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. 

pozole

Yesterday I went to a mexican restaurant in Poland Street with some friends. There was pozole on the menu and I said we had to share it. Pozole is a stew, made with pork and maize and anything else. It’s a Michoacan speciality. When Willy and I stayed in Santa Fe, whenever there was a communal event, there would be a vast cauldron of pozole on the go. It was considered a great treat. Something struck me, on the bus on the way home. It went without saying that there would be a plate of pozole for us too. Even on the very first night we arrived, one of the strangest nights I’ve ever known, when we found ourselves in a large courtyard garden, with over a hundred strangers, whose language we didn’t speak, having followed the band around the town for an hour and a half. Willy was filming, I was drifting around in my aimless fashion. People smiled at us. There was never any questioning of why we were there. After what seemed like an hour of recitative prayer, and then the unusual dancing, the pozole was handed out on small paper plates. This generosity was repeated on many occasions during my short stay there. The action of sharing was their normality. So it came instinctively to me, in the restaurant, to order the dish, so that we too could share a bowl of pozole between us. 

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. 

memorial to #71

We got back from Berlin at around 2pm. It had been one of those trips. Getting to the airport at 8am only to find that the flight was delayed an hour and a half. Getting to Luton and buying bus tickets only to find that the bus was delayed by half an hour. Traffic. A grumpy bus driver. A tiff. Rain. The typical comeback comedown.

When I got home I checked my mails or something. Within twenty minutes there was a knock at the door. Two women from the tenancy company asking if I’d seen my neighbour. It’s been about six weeks now I’ve been back in the flat and I haven’t seen head nor hide of him. A few weeks ago my former tenant came round to pick up his post and asked if I’d run into him. When I said I hadn’t he said he must have gone away for a bit. It’s been years since I lived in this flat and I have a vague memory of a man who was quite kindly but who I never got to know. 

I explained to the women that I hadn’t seen him. They started shouting through the letterbox. There was no reply. They seemed concerned. About half an hour later, C told me that the police had arrived. I looked through the peephole at the very moment that a policeman kicked the door in, surprisingly easily. It was, indeed, like a cop show, seen through a fish eye lens. A little later I opened the door. There were four policemen and the two women. The most senior policeman said that, unfortunately, he had to inform me that my neighbour was now deceased. Again, he asked if I’d seen anything and again I explained that I hadn’t been living here long and hadn’t seen my neighbour since I’d been back. 

About an hour later I looked through the peephole again. Two men were lugging a body-bag out of the flat. They were struggling and telling each other off, like angry removal men. 

When we left the flat later to watch the football, the smell coming from next door was overpowering. The sickly smell of death. The smell we read about in the papers when they talk about massacres; in countries gripped by war; when planes fall from the sky and crash on the earth. This smell, the most universal of smells, the smell that unifies all mankind, from babe to veteran, was completely alien. As though to show how us how inured we have been to that which it means to be alive, which is to die. Inured through the accident of history, through luck, through the privilege of living in times when death is a stranger.

I wondered how long my erstwhile neighbour had been dead. It was presumably weeks. As we left the building, Jose, the Spanish concierge, made a comment that they only find out you’ve died when you haven’t paid your rent. It’s true. This is the anonymous city, where no-one notices your absence, where your death will go unheralded, if you haven’t managed to convince people it’s worth something. Death has a currency like everything else. 

I trust he rests in peace, the unknown neighbour who has now moved on.

london notes

Feb/ March 2016

• London air on a February morning: slices like an unseen dagger.
• Black kid being picked up by 7 cops at London Bridge.
• Latino having serious skype chat with novia on overland.
• I keep expecting to run into people i know. #montevideohead
• In the imperial war museum there is an interactive sub-Schwitters political photomontage workshop. Giant cut outs of  Obama/ Trump/ Merkel/ Blair & co are available for pre-teens to rebrand with their slogans. War is evil. Peace is good. Trite speakthought in a proto-libertarian brainwash. There are no anti-monarchy or pro-putinist options. The language of protest is reduced to a child's dribble.
• The Romanian busker on the tube is so angry he shouts at his two younger companions. He plays his sax like it’s a machine gun. People cringe before his anger. No one gives money.
• 2 Argentines at the bar in the Ritzy being told by the waitress that uni in the UK is very expensive. She asks how much it costs in Argentina. The young man looks at her and says...ah, it's free -
• In Punta Arenas, towards the end of the world, we came across the story of Ernest Shackleton, intrepid and vanquished arctic explorer. Walking down the hill from my sister's obscure corner of London to Sydenham station, I pass one of those big old houses with a blue plaque. The man who lived there was the explorer himself. A world so big and small all at the same time.
• 2 pubs face one another at the Limehouse end of Commercial Road. One is The Royal Duke. The other The Royal Duchess. Both duke and duchess are shut now. The guillotine has fallen.
• My friends move into a new house. Bought by her stepfather. To get them on the property ladder. Shortly after, the stepfather starts receiving letters. 3 or 4 a week. Demanding that the sender is paid the full value of the house, which is legally his. He threatens to have my friends evicted. They report this to the police. The sender now lives in a psychiatric hospital. 20 years ago he lived in the house, which he lost in a messy divorce. He keeps an eye on land registry records. Every time someone new buys it, he tries to claim his old house back.
• Big man in homburg on train, looks a bit like Churchill: "Damascus would have us." His companion: "I bet they would." Later in the conversation I realise they are talking about weapons sales. The last thing I hear is the other man, younger, looks ex-services: "You weren't there for the meeting with King Abdullah, were you? I thought he was jolly good."
• T is an actor. He was hired to do an advert for Italian cornflakes. He was flown to Nepal for the shoot. Himself and a girl eating cornflakes against the backdrop of Everest. the Italians treat the Nepalese like servants. They spend a couple of days setting up. The morning scheduled to film the wide with the mountain it's foggy. The next day too. The next as well. The mountain refuses to cooperate. The following day they get out the green screen. Everest will be added in in post.
• Sitting in the window at Curzon Soho, a portly figure on a bike goes by. There is something familiar about him. It is the mayor himself. Five minutes later the cafe space is swathed in the irrefutable odour of shit.