doodling

The urge to write is ultimately connected to an instinct to order the world. In the course of which, all writing might ultimately be seen as an expression of a quest to ascertain why the writer has been both placed within his or her situation, and also given the means to pursue that investigation in a form which will allow future readers to share the writer's curiosity/ anxiety/ journey.

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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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south london stories #19901

I go round to visit my friends who live in Herne Hill.

There's a freezer in the hallway.

The freezer is full of clothes. I think I spy a handbag there as well.

Later my friend has to locate his suit.

He needs it because he's going to be a vodka-distributing, confession-taking priest between the hours of 10pm and 2am.

He goes to the kitchen and starts throwing plastic bags out of the freezer section of his fridge-freezer.

Finally he finds the suit.

He takes it out and places it on a wooden chair to defrost.

It's chilled and has a texture like paper, not cloth.

We go to the pub. At half nine he will come back and put the suit on. It will have defrosted somewhat, but still be at a sub-normal suit-wearing temperature.

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why there's no point doing interviews

Literary writing does not explain, does not teach: It simply offers the presence of its own mystery, its own experience, in its absence of explanation, thus inviting not some illusory ‘understanding' … but precisely a reading.

Hence the vanity of asking the writer what he ‘wanted to say' ... as if writing came from his wanting, from his free and sovereign will.

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Jonathan Littell, quoted here: http://bit.ly/esUPo6

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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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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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the tudors

Four eight year olds sit around a table. One has Somali parents. Two have Turkish parents. One has British parents. All are British schoolchildren. They are studying the Tudors. Religion under the Tudors. They've made a poster, with a picture of the Pope hidden beneath the flap. The exercise they are asked to do involves imagining themselves to be a Catholic and then a Protestant firstly in the reign of Mary and then in the reign of Elizabeth 1. Their Catholics express their happiness at being ruled by Mary and their Protestants their relief at being ruled by Elizabeth. Their Catholics express their fear of persecution during the reign of Elizabeth, and the Protestants the fear of persecution under the reign of Mary. When questioned they say that the exercise makes sense, and they like it.

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west london tales 11 - silence

I finish the play that I've been reading. It's gone midnight. The play's about a soldier who comes back from Basra and brings the war with him. I switch the light off. I notice something. I look out of the window, which is placed alongside the bed. The Westway is closed. Not a car passes. A camera flashes in the distance. I realise what it is that I am noticing. It's the first silence I have known in my home in the two and a half years I have lived here. I listen to the sound of my room. It hums. I hear a train go past, and see its lights reflected in the next tower block down. Or perhaps I see the lights and then I hear the train. The room hums. Silence.

Then, even as I am wondering what it might be like to live with silence, or that approximation of silence which the traffic, the traffic which never sleeps, snuffs out; the Westway opens again. Red tail lights drone Westwards. In an instant I forget what the sound of that silence, if that is what it was, felt like. Although the hum remains.

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enfield locked

The exercise was about writing without thinking. Letting the pencil reveal what the mind contains and conceals. Six years olds sighed at the chore, before the classroom was given over to the sound of pencils tacking at paper.

A few days later one of them, a boy called B, told me his dad had been quizzing him. Normally when this happens, his mind goes blank, the more he seeks the answer he's searching for the more it eludes him. This time, he tried not thinking. And to his surprise, he found the answer he was looking for.

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reading and drinking

Reading a novel is not dissimilar to having a conversation with a drunk in the middle of their night.

Saying which:

Reading a novel you don't get on with is like being trapped in the drunk's headlights.

Reading a novel you do get on with is like getting drunk with the world's most entertaining boozer.

The only thing that's certain is that when the dawn comes, the night will end.

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west london tales 10

On a good day it takes 15 minutes on the 18 bus from my nearest stop to Warren Street. The buses are regular and this day was no exception. However, at the Paddington Green police station stop, which is the junction with Edgware Road, the bus hit heavy traffic. The driver opened the doors early, to let people out. The rear door wouldn't shut. The bus sat in traffic for five minutes. I offered to go out and give the doors a push for him, but he said they had to shut on their own or not at all.

I got out, as there was another bus behind, but almost as soon as I did, the driver got the doors to work, and the same bus pulled up, and I got back on. I wasn't in a hurry, merely heading to Tottenham Court Road for what turned out to be a doomed mission to buy Christmas presents.

The bus filled up. Just past Marylebone, I heard a thud. I looked up. There was someone on the floor. She was writhing around, her head under the seat, her legs stretched out. A stocky man, who looked Turkish, with a short, neat ponytail, looked at me, and we both called an ambulance. He got through first. The woman was still writhing on the floor. Several people had gathered round her. Finally someone told the bus driver to stop, and he did so, at the Harley Street stop. 

No-one was quite sure what was going on with the woman. She had her clothes - primarily her hijab - bundled over her face. Someone tried to pull them back. They spent what felt like an age trying to get the black cloth away from her face. For a moment I wondered if there was actually a head there at all. Perhaps this was a symptom of a new horror, the headless fit. Finally the clothes came away. The woman was a young African woman, bundled up against the cold.

Most of the passengers stood around for a bit, looking at the spectacle, and then got off. The woman still lay on the floor. Suddenly she began to fit and then appeared to pass out. This was the only occasion I found myself able to do anything useful, as I reached to undo the buttons of her coat which were constrictively tight, the top button throttling her.  A European man appeared and pressed on her chest. Suddenly the woman sat up. 

Besides myself there was the Turkish looking man, the European, a white English woman who seemed to have some idea of what she was doing, a frenetic Italian woman and a smiley black man with two protruding front teeth. The man with the teeth spoke the woman's language, Somali. The woman was concerned about her hijab. The Italian tutted at her for being so silly, telling her that god wouldn't mind how she was dressed. We waited for the ambulance to come. The African man explained he'd been born in the UK, and his Somali was rusty, but she was thanking us. The ambulance still didn't come. The driver was full of calm and good sense. 

Nothing much happened for five or maybe ten minutes. There was no value in most of us being there. But the longer we all stayed the clearer it became that the value was just in the choosing to be there. To ensure that whatever could be done - those things that society can provide - would be. This woman wouldn't be left to fend for herself. She would be looked after. Even though, by now, she seemed to be alright again, the crisis passed, sitting up and wrapping her hijab around her. She'd only arrived recently, the man explained. He'd go with her to the hospital. The ambulance arrived, and I left. The man with the protruding teeth waved goodbye. 

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west london tales 9

In the Bayswater Coffee Republic a business meeting is taking place. A group of five men sit around a table, all of them wearing suits. An older Asian man tells a younger Asian man that he has already asked him two questions, which have only helped him to ascertain that whereas he, the older man, has ten million pounds to invest, he cannot see anything that the younger men has to bring to the table. The older man talks at length about sugar cane and Malaysia. The younger man is trying to get the older man, who says he's from Pakistan, to invest in palm oil, in Ghana. He enumerates the advantages of palm oil as an investment. This is the kind of conversation which helps to explain why, unlike some, I find it hard to write in cafes.

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west london tales 8

The woman whose flat downstairs I sometimes flood is a Coptic Egyptian. She doesn't hold the flood against me, and we make small talk in the lift. Today I came back with vegetables from the market, and she said to me: 'The market is getting so expensive now'. She's right, it is. The price of vegetables has gone through the roof in the past few weeks, for all kinds of reasons. For a moment it seemed like we could indeed be living in a world where the ebbs and flows of fortune are revealed by the price of broccoli or spuds. A world we ususally associate with markets in distant countries; markets where shopping has a meaning which is both exactly the same and completely different to our own.

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south west london tales 2

It's gone midnight and we're sitting outside the theatre in the car park after the last show drinking rum and beer. The pretty girl who I've barely spoken to in three months is sitting next to me. She apologises for not really being present during the run. She says it's because her personal life has been getting in the way. She can't help it. It's in her blood. I ask about her parents. She tells me her mother lives in Eritrea and her father's in Paris. He's an actor and a writer and a spoilt child who stamps his feet down the phone. The mother works for the Red Cross. She's a different kettle of fish, but she's in Eritrea. I ask her how old they are. Just making conversation. She doesn't know. She thinks about it. She says her father was born in. She thinks about it. The same year as her mother. Sixty six. On the bus home this information will sink in as some kind of a crossroads, an unforseen detour into the desert just off Marble Arch.

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west london tales 7

It's half past two in the morning. I'm walking across the iron bridge to the Harrow Road. I'm drunk. Someone's walking behind me. There are people on the streets. Then the someone is walking beside me. I'm listening to music. The someone crosses my path under the flyover. I try to move away from her, increasing my speed. I look round. She's still there. She's talking to me. I take one headphone out. She asks me if she can come and stay at my place. I'm befuddled and bemused. I keep walking. She sticks to me. I tell her I have a wife and three children. She doesn't budge. We've reached the library and she's still there. She says she knows she can't stay at mine because of my wife but she still wants to stay at mine. I ask her where she's from. She says she's from Birmingham. She says they sent her away. I take her to the hostel. Ring the buzzer and a man lets us in. He comes down the stairwell. He says there aren't any beds. He says she should go to the police station. We have to leave. I give the woman the money left in my pocket and tell her to go to Euston. It's just down the road. Wait and get on a train to Birmingham. She says she doesn't have enough money for the train. She says she's going to go back into town. See what's happening there. She says goodbye and walks away.

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blurred vision

Last night I got home after two glasses of wine, one game of football, one late-night trip to Euston station, a shakespeare workshop and about twelve thousand scripts, and switched on the laptop.

Everything was fuzzy. The words has furry edges. My head spun trying to read them.

I tried to find a way to correct the problem. I turned the computer on and off. I searched the control panel for screen adjusters. I searched the yellow pages. I thought of which friends I could call for advice after midnight. I gave up. I went to bed.

In the morning I woke and read a script and contemplated the calamity of the fuzzy screen.

I switched the machine on.

Its world was no longer fuzzy.

But then again, neither was my brain.

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west london tales 6

Wild parrots at play in Hyde Park. Screeching and diving like they've lived there for generations. Except that, on an admittedly grey day, in contrast to the parrots of the tropics, singeing the sky with a vivid dart, these creatures have no colour at all. They've flown straight out of a black and white movie.

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cultural conditioning

Growing up in Thatcher's Britain, as it was known, it seemed like the only alternatives were to become an entrepreneur or go on the dole. Or, as in my case, do both.

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west london tales 5

Conversation in the lift, between ground and tenth floors

- We've been here 41 years. We were one of the first six families to move in. Things were different then.
- What was it like then.
- Oh it was very different.
- What was it like?
- Oh it was like... paradise in the sky.
- Paradise in the sky?
- That's right.
- And it's not like that now -
- Oh no. Not like that at all.

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the mistake

One day it was announced that the war was now imminent.

The announcement was made on television. Thereafter only two television stations were available, both rolling 24 hour news channels which looked at the way the state was responding to the news and what people should do to prepare.

After 48 hours both of these channels went dead.

At the same time mobile phones ceased working, as did the internet, and twelve hours later land lines stopped working. All petrol stations were closed.

There was nothing for people to do except go back to their homes and wait for the war to happen.

During the whole of this time no-one had informed anyone exactly what the war was. Who the enemy was. People thought it might be the climate war, or a nuclear war, or a biological war, or a chemical war, or an ideological war, or a state-sponsored war, or perhaps a vestige of the class war, or even the gender war.

However, whilst there had been much discussion on this point on the television before it closed down, and whilst people had initially debated it amongst themselves, in the end they realised it didn't matter. They had all been expecting the war, in some way, sub-consciously or semi-consciously or just innately. There had been so much peace for so long that people realised in their guts it just couldn't last, and when the war came they were not surprised. In fact many, although they didn't express it, in spite of their fear, were quietly relieved that the war they'd been anticipating and warned about all their lives was finally arriving. 'Good', they thought to themselves. 'Let's get it over with.'

Tanks made sweeps down wide roads. Soldiers could be heard talking outside on radios. People sat in their silent homes, waiting. Some went through phases of hysteria and then depression, and then realised there was no point in even these emotions. Others left their homes, against their family wishes, and walked the street. Some of these were shot at, and then tried to return home.

After two weeks, the electricity was cut off.

An hour later it came back on again.

When it came back on, all the televisions and radios and computers came back to life.

The television was running as normal.

So was the radio.

The internet was back.

People charged their mobile phones and found they were working.

Buses started appearing on the streets.

Over the following week, people returned to their former lives. They stocked up at the supermarkets and went back to work. They cleaned their houses and started jogging.

For a week or two there was much discussion over what had really happened, and the government offered its apologies and one or two people resigned, but at the same time the population was praised for the way it had handled the crisis and the armed forces were praised for the way they had handled the crisis, and everyone had to acknowledge the state had done better than anticipated and people felt good about this in a quiet and understated way.

In two months the season had changed and life was normal. People went about their day to day existence as if nothing had happened.

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