'Don't Touch the Axe'

The Andalucian coast, and Paris in the 1820s. Based on Balzac's novella, published first as 'Ne touchez pas la hache' later 'La Duchesse de Langeais', 'Don't Touch the Axe' was previously filmed by other directors in 1942 and 1995. Guillaume Depardieu is Armand de Montriveau a withdrawn French General, a war hero with a gammy leg, honored in society despite his taciturn manner. Jeanne Balibar plays Antoinette, the Duchess of Langeais, amusing herself through the balls and receptions of Parisian society in the absence of the Duke. Through her lorgnettes she observes Montriveau and determines to take him aside and have him tell her tales of his suffering in the desert and toy with him in the process. The general for his part falls in love with her and embarks upon a lengthy campaign of seduction that veers between propriety and near-violence.

The pair interact in a choreography of visiting cards accepted or sent away, letters read or unread, meetings punctuated by the ring of bells for servants. Always there is the threat, for Antoinette, of scandal, and the sense above it all of a complicated game in which the rules are malleable by reference to a person's gender, status, rank. For all that the duchess and the general conceive a passion for each other, in their own ways, never do they appear to achieve that happiness and contentment glimpsed momentarily between the butler and the maid, below stairs, between bells.

Both leads deliver deliberately remote performances, Depardieu Jnr inscrutable beneath his brooding brow, Balibar (best known outside France for another Rivette film, 'Va savoir') working from a limited palette of pouts and side-to-side eye swivellings. But given the social context, who knows if such characters might not naturally occur, their expressions considered realistic?

'Don't Touch the Axe' ('Ne touchez pas la hache') ['The Duchess of Langeais' in some anglophone distributions] Dir: Jacques Rivette (2007).


Balzac's original is fairly typical of his output, enthusiastic description and digressions on society to the fore. An English translation of this novella can be found at Project Gutenberg.

'The Band's Visit'

Waiting for the 472 to Beit Hatikva


"Do you like Chet Baker?"

The Alexandrian Police ceremonial band finds itself stranded until morning in a small Israeli town which suffers remoteness and council estate architecture, without a connection onwards to their concert booking. Circumstances compel the band members to remain as guests and 'The Band's Visit' shows the encounter the band and some of the people in the town experience over the night of their stay. Tewfiq (Sasson Gabai) is an ageing authoritarian and the band's conductor, Khaled (Saleh Bakri) a young Casanova type who plays violin but prefers the trumpet, and Dina (Ronit Elkabetz) is the dry-witted proprietress of the cafe who forms a kind of friendship with Tewfiq.

Khaled is taken to the best available entertainment for young people in the town, a roller disco where in a bladder-threateningly funny scene the visitor teaches his host how to approach girls, and they both conspicuously fail to roller skate. Dina takes Tewfiq to the equivalent for older people, a restaurant and supermarket, and later the park, much of the amenity of which is imaginary. Other members of the band have dinner with a local family and bond tentatively over jazz. There are visual jokes that resemble fragments of Tati, and plenty of humour in the dialogue, which mostly uses English as a lingua franca, with occasional discursions into Hebrew and Arabic to let hosts and guests communicate directly, aside from each other.

'The Band's Visit' never quite mentions the situation, the context - it's assumed that the viewer will know enough about this to hear all the resonances, feel some of the awkwardnesses for the characters. One of the band discreetly places his cap over the picture of a 1967 era tank hanging above his table in the cafe; Dina recalls a time when the streets in Israeli towns would clear as the population would watch the Friday afternoon Arab movie on television, though without elaborating on why this scheduling fell from popularity. Yet if we thought the two nations were thoroughly amicable neighbours the body of this film would be much the same, discords among hosts and band respectively, affinities and shared hopes and experiences discovered by the two groups together. There's something perfectly rueful and tender about Tewfiq and Dina's conversations. It's a film about small-town life, music, people who are different and the same.


"Arab Cultural Centre? There's no Arab Cultural Centre here. No Arab culture, no Hebrew culture, no culture at all. This is nowhere."


At the roller disco.

"Why the police need to play Um Kulthoum?""That is like asking why a man needs a soul."

The Band's Visit (Bikur Ha-Tizmoret), Dir: Eran Kolirin (2007)http://www.thebandsvisit.com/

Bliznji

Somewhere around Amiens

Seen from above, maybe one or two storeys up and distant. An open window, sunlit, early or late as the light is very direct and tinted yellowish, in a warmer season than this. The face of an old man leaning into the frame created by the window, two-thirds profile, lightly bearded as if ordinarily he shaves. The pictures are very similar, they have been taken in sequence with a camera that is not fixed to a tripod, possibly with a burst function or manual repetition. With each successive photograph he is further into the frame, leaning forward towards something, or trying to rise. He bears an expression of discomfort or irritation. His eyes are blue and pink and watery. There are at least a dozen images in the series, which is run through several times, but nothing gives any clue as to why the pictures have been taken, of this subject, from a remote vantage point.

Then the girl in carriage 18, seat 52 goes back to watching action movies on her laptop, the glossy keyboard surround surfaces of which she strokes occasionally as if to remove perceived dust. I go back to my book and read the page twice over without the text sinking in because as guilty as I ought to feel for peeking out of the corner of my eye at the scenes on my neighbour's fold-down tray, I cannot stop thinking about the old man, and the person who took his photograph, from a distance, in sequence.

Paris, metro, sounds

A tube train, in motion, often gives a good aural impression of some kind of metal-beating workshop, or a particularly discordant performance by Einsturzende Neubaten. The Métro doesn't exactly a whisper, but the rubber tyres and so forth make it possible to talk, etc. So the passenger is more aware of sound.

Where in the Code Penal is it written that buskers and beggars must populate the Etoile-Nation line in greater numbers than all the others combined? Not frequenting jazz clubs etc, I'd never before been exposed to the noise of a double bass (plucked rather than scraped) at close range - it's impressive, you can almost feel the sound on your outer clothing. Must be a nuisance to get through the ticket gates, esp. if not paying the fare.

I need to understand sound better. I still don't understand the Doppler effect, or why clock tower chimes get carried by the wind and if it's a strong one from the west I can be waiting in bed for eight to strike for ten minutes before I realise it has been and gone. If two notes are put together, surely they're indivisible? But there are definitely two on the Métro door closing warning alarm, presumably to make it more distinctive, or simply more interesting to the ear. There must be something independently uneven in each. Reminiscent of a wind and string collaboration, and preferable to the usual bleeping.

Next station announcements are being introduced. Levallois-Gallieni has them, not sure about the rest. The station name is announced first on an ascending note as a question, then as a statement with decisive emphasis. Tentative, then confirmatory. Invitation, then welcome. As if to say: Anyone for St Maur? Well, here it is take it or leave it, St Maur! Or: Is this Parmentier approaching? Yes, Parmentier, of course!

Not a jarring voice either. Compare to the woman who calls out the station on our own Jubilee Line, in such an inappropriately celebratory way 'The next station is: Neasden!' clearly demonstrating that the person who recorded the message has never actually alighted at Neasden in their lives, or she would not sound so bizarrely pleased about it. Though Mme. Ligne 3 probably makes even Porte de Bagnolet sound inviting, rather in the manner that mermaids once called to mariners 'Not rocks, but pillows! Big fluffy cushions! And we're not all scaly below the navel, honest!'

The Seven Whores of the Messe

The xylophone truly is the instrument of madness, all music it makes is dressed as Napoleon

For a very long time metro tickets were turquoise. The streets of Paris were strewn with them, discarded after use. I have seen them in other cities, too, jettisoned from the wallets of Parisians abroad and visitors returned. Then not so long ago they became mauve. Now, with swift caprice, they have become white. With all this change it's no wonder that the celebration of incoherence that is Post-Modernism continues to be so popular among French intellectuals.

Beaujolais Nouveau isn't half as bad as it sounds, if pretty close to grape juice. Better for your kids than Ribena, that's for sure.

Later that night I dreamt of Hammersmith Bridge, in all its greenish glory, and woke in terror, as if I had looked on Hades itself. Odd, and a little unfair. What can it mean?

The recently opened John Lewis Food Hall is just a Waitrose, and not even in disguise. The Wholefoods on High Street Ken does not sell big tubs of chocolate raisins, so what's the point?

If you've ever listened to 'You and Yours'

Consider the terrible fate that befalls so many who earn their living via their own pen. For a minuscule few this is the occupation as imagined: wads of money coming from royalties from the last two volumes, film rights from the first of these, and the hefty advance from the publisher for the one that's in the chamber. The work in progress being addressed from a table on the balcony of a Tuscan villa (the ninety day rule, you understand), a few hours every morning, then into town to be lightly interviewed by a visiting journalist before an afternoon and evening of sensualism and rest. Here and there a little pestering from one's agent, but that itself is only a form of flattery, easily fended off, should put yourself about a bit more to increase sales she says, but really why bother?

For all the other poor sods, oblivion. The economising, the doing just about anything that pays and involves writing so that one can maintain truth over the creeping fiction (hah!) that writing is one's occupation. The hundred word book reviews that generate about as many pounds in payment and hours in reading the blasted thing in the first place. The side pieces for magazines including (oh dear god no) trade publications. Running creative writing classes for the county council in some wire-mesh-windowed community facility. Always with financial consideration at the back of the mind, closely associated with the act of writing itself, rendering it a necessity, a nuisance, a burden. Work.

Being at home all day. Unnaturally attuned to the rhythms of the place, the postman's delivery, central heating switching off, noise of kids in the street a reminder that it's already twenty to four and nothing has got done. The time that can be taken in making your own lunch. Then the temptation to have a nap in the grey afternoon of this close, airless prison.

That's just if residing on your own, if living with another there's an inevitable list of tasks - explicitly written or tacitly understood. And if this actually doesn't prevent you from getting on with the job, it's nevertheless far too good an excuse to pass up ('There, cohabitee, I've done the ironing and fixed the door on the bathroom cabinet, but at the expense of the novel that was to define the latter half of the 20th century, I hope you're satisfied').

That's before anyone's even put a pram in the hall. Or a television in the living room. And don't get me started on the internet, bloody hell...

The temptation to allow 'local author' status sets in, leading to a stifling kind of prominence within the district, among other people who are never to be found more than the capacity of a weak bladder's distance from their own front doors. This would be fine in W11, NW3, Park Slope, the Cinquieme, where the pavements are regularly shaken by the tread of literary titans, but in Chiswick?

Then the writer's worst enemy lurking on every High Street - Ryman's. Even in parts of the country where functional literacy is at or near zero and there are fewer books in the entire conurbation than there are sitting beside the Andrex on my toilet cistern lid, there will always be a branch of this bland stationery shop. And in each you'll find at least one aspiring writer shuffling about in comfortable clothing, searching for the pen, the A4 binder refill pad, the print cartridge, the package of high gsm paper, that will in some way stimulate a creativity that has been so compromised by demeaning ill-use and suffocated by crushing domesticity. Hopeless.

Villiers-le-Bel? We brought back a couple of bottles of that from Calais didn't we?

Foreign languages, lots of them, I love it. There's something about seeing all the letters jumbled around in wild new conjunctions, all the differences, similarities, apparent and misleading. Half the fun of being abroad is not having a clue what's going on, then thinking that you're picking it up, but finding you were a bit or a lot wrong...

Not calling other places by their right name, why do we do that? Sometimes it makes the place-name easier to pronounce, but often not. In English the decision seems as much based on what the French call it as anything. Cologne is hardly a word likely to naturally occur in our language, yet we use it rather than Köln. Perhaps it belonged to the French once? Ditto Bruges, which almost everyone lives there knows as Brugge, but we persist with the Francophonic. Perhaps it too belonged to the French once? They seem very careless with their cities.

While we're in that region, I should pause for a moment to congratulate Belgium on having given up on government. They've been without one for nearly six months now and provide an example to us all that one can manage without.

Switzerland is littered with them, places squarely in the German speaking region which we in England cannot imagine as anything other than of Gallic stock. Luzerne become Lucerne, Bern gets an extra e on the end, and we commit the unforced error of calling Basel 'Basle' and silencing the s - because we're au fait with that pronounciation, y'know - despite the French calling it Bâle. Why? Who are we trying to impress?

Worse is when they do it themselves. The amount of nonsense graffiti I've seen on Northern European bus shelters using English words - which far from being hip just look like those little self-help phrases one sees stuck to the desk partitions of the unfortunate.

See also football, that sport that looks back to its mother country, undeterred by the homeland's intermittent failure to qualify for international competitions. Consider FC København, so irretrieveably middle class that they make Brøndby look like Milwall. Several years ago I happened to be in the Trianglen district when they were at home to Lazio and it was deeply embarrassing: 'Everywhere we go / people wanna know / who we are / and were do we come from / we are København / we come from Copenhagen...' all in perfect Engelsk. Makes one nostalgic for the Vikings.

And Rotterdam's Feyenoord, who have made the Feijenoord post-industrial district in which they reside more phonetically available to the easily confused English tongue. "Zowel Stadion Feijenoord als Feyenoord Rotterdam met een lange ij geschreven werd. Pas in 1974 besloot de voetbalclub een y te gebruiken, de lange ij gaf namelijk problemen met de uitspraak in het buitenland." It's like having your food cut up for you as for an invalid.

The Dutch have a natural sensitivity to hearing their language mangled - see how relaxed they are about our mispronunciations of 'van Gogh' "Van Goff, fine! Van Go, if you like!" Anything but hear us attempt the blend of strangulated respiration and expectoration required to emit the correct sound. Not until one of the kunstenaar's descendants got assassinated did we get to hear the real sound of it. See also what we call The Hague, which to them is Den Haag because even they can't be bothered to enunciate 's Gravenhage.

And while I couldn't hope to be able to pronounce 'Scheveningen' with any hope of being understood by Nederlanders, for their part they'll never be able to say 'squirrel'.

Solomon's Children

Rosso and Blanca

Sunday morning

Recent model Merc pulls into the parking space outside my window. In between me and the car: six feet of pavement, railings, four feet of basement drop and stairway, my window and a net curtain, the table at which I am eating runny boiled eggs on bread rolls. Occupants of the car open their doors, then close them again without emerging. A man and a woman, he at the wheel and closest to the kerb. They are arguing.

It is a louder row than the usual listless bickering that characterises the interaction of so many couples out together and in public at the weekend. Or at least his voice is louder. Then there's a lull and I'm paying more attention to my breakfast and an interview with Jools Holland in which he extolls the virtues of keeping things bottled up.

Now they're out of the car, apparently about to leave for wherever it was they were going. I'd guess he's middle eastern, of the nearer shores rather than the Gulf, well built yet not the bloated prince type. She may be from another country abutting the Mediterrannean. She's well dressed, more likely to be his mistress or girlfriend than his wife. Aside from the intangible clues in her appearance, his argument seems too passionate to suggest a matrimonial dispute.

The discord resumes and they get back into the car. His gestures are more expressive now, he is practically throwing himself about in his seat. The exchange is being conducted in English, and his words "I could kill you right now!" are unmistakeable and lack any leavening trace of humour or figurative intent. Then he punches the inside of the windscreen, near to the top. That he manages to shatter it in that area is quite impressive - slanted, the glass is close to the driver so there's little room for building momentum and the surface is awkwardly slanted. Also, it's pretty tough glass. On the one hand, this would compromise the only act of intervention I had thought open to me if he started delivering on the "kill you right now" option, that of toddling out there and putting my fire extinguisher through the windscreen on his side as a sort of distraction. But on the other hand it's rather a relief to see him taking out on his motor, it suggests to me that his fury is likely to be diverted. And so long as he doesn't start lamping the lady, well, I can watch big expensive cars being trashed all day.

He jumps out, still shouting. Now the entire Sunday morning street knows that the girl in the car has taken the decision to leave him, but how could he have paid her more attention when he had a family to look after? So, no surprises in the scenario there. He punches the windscreen again, from the outside now, and she gets out, looking calm and sad. As she wanders off he gives the glass another clout, leaving a mark that looks pinkish in the powdered glass.

Holding his head he walks after her, out of sight. When they return he is hunched, and for a minute or so crouches at the open door of his car, her fingers touching his shoulder. Then they get back into the car and drive off. Now his blood is spattered about around the corner and several buildings down, but none outside my front door.

Christmas often brings out these tensions. Presumably Ramadan is just the same.

-

We had stopped drinking, after a couple of whiskies.

It was because I wasn't looking at him that I realised who his voice reminded me of: Benjamin Zephaniah. He has a gentle voice, quite thoughtful, with a slight lisp. He looks quite dissimilar to Mr Z, a fuller face (stocky in build, he is often mistaken for Nigerian), and of course much shorter hair.

I don't need a photographic memory as for the inanimate I've a camera and I'm happy with my visual recollection as far as the organic are concerned, but I wish I could capture exact speech. He said something like this, though more colloquial yet more eloquent:


"What's really lovely is being with her when she's getting ready to go out. You know, when they build it up right from the beginning. From the shower on. It's a bit like a striptease backwards but not really. And you're there in the bedroom and she is half paying attention to you but more on getting ready and there's the smells of perfume and hair things and all the clothes here and there and how she does her make up even before she's half dressed and no, I don't think it destroys the magic at all."

He wasn't talking of a particular she, but rather a generic one, though his character suggests that his interactions with women, or anyone, are anything but generic. He was talking of that experience within a relationship, and the wistfulness with which he said this suggested the scenario had not been played out before him for quite some time now. Or perhaps it had just been yesterday. Or that evening if they had then gone separate ways.

Basel and Bern

Basel

Borders and boundaries and demarcations, territories within territories. At the airport you are given the option of exit left into France or right into Switzerland. Beyond the latter, a sealed umbilical road of a mile or so before Switzerland itself begins. National borders form much of the boundary of the city - customs posts slow the traffic but pedestrians cross to or from France or Germany unregistered. The Rhein Center sits in an opportunistic corner of Germany between the new footbridge to French Huningue and Swiss Kleinhüningen. It takes 9 minutes to walk from France, through Germany and into Switzerland (it took me longer in the other direction on account of the attractions of fish and chips from Nordsee). Several tram lines terminate within spitting distance of the border, though along the intinerary of the outer reach of the no. 10 tram, a single stop is isolated in France. An annexe of the main station, administered by the French railway company, lurks behind a visually impermeable structure, shabby yet intimidating in comparison with the rest of the station. Rather than 'Gare SNCF', the sign makes it clear that to enter platforms 30-35 is to enter France itself. The other big station in the town, Badischer bahnhof is a more solid and attractive structure, being large and designed to declare itself. Its innards are entirely Deutsche Bahn, from the ticket office to the coffee being priced first in euros. This extends to the forecourt, containing a green-banded German polizei van and one of those distinctive green and yellow 'H' bus stops. Nevertheless, numerous trains from France and Germany serve Swiss platforms and stations without bureacratic intervention.

Inevitable to wonder how, and in what circumstance, those borders might be closed or restricted. Reminders of the possibility of this in the SVP's sheep posters everywhere.

Evening. In a country as clean as this, one feels self-conscious just carrying litter. Somewhere around Zürcherstrasse I saw a bin on the other side of the road, crossed between the lights, walking over the clovered lawn into which the tram tracks are set. Bats were tumbling above the grass in the middle of the carriageway, I've never seen them so close before, under sodium lighting. Further down the road a middle-aged man on crutches waylaid me and addressed me in Swiss German, and then in English. He was not entirely sane. Grinning, he said 'I can see you are a game-breaker. Don't be a game-breaker! I am with the mafia, I shoot you, blam!' and with that he lifted one of his crutches to point at me, rifle-like, losing his balance and tottering backwards into the road. Regaining the kerb he assumed a sheepish expression, his repertoire evidently exhausted. We wished each other good night.

Apropos of nothing, Walter Benjamin once interjected: 'Germans, drink beer!' And they still do, on the move, from bottles, it is refreshing just to see it. Ditto the Swiss, at least in the north of the nation, and very brand loyal they are too, particularly in Basel, although the availability of Feldschlösschen in the shop fridges is mainly in cans. I see those blue and white cans in my sleep.

Bern

The River Aare passes around the town, flat but swift moving, a vivid milky turquoise. There was no river traffic but a small inflatable raft. That raft's two occupants lolled in the sun, occasionally maintaining their position in the median of the river with an oar as they were borne along. They were not equipped to make any progress in a contrary direction, nor did they appear to want to. Where they had started from, or where they would end up, seemed not at all relevant. Seen from the bridge, there was only now.

In a shop on Saturday. Queuing, there is a woman in front of me, and a woman in front of her, in front of the till. As she reaches into her bag for her purse her scarf falls from her shoulder without her noticing. The woman in front of me does and picks up the scarf, hands it to its owner. To my imperfect vision and poor knowledge of fabric, it looks like a nice scarf. Thin material, very white. You wouldn't want to just lose it, or discard it.

It's not the sulky undertone in which the scarf owner's 'Thank you' as she takes it that is so striking, but her facial expression, directed at the woman who has handed it to her. A look can be like a whisper audible only to the person addressed. This is not such a look, which I can see and decipher clearly from four feet back and several dozen degrees of angle skewed. It is of something between contempt and revulsion.

The woman in front of me looks in the scarf owner's direction just for a fraction of a second longer, enough to assure me that I haven't imagined the cast of the other's face. I want to say something but can't think of anything appropriate, useful, or that would make it better.

I can look at pictures in the paper of barefoot monks being beaten and ice melting that shouldn't be and while I think I'm concerned it's just an intellectual exercise. But this thing in the shop with the scarf I've been chewing at since. Though the woman in front of me has probably forgotten about it by now or washed it through by telling a friend who replied, 'Yes, some people are like that aren't they?'. And the woman with the scarf has perhaps changed her medication or is possibly on her way to changing herself. It was all in an instant, or it should be.

Just waiting for their chips and their pie

There's nothing like the situation of waiting for someone. On the street, in a pub, a station platform, somewhere busy. An excuse to loiter and watch it all go by, the people, the traffic, and occasionally the traffic in people. Of course one can mooch about for a bit anyhow, but after a while I would get self-conscious. For this to work, to get right into it, it has to be the real thing. You might think that occasionally scanning the crowd for one's approaching companion / consort / connection would be a distraction, but apparently not. That's your standing ticket, your loitering licence.

Getting nicely plotted up is more than half the trick. What you want is a window seat, or near the bar, or on a corner, under cover, close to the flow but with a bit of architecture either side of you to keep the bodies from bumping you. Have a think about this before you fix the rendezvous. Some of the best spots already have uses. If you're not buying or selling cracksmackpaddywhack people will wonder why you're sticky about the top of Charing Cross Road by the furthest tube exit - and those people will have an urgent reason for wondering why.

A chamfered corner is useful, giving that crossroads location without thrusting you into the path of the populace. Standing on the steps of a building, so long as one is not impending ingress and egress to the relevant edifice, works a treat since you have elevation into the bargain. Another trick for getting a bit of space around you is to stand directly beside one of those vagrants who sleep at right angles to the brickwork. Or adjacent to a freshly shot or stabbed teenager - no-one wants blood on their Blahniks or Churches.

After a while you'll get to read the street, its characteristics and rhythms. The ebb and flow of the bus stops, the steady stream into the tube station and intermittent gushings out, shuddering cinema queues and the pink provincial mobs outside the theatres. Taxis flagged down, amber gambled, figures bolting through the vehicles. The people, beginning or ending their evenings, the lovers, the adulterers, the escorts and the escorted, the couples, the singles. If the truth could be told to you, of all those passing, most of it would bore you arseless, but in among them you know a few are there doing something Else, New. Have to be, it's in the numbers.

If you do it right, get it, you won't want him or her or them to turn up, not just yet, not until you're good and cold or wet, and really need that drink and the Vietnamese from the new place. You might almost want to skip before they arrive, and find another corner. But you don't and it's usually just enough.

When a man is tired of London, he is tired of gits quoting Samuel Johnson at him.

No excuse for having a go at the canvas, mind you.

You'll all be familiar with Flickr by now, and its splendid tag facility, the potential for misuse of which is enormous. Take 'London' for instance. Here you'll find pictures of Nelson's Column and Bayswater, Bloomsbury and Marble Arch. You'll also find pictures of Stonehenge, Princes Street in Edinburgh, the Eiffel Tower, the interior of a Prague hostess bar, and several pages' worth of the long stay parking area at Washington Dulles. Because people don't tag their snaps for other people, they tag them for themselves, and relevance and association are highly subjective concepts.

On the other hand, it's also disturbing when the subject is more tightly defined. Of those photos that fit the GLA boundary, an overwhelming percentage seem to be from a tiny oval shaped area stretching from the Wheel to Buckingham Palace, as if most visitors had only two hours in town before leaving again. The sheer profusion of views of Westminster Abbey is especially perplexing - most English religious architecture manages to make the ornate seem dull, but WA does it in a way that is actually exhausting to the eye.

Perhaps we just don't have much to take photos of here? I may be biased, because I have had plenty of time to have had it up to here with here, but some of our most renowned public spaces really aren't up to much.

One of our more architecturally underwhelming buildings, Buckingham Palace is more of a house. A dull one at that. In the style of a Town Hall in a West Country spa town, but pointlessly elongated. In summer there are tours - I've never been in but I'm told it's filled with a horrible quantity of tacky gilt.

Piccadilly Circus: there are postcards of this road junction from the 1950s in which the neon ads look picturesque, but now the buildings are clad in mediocre fascias evoking a suburban shopping parade on steroids. Even the smackheads and rent boys have forsaken the place. This vortex of human and vehicular traffic obstructs passage from St. James to Soho to the extent that one is tempted to take the 38 one stop just to cross it. Walk down Coventry Street and past the effluent Trocadero and you find...

Leicester Square. Several obscenely overpriced cinemas, streams of adolescents from zones 4 to 6, indefatigable little fellows trying to sell single roses to couples who have already shagged. On weekend evenings, a place where people from Brentwood and Carshalton can meet and kick each other senseless. We do vertical drinking on the pavements outside pubs very well, but otherwise al fresco urban social culture is beyond us. We should give up and Fester Square shows why. La Rambla it's not.

When I lived in Fitzrovia I'd occasionally be asked by visitors for directions to Oxford Street - when we were already on it. I can only sympathise. If Canal Street ever got as bad as Soho's (oursnotyours) northern boundary, it would lose even its PATH-borne custom. Was ever thus: in 1964 Len Deighton wrote 'Charlotte Street runs north from Oxford Street and there are few who will blame it' (Funeral in Berlin). When even spy novels are hitting something with near-Wildean putdowns you know it's low.

Covent Garden: as Time Out will tell you, London is all about shopping, buying things, etc (that and watching telly). The Parisians learned their lesson with Les Halles and so have we - it's when you chuck out the fruit and veg market that the rot sets in. WC2 sucks in the creatures from Burbworld like a big Electrolux that's just had its dust-bag changed. Put a roof on it and most of Covent Garden would be more obvious as the shopping centre it merely is. Or mall. Pronounced 'maul'.

On the other hand, London looks good from the air. It really does. Do yourself a favour when you're next flying in to Heathrow (which, as overcrowded, prone to baggage loss, and grim as it is, is not Gatwick in Sussex, Luton in Bedfordshire or Stansted almost in the Fens) - use the 'change seat' facility to be over on the right hand side of the plane. If your boss isn't paying sit way back (it's not as if you'll beat your luggage to the carousel) so the wing isn't in the way. Usually the plane will enter London from the north and make a sharp right turn over the City, so that your view is exactly aligned downwards with the Bank junction, pivoting around it. Time your arrival for dusk and it will be lit prettily, the bridges like Christmas trees, the parks as dark voids in between. With all the lights on even Hounslow High Street looks like a valley of jewels and precious metal. Try not to dwell on the fact that you're not going to be at your hotel for at least another hour and a half. Even if it is at the country end of the Cromwell Road.

pictures of cars and flowers

As children, we play, and think: 'When I am an adult I'll do this all day - and all night if I want'. We imagine ourselves with an adult's resources and freedom to act. We can take the train to the seaside on a schoolday, paint pictures of cars and flowers directly onto the wallpaper, eat nothing but beef stew, breakfast cereal, and pancakes at the cafe in town.

As we grow older our passions for all these things lessen gradually, so precisely in synchronisation with our increasing ability to act for ourselves that it seems almost mechanical. With the impulses of children, as adults we would be a danger (as they say of the psychotic) to ourselves and others, so perhaps this is all just as well.

But there's an echo or a shadow, or something, that brings a tinge of regret. Now we can do all these things, the wanting has gone and for all this independence those desires have been lost and the real strong soul-filling pleasure has ebbed away.

There's love, of course, but that's not the same.

Interview

Blackmail Years

For a long time I've believed that my demise will be foretold unto me and I will simply not get around to do anything about it - like never putting my the bulk of my savings in an interest-bearing account or topping up my ISA, only fatal. One day I'll get one of those Chinese fortune, ahem, biscuits and the rice paper message will just say "You die."

I'd rather walk around a built-up area wearing shorts and a Bluetooth phone headset than have a presence on F'cebook, so when a friend of mine sent me a link to it recently I had to politely decline. This isn't the first time this has happened, as it is popular with several colleagues (why use a social networking site when we can more easily procrastinate on our employer's e-mail system?) but I'd never followed the link before.

"Blackmail Years"? Eh? Am I just about to enter my 'blackmail years', is that the message? Am I blackmailing? Or do I leave it to one of any number of Feisbook users to do that to me? Perhaps we need to be clear about this, because it's going to last a while.

It may foil the spammers but it scares the sht out of me.

All I am saying / is give bureaucracy a chance

Prowling the corridors of an unfamiliar building the other day, seeking a cryptically numbered meeting room, I glanced in through the glass wall of an office and saw what I at first thought was one of those security service posters of terror suspect mugshots. I normally only see these affixed to the cubicle of a passport control desk (and in the brief moment of having my particulars scrutinised can usually identify at least one individual who looks a lot like me).

It wasn't one of those posters, but an organisational chart, depicting all those senior bods in the structure who have it in their objectives to circulate among their staff and get to know what it is they do, but never quite get around to it. So they settle for having their face in the organogram. By the way, doesn't 'organogram' sound like a cross between the strippergram the lads get Dave for his fortieth and that bloke on the ambulance service motorbike with the freshly harvested kidney in an ice-box on the pannier?

The similarity of these posters is striking in terms of the occupants of the boxes above the names. Neither suspects nor directors want to be in front of the camera, all look puzzled, miserable or suspicious. The manager of strategy, performance and corporate relations appears to have spent a full morning being waterboarded, while the business development coordinator clearly has electrodes attached to his genitals at the moment of photographic capture. Just as an aside, there is an important cultural difference here in that the inhabitants of corporate charts across the atlantic generally look as perky and shiny as a row of freshly rubbed buttons, smiling with their lips pulled back like salaried lupines to reveal a row of glaring halogen bulbs in the approximate shape of teeth. So anyone not familiar with the dowdier UK version will have no clue what the flip I'm talking about, but that's never bothered me before, so on I go...

What this led me to think was that there is an opportunity here for the Great War On Terror to become more sophisticated in its methods (or 'get smarter' if one has to be vulgar about it). For comparatively little resource the evil-doers and wrong 'uns can be effectively thwarted with one of these organisational charts. Here's how.

To begin with, I hope I am not being merely charitable in assuming that the security services have already infiltrated Al Qaida at various levels. I was speaking to someone who works in marketing the other day and he said that his firm already has half a dozen guys in there on secondment. They're developing a campaign to put costumed distributors onto the site of the next atrocity with free samples of a new carbonated lemon juice drink before the emergency services arrive. Similarly the British Army in Helmand, a lucrative market segment representing high impulse spend opportunities, might want to consider why they keep seeing gigantic images cut into the poppy fields advertising X-Boxes, Lynx deodorant, and FHM magazine everytime they fly over Taliban-held territory. My sources tell me Gilette are interested in the viral marketing possibilities of those video clips of beheadings. All you have to do is turn up, really.

So let's assume our spooks are in and they're passing information out. What I suggest is a shift to the proactive. Never mind bunker-busters and other noisy crudities, if someone were to introduce a root and branch reform of Al Q's cellular command structure their activities could be halted by, well, the end of the financial year. It all starts with the organisational chart. No-one will question the wisdom of putting the internal command structure down on paper because they'll be too busy squabbling about what the poster's background should look like ('Blue is authoritative.' 'Yes, but pistachio is nicer.' 'What about an intricate repetitive pattern - with bits that look like crescent moons but only if you squint.' 'Yes, it could be like one of those magic eye pictures!' 'No, that's naughty, it has to be plain and pious.'). If they ever get past the swatches they can move onto the power struggles, but these are less important than an institutional collapse from the foundations upward.

Because once you let an organisational chart into your concern, a bureaucratic oblivion soon follows. Corporatist interference in ongoing and forthcoming activities is now sanctioned. Martyrdom operations have to be cancelled because everyone has back-to-back meetings all day, or is on maternity/paternity leave (AQ being by now an Equal Opportunities employer) or is on a training course. Of the latter category, 'Health and Safety', 'Motivation and Teambuilding with Will Carling', and 'Diversity and Cultural Awareness for Public, Voluntary and Community Sector Professionals', are likely to be mandatory.

Whereas before WMD and associated components could be obtained on the spur of the moment down at the market, they will now have to be bought from approved suppliers, using the prescribed procurement system. These suppliers never have the thing you want in stock, or at least not in the right colour, and in any case filling out the forms and getting them approved takes ages. How can you obtain clearance for a dozen snazzy new surface-to-air missiles when your counter-signing officer is in Belmarsh, your budget holder is in Guantanamo, and your line manager is holidaying in the Atlas mountains for the summer? After a while all this will no longer matter as operatives will have become too distracted by the contents of the stationery catalogue to have time for purchasing weaponry. Under the new priorities a gun that can fire 300 rounds a minute is one thing, but a stapler that can clip through 50 sheets of paper, now that's quite a compelling piece of kit.

Transport of goods and fugitives across the Hindu Kush then grinds to a halt because no-one can work out how to get their donkey hire expenses approved on SAP. Furthering the descent into chaos, Al Quaida establishes a central Help Desk based in Bolton. Imagine a Baghdad insurgent attempting to prime his improvised landmine with two minutes left before the biggest Blackwater / Haliburton / Bectel convoy ever comes through, under lethargic wheezing instruction via sat-phone from a Johnny Vegas sound-a-like.

And so peace, a vaguely frustrated but increasingly ennervated peace, breaks out.

To address over-achievement

Do this in winter. The effect of the exercise will be all the more severe. You want this moment to live forever in the memory, but never to be repeated in life.

Wake them early, your children, wrench them from their dreams. Dress them in new and starchy clothing, irritating to the skin and restrictive to movement, applying to the male child a kind of noose, tightened to within several circumferential millimetres of the fatal. Permit no leisurely breakfast, or indeed any moment for contemplation or assimilation to the waking world. About the whole exercise there should be an air of crisis, of near panic. Hurry them from the home and out into the street. It will still be dark.

Scamper them to the station, tripping and hobbling in their new and uncomfortable shoes. Explain carefully as you pour coins into the ticket machine that this is their pocket money. All of their pocket money and then some - they will be repaying the balance over many weeks to come.

When the train arrives force them in among the dense herd of human contents. There will be no seats, nor any window sufficiently nearby to look out of. Several stations later take them off that train, taking care that they glancingly impact on every briefcase and umbrella point on the way to the door. Scuttle them through tunnels, up and downstairs, through apparently impenetrable crowds of oncoming people, maintaining urgency throughout. On another platform, another train, repeat the process.

By the time you reach the surface, in whatever financial district your city possesses, your children should be terrified, dazed, perhaps shivering, but still sentient. You want them to learn from the experience. You want them to understand.

Only now let them rest, ideally placed at some vantage point from which they can see the gadarene trudge of compromised humanity. Direct their gaze to the shuffling columns of commuters, identify for them particular subjects, examples of dead-eyed half-life.

Now you can speak to your children at length, gently, return to them the parent they know and love. Tell them that if they work hard at school, apply themselves in particular to those subjects that seem to promise most in terms of later career and fulfilment of material aspiration, all of this can be theirs. Day after day and year upon year, and only when they are too weak to work, too drained to play, when they no longer recognise their younger selves, will it end.

That should see to it.