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A few months back when I was getting into planning Family Fortunes perhaps before it became really unwieldy, I had a dilemma over Chris and his fate. This dilemma was shaped in no small part by B_____ and his luck with women. Chris, you see, is a fantastic guy. He becomes the real hero of the piece, though it was not initially conceived in that way, I think. He has no luck with women, however. Part of this is the way he dresses, in oversized geeky t-shirts and naff boots (the right-hand sketch above is mid-way through his transformation in the novel) but also because he is a geek. Part of the problem, though, is with women, who can’t see through this, because many women in Britain claim to want one thing in men but actually go for something else entirely and decent men like Chris often get overlooked.

The novel is in part about the relationships between men and women in England, and how this is curretly dysfunctional. I had a dilemma with Chris because I think a man like him could continue to get overlooked, and women would continue to reject him. I wanted, however, to offset the depressive nature of the novel and its focus on one of the few communal rituals we still have in Britain, the stag night, and the fact that it is so dysfunctional, and the rape. I did not want to make the novel too moralistic and schematic, with good characters getting their reward and bad characters their comeuppance (as time went on there were more and more instances of exactly this, however, with the rapist being threatened in a restaurant, and a burglar being both stabed and electrocuted in the testicles with the broken bulb of a desk light; it seems I came to enjoy these more Dickensian elements) but Chris seemed to deserve something, and his being coupled off and changing and growing with time seemed to free me to diverge from this karmic trend elsewhere, to show for example that fate is less kind to those who are already underprivileged, like Gemma, the rape victim who winds up doing worse than a Dickensian villain.

B______ has been overlooked by women. He doesn’t jump through all the hoops of what a man should be according to women, and the quorums of friends who get together to discuss men and relationships. We saw him a month or so back at a nice little pub over in Clent where some old folks had got together to play jazz with a french horn, a clarinet and sax, a little drum kit and an old singer - reminiscent, I thought at the time, of Belleville Rendezvous. He had brought his girlfriend. He was off the anti-depressants he had been on and was doing ok. Only now I saw him last week and he hadn’t seen her for a couple of weeks, and the whole cycle was coming round again - he tends to last with one girl for a month or so and then lose contact without any real reason given. He gets clingly, that’s for sure, and can be uncommunicative and intense at times, and that doesn’t help, but M_____ can’t believe the luck he has. Assholes tend to get the girls.

And what really brought back the dilemma I had over Chris was that it was the lads who had fucked it up for him, just as Ben and his lot almost fuck it up for Eddie and Danielle in FF. D_____ was back from Sandhurst with his girlfriend, and they went on a double date. He regaled B____’s girlfriend, who we had taken to be older and wiser, and less likely to fuck him around, with stories of B____’s past with women. It seems she wasn’t impressed, and she has barely spoken to him since.

It’s too late for me to change anything with Chris. Everything is locked together now, and Chris’s relationship with Rock Chick [the one character whose name I haven’t yet decided on] is now crucial, but B____’s fate, and the anger it spurred in me really brought it back, and perhaps made me feel that in one way, the novel is a little untrue to life. I say perhaps because it’s been a week now since I mulled all this over, and I have been away since then in Shell Island with work, and a lot happens in a week. Emotionally I am once again removed from the dilemma, but one way I reassured myself was that, actually, geeks like Chris do very well when they are monied, as he is, and with prospects, that Rock Chick has been burned by the kind of men women tend to go for, and that he does change, becoming more socially clued in (though she still has to see his occasional lapses as endearing) and interesting. And of course, he is a hero, and fucked over one of her exes. All in all, it is not so unbalanced, but it just shows one of the ways that life influences art.

Just scanned the last post, and this is a great one to follow it up!

I went away again, to the Czech Republic this time, to stay at M____’s  folks’. Of course, my diet went to pot straight away, despite the marathon efforts of M____’s Mum. Loads of beer, wine and rum for a start, and then the coffee, cheese, sugar , bread and the rest of it.

The pattern was pretty much identical to Italy. I didn’t really notice the slip for much of the time. yes, I didn’t sleep after cheese, especially when having it late at night, which I did a couple of times, but then I did sleep, more or less after beer, which I had noticed over and over again I had not before. On the other hand, I had more and more reveries, and some angry ones at times. But it was coming back that threw me, and I have been angry and irritable since, having very very angry workplace reveries.

I got back Thursday night at around half midnight, with Dad picking me up from Nottingham airport, and Mum and M___ coming in the car for me too. I got up early Friday for work and wasn’t actually too tired, though I just chilled out for much of the morning. The afternoon was a shocker, one of our students started kicking off over nothing, as he does sometimes when he has had a problem with the food, and when I went down to see what he was up to, having been instructed to call the police if he was indulging in any criminal damage, one of the heads ran by shouting me for help. Another student was ahead of him, having injured another student in a fight - this student will require an operation, and may have already had it. We chased him a mile or so up the road towards a pretty rough town, him threatening us all the way if we kept on pursuing him. We followed him as he ran across busy roads with little concern for his own safety, me having to gesticulate to cars to stop, as I have had to do before, into a steelworks, me at this point concerned that his dad, who he had been on the phone to, might come out, some bruiser backing up his son. It didn’t happen that way and the police took the lad away, but it had been a hard day, and so D____ asked if I fancied a drink. I took my car into town and left it there, drinking from five-ish.

A lass from work was opening up a pub later on and so a few of us went out for that. And so over the night I had quite a few, saw B____ and chatted to him for much of the night. It was a good night in many ways, but then came Saturday, and B____ was still at mine, and I showed him the house and so on, and then, when we came back, I took M____ out to buy a few things for the house in Mardy Hell. And I started to lose hope and become distant and angry.

I have become so scared about the house and everything it entails, with the need for me to cook the more and do so many things I have not had to do before. I will have so much less time for writing! That thought scares the hell out of me. If I don’t become a writer I can see for me only a life of stress and anxiety, frustration and resentment.

On coming back home I was worn out, depressed and angry. Angry reveries had escalated and I couldn’t deal with anything at all. Nor could I relax.

I can’t now much remember what we did, but I cried for much of the evening on coming back. Dad had cooked for us. Neither of my parents are proficient cooks and though it wasn’t so appetising, it was edible, the kind of thing I have been eating a lot of because I rarely cook while I’ve been staying at my folks for the last year and a half (mum has pretty much settled into a routine of two dishes, and dad much the same) and I was hungry. I came down when they called. I think I had been crying with M____ a little while before, perhaps explaining how and why I feared moving in with her. I came down and stood in the corner of the kitchen, away from them. I then settled down and managed to shake a little salt and pepper before feeling tearful again. I had to move get away and sit in the lounge.

In the evening I could not engage in conversation with M____. Nor could I sleep. I tried to read over old notebooks. While I was in Prague, again, an old story idea came up and moved itself forward in my mind. To Je Bomba, it’s called, a Czech-language farce I came up with over Christmas in Prague trying to listen to M___’s brother - one guy I cannot understand at all, however hard I try, given the speed at which he speaks, and his colloquial style - and drinking beer. Once again, coming back, this falls away again and ends up just another example of my brain tricking me and cycling round on me. You see, when the priorities change, everything changes with it, since it brings a whole outlook, a whole way of thinking. with To Je Bomba comes the gregariousness of Prague, the fact that I can last longer seeing more people over there since I haven’t seen them for so long, and since, speaking Czech, I am learning while I am doing it. It comes with the idea of living again in that wonderful place, a place which, as Kafka said, has claws. It comes with the idea of being a joker rather than a philosophising highbrow. And just as I came back from Italy unsettled after a change in the bedrock of my life, in Family Fortunes, this too is a destabilising force which would have shook me even if the shift in routines had not.

And so I sat up there on the edge of the bed, looking away form M____ and unable to talk with her. I then came down, having struck upon the idea that I could write on some postcards from Italy. The boss had gave them to us all and at the time I figured I would treasure them because I had felt almost some kind of religious experience while I was there. All that’s come of that on the return home was that I found an old pendant, a crucifix, that in my “hypomanic” days I used to use to pray with. The crash to earth on coming back home may have been another contributary factor in my depression then. In any case, I took that with me to the Czech Republic, embarrassedly laying it in the tray for the X-ray with my keys and change (I always have loads of change, so afraid to hold up cashiers and barmaids for the seconds it takes me to count it out and pay with it, rather than with a fresh note or pound coins.) Upstairs with my head in my hands by the radiator and the open window I felt so trapped and afraid of the future, almost more than I ever have since the days of real depression. (Another way of looking at it, perhaps, would be that I have been like that every time a large change was coming in my life. This might be equally true though I can’t remember any further back than the time leading up to my move from the Czech Republic.)

Anyway, I then came down and wrote out a few postcards. I was feeling particularly aspergic and uncommunicative. B____ on Friday was talking about a similar thing, how he had forced himself to open up to his new girlfriend having at first held back from telling her he was having a hard week.

Anyway, this is what I wrote on those postcards of paintings by Boticelli, Sanzio, Verrocchio and Leonardo da Vinci:

Sandro Boticelli, La Primavera

“I’m stressed. Can’t sleep. I shouldn’t have had the beer on Friday but I can’t sit down with people for long sober and haven’t been out with anyone for ages, nor seen B____ or anyone.

The house is fantastic. I can’t imagine a better one but the idea of living in it is starting to make me feel trapped. I enjoy cooking, might even enjoy gardening given time, bit if I don’t have enough time for writing then I can’t think of anything else and my head feels so full to bursting, so blocked: I become angry, irritable, distracted; I might go through the motions, but my mind is elsewhere.

I can’t cope like this, writing has been the aim of everything for years. Characters, ideas have totally possessed me, being in my head while I’m supposed to be thinking of other things.”

Sandro Boticelli, Primavera, detail

“I can’t enjoy being with people I care about when I have so little time, when writing takes so much time and day after day, week after week, month after month I’m denied it. People make demands on my time and I feel like I want to scream.

I fulfil all the diagnostic criterior[sic] of ADHD and Asperger’s syndrome and that doesn’t make things easy.

Plenty of things most people find relaxing stress me out and depress me and the weight of expectation is often too much. I can’t slot in to a normal pattern of lifeand take care of all the things a mature adult is supposed to take care of - there’s not a chance in hell - I feel overwhelmed and”

Raffaello Sanzio Madonna and Child with young Saint John

“Trapped by the usual mass of obligations, and without  being able to relax as most people would, this stress and anxiety builds up.

The times I’ve achieved things in my life have been the ones I’ve been most on my own - A_Levels at Kiddi college, barely going out, writing at Nottingham one summer. I need a lot of time alone, a lot of time to write and if I don’t manage to become a writer I’ll never know anything but stress and anxiety since the creative drive in me is as strong, if not stronger, than the urge to have children for some (I am adament that if I do not become a writer by profession I”

Tiziano Vecellio, Venus of Urbino

“Will never have children since that would only place more demands on my time, more stress).

The ideas I have are simply world class. I believe I have a duty to see them through. Every one that dies a death fills me with a profound grief, guilt, resentment, anger and frustration and too many have died so far.

I keep trying and trying to fulfil people’s expectations of me and settle down into some kind of normal life but nothing that issupposed to be natural for me is. Not least talking.

I need to write and I’m going to need some help”

Michelangelo Buonarroti, Holy Family with the infant St John the Baptist

“To do it. I need understanding. I need support and I need time. There’s nothing else I can do in the long term but write. Nothing.

And without writing I cannot begin to do other things.

Yes I need to see this dietician, though I’m very sceptical about him, and I’ll need to keep seeing doctors etc re ADHD and Asperger’s, perhaps even to get medicated, but writing is the key and at the moment everything is in place except the time.

And that is going over and over in my head.

And there is absolutely no chance of me being able to begin to think of money and careers or anything else I’m supposed to think of when that is the case, and it’s not lack of willingness or interest or anything else but the fundamental fact of my brain being differently wired.”

I left the cards fairly ambiguously. Not writing up but leaned against a pottery bell in the shape of a cook that M___’s mum gave me once I had cooked for her. I woke up in the morning still not knowing whether we were going for a trip as we had decided, the two of us having hardly been together for so long now, and M____ depresed all the time I was in Prague due to the horrible weather back home in the Black Country. M____ got up first and I cuddled up to my doggy for a while listening to her talking to Dad downstairs, wondering whether he had read the cards (there was a while when I first stirred with M____ turning on the TV to listen quietly to the news, where I considered going down to take the cards away). I went down and saw that they were still leaning in the same place, but in such a way they could conceivably have been replaced there. Dad later asked me how I was feeling, which he normally would not (I shook my hand side to side as if to say not great.)

I cried a lot in the morning still. M____ first said she no longer felt like going anywhere but we decided on Stratford. In the end we even enjoyed ourselves, me especially when we went on the rowing boats for an hour. Perfect:-)

In the Service Station on the way home I made the kind of resolution that lasts but minutes. we had ended up there because, after a lovely day, it started to throw it down on the motorway, making for dangerous driving conditions, and besides, M____ had failed to find a Magnum of the kind she wanted in Stratford and so I promised I would stop somewhere. I told myself, again, that I would make food the priority in the house, so I could get everything else in place much like I had for a while at university when I learned to cook the first time round. Now I have to re-learn and I haven’t invested anything like the same amount of time. That’s something else I’ll have to write about sometime.

I’ve just remembered. This morning, one of the things I cried about was unpacking my rucksack (onto the floor and bed) and giving M___ the Spanish Czech dictionary she had wanted. She said it maybe wasn’t a very good one.. I so want to help people and be there for them and most of the time it goes wrong one way or another so even the smallest things can get to me at times. We hugged at that, but it’s been a difficult few days.

Oh, and I even cried on the plane going out to Prague, to a reverie. I’ll have to write that one up. And others, of course.

But now, to bed.