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.