the eclipse

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 discernible 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 every time we’re back together in our hometown 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.

the duke of edinburgh

Back in the Duke, a pub that I love as much as any other. Even if these days it feels like a young person’s pub. Perhaps it always was and I’m just harking back to the old days. But it’s also the football pub and has been for twenty years or so. That kind of continuity generates affection. The existence of constancy make the passing of time more bearable. There’s noise. There’s chat about John McDonnell and the flaws of the Labour party and Mark Grief and Benjamin Markovits and Updike too and being a father for the first time and all the rest of it, because that’s what Thursday nights are about. 

The Duke has always stayed open later than normal pubs, back in the day it used to have a 1am license, or maybe it just did lock-ins. At one point, late in the evening, around 10.45,  a couple come and sit at the table next to us. They are young and have something stylish about them. Maybe I notice they don’t seem to be talking or maybe I don’t. I head to the bar to get a round and I have to get around the young man, who makes no effort to let me pass. HIs hair is neatly cut and he wears a smart coat. He’s slouched in his seat. He seems to enjoy the fact I have to climb over his bag and his legs to get out. The young woman rolls her eyes. When I come back I ask him to move his bag. He does so, but he seems disinterested in anything. 

Shortly afterwards they get up to leave. The woman walks out of the front door. The man goes to the loo. He comes back and he looks lost. He sits down for a while in a chair on his own. He gets up and looks around as though he’s looking for her, but she’s long gone. He sits down again. Periodically he gets up and walks around and then comes and sits down again. As I leave, I see him at the bar, buying another drink.

It makes me a tad sad, to see this couple go through this before my eyes. I imagine all the times I might have been drunk and obnoxious and the night ended badly and this makes me sad too, for the nights that ended badly, and also for this couple, who will have to wake up tomorrow and do that thing that people do as they try to put the pieces back together again. 

Or so I thought. Because as we walk to the tube, Phil, who also noticed the couple, says they were probably a Tinder date. He says there was a moment, a couple of years ago, when I was away, when the pub became infested by tinder dates. It is, after all, a young person’s pub. Awkward couples trying to connect. According to Phil, the woman tonight probably walked out and will never see her companion again. Which, oddly, made me even more sad. The idea that the couple in whom I had invested my past errors were not even a couple. Just a random, algorithmic event, which couldn’t even bloom for one night. 

groucho club writing exercise

There are 17 people seated at a long walnut table in the Georgian room which looks out over Dean Street. At the head of the table is the writing tutor. On either side of the long table, her students. It’s Wednesday, half way through the week-long course. The course contains many writing exercises: dialogue and its framing; the historical novel; the use of images as a writing prompt; etcetera.  For this session the chosen topic is time. How the writer conveys time within their writing. The tutor hands out a postcard to each of us. The exercise will be to write a brief piece which incorporates two timelines, one of which could be a memory. We will be given approximately ten minutes to write. 

My postcard is a photograph of a man, cut off at the waist, wearing walking boots, striding down a road. I turn the postcard over and discover that the postcard is promotional material for a shop called the Natural Shoe Store. A shop which is five minutes walk from where we are. Down the stairs, onto Dean Street, turn left at Old Compton Street, cross Shaftesbury Avenue, take the street that leads to Seven Dials, then walk up Neal Street. I know this because I used to work in the Natural Shoe Store. For the best part of a year. Over twenty years ago. The summer of the Italy World Cup; the summer when Annie Lennox and Pavarotti and that bloke from Eastenders and a hundred others came through the shop. When I met Arita and Steve. When Sedley and I began our shirt business. When I’d stay in Sedley’s father’s flat the other side of Oxford Street. A time when you could still drive into town and park round the back for free. All of that and a thousand other memories, stacking up, vertiginous. 

I felt distress. I had no inclination to write but I felt as though I was obliged to write. I picked up my pen and wrote.

There’s a room full of people. They’re writing. They’re dispensing. Letter by letter, thought by thought. A youth walks through the room. In his hand he holds a pair of shoes. The morning light catches the wooden shelves. Neal Street dust flickers with its invisible energy. Daylight. The youth kneels. He holds out the shoes, black sandals, leather strapped, cork soled. He says: If you treat them well they will last you twenty years. Twenty years later he is one of the writers, whittling time like a stick. Marks on a page. Memories collapse in on him like an imploding house. Dust flies. Emptiness is all that is left. A blank space. The client looks at the youth. The client tells him: I don’t need to try them on. I know they fit. I’ll take them.

It didn’t take me long. I’d started after everyone else and finished first. I stared out of the window. Women in a third floor room on the other side of Dean Street were applying make-up to each other’s faces. They gazed at themselves in mirrors which I couldn’t see. 

The tutor stopped the exercise. She asked people for their reactions. I wanted to share mine with the group. I made an attempt to speak. I used words like ‘weird’ and ‘freaky’. The tutor said the exercise had more to do with the image on the card than anything written on the back. I wanted to explain that I knew that but that the biographical connection of the card which she had given me in order to do an exercise about time was too strong to ignore. One of the other students, about my age, understood. The class moved on. Some people read their pieces out. I didn’t. Soon enough we would be given the next writing exercise to perform. 

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.

+++

on the way to queensway station, 7am

I once knew roses that grew in back yards.
I’d wait for them and most years they’d show up.
When they did, I was grateful, if not inordinately.
I thought we’d grow old together, somehow, the roses
And I, in our back yards. Duplicate that course of
Nature, inherit a thoughtless rhythm. My roses –
Although they were never mine, they belonged to no-one –
Came back to haunt this morning, cascading over
City walls, crying for gravity, flexing dormant
Memory muscles of shared seasons, long-forgotten.


+++

unfinished 4am poem, written in a hotel near barajas airport, madrid

Four in the morning is a transient moment in
A Spanish night. For some, the final minutes
Of a day which has ended in the soft
Enveloping grasp of alcohol and friendship.
For others in this functional hotel, it
Will be the last gasp of a day’s business
Which, far from soft, has gone on longer
Than was ever planned (twas ever thus),
And a night fuelled by lust for profit, or
A colleague, or mere security, which can
Only be attained at the price of nights like
This, a mortgage paid towards the family
Redoubt, the sound of your children’s
Exuberance of a morning still five years
In the future, a sound already heard as
The door is shut and you fall into bed, the
Fog of alcohol on your breath, an
Unfulfilled desire tempered by the knowledge
Of the investment you’ve made towards
The future you shall not dream about tonight,
But live one day, the day when the sight of
Your child in a sunhat playing beneath the
Pine trees beside the lake will trigger the
Memory of a bad joke, or the strange
Juxtaposition of pompous sixties
Architecture with the medieval wall
Hangings someone has chosen to adorn
The hotel’s walls. When your child trips,
And cries, you’ll smile at the investment
You’ve made to hear the sound of their
Bitter tears, and for a few perfect minutes
It will all make sense. Four in the morning
Is also the hour at which the earliest of
Risers make their way to the airport,
Wiping sleep from their eyes, leaving
Their partner and offspring behind to
Catch a bus, arriving as the lights come
On again, the bustle of international
Travel on the verge of spinning the world
Like a top; a world measured in the
Dead hours taken to trawl the very skies.

june 2010

+++

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

+++

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.

+++

24 hours in buenos aires

+++

I was told by the taxi driver, a taxi driver who I later realised had succeeded in charging me double the going rate for the trip, that Boedo, the barrio where I was staying was the ‘barrio de tango’. I didn’t realise it, but his remark at the start of a flying visit to Buenos Aires presaged a quest to discover whether tango, a slightly anachronistic seeming rhythm in a world of beats and salsa, was more than just a museum piece. Driving down 25 de Mayo, the city’s main artery, with all its billboards and its grandeur, it seemed hard to imagine that this was still a city of immigrants, nostalgic for the motherland, singing sad, lilting songs of loss. A meal in an authentic Italian restaurant, with homemade pasta and pictures of the 2006 Italian world cup winning team on the wall offered a hint that it was out there somewhere, and the next day, the girlfriend and I set off on a haphazard exploration of the city, with the unwitting ambition of discovering if tango was alive and well.

We had started in appropriate fashion. By arguing for most of the night. Finally sleeping near dawn and waking after 11. Sun dappling the windows of our hotel room, suggesting that no matter what the grief might be, it would still be worth our while heading out. If tango is a dance of lazy passion, an understated hysteria denoted by the flick of a leg or a sudden shift of rhythm, then it makes sense that we began the quest in a woozy, desiccated state of mind. Fortified by café au lait and finger sized croissants, we headed out into the back streets with hope in our hearts.



+++


To begin with we drifted through the leafy streets of Boedo which, save for the odd mural, offered precious little in the way of tango. Admittedly it was far too early for any kind of serious tango activity. (It’s only down in San Telmo they dance for the tourists all day long). After a while, the leafy ‘barrio of tango’ began to give way to a seedier vibe, as we moved from Boedo into Once, which is all warehouses and shops. Our route took us across the train lines into the commercial zone. Suddenly, tranquillity gave way to a feverish shopping street.

In common with every American city, Buenos Aires is a city of immigrants. The majority of Portenos, as the citizens are known, have either Spanish or Italian descendency. But there are also large communities of Germans, Eastern Europeans, Russians etc. The only Porteno I know in London has red hair and the surname Rattagan, his ancestors having come from Ireland. Tango emerged in the early twentieth century on both sides of the Rio Plata, in part as an expression of nostalgia for the motherland. However, the mass influx of Europeans ended over fifty years ago. Their descendents are all Argentines now. Nostalgia for a lost paradise is more of a symbolic than an actual phenomenon. Which is where the bustling activity of Once took on an extra dimension. Because the shoppers and the shopkeepers are all, by and large immigrants. The new immigrants – Bolivians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, as well as Chinese and even Nigerians, are economic migrants, hoping that the biggest city in the South of the continent will offer a higher standard of living. They have taken over Once, with streets full of Andean restaurants, money changers, any commercial opportunity. Perhaps here is where the modern day tango is most likely to be found. Except for the irony that the Argentines resent these modern day immigrants. They don’t want to integrate them into their culture. Instead, like immigrant communities the world over, they are blamed for rising crime and other social ills. The spirit of tango might exist in Once, but its not a song that’s getting heard.



So we left Once, crossing Avenida Corrientes, heading into Abasto. In a matter of minutes the streets were cobbled and the houses, theatres, garages and pizzerias painted with vivid, floral designs. This seemed more like the traditional image of Buenos Aires, and it came as no surprise to stumble across the home of the greatest tango singer of them all, Carlos Gardel. In his day, before his untimely death in a plane crash in Colombia in 1935, Gardel’s fame took him far from his Rio Plata roots. He was an international superstar, big in Europe and Hollywood. His modest house displays a quote which says that a homemade stew cooked with care tastes better than the finest meal in the finest restaurant in the world. A clip from one of his films shows him waking up in his New York penthouse, with four platinum blondes lying around to whom he promptly croons an appreciative ditty. His house has become an unpretentious shrine, and the spirit of tango flickers throughout Abasto’s pleasant, low-key streets, where some of the houses are painted with lyrics and notes from Gardel’s greatest hits, as well as a stream of Gardel murals on seemingly every corner. (Warhol Gardel; Lichtenstein Gardel, Impressionist Gardel etc.)

However, for all the murals and street art, there’s something of the heritage industry about this veneration of Gardel, who died over sixty years ago. If anything, it seems to imply that the phenomenon has atrophied. A short stroll towards the historic centre of Buenos Aires takes you to the Plaza del Congreso where the offices of the Madres de La Plaza de Mayo are located. The offices of the Madres, which continues to function as an NGO, are open to visitors. On the walls are photos of those who remain disappeared, a quarter century after the fall of the dictatorships and the return to democracy. Rows of faces, captured in the aspic of their seventies haircuts, are testament to a time when, along with its human rights abuses, the nation suffered a period of cultural devastation, its musicians and artists banned or forced into exile. Argentina, along with the other Latin American nations which suffered political repression in the latter half of the twentieth century, has moved on, but the walls are a constant reminder of the lasting scars.

In the Plaza de Mayo itself, there are more reminders, with a demonstration by veterans of the Malvinas. One banner says ‘No more fake veterans’. However, the demonstrators share the square with a christian rock band, and the mood is relaxed. We decide to cut short the expedition and head back to the pension. The search by day was always likely to be fruitless. A hunt for the real spirit of tango has to take place by night.

+++

A few hours later we made our way to La Boca to see El Fulgor Argentino. The show recounts a hundred years of Argentina’s history, in its own theatre, the Galpon de Catalinas. El Fulgor Argentino has been running for 13 years, with the ending constantly being rewritten. There’s a cast of approximately a hundred – it varies from night to night – made up entirely of local residents from La Boca. This is their theatre. Outside, vast grills serve up chorizo sandwiches, beer and cake. All of which can be taken into the theatre. The audience is a mix of the well-heeled, venturing into the badlands of La Boca, and locals. The theatre’s full and the audience’s enthusiasm grows as the tale unfolds, a mix of satire and music, including comedy tanks and generals, the rich and the poor, culminating in a hundred people on stage singing a rousing finale.

Obviously a show dealing with a hundred years of Argentina’s popular music has to include tango, and there’s one wonderful scene where a series of actors dance with giant puppets, whispering sweet nothings as they do so. But the show also demonstrates how tango would appear to have been displaced, by salsa, rock, pop, you name it. As each new dance craze hits the stage, a lone couple continue to steadfastly dance tango, resisting the tide. If anything El Fulgor Argentino would seem to confirm the fact that tango is nothing more than a museum piece, in a society which now looks both to Europe and the rest of Latin America for its cultural infuences.

It’s midnight by the time the show finishes. There’s one last stop to be made. We flag down a taxi and head back towards the centre. Our destination is La Catedral.



La Catedral is a vast hanger. You climb some stairs and enter a cavernous space, with a bar at the far end. The lighting is subdued. As, at first, seems the atmosphere. It’s gone one in the morning and people are dancing but there are no beats, no flashing lights. Gradually the mesmeric rhythm of the tango starts to get under your skin. On the dance floor, a dozen couples are weaving their way around, lazily changing pace as the music picks up and recedes.

Tables surround the dance floor. They are occupied by a mix of age groups and demographics. Sixty year olds dance with twenty somethings. Domination of the dance moves provides the democratic key to participation. On the sidelines, there’s no pressure to join in. A milonga is an opportunity to observe the dancers’ talent, with no need to make a fool of yourself trying to emulate them. Unless you feel like it.

If one were to say that an atmosphere can be dream-like, then La Catedral would embody this atmosphere. No-one is in a hurry. No-one makes too much noise. The environment is both resolutely contemporary and absolutely timeless. The dancers could have been there for decades, centuries, picking out steps, lurching against one another in a parody of desire, staggering or skipping, graceful swans then, by turns, clumsy swans, all at a time. Here is the pulse of tango, alive and well in Buenos Aires.

Later a singer comes on, a small, fiery woman with a low-key band of four. She sings tangos which the audience knows and tangos which they don’t. The most confident couples join her on the dancefloor, cutting through the space like lasers.

The very word ‘tango’ in English is a strange, almost comical one, an alien sound for an alien dance. This is the music of old Europe, displaced, distorted, disturbed, remade anew for a new continent. In La Catedral, of a night, that time when the dawn is still distant but the night is already old, it’s possible to glean what tango feels like, what tango was and is and always shall be.

+++

dream diary xmas 08, ipswich

The events of the dream(s), the details, are of less importance than the fact of the dream. However, for the benefit of context I shall attempt to describe them.

I met up with H in South Africa. We spent a lot of time in a car. The clutch was slipping. Sometimes H drove but most of the time I did. We were in some kind of valley. At one point I had to clamber up a slippery muddy slope; at another we were trapped in a lift in an old building into which a black cat had crawled. At another we became separated, and I walked through a village where a girl approached me, begging me to sleep with her and pay her, her whole family in tow. I gave the girl 20 pounds, which was all the money I had in my wallet, and an old 70 real note which no-one recognised as currency.

[My nephew is playing a Boo game with me]


Later H and I rediscovered each other and kept driving. There is much that I’ve left out. But the real thing that has struck me about the dream is the way it both reminded and revealed to me a sense of intimacy with H. Intimacy which has nothing to do with sex (although the consummation may be found there), but the knowledge of one for the other, and the other for one, of spending time in each other’s pockets. An intimacy which engenders a way of speaking, knowing, sharing. Its been so long now since H and I knew one another, both as lovers and as friends, that I have all but forgotten it. I would almost have been ready to accept her commandment that we no longer know one another, and that to claim otherwise would be to claim a false knowledge. The dream restored the intimacy, which can, I suspect, never be quite annihilated. The intelligence, humour and love which accompanies it. I can’t remember the last time I dreamt about H. Maybe I’m only just ready for it.

+++

on economics, love, war, etc

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

+++

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.

+++

barcelona pensamiento 2

Two years is long time but three years is longer.

+++

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.

+++

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

+++

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

+++

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

+++

still

I wake up early, Saturday, peaceful in the absence of scaffolders. In a dream you visited, treating me with your now habitual brand of self-centred disinterest. Which nevertheless I welcomed; for it had been good to see you; after so long. By day I walked the canal, reflecting, in dirty water, that my real mistake was not the one you would like me to think it should be.

+++

montevideo notes 6 - departure

Sometimes when I visit Montevideo, the last few days before departure are obscured by an almost pestilential sadness. The disease corners me as I shuffle through sun-dappled streets in a daze.

This sadness is, of course, a testament to the happiness my time here, always too brief, bestows on me. I could be Adam pacing his garden just before the helicopters arrive and the evacuation takes place.

Having said which, I realise that Montevideo is no paradise. The harshness of life is more evident here than it is back in London. Last night I took a walk by the riverside at sunset. In a nook between Playa Ramirez and Pocitos I came across a small beach, scattered with a litter of weather-worn concrete blocks. Two white waders plucked at the water’s edge. Deciding to explore I took a couple of steps across a piece of concrete and then stopped, and immediately turned back. A dead dog, small, brown, it’s spine curved round on itself, teeth grinning, stomach bloated, lay foetal in amongst the rubble, abandoned.

My Montevideo could never be a paradise. Rather, it belongs to a parallel universe, evolving alongside my own. In this universe I rediscover the unpredictable, the beautiful and the tragic. When I arrive here it is with the elation of a homecoming. When the final days of my trip are upon me, the reality of reality, the separation of reality, hits; everything begins to seize up, a mechanism grinding to a slow, barely noticeable halt.

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The fact that my marriage to Helena is now over heightens these feelings. This is the first time I have been back since. Our marriage was the product of a delirious year, working and playing here. I discovered her city; she rediscovered it through my eyes, as well as opening her eyes to the possibility of escape from its confines. (For in this regard a city is like family as opposed to friends: the latter you chose yourself, the former chosen for you.)

We never lived here again. Never put the delirium of that year to the test of something more measured, along the lines of the lives ordinary Montevideans live. All of that living, the prosaic, was done within the jurisdiction of London, my antithesis to Montevideo, a place of work and stress and deberes.

In my fortnight here now, with my former in-laws up the road, the pale ghost of my marriage and its abrupt conclusion has haunted me. Any reader worth their salt might conclude that the love I feel for the city has a connection with the love I felt for Helena; just as the love she felt for the idea of escaping the city had a connection with the love she once felt for me. When our marriage ended, I often felt I would never return here, that this city would also be lost to me.

As one day, indeed, it might be. (As I write Ana interrupts to say that the theatre she had in mind for the play next year now seems to be booked for the time we wanted, throwing everything up in the air again.)

However, a marriage has nothing to do with place or time - the things which alter in the course of a marriage’s natural lifespan. It has to do with how the two people themselves connect, above and beyond circumstances, crises, failures, changes. Whether those two people still retain any kind of imperative to continue in the face of alteration.

We, evidently, did not. It’s only upon returning to Montevideo, after the event, that it’s possible to see how little our respective cities had to do with anything. Montevideo and London, it transpires, have as much significance as a favourite flavour of ice-cream.

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drunken jotting

My foolishness is a part of me I would never repudiate.

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It makes me human.

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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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from the cradle to the grave

The older you get, the more life becomes about the acceptance of loss;
Learning to live with the accumulation of loss, which cannot but increase with every gain you make;
Learning to live with loss without resentment;
Or undue regret.

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message found on the inside cover of mario vargas llosa's the war at the end of the world

To A -
may all your wars be little ones
Love
N
oct' 87

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the long haul

Whenever a deep-rooted attachment comes to an end - a love affair, a friendship, a home, a place or a task - we learn a little more of what it will mean to die.

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my new home

Upon this day the headline announces:
Banking Crisis: The Fear Spreads. Three blue
Chairs and an ugly bed left behind declare
The ghostery of those who came before. Along
With unpaid bills and electriclessness. The
View across Notting Hill, Battersea and the M40
Begins its job of luring me in, revealing first
Secrets. A musty stench mutters of not-being-
Lived in. Months and months of neglect
Lend a forlorn air to the kindliest of souls.
The flyover, redolent of a megalopolis
Intrudes with its automated burble, but
Its unthreatening; the reliable riverine
Flow. Cars, vans and bikes skedaddle
Along, each one different, full of purpose,
A counterpoint to the writers vacuity. Who
Sits, writing his way into his new home,
Waiting for the light and the glow to take hold.

180907

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itineranced

He often goes to bed of a night convinced that the life he's now leading is but a chimera; that his real life continues elsewhere, without him.

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