me by then, that he was never going to: and his aggressive approach made it worse.

- I don't know, I said.

He asked again: Well, are you? And I said, as it was true and I could think of nothing else to say: I don't know. What would we talk about?

That was as much as I could handle, and rather more than he could: because then it came out, the blaming of the child for the father's sins, the anger and resentment that I cause him as the living symbol of his own failure as a father and his own moral cowardice in smothering that failure in a blanket of lies. His hatred of himself, for what he had done, rechannelled as a hatred of the child for making him do it. It was my fault. The lies were mine, not his. I was the guilty party.

- That's the question you're going to have to ask yourself. That's the question you've had to ask yourself for twenty years, he said. And then he said something else: You are a traducer and a liar. And he got up and went to the other end of the room and sat down with his sons, his real sons, the shiny new ones that he got when he denied the old ones.

For a short time I could not speak. Nor, if I could have spoken, could I have said anything that would help, or change what he had done or what he was. It solves nothing, to slap your father in the face: but if there can be no solution, what is there left to do? If the father who denies you, who lies to cover up the fact of your existence, then comes to you and blames you for it, calls you a liar, calls you a traducer, what is there left to you? What options exist? What reactions exist?

Only one, that does not involve swallowing the hurt and the humiliation. Only one. You walk up to the other end of the room, pick your father up by the arm and tell him that you will not be spoken to like that. And when he responds that he will speak to you in any way he wants, you slap his face for him. It is the truth: it is the only truth that you can tell that he will have to listen to. It tells him true: You will not do that again. You will not hurt me any more.

I have told him so. He is a liar, a traducer, and I have told him so, in public, such that he understands it. It needed to be done: sooner or later it would have been done, if not in that place, at that time, then at another place and time, because there was no other end to it than that. But there is no end, no resolution, and I feel none. I feel no satisfaction, just distress, just anger, anger, bitterness.

I am down, distressed, confused and angry. I have spent much of the period since, suddenly bursting into tears: in the street, in the airport terminal, in the café before breakfast, back at home. I did not want any of this to happen. I do not like conflict and confrontation: it is partly to get away from it (and to get away from people, since without them there is no confrontation) that I came to Aragón, to a small town near the almost-silent Pyrenees.

I did not want to see my father. I did not want him to come up to me. I did not want to slap his face, not at a funeral, not anywhere. I am not sorry that I did, though I am sorry that it happened: but I am not sorry that I slapped him. But I am more than sorry - I am shaken, shattered, traumatised, by the anger, the hatred, the fact that all I can feel for my father is hatred and anger. I do not want it. I have had enough of it, yet it is all that I can ever have. I do not want it, but I cannot rid myself of it. He, only he, could do that: but it is the one thing that he will never do.

I do not want this. I want a proper father, not this louse, this liar, this serial betrayer. I do not want a father who prefers to hurt his children rather than apologise to them. I do not want a father who victimises his children in order to preserve the lies that he tells to others and himself.

I do not want this father, this louse, this spineless bastard. But what is a bastard? A bastard is a child without a father. I do not want this father but I cannot rid myself of him. Even if I could, that is his game, his particular cowardice, his arrogance: these children do not suit me any more, I shall dispose of them.

I will not be him. I will not be like him. I can see him, in myself: I can see myself, in his face, in his shape. In the way you see, in looking at your father, what you will be like when you are his age. I can see his characteristics in me, his stupid pride, his difficulty in apologising. But I can see them in myself and not deny them. That is the difference between us. I can recognise my pride and admit to it: I can know and admit it, that I find difficulty in apologising. But I have had to live with my failings and learn to understand them: to work on them when I can, to work around them when I cannot, to accept them when I cannot do either. I have paid for my failings. But with that price has come some understanding.

That is the difference between us: it is all the difference in the world. Errare, humanum est: it is the failure to accept it that constitutes inhumanity. We all hurt other people, through our own stupidity and thoughtlessness. But to hurt one another for no reason other than the failure to admit our fallibility: that is evil. When you are driven to do further wrong, solely because you cannot admit you are wrong, then that is evil. Because it multiplies itself and blames your victims and there is therefore no end to it. For that reason, moral cowardice is evil.

My father is an evil man. I hate him, not, in truth, because he is evil but because he is an evil from which I cannot detach myself. He is evil and he is my father: because he is my father, I cannot be free of the evil that he does. I hate him. I hate him, but I will not pretend he is not there. I cannot pretend that he is not there. That would suit me, but would be a lie. An impossible lie: impossible not just to sustain, impossible to tell. To hate him does not suit me, but it is the truth. I have that, at any rate. I have it and I understand it. He has money, and pride, security, ambition, while I have none of these: but he has nothing, nothing, and I have more than him. Because I have integrity, and he does not. He has nothing. Liars have nothing: it is because they have nothing that they need to lie. He has given me a legacy of infinite anger, yet he has nothing and I have more than him. He has nothing, because he is a liar. He has nothing, but I can tell the truth.

I never really knew him

2006-10-07T17:10:00.000+02:00

My uncle Nick: he died, on Thursday I think. My brother called to tell me. He was 47 or 48, died of cancer. It was diagnosed in June and he was told he had just weeks to live: but he seemed to improve, went from being on a ventilator in his sister-in-law's house to, when I saw him at the end of August, being up and about and getting ready to go home to Bradford. He'd got his hopes up but when they did the diagnosis again it was still grim and perhaps this knocked him flat: early in September he suddenly developed pneumonia, the cancer got in his bones and after a few weeks in Hammersmith Hospital he died.

There's a deep split in my family between black sheep and white. He, like me, was one of the black ones. He'd even been to prison - for possession, as it happens. I liked him when I met him. I thought he was one of the good guys, interested in life (though he had little left to him) and disinterested in money, greed, ambition, intolerance of his fellow citizens. I would have liked to have known him: to have had time to know him. But after my family exploded, I didn't see him for twenty years, and then only briefly - and then, not again until it was nearly time to go.

I saw him, after that twenty-year hiatus, shortly after finding out that my other uncle - his brother Patrick - lived near me in Acton. I'd not seen Patrick for those twenty years either, but after learning where he lived I went round, off the cuff, and said hello. We talked, about our lives and where they had gone, about how illness (for he, too, had been ill) makes you appreciate the value of life. The emptiness of things material and their pursuit. I said goodbye to Patrick and arranged to meet again soon. A few days later my brother called, to say that he had died after collapsing suddenly while jogging round the park. I never really knew him.

Life is movement, movement life

2006-09-13T20:40:00.000+02:00

I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you

Some days ago I saw a cat whose will had shrunk so much that it comprised no more than a weak but obvious desire to die. She was in a pet shop, in a glass cubicle no bigger than a fish tank, a prison small enough even for the kitten in the cell adjoining hers. The kitten, at least, could walk a little - it would be too much so say that it could walk around, but it could at least describe a circle, and it did so, one way then the other, expressing in its walk the curiosity that a kitten would normally display with any object that it came across.

The cat, however, was wedged inside her tank, the length of which was shorter than the cat herself. She lay on the floor, bending her back so that she could fit, and unable to move much more than that, moved not at all. Neither her body nor her eyes would move. She had no further presence, that quality of being always there, however quiet, however silent, however apparently motionless a cat might be, that communication of intelligence, observation, calculation and intent that a cat projects simply by virtue of itself. Deprived of movement, she had nothing left: the whole life and personality of a cat depends on movement, on the expression that a cat lends to the smallest movement, on its ability and desire to detect and track that movement in anything else. But it was gone. The life of the cat was gone and what was left, with what was left, she just wanted to end. She was gone. She just wanted to die.

She wanted to die, and I wanted to scream: but I have not yet the Spanish in which to scream. I could perhaps have started: "¿Qué quieres? ¿Intentas matar al gato? ¡Mira, desea morir!" But I couldn't have finished any argument I started: my language, my ability to communicate, almost as absent as was hers. I thought, for a moment, about pulling open her cubicle, on which were written her breed and price - two hundred and forty euros - and hence the reason for her confinement, though not the reason for her torture. I wanted to release her, watch her flee for her life through the aisles of the shopping complex, watch her exhibit the will, the will to live, the will to fight, defy, resist, which a cat possesses in excess of any other creature.

But I was afraid that even that had gone: that if I dragged open her window she would remain just as she was, wedged, immobile. Eyes without life, aware only dimly, if at all, of any life outside herself, only dimly aware that any life remained within.

Only one time in my life have I wanted to die. I mean wanted. I mean, actually wanted to die, not only thought about it, not only felt it as a desire within me, not only considered it as a genuine proposition. Only once acknowledged it, only once said it to myself, only once understood and meant it. Only once known - only once I want rather than I wish.

I wish, you say. I wish. Wish you could sleep and never wake again, wish that there were some way, by the smallest effort of will, to close down, close off the outside world, enter a world of safety and softened noises. You wish. You do not want. Wishing is cursing. Wishing is crying "enough", but crying out. Wishing is crying out for what you do not want. The truth about a wish is that it does not happen. You wish for what you know you cannot have.

Wanting is different. Wanting is without reference to what you can or cannot have. You cannot lie, not to yourself, about whether or not you want. The thought arrives spontaneous, unbidden, not so much thought as revelation. It comes, not as the end of some process of reasoning, but on its own, attached to nothing, expressing itself alone. You speak: I want to die. You speak as if speaking someone else's words at someone else's instigation. There is no possible discussion. You speak. You want. You know.

Only once. Not even in the act of suicide, as that is not the action of your will, but what happens when your will and being are exhausted, when you cannot want because that function is no longer there. You cannot want, just be indifferent.

There are three conditions which often look alike
Yet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:
Attachment to self and to things and to persons, detachment
From self and from things and from persons; and, growing between them, indifference
Which resembles the others as death resembles life,
Being between two lives - unflowering, between
The live and the dead nettle.

Wanting cannot be indifference. Wanting is conscious, certain. Clear.

Once and only once. A few months afterwards: six years ago today. When they came for me unexpected in the morning and by the afternoon I found myself confined. I remember clearly, as if I'd asked to have one memory preserved and chosen this one: the rest is madness, impossible to remember because impossible to believe. But this I remember clearly - that on the first evening I stood in my room, my cell, my place of confinement, forbidden for me to leave but open to the staff to watch. I stood there. I could say that I felt desperate or humiliated or shattered or any word I chose, but the truth is none of those words meant anything to me, not at that time. Not even anger, which overcame me before they locked me up and motivated me later when I fought to get back out.

All these were irrelevant, or at least subsumed, subsumed within the one clear thought that I could still have, the one clear thought that forced itself upon me. I said it to myself. I remember clearly - not quite clearly enough to remember if I spoke the words out loud, but I remember the words clearly. I said:

I want to die.

I said it and I meant it: and I knew I meant it, as I had not meant to say it. The truth comes unrehearsed. I stood there and I knew that what I wanted was to die. And I knew why, as well: not because I had gone as low as I thought possible, but because I thought I would. I saw myself declining, sitting in that cell, medicated, my consciousness smothered by whatever drugs they wanted me to swallow, maybe sometimes in the garden, being visited. Hearing, half-hearing as though muffled, people saying how sad it was and other people saying that they were hopeful and I'd been responding well. I saw myself like that, permanently medicated, permanently submerged, and I felt and knew that I would rather die than be like that.

No more the cat. Life without life. Without movement, there could be no life. She was erased: whatever sort of life it was, she was no longer in it. I looked at her, emptied of life, and saw myself, and what they might have made of me. What they would have made of me, had there not been enough, by way of anger, left to motivate myself, and make me live, and get me out.

And live. But gradually. Poco a poco, they say here. Bit by bit, and many bits still missing. Some of them left behind, that year, in that place and in others. Some of them doubtless gone forever. And I must, now, go and find the pieces that remain. Because I should, because I must. Because something happened, back then, which I need to understand, explain, go back and look at, write about.

I need to write now. I need to write about the meaning of indifference, the space between the will to live and the desire to die. I need to concentrate on that, to grasp at it, to hold it down and wring what truth I can from that experience. For me. For anybody else who cares to read it. Should they get the chance: should I ever finish, should it ever find a publisher, should it ever find a reader. But I must start and see how far I get. To find out how far you have come, you must return to where you started.

So I must go. And here, a hiatus. Temporary one, while I work. Not from indifference, but from the need to understand it. I cannot half-write: I must write in one place or the other. I have had two years in this place: for a few months, I must let it lie. It has been good for me. It has helped me organise and understand my thoughts. I shall be here again. But life is the desire to move and keep moving. I hope, I hope, that cat was rescued, set free to express her life through movement, her own movement and the detection of others'. Life is movement, movement life. I must move. But I shall be here again.

This parrot is now reversing

2006-08-09T17:50:00.000+02:00

I'll be on a ferry on Sunday, Caen to Portsmouth, taking a van across the Pyrenees and France for three days. I've not been on a ferry for a while: it used to be aeroplanes I could never afford, so much so that after making a plane journey in 1991 it was ten years before I took another. Even now, when I fly regularly between Zaragoza and Stansted, when I'm blasé enough to talk about the time "it usually arrives" as if it were a bus journey, I still make sure that I am far enough ahead in the queue to get a window seat so that I can watch the country I am leaving, as it recedes, and the place to which I travel, as it looms. I used to do much the same on a ferry, watching the land behind me until I could see it no longer, then hoping to catch the sight of new land before anybody else, as if there were a gold coin for the first of the ship's company to see it.

I took a ferry from Ramsgate early in the morning once: sufficiently early that I had to stay in a B&B the night before, on the cliffs above the ferryport. The one I stayed at had a parrot, presumably to convey the idea that the proprietor was an old sea-dog who, though now retired, could hardly bear to be out of sight of his beloved sea and who had brought home with him a parrot he had acquired on his travels. In all probability neither parrot nor proprietor had ever seen any more of the sea that one can see when standing on the land, and certainly the parrot's interests clearly lay in the freight lorries that made use of the port rather than the ferries to which they transferred their containers.

I knew this - I could hardly not know it - because with immensely impressive skill and attention to detail it had learned to imitate the sound of a lorry's alarm and the warning message lorries play when they're reversing. The lorries are, I believe, restricted in how much activity, and therefore noise, they are able to generate at night, so as not to unduly disturb the residents. The parrot however was not apparently subject to this restriction and made the most of his freedom from red tape: all through the night, just outside the window, emitting the same phrase over and again:

Beep! Beep! Beep! This lorry is now reversing!

The monster in the corner

2006-08-07T20:00:00.000+02:00

While we are staying in the house, its owner is away, in Ireland. So we are looking after the house itself, her garden, her cannabis plant and both the cats. They are longhairs, brother and sister, though resembling one other in little but name: to distinguish the two, we have called the tom Mimi Blanco after his white coat and his sister, smaller and half his weight, Mimi Pequeña. They get on better than other pairs I have known, restricting themselves to an exchange of jabs every couple of days and other than that not quarrelling about food or territory. Blanco is the braver of the two, though he will not let himself be picked up: Pequeña will pick up, light and small enough to fit comfortably in one hand, but will not visit the darker parts of the house on her own.

She will have to, soon. Cats hate changes in their environment. They do not want new people coming into the house, but once those people have arrived, they are made nervous if the people leave. They do not want the temperature to rise, and if it rises, mew and whine, complaining that you let it happen, wanting it changed back to what it was before. But after it has risen they will mew and whine if it begins to fall. They do not want the furniture to move, and least of all they want their feeding-place to change. But now the feeding-place, alas, must move, has moved, and the change has made them nervous.

We are away, back in England collecting my life, until almost the end of the month, and the job of feeding and watering, both cannabis and cats, will pass to an elderly woman who lives across the street. Pequeña mostly lives on the first floor, where the people mostly live as well, the ground floor being to all intents and purposes a basement, a floorful of things apparently unused. But the old lady is not agile and to make it easier for her, the food bowl has to move from the first floor kitchen to a ground floor room adjoining the front door. We have moved it already, so that they are used to it before she comes. But although they know it is there and although they have mostly ceased to stand in the kitchen and make mewing, mimi noises, Pequeña cannot get used to it yet. The bowl stands at the foot of the staircase, but although Blanco, with a little encouragement, will bound down the stairs, with more ease than he can bound up them, Pequeña needs to be carried, or she will not go.

It is on the furthest side of the room from the street, but there is still light, through the gaps around the edges of the door, and hence and outside which she knows nothing about. There is an inner courtyard, where both cats get light and air and room to run around, but they do not know the street except as a hidden world of noises: dogs and people and their cars. They may make of them, for all I know, what Plato's cave-dwellers made of the shadows on the wall, but while Blanco is sometimes at the door when we arrive, curious to find out whether how close reality is to his perception, Pequeña is afraid of the noises, or whatever she has made of them. She is afraid of the light around the door: she is also afraid of the dark, the quiet, unlit rooms on the other side of the staircase. When I first carried her down the steps to show her where the food was, she looked one way, towards the light, then the other, towards the dark, and finding neither brought her comfort, she struggled free and ran up the steps again, crying mimi as she went.

Between the light and the dark, the monster in the corner. The water tank is next to the front door. It hums, gurgles, roars, depending on what function of the sink or toilet has been carried out upstairs. Pequeña need not use her imagination to give this monster shape. It is there, menacing, crouching, watching her. She looks at the bowl - and looks straight back at the monster, unable to eat for fear that it will make her move while her head is busy with the food. Even if it falls silent, she glances at it constantly, unable to trust its silence, fearing that the monster will wake up.

But she will eat, now, sometimes, provided that I take her down myself and make sure the monster is kept quiet, no using the sink or bathroom before I carry her to the bowl. When she eats, she takes one mouthful and then looks to her left, like a swimmer breathing, checking that there are no noises, checking that the monster has moved. She eats, but nervously, quite likely losing as much energy in her nervousness as she accumulates in eating - and I must stay by her side while she is eating, being with her, making reassuring noises. But in a couple of days I shall be gone and she will be on her own, only her desire to eat preserving what remains of her much-dwindled courage, only her and the food and the monster in the corner, without me there stroking, waiting, standing by her, telling her that everything is going to be all right.

Scraps

2006-08-03T13:30:00.000+02:00

After he was shot and wounded, Orwell went to Marrakesh to recuperate: he described the storks he saw there as

great white birds....glittering like scraps of paper.

The storks winter in Africa and summer in Europe: I saw them as a child, on holidays, along the south-western side of France. I see them daily, here, during the summer. They nest at the top of the Cathedral. Huesca is practicaly alone on the plain and the cathedral, itself, like most Spanish churches, stands already on a hill. I don't know if Orwell ever saw it: you cannot see Huecsa from Siétamo, there being a ridge between the two, and atop that ridge a castle, Montearagon. From there, seventy years ago, one would have seen the cathedral clear and although Huesca is bigger now than it was then, it still stands out, as it was intended to do. But in dominating the landscape, imposing itself on human eyes, it necessarily attracts the attention of the stork: who must see it from a long way away and see it as an ideal place of rest and sanctuary. The upper reaches of the edifice are full of nests, where the storks, having made the opposite journey to Orwell's, take their rest and make their summer homes.

I can hear them from inside the house. Their cry is more a clatter than a call: it persists for several seconds sounding as if it was being made by someone setting off a wooden mechanism, each slat crashing into the next until its energy is exhausted. Yet when one sees them, in flight, singly or more often in a group heading towards the Cathedral, barely higher than the roofs, the startling thing is how small their bodies appear. They are large birds, but they are all wing: their body functions almost as a joint to hold their wings together, but the curve of the neck stands out, providing a third dimension to its shape.

It seems, at first glance, not quite right. It gives the impression that too much is being asked of the design, that the stork needs to look about itself and fly at the same time, the former requirement detracting from the aerodynamics that serve the latter. But one watches the storks until they are out of sight. It is the very slight ungainliness which makes one watch - that and the knowledge that they have come such a long way, together, understanding by instinct what we can only understand by reading.

What wonders they are, in their instinct, in their flight, in their ability to produce such a loud and lasting clatter from such an insubstantial frame. I am not sure what Orwell meant by "scraps of paper". The body is small but the wings are large, too large for scraps. Perhaps he meant, in the sun that must have shone in Marrakesh, the way it glints off portions of their frame, appearing suddenly whiter than they are, proceeding without much movement of the wings, without much effort, slowly as everything moves slowly in this energy-sapping sun.

Turn and live

2006-07-29T18:55:00.000+02:00

We cannot stay in our flat. The air is damp, the dehumidifier hums away but the ceilings are measled with fresh mould. Homeless, temporarily, we are staying with a friend in her house in the Old Town. She teaches English and her shelves reflect the fact: in the original language she has Austen, Dickens, many more. I spotted Swift, Gulliver's Travels, which I read many years ago. When I think of Swift I think of Orwell, as I do when I think of Dickens: I read Orwell on them both before I read much of either. My reading of the criticism preceded my reading the text. This is not the way it should be - acquire that habit and the criticism will, sooner or later, substitute for the text. It will save you the trouble of reading it and a bluffer's knowledge will do instead. It's been a long time since I found the time to read a proper book, but instead I read the London Review of Books, which they post fortnightly to Spain. I know books: all about them, without the bother of actually reading them. The Review has read them for me.

Besides, my books are in hiding or in transit camps. Most of them are still stuck in a storage unit a thousand miles away: even the others, those I managed to take to Huesca, have been evacuated, taken from the flat for fear of damp. They are sitting in the basement of the house, living in a suitcase, refugees.

They include several volumes by Orwell. I think of Orwell often. Huesca is a good place for thinking about Orwell, though he was never here, not in the town itself. As far as I can tell he never got closer than Siétamo, a small town few kilometres to the east, where we sometimes go for spring water, which gushes from a fountain in a small plaza in the middle of the town. Most of the time he was further to the south, closer to Zaragoza than to Huesca. The town is in Alto Aragón, Upper Aragon, the northern part of which consists of mountains: Huesca has a view of mountains to its north, and if you pass through them, you then see many more, and larger. The Pyrenees, covered in snow most of the year, are only about thirty kilometres from here. Yet go where Orwell was, much the same distance in the other direction, where Huesca province ends and Zaragoza province starts, and you find yourself, instead, in semi-desert.

Water and its absence is everything. Spanish water is sparse and precious. Even in Alto Aragón the villages all share the same two features - the church, as one might guess, and the water tower, which one might not. But lower down, southwards, the landscape is parched, almost bare of trees. Scrubby, a series of low, circular mounds of dry, unfertile earth, to which cling small, rough bushes and some heather. The circular pattern may have been formed by the wind which sweeps towards Zaragoza with such intensity that its inhabitants are known as "the hunchbacks"- and from the air, when the plane descends towards the city and its airport, it appears as a bizarre, inexplicable pattern, a series of brown circles. But south of Zaragoza, in Lower, Bajo Aragón, one would be lucky to see as much life as that. The earth becomes rock, from which the sun reflects with such intensity that at its peak, one cannot cross the street, such is the heat. Buñuel - who was raised here - wrote of the sky:

Podía pasar un año y hasta dos sin que se viera congregarse las nubes en el cielo impasible. (A year, or even two might pass without seeing clouds gather in that impassive sky.)

He goes on to relate that if a single cloud came over the mountains the neighbours would rush up to the roof and watch it, before predicting, rightly, from experience, that it would pass to the south of them and no rain would be forthcoming. It is a life and a landscape defined by the heat. In England, when it is hot, we open the windows: here, we close them, hide behind shutters and try and sleep until it is more bearable. Heat and the absence of water: and yet I am temporarily homeless because of the water in our flat.

A small thing, in the great scheme of things. But small things become more prominent when there are no longer great things and great schemes of things to fight about. Spain is reluctant even to remember the Civil War, though some, pace Orwell, are more reluctant than others - but even in my exile and retirement from political activity I find it easier to remember Orwell than forget him. Because of the exile, no doubt. Because he was here, or nearly here, or tried to be here. Huesca withstood a Republican siege for twenty months. There will be people here who would wish the Fascist past forgotten, because they were part of it. I see older people, sometimes, and wonder - what did they do? Did they inform? Or hide?

Orwell came to Spain as an idealist: what happened to him here caused him permanent disillusion. I came to Spain disillusioned but still some sort of idealist, still inclined to the Quixotic, still inclined to believe that worlds can be changed for the better, though preferring it be someone else that does it. Disillusioned with people more than principles, perhaps. Swift was disillusioned with people: his Gulliver goes to live among the Houyhnhnms, horse-creatures, rather than stay any longer among human beings.

Orwell, though he wrote against Swift's seeming misanthropy, went to live on Jura, as far away as he could get from people. Though ostensibly the reason was his health, a cure for the malady of people must have been somewhere in his mind. And here am I in Huesca, having escaped, in some way or another, from something or other. Gulliver returned from his exile, but found people intolerable to be with:

At the time I am writing it is Five Years since my last Return to England: During the first Year I could not endure my Wife or Children in my Presence, the very Smell of them was intolerable, much less could I suffer them to eat in the same Room. To this Hour they dare not presume to touch my Bread, or drink out of the same Cup, neither was I ever able to let one of them take me by the Hand. The first Money I laid out was to buy two young Stone-Horses, which I keep in a good Stable, and next to them the Groom is my greatest Favourite; for I feel my Spirits revived by the Smell he contracts in the Stable. My Horses understand me tolerably well; I converse with them at least four Hours every Day. They are Strangers to Bridle or Saddle; they live in great Amity with me, and Friendship to each other.

It may be a few years before my misanthropy can be compared to Gulliver's. I stay away from people, sometimes, but I can still manage their presence, in small doses, for short periods of time, provided I can see the exit door and use it when I wish. The world is not so bad, not always. I might be in a country where fascism triumphed, but also in one where it was dismantled. I might have had my home half-destroyed by an incompetent and liar, but it will dry, I trust. I hope. I trust.

But I had meant to start writing again, writing properly, in the very week I found I had to leave: I cannot begin, cannot get going, cannot do the things that I need to do, not in the flat, not with the damp and the dehumidifier and the disruption. I can neither try to read nor try to write.

It is a small thing, but it is the small things which test the patience most. Our lives are composed of small things, the small things are the routine by which we live. Small things comprise our world. Sometimes, it is so hard to keep one's patience with the world. But cats, that is a different matter. There are two cats in our temporary house, both called Mimi, the one because she says nothing but mimi and the other one for want of an alternative. They understand me tolerably well; I converse with them for several hours a day. I think about it sometimes: if I could get away from other people, if it were just cats and me. Six billion cats and me. They would not live in friendship to each other. But they would live in great amity with me.

Keep watching the lies

2006-07-26T10:50:00.000+02:00

Guest post at Lenin's Tomb.

I know why the caged bird dreams

2006-07-22T12:15:00.000+02:00

When Benjamin Zephaniah was in prison, he escaped from his imprisonment only in his dreams. I remember him saying so, on a television programme: only when he slept, only when he was alone save for the contents of his head, did he feel free, because his jailers could not get him there. Those dreams were liberation: but for me, my jailers are my dreams. I cannot get away from them. My dreams - my dream, perhaps, because though it is different every time, the person about whom I dream remains the same.

It has been the same, for years.When I am stressed, or insecure, or frightened, I have that dream several times a week. When I am calm, at ease, secure, I may go several weeks before the dream returns: I can even judge my mood by the presence or the absence of the dream. Night before last, I dreamed. I wasn't in my usual bed, my flat, my home: the incompetence of roofers and the accident of rain has left the ceiling full of water and the air weighed down with damp. My home is temporarily in pieces and my head, presumably, the same. I know this because, last night, I dreamed.

I know who I dream about. I always know her name,though if, in the dream, I ever see her face, it is different every time and never really hers. But I know it is her, as, in a dream, one does. I know her: the dream consists of my trying to find her. Sometimes I never do. Sometimes I do, but then she goes away again. Sometimes, she stays with me for a while. But the dream is full of doom, the knowledge, from the start, that this is pointless. Pointless and inexplicable: unnecessary and unavoidable pain. The outcome is the same, the action similar: the location is always different. We are usually staying somewhere, or going round somewhere. I try to find her, or approach her, or talk to her. Sometimes she will talk and sometimes she will not. But everything begins and ends and takes unhappy place in an oppressive mood, sadness and disappointment. She will not talk, or talks and goes away. Three or four nights a week, when I am at my worst, I try to talk but then she goes away: and I have had this dream, recurrently, for half my adult life. For longer than the past ten years. It does not stop. It does not, in essence, change.

When I am asleep, I know her name. When I am awake, I cannot speak it, not directly. I cannot say her name. Something stops me from doing so. Some anger, some resentment, some inhibition deriving from the appalling fact that I cannot escape the dream. You cannot let go of what will not release you. Only prisoners, when they dream, are free. The rest of us are prisoners of our dreams.

Flow my tears

2006-07-18T19:25:00.000+02:00

I muffled the river so it sounded like the wind and rain. It kept me awake: as the sound of people coming and going fell away, as the background hum fell silent, so the river's flow became correspondingly louder, more defined, more intense. And though the total volume of sound can have been no greater, must indeed have been much less, the river drew attention to its solitary self, crashing where it had babbled, gushing where previously it had merely flowed, persistent and intolerable.

Eventually I put in ear-plugs, which I had brought for fear of noisy neighbours, and which I used instead to ward off the very sounds of nature on which the neighbours were intruding. They quietened the river, made its noise less specific, less distinct: and, once its sharpness dulled, it was diffused still further by the effect of the tent, which made its point of origin harder to discern, made it unclear, to me inside, whether its noise came from any given direction or from all at once. So its rushing seemed rather like the rushing of a wind, something possessing movement but no particular place: but it still had substance, texture, the way a movement of water always does, and therefore, wind and water, gave the impression of rain against the tent. It seemed to come from everywhere without, and I had to concentrate my mind, in the dark of the tent, unsure of direction and lacking sense of place, to dispel my uncertainty, to be sure that it was still the river and not a storm.

I wanted it to be a storm. I always do. I feel more secure that way, safer, enveloped, bewombed. When I was a child I always liked it when the rain began to batter against the window, when I was in bed, in the top bunk, thinking in the dark, struggling to sleep. As the storm got up the noises of the rain would merge into each other, no longer striking the window in separate drops but become a constant rushing against the house, like a river, like the sea. And I would imagine myself in a capsule, on the sea, within it, a capsule miraculously stabilised and upright, unaffected by the waves. Unaffected by anything, floating indefinitely, and me inside it, sleeping soundly, sleeping for as long as I wanted to, sleeping until everything was washed away that hurt.

Futility

2006-07-11T19:10:00.000+02:00

R. stayed with me at the weekend and when she arrived back at Huesca on the Monday, there was a message waiting for her. A friend of hers, somebody from the same dance class, had been killed in a helicopter crash in the Canaries on the Saturday. We'd missed the news: we didn't see the papers on the Sunday.

I read them yesterday, to see if there was anything about the accident, and found nothing: but then there was a story in today's El Pais, about the copilot, about how he'd told his family for years that he was working too many hours to fly safely, about how he'd been threatened by the company if he made any complaints, about how, just the day before the crash, he'd called his wife and told her that the helicopter wasn't safe and that if anything happened to him, they should make public what he'd been telling them.

I read this, or read the first couple of paragraphs and not much more, my Spanish being inadequate to carry me much further and my anger being unwilling to allow me any more. I read it as you read something that you knew, you knew that it was going to be something like this because it's always something like this. I read it and then I walked, not going anywhere, walking as a distraction, walking to try and clarify what I was thinking without really wishing to think. Thinking why does it always have to be something like this, thinking were they poor people, these, were they so poor that they needed to cut corners and cover themselves with threats, thinking nothing will ever happen to the people who do this, nothing ever does. Thinking it doesn't matter anyway, it's too late now, it doesn't matter any more and thinking, not in words that I could have spelled out and placed in order, thinking in shapes and moods rather than sentences, thinking angry and pointless and futile and intrusive through the tears.

Figures

2006-07-05T14:10:00.000+02:00

After the car came back from el taller, the dashboard clock was wrong, so she decided to put it right. It read 1314 and it was just past nine in the evening, so she took out a pencil and prodded the appropriate button until it read 2114 instead. It was a painful process, though, one jab at a time: and I wasn't looking forward to her having to go almost all around the clock to get the minutes right. I had a brainwave. "It's OK", I began to say. "If you wait a few minutes it'll have caught up with the clock by then."

Insignificance

2006-07-03T13:15:00.000+02:00

I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contain'd;
I stand and look at them long and long.

They do not sweat and whine about their condition;
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins;
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God;
Not one is dissatisfied—not one is demented with the mania of owning things;
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago;
Not one is respectable or industrious over the whole earth.

I do not believe in God, but I believe in cats. Little gods, they are, I often say: like gods but real, manifest. Tangible where God is not, where God is none of these. I believe in them, with awe and fascination, with pleasure and with joy. My heart skips at the sight of an unexpected cat: running, slinking, sitting, prowling, contemplating me with curiosity and suspicion from its superior position. "A cat!" I cry, catching my breath on seeing a cat leap a gap or scamper down an alleyway. "A cat!" I cry, "a pussycat!" as a cat comes round the corner and watches my rub my fingers together in an effort to attract them with movement. "A cat!" I cry, "it is a cat! It is indeed a cat!" as a cat inspects my appearance from atop a wall. I cannot help it. I have not always been like that, but now I am: over the last ten years, give or take, I have become a worshipper of cats. Their friend, their advocate, aware always of their presence or of the possibility that they may come. I am ready for them, permanently. I look for them and when one is seen, my mood, where low, is lifted: where high, is transmitted to the cat and anyone who is with me.

I think about them often, and often I think about why this is so. How has this come about? Their grace, their beauty? There is no creature in the world so perfect as a cat. Their intelligence, their cunning? These, too - to be in the presence of a cat is to be aware of a mind that will do battle with your own. But while these would inspire admiration, admiration is short of joy. What do they have, these cats, such that I experience such joy in seeing them? What have they done, what do they do? I didn't understand: so in search of understanding, I turned to God. Or not to God directly, not to the non-existent God but to the idea of his existence.

Because while cats are real and God is not, that was not all that separated them in my mind. The God-idea claims moral virtue, claims that he, or it, embodies Good: while what they actually embody is Power. We flatter God and worship him as a courtier might have flattered a Pharoah, living in the permanent fear of punishment and death. A cat makes no such claim: a cat could not care less about your opinion. The God-idea prescribes your moral code. It is the God-idea's most basic and important purpose - the God-idea instructs you how to live. The cat makes no prescription, other than its wants and needs should come before all others. Both God and Cat are egoists, but when the cat is satisfied, the cat's will is done. God, for his part, is never satisfied. The cat tells you what he wants - God tells you what to be. Which is what is evil about the God-idea, unavoidably evil, evil in its very nature. A cat does not tell you you should be like a cat: nor does it tell you what sort of person you should be. A cat creates no universes and destroys no worlds.

Yet that is not all there is to God, or his Idea. I cannot abide the moral lessons, I hate and fear them: but sometimes I understand the idea of God as Creation, as the wholeness, the greatness, the hugeness of the world. The idea of God that comes from the contemplation of the sky, once one is outside the man-made city and can see its whole extent, its infinite variety of colour, where one can feel its vastness and set it against one's own impossibly tiny self. Or the idea of God that comes from experiencing the presence of teeming nature, a proliferation of different colours, different natures, different purposes, the organisation of the ants, the fragility of the butterflies, the way the greenness changes from moss to grass to bush to tree. The many millions of variations that exist on each of these, the hundreds and thousands that exist around you, beneath you and above you as you walk and watch, far too many even to register except by closing your eyes and feeling them everywhere and you as part of them, as part of this Creation multiplied to infinity, which does not spring from God but from which springs the idea of God.

Or there is the idea of God which springs from feeling the awful emptiness of Creation, the spaces that exist between the stars, the loneliness that consists of your own singularity, the fear of falling into the chasm. I suffer from vertigo and a few weeks ago I was in the Pyrenees: I would close my eyes as we went round corners in the car, trying to avoid seeing, with my eyes closed, what I would visualise when they were open. But even when we stopped, and walked, or sat on one side of a valley and looked at the other, I felt the distance between them, felt it as a void, felt it as if falling. And even when I did not think of falling, I felt my smallness, with the mountainside above me, below me and opposite. With the silence, save the flow of the Ara at its bottom, of the valley. Steep mountainsides and us: and other life seemingly absent, except when, occasionally, a bird of prey would circle, far above us. Or below us, since later we drove up to an elevated village, to a restaurant, and from the window I saw a bird - an eagle, a hawk? - circling, looking for the life of which I could see none, and which, if it existed, the bird sought to end.

It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

From its gaze over the emptiness, from its desire to remove from that emptiness whatever might live and move, appeared that other idea of God, of the Universe as yourself alone and God as the means of your obliteration. God as a world full of life and God as a world empty of it: opposite poles but poles expressing a shared idea, that you yourself are of little moment, no importance. You yourself are overwhelmed, much more than overwhelmed, whether it be by the extent of nature or by the extent of emptiness. None of these things are God, as God does not exist. But they are the idea of God, which derives from the feeling of God, which derives from the feeling of being overwhelmed.

We stayed in a little town called Broto, quiet but not silent, that same sound of the river, with the gushing of water from the falls called Sorrosal.

We arrived close to night and when night fell, one could hear it, a few hundred metres away: its crash muffled and perceived merely as a rumble, but its potential, its power, implict in that rumble, understood. When morning came, we went and looked: I stood close to the fall, on the rock opposite its pool, outside its fall but close enough to be surrounded by spray. I stood there, on the rock, with the rumble become a roar, with the spray all around me so that whether I closed my eyes or kept them open mattered not a jot. I was enveloped: I was within, so completely within as to have little knowledge of myself, little awareness that there was a self, that a discrete and separate self existed, could exist, could ever have existed. Not totally: I could still think, could still perceive, could still feel I am. But while I could have felt it, I could not, at that moment, while I stood within the spray, have understood it, still less said what it meant. It didn't matter. I no longer mattered. I felt that, and later understood, and I was glad of it.

What does not need to matter, does not matter. I do not need to leave a mark upon the world. I used to want, not to be famous, but to be known: to be a name to which people made reference, a name to which a meaning was attached. I used to write, for many reasons but with this among them:

Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.

Not for money, though to no small extent, as a substitute for money. Not for fame or even influence but in some way, to prove to myself that my life had not been wasted, that I had done the things that I could do. I used to want to change the world, but the world changed itself without my help and not in the way I would have wanted: to make no difference oppressed me with the knowledge of my own futility. And then my life, my mind exploded, for reasons unconnected: after that I could not have written even had I had the will to do so, even had the thought of writing not filled my mind with dread and fear and horror, with the impossible vastness of the task and the certainty of failure even if I could somehow complete it. I gave up, or realised I had given up, or understood, half-understood, half-grasped at the understanding that I could not finish what I started and therefore could not start.

There was little by way of I am, for a while, for a long while indeed. I am not, now, who I was then, in name or place or function, though there is a thread that links us, thin but real, real but thin. I am never sure how I got here from there, but I travelled in the company of cats. In cats I took my solace, though it was not what they offered me. They took from me what they wanted, not what I wanted to give. I could not impress them: I could not impress myself upon them. They accepted me, but did not need me. I realised none of this, not at the time. I understood only that they were good for me. I do not believe I even realised that they were remaking me. Not until I had stood underneath the waterfall at Sorrosal and understood the unimportance of I am.

I do not need to leave my mark. I may not even notice it where it is made. Recently, in a chess magazine to which I have a subscription, I saw an advert for a newly-published book, by an author that I like: I registered the advert and the existence of the book, the front cover of which took up most of the page. I turned the page: and only later, when somebody told me, did I realise that the cover, which I had spent no little time looking at (partly to identify the players, partly because the photo is inverted and the board the wrong way round) bore my mark. My name: my quote, a sentence from a previous review. There I was. A name to which people made reference. I hadn't even noticed, and I laughed.

I am ready, I think, to write again: soon, very soon. To write, you must know who you are: I think I know this, now. To write, you must know what you want to say:I think I understand this, now. But to write, you must also need to write:

A man makes art because he has to. Why was that made?

You have to be ready. I think that I am ready. I think I need to write: but now, what happens after I've written does not matter. That would be a question of I am.

Little gods, they are. They made me, or remade me, or enabled me to happen once again. Their grace, beauty, intelligence: their solitary nature. Their suspicion of people, too, which qualities I share, which make me identify with cats in a way one can never identify with God. All these things, they are, but one thing more and greater, which I feel in Huesca, outside the places which made and shaped me.

Outside and without my country, speaking little, understanding less. Not yet part of this, never likely to belong to it entirely. I wonder if it is not the goal that I have unwittingly aspired to for all my life, always wanting it but never realising that I wanted it. Not until, in the fourth decade of my life, I was taught it, by cats. This is the reason I love them, more than any other. Because they taught me what I wanted. They taught me insignificance.

Des res

2006-06-28T11:25:00.000+02:00

George Monbiot was writing about second homes in the Guardian the other day and the following passage caught my eye:

Two weeks ago the Sunday Times revealed that the Labour MP Barbara Follett, who owns a £2m house in her constituency (in Stevenage), a flat in Soho and homes in Antigua and Cape Town, has claimed £76,357 in Commons expenses over the past four years for her London pad.

My eyes popped out. Not at the expenses, extensive though they were, nor at the overseas possessions, superfluous though they be. Nor even at the West End flat, which would seem to render unnecessary the expenses at least. My eyes popped out at the suggestion that Mrs Follett might own a place in Stevenage worth two million pounds. Mrs Follett, or anybody. I was brought up in Stevenage: I spent my teenage years there. How can there possibly be a house in Stevenage worth two million quid?

I know the town well. Or I did when I was younger, ten years going round the cycle paths and roundabouts which form its skeleton, getting to know the place: a task both easy and difficult to accomplish. Easy, because it all looks the same, being composed of a number of large - and largely identical - estates, which earned it the nickname of Legoland. Difficult, for the same reason: when everywhere looks the same, it is hard to remember exactly where you are, except insofar as you are in Stevenage. The landscape is always familar. Like knowing you are in the desert because of the proliferation of sand. Stevenage is bigger now than it was when I was young and so there must be parts of it I do not know. But there can be no parts of it that I would not recognise, because how can something alter when it is always the same?

So where, in the name of God, might one find a house in Stevenage worth two million pounds? Most of the houses there were built as council houses after the war and were not therefore actually supposed to be worth anything. Even since their transformation into property, they're still not worth anything, not by Mrs Follett's standards. You'd have to own a dozen of them to get close to the two million mark. Perhaps she does own a dozen or so and knocked them through to make one big one. It's not as if it would damage their architectural integrity.

I don't know. House prices have reached such ridiculous levels in the UK that I've been saying for years that they might as well add on a nought or two just for a laugh. Perhaps they did.

Run, rabbit, run

2006-06-12T11:10:00.000+02:00

The other day my rabbit shook hands with the mayor of Huesca. It was La Fería del Libro: for a week at the end of May, all the bookshops in the town go and set up shop in huts in the park and sell as many books on a Sunday morning as we'd normally sell in a month. The mayor came round to talk to the stallholders, much in the manner of Her Majesty the Queen: I was wearing the rabbit at the time and so we touched paws. (I probably would not, I imagine, have touched paws with Her Majesty. If he'd got within a hundred yards of her, the rabbit would have had to be searched.)

Rincón, I call him: the shop is called Menuto Rincón, half-Spanish, half-Aragonese, and from that he takes his name. He has a manic look in his eyes and his ears flap when I wave him at the passing children. My little finger fits inside his paw and when I wiggle it, he waves too. He waves at kids, adults, policemen: anybody passing the shop, anybody who passed the hut during the book fair. He waves at parents - they stop their children and turn them round to look, saying "¡Mira! Un conjeito!".

Sometimes they laugh: sometimes they stand there, wide-mouthed and open-eyed, not sure whether or not the rabbit is real. Sometimes they run and hide behind their parents' legs and when they do, the rabbit hides as well, scooting behind my head orbehind a pile of books before creeping out again to see if the scary child is still there. If they are, we look at one another and say "Mira! Un niño!" (or una niña!) and he waves his way towards them, stopping and beckoning with my thumb in his left paw, and if he is lucky, resolving all their fears with a hug and a kiss. If he is unlucky, they grab at his ears and he has to be rescued by the parents; when they extricate him from their loved one's grip I scrunch his head into my palm and move thumb and little finger to his eyes, imitating tears. But if a child is crying and the sight of Rincón stems the tears, he dances: up and down with paws aloft to celebrate the happiness of los pequeños.

I have been extending his repertoire. He bows: thumb across my palm, over he goes with ears hanging down in a show of humility. He plays air guitar (finger pats my palm with thumb outstretched) or flicks one ear amusingly in front of his head while leaving the other behind (turn hand swiftly with slight rolling motion, almost as if bowling a leg-break). Adults enjoy him almost as much as children: and if they do not, and glare disapprovingly or walk on stony-faced pretending they haven't seen him, I assume that they're Franquistas and if I am so minded, Rincón, with a swivel of the hand led by my little finger, can make a rude gesture behind their backs.

But most people like to see him, and respond to him: and they respond to him all the more when he hands out free slices of carrot, as he did a few weeks ago when we operated a stall, in the marketplace, directly outside the shop. It was too hot for carrots at the book fair (too hot for the carrots, I mean, rather than for the eating of them: when evening temperatures get up to the mid-thirties and beyond, the carrots wilt quickly and the flies do not).

So we handed out cerezas de Bolea instead and Rincón swept up behind us, offering the customers a plastic cup for the stalks and stones. He worked hard, Rincón, and deserved his sleep, which he took in a box of books, nestled against a copy of Adivina Cuando Te Quiero.

I took him to school, to read a story, in English, to the children. They are taught in English but, as yet, can't really follow it, any more than I can follow Spanish spoken at normal speed - but they can understand a rabbit waving about and doing silly things.

Rincón played the lead, as Flop-Ear: we had another rabbit on the sidelines, to represent Flop-Ear's friends, who laugh at him, and a series of props to tie to Flop-Ear's right ear (which he does to try and make it stand up properly). We propped it up with a carrot, with a pencil, and tied a balloon to it: we even hid his ears under a hat.

We inspected his ears using a toy doctor's kit and when we had finished, and decided - as does the doctor in the story - that there was nothing wrong with the ear, we tied another carrot to his ear in celebration, but letting it hang down rather than prop it up to show we didn't care what it looked like. To prove the point, we tied a carrot to the other rabbit's ear as well, and to mine: and Rincón and I took our bow with carrots hanging on strings from our ears. After that, we all sang Run, Rabbit, Run and In A Cottage In The Wood with all the gestures, and handed out carrots to the children, one for everyone, before they left.

I know he is a resource, Rincón, an advertising tool. He attracts the notice of the children, they wander over and then the adults come and buy them books. He is a Unique Selling Point: we become la libreria con el conejito and hope as a result that the kids pester their parents to go to the rabbit's shop rather than somewhere else. He looks after them in order to look after us.

But at the same time, there is no other reason, no other agenda, other than the one the children see, other than a rabbit reaching out to them and wanting to be their friend. Because it was with no conscious thought that I picked him up and began to wave him at the passing children, lest it be something else, something else I read a very long time ago, when I was closer to their age than to the age that I am now. Something that I read, and half-forgot, and had not entirely forgotten.

Old Phoebe said something then, but I couldn't hear her. She had the side of her mouth right smack on the pillow, and I couldn't hear her.

"What?" I said. "Take your mouth away. I can't hear you with your mouth that way."

"You don't like anything that's happening."

It made me even more depressed when she said that. "Yes I do. Yes I do. Sure I do. Don't say that. Why the hell do you say that?"

"Because you don't. You don't like any schools. You don't like a million things. You don't."

"I do! That's where you're wrong--that's exactly where you're wrong! Why the hell do you have to say that?" I said. Boy, was she depressing me.

"Because you don't," she said. "Name one thing."

"One thing? One thing I like?" I said.

"Okay." The trouble was, I couldn't concentrate too hot. Sometimes it's hard to concentrate.

"One thing I like a lot you mean?" I asked her. She didn't answer me, though. She was in a cockeyed position way the hell over the other side of the bed. She was about a thousand miles away. "C'mon answer me," I said. "One thing I like a lot, or one thing I just like?"

"You like a lot."

"All right," I said.........

......"anyway, I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all. I know it's crazy, but that's the only thing I'd really like to be. I know it's crazy."

Old Phoebe didn't say anything for a long time. Then, when she said something, all she said was, "Daddy's going to kill you."

"I don't give a damn if he does," I said.

Illiterates

2006-05-24T11:55:00.000+02:00

The Chinese, according to this story, have been:

aiming to improve illiteracy from an estimated 80 percent.

Do they mean reduce?

Mickey Mouse sport

2006-05-17T16:25:00.000+02:00

Whenever one of Huesca's sporting teams are due to play a home match posters appear on the walls of the Coso in the preceding week alerting the unenthusiastic public to the existence of the forthcoming fixture. Fútbol, baloncesto, balonmano - so far I've only been to the first of these. I've had little acquaintance with basketball in my life, save a term or two in the gym at school, and none whatsoever with handball - in fact I never even saw one of the balls until I picked one up where somebody had left it, just a few weeks ago. Perhaps that ought to change: this week's poster advertises an upcoming clash between Huesca's team and Ciudad Encantada. Limited though my Spanish still remains, I have enough to understand Enchanted City: or, to translate a little more freely, Huesca are taking on the Magic Kingdom.

Unavoidably, it's Disneyland that comes to mind: one envisages team made up of Disney characters and those appropriated by Disney, such as Winnie-the-Pooh: Mickey Mouse lining up with Pluto and Goofy and "all his friends". I have, as I say, no idea at all about balonmano and I wouldn't pay to go to Disneyland - matter of fact I probably wouldn't go there if you paid me - but it'd be worth a dozen or so euros to watch Donald Duck getting taken out off the ball.

Bad Santa

2006-04-19T22:40:00.000+02:00

Say what you like about the Catholic Church, they know how to put on a show. All last week, down the Coso, in Huesca as in every other town in Spain, parading with drums and banners, dressed in cultish robes and hooded like the Ku Klux Klan. Semana Santa, Holy Week: the commemoration of the Crucifixion and the reminder of the Catholic Church's obsession with violent death. Be thankful for small mercies, that we do not get auto-crucifixion like they put on in the Philippines: here in Spain the preference has always been for torturing other people, and they are not allowed to do that any more. They do, however, have people who bang their drums without gloves so that their hands are torn, as if mangled with stigmata, and drip blood onto the drum as a symbol of their penitence. Be thankful for small mercies, because when you understand the Catholic Church, you understand that they are serious about pain and about suffering. Be thankful for small mercies, and for larger ones, that the Catholic Church in Spain no longer has the power to put into practice what it symbolises in show.

But it knows how to put one on. In a sense the Catholic Church is show, the overcoming of resistance by appeal to the power of the senses (and, if that fails, by fire and sword). The incense, the finery, the magic spells. There is not, as in there is in Protestantism, any appeal to reason. The Protestant aesthetic is very different: pared-down, direct, opposed to excess, suspicious of decoration. They do not like show: it interferes with the direct relationship of Man and God, which in the Catholic superstition is mediated only through the well-dressed clergy in their well-dressed churches. The glory of God, expressed in ostentatious wealth.

The Protestants do not like show, and perhaps for this reason they do not do it well. A few years ago I holidayed in Northern Ireland in July. An obscure choice, perhaps, but I wanted to see the rain (rather than the bunting and the markings on the pavements) and it was the only place within reach where I felt sure of seeing rain at that time of the year. The other thing I could be sure of seeing was the Protestant parades: and I remember one in Belfast.

I had always been under the impression that, whatever one thought of the history and purpose of the marches, they were impressive to see: with flutes and lambeg drums and uniforms. But it was not so. Not just because of the unrehearsed tunelessness of most of them - they did not know what they were trying to play and they could not have played it if they had been - but because they were accompanied, along the pavement while they marched along the road, by drunkards, pissed-up youths drinking from bottles and then throwing them. It was, in the rain, pathetic rather than impressive. Of course, it was intended to frighten, to intimidate, and one could see how it might do so: and though it was laughable one would have been ill-advised to laugh. But it did not terrify. It was disorganised yobbery rather than organised madness.

In Huesca, in contrast, though it had its share of white-robed kids leaving the parade to go to Mama, and of people removing their hoods when the parade was over to have a fag, there was none of the indiscipline, none of the drunkenness, none of the lack of focus of the Orangemen. They had a sense of purpose because they have a sense of destiny: their past is linked to their future and their future consists of victory, the personal victory of reconciliation with God in Heaven and the greater victory of the Triumph of the Church. The Orangemen, however, do nothing - do absolutely nothing - but fear inevitable defeat. The Orangemen, afraid, lash out: the Church assured of victory, parades.

I fear the victory of the Catholic Church: and for that reason, like so much about Catholicism, that I find hard to describe to anyone outside the Church, I find these parades frightening, because of what they stand for, because of what they know they stand for. To the outsider they might look like fun. To the outsider they might even look silly. But to the Catholic they look serious, because within the Church, we understand that everything is deadly serious. Of course they're fun for the kids who take part, a bit of dressing-up and marching down the street. Of course the hoods aren't KKK: they're far older than that. Of course it's just a bit of pageantry, good for the tourists on whom Spain depends. Of course it isn't serious.

But of course it is. Nothing that isn't serious could be so loud. Nothing that is so Catholic could ever not be serious. The hoods may not be copied from the KKK (it is presumably the other way around, most curiously as the KKK hated the Catholic Church) but if Spain is a modern country, which it is, then they know - even the clergy know - exactly what they look like. Nevertheless, they choose to look like that. They look like that because they want to celebrate their history, and in no other country is the history of the Church as soaked in blood as it is in Spain.

Not just the blood of its opponents. This weekend past, out walking in the countryside, I came across the roadside gravestone of someone killed in August 1936, asesinado por las hordas rojas

I do not know what has happened to the horde, but I do know that I would be a Red in the eyes of the Church. I know also - that it never forgets a drop of its own blood. The school I went to named its houses after Catholic martyrs: Fisher, Houghton, Rigby, Stone and More. it remembers them, as it remembers all its saints. How could these parades be shorn of meaning, held as they are by a Church that won't forget?

Of course they cannot be. Practically every festival in Spain exists to celebrate the Church, and more than that, to celebrate the driving-out of Islam. They celebrate the history of the Church in Spain, a history of violence, backwardness and persecution, a history in which ignorance has been nurtured and imagination crushed. A history of shooting, burning and banning. A history of blood, some of their own blood and an unequalled quantity of the blood of others in revenge.

The Catholic Church is a church of ritual. Ritual has purpose: the purpose of ritual is to sanctify and celebrate. The purpose of Semana Santa is to sanctify the history of the Church. The purpose of drums is to terrify the listener. The purpose of a hood is to hide the ones who wear them. Everything is hidden so that everything can be preserved. The Catholic Church does nothing for fun: the Catholic Church knows what it's doing. And this is exactly what the Catholic Church wants everything to be.

You can't get away from them

2006-04-03T10:05:00.000+02:00

When I got back to the flat last night and turned on the television, TVE2 were showing the Boat Race.

Con job

2006-03-31T22:40:00.000+02:00

...it's people like that who make you realize how little you've accomplished. It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age he had been dead for two years.

The other day a friend sent me a link to say that an old acquaintance of ours, Constantine Gonticas, was now in day-to-day charge of Millwall Football Club. I was surprised and unsurprised. Surprised and unsurprised and interested, not least because until a couple of weeks before, I was living in Millwall country. I was lodging in East Dulwich, where if you saw a football shirt (and although East Dulwich is not Dulwich Village, that wasn't very often) it was likely to be a Millwall top. The Southwark News billboards, when they were not talking about crime, which wasn't very often, would be talking about events at the New Den. Not having much of a liking for crime-led local papers, I didn't read it very often. Perhaps I should have. I would, then, have known about Constantine.

I never made it up there when I was living on their territory preferring Dulwich Hamlet where the absence of success caused little anguish, but my landlady's boyfriend was a fan and they did, therefore, impinge on my existence. They would have done so a great deal more had I known that Constantine was there with them, because I know Con of old. I knew him when we were at Oxford. As I said, before, you can't get away from them.

I wish I could. But I'll say this for Constantine: he's a football man. It is the only thing I'll say for him. Other than that he must be one of the most arrogant and self-centred men I've ever met. If he told me the date, I'd check the calendar: if he told me my name I'd check my birth certificate. If he told me he was interested in anybody other than himself I'd laugh out loud. He was a keen member of Oxford University Conservative Association, and every bit the braying public schoolboy that you would imagine. His favourite word to describe other people was "sound": in that accent and in the manner that he said it, it meant somebody who was supportive of somebody like him. It meant somebody satisfied that people with a great deal of money should maintain, or increase, their share of all the money going round. His comment on student hardship was that those suffering should "get a job": he did not of course have one himself. Not even a directorship. But somehow, he managed to get by.

This, it transpired, was because he held a large number of shares, ones which did not, as far as anyone could tell, derive from any investment decisions he had made himself or any remunerative employment he had undertaken. He was a trust fund boy, and like many people who live off unearned income, he believed that other people were not working hard enough. They needed to work harder and to complain less. He complained about it often.

But he was, as I say, a football man. He supported Manchester United before it was unpopular to do so, though to my knowledge he had never been there and in all probability had only the sketchiest of ideas as to where Manchester was, none of the major public schools being located in that city. (He also, as I recall, had only the sketchiest idea as to who Dave Bennett was when that player scored in the 1987 Cup Final. Con, watching on television, attributed the goal to Cyrille Regis, a player who resembled Dave Bennett only in wearing a Coventry shirt and being black.) He had a much more highly developed opinion (though one as woefully ill-informed) of his own abilities as a footballer, believing his skills to be substantial and his prospects of playing for the University to be substantial too. He might have made it, too, had his twopenn'orth of talent been matched by more than a ha'porth of speed. He was, alas, even less fit in the physical sense than he was fit to run a football club, and the last I remember he was playing for the second team, not even of the University but of the College.

It was not the last I heard of him entirely: I recall him, during Black Monday, panicking loudly because his aforementioned share portfolio seemed likely to be reduced to the aforementioned twopenn'orth. Reacting to the departure of his money as others react to the departure of a loved one, he was unable to understand why those less morally serious than himself seemed to find it funny. He rushed out of the room in some distress.

It is a small world, Oxford, a small world that seems to dominate the larger one, and they always crop up sooner or later. That was the unsurprising bit; the surprise was that he should emerge at Millwall. I hadn't realised he was connected with Peter de Savary, who recently took over the club. A man, Mr De Savary, of extraordinary ability, or so it would appear: there can be no other explanation for his enormous wealth or his apparent belief that he can both cut costs through player sales and yet put Millwall in the Premiership within five years. Rarely can such a talented man have had such an untalented factotum.

De Savary claims to be making "a short-term plan, a medium-term plan and a long-term plan", for Millwall. Were I a Millwall fan my first inclination would have been to worry, lest the first of these entailed making cuts, the second involved making money and the last of them constituted making an exit with the club no better off than it was before. And, so indeed, it might. Apparently the idea is to develop the surrounding area as part of a project which places the football club at the centre. The football club would be able to engage in property development, regeneration and all the rest of it, a highly profitable enterprise judging by the amount of it that has stretched across the Thames from Tower Bridge to Greenwich and beyond these past few years.

This would therefore make much money for the football club - or, at least, for the people who own the football club, reminding me of the recent experience at my own Oxford United where the owner was able to realise an eight-figure sum in profit while leaving the club a few places above relegation to the Conference and tenants in a stadium they no longer owned. Would Constantine Gonticas be party to something like that? Of course he would. Because Constantine is a football man, but Constantine is also a greedy man and a Thatcherite.

Perhaps he is not so talentless as I thought he was twenty years ago. He has, at any rate, a talent in making connections. De Savary - a former Referendum Party candidate, like Southampton chairman Rupert Lowe - is a good man with whom to have a connection. His other connections appear to include the Crown Prince of Yugoslavia and most of the government of that truncated and benighted country - and one Thor Bjorgolfsson, a billionaire and the richest man in Iceland (and, so I am told, one of the central characters in the advanced libel course of a leading London-based financial magazine: his reputation, I should like to stress, is absolutely unimpeachable). Wealth is the teat at which the greedy have to suck, and Constantine, it seems, has sucked widely and well.

He is, one assumes, wealthy himself - the phrase "Managing Director of..... [an] investment fund" is at any rate more often associated with wealth than with its opposite. In the terms in which Constantine thinks, he must have achieved all the success that he set out to have. He has made it, and at the age Tom Lehrer had achieved when he referred to Mozart. The investment fund and other companies besides, his contacts among the rich and royal and even his own football club to play with. It is what an Oxford education is all about.

And as for me - I am a thousand miles away, without a source of income and never sure whether to wonder what happened to the first part of my life, or to see what I can make of the second half.

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l'entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it.

But what words should I try to use? I should, by Constantine's standards, be jealous of him. I doubt that he could interpret my feelings in any other way. Success is the measure of man, and money is the measure of success.

But I am not jealous. Of what accomplishments could I be jealous? He has done nothing - nothing that I value, nothing for anybody save himself. Nor has he done anything that I could have done, nothing that I want to do. There is no shadow there, no other-me, no what-I-could-have-become. So there can be no jealousy. But there can perhaps be sadness. I am sad, though not for him. I am sad that people like Constantine find it so easy to prosper while other people - perhaps, the sort of people who watch Millwall - so often find it hard.

Sad, too, perhaps, that the sole purpose of an Oxford education should be to make somebody rich, though sad because that is the rule rather than the exception. We are told, in a Western world becoming increasingly unequal, that egalitarianism is the enemy of talent, that to hold back the rich is to hold back the best. But I have never thought that. I have always thought that elitism rewards the mediocre. And rarely has there been a man more mediocre yet more part of the elite than Constantine.

Poor show

2006-03-28T11:05:00.000+02:00

There is, undeniably, something voyeuristic about opera, something about the form which makes it less empathetic than a novel. One may read a novel about illness or death or war or genocide and not feel that these events are being laid on for your entertainment: the whole idea is to put you within the events and the minds of those who experience them. Dickens may kill Little Nell: Primo Levi may walk you through the death camps, but in either case, you are there, watching it happen but wishing it would not. In opera, there is a greater distance. It is a show, which a novel is not. A novel does not seek to send you out of the theatre whistling the tunes.

At the same time, there is a heightened emotional atmosphere in opera, deriving partly from its musical nature, which serves, as music normally serves, to intensify and lay bare emotion. It derives also from its melodrama, itself a requirement of the form which, in the short period permitted to complete the action, allows relatively little scope for character development and little more for ambiguity. Opera is stark, and none less stark than Puccini: his heroines, like those of Verdi, die, and dying is what they are there for. There is never any doubt about it. You know what is going to happen: there is no sense of wishing it were otherwise.

Moreover opera is an art form with a repertoire: the material is not new, the conclusion and the working-out are already familiar. The pleasure in Puccini is not the plot, any more than it is in Shakespeare, where there is no capacity to surprise us. We need to know what is going on (I was not, in fact, totally familiar with La Boheme, nor with the Spanish in which the surtitles naturally were written) in order to appreciate the meaning of the songs. But the chances are we know how this is going to turn out, and even if we do not, the ending will not surprise us any more than we can be surprised by the death of Macbeth or of Hamlet. Hence, while we feel the death of Mimi or of Butterfly, there is no sense of wishing to prevent it, or wanting the plot to jerk from its apparent direction. In the action of a novel the hero may be trapped: we wish the hero to escape. In the action of an opera we know already there is no escape. If anything, we egg on the pursuers, since we wish the action of the opera to proceed. Cio-Cio-San must die. Violetta must die. Mimi must cough her last in the cold of winter. We want it to happen: we want to be there to watch it happen. There is something inescapably voyeuristic about opera.

But possibly the most voyeuristic element of opera is the contrast between the audience and the scenes that they have come to see. It is, in practice if not of necessity, an art form patronised by the better-off, by those who do not know cold in their homes, by those who do not sell their coats to fetch a doctor for a dying friend. That is not the audience which watches La Boheme - nor was it the audience for whom it was written. The opera is watched in warmth and comfort though it is about the absence of both.

Why does Mimi die? Why is Mimi doomed to die? Mimi is doomed to die because she is poor. It is her poverty, not the winter, which ensures that she is cold. Alcindoro does not know what cold is: Musetta does, and for that reason soaks Alcindoro for his money. Mimi knows cold but does not know money. For that reason she has consumption; for that reason she has no rest cure, no long stay at a spa. Her poverty places her in Puccini, not in Thomas Mann. She dies in an unheated room without a coat, clutching Musetta's muff: our coats are in the cloakroom and our seats are nice and warm. Che gelida manina: our hands are warm and fresh from holding drink.

We know what is going to happen, because they tell us so: in the third act, when Rodolfo and Mimi separate, they do so above all because he cannot bear to watch her die. But we can bear it. There was an interval before the last act, as there was before the third: in each of them I had una copa de cava at the bar. I had two glasses of champagne and then I came out for the last act to watch Mimi die.

Bathroom break

2006-03-27T18:10:00.000+02:00

Yesterday morning I went to the bathroom in my hotel room in Madrid - and coughed like Mimi, who I had seen die of consumption in La Boheme at the Teatro Real the night before.

I had been suffering badly from hay fever for the previous few days, accentuated rather than alleviated by a night asleep, which had merely allowed all the gunk I accumulated in the night to gather at the back of my throat. Causing me to cough - to cough, and once I had leaned over the basin to spit, to also splutter, gag and retch, to spit into the basin not only the contents of my throat but, to judge from the tearing feeling and the spots of blood, much of the throat itself.

Mercifully, the throat remained intact. The blood was actually from closer to the mouth, as I discovered shortly, when I began to brush my teeth and found myself obliged instead to swill several glasses of water before the bleeding subsided. I have recently had a tooth extracted - the third of its family to disappear - and the resulting cavity is still both deep and sensitive. One fears to touch it with a brush because of the likely short-term consequences - some pain, some bleeding, some soreness, some discomfort. Yet one fears also to leave it untouched for fear of the likely consequences in the longer term: more decay and more extractions and an old man's empty mouth.

I shaved, using a cheap blade I had bought at the Farmacia opposite the night before. Once more my worn-out memory failed in a simple task: to remember that a razor might be one of the very small number of items one needs for an overnight stay. I completed the shave adequately enough, and having finished, looked at myself in the mirror and saw more grey hairs than I thought myself accustomed to seeing. I finished going to the toilet (at my third attempt) and completed my routine with a shower, which I interrupted halfway through by dropping the sprinkler too close to my foot. It missed that foot by inches, but the foot itself was not to entirely escape misfortune. By the end of the day it, too, was in the treatment room, suffering from a blister on the sole.

When you're in your forties you don't go for a shower in the morning. You go in for running repairs and maintenance.

Modern life is rubbish

2006-03-22T10:55:00.000+01:00

I woke up this morning to the sound of cockcrow.

Bloody ringtones, I thought.

Fresh crop

2006-03-20T01:20:00.000+01:00

Graeme Le Saux was on Match Of The Day last night: I am getting my hair cut this morning. The two are connected historically, if not in the present instance, since the morning's cut is induced by my impending emigration. My Spanish is still essentially vestigial: there is no phrase I use as much as no hablo mucho espanol, unless it be Los gatos son mejores que los perros. This being so, I felt it wise to put off as long as possible my first visit to la peluqueria, as any instructions I give as to my cut are likely to be misspoken, misunderstood and end in a misshapen haircut. (Huesca is full of hairdressers, almost giving the impression that it is devoted to them in the way that Charing Cross Road is devoted to booksellers, or Harley Street to expensive quacks. They have good hair, the Spanish: the English, apparently, do not, in keeping with our bad teeth, bad hygiene, bad weather and bad food.)

I have what is called, in England anyway, a French crop: it is apparently not called that in Spain, at least according to the Spaniards who were having their hair cut last time I had mine done, and told me that I would have to describe the cut I wanted. List its characteristics and specificationns, rather than simply saying the magic words and choosing between a number two and number three. I am fearful of the result. I may have to give myself a good few weeks to summon up the courage to have it done, and even then I may take a photograph and an interpreter.

The French crop, though, comes from Graeme Le Saux (appropriately enough, since Le Saux comes from Jersey). I have had it like that for seven years now, after having it cut, not long after I changed my name, and with a similar motive - to change myself out of all recognition in an attempt to wrench myself out of a personal crisis that nearly killed me. Be someone else, I thought: a different name, different appearance. I even thought of emigrating, at the time, though in truth I could no more have summoned the energy to leave the country than I could have played the St Matthew Passion on the comb and paper.

The difference was stark. Stark enough for people at work to fail to recognise me - though, alas, I still recognised myself. But the model for the cut was Graeme Le Saux. I liked his cut: it was different to mine, different to me. So I went into a hairdresser's in Thame, where I then lived, and asked for a cut like his.

It was a drastic cut But not the most drastic I have had. For five years, in my later teens, I never had it cut at all, growing it as far as it would grow until it was a forest of split ends. I can barely recognise myself in old photographs - which matters rarely as I am not sufficiently fond of my past often to look at them. Five years, and more. Until, during the first term of my second year at college, I became offended by the presence, in the student common room, of termcards belonging to Vincent's, a club for Blues, i.e. those who had represented the University at spor. (Or rugby union). For men, that is, who had represented the University, in the evenings at any rate, since the termcards bore the phrase that particularly offended me:

Women will not be admitted after seven pm.

I looked at the termcards, full of snobbery and arrogance, and I decided that they had to die. A tiny gesture, meaningless, more part of Oxford, when you think about it, than rejection of it, the futile dissenter being as much a component of the institution and its mythology as rowing, subfusc and Latin at its graduation ceremonies. Nevertheless, they had to die. I piled them on top of an ashtray which, in turn, was sat upon a coffee table, and being a non-smoker, asked around for a lighter. A friend of mine passed me his Zippo: I held it horizontally, so that the flame would catch the lowest of the cards and pass from there into the others. I clicked, and nothing happened. Clicked again, and again, nothing happened.

I probably should not have held the lighter horizontally: it's not designed to operate like that. But not being a smoker, ever - to this day, I have never had a legal cigarette - I wasn't used to lighters of any sort, let alone this powerful Zippo, which I had seen resemble a flamethrower when used by someone else, but which now refused to emit as much as a single spark. Holding it horizontally was my first inexperienced mistake. My second, rather greater, was leaning over it to see what I was doing wrong. At which point, everything went right, at least from the point of view of getting the desired flame. It was bright, and hot, and long: long enough to catch my hair, my hair of five years' length, which was draped over the table and cards as if it were intended to act as kindling. It ignited my hair in the manner popularised by Michael Jackson.

My hair lit up, though despite being the person closest to the flame I was the worst placed to see it. But I could feel it. I was told, after the event, that it went up in a fashion spontaneous and spectacular. I could imagine, as I'd seen it done before, on a coach trip to a CND march several years before, on which one of my friends non-violently set alight the hair of another. He beat it out so quickly, it was barely singed.

Having seen it happen probably saved my hair at least, and maybe more besides, as I simply battered my head with my hands until I was sure the fire was out. Little damage was done, and hairs with split ends might as well be singed a little anyway for all the difference that it makes. But after that, I decided that it was a sign from God to get my hair cut, and I did: a halfway house between the length that it was previously, down to the small of my back, and the French crop that I got fifteen years later, and which I will still have, later on today.

French crop. I didn't know, when I went to the hairdresser's, what it was actually called: in my naivete I assumed that if you named somebody famous, the hairdresser, who presumably did nothing else than read OK! magazine and talk about the hairstyles of the rich and famous, would instantly recognise both name and cut. Graeme Le Saux was famous then - he played his last game for England in the very year I chose him as the model for my makeover. But not, as it happened, famous enough. Or not in Thame, at any rate. The hairdresser had no idea who I was talking about and there was not a copy of OK! around to help us out. Except that the bloke in the adjacent chair not only knew the player, but his cut - "Graeme Le Saux - French crop", as I might have said "Graeme Le Saux - Chelsea and England". French crop it was. But I do not know what it is in Spanish.

(subsequent note: it is called un parisien)

My life in seventeen boxes

2006-03-13T11:35:00.000+01:00

I am leaving the country shortly*: most of my stuff is in storage. I went and looked at it the other day, in its bleak metal box in a bleak industrial unit a short walk away from the middle of Croydon. I went and looked at it the other day: I went and looked at me.

A storage unit looks as bare when it is filled as it does when it is empty. The walls seem almost to come through the contents, to render them transparent, to render them absent. Their bareness says, this is a place where things are left, not kept. Whatever you leave here, is insignificant. It is not used, it has no place, it therefore has no meaning. There is nothing here. Your home is where you keep your things: yet here they are, your things. You call this home?

My life is in that unit. My tangible life. It is easily listed. A television, without remote control. A bike, neglected. A couple of chess sets. Four paintings. Six bookcases. And seventeen boxes. White packing boxes, of two different sizes, stacked like bricks in a corner. About fourteen of them are full of books, the rest with bits and pieces, bric-a-brac. It took me forty years to accumulate the contents of those seventeen boxes. Yet, when I look at them, especially when I look at them hunched together against the bare walls of a storage unit, how little they feel.

Well, a life is not composed of lists. A life is not composed of tangibles. Your life is the memories that you leave behind you, not the marks you make. And every life can be squeezed, can be reduced to the thinness of a notice, the carving on a headstone, the line in a newspaper, the numerals which denote the date of birth and death. All the matter in the universe might be compressed into a ball so small that it would fit inside my unit many times. They are nothing. Caesars, Christs and Stalins had statues erected of themselves in even the smallest towns and yet they were never satisfied because there were always places that remained unmarked. Often I have wished that I could cut myself free from my possessions and travel as I pleased. But there they are, piled small, and it hard not to look at them and think that they are all I have to show for forty years. To think that they are awfully little to have to show for all that time.

My books, mostly. My books. If those books that I have spent so long accumulating and protecting, if those books man nothing, what, then, do I mean? I am beginning again, another person, an unknown, in another country, one I do not know. That should be distance enough to allow a new beginning. But the strange thing is that it is hard to begin again without the sense that one is not beginning, that one is building on what is already there.

The past is always with you as you travel. You can only drop anchor: you cannot cut yourself adrift. Almost every night I dream. I dream of things gone past and yet not gone. I dream of fears both known and unknown. Last night I dreamed that I was living on a high cliff, and yet the waters had risen and were coming over the top. I am glad to be going and still I am afraid. Your life is in the memories that you do not leave behind you. Those memories make me afraid. Those memories make me stand in a cold box in Croydon looking at the boxes that it holds, and asking them what they tell me about me.

[* = hence the paucity of recent postings, for which my apologies]

You don't say

2006-03-12T10:55:00.000+01:00

Newsflash on Ceefax this morning:

At least one person dead in suicide bombing in Kabul, Afghanistan.

Three paintings of cats

2006-02-15T01:00:00.000+01:00

I bought a card in the National Gallery yesterday, in honour of the cat which it depicts.

The cat is a detail from Willem van Mieris' A Woman And Fish-Pedlar In A Kitchen, or the painting itself is a detail in the depiction of the cat: while the painting itself may centre on a basket,

my attention centred firmly on the cat.

The cat itself has her attention on the bird whose neck is hanging over the edge. (I think it is a she: the plumpness may suggest a tom, but the colour suggests otherwise, and I've met quite a few she-cats plump enough to pass the test of size.) The colour of the cat is beautiful: but the cat itself is not quite right.

There's always been a shortage of good cats in art. One notices this almost immediately in the National Gallery: so many paintings are bucolic in theme, or depict people who wish to show their relationship to the land, that dogs have a clear advantage. The artist depicts hunters:

where there are hunters, there are dogs.

So there are not very many cats in art, and well-realised cats are few and far between: assuming you can see the elusive cat at all. (I am sure I saw a cat in the attic in Bosch's Adoration Of The Magi

when I saw it just a couple of years ago: but either my memory is failing or my eyesight cannot detect the creature any more.)

Van Mieris' cat is, as I say, beautiful but not quite right. She does not have quite the poise of a cat, even a chubby one: she is a little too solid, a little too inclined to look but not to try and touch. The bird is well within reach: where a dog might merely enquire, a cat would reach out, jump, claw for her prize, walk round in circles, plead, wail, try again, and if rebuffed, would glare and prowl and sulk. But our cat here is just a little quizzical: a little too human, or even canine, rather than catching completely the essence of the cat.

Hogarth, on the other hand, overdoes it just a little.

His cat, as we might expect, is after the bird: but makes it too obvious, lets his presence be known, scowls and snarls at his target rather than approaching it with quiet, cunning and dexterity. Of course, in a cage, the bird is probably beyond his reach: but if it came to scowling and snarling it would come after the cat had made his play, not while he cased the joint from behind a chair. Hogarth is a theatrical painter and exaggerates for an effect he usually achieves: but cats are subtle, it is no small part of their capacity to enchant, and I would have thought it too theatrical a cat.

Of the three cats I saw (after a while, ones going looking for them), it is Manet who captures best his cat, and it is no surprise to learn that Manet himself had a cat, Zizi, who was the model for the painting.

She is a fantastic cat, perfectly realised in form and character, splendid in her isolation, entirely self-absorbed. She accepts Mme Manet's stroking without complaint but also without acknowledgement, each of them benefitting from the other's presence but each, at the same time, devoted to their own thoughts.

If it were painted today you would have guessed Suzanne Manet was watching the television: as it is she seems distracted, unable perhaps to give her full attention to the cat. But Zizi gives her full attention to herself. One imagines her tail flicking, occasionally, from side to side, to aid her meditation, until without warning she makes up her mind and jumps down from Madame Manet's lap to go about her business.

Woman With A Cat? Though Edouard Manet was not really in a position to say so, it is Cat With A Woman, the world looking at Zizi, or looking at the world as Zizi sees it. I bought a card depicitng the cat as painted by van Mieris, and she is quite a cat: but Zizi is a cat among cats, le chat des chats. I cannot keep my silence in the presence of a cat: and I cannot see Manet's painting of Zizi without saying, out loud for all to hear:

What a cat! What a cat!

Sign of the times

2006-02-14T10:40:00.000+01:00

I watched the Ryanair documentary last night, not least because I take their flights to and from Zaragoza: therefore I want to know everything about them that I really didn't want to know. What I got was what I expected to get: basic safety and security checks neglected, basic training skimped and bypassed, in general everything done in the shoddiest of fashions by undertrained and underinterested staff because there was no time and no encouragement to do it any other way.

I've taken, occasionally, over the past few years, to watching television with the subtitles on, partly in case the phone rings and I need to turn the volume off, partly because I have convinced myself that now I'm in my forties, my hearing is falling apart like a secondhand plane from Aeroflot.

I needn't have bothered: I could barely make out what the subtitles were saying. Not because of my (no doubt) failing eyesight but because spellings were wrong, incorrect words provided, sentences produced that neither followed the rules of grammar nor made linguistic sense. In short, everything about them suggested that subtitles were produced in the shoddiest of fashions by undertrained and underinterested staff because there was no time and no encouragement to do it any other way.

The bodies of Christ

2006-02-08T19:15:00.000+01:00

I return from Catholic Spain in the middle of a worldwide conflict between the various Peoples of the Book as to which of them are more (or less) civilised than the others. Naturally, such a question can only be settled by the more civilised parties treating their less civilised rivals in as uncivilised a fashion as they can - on the principle of doing it to them before they do it, but worse, to us. But why stop at that? I had a boiled egg this morning: Swift might well have advised me to be careful at which end I broke it, lest I accidentally be mistaken for a member of the heretical Big-Endian camp instead of the theologically correct Little-Endian position to which I have adhered all my egg-eating life.

Spain, of course, has never really recovered from the overthrow of Muslim sovereignty in that part of the world: since the fall of Granada it has suffered Inquisition, decay and Fascism, with the Roman Catholic Church the common link. Not much happier the land of Christianity's older brother, in which the Jewish state lives by and is built on the principle of killing, encircling, expelling, imprisoning, dispossessing and repressing those people of the region who are not Jewish.

Such was - with only the names being changed - the intention of the Christians of the Republike Srpska, with regard to their neighbours, neighbours of all backgrounds but led by a Muslim President and a Muslim party, in the state of Bosnia. We are currently being encouraged to agree that Christians, unlike Muslims, do not burn down embassies in pursuit of their religious fears hatreds. Indeed not - they are capable of burning down whole countries, as the Orthodox Christians tried to do to Bosnia. In the case of Orthodox Russia with regard to Muslim Chechnya, they do so on a regular basis.

In doing so, they are not restrained (though not, perhaps, encouraged quite as much as Israel) by the Christians in power in London and Washington. Which latter government, when headed by the devout Christian administration of Ronald Reagan, provided many guns and many dollars so that equally devout death squad members in Central America could slaughter many tens of thousands of their fellow citizens in the name of Jesus Christ. These particular butchers were Catholics, which Reagan and his friends were not. An admirably ecumenical effort.

Not that the Muslims are always on the receiving end, as demonstrated by the world's largest Muslim country, the Islamic Republic of Indonesia, where the coup of 1966, perhaps the bloodiest in history, involved the slaughter of their political and religious opponents by Muslim mobs aided by the police and army. Nearly ten years later they went to largely Christian East Timor and carried out a slaughter just as bloody - supported, on the quiet, by Britain, the US and Australia, the latter two, countries formed by the Christian genocide of non-Christian peoples. Cries for help from their fellow-religionists went unheard. Prompting us perhaps - as one might when contemplating the Six Counties of Northern Ireland - to observe, with Julian the Apostate:

How these Christians love one another!

Life sentence

2006-02-07T19:25:00.000+01:00

The prison in Huesca is closed. I walked past it earlier today and it was silent: silent and still. I wasn't sure at first, since that is precisely the impression that a prison likes to give, but when I asked I was told, yes, the prison was closed and its fate was still being discussed - whether it should be a supermarket, or some kind of leisure complex, or whatever other use the building could be turned to.

Whatever it is would surely be an improvement on a prison, just as a prison that is closed must surely be an improvement on a prison that is open. In London, I imagine, they might squat a building such as that: thereby respecting the principle whereby prisons are usually the place where homeless people find their destination.

Rare to find a prison that is closed in England: we cannot find enough places to put the people we lock up. But they did close Oxford prison, towards the end of the fifteen years I lived in that city, the prime location of the jail no doubt influencing the decision to terminate its history as a penal institution. A shame, from no point of view other than my own: I used to walk close to the prison to visit a favourite pub not far away. When I did so it was often possible to come across some women, wives and girlfriends of the inmates, just by the bank of the Thames on the ironically-named Paradise Street, shouting messages to their men from a point beyond the walls. I rather liked to watch them as I passed.

One evening I saw a family of ducks - which creatures, as I understand it, mate for life - swimming along the river by the point at which the women used to stand. For a minute or two the drake mislaid his wife and chicks and panicked, circling round, flapping and quacking as he went - until he found them again, landed among them on the water and they swam off together. Some bonds are stronger than governments and laws.

Lightning does not strike twice

2006-02-01T13:05:00.000+01:00

I found a fiver on the way to the pub last night. On the pavement, right in the middle of the pavement as it happens, practically standing on edge asking to be picked up. Fresh, perhaps fresh from the cashpoint at the crossroads of which the pub constitutes one quarter and the cashpoint another: straight but curved, straight up but curved along its length, as though it had been folded but not for long enough to be reconciled to it. I pocketed it: I looked around to see if anybody had dropped it and I even looked around for the cameras in case it was a stunt for television. But it was dark, and half-past ten. I doubt a fiver coud have been there since it was light.

Even in London, five pounds will buy you a couple of pints, which was as much as I had in mind. I walked to the bar, to order the first of these two, and as I did so I saw a pound coin on the floor. Unbelievable. This was my evening! That would pay for peanuts and crisps as well. I ordered my pint and slid my boot gently over the coin before dropping to the floor to pick it up under the guise of doing up my laces.

The coin had been glued to the floor.

Marx hits the spot

2006-01-31T10:55:00.000+01:00

Now: MPs have expressed concern over the Church of England's plan to sell off affordable housing amid a claim it is "only interested in profit".

Then: "The English Established Church...will more readily pardon an attack on 38 of its 39 articles than on 1/39 of its income."

But he was famous long ago

2006-01-30T19:45:00.000+01:00

It's Boris Spassky's sixty-ninth birthday today. I saw him on Thursday: he came out of the main hall in my Marianske Lazne hotel and walked right past me in the corridor. From my copy of Dnes the following morning I understood, in so far as my holiday Czech would permit, that he was going to spend his birthday in Karlovy Vary: presumably taking the waters and hoping, like all the other rotund pensioners, that they would somehow roll back his waistline and his years alike.

It's a good way to be a celebrity: to be famous among only a small section of the population, or at least recognisable onto to a few, though your name might be, as Spassky's once was, known across the world. No paparazzi (save the slow-witted English chessplayer photographing you as you descend the stairs) and very little press attention. Just enough, perhaps, to remind you, as you close your seventh decade, that you are remembered: just enough to make you feel good about yourself, feel you made your mark.

But no need to escape the attention, to live behind high walls with security guards. No need to accept the consequences of celebrity, to be greeted by total strangers and expected to be pleased to see them, no need to acknowledge their desires to mak their mark on your life and have them make a mark on yours. No need to be asked for autographs to prove that your path once crossed theirs. The occasional requirement to be applauded at an event which you can choose whether or not to attend: other than that, the open air, the shops, the streets like any other person, away from the insanities of celebrity and its consequences which, almost as much as shopping, define the culture in which we live. A culture of money is one that worships the successful: and because one cannot be successful any more than one can be a saint, we touch the living celebrity just as we used to touch the relics of the sainted dead.

None of that, for Boris Spassky - or just the shadow of it, just enough. None of the fear of being recognised, the persistent fear of lunatics, the constant resentment of intrusion. It is a healthy world, where those who have excelled can mix without discomfort with those who have just watched them and appreciated. Such a state of affairs, of course, depends entirely on those who excel not getting everything they want: upon them not receiving the enormous financial rewards which make a bridgeless separation between them and the community from which they spring.

No doubt the film stars and sportsmen believe that their wealth is, in part at least, a compensation for the fact that they are denied an ordinary life: no doubt that they are, in part at least, quite right to think so, because if people are to be denied that life they they must surely be allowed to live some other way. But it is unquestionably the wealth itself which produces the problem of which they complain: the cult of celebrity and all its attendant phenomena. Nobody bothers the genius who lives in the house next door: only the famous end up, not like the happy Boris Spassky, who could stand in any London street and not be noticed, but like the hapless Bobby Fischer - hiding from the world for half his life, almost as famous for the consequences of fame as he was originally famous for his talent.

You would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row.

It was also, today, another anniversary: another less famous than once it was. Less famous than it ought to be: it is the anniversary of probably the most significant day in all this country's history, a day with greater consequences for politics, government and religion than any other. Yet it is the best-kept secret in England: it is a secret we have hidden from ourselves. It goes uncommemorated: in fact it goes unspoken, undiscovered. Its significance is not known, because its meaning is never debated: its existence is not known because the fact of its happening is never mentioned. Ask people what happened on 30 January - give them even the clue that it is, in your opinion, the most important thing that ever happened in the country's history, and still the answer is not come.

Well, you say, England can be an ignorant country when it comes to history, and few of its people know much more of that history than the date 1066 and the outcome of the War. Maybe so. But I was on a bus through Westminster this morning and I saw the statue of Oliver Cromwell that stands (with much unmentioned irony) outside the House of Commons. It was surrounded by scaffolding, as was much of the building, and the effect was to make the man seem even more hidden, more obscure.

Nobody was taking his picture, nobody was standing on tghe pavement contemplating his monument and its meaning. Nobody, on this anniversary: like Boris Spassky, Cromwell can pass unnoticed on a British street. But Boris Spassky was World Champion, and did play Bobby Fischer. What happened on 30 January really happened. When a tree falls in the forest, though there be no-one there to hear it, it still makes a sound.

Dawning of the age

2006-01-24T15:00:00.000+01:00

They have the radio on during the buffet breakfast at my hotel: at some point yesterday I was surprised to hear it play Aquarius. I don't often get to hear that record, but when I do it always reminds me of a conversation I had with a girl called Dawn I used to work with at the DSS in Oxford nearly twenty years ago. She was saying that her birthday was coming up and I asked her what her star sign was. She told me Capricorn (or something) and I said that was a shame: if only it had been Aquarius. Because then, it would have been the ageing of the Dawn in Aquarius. She gave me a funny look.

Four out of four

2006-01-20T09:35:00.000+01:00

Talking of traffic and accidents, I'm off to the Czech Republic for a week or so, to play in a chess tournament in Marianske Lazne. I'm flying to Prague, where I stayed for a week in 1997. I remember it well: but as much as anything else I remember the reckless driving. Not reckless for speed, so much as for direction. I never saw anybody get hurt, but I did see a lot of accidents.

Four, in fact, in the first four days I was there. Nor, when I say I saw them, do I mean I saw the aftermath, four broken cars beside the road with police cars and tow trucks in attendance. I mean I saw four collisions, cars coming together and bouncing away again, describing a slow parabola until coming to rest: nobody hurt, or even, as far as I could see, particularly distressed. Or even surprised: as if nothing had happened, or as if this really did happen every day.

De omnibus disputandum

2006-01-19T11:20:00.000+01:00

Until quite recently I lived in Brixton and in the morning, cutting it fine as I made my way to work, I used to catch a bus up the Effra Road if one threatened to overtake me on my way to Brixton Underground Station. Travelcards have that effect: if there is a bus, you find yourself taking one automatically, even if only for a couple of stops, even if you could probably get there just as quickly under your own steam.

A little more than sometimes, when I got across Brixton Road to the station, the gates would be closed, the station unaccessible due to some problem inside or further up the Victoria Line and I would have to phone through to the answerphone at work while wondering if there was any other way of getting in without being late. There wasn't: even if I squeezed myself onto an overground train to Victoria with all the other refugees from the Underground, I wouldn't make it on time, and none of Brixton's multitude of buses had any chance of getting me across London in an hour, not at that time of the morning.

Still, they were more than handy at other times of the day, when I wanted to go into town , or even if I just wanted to go a short way up the road to Stockwell, to my chess club, in the evenings. Sometimes the Tube would be shut then, as well, or perhaps I just felt like changing buses, or the one I'd caught on Effra Road didn't go to Stockwell after leaving Brixton. I'd change buses on Brixton Road and then get out, at Stockwell station, walking the last few hundred yards if I were going to the club. Or perhaps, if Brixton station had been closed and I had some other destination in mind, nipping into Stockwell station.

The funny thing is, after all that messing about - nobody ever shot me dead for it.

Matter of fact I was never even wounded.

Decline and fall

2006-01-18T16:00:00.000+01:00

There's nothing quite like a live performance. On Monday night I went to La Traviata at the Royal Opera House: the last time I saw the opera it was on a television above a hospital bed. I passed from death to life: Violetta passed from life to death. I didn't really appreciate that at the time. I wasn't really in a position to.

It's a fine place to see La Traviata, and at the same time it doesn't really work there as it should. It's an opera about a fall, a fall from a life of finery in the first scene to a death on poverty in the last: the contrast is at the centre of everything and for that contrast to be meaningful, for it to be more than just a change of scenery behind the curtain, the contrast has to be felt. But how can you feel that contrast when that opening scene, high society at play, with dancing and footmen and dinner jackets and drinks, is no contrast at all to the audience? To me it looked much the same as the Champagne Bar in which much of the audience (though not, alas, myself) had spent the period just prior to the curtain coming up.

It's hard to feel privilege, when you possess it: it's hard to feel its loss unless you lose it. Or unless you've never had it anyway, but have had the chance to see it, touch it, look at it not just nose-against-the-window but in the same room. You can get that experience, at the opera: you can hardly avoid it. And after that, you go home, through the rain, on the 176: you have the same music running through your head as everybody else, but, perhaps, a different set of thoughts entirely.

January 17, 1956

2006-01-17T19:25:00.000+01:00

America I've given you all and now I'm nothing.
America two dollars and twentyseven cents January 17, 1956.

America has been my favourite poem for twenty years: only Song of Myself has come close to extricating it from that position, which given Ginsberg's own identification with Whitman is not so surprising. To read Ginsberg is to be reminded of Whitman: supposing, that is, that one has read them both. Perhaps that is the reason for my preference: the way it turned out, it was Ginsberg I read first.

I was introduced to Ginsberg in a talk by the late David Widgery, who enthused about Howl for long enough - and well enough - to induce me to buy a copy of Ginsberg's Selected Poems, a copy which I have flicked through many times since, in the time since I first read it, in a period that now encompasses half the time that I have lived. (To my annoyance I have looked for the copy in vain over the past week, but cannot find it. It has given me its all and now it's nothing.)

I never took to Howl, finding it too difficult to understand its rhythm, although its opening, once heard, is hard to let go:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness

a line which sometimes brings to mind Pia Zadora, who recites the line at Ricki Lake in Hairspray: but which, a little more profoundly, brings itself to mind whenever I read, or think about, Christopher Hitchens. The best mind of my generation, one of the best at any rate, and destroyed, destroyed in all its purpose, by the consequences of someone else's madness.

The best minds of my generation: I am from a generation which lost its way, or saw that way disappear before the journey even started. Perhaps that is why we find our consolation in the querulous poetry of half a century ago. It is fifty years today since Ginsberg completed his great poem, at Berkeley.

It is less celebrated than Howl, if easier to grasp, and as I say, I found the Howl mostly eluded me until, one evening, I saw some film of Ginsberg reciting from Kaddish:

All the accumulations of life, that wear us out—clocks, bodies, consciousness,
shoes, breasts—begotten sons

and understood consciously what I had only previously felt about America, that it was the recitation that gave the poems their rhythm. That one could only understand their tone and their changes of tone if one imagined them being spoken rather than read. America has the form and texture of a conversation, albeit a one-way conversation, half a conversation, Ginsberg bouncing complaints at accusation against America as one might bounce a tennis ball against a wall. America delivers itself more easily to the reader. Ginsberg addresses America as one might address oneself.

It occurs to me that I am America.

It is more of a harangue than a soliloquy, but more of an appeal than a harangue.

I won't write my poem until I'm in my right mind.

It isnt true: Ginsberg never finds his right mind, never settles, never - until, possibly, right at the end when the poem is already written - descides what his point is, what it is that he would actually like to say. There is a whole series of apparently unconnected questions and accusations, if not non-sequiturs, with which he begins:

America when will you be angelic?
When will you take off your clothes?
When will you look at yourself through the grave?
When will you be worthy of your million Trotskyites?
America why are your libraries full of tears?
America when will you send your eggs to India?
I'm sick of your insane demands.
When can I go into the supermarket and buy what I
need with my good looks?
America after all it is you and I who are perfect not
the next world.
Your machinery is too much for me.
You made me want to be a saint.

He continues:

There must be some other way to settle this argument

I should hope so too, the reader is likely to respond, for as yet it is no argument at all. But Ginsberg has got his excuses in early:

I don't feel good, don't bother me

he says. (He finds an echo eight years later in Bob Dylan:

Right now I don't feel too good
Don't send me no more letters, no
Not unless you mail them from
Desolation Row.)

Ginsberg addresses America as if it were America who were bothering him rather than he who were addressing America. He objects:

I'm trying to come to the point

and fobs America off

America stop pushing I know what I'm doing

and as soon as America has given him the space to string some lines together, he pulls America up as if it were America whose attention had become distracted:

I'm addressing you.

Perhaps America was looking out of the window:

America the plum blossoms were falling.

Indeed, for much of the poem Ginsberg adopts the tone almost of a schoolchild, teasing, changing his mind as often as he may, putting on silly voices, singing nonsense songs. He tells America that he's been naughty:

I smoke marijuana every chance I get

and has no intention of doing as he's told:

I won't say the Lord's Prayer.

What's more, he's not about to apologise:

America I used to be a communist when I was a kid
I'm not sorry

It's the opposition of the adolescent (when I was a kid) which means defiance of the pieities, the norms of the adult world - but no more than that, a testing of the boundaries, a healthy desire to have those boundaries justified.

Well? says Ginsberg. It is America who accuses me of failing to grow up:

Are you going to let your emotional life be run by
Time Magazine?....

.... It's always telling me about responsibility. Business-
men are serious. Movie producers are serious.
Everybody's serious but me.

So let me not be serious: let me be what you say I am and then I'll tell you what I think of you. What are you telling me, businessmen, movie producers?

Asia is rising against me.

Really, it is? Well what shall I do about it? I'd better be serious:

I'd better consider my national resources

or not so serious

My national resources consist of two joints of
marijuana millions of of genitals an unpublishable
private literature that goes 1400 miles an hour
and twenty-five thousand mental institutions

or perhaps more serious than I was letting on?

twenty-five thousand mental institutions.

Perhaps the people forgotten in those mental institutions are something we should be serious about. Not to mention a few others:

I say nothing about my prisons nor the millions of
underprivileged

for who would be so lacking in seriousness as to mention them? Only somebody as silly as this:

My ambition is to be President despite the fact that I'm a Catholic.

So who is silly? Is it Ginsberg or is it America, in so far as he distinguishes himself from them? America, he asks,

how can I write a litany in your silly mood?

Well, let us be serious then. Businessmen are serious and who more serious than Henry Ford? Ford constructed and sold cars - Ginsberg constructed poems and so, as the businessman to whose seriousness he aspires, he must try and sell us some.

my strophes are as
individual as his automobiles more so they're
all different sexes.

America I will sell you strophes $2500 apiece $500
down on your old strophe

Ginsberg, I said, needs to be imagined read out loud: when he offers us his part-return poems I always imagine him laughing out loud. But Ginsberg is serious again. Look, if we are to talk of Henry Ford, here are some forgotten slogans of that era. Do you remember them?

America Sacco & Vanzetti must not die
America I am the Scottsboro boys.

Ginsberg remembers.

America when I was seven momma took me to Com-
munist Cell meetings....the
speeches were free everybody was angelic and
sentimental about the workers it was all so sin-
cere you have no idea what a good thing the
party was in 1835

and if it was all a very long time ago (in 1835) and if it is no longer quite what he believes in (I used to be a communist when I was a kid) then it nevertheless deserves to be remembered for what it really was, not dirtied by the slanders of a paranoid imagination.

Everybody
must have been a spy.

Is that really what you think, America? Well, how can one argue with somebody who believes such nonsense?

And that is why Ginsberg addresses America as if he were a kid: as if he were a kid who taunts his stupid schholmate, reciting his stupid opinions in a stupid voice.

America you don't really want to go to war.

Ginsberg rolls his eyes.

America it's them bad Russians.

Them Russians them Russians and them Chinamen.
And them Russians.

The Russia wants to eat us alive. The Russia's poer
mad. She wants to take our cars from out our
garages....

....That no good. Ugh.

Doh, says Ginsberg.

Him make Indians learn read. Him need big black niggers. Hah. Her make us
all work sixteen hours a day. Help.

Help indeed. After that, there comes the punchline: for all these ridiculous questions, for all these non-sequiturs, for all this senseless gabbling, there is a reason. It is that the impressionistic nonsense reflects an impression of nonsense.

America this is quite serious

His voice is sharp, raised, direct: he is looking straight at you.

America this is quite serious.
This is the impression I get from looking in
the television set.

It is: it is a world full of threats and enemies. America, this is quite serious. In every sense, it is serious. Because this is the America with which Whitman identified himself. As did Whitman, so does Ginsberg:

America I've given you my all.

For what? For two dollars and twenty-seven cents? For twenty-five thousand mental institutions? For the madness he sees when looking in the television set? Well, let it be so, then, for Ginsberg cannot detach himself from America:

It occurs to me that I am America.

and he will serve if America wants him to. But it will be he who serves. It will be Ginsberg as he is.

America I'm putting my queer shoulder to the wheel.

It is a great poem. It will be forgotten today, as forgotten as it ought to be remembered, as silent as it ought to be spoken. It should be spoken on the steps of every town hall in America. Because if it were, we would get a different impression, of a different America, than the impression we get from looking in our television sets.

Five out of five

2006-01-14T10:50:00.001+01:00

Watching the darts on telly always puts me in mind of Tom. Tom was at college with me twenty years ago and in the first year lived just along the corridor. He never did much: he also lived (as I did) in the bar, where he exhibited an aptitude for darts as prodigious as his work was not. I played him many times and I am not sure I ever took a game off him, certainly never one in which he could be bothered to concentrate, even if his means of acquiring that concentration was to let me build up a big lead first, much as some writers cannot write until a deadline is almost upon them.

One game in particular I remember. Tom had got down to twenty, with two of his three darts remaining, while my score was still in three figures and probably still closer to my starting score than it was to a double. Having beaten me far too often to render the mundane task of victory even slightly stimulating, he decided to spice it up a little by inviting me to select a more challenging finish than the obvious double ten. I suggested he oblige me by hitting double five twice successively instead: it's hard enough to hit a double first time even if you're a champion, twice in a row (and double five is not the easiest one to hit) would surely be beyond even Tom.

It was like Robin Hood, stepping backwards to split a wand with his arrow from a hundred and fifty paces rather than a hundred: such things happen only in myth. But Tom stepped back to the oche, looked up to the board to pick out the double five and hit it at his first attempt - and as I shook my head, he hit it with his one remaining dart as well.

Only on one other occasion have I been on the receiving end of such a feat. I once played a chess tournament in Stroud with a clubmate of mine, Jesse Kraai, who was from New Mexico but was in England to study. During a break between rounds he made me a bet that he could beat me in five consecutive blitz games, a pound per game: and although he was a better player than I, he would even the odds by taking time off his clock every time he won a game. The first game would be played at five minutes apiece, but if he won it (as he did) he would play the second with four minutes, the third with only three and so on.

So he played the second game with four minutes, the third with three and the fourth with only two, and each time he knocked me over. The final game he played with what seemed to me an impossible one minute on the clock: how many moves can you play with only one minute to make them all and your opponent simply needing to avoid checkmate before your flag falls?

But Jesse had had his upbringing in American chess, where blitz play (and, for that matter, blitz for money) was far more common than it was here, and he knew how to stretch his sixty seconds by using my time as effectively as he used his. A crowd had gathered as the sequence of games progressed and by the time that Jesse delivered mate and I handed him his fiver, there was shouting and cheering all around the board. If they had been any more excited, they would have pìcked him up and carried him on their shoulders out of the playing hall and into the streets.

No crowd was there to see Tom hit his double double five: our game was played in an mostly empty corner of a mostly empty bar. But I saw it. I invited him to do it. And I remember it after all these years.

Howells of decision

2006-01-13T19:35:00.000+01:00

It appears that it is Kim Howells who has been permitting sex offenders to work in schools, rather than, they say, his boss. (Which assumes that she is his boss, which would suggest that they work for the same organisation rather than one of them actually working for Opus Dei. But I digress.)

I don't suppose the general public are much aware of Dr. Howells' existence, a fact that would quite likely disappoint him. I've followed his career since he organised the back-to-work movement in the South Wales coalfields that put an end to the miners' strike twenty years ago. Since then his progress has been slow, though he has perhaps fared rather better than the aforementioned coalfields and their inhabitants. If he's come to public prominence at all it's probably for his attacks on contemporary art.

Personally I remember him for declaring "comrades, embrace capitalism!" - when and where, I don't recall precisely. I do recall that some years ago I saw the Member of Parliament for Pontypridd emerging from the WH Smith next to Cardiff Central station with a copy of the Financial Times under his arm. L'esprit d'escalier: he'd walked just that little bit too far by the time I thought to ask him, indicating the newspaper he was clutching, whether, by Comrades, embrace capitalism, that was what he'd meant. But the moment was lost.

Creeping Jesus

2006-01-10T17:40:00.000+01:00

George Orwell, 1937:

...then there is the outer-suburban creeping Jesus, a hangover from the William Morris period, but still surprisingly common, who goes about saying "Why must we level down? Why not level up?" and proposes to level the working class "up" (up to his own standard) by means of hygiene, fruit-juice, birth-control, poetry, etc. Even the Duke of York (now King George VI) runs a yearly camp where public-school boys and boys from the slums are supposed to mix on exactly equal terms, and do mix for the time being, rather like the animals in one of those 'Happy Family' cages where a dog, a cat, two ferrets, a rabbit, and three canaries preserve an armed truce while the showman's eye is on them.

Tony Blair, 2006:

If we're not careful, we can fall into the old heresy of levelling down, rather than levelling up.

Leaping Jesus

2006-01-10T16:30:00.000+01:00

I saw the Grand Prix Priest on Sunday, underneath London Bridge, dancing a jig while waving a banner advertising the Second Coming. I was walking along the South Bank, from Waterloo Bridge to Tower Bridge by way of the Tate Modern. Spattered with rain, more cold and damp than one can be in comfort, I was just at the end of the stretch where the path slips away from the riverside itself and picks its way through the streets just off the river before it returns to the bank just after Southwark Cathedral.

I passed the cathedral, having briefly considered a period of sanctuary within, and coming back within sight of the river, I also found myself within hearing range of an Irish jig playing over a music system of some description. It was not loud enough to be a public performance so I assumed it was likely to be a busker, a busker with an instrument but accompanied by recorded music. (A gambit, I should say, which always fails in its purpose, if its purpose be persuading money from my wallet. I'll pay for a performance, but not for one somebody else recorded earlier.)

Turning right along the bank and dipping under the bridge, I saw - to my surprise, if it were possible any more to be surprised by the things one sees in London - a manic man, looking a little like Catweazle with a haircut and a recent change of clothing, cavorting in front of a CD player in a fashion which, if passably disorganised, was still enthusiastic. As he danced, he waved a banner - a banner scarcely any smaller than he was himself - which advertised not only the aforementioned Second Coming but his own status as a celebrity.

I walked past without hindrance. Without, in fact, even noticing whether he was collecting money, either for himself or for some religious cause. Possibly, given the imminence of the Apocalypse, he didn't think it necessary. I might have given him a fiver if he could have persuaded God to turn off the rain for the duration of the afternoon, but as he was located under the bridge he possibly lacked faith that a Divine Rethink - rather more rare than Divine Retribution - was on the cards.

He may even have been thinking that the rain was the precursor to a second Flood, or even the beginning of the same Divine Procedure. If that were the case, he might have been better off seeking the high ground rather than taking up station by the river. But of course, London is short of mountains. So one does what one can.

I spy for the RSI

2006-01-04T17:25:00.000+01:00

I have a twinge in my right arm, a dull, inconstant pain. It's been with me for about five or six weeks, appearing suddenly, no small twinges as precursors. It's a peripatetic pain: it appears sometimes in the upper arm, sometimes in the lower arm and sometimes towards the wrist. Sometimes present, sometimes faded for a while, it shows no signs of weakening since I left work two weeks ago and stopped the constant click-click-clicking of a mouse which used to be integral to my job for several hours a day and which I am sure is the long-term cause of a pain which is absent from my left arm but present, I pray not permanently, in my right.

I have moved the mouse to the left side of the keyboard: it is odd, unsettling, to try and move it with a hand that is not only weaker, but which moves it in the other direction from the one expected. The cursor slides off the screen and returns in a place I did not anticipate, and controlling it feels as if I was giving instructions to a third party: right, left, back a bit, you missed it that time, try again. The right-click and left-click too confuse me and I find myself closing down applications that I wanted and opening ones I've never seen before: but these are small inconveniences, the price of losing some functions of an arm for a short period. I hope, assume, believe that the pain will fade if I release the right arm from some of its duties for a while. I had, after all, already handed in my notice when the pain began (or, I suppose, when it first became strong enough for me to notice it, which is not entirely the same thing).

I had a lot of back trouble in the last few months at work, probably down to stress rather than a poor workstation, since mine was adequate enough. That longstanding problem seems to have left me for a while, but the newer problem remains. It is not intolerable - it is not even painful in the sense of something that would make you wince or grimace, let alone cry out. But it is uncomfortable and awkward and it is painful enough if I try to support myself with my right arm. It has once or twice disturbed my sleep and it disturbs my peace of mind. I can let it alone for a while, for weeks perhaps, for even longer if I feel it fading. But I shall become fearful if the pains remains, or becomes worse.

It is, I am sure, an RSI problem, and I know from the accounts of others that problems like those can stay with you permanently, rendering your hand unusable, or usable only with persistent pain. That frightens me. It is not what I expect to happen but it frightens me nonetheless, not just because it is possible but because assuming it is not how things turn out, it might have been nevertheless. Escape a serious accident, cross the road when you should not and hear the blare, too close, of someone's horn, and it is only when you reach the other side that you realise what you nearly did. That is shock: it gives you just time enough to get across before it lets you realise how you feel.

So I find myself thinking: Christ, suppose I had not stopped work? Even this month, when I am home but getting paid for it in a month of gardening leave before I am on my own, suppose that I had worked that month instead? Would that month have been enough to wreck my arm for good? How fast was I rushing towards the edge of the cliff and how close to it had I come? Once I start thinking that I've got away with it, the thought that I may, indeed, have really got away with it, maybe as close as a single page of a calendar, frightens me almost as much as the thought of permanent damage to the arm itself.

We work in pain much of the time, many of us. The body ages and the body gets damaged. It's understood. It may be the result of negligence or accident or lack of knowledge or simply age and the actuarial likelihood of something going wrong. It happens sometimes and we live with it, or learn to live with it. But the sheer fact that we do live with pain itself deserves restating simply because it is forgotten. Like so much else in a society which seems sometimes to be based on the denunciation of those weaker than us, the issues of sickness and sick leave are carried out against a tide of aggression in which sick leave is assumed to be excessive and assumed to be the product of malingering and assumed to be a cost which we need to cut down at the expense of someone else. Get 'em, get 'em, is the cry, even if it is not put in those terms.

But compared to what we hear about people who receive sick pay when they are not sick, what shall we hear about those who work when they are sick? Of those who are sick because they worked when they should not? I am fearful, sometimes. Sometimes, as today, I am fearful for myself. Sometimes, I am fearful and I do not know why. But sometimes I am fearful because so much that we do is stupid and malign and the consequence of malign stupidity is almost always the suffering of the weak.

Pace attack

2005-12-20T14:25:00.000+01:00

The BBC Weather Centre Manager
BBC TV Centre
Wood Lane
London W12 7RJ

Dear Sir/Madam

I wonder if I might seek your opinion on the status of a outstanding query I have with the BBC Online weather forecasting service.

This offers a five-day weather forecast which one can access by inputting the postcode for a given area. Being a cricket fan, and the weather forecast being integral as to whether or not play is likely in a cricket match, I am naturally interested in the weather for Lord's Cricket Ground which is in the postcode area NW8. However, when I attempted to input that code, much earlier this year, I was given, much to my surprise, the following message:

Postcode searches must include all letters and numbers of the first part of the postcode. No locations were found for "nw8".

This took me aback since I have been going to Lord's for more than thirty years and it has been in the NW8 postcode area all this time. No matter, I thought: I shall contact the service, using the feedback form provided, and they will surely address the problem. My confidence was boosted by my receipt of a same-day reply:

Thank you for bringing this to my attention, we will be working on the postcode problems very soon, I have passed this onto the technical team

Duty Producer
BBC Weather Centre

That was on 6 April: the cricket season began two days later (hence my interest at that particular time) with the traditional match between MCC and the Champion County. The first day, as it happens, was lost to bad weather, with freezing temperatures and - if memory serves - snow. I didn't expect the problem to be solved by then (fortunately, I decided not to attend the first day anyway) but I was surprised, given the use of the term "very soon", that it remained unresolved a fortnight later, and on 20 April sent another email on the subject. This received no response.

On 18 May I sent another message, which was favoured with no fewer than three responses at various levels. The first read thus:

Your email has been forwarded to the BBC Weather Centre.

The second, an automated reply, began:

Hello

Thank you for contacting the BBC Weather Centre. Your feedback and comments are both welcome and important.

The third, clearly from an actual human being but not alas one with a name, said:

Good afternoon ejh
I'm aware of some problems with the postcode search but thank you for bringing this to my attention. We have set aside development time for this problem and will fix it as soon as humanly possible
regards

Duty Producer,
BBC Weather Centre

"As soon as humanly possible". Naturally I assumed that the use of this term meant that it would in some way be addressed as soon as humanly possible, which it apparently was not. Within a week the First Test at Lord's between England and Bangladesh had come and gone (I had tickets for the third day, which was shortened not by the weather but by the ineptitude of the visiting side's batsmen, which degree of ineptitude apparently rivals your own). On 5 June, I contacted you again, asking:

Dear Sir/Madam
Do you have any idea as to when "as soon as humanly possible" is likely to be?

On 16 June I received a reply:

Thank you for your email with regards to the problem you are having accessing the forecast for your postcode. We are sourcing the latest post code data, which will fix this problem. In the meantime you can access your forecast by typing in your town name. Sorry for any inconvenience this has caused.

One notes, in retrospect, the absence of an use of the word "soon" or any synonyms thereof. The advice to input the town name was kindly meant, no doubt: unfortunately, it doesn't work. (Possibly the system fails to recognise St or something). I emailed back to point this out: no reply was received.

On 5 July, perhaps mindful of the approaching Ashes series, with the first Test to be played at Lord's, I tried again:

This problem remains unfixed, three months after I reported it.

and when after three weeks (and the first Test been and gone) your service was still silent, I tried again:

Nearly four months on, this problem has still not been addressed.

Mirabile dictu, a same-day reply, and from a real person, F! She wrote:

Thank you for your email. Unfortunately this wasn't a simple problem (although it may seem like it). Please bear with us while we set this up.

Kind Regards

F

Well, if it were not a simple problem, it would have been as well to tell me that when claiming that it would be done "soon", or "as soon as humanly possible", but no matter. I did indeed bear with you, until 22 August, when I sent another email to which no reply was given:

This remains unfixed.

It remained unfixed by 11 September, when the last fixture of the season was played at Lord's - and indeed when the cricket season ended on 25 September. On 26 September, realising that there were fewer than seven months until the next season and that there was therefore no time to lose, I tried again:

Do you think I could have an honest explanation as to why this hasn't yet been fixed?

I got a reply from another unnamed Duty Producer:

Hi ejh,
We are working on this problem and hope to have it and other mapping issues resolved by the end of October.

regards

Well, short though my patience was by now, I nearly made it through to the end of October before enquiring again. On 25 October, I observed:

The end of October is practically upon us.

So it was: and once again, there was some celerity in replying to my message, if not (alas) in actually dealing with the problem. I had an email from C:

Dear ejh
Thank you for your email. I have checked with the web team, and they have confirmed that they now have an update to the postcode database and are working with the Met Office to add new postcodes as soon as possible. It is a priority, but as we mentioned before, not a simple job.

No doubt: it certainly seems not to have been "humanly possible" to resolve the problem in the eight months and more since I drew it to your attention. Nor indeed to respond to my subsequent emails on 17 November, 1 December and 14 December, the last of these asking if I could possibly have the name and address of an identifiable individual to whom I could send a complaint. Apparently, I could not: I had to contact the Met Office in Exeter just to get the address to which I have sent this letter.

Now, I know that it is, in some ways, a trivial problem. I also know that I could get a suitable weather forecast by entering the postcode of an adjoining area, or perhaps by entering Marylebone in the appropriate field where St John's Wood will not work. But I do wonder whether it is really necessary to take more than eight months in order to fail to resolve this problem, or whether the period of time it takes is really compatible with the claims that were made at the outset, that it would be resolved "very soon" or "as soon as is humanly possible". I really don't like being fobbed off at the best of times and fobbing someone off for a period in excess of eight months doesn't really do the BBC Weather Centre any credit unless it is an attempt to set some sort of record. (If so, I would be grateful to know what record is actually being aimed at, so that I know how long this is likely to continue.) Nor am I entirely amused by the number of my emails that have been ignored, especially the one asking who I should have to write to in order to pursue this complaint properly.

As the target of "the end of October" has eluded us, I wonder whether it would be possible to set a new one? The first match at Lord's in the 2006 season begins on Friday 14 April, just 373 days after I first raised this problem with your people. The MCC play Nottinghamshire, the Champion County. I do not know whether or not I am likely to attend, but I would like to be rather less doubtful that by that time, this problem will have been resolved. Or, if not, that we revise our opinions of the limits of human capacity, if this is not, in fact, "humanly possible".

In the meantime, I suppose I would appreciate some sort of explanation for the various nonsenses that I have been told, not to mention the numerous occasions when I have been told nothing at all. To be honest it is hard to know which of these two dismal options I prefer.

Yours

ejh

Give us pause

2005-12-18T17:55:00.000+01:00

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

I can recite the whole soliloquy: I used to be able to recite the whole thing in about forty-seven seconds. I learned it, twelve years ago this month, as a party trick to celebrate the leaving of a job, choosing the high-speed Hamlet rather than - my other idea - learning to recite the lyrics of Bohemian Rhapsody backwards, beginning with blows wind the anyway and closing with life real the this is? I've never got round to learning the latter of these party tricks: I thought I'd save it until I celebrated leaving another job. And now I am leaving another job, I find myself not in the mood for celebration.

I wasn't really in the mood before, if truth be told. I resigned that job, twelve years ago, in a tide of anger and a torrent of relief. In truth, the job resigned itself. It had become impossible to do. Impossible for me to function in the job. Impossible for me to function while I did the job. When she left the Labour Party, Shirley Williams notoriously claimed that she hadn't left the Party, so much as the Labour Party had left her: the sentiment applied to my job and my leaving of it rather more than it ever really did to Shirley Williams. The job was gone, disappeared, disintegrated: it couldn't be done any more. Some line had been crossed, some line which marked the end of patience, the end of will, the end of my resistance. My notice wasn't resignation so much as recognition. I spelled it out before it was spelled out for me. Like Duran said to Leonard: no mas, no mas. No more, no more, he said, and turned and walked away.

On my CV, or on job application forms, the reason for leaving - when they ask - is thus: wanted to write a book. Well, so I did, and write the book I did, although the book was written many months later, and not, in fact, begun until I was back in a job. I had certainly intended to write. but it was not the desire to write that gave me the impetus to leave my job: it was, instead, leaving my job that gave me the impetus to write. Gave me the chance, the opportunity: more than that, gave me the possibility. I couldn't write until I gave up the job. I couldn't do anything until I gave up the job. I didn't have another job to go to: it took me six months to find another. It made no difference. I couldn't have written any job applications while I still did the job. I couldn't write, sleep, think or even talk properly while I did the job: my speech would cut up, tangle, words with which I was familiar would elude my stressed-out mind. I could not have learned a line of Hamlet, let alone recited it. I could not have written a word until I wrote my resignation. They say of sackings, we have to let you go: to resign my job was a release.

I had been working for six years, nearly seven, at the DHSS. Processing claims for Supplementary Benefit, which then became Income Support. The DHSS became the DSS and then the Benefits Agency: the name changed but the job remained the same, until I moved onto the front desk and a job that was usually no worse wearying became, instead, intolerable. To be in the job was to be in a position of conflict: it was to pay, or withhold payment, to people who had no money and needed it. To pay them later when they wanted it sooner, to pay them not at all when they needed it desperately. I had no qualms about the job, not from the point of view of conscience: if I didn't pay everybody who I thought should have been paid, paying people was my daily job and every day, people who came with nothing left with something because of what I did.

It wasn't conscience, it was conflict. It was people shouting at you, swearing at you, threatening you, hating you, down the phone, in the letters that they wrote, in person if you saw them on the front. It was not intolerable, provided it was intermittent: it was rarely meant seriously, it was just somebody lashing out, and while, given the choice, one would rather have done without, it was just one of those things that makes a job unpleasant rather than impossible. Rude customers, if you are a shop assistant: faredodgers, if you drive a bus. There is always something, somebody: the intermittent conflict was less troubling to the mind than the permanent understaffing and the permanent overwork. You could never achieve anything: you could never get anything significant done. The most that you could do was clear your desk, and that was rare enough. For most people beyond all hope of ever happening.

But other jobs, too, are pretty much like that. You never complete any projects, never clinch any deals, never win any trophies, never change anything so things are never quite the same again. Jobs get you down: it's what they do. They get you down, and get you down, and then you go home and put the job away until the next day. As long as you can do that, then the job survives and you survive. But when the job allows no separation, when it preys on you, disrupts you, messes up your head outside the hours that they are paying you, then there is no job, because it is not a job but an affliction. It needs not to be done but to be cured.

My job became an affliction after they moved me onto the front desk: I survived there, as I recall, nearly two years, which was by, a distance, longer than the time which you could reasonably be expected to serve. It was rather like the bombing missions in Catch-22, in which the number the airmen were required to complete before they were allowed to go increased every time they approached it. The only difference was that there was no set time you were supposed to serve on this front, so you knew officially ,as it were, that you were there for infinity - or before it did for you, whichever came the sooner.

Strictly speaking, this was not true. There was a recommended time of maximum service, agreed by the management and unions, which was something like six months, but subject to "the needs of the office", which meant, just as it always means, that the needs of the officie came before your human needs as surely as a full house beats two pairs. You had no chance. Your only options were desertion or discharge through incapacity.

The difference was the sheer relentlessness of working on the front. You couldn't get away from it. Nor could you walk away from somebody as easily as you could terminate a conversation on the phone - they were still there for somebody to see and there was a limited degree to which you could either ask other people to take over from you, or - in extremis - ask that they be removed. It was no longer within your own control to call a halt when things got too unpleasant.

Nor, if you called a halt, did it stop there. Not there, not at the time the job was over, not ever. At work, you would be threatened: outside work, you would be recognised. The line that spearated job from life, the line which saves us all from being driven frantic from our jobs, no longer held. You do not want, perhaps, to be a faceless bureacrat. It is a soulless, stupid, sullen role to play. But worse than that is being a bureaucrat with a face. You cannot take impersonal decisions on the government's behalf when you are a person who people recognise. I was recognised, in the street. Not often, but enough, enough to make me worry that I might be recognised. Recognised and - very occasionally - threatened.

You can be threatened a hundred times anonymously on the phone, at work, and you can handle it. But once you are threatened personally, outside work, there is no "outside work". There is no rest, no relaxation, no refuge from the stresses of your job. And the more the job eats into your personal space, the more that it eats into you. Until there is no you, just the job that is no longer even a job but something foul. You go to work with a sense of dread: you leave work with a sense of dread. You cannot deal with such a job, cannot negotiate with yourself to enable yourself to cope with it: because negotation defines limits, boundaries, points which may not be crossed. And the job has said it will not respect boundaries. Those lines are crossed. The line of no return is crossed as well.

There was one other aspect to this dread, this fear of being at work. It was the fear that, whatever happened in these situations of conflict, you would always be let down by the people above you in the system. You were obliged to say no to claimants: you could always save yourself that conflict by saying yes, but you were supposed sometimes - not sometimes, often - to tell people no. You were obliged, therefore, to bring hatred down upon your head. The limits of your discretion didn't extend, often, to whether or not somebody was entitled to be paid. They did, however, extend to whether or not they should be paid now, a giro, a counter payment, money they could take away that day. Except they didn't: your discretion was hedged about by guidelines and realities. Nobody ever wants their payment later than it has to be: everybody wanted a counter payment. To say yes to all of them was impossible - you had to say no far more often than you could say yes. But to say no to any of them was to risk the consequences in abuse and threats.

These limits of discretion extended too to the question of identification, without which no payments could, theoretically, be made. There was, however, no official limit as to what was, and what was not, acceptable ID. There was merely a short list of some documents which would be acceptable, without that list being exhaustive. There were ground rules which existed in each office, known to the staff working on the front and theoretically the basis for our practice. Official documents were acceptable, handwritten letters not, that sort of thing.

But these rules were not written down in any form, and could not be. But because they were not, they provided the get-out for every spineless manager who would not face up to the pressures that their staff experienced every day. You would turn down a request for a counter payment, perhaps on the grounds of insufficient ID, and you would get many mouthfuls of abuse in consequence. Yet you would stand firm, because those were the guidelines, that was what had been agreed, that was the proper and professional thing to do. So then the supervisor or the manager would be called: and they would decide to exercise their discretion. They would play Mr Generous to your Mr Nasty. They had no stomach for abuse: they would decide to bend where you had known that you should not. And they would let you down. They would always let you down.

If you complained, they would have none of it: they would always say that you should have exercised your discretion, that you could after all have referred it to them if you'd wanted. It was true, yet it was one of those truths which everybody knows is actually a lie. They knew very well you could not do this every time. They knew very well you were going by guidelines they themselves had set. It did not matter. You were the bad guy, inflexible. They were the good guy. They used their discretion.

The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes

It stank, and everybody knew it stank, and yet you knew, you knew in advance that they would do it. You knew, even as you were taking the abuse, that they would do it. You knew, even before you saw the claimant in the first place, what would happen. You knew you were going to put yourself through a vile experience and be left looking like a fool as a reward. And this knowledge, just as surely, just as often as the threats would fill your mind with dread. With anger and frustration and disgust and hopelessness. t was the most impossible of impossible positions. It was impossible to stand: it was impossible to function. It was destructive. It destroyed you.

Eventually, inside work and outside it, your head would fill with stress, blotting out everything but itself: a buzzing in your head, although a buzzing without noise. A ringing in your head, although a ringing without bells. You had to walk away. You had to walk away before you could do anything else. You had to walk away and say no mas, no mas, or else there would be no-one left to walk away. So walk away I did, December 1993, and left with Hamlet rather than a buzzing in my ears.

That was then: this is now. I have left several jobs since, some willingly, the jobs I hated, some unwillingly, when they closed down or I had to move on to something prearranged. But I have not, since then, resigned a job without something else to go to, not until no. Not until, with dread in my head and a buzzing in my ears, I resigned a job which I have been in for four lousy, fruitless years. Four years of being fobbed off, being let down, being put in impossible situations. The details do not matter. It is not detail but consequences which matter. I have no other job to go to, but I have learned this, learned this from a dozen years ago. You cannot let a job destroy you.

You cannot let them put you in impossible positions. You cannot let them treat you as though you were there to take the heat off them. You cannot let them fob you off until you give up dealing with your problems in despair. (The problems, of course, remain.) You cannot let them give you instructions and then pretend they are nothing to do with it when you put those instructions into practice. You cannot let them drive you mad, you cannot let them drive you into anger, you cannot let them fill your head with dread. If they do, at that point you have to walk away and damn the consequences of your doing so.

So I have walked away. I will not lt them do it to me. I will not let them interfere with me, with the private me, with the person who cannot function properly if his mind is filled with dread. I have other things to occupy that mind, other things I need to occupy that mind, other things that need that mind to be free of worry, free of loathing, free in general if I am to live my life. So I have walked away. And when you take a decision, and know that that decision was the right one, come what may, you always know, at the same time, that the decision should have been taken long before. I should have walked away a long time before now. A long time. I know this, know this, know this. I know, in knowing, that I knew it long ago.

God, I know it. God, I know it. God, they made sure that I know it. I have worked for them four lousy, fruitless years and at the very end of it, a few days past, I sat in an office and had a manager from Human Resources, an arrogant suit with no thought in her head other than to bully me into submission, stand over me. Stand over me raising her voice, finger jabbing repeatedly towards my face. A bully out of control, a bully almost breathless with the thrill of bullying. And I thought, God, I should have done this many months ago. God, I thought, how I hate you. Imperial College London Libraries, I thought, how I hate you. I thought, I would rather live on fresh air than work for you. But most of all, I thought: I should have done this many months ago.

But it is done now, at any rate. No recitations, no party tricks. It is done now, damn the consequences. I do not know exactly what will happen now and I do not care.

And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?

Not this time, Prince. Nor any time again.