The festering season

A bright red blanket on the mud and incident tape when we walked past Barnes Bridge on Sunday, one-under at Stratford today, the couple next door have been having a barney all sodding week now with added flung furniture, it's that time of year right enough.

What is point, tell me, what is point?

Four compelling examples which suggest that while the public may at first get what it wants, it is no less happy later to want what it gets:

- Tom and Jerry after Fred Quimby
- Star Trek after Shatner
- Doctor Who after Tom Baker
- Scooby Doo with Scrappy Doo

And yet I have encountered more than one man old enough to see his hairline go into full retreat who believes otherwise.

Serve chilled at °5C with a large creamy head

You know those hangovers which are so sophisticated that they get their own second wind not long after you've risen? Well, my new Waitrose is so close that I'd got there, bought eggs, bacon and Bombay Sapphire and was home again before I started spewing. That's convenience.

Just read 'unwary maiden' as 'unwieldy maiden'. Not as good as mishearing 'cumbersome' in place of 'buxom' the other day. Also, Charlotte Green, does she gargle with dairy products (o.n.o.) before hitting the studio or what?

Can I have another drink yet? Have I been awake long enough?

These Are A Few Of My Favourite Things

When considering the correct approach to reading a newspaper I omitted to mention the tide tables. Consultation of these is important for those whose city is complemented by an estuarine body of water. Few things are more cheering than the sight of the river at the height of its froth looking fit to swamp the Embankment and fill the cellars of Southwark with its ebullient swell.

Fewer still more depressing than at its lowest ebb when it appears that every water molecule with a valid passport has emigrated to a villa in Bulgaria.

Banks of mud and broken masonry are exposed, strewn all across with:
used firearms and shanking tools,
red Royal Mail rubber bands,
Nutrament tins,
Railtrack luggage trolleys,
traffic bollards,
plastic bags from Gregg's,
skateboard halves and bicycle segments,
used GHB bottles,
Make Poverty History bracelets,
crack pipes and clay pipes,
the plastic surrounds SIM cards are snapped out of,
discarded Filipina domestics,
Oyster card wallets,
exhausted fire extinguishers,
Waitrose charity tokens,
luminous visibility tabards,
Next and Top Shop clothing hangers,
latex gloves,
Fitness First backpacks,
IV drip stands,
fag stubbers sponsored by Addison Lee,
USB memory sticks,
acrylic nails,
conference pass lanyards,
Metropolitan Police incident boards,
complimentary Evening Standard umbrellas,
seat cushions detached and defenestrated from First Capital Connect carriages,
pages from Georges Perec novels,
cassette tapes of Clement Freud 'Just A Minute' filibusters,
and the occasional torso of a ritually murdered child.

£=€=£=€ ha-ha-ha!

Avoid newspapers displaying an indecent haste in getting to the facts. Short punchy sentences, swiftly conveying information, suggest that the reader is in a hurry, has something better to do. Places to go, people to see, wanting to know the state of the world in ten minutes, reeking of business. This style of journalism is clearly aimed at persons who wear wristwatches - and consult them.

Ideally there should be many more words to get through than strictly necessary and the path to knowledge must take a circuitous route. The press should insinuate the news rather than report it.

No lady or gentleman would rush her or his morning paper (least of all by reading it in the morning). The mature reader will take a more sedate approach. The mature reader will begin with the obituaries.

Followed by the court circulars, then possibly the day's race cards. Then the theatre reviews.

Financial pages go straight to line the rabbit hutch or to light the fire in the study. On no account should they be read, other than in a period of onsetting recession, in which case they may be declaimed aloud to gatherings of family and friends for mutual delight and hilarity.

Then to the comment pages and editorial, to put one in a properly prejudicial frame of mind before moving to 'the front of the book'. International news first - start with the Tropics, other developed nations' remote holdings, one's own remnant empire and former colonies, then the neighbours. Finally domestic news, beginning with the parliamentary sketch: never quite as satirical and scurrilous as Hansard, but it will do

7 pence an hour

They didn't really riot of course, that's just typical Evening Standard bollocks. But I'm told things got pretty foul.

This evening, the sort of noise that in the print media would be described as 'a sickening thud' and the bus driver dropping anchors and swearing loud and panicky. 'Ah f ck we jus run summon over y'know.' the girl behind me remarks.

The mildly uncomfortable feeling of being on a bus that is on someone. Though arguably more agreeable than being the someone under the bus, I'll grant you.

Due to the height involved only the gathering crowd, briefly distracted from London Lite, Blackberries and Foot Locker, gives a clue as to what is happening directly beneath the windows. Hands over mouths in a dismay sort of way, but not actual wincing. Then a sort of quasi-religious reaction, gaping and widened eyes and actual smiles. She is risen.

Seems she'd fallen into the kerb by the vehicle, and was tucked into the gap between bus and pavement. Brief glimpse of her standing unaided looking down herself in wonder, all still there.

And off we go again, I'll be off in ten minutes, the driver's got no break until Golders Green. Had it been me I'd have turned out the passengers and parked up on Portman Square for an hour to cry or punch the seat cushions or just hit the pub. I don't know how they do it. Not just the near misses and actual hits - Oxford Street full stop. The collision took place at low speed, between lights, short of precognition what can you do?

You don't get a much bigger frontal profile on a moving object. 14 feet high, 8 wide, bright red. It doesn't exactly test the peripheral vision. But just try the view from the front up top, Centrepoint to the Arch. It's a series of masterclasses in making attempted suicide look like an accident.

Shoppers, they're not all there. Drunks have better coordination and spatial awareness. Free-range psychotics display more concern for their own personal safety. Like toddlers transfixed by the brightly coloured objects they blunder across the spaces between shops without regard for what they may meet on the way. Could be a river running between the pavements, boiling with snapping crocodiles. Or a chasm without floor until the flaming pits of Hades. They'd still step off the kerb without for one moment taking their eyes off the opposite window display.

In the suburbs the shops open at eleven on Sunday mornings. In Oxford Street they don't switch the tills on before noon. The creatures from Burb World forget this. By 11:15 the pavements are crawling with whimpering staggering zombies, pawing and beating at the closed doors, scratching at the windows with their credit cards. At the request of the London Ambulance Service many shops relent at half-past, giving the junkies thirty minutes of product fondling before they can finally start Chipping and Pinning.

A fine bloody recession this is turning out to be.

Now with 2.5% less charm

King Herod, it seems to me, is ripe for re-appraisal. Rather than a despotic tyrant, in the context of the Roman Empire he had only limited latitude for determination. He did not dictate the overarching policy, this being a matter for central authority. Rather he sought to implement it in the region, having regard to distinctive local conditions.

It can't have been an easy job, what with all those divergent interests and nuisances. An impressionable and excitable populace, prone to unlicensed gatherings. One messiah after another, often several on the go at once, some of them more disruptive than others. It's true that the Massacre of the Innocents wasn't a universally popular initiative, but it fell to King H to take some tough decisions and from that one he did not flinch. Though not achieving its objectives, as a process all reports suggest that it was delivered on time and within budget. This so rarely gets the recognition it deserves.

Today I was put in mind of Herod the Great, and the adversities he faced, by an attack of Stakeholders. I don't know if you have Stakeholders in your field - perhaps you have customers? Well, Stakeholders are worse, deputations of disputacion, pestersome mendicants, the lot of them.

Often they want guidance - not for practical purposes, more as an amulet against failure or scripture to blame when they screw things up. Refuse them and paralysis will ensue while all involved wait for each other to do things. Eventually someone will crack and start doing, and unto that endeavour will be accorded the acclaim of 'Best Practice'. When in fact it has the utility and consistency of the first pancake.

As frequently they will want money. In June. Unringfenced. In cash would be handy, ta.

Sometimes Stakeholders want to be allowed to do things hitherto prohibited and unmentionable, or at the very least for their overseers to look the other way for a bit - at this point you may hear the phrases 'light touch', and 'self-regulating'.

But most often Stakeholders just want biscuits. This is the worst of it. To preserve the dignity of policy development there must be the minuscule thong of consultation - with Stakeholders. Consultation requires meetings and at meetings there are biscuits. Referring to another body of which mine is a contemporary Stakeholders will insinuatingly observe that:

'at ----- they had Jammie Dodgers' or 'Weren't there Viennese fingers last time? Oh no, that was when we went to ----'.

Perhaps they like to see themselves as acid-tongued coquettes, seeking to ignite jealous rage in an intemperate suitor. Rather than, as they appear, the sort of people who habitually feed feral pigeons.

Where hard baked goods are concerned the Stakeholders will defenestrate all notions of fraternal cohort. For budgets they will compete in a ladylike or gentlemanly manner but for Bourbons they are like hungering beasts. Once when our internal catering broke down we brought in a selection from Marks and Spencers and they tore each other to shreds about the biscuit plate, consuming scraps of each others' flesh along with the white chocolate wafers and those ones wrapped in yellow foil. Imagine if we provided a working lunch finger buffet - identifying the participants afterwards would be down to dental records.

Stakeholders often dress like provincial bailiffs, in jackets fitted with poacher's pockets with capacity for several pounds of Ginger Snaps on each side. The other day I met an elderly bearded gentleman rattling around the corridors, engaged in multiple consultation exercises for the past decade, who claimed to have subsisted entirely on Hobnobs since 1998.

Their weakness, our strength. When we wish to divide and rule a Penguin here and Tunnock's teacake there, surreptitiously and iniquitously bestowed, can sew great discord among the category. Similarly, sworn sectoral enemies can be made to unite in synergistic partnership working at the promise and sniff of shortbread. I have brokered a deal worth millions - once you include all the gearing and match funding, etc - using a formula entirely populated with Custard Creams. If a bombardment of Rich Tea fails a few fig rolls will clear out any nest of resistance. In tough negotiations* I'll have the Garibaldi option, not figuratively but literally, in my back pocket.

So I salute Herod. And also Pontius Pilate, for he suffered representations from Stakeholders in droves. There were no Peek Freans or McVities to distract them with then. No wonder he was always washing his hands afterwards.

Seen from the bus up Regent Street, the webs of lights hanging above road were reminiscent of something, but I couldn't pinpoint what.

Now I've got it: in those of HM prisons with the classic gallery and landing layout, netting is strung across the voids between floors in case of prisoners chucking themselves, their fellow inmates, staff or other items over the railing. It's pretty much like that, but over a street and plugged in to the mains.

If you say 'Xmas' in your head, it makes it sounds like an irritating and unsightly skin condition. Appropriately.

Mists and Mellow Fruitlessness

No sun - no moon!
No morn - no noon!
No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day
No sky - no earthly view
No distance looking blue

No road - no street
No "t'other side the way"
No end to any Row
No indications where the Crescents go

No top to any steeple
No recognitions of familiar people
No courtesies for showing 'em...
No knowing 'em!

No mail - no post
No news from any foreign coast
No park - no ring - no afternoon gentility
No company - no nobility

No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds,
November!

('November', by Thomas Hood)

18% of them, apparently

The second time, we took her dog for a walk. A white Boxer bitch she was, deaf in one ear. 'She don't like the grass', I was told. I liked her already.

We walked across the Heath, and for the sake of the dog's sensitivities we stuck to the path. She wasn't at all enthusiastic, not like she'd been in Kentish Town.

Then at the crest of Parliament Hill she picked up her paws and it was lunge, pull, scrabble down towards the streets across the railway line. Happy as Larry up and down Haverstock Hill and we went back through Gospel Oak.

You can't really - and it would be wrong to, anyway - e-mail or text a dog to say, remember me, I was that bloke the other day, you sniffed my hand, beer and falafel you'd recognise me by. Well, if you ever want a walk I've got some decent pavement round my way. Just, you know, if you're ever at a loose end, no-one to cop hold of the other end of the lead...

It didn't work out. That was a while ago.

elsewhere

Saw a heavy scattering of hundreds and thousands on Waterloo Bridge as if blown back on a failed attempt to throw them out onto the river.

Overheard on the Strand,
"Why do you always wear those ugly glasses when we go out? They make you like a granny."

"I don't always. I wear them a lot around the house and you don't complain."

"...."

"Are you ashamed then? Are you ashamed of me?"

"No, what I meant..."

"We're never having children."

You took your daughter to the slaughter, now she's a PR in a pashmina scarf, are you proud?

As Sartre - or was it Camus? (you'd think I'd look this up, wouldn't you) - said, or would have done if he had taken a moment to be more specific, 'Hell is other people's children'. I wonder if other countries have the tradition of Half Term. The arrangement by which, a few weeks after the little bastards have been rounded up and confined they are set free again for a week.

From a humanitarian point of view I can only be in favour - the more holiday people can get, teachers or children, the better. I've vague memories of having been subject to the same conditions once, and I know I was glad of it. But, with the prime purpose of schools being to act as juvenile holding pens while the parents service the economy, this can lead to a return to the tradition of taking your offspring with you while you till the fields.

Like Welsh or Self said in a book title (you'd think I'd...) 'If you liked school you'll love work'. What a way to spend a day. And the poor little sod doesn't even get paid for it. Things have improved for them slightly: where once there was a sheaf of A4 hoicked out of the printer, two ballpoints and dry-wipe marker to play with, now they have internet access. And a whole new set of content filters and firewalls to get around.

A more proactive parent will seize upon the opportunity to inculcate their spawn into the ways of paid employment, subjecting them to that baleful practice known as 'shadowing'. Which, as with the adult equivalent, means dragging them around the weary circuit of meetings, presentations, and one-to-one line management appraisals ("And now darling, I'm going to make one of my colleagues cry. You see, it's just like school!").

The stifling effect of having a child present at a meeting is inestimable. It is almost impossible to conduct proceedings without resort to innuendo and expletive - if you can't swear and impugn the proclivities of colleagues absent and present, how are matters to be taken forward to a satisfactory conclusion? Unfair on the under-sized participant too - they can hardly duck out with the usual formulae of polite decline: 'Would love to, but I'm not sure my presence would add value' or 'Sorry, have to crack on with something terribly urgent that sits rather higher on my ladder of priorities', or even my current favourite: 'I'd rather eat sand.' Then, when the introductions drag around the room, poor Junior not only has the embarrassment of the same surname as the person they are sitting next to, but has to substitute 'cause my mum said' for their organisation of origin.

Of course they might bring fresh perspectives: powder paint instead of Powerpoint for presentations, angry red crayon instead of track changes for those contentious drafts. And as for spreadsheets, I've always believed that any figure that cannot be worked out one person's fingers and toes is Too Big, and also Rude.

Never work, ever

In a meeting, this morning, someone actually used the phrase: "A basket of deliverables." He really said that. Without apparent irony. One of these days I will bite my tongue so hard it will bleed.

I took the afternoon off.

On the bus, looking down into the shops, it occurred to me: what must it be like to be a security guard in Mothercare? Sending for the cops to deal with persistent mitten thieves. Detain one person and get a smaller one free. The defendant and the dependant. I wonder if they burn out quickly, or become somehow immune.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Radio 4 doesn't get much more despicable than 'Money Box'.

It tries, with 'Brain of Britain' (you know that moral dilemma scenario in which the question is: 'If you could go back in time and assassinate Hitler, would you?' Well, Robert Robinson is alive now, and broadcasting now, and some questions just shouldn't be asked).

It tries very hard, with 'You and Yours' (a programme devised by the Confederation of British Industry to drive the work-free out of their homes and into factories, offices, schools, brothels and other places of labour just by its utter inanity).

But for sheer nauseation value the 'Money Box' formula can't be beaten, unless by more extreme strains of this cancer of the radio, 'Money Box Live', and recently 'Money Box Live Special'.

Oh, it's a fine idea in theory, advising the ordinary person about matters financial in language they can understand. It empowers and it enables, equipping the individual to do battle with Big Capitalism by evening up the knowledge imbalance.

But then, just listen to it. Caller after caller, venal grasping scum, the sodding lot of them, bleating their craven insecurities and tremulous greed. Take the other night for instance, here's 'Margaret in Droitwich':

'I have three ISAs: one cash, two mixed; buy-to-let properties in Bulgaria and Bromsgrove; a portfolio of investments in commodities... and some antiques.'

'And what is your question Margaret?'

'Oh, I don't have a question, I'm just a smug git who likes telling everyone about all my money. Moneeeee... moneeeeee...' Etc.

Okay, so I changed her name. And paraphrased a little. But otherwise, that's what it's like.

Maybe I should listen to the radio less.

The FT and the WSJ are the new Funny Pages

Grotesque notion that Iceland should find themselves compelled to approach those vultures the IMF. I know they had a flutter and lost, and so theoretically all is fair at the poker table. But the IMF? Telling proud Norse folk that they should "...like, totally cease social provision, deregulate their economy, flog off their natural energy and marine resources wholesale at bargain prices to a favoured multinational and offer their daughters and cuter sons up at auction..." etc. No, that's not right, and about halfway through tomorrow morning I think that nation will remember that for them there is an alternative.

Viking, being also a verb, is like riding a bicycle, only more so, I would imagine, in that once it's in your genetic inheritance the skill and instinct comes back in a trice. Remember the Cod War? No, I don't either, quite, but all I've read suggests they gave us what for.

The solution is close at hand. Iceland, may I offer you London? The Thames is navigable for container ships as far as Tilbury, gunboats and lighter craft can probably get as far Richmond with no bother, depending on the tide. Don't worry about the Royal Navy, they're still tied up out east. Army ditto. As for the cops, ha, ha. Your opposition will consist of some overweight wheezing PCSOs and numerous catatonic security guards. Short work for the halberd and axe.

You won't need all of it, just the juicy bits. I'll draw you a map, like the sort our tourist board gives to visitors. Chelsea's on the river, Knightsbridge up the road, you're welcome to it. You already have most of Regent Street. Take the lot. Just let me know when you'll be dropping by so I can be out of town for the weekend.

I like go-arounds, they give me a thrill in my pancreas.

I was almost on top of it, the giant hoarding-sized advert, over a WH Smith and a Leonidas, I think. More correctly, it was almost on top of me.

On the poster a men's shaver, with a fold-out LCD screen. This was in Terminal 4, and it didn't, for more than a full minute, seem unreasonable that such a thing should exist. Now I can't remember what it really was.

It was very early in the morning. Perhaps terminals really are termini, where everything ends. Purgatory will be supplied with Harrods concessions, Sock Shop, Tie Rack, Zara, false Irish bars, mutant electronic goods outlets, internet at one Euro for five minutes.

Imagine despite having, at the direction of the Archangel Gabriel, taken your jacket, belt and shoes off and put them into the x-ray machine, the gates of Heaven emit an accusatory bleep as you attempt to pass through. Cherubim and Seraphim give you the pat-down looking for house keys, a chunky watch, stray coinage. But there's nothing for it, something in you is ferrous and it's downstairs for you, they can't be too careful these days.

My plane taxied with such conviction, and so far, parallel to the A5, outrun by cars and lorries, that it resembled an escape attempt. Only by remaining ground-bound can an aircraft evade its destiny, but where would it go? And what would it do when it got there? Change its name, have its KLM-blue sprayed over, get a job as a bus? Could it ever lose itself in town the size of Hoofdorp, this only lonely bird of its species?

Nederlands a.u.b., I need the practice

I know enough of the language now that not every person who sells me coffee instantly switches to English. Perhaps they are more indulgent these days. I understand the simplest exchanges.

Street parallel to Overtoom, late afternoon. Two children, a boy facing a girl on a bicycle. They are about seven or eight years old, the bicycle is scuffed and blue.

He says: 'Annie... Annie, I...'

He is looking at the girl, but also around and about, the way children will. She is staring intently straight ahead, as children sometimes do. His hand is tentatively on the crossbar of the bike. She does not answer him.

He says again: 'Annie...'

She shouts: 'Let go of my bicycle!'

By now I've passed them, I don't see their faces and I don't look back, but I hear him say: 'Annie, it is my bicycle.'

Communication of a kind, or a humble contribution to London Fashion Week

Some time ago I was the guest of, among other creatures in the household, a mostly magnificently white cat (I say mostly, he was equipped with a dark coloured tail so as to be located easily in snowdrifts, etc, and a Gorbachevian patch on the forehead for aesthetic purposes). He resided with his sister, an elegant mute with an eating disorder blending bulimia with an appetite for electrical wiring. I believe they originated in Bushwick, or thereabouts.

Anyway, this feline was in the habit of shedding his brilliant raiment about the place, liberally, as a means of self-expression. Irresistably adherent, this fur of his, so all visitors carried out into the world his traces, and thus his fame spread, by the medium of subway and taxi seats and the general crush of the crowd.

I'm only reminded of this as I found a pair of jeans today that for several years had escaped the attentions of the lint roller kindly despatched to me by his human companion. They are, in theory, black. But, in practice, due to my dear acquaintance, not. Sentiment dissuades me from attacking them with adhesive rotary contraptions. I'll wear them as they are, almost a furry beast in their own right. I'll be sure to sit down a lot on public transport and in pubs and people's homes. The coating of fine white hairs on my own clothing won't be much dimished, but enough of their number will transfer to the garments of others. I'm just a humble disciple and courier, really.

There is no need to apologise, for the pain has somewhat abated

Last night, walking home, about two-ish, smell of something like creosote in the air around Portland Place, as if RIBA and the BBC had just redone their garden fences for the winter.

On Baker Street, Indian couple, looking lost, asking for directions to the night buses, I think they expected them to all be in one place. Turned out they wanted to get to Wembley so pointed them up to Marylebone Road, but really wanted to give them the cash for a taxi. They did look so very young and disorientated and the 18's a bit sht at the best of times and probably doesn't improve with an N prefix, but I couldn't think of a way to offer.

A fox was zig-zagging in and out of the pillars at the front of the Swiss embassy, I'm sure it was doing it for fun, a sort of nocturnal slalom. It will look good on their CCTV tapes.

On the Large Hadron Collider

There was always the hope, this morning, that it would go mildly wrong and the scientists would turn on Andrew Marr and offer him up to the gods as a placatory sacrifice. Of course I don't believe for one moment that today was the first time they had tried it out, the thing's probably been up and running for ages. To begin with there would have been a lot of faffing about, with dialogue boxes popping up saying 'cannot find drivers for new hardware', and they'd have lost the set-up CD that came with the thing (and you can imagine how much packaging there'd be to go rooting through). Then there'd be a good twenty minutes phoning the helpdesk in Mumbai at 2.19CHF a minute, who would finally tell them to do something really simple like switch off the anti-virus or the screensaver.

Sorry to be banging on about this, but it looks as though I shall have to have that meeting after all. Anyone who has read Orwell's account of being called upon to shoot a Burmese elephant will understand my feelings.

I know there are consolations. My father had high hopes for his runner beans next year and, though he would not say so aloud, his carrots. I may yet see 'Whistlejacket' restored to its rightful place in the National Gallery. I've got about thirty-five quid to get through on my Oyster card. There'll be a big new Waitrose opening on the Edg Rd in December, just where Woolies used to be.

But then, but then. Palace have got off to a really poor start this season and prospects aren't good. I've still got to get around to arranging some arcane bank account thing. Lots of laundry needs doing, and most of what is clean needs ironing. Have been invited to a friend's wedding in October, really they're both fine people but I'd rather not. And, again, that meeting.

So if it can still go proper tits-up, preferably between now and about half-three tomorrow afternoon, I wouldn't entirely mind.

That's enough of the knockers, let's be proud

How inspiring it is that the weekend's olympic hand-over hand-job was sponsored by Visa. That's Visa, the credit card company. It's how we're going to pay for it, whack it on the plastic then next month put it on another, keep shifting it card to card, we'll be fine. Then one February HM Treasury will forget to do the necessary because it's a short month and we'll be up for late payment charges and the full sum and before you know it there'll be geezers round to take away Britain's every last lamp post, paving slab and house brick. There'll just be lots of households sitting on mud with nothing left but their 32" plasma screen tellies and SkyPlus dishes, the bailiffs can't take those away, it's the law.

The last major infrastructure project we delivered on time and under budget was the Bridge on the River Kwai. And then we had the Japanese Imperial Army providing project management services.

Never mind Paula Radcliffe exhibitionistically taking a crap for the edification of the public on the Embankment. If you want a vision of the future, take what my friend saw from the bus the other day: imagine a middle-aged balding man in a Hackett shirt and shorts using his mobile to video a kid in a knock-off Moschino t-shirt getting mauled by his own Staffie in a pool of blood outside a Favorite Fried Chicken. Forever.

Maybe you know her

She's quite small, though sturdy. Often she bumps into things, just as often is bumped into. Sometimes she breaks things without meaning to and she holds her pint glass in both hands until she gets about half-way down it.

She has our full attention, because she tells these stories so well. This one's about the last time she got dumped. She says something like:

'...she puts on this big responsible voice and I think oh, here we go.'

And she makes a facial expression that I can only describe in words as that of a person who has no choice but to be slapped very hard across the face with a large wet haddock and is trying to prepare for it as best they can.

Which is hilarious there and then, we're all pissing ourselves, and then she makes more of her ex-girlfriend's voice, hangs her head like someone getting told off, it's so funny.

Then walking home it doesn't seem so funny, in fact it's bloody tragic. If it had just been a humourless whinge I'd have forgotten all about it, but after the falling about laughing it seems so unfair, this always getting knocked over in the playground.

E.M. Forster 'The Longest Journey' (1907)

"He passed for a cultured man because he knew how to select, and he passed for an unconventional man because he did not select quite like other people. In reality he never did or said or thought one single thing that had the slightest beauty or value."

Konferenz

Part of the conference centre site is under construction, creating diversions around hoardings. The diversions are well sign-posted and curve about as if a product of intentional landscaping. Posters on the hoardings, images of the town itself, three miles distant. You are here. You are not here.

Along the pathways the human components move. Purposeful, encumbered by bags or trundling wheeled cases, alone or in groups. In the morning.

Inside the centre, the rooms, the coffee, the awful coffee. Sessions spawning break-out sessions like raiding parties into subdivided rooms, returning with flipcharts, those bloody flipcharts.

The coffee, indigestion. The flipcharts, enervation. The taxi from the airport, indifferent disorientation.

Lunchtime. Two delegates have strayed from the building and have found their way to the station. They look longingly at the shop, with its newspapers, chocolate, fruit juice, basic stationery and distress purchase items. Then they look at the OV-chipkaart gates, open for now but potentially thwarting their path to or from the shop.

Light rain outside, early dusk, the windows of the main hall indigo. Except for one on his feet, the inmates feel the drowsiness of cats. They fiddle fretfully with personal communication devices.

Then the last handouts. Feedback forms. Autumnal shower of exhausted post-it notes.

Release.

Instead of catching up on correspondence

Yesterday, Notting Hill at lunchtime, smell of charred paper in the air. Several drinks and out onto the street, it's now almost acrid. Whenever I smell this kind of smoke, wherever I am, I wonder if it's my own books that are burning.

In Hatchard's a woman with her hair fashioned into a brittle auburn helmet approaches me with a book and asks: 'Would this be suitable for my daughter?'. She must think I work there. That's okay. Were we in Waterstone's I'd be offended.

After seeing the operetta at the ENO the other day (stylish but occasionally cumbersome and overdone), rereading Candide - I recognise the tone from when I first encountered it at thirteen.

On Piccadilly, amplified noise of birdsong emanating from Fortnum's. From a distance it works as a decoy, reflected off the buildings. Closer to, screechy, aurally gaudy.

In Green Park a man in late middle age and a suit walking with a young woman who did not quite seem to be his daughter. They were walking slowly, something about them suggested that each were thinking, separately but about the same thing. Then he said: "The tragedy of it was that he loved an unconventional woman in a conventional manner."

Disturbing song lyrics: If That's Okay With You.

When I type I listen to Gay radio. Lyrically the music is short on profundity. I'm not asking for Baudelaire, in fact it would be distracting to have anything in terms of meaningful song writing. It's this or drum and bass and with that I always get temporary dyslexia after an hour or so. 

But sometimes a track comes on, and I hear the words, and I think 'Christ on a bike, that's gruesome'. This particular example, I don't know whether it's creepy or psychotic or what. The central theme is young Mr Ward's manifest politeness, but from there it gets disturbing. 

I love the way that you look without your make up 
Aw. Bless. He likes you just as you are. Best keep the warpaint off, eh. All that slap's for whores, harlots and jezebels, you know. Also, you might want to cover your hair a bit. Well, completely really. Just when you're out, where men can see you.

I had a girl before we met but we broke up
Not that he was wanting for female company, but she's out of the picture now, right? Implication being he chucked her for you, princess. No pressure mind!

There's something ’bout you that makes me want to step up, step up and be with you
He wants to step up! Aren't you flattered? So grown-up and responsible. That's a man, not a boy, right there. He'll be wanting a medal for that later.

If that's okay with you 
We're going to hear this conditional clause about two dozen times throughout the song, but the first few at least may seem endearingly sensitive and unpushy. 

And anyway: we’ll keep the neighbors awake too late too late 
So, the noise abatement order, the anti-social behaviour order, the eventual eviction by the housing association aside, the lad's going to be fun.

Also, he's going to: make you feel like you are heaven on earth
Now there's a challenge to 'step up' to: you won't just feel as if you're in heaven - you'll actually be that imaginary celestial-spiritual dimension. Can't say fairer than that.

More if-that's-okay-with-yous. Beginning to sound a tad unassertive now. Seeking reassurance. Bit needy perhaps?

Now he's either going to thank, or in some transcriptions 'saint' (what, he's the Pope?) your mother just for giving you birth. My perspective may be buttoned-up and English, but even in Latin cultures that would be considered excessive. Can you imagine how embarrassed your mum's going to be if he gets a chance to do either of those? As part of his 'stepping up' programme he's probably been pestering you for an introduction to your family, but best avoid it if I was you.

I'm gonna wanna hold you in my arms when you cry
There, just let it all out, have a good sob. No point in telling him: no, s'alright babe, I'm quite happy at the minute as it goes. He's gonna wanna, and that wannaing starts about now. Chop some onions, summon up a sad thought to get the waterworks going like actors do, just get blubbing. Before he gives you something to cry about. There, isn't that better? Is that okay with you? 

I wanna keep your toothbrush at my apartment
Or you can use his! He'd like that. He really would. 

Make a second set of keys and ask you to move in
No, really. You can have those two shelves and that half of the wardrobe. Just don't touch his collection of Battlestar Galactica action figures. Don't touch them! 

I’m not crazy, I know what I'm getting myself in, I wanna live with you, If that's ok with you
He's done his research and it's a mature decision on his part. Not impulsive or disturbingly sudden or anything. Okay? He said, is that okay? Well? Good girl. Dyson's under the stairs by the way. And don't forget fabric softener when you do his shirts.

There follows a great deal of repetition, including multiple threats to congratulate your ma and piss them at number 27 right off. Also, a bit more crying in his arms wouldn't go amiss, eh? It would be rude to refuse. 

If that's okay with you
It is, isn't it? 

If that's okay with you
He asked you a question. 

If that's okay with you
Well? 

If that's okay with you
He's got all day...

If that's okay with you If that's okay with you If that's okay with you If that's okay with you If that's okay with you.
Just say yes. Then use that second set of keys and let yourself out very quietly. Then get a restraining order. And make sure your mum's got one as well. Leave town. Change your name. 

Iedereen wil weten / Waarom ik rondloop met een grote glimlach op mijn gezicht

Talking of mental dexterity, I was in the pub with a friend the other lunchtime and that Brief History of Time bloke came up in conversation. How things had gone bad with his first wife, and one day he was sat in the garden in blazing sun, getting hotter and hotter... and she took away the thing that controlled his wheelchair. A veritable genius, baked where he sits because his missis has gone on a strop and unplugged his special mouse. I know it's not funny, but. We were in fits. Angelika and Agniewska didn't know what to make of it.

While I'm getting the next round in, a geezer turns to me and says: that Portuguese player, don't he look like a pimp's errand boy? And now he mentions it, so he does.

My heartfelt thanks to the Spaniard for putting a stop to this before it got even more embarrassing:
"...one woman spectator emitted a chilling staccato shriek that sounded like a feral cat being fed slowly into the rotating blade of a combine harvester."

Rendering unto Caesar (5)

Someone once tried to explain the exchange rate mechanism to me. They were not, for reasons all on my part, entirely successful. But I do recall, just before I lost consciousness, apprehending the concept of all the former national currencies of the Euro zone remaining potentially in existence, albeit rigidly fixed in relation to each other. So they could live again, which would be nice since I have a painful quantity of guilders, pesetas, and francs (both Belgian and French) that I never got around to spending. I thought I'd be going back one day, and in all cases I did but by then they'd changed to the Euro.

The pound and the dollar float free of the Euro of course. They're heavily laden vessels, stuffed to the gunnels with consumer debt, which you'd think would be lighter than air, but evidently not, and they sit rather lower in the water now than they used to.

Let's take a moment to consider the plight of those young people abroad who have no locally generated income, but had until recent times been comfortably supported by the parental trust fund. Now Mummy's Money doesn't translate into nearly as many Euros as before, well, it's a shame. It would make for a moving painting: in oils, large format, big enough to occupy one wall of banqueting room, depicting a column of defeated hipsters and spoilt brats with assymetrical haircuts trudging through an airport departures hall: 'The Retreat From Fredrichshain'.

I wonder if Scotland still has pound notes. As if paper currency in such a minor key were not sufficiently disorientating, they were issued by more than one bank. Imagine if Barclays, or Fortis, or North Fork, or Caixa de Catalunya took it upon themselves to start printing their own money. It's an idea you can get used to without fully understanding the parameters, so when you get seven quid in change in a pub in Leith and all the notes are in different colours, apparently rendered in felt tip, from the Bank of Drumchapel, you don't think anything of it.

The general rule is that coins are for the small stuff and paper for the big stuff. Somewhere between is a tipping point, which is the level at which a sum is no longer terribly impressive as a tip. As inflation takes its toll, paperisation applies to higher numerical units. Sometimes, due to inertia or tradition, this is slow to take place. Another indicator can be deployed here: if you have a runny nose and no tissues, but money in your wallet, would you blow your nose, without great regret at the disposal, on the smallest unit of folding currency? As I type $1 = 51p. It would get costly during the hay fever season, but as a one-off solution to a mucus emergency, you could, couldn't you? Kleenex currency!

Rendering unto Caesar (4)

Cash machines are an improvement on their predecessor, which my parents were subject to. You had to go into the bank during office hours, which was practically impossible if you actually worked. Of course if you were unemployed then you got your money by fortnightly Giro, cashed at the post office whenever you liked, much easier. Once in the bank you'd write out a withdrawal slip, or something, I can't remember how ID worked. I think you needed your cheque book. God knows. Anyway, with cash machines it's just the PIN. Now I know other people are pinning all over the place with those little keypads in shops (honestly madam, you're in Smiths buying a Now magazine and a packet of low fat cheese and onion crisps, could you not possibly use coins? just this once?). But I only seem to get money out every couple of weeks and that's a long time with the state of my memory.

It's not so much that I forget my PIN, it's that sometimes I make the mistake of trying to remember it. I did this the other day, as I was on my way out of the office. Couldn't recall it at all, I was going to be stuck at the cashpoint with an empty head, and ultimately empty pockets. My only hope was that somehow in the next five minutes the number would just pop back into my mind. But then I bumped into a former colleague while passing through reception and we had a natter, and so I forgot that I had forgotten my PIN. I only remembered that I'd forgotten once I had the money in my hand, my fingers having automatically danced the keypad choreography for me. So that's how it works. Leave it to the extremities, they know what to do.

Once I was in Wrexham. Don't ask. Anyway, while I was there I made the mistake of choosing, just for fun, the Welsh language option on the screen. I just about got through the transaction, hitting keys based on the number of syllables in each word, or randomly. I had taken a course of refreshments during the afternoon, which may actually have helped. The next time I used a cashpoint, back in London, the machine assumed I had become Welsh, and gave me instructions accordingly. And there was no means of changing it back, or if there was it was in Welsh. I had to actually go into the branch and get them to change it for me - this was the Mortimer Street NatWest, which would be accustomed to wilful cosmopolitanism, but Welsh...? I haven't been in there since and I think that branch has closed now, which is a relief.

Then she went clack-clack-clack "Lekker!" Filthy!

Digital cameras usually have a few MB of internal memory, just to tide you over, also very useful if you have to pull the SD card in a hurry because you think CRS/Guardia Civil are about grab your pointandshoot. I usually fill mine up with pictures of the telly, because the tragic lantern's surreal enough to begin with, but that goes twice if it's someone else's.

I had a landlord who was fascinated by the two dozen German channels on his Skum package who reckoned that half the stodgy discussion shows ended up with full-on HC. He must have seen one which cut away to such scenes, and had been watching them nightly for a good half-hour after his wife went to bed ever since, like an Inca waiting for another eclipse.

There certainly aren't as many interminable panel gab sessions as there used to be, but just enough to make you wonder at the strobing effect on those dreadful check jackets some of them still wear. The sheer unnatural variety of the audience: goths rousted out of their bedrooms sitting next to plump young couples from Saxony next to elderly ladies with pink streaks in their hair next to middle-aged men with daughters locked at home in their basements. Only something entirely compulsory or very popular can manage that kind of demographic spread. I'm going with the former, it must be a kind of jury service - the poor sods get a window envelope through the door that tells them they have to cancel that holiday in Antalya and do two weeks in the audience of Morgen-Dialektisch or whatever. Their only compensation being coffee made from ground roasted acorns.

The other programmes aren't much better. Scary hags doing people's horoscopes, ffs. Creepy adverts for subscriptions to GPS Handy tracking services. You can imagine the kind of sick freak who is going to sign his girlfriend's mobile up to that. Then there are the solarium bunnies doing the music video shows

Rendering unto Caesar (3)

Celebrities or politicians used to be asked if they knew the price of a pint of milk or a loaf of bread. I don't think they do it any more, probably because milk now comes in numerous different varieties and sizes. Even with added omega 3, which I thought came from fish - can you imagine a sardine milkshake? Perhaps this is popular in Portugal. And as for bread, I remember when there was just Homepride, which was plasticky and stuck to your teeth, also available in brown (same taste and consistency, just a different colour).

Anyway, they asked them that question to see how out of touch they were, since they wouldn't be doing their own shopping. I always do my own, of course I do, myself, on foot, and I pay in cash. Usually I buy a bit less than twenty quid's worth, because that's what I've got on me. I never Switch it. Which means I should know how much everything costs, because I'm keeping a running tally on the way to the checkout so as not to end up embarrassingly over cash in pocket. But I'm b------d if I can remember how much milk costs. Or eggs, they reckon they've gone up by a third in the last however long, can't say I noticed. I always get the extra large ones, if it didn't make the hen's eyes water on the way out then it's not worth cracking open.

So there's meant to be lots of inflation, but its passed me by. Beer's been costing silly money since a couple of years after I started going to pubs, so no change there. Cinema tickets are through the roof, but that's just a zone 1 thing. If you go to the UCI in Beckton you can get two seats for a double bill of, with popcorn and a Westler's hot dog thrown in, for about four shillings and thrupence-ha'penny. Or at least that's what I've heard. Most of my books come from second-hand places where you find the out of print stuff, so that's cheap. I don't think I buy much else, except for coffee beans. Clothes, they're all made in the sort of places Blue Peter used to tell us to send garments to not so long ago, so I'm glad that's sorted out. You can get a cotton shirt with genuine blood from a nine year old stitcher's mangled fingers in the seams, for about £1.75, world trade, eh, can't beat it.

Rendering unto Caesar (2)

Some years ago I lived near a charity shop with a collecting box outside, shaped like a curved funnel. You'd put your coins through a slot in the perspex lid, and they'd roll around the funnel in ever decreasing and accelerating circles! There was more than one slot, so you could send two coins around at once!! This provided literally minutes of fun for my then girlfriend and I. This was emblematic of the intense hedonism and senseless spending that characterised our relationship, but you burn out after a while, it's inevitable. By the end we were little more than charred husks. However it did get rid of surplus coins.

I read somewhere that penny and tupp'ny coins are now worth more as scrap metal than currency. So perhaps the rag and bone man might take away the four Pringles tubes full of them which are threatening the stability of the floor in the corner of my kitchen. Of course if it's possible to gradually collect these things through purchases, then it's possible to get rid of them in the same process, by handing over Exactly The Right Money. But that's far more mentally challenging and socially awkward than it is, in a very literal sense, worth.

First of all you have to carry the shrapnel about with you, giving your trouser pockets that end-of-the-evening feel, but without the associated pleasant alcoholic haze. Then you have to work out, in your hand, on the spot, at the time, Exactly The Right Money - I'm neither good with figures nor particularly dextrous, so this takes ages. Which is all very touching when a poverty-stricken geriatric is doing it insanesbury's but can hardly be indulged by the queue to the rear of a comparatively young adult. Then, having given them Exactly The Right Money you have to hover for a moment to check they concur with your estimate, which is a real moment of discomfort, I can tell you.

Now it's not just the coppers, I can't seem to shift the silver either. Fivepences were long since impossible, but I've been passively collecting ten and twenty pees for years now. That's more Pringles tubes, the requirement for which as storage for coins outstrips my own consumption of the original contents.

Not that I'm looking for sympathy. The real victims of excessive coinage are crack and smack dealers in the West End. Beacuse their customers raise almost all their funds through begging, and because donations generally arrive in pounds and fifty pees, that's what they end up with in their pockets. Even a fairly stout Avirex jacket can be pulled out of shape by a couple of hundred quid's worth of coinage stowed in the pockets. They have to go to the local banks several times a day to change all that metal into paper.

So in future the lunch hour Lady Bountifuls and One-Day-Travelcard philanthropists upon whom the Seven Dials and district narco economy ultimately relies should make it a fiver or a tenner. Or set up a direct debit. It's the least they can do.

Rendering unto Caesar (1)

Another version of this post was accompanied by pictures of unaccompanied banknotes I've encountered in public places, not exactly evidence - I could have just put the notes on the pavement myself and then photographed them in an attempt to prove to a thoroughly pointless point. You'll just have to take my word that it's naturally occuring currency. It doesn't matter anyay, and it's not mattering on the internet, so that's inconsequence squared or something.

The pointless point is that I'm intermittently assailed by money. Not stacks of it, just low denomination notes, usually singular, skittering across my path like freshly fallen leaves. Once, borne by the breeze, a crisply folded twenty came sliding up to me across Baker Street when the lights were on red, then changed direction to accompany me as I crossed the street. Abroad, when I've got my eyes open a bit wider, there's even more of it. On Vasagatan at least five ett hundra kronor notes and possibly a till receipt, all curled up, and they were still there when I passed again ten minutes later, as if only I could see them. On a Saturday morning. And as you can see above, fünf oyro all over D'land. It keeps happening, and no-one else I know seems to suffer from it.

For context:
A very good friend of mine originates from one of those countries in which it is evidently not considered indecent to enquire after another person's salary level, and resides in another nation where ditto clearly pertains. On being told, in response to close questioning, how much I earn, she cried out (I recall this verbatim, it was priceless) 'How do you live?!', sprang for her laptop and fed the figure through a currency calculator to estimate the true scale of my penury. Even allowing for the gigglesome £/$ exchange rate I was still considered a financial derelict. Since it remains the case that the part of the train or plane I travel in is dictated by whether or not I'm paying, it's fair to say I'm of modest means.

But. I can't claim to be as poor as all that. Here's a useful perspective - wouldn't it be slightly despicable for someone who does most of his food shopping at Marks or Waiters to be picking someone else's cash up off the pavement? Even if it's highly unlikely that the rightful owner will return to retrieve it, surely this stuff should waiting there for someone who actually needs it - for their next meal, or for the train fare to see a loved one, or maybe just a nice big pipe of crack? So, whoever's in charge of doling out the random dosh, pushing it all my way is inappropriate, no?

Back to the evidence above, I resolved a few years ago to take a snap of each incident of loose currency, but often conditions aren't ideal for getting the photo. For instance I couldn't get the fascinating Middle-Eastern origin banknote by the barriers at Edg Rd tube the other night because of low light. If surroundings are crowded it just leads to awkward questions, such as from the bloke who followed me up Charlotte St with a tenner I'd just captured on the memory card: "You've left this behind." "Cheers, it was there already, I just wanted a photo of it." "Yeah, but don't you want it?" "No, ta, it's not mine, just free money, anybody's eh?" [or something - I really didn't know what to say] Thing is, I can't be the only one this happens to: I reckon he didn't want it either. It probably happens to him too.

Portland Place ASBO Crew

Every morning at nine Eddie Mair has to run up to James Naughtie and John Humphrys and towel the sweat off their torsoes as they leave the Today studio. Then he has to wring the phlegm out of their foam microphone shields, without gloves. He's their fag and he has to wear scratchy grey shorts. For the rest of the day he fetches and carries for them while they make disparaging comments about him: "Hurry up bursary boy", "Are you really the future of radio news broadcasting? You'll never get on Today, we even let Sarah Montague co-present and she's a Girl' 'And Evan Davis and he's a Gay' 'we only let you work in News because our dads say we've got to be nice to you, otherwise you'd be with all the other oiks at Radio Five', 'Yeah, one word from us and you'd be going to Manchester with all the other white socks'. Sometimes they get together with Robert Robinson and play the Soggy Biscuit Game together - the difference being that it's boy Mair who has to eat the marinated McVitie, just before he goes on air at teatime.

It isn't only young Eddie that gets it. J and J are always beating up the You and Yours team in the corridors, they can get a lot of punches and kicks in the five minutes before the World at One. Then they sneak into Martha Kearney's empty office and sniff her cycle shorts, etc. They're pretty much out of control: just in the last week they swapped Peter White's guide dog for a dead sheep, threw Andrew Marr's briefcase on top of a bus shelter, and set fire to Melvyn Bragg's hair in seventeen different places. They bully Mark Lawson something chronic, they don't hit him, but just say: 'Mariella Frostrup, she's your mum', and he always bursts into tears. Those drawings of Sue MacGregor on the wall of the third floor gents were definitely Humphrys' doing, as he got pastels for Christmas and only he would reference Courbet's 'L'Origine du Monde' like that. And the one in pencil of Kate Adie above the urinal, you can tell from the cross-hatch shading under her left one that it's Naughtie's work. Everyone knows it was them who vandalised Nicolas Parsons that time. All the From Our Own Correspondent journalists are broadcasters who willingly took a posting in countries that smell awful just to get away from them. They wouldn't be getting away with it if Brian Redhead was still in charge...

Radio 4 Cage Fighting

Children are vicious creatures - give them too much access to nature and inevitably they end up putting diverse insects in a glass jar to see if they'll fight.

It's in the same spirit that this occured to me today: if you put Jenni Murray and Libby Purves alone in a studio together, would it kick off? I reckon it would. It couldn't not.

They'd start off all Jenni being jolly and Libby being vivacious, but pretty soon, well within the standard twenty-four minute segment, the mask of professionalism would slip and it's titan versus titan, no rules, just total hardcore fighting. Seen from the producer's side of the glass partition it would just be a wall of red. Then the victor would stagger out into the corridor, waving a limb wrenched from the corpse of the vanquished.

'Jules et Jim', Francois Truffaut, 1961

A film, like a book, has in some way succeeded if it gets you worked up about the fate and the actions of the characters - even (or especially) if you suspect that director and author have sympathies contrary to your own. For my money, with 'Jules et Jim' Francois Truffaut and Henri-Pierre Roché did both.

In Roché's 1953 novel Jim and Jules' friendship is a delight. A celebration of male companionship, at one point separated by war but meant always to be in some way together. We don't see many portrayals of such relationships now. Truffaut's 1961 film is true to this, their togetherness charming and real. This is a doomed idyll.

In neither version is Catherine a femme fatale or ogress. No lazy caricature or misogynist's cipher. Thoroughly human, but more difficult to reach than either of the men. Their love for her, prompted by her likeness to a certain Greek sculpture, is inexplicable and sometimes you have to take the author's word. Her indulgences and unhappiness, the acting out, the infantile revenges - yes, it's freedom, and oh how they lived, but look at the cost: Jules and Jim forever parted and two lives cut short, decades of experience and enjoyment that will never take place.

But, and I think Truffaut manages this better in his film than Roché in his book, there's no blame to be attributed and grudgingly I'd agree: the actions of the characters couldn't be reined in without constricting their vitality, and no-one can be called to account for living.

Perhaps it's a French thing, this impetuous emotion-to-action, the respect for passion. Possibly also you have to be able to relate to Catherine, and some people can. But I'd be wary of getting into a car with them.

'Jules et Jim', in a restored (if dark) print, is on at the NFT all the way through June, and given the weather there are no excuses for not seeing it.

Andre Gide, 'Isabelle', 1911

I can hardly understand nowadays the impatience with which I then flung myself upon life. At twenty-five years of age I knew almost nothing of it except from books; and that no doubt is why I thought myself a novelist; for I had not as yet realised how cunningly and maliciously events conceal from us just that part of themselves most likely to interest us, and how slight a handle they offer the man who is incapable of wresting their secret from them by force.

Can you hear us out at Rond-Point Schumann?

Extract from the noise map produced by the Department for Environment, Food and Country Matters, published in compliance with Directive 2002/49/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 25 June 2002 relating to the assessment and management of environmental noise.

Where's the noise? Obv I can't say exactly where I am on here, but sometimes on my plot it's beyond pink, it's purple.

It's mostly road noise here, which should pull in the diesel-clattering cabs, the Onyx dustcarts, the disco-boy from the UAE in the no-silencer concept car and it might even pick up his chassis ripping sparks off the Tarmac.

But I'll bet they're not getting the slamming doors, the rubbish lorry a-mashing and a-compacting, Emirates lad's stereo blasting out Fedde le Grand and ya habibi this and that all night and doing a tight circuit like a kid what's borrowed another kid's new Grifter.

I'm not seeing all kinds of oi-oi-oi from the Duke when there's a private on and the big girls' karryokey I will survive. Arguments in Mandarin at four in the morning after they lost it all at the Grosvenor. Gulf families in the summer coming back from the restaurants and loading into tint-windowed 12 seaters.

What about all the I-was-like-and-he-was-like-and-she-was-like-and-we-were-like-and-they-were-like-awesome! from the Episcopalian kids from the short-stay flats at the end off to do something healthy at the Seymour, geezers loading up on breakfasts at the cafe on the corner, her next door Ona chuck the keys down yeah!, 50% of a million mobi convos, the off-her-head woman in the blue cardi most mornings Where were you Lord, when I needed you, where were you?

And next door at the back shagging all afternoon with the windows open fit to break the bed but at least it's not for money which makes a change at that address, also one or other of the test-tube brats blowing it on the clarinet or hurting a violin badly in the single occupancy dwelling diagonally opposite, not to mention the Togolese Embassy having a function, and the French couple having a barney in that basement of theirs Tu fait me merde egoiste!

Cop helicopter, air ambulance, sirens on and off and especially when they've got terror suspects round at Paddington Green, also planes on the last chance to dog-leg into the Heathrow descent path or taken off and climbing over Stanmore at least but the sound still reaches here from the part of the sky the jet was in a little bit ago.

Not that I'm complaining, it's my sunshine, you'll never know just how much I love you 'til you've taken my sunshine away. La-la-la-la-la ooh!

should see my navel, other people get fluff, I've got Tesco trolleys, dead dogs, burnt out cars...

Hate it when I get an idea that I can't make a story out of. The damn thing just goes scurrying around in my head getting nowhere, like a problem that's irrelevant but nevertheless cries out to be addressed. This is my excuse for forgetting to pay the leccy bill, for instance.

So there's a person, and let's stick them right in the thick of responsibility: person has a spouse and kids. And there's work, which is unavoidable, and that takes the most part of person's waking life, and spouse and kids, love 'em dearly, they get the rest, of course they do. But there's other things person would like to do as well, and no time. Nothing spectacular, nor detrimental to spouse or kids. Just, I dunno, watercolours, reading, volunteer work, sitting in the park doing nish, watching daytime telly even, why not?

Let's say person comes into some money, therefore making work avoidable. Not a gigantic stack, just enough to replicate person's salary adjusted for inflation and career progression from now until retirement.

Now it gets a bit difficult: where does the money come from? If it's a lottery win then even if person pulled the price of the ticket straight from his/her pay cheque, that salary was assumed part of the family resources, therefore spending the resultant lottery win is to be decided by the family. Okay, let's try some kind of inheritance - still liable to the presumption that it should be declared and shared at the breakfast table, but less clearly so. Or maybe generous compensation for a non-debilitating injury (though awkward to keep concealed).

Anyway, person can now buy time to do the other things s/he wants, but only by the deceit of pretending to go to work. This lie should sit at the heart of the rest of the story. It's something fundamental. Ongoing tension and plot progression opportunities over whether person will be found out. Simmering moral dilemma over whether person is being greedy by pulling all of the benefit to person's self, a great big full-time employment sized lump of freedom while spouse is still enslaved. Or whether it's perfectly okay because from some perspectives it's person's money anyway and family are getting the benefit as person is still pumping salary equivalent into the pot and person's a lot happier now and more fun to be around?

But I'm never going to get as far as this, because I can't think of a way of getting this far into the story without declaring person's gender. Or if I do it's going to be so conspicuous by absence that the reader will have the varying notions of how this plays according to gender well in mind anyway. Or they'll have assigned a gender to person based on their own interpretations of person's behaviour. There'll be notions of the duties of father and husband, of mother and wife, put through filters of tradition, societal expectations, and reappraisals of these, etc. Not to mention the reader's own lived experience. Can't blame them for that, we'd all do it.

And all of that will distract from the universal, non-gendered elements of the dilemma, slanting the reader's handling of it one way, or the other, or just throwing in so many slants it all gets lost in any case.

So I can't do it. But if I could I probably would have done in fewer words than I've expended above.

None of this gets me out of finding my chequebook to pay Electricite de France their quarterly bite, which I wouldn't even have to do if I'd got around to setting up a direct debit, but I probably got distracted the last few times I remembered it.

Just wait until Steve Bell hears about this...

So everyone's sending this link around, we're all having a right grinning session, but has anyone given a thought to what it's like for the poor little sod?

As the article suggests, the sex life of the king penguin is pretty vanilla, so imagine how it feels after all that. Now, I know that scientists and wildlife photographers are bound by ethical codes which require them never to intervene, so as not to upset the natural order of things. Normally, fair dos. But fuxake. I'd have been off across the rocks and giving that big bastard what for with the plug end of an extension lead or whatever until he desisted.

No, I'm not going to leave it there. I'm sorry, forty-five minutes, someone's got to step in and sort it out. It's a bit more than a misunderstanding on a bad date. And all the excuses they're making "...frustrated, sexually inexperienced..." "...the incident may have arisen because the seal was "play-mating"." Oh, that's all right then. "It was most certainly a once-off..." Won't happen again, your honour. No, it's wrong.

LINK

'Happy-go-Lucky', Mike Leigh, 2008

London, the present. Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is an exuberant thirty-year old primary school teacher sharing a rented flat with a friend. She enjoys trampolining, flamenco and cycling, until her bicycle is stolen. This event leads her to driving lessons and a series of encounters with an unstable driving instructor (Eddie Marsan)that eventually reveal Poppy to be more clear-headed than she purports to be. Along the way, Poppy's life is compared with that of her two sisters, and the expectations of contemporary society.

Often film-makers lose their character over time. Woody Allen for instance, once a strong flavour, now makes highly competent yet dissappointingly bland films. Sometimes they clearly don't: Kevin Lynch, say. Mike Leigh falls into the latter category.

In 'Vera Drake' and 'Secrets and Lies' Leigh reigned himself in, or at least compartmentalised his weakness for caricature. You could still spot his traits in there but they didn't grate so much as to interfere. After all, I only saw the resemblance between Imelda Staunton's Vera and Beatrix Potter's Mrs Tiggywinkle when it was pointed out to me.

In 'Happy-go-Lucky' he has let himself go, the first hour being the film equivalent of a self-indulgent guitar solo. The Mike Leigh cliches come fast and thick, all piling up in the perception: the female characters are his dolls, dressed as loons, speaking nasally through pursed lips. All that Camden Market schmutter and pastiches of Katrin Cartlidge ('Naked', 1993) gets pretty wearing. With the quirkiness dial turned all the way clockwise, it's a profoundly irritating advert for positivity. As a cartoon, fine, but with real people on the screen it resembles clumsy and over-saturated satire.

But there are some good scenes. So good they pay back the price of the ticket (£12 at my local Curzon ffs), but then induce despair at the rest of the film by comparison.

The flamenco teacher, another cliche but an engaging one, a performance rather than a collection of tics.

The social worker, and the scene in which he first appears, seem to have arrived from the set next door. Perhaps it's a swap and there's a complete buffoon somewhere in the next Ken Loach flick. Such a genuine, human, likeable fellow, surrounded by clowns.

The scenes with the driving instructor (in Vera Drake Marsan was a cowering shuffling introvert) had some depth - somewhere in there was a convincing portrayal of an everyday racist, the angry yelling motorist, the creepy stalker, the paranoid conspiracy theorist. In response to his worst onslaught Poppy suddenly becomes an adult, a credible human being, with the depth of character to properly engage with him.

The underlying premise of the film is appealing: a person genuinely happy in her own life and true to herself. Proof that one can live outside the mortgage-marriage-babies consensus, without needing to reside in a teepee. There's a film to be made about this, to show the reality of all those people happy as they are, regardless of the Sunday supplement template. Or a book to be written, several songs to be sung. And 'Happy-go-Lucky' sort of did it. If only there hadn't been all that primary coloured eyeshadow, bangles, and yelping.

1 Mai

Time was when the first of May wasn't just for elections. Helicopters, W1 one continuous jam sandwich ribbon of personnel carriers, Bond Street a solid curtain of chipboard. Ah, thems were the days.

You could say the Public Order Act did for Mayday, in the powers it provides to the police to impose conditions on public processions and assemblies. By enabling a mechanistic tactic it arguably did. But I think what really killed Mayday was love.

Here was the dilemma: centrally, the police had become adept at strategy, using the 'Gold Control' model of central co-ordination, with some degree of autonomy for commanding officers in the field. But this amount of operational flexibility was nothing compared to that available to the protesters. The police communication chain still has a great deal of latency, often leaving significant numbers of officers deployed in locations that have gone cold, or worse for the individual cops concerned, unable to leave a situation of physical danger for want of an order to retreat. The protesters in theory could do just about anything, running in all directions, dispersing on foot and cycle or such public transport as still running, 'like so many infernals'. Being mostly anarchists they should have done. But they failed to, um, sorry, capitalise on this advantage.

Instead, almost as if in sympathy with the cumbersome organisation of their opponents, they grouped together, soldified, hung around for just about however long it took to get a cordon in place. And they did this time and time again.

Known as the kettle' or 'the bubble', the containment approach could only be achieved with large numbers of officers, though once in place it did not necessarily need as many guards as detainees. Having identified the gathering, officers with short shields, several rows deep and often with vans behind them would encircle from all sides and form a cage for the entire group. It was also remarkably 'safe' in that though it led to a frustrated crowd, it was a practically impotent one. The trick then was to hold the crowd until it became exhausted and dispirited. Then, late in the day, the contents would be allowed out one by one, making it likelier that the individuals and small groups would go home rather than simply reform elsewhere.

You could see it forming from outside, you could see it coming from inside. A person would have to have been deeply unobservant not to see the impending penning action. For many within the cordon there has to have been some collusion, some voluntary aspect.

There's something in child psychology that identifies acting up behaviour and testing of boundaries as a means of extracting actions and proof of parental love. The kid's objective is not the misdeed, but the punishment itself, and the reassurance that provides.

So obvious, the connotations of an authority figure, arbiter of right and wrong, and enabled (by legislation) to administer a kind of punishment on the spot in the form of restriction and act in loco parentis. The human consistency of the cordon. It encloses rather than disperses. It is like a big hug. Like children seeking a demonstration of parental caring, the protesters sought out and provoked that stricture, writhing within the embrace the better to feel its comforting strength.

Tomorrow I will explain why the Transport for London headquarters at St James's Park is essentially phallic and represents the father, and how New Scotland Yard just opposite is a maternal structure, and how fare-dodging is therefore an act of such intensely Freudian import that I wouldn't sit down on a bendy-bus even if I could find a seat.

Berlin - They don't have natural rhythm, that's a fact

I've seen some incubator enclaves. The nanny-congested vale between Clapham Junction and almost (but never quite) Balham, the IVF twins and triplets attended by geriatric face-lifted parents in Tribeca, the convoys of infants propelled triumphantly in cycle-trailers through Islands Brygge and Nørrebro. I've witnessed evidence of some pretty heavy localised breeding. I was told about Prenzlauer Berg... but blimey, they weren't joking, or even exaggerating for effect.

I wondered if I'd even get into the district without accompaniment by offspring. Had my excuses ready ('What can I say, I'm a Jaffa, feel sorry for me', etc), but there was no checkpoint at Tor Straße to keep out the unprocreative. This isn't to say that progress was unimpeded, for the pavements were alive with pushchairs, in fact the upper reaches of Schönhauser Allee were practically gridlocked with the things. Great pantechnicons of baby carriages, conducted forward with the assurance and sense of entitlement of an eighteen-wheeler with a Brinks driver.

Strange to see so many parents looking after their own children. I don't know what it's like in your part of the world, but round my way it's practically illegal for childcare to take precedence over one's duty to the workplace. What about the 'Hardworking Families' beloved of our politicians? The Economy! Won't Someone Please Think of the Economy!

Great kinder-columns form up out of nowhere and descend upon the local S- and U-bahn without warning. While British children are simply turfed out into the playground for twenty minutes every morning, each German infant is guaranteed at least one bout of terrorising public transport by sheer weight of numbers somewhere in the school day. There are so many of these chains of brightly coloured children that isn't uncommon to see one cohort halted on the pavement to let another pass, like trains at a junction. Even more remarkable, I saw one large group supervised solely by men. Men! No women about at all. Social Services'd be onto that like a shot back here. Also, so many children all the same colour.

The youth of eastern Berlin are so Weiß, they play Wagner on their Handys. Nah, it was death metal or something, but at first it's quite surreal (if not as deeply disorientating as the stairs being on the 'wrong' side of their double deck buses) to hear music by white people on that medium. This enables a comparison based upon which I can say that, forced through the tiny speaker of a Nokia 90210 or an Ericsson C3PO, whether in Harlesden or Hellersdorf, all music sounds sh-t. Which is presumably why the little sh-ts / Scheißen do it.

Peripheral note:
There are compelling arguments for and against several pluralisations of the word 'Handy', in the context of text that is otherwise English. I have chosen from these using the formula specifically developed by linguists for such circumstances (eeny meeny miny mo) and will not enter into correspondence on the subject.

Where did they get the name 'Handy' anyway? Makes the phone sound like an san-pro item, easily and discreetly toted around in the handbag. 'Mobile' has resonance of something developed to give hours of fascination to infants, which is appropriate. 'Cell' just sounds like a means of communication between prisoners, replacing the banging on the water pipe with a tin cup.

The French 'Portable', already fading from currency, brings to my mind's eye something the size of a house brick, and a Gallic yuppie (it is to the credit of Gaul that this is a contradiction in terms), yelping 'vendre!' into it. Or more appropriately 'Vendre pas, la bourse descende vite, mais c'est la double-heure de dejuner, et travail arret' (again, I shall not enter into correspondence).

الزرافة

The poor thing, it was waiting for me at the London Central parcels depot on the far side of Camden, the northernmost extremity of St Pancras. Three times on successive days, the Royal Mail had conveyed it about London, to my doorstep, and back to storage. It must have wondered why it wasn't being received, why I was never at home to Mr/Ms Giraffe. A beast of shorter stature might have felt slighted.

Luckily my fleeting guest did not take it at all amiss, or at least I reckon its silence was more a symptom of shyness than reproach. To make amends I pointed out the sights along the way, rather hoping it had not seen it all before on its Parcelforce tours. I think it enjoyed the sensation of the Euston Road underpass (I know I did - the buses don't go that way). The most direct route would have been across the Regent's Park, but I thought the prison-like structure at the Primrose Hill end might be tricky to explain, and potentially traumatic for the creature.

Normally I know what to do with a visitor - several pints in the Duke or the Windsor, then Garbo's or Maroush or Pont des Indes or that Persian place whose name I can never remember. It should certainly have cosmopolitan tastes by now, having originated in Madagascar, domiciled for some time in that slightly ineffectual but worthy institution at the eastern end of 42nd St., so by definition exposed to all shades of culture, then to the LES for a period... But what may amuse a human may not impress a giraffe. Had intended to read to it, but haven't any Kipling in the house. I think it appreciated an early night - and its travelling accommodation was well-appointed, containing reading matter from the Wall Street Journal, and bubble wrap for the relief of stress, so need for me to give up my bed.

Now it is in its rightful home, albeit SW5 rather than the Sudan. I'm sure it will thrive.

Youth is not always wasted on the young

“The sight of some three hundred dancing people thrashing about was absolutely horrid. No one can describe the dancing because no one danced normally. Indeed, this was the naughtiest of Swing dancing that can be imagined. Sometimes two boys danced with one juvenile girl, and at other times several couples locked themselves into a mass embrace and just hopped around. Many couples hopped together while holding hands and bent over wildly, so that their long hair flew across their faces and whipped their thighs as they spun. You had to worry about the sanity of some of them. The scenes that happened on the dance floor were fit for a lunatic asylum. Even the most hysterical and primitive Black jungle warrior war-dance would have paled in comparison to what happened here. Everyone jumped about like crazy while they mumbled English musical gibberish. The Band increased the tempo faster by the minute. No member of the band was sitting, because they were all getting hotter and wilder as they also succumbed to the jungle beat on the stage. You often saw boys dancing together with other boys, always with two cigarettes dangling from each corner of the mouth.”

Red Corp

As long as they don't use monkeys

Reviewing books, there's a thankless task, no-one will like you for it. Authors will usually clench up and get all defensive, brooding and tending grudges in perpetuity. It's a small world, and most book reviewers are also authors, who usually only do it because they need the money. They really need the money. So they get dirty and the rest of us stay clean. Because we need someone to do it for us, as we can't always rely on word of mouth.

Our friends can't always do it for us. Often as not they have different tastes in books, or may not like books at all. They do incomprehensible things like riding horses or watching telly or surfing or getting married or playing video games. There's a line in a Turin Brakes song: '...my friends are all junkies / but they're still my friends...' It's like that. That saying: 'you can choose your friends but not your enemies': nonsense, it's much more the other way about. And why would you want to choose your friends, anyway? Might as well presume to choose your parents. Your friends happen and they happen to you and you think about them and sometimes you worry about them and you look forward to seeing them and you're happy when you do, usually, and that's how it is. Isn't it?

How did I get onto this subject? Book reviews. Thought I'd something more to say about that before I got distracted, but perhaps not.

I'm blaming Andrex

In office discourse one encounters an awful lot of cliches, which can be sectoral, or shared in common with many other workplaces of like character. This use of metaphor and similie seeks to ease the passage of the banal, but is as much likely to be a means of expressing belonging and accordance with one's fellow creatures in the burrow.

My own organisation has practically colonised use of the phrase 'Going Forward' (to describe activity taking place from a point somewhere around nowish to some time in the future). That term originated, in this incarnation, in football (or soccerball, or whatever you want to call it), to describe either the movement of the team in possession of the ball towards or into the opposing team's half of the field, or more specifically that of a player normally in a defensive position taking on a role that sees him moving beyond that position to some effect. Alien terms such as 'ballparks' and 'plates' (for 'stepping up to') occasionally creep in and are hereabouts considered vulgar among the sensitive - however this being an office there is a mix of both vulgar and sensitive and the former predominate.

The most distressing aspect of these cliches is that, like any language one is ambiently exposed to, there's such a temptation to use them. Best to invent your own, but after a lengthy afternoon of doing little but try the best I can manage is 'Squeezing the Puppy'. This refers generically to those actions or utterances that are difficult to resist but damaging when permitted: all the examples of this that come to mind are offensive so I shan't give them here. The term originates of course in the sensation of holding or supporting a puppy in one's ungloved hands.

This not to say that I'm in the habit of squeezing puppies. Anyone who has ever held a puppy in their bare hands will agree that ethically the squeezing thing is a high contrast, monochromatic concept. It is not morally nourishing. Sensual urges are one thing, squeezed puppies another. A young dog, cute, defenceless, possessed of large trusting eyes, downy fur and an unreliable bladder, may invite some excess of pressure between the palms, but go too far and the puppy stays squoze and and cannot be unsqueezed. It swiftly loses some of its functionality as a puppy, and ain't half as tempting to squeeze on future occasions.

Far better to squeeze all one's puppies figuratively, for instance by [deleted as offensive], or [that as well]. I don't think it will catch on as a cliche, nor, I hope, as a practice.

I love the smell of red Reuters screens in the morning

You know how sometimes you walk into a room and realise you've forgotten what you came in there for? And you think if you go back into the previous room you'll somehow remember, but usually you don't.

I think it's like that on the internet, and then you hit the back button on your browser and you can't see anything on the previous page that reminds you but you've lost everything you've typed in the process.

And this happens more often than it used to, back in real life. You wonder how many really good, or fun, or useful ideas you had that got forgotten between the bathroom and the kitchen and never came back.

Unless you somehow remember them when things have changed and you're too old and it's too late.

When you eat no-one else does But you always wonder why

One of my colleagues has taken to bringing in soup. He makes it himself, which is all terribly laudable, etc. But sometimes I'm just not out of the door quickly enough when I hear the microwave oven bell ping.

It's that great menu oxymoron, The Delicious Vegetarian Alternative. In trying to make an interesting dish out of ingredients that are all flora and no fauna, desperate measures have been resorted to. Odd and ill-advised combinations of spices have been applied. The resulting concoction suggests to the nose nothing like that which is to be eaten and very much akin to something that has already been eaten and wisely and swiftly rejected by the stomach of its consumer. Let me state this plainly. It smells like last night's vomit, captured in a bowl on egress and reheated on full power for 90 seconds.

(Title: Kirsty MacColl - Innocence)

'If it wasn't spring this would be just dandy. But - not bad anyway.'

"On this Sunday morning in May, this girl who later was to be the cause of a sensation in New York awoke much too early for her night before."

There's a point in 'BUtterfield 8', in fact the instant it's clear that Gloria will be boarding that boat, it's obvious what's going to happen. It doesn't have to happen, does it? But it's so horribly inevitable, not just for the story but the convention of all these stories. By accident and judgemental fate or by their own hand (penance) or another's.

It's not just the punitive element, perhaps something worse, that this always has to happen for the story to end.

John O'Hara seemed to me inconsistent in tone and prone to tangent, but I liked that, could relate. Flaws are good. I thought that he might be different.

I wonder how it works in the film.

People I worry about

Every relative, including those I don't like. Any of the colleagues I care about and several I like to think I don't. Blind people seen from the other side of the street. The Iranian guy at St Mary's. Someone with more luggage than they can comfortably handle. The girl in the donkey jacket and 101 Dalmatians pyjamas on the Piccadilly line last night. Celebrities gradually killing themselves. Anyone I've slept with. Those doing military service. Persons having difficulty breathing.

Victoria - Bow Church

On the bus earlier, flash memory of childhood as it took the sharp turn from Piccadilly into Stratton Street. It was the view from the front window that did it, reminding me of the illusion I enjoyed as a kid, sitting at the front of the bus but lower in my seat then than now, the cars coming in the other direction seeming to disappear beneath vehicle. I used to think: 'We're eating up the cars'. Of course now it was people, the 8s pulling left always take a few by surprise and now that I'm older I'm very slightly holding my breath and hoping no-one will go under, though they never do. It's as irrational as an infant thought.

.

A piece on the radio yesterday about the Bethnal Green tube station disaster. Reminded me of something I was told by an old bloke from Bermondsey, a colleague working past pension age. He said where he lived people weren't so bothered about the air raid siren and noise of planes overhead as they were about the anti-aircraft fire. Regardless of whether they hit anything, the artillery shells would fall back to earth as hot heavy shards of metal, capable of causing anything from injury to death. He said something like: 'You didn't want to get caught out in it!', as if it were a shower of rain.

Then much later I read a piece in the New Yorker archive, written by their correspondent in London during the Blitz. I think most of the columns were about shortages of dress material, but this one mentioned the Bethnal Green incident and ascribed the panic to fear of falling shell fragments.


No mention of the flak in yesterday's news item, but perhaps it's been forgotten.

Everybody's lyin' and skivin' and dyin'

Around Shepherd Market, down Curzon Street and several other places on my way home, some attractive new varieties of outdoor heater. Rather than the orange glow reminiscent of an early January morning in a station waiting room, a gas flame leaping yellow. The first I thought was an installation with that silk-like material that represents fire, but encountered closer it was real and beautiful and warm.

There is a part of England for which there is no positional reference point, being neither North, nor Midlands, nor East. A flat land awaiting rightful return to its proper status of seabed. A few days ago it was the epicentre of a small earth tremor: locally numerous acts of habitual incest were disrupted, and habitations damaged to the cost of literally dozens of pounds.

I'm due to fly from Heathrow's T5 just a week after its opening. Of course it will all fall apart in a farce of faulty software and things getting stuck or breaking off, so that by the time I arrive the accumulated passengers will form a vast refugee camp surrounding the terminal building, huddled around burning stacks of mis-sorted luggage in the freezing Spring rain. The first cases of typhoid and cholera should just be breaking out.

.

'On the 100th anniversary of his birth a lot of tosh being talked about Auden as poet of Cumbria. Auden couldn't have inhabited his ideal landscape, however nurturing he found the idea of it. Everything about him was urban. He wanted opera, libraries, restaurants, rent boys - all the appurtenances of civilisation. You don't find them in Penrith.'
From Alan Bennett's 2007 diary, published in the London Review of Books, 3 January 2008.

'Alan Bennett may be right about the dearth of rent boys in Penrith, but he's wrong about libraries: there's a good one right by the church.'
Reader's letter printed in the London Review of Books, 24 January 2008

'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'

Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), dandy and editor of 'Elle' magazine, suffers a stroke and is almost entirely paralysed as a result, his doctor using the English term: 'locked-in syndrome' to describe the condition. We first, and often thereafter, see the world from the patient's perspective, blurred and confusing. One of his eyelids is sewn shut and we see that too. It's a long time before we properly see his twisted face.

Jean-Do's only available means of expression is by blinking his left eye. But we also hear his internal monologue, with a dry wit that's a relief to the viewer. Occasionally his over-avuncular doctor appears to diagnose his condition, but for the most part he is in the hands of women: Henriette (Marie-Josée Croze) who teaches him to communicate, Marie (Olatz Lopez Garmendia) his physiotherapist, Céline (Emmanuelle Seigner) his former partner and mother of his children, and Claude (Anne Consigny) to whom he dictates his account of the experience.

Using a list of letters and eye blinks, Henriette teaches Jean-Do to 'speak', it isn't an easy task and to begin with he isn't an easy pupil. Even when both parties are adept, it's a slow process, more tortuous than composing a text message if that's possible.

Throughout there's a real sense of his incapacity: the television in his room left on overnight emitting the monotone high-pitched tone that accompanies the test card and prevents sleep, the fly on his nose that causes him to move his head for the first time. In his helplessness, Jean-Do is at the mercy of women, and occasionally there's a hint of his fear - yet they are generally very good to him, including Céline, who may have some cause to be vengeful. The worst he experiences at their hands is a visit to church conducted by the devout Marie - Jean-Do recalls a visit to Lourdes with a girlfriend who installed a performance-thwarting illuminated Madonna in their hotel room.

As well as his paralysis there is the awkwardness others feel, but they quickly adjust: his children recognise him as their father, his friend Laurent (Isaach De Bankolé) reads to him from The Count of Monte Cristo. People find ways to connect.

The scenes of conversation with characters who are elsewhere, via telephone and an interpreter, are the most painful. Jean-Do found it difficult enough to communicate with his elderly father (Max von Sydow) before, but now it's near impossible, frustrating them both. The scene in which Céline has to translate for a call from Jean-Do's mistress, is agonising.

It's a film about communication, and about what people can do to people and what people can do for people.

'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly' (Le Scaphandre et le papillon) Dir: Julien Schnabel (2007)
http://www.allocine.fr/film/fichefilm_gen_cfilm=119032.html


Marie and Henriette


Claude


Céline


Jean-Dominique Bauby (in flashback)

Bratislava

Crossing the border, the countryside didn't change. Terrifying bleak forest, mistletoe clumps in the trees like nests of some big malignant bird, grey vegetation, frozen ditches. The landscape was the same, but the use of it altered: shacks and knackered livestock compounds. I'm not much for the sticks, it's in the username, but this was something worse. It was all broken down, and horribly thriving. On the outskirts of the city there was a Tesco.

Walking down the approach from the Hlavná station reminded me of arriving in a northern town on a Saturday lunchtime in the dead hour before the football special and the police escort. Remains of benches with the wooden slats missing, cow shed shelters, wheezing buses almost as old as me. Like Barnsley not long after the miners' strike.

Obchodná was like a street my subconscious had invented in a dream, nothing especially surreal about it, but the mix was all off. I can't explain how. Walking down it I got slight tingles, the buzzy-dizzy feeling that deja vu causes, but I'd never been there before.

.

What do you like doing best in the world, Pooh?"
"Well," said Pooh, "what I like best?" and then he had to stop and think. Because although Eating Honey was a very good thing to do, there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn't know what it was called. And then he thought that being with Christopher Robin was a very good thing to do, and having Piglet near was a very friendly thing to have: and so, when he had thought it all out, he said, "What I like best in the whole world is Me and Piglet going to see You, and You saying 'What about a little something?' and Me saying,' Well, I shouldn't mind a little something, should you, Piglet,' and it being a hummy sort of day outside, and birds singing."
"I like that too," said Christopher Robin, "but what I like doing best is Nothing."
"How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.
"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it 'What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?' and you say 'Oh, nothing,' and then you go and do it."
"Oh, I see," said Pooh.
"This is a nothing sort of thing that we're doing now."
"Oh, I see," said Pooh again.
"It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
"Oh!" said Pooh.

[...]

Then, suddenly again, Christopher Robin, who was Still looking at the world with his chin in his hands, called out "Pooh!"
"Yes?" said Pooh.
"When I'm--when-- Pooh!"
"Yes, Christopher Robin?"
"I'm not going to do Nothing any more."
"Never again?"
"Well, not so much. They don't let you."

A.A. Milne, 'The House at Pooh Corner' (1928)