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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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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inside out (2)

Every relationship is also a story.

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What a story reveals is no more the shell of its existence.

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Beneath the shell lurk networks and connections and fears and dreams.

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However, even in the best told of stories, nothing more than the shell can ever be revealed.

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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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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.

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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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its easier to take an engine to pieces than it is to put it back together again!

Once you have negated someone, it's a tricky technical operation to un-negate them.

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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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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.

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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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around the city's edges

Relationships demarcate a hinterland of our psyches, souls, or sensibilities that we forget exists when we are not in them.

Those long conversations about marginalia that don’t need to occur for any other reason than they help us to understand who we might be; have been; or might become.

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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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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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on reading

Reading is a process of curiosity. One turns the pages in order to have something revealed that wasn't known before opening them. Whether that be the end of the plot or the shape of the universe.

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Every time we open a book we do so in the hope that we shall meet someone with something to say, something we have never heard before.

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the lover's discourse

There is nothing as attractive as someone else finding you attractive.

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People think seduction is about dazzling. Fortunately for some and less so for others it ususally has more to do with listening.

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Tickle someone's vanity and you can steal their soul.

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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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