the eclipse behind the cathedral

It’s a Summer’s evening. The Eclipse is a Tudor fronted pub, black beams, white plaster. Inside it has a low ceiling and a tiny bar. Tables always at a premium. It has its regulars, who prop up the bar and have their own tankards. Although it looks like a village pub, this is a city, albeit one which froze in size around the time of the Crusades, and The Eclipse still has an edge to it, a place from where late at night drunkards will spill out onto the streets keeping the locals awake. Outside, there are twin benches either side of the door, set into to the fabric of the building.

That’s where we are. It’s around seven pm. We’re drinking lager, because aged 19, it’s what everyone drinks. There’s only the two of us, myself and a man called James, known at school as Muppet, who will go on in life to become a long-serving employee of the Bank of England, a reliable dad, a resident of Surrey. All these things are probably discernable in his frame and demeanour now, to the soothsayer, but at this point in our lives he still carries other possibilities around in his back pocket. We’re both negotiating our way out of childhood, on holiday from university, back from the growing-up wars. Our friendship runs deeper than any we have at university, but it’s also at its zenith. These are the last things we’ll truly share, after six years of school. For the next decade we’ll remain in each other’s lives, slowly drifting apart, the ties that bind, the common interests, eroded by time, geography and the atomization of the late twentieth century. Because really there’s no reason why James and I shouldn’t still be meeting and talking Economics until we’re old men, cozy in the complicity of the conversation game. But we won’t and we don’t and that’s just how it is.

This particular evening there’s an edginess around me and there’s a reason for it. My girlfriend, the one from University, is not with me. She’s gone back to her stomping ground, the wilds of Hertfordshire. Only, on this day, she’s meeting up with her ex-boyfriend. His name is Masa. He’s Japanese. He’s a multi-millionaire who was part of the Japanese Olympic skiing team. He lives in New York. A week after she met me, she took down the photo of him that lived on her wall. Destined to be together, until I appear. They are meeting in London. At his hotel. I don’t know where exactly. Somewhere on Park Lane.

I’m too self-absorbed to be really worried. She and I have been together a whole academic year, we’re about to move into a little house with a yard with roses in a place called Dunnington. We’re playing out some kind of fantasy of coupledom which we both need and which is already turning sour. Nothing will interrupt this sequence, I know, and even if something were to, I would recalibrate my horizon, suffer the crisis which will arrive sooner or later, the world would have shrunk, but then the world is expanding all the time anyway.

Although the truth is I’m not even contemplating any of this. I’m just edgy. On adrenaline and lager. James, because he knows me, picks up on my edginess. I explain the context. Perhaps he asks if I’m worried or not. I don’t remember. James says something along the lines of: “It’s good {or unusual} to see someone so passionate about things.” His thesis doesn’t quite ring true. Later others arrive and the evening changes or becomes more drunken. For the next three years whenever we’re back and we go out it feels like the end of an era.

I never learn what happened in Masa’s hotel room and I never force the issue. There are things you know in the heart which are more important than the things that are actually lived. As decreed we will spend the next two years of our lives together in a house with a blue door and a yard with roses. Sometimes he sends her envelopes stuffed with money.

For two years we fight a lot then we split up. She goes to New York and marries Masa. James has a child called George. James and I drift apart. The Eclipse is still there. To the best of my knowledge.

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el pibe de 17 anos

Today, a footballer known to the world as Ronaldo retired. He's 33 years old. If you pay any attention to football he's been around for what seems like forever, in footballing terms.

There's a famous story which I found myself repeating about my first night on Latin American soil. I was taken to see a football match. I was hugged by a fat, sweaty man on the terraces. Thanks to him I learnt my first Spanish words the hard way. Saltar. Cantar. It was a fitting introduction to what was to become the other side of my life.

What I didn't realise, when telling this story, was that there was a kid of 17 playing for the Brazilian team, who scored two goals and ended up on the losing side. Because he was young, he wasn't famous in Europe at the time. There would have been no reason for me to have heard of him. His name was Ronaldo.

It's only this evening that I've worked out what team he played for in Brazil before he went to play for PSV in Holland. The same team that was playing against Nacional, in the Estadio Centenario, that night. The 28th October 1993.

The details of the match itself have always been hazy. I know Nacional won. Largely because of my capacity to learn in no time at all what the Spanish word for 'to jump' meant. I remember there were penalties involved. But not how many, or how decisively. Though now it comes back to me.

On that night, I was still a 'pibe', albeit of slightly more than 17 years. I had long hair and honey coloured skin. I didn't have the faintest idea that the internet existed and that it would become part of my life. Therefore I had no way of even conceiving the fact that one day I would be able to rediscover that night. That I would rediscover my first night in Latin America on the day that the kid who scored two almost immediately forgotten goals would eventually choose to retire.

Thanks to this thing called the internet, I would see the faces of the people who were all around me again. Hear the sounds of the stadium again. It's the sounds which, above all else, remain familiar. All of which I rediscovered here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XvjtFM4vKrg&feature=related

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This match was the quarter final. In the semi final, I learn, Nacional were eliminated by Flamengo. The game was "Suspendido a los 77 minutos por incidentes." I suspect that translates. I wasn't there to saltar.

Ronaldo and the internet and myself. And everyone else. We've all been a long way round the houses since that mad, spectacular first night of victory and defeat in Montevideo.

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the whole of the moon

You have to love someone for their flaws (in your perception) as much as their values (in your perception).

Otherwise your love is partial, discriminatory and vulnerable.

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it could quite reasonably be argued that we inhabit -

- A world cursed by the fascism of perfection.

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feel the quality

We inhabit a conviction society. The more you convince yourself and others of your worth/ the worth of your idea/ the worth of your conviction, the more successful your integration within this society.

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on friendship

It might be said of a writer that it is not his or her job to like his or her friends.

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But then there are as many ways of ‘not liking’ your friends as there are of skinning a cat; which is also to say that there are as many ways of ‘not liking’ your friends as there are ways of liking them.

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angels walk backwards

Do you not believe that you can know everything there is to know about someone from what is depicted on their face the very first time you meet them? And everything that comes thereafter is merely an unfolding of that moment?

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head over heels

When you fall in love with someone, try to make sure you also fall in love with some part of the person they think they are, in addition to the person you think they are (which you cannot help but do).

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the invisible hand

If no-one sees any artistry, how do you know it's there?

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on economics, love, war, etc

Crises are subject to the rules of drama, rather than the rules of logic.

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Which is another way of saying: Drama contains its own logic. Whose connection to the logic of physics or mathematics is tenuous, at best. And, in the world of humans, infinitely more powerful.

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barcelona pensamiento 2

Two years is long time but three years is longer.

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The first year you're still grappling with the consequences of what happened/ has happened/ is happening. The past and the present and the future seem inseperable.

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The second you're quantifying, making space, organising a perspective.

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It's not until the third that you can truly begin to believe it was, or is, now, in the past.

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Praca de Santa Marta, following a converstation with Mr Blue.

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sartre's waiter (variation)

Some people are so in love with the concept of what they are trying to achieve that they forget what it is they are actually trying to achieve.

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cautionary notice

Sentences, phrases and words: all of these things combine to over-simplify the world.

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Behind every sentence lurks a galaxy of meaning which can only be revealed through the use of further sentences.

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Never believe a word anyone says. Not because they lie, but because the truth is unspeakable.

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the foundations of shifting sands

Unless one is secure in one's own attractiveness, whatsoever that might be based on, it becomes hard to accept the attractiveness of your partner; preferable to see them as loveable but resistable to the opposite sex.

At which point the other is liable to assume the role delegated to them, in order to play the part the partner desires, in order to please them.

They might play that part so well they come to forget what anyone ever saw in them, (including their partner).

Until someone else comes along and reminds them.

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mortgaged to the hilt

You can work for years to pay a debt you´re not even aware of. It´s only when the debt is paid you realise what´s been happening. Then you stand back and discover how much you once owed.

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permutations

Some people spend so much of their time trying to please other people they forget to please themselves.

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Some people spend so much of their time trying to be other people they forget to be themselves.

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Some people spend so much of their time trying to please other people they forget to be themselves.

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Some people spend so much of their time trying to be someone else they forget who they are.

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betrayal

Betrayal is both an absolute and a relative art form.

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It can take many forms. Some less obvious than others. Sometimes the most obvious betrayals are the most minimal. And the worst betrayals are never even noticed.

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For betrayal does not take place in the outside world. In the boardrooms, bedrooms or corridors of power.

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Betrayal always takes place in the heart.

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a line discovered written in pencil on the inside flysheet of alan pauls' the past

Love is like a lens
Which filters out all
Those things the lover
Does not wish to see.

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'the past is another country'

The man was right.

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But... the past is still somewhere whose streets are walked in the mind, whose hills are climbed, whose water is drunk. In the mind.

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The past may be another country; but it can never become a foreign land.

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the un-randomness of it all

Barring acts of god; (unless one is of a religious disposition):

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Events have a way of happening to us as a result of our susceptibility to those events.

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Even though they might seem like the most unlikely of occurrences.

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