I heard a programme on the Radio 4 recently about humiliation. It told the story of a boy who grew up poor. His mum had found a fabulous jacket in a jumble sale, which the boy adored. All his friends wanted to know where he'd got it, so he'd made up a story about a rich uncle in the States. Then one day, fetching a ball from neighbouring flats, a kid shouted out why's that boy wearing my jacket? The kid's mother yelled back that she'd donated it to a [...]
I’ve owned a car since 1988 – not the same one, but not that many. I’m on my third. In those thirty years, I've never taken it into a car wash. Which means that I have mostly been driving a dustbin. Things accumulate. Plastic bags, pens, shopping lists, CDs without covers, bits of mud, grass, crumbs. How do those crumbs get there? I hardly ever use the car, much less eat in it. Never, in thirty years, until today. I've just treated myself to a valet. It’s the best feeling. [...]
Something bad happens and before you’ve even thought of picking yourself up a ton of disasters tumble down on top of the first, as if they’ve been waiting round the corner for the go ahead. Recognise that? Shakespeare (of course) summed it up nicely: When sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions. Indeed they jolly well do. It’s as if the Universe is … well … taking the piss. If you found yourself in the pub with the Universe, you’d give it a wide berth on the grounds that [...]
I am on a trip down the west coast of the US, taking in a few large cities and some smaller places. It’s easy coming to the States, apart from the money. Or not so much the money, but the tick I’ve developed whereby I can’t help comparing the notes to Monopoly. It’s boring for anyone in the vicinity and I’m dealing with it. The language is by and large the same; the culture is familiar from films and TV; America’s political news was the world’s news even before Trump [...]
Last night I went to the wrong film. A lapse of concentration at the ticket office meant that I saw a film call Won’t You Be My Neighbour instead of Three Identical Strangers. Kind of linked in broad idea, I guess, (if I am being kind to myself). Both documentaries, so at least the same genre. It's not as if I set of to see PS I love you and ended up in Mad Max Fury Road. I realised the mistake about ten minutes in. I felt disappointment and a [...]
A few years ago my sister gave me Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth. I started reading it, thought it was pretty interesting, and got about half way through. About a week ago, his name having come up again in a number of important conversations, I picked it up again. This time I couldn’t put the book down. If I were to go against the rule I set myself in the last post, I’d make some trite comment that sometimes things arrive at a time when you can’t really process them, [...]
Since I lost all my previous blog posts, I’ve been having difficulty building the stock up. I’m stuck. They call this writers’ block, that’s the generic name anyway. The specific problem goes something like this: I have a small idea, something that’s occurred to me during the day. I start to write about it and then I get to the part where I have to bring it all together and wrap it up with some kind of pithy observation. Then I dry up, banality getting the better of me. I [...]
I am proud of my excellent memory. I know exactly what people said, what they wore, how the behaved, years back. No one queries it, which is how I know I’m right. I am currently visiting the apartment in Aix en Provence that I first visited as a fifteen year old. It’s not unusual to visit places you came to as a child, often you visit periodically over your life. I guess it’s slightly less usual to have had a forty year gap. Several things have struck me. First, I’d [...]
I lost my website a fortnight ago. It was my fault. I ignored an email that looked quite boring. It was from the hosting company, referring to something I didn’t recognise and asking me to update my card details, in itself a tedious task. I hadn’t kept a copy of the website (though I managed to retrieve bits of pieces of it). I especially hadn’t kept copies of the blog posts. I drafted them straight onto the site. There are so many morals from this sorry story that I hardly [...]
