Wake Up at eight thirty or so, a little bit of a nap as she gets ready. I had taken my running gear to her place the two days before, hoping to go for a run in the morning if the opportunity arose. I had written for much of the day Friday. The evening then was our anniversary, six months, postponed a day because she had been working. We went to a Pizzeria. There I of course automatically broke the no drinking rule I had imposed on myself a couple of days before having come back from Cesky Raj, Czech Paradise, having drank a bottle of vodka over the few days we were there. I have been thinking recently that I really need to follow up the research on nutrician I began in earnest a few years ago and which helped me so much to concentrate, but which became too much to juggle, with the attempts to write that it was to facilitate, reading and learning French and the rest of it; don’t drink was the first rule in one of the books that helped me so much, and one thing expressed as self-evident by the woman in the Study Support Centre I went to see in the months I stayed as a recluse in my house in my university town to do nothing but write, take an occasional run, and research my disorder in the Medical Library at the university, a period which in many ways, is the only extended period of time in my life where I have been able to concentrate on what is important to me without distraction. We then watched Amelie, one of her favorite films, albeit first in French with Czech subtitles, which only made me angry because the subtitles were so fast even she didn’t sometimes catch them, flicking from the screen in a fraction of a second and absent for some inexplicable reason for what seemed longer period than they were present, before the next, and then in Czech with Czech subtitles, which was less confusing, since it did not lead me to listen to the French and try to process two languages I do not understand well, knowing French, despite my desultory efforts, less well than Czech, which I have studied hard at and picked up extraordinarily well in the little time I’ve been here; still, I didn’t understand it so well, and M____ was maybe a little disappointed that I didn’t love it, just as I was when we began to watch the Life of Brian maybe four months ago, and she began to distract me from it, as indeed I did her at the end of Amelie. I also ate pasta, which I usually avoid. Talked about how I would run in the morning. I had said so last time when she was recovering from tonsilitus, that I would rather stay at mine so I could take a run in the morning. We hadn’t been together for a while and so she wasn’t happy about it. Eventually her friend told me. “Neser”


Saturday morning I didn’t run. In fact we did little the whole day. Watched the last hour or so of Amelie - we got back late from the Pizzeria and then copied some photos from her camera to the laptop I’m writing on and which we’d be watching the film on, made some tea and the like, and it was late by the time we sat down to it. I was losing the plot a little in a couple of places - it tends to depend on plenty of factors: I’d followed a play with two characters a couple of months before, and a farce with many barely at all a few weeks after that, and with people, well, it depends how excitable, young, drunk etc., they are. Took a trip then to a get some photos printed from a CD, to some huge horrible shopping centre. Took an age getting there. And then back. Her friend had broken up with her oaf of a boyfriend, a guy who had been beaten by his parents and is now big, with a Hooligan tattoo on his calf, a guy I had spent a little time with, and who, obviously having spent no time with foreigners, spoke quickly in Czech the first time I met him, but then succeeded, despite his interpretation of my attempt to shrug off questions about football, by talking about how I prefer smaller clubs (ones which no foreigner in their right mind would have heard of, and consequently would not be able to ak me about) because of the atmosphere in the grounds, as meaning that the hooligans are more geniune, in being a reasonably good bloke, in the sense that I’ve got used to extracting from certain types of man back home, that they try in the only way they know, and that, though they are tied up inside, though they need professional help they’re never likely to get, though they are trapped inside the male gender roles they retreated into from their first sign of emotional problems, they try, against themselves, despite themselves. Still, ass hole he remains, no doubt needing more from women than they are able to give, needing a deeper relationship from them than with men and friends, and needing some stabilising force, pinning all impossible hopes on them, he behaved despicably to her, having hit her before - where, like all women who perhaps dream of changing a man almost as much as the men themselves dream of being changed, she should have left him, and left him to sort out his problems by himself, though he scarcely has the resources to do that - and this time, hitting her in a pub full of perhaps sixty people. Now, this was related to me first by M____, who, angry, related it in exceptionally fast Czech as I ate my scrambled eggs, and then by another few women later who were speaking to each other more than to me, but it seems he struck her - this much is clear from repitition as much as from the gestures that tended to accompany it - with all his force. Not just a slap, as one of the girls related, as if this would have been acceptable, but really struck her, sending her flying. ANd then one of his friends, who worked there behind the bar and came to intervene, took a punch to the chest (and again the gesture, and again, sent flying). I had been happy to suggest when the phone went in the morning with the news (after Aneta had spent a sleepless night) that M___ could go over and talk to her, and take as long as she would want, and I would meanwhile go for a run or do some writing or read something. In the event I did little but read over a Czech French conversation book I’d picked up in the supermarket where we stopped for water: I have a number of books for learning Czech, parallel texts with Czech and English, and then bought one I found with Czech and French, thinking it would be good for the very fact that I would have to struggle to understand it, making what I could of the grammar and words I knew in both languages, without cheating by reading the English and thus learning little. Amelie had made me recall my attempts at learning French, and so, despite the struggle I’ll have to take back the books I already have accumulated here, I bought it. And so, I read a few entries and a little pronunciation, while putting on Monty Python’s Life of Brian, still in my computer CD drive, from the times I try to pick up some Czech by playing it while I eat, this time with French, and played at half speed to give me to to read the subtitles. That, and then hunger struck, as it does, and I took my pocket radio and tried to find th Prague French station I wouldn’t hope to understand while I raided the fridge and made a some scrambled eggs. That’s when, as I have aleady related, she came back with her story, cursing him as she came in the door, and I cooked a simple pasta sauce for her with the few ingredients she had, just tomatoes, garlic, ham, onion and cheese.
And so, she said, we’ve got until seven and I’ve got some ironing to do, so you can go and do some writing.

Trying to show M___ how much I need to write, when it hadn’t been somethign I had talked about much before. I told her perhaps yesterday that I had written all the time at school

Compulsion

- despite praying every night (keeping my religion at a distance, in Sociology for example), and praying at the same time as the beautiful [] farts, [] and MK swears “Fuck off, Bollocks” and writing essays with this crazy clash of registers, despite what I long for, that I can make the world a better place, and everything I told myself, that it would be for the better, and that I can make a difference, I don’t believe it, people are too stupid for that, I often believe; no, all I can be thankful for is that I have a compulsion in many ways less harmful than Martin’s, with the Hooligan tattoo, and such a reflection as he is, of Fanda in Hrebek’s Horem Padem [review]. Dickens describes in Tale of Two Cities the desperate return to making shoes in the prison. And indeed, a belief that it could be me in that prison, a belief that I have explored in Unabridged and others, and every time I read statistics of the number of people (Dickens’ blue books in Hard Times is perhaps one of the times he got it wrong, like, in a sense, with Stephen Blackpool, just today I was having a reverie and arguing against some guy, and this one I can take apart, it was with a guy in London, my brother had told me about some guy who had asked him to ask me if I knew of any posh restaurants here in Prague. My bro was fairly sure I did not, which I was quick to tell him was certainly true since I have taken to frequenting the old communist-style diners, which are often cabbage slapped onto your plate stand up affairs, but I guess somebody is standing around playing up in my mind, and I have had a number of reveries involving telling off waiters for being supercilious cunts. It expanded from that point, to a series of reveries in which I am out with my brother and his friends and there is one guy who I just cannot help but argue with - which takes various forms, from banter which, whoeever the others see it, we both kind of enjoy, even wishing each other well at the end of it - to real cutting stuff; yesterday he was slagging off my origins, and I was putting him down for being homophobic, telling him, yeah, now that’s the hight of civilisation is it not, and quoting him how many years have passed since Oscar Wilde got sent to jail for buggery. This one

finally, to the metro, and feeling down. It’s late. Must have been one o’clock. I hadn’t eatne, so that clock is ticking already, pushing my plans further out of shape. I had walked down from the toilets, before going to the shop, having my usual conversation with characters in my head. Lying to people. To interviewers, perhaps, that I had written my stories while working in the toilets in Prague, taking 3 crowns a time for use of the urinals and toilets, reading and writing in the meantime. Standing in front of the metronews, and reading the Observer, which I had hesitated over buying, having to save money, and finally bought at the one hundred and thirty crowns, receiving one hundred and twenty for my two hundred note. I start to feel down. Another wasted day. Another wasted free day! It had looked like I would have so much time to write, but even with no students its so hard and I have wasted the best part of the day. It’s a kind of recidivism. I had felt the anger as I do at shopping to buy presents. This celebrating people in their absence by investing time and money on them. I get into this anger at these times and feel that it is a system, that you can only live a certain conformist life because of these things, regular birthdays, and, my God! Here regular name days. It brings me down so much. I feel it as such a waste of time. Writing is something I have to spend so much time on, and without that I am not myself.

And then MetroNews and doctors, and in ENgland, find that not only mothers but also fathers can influence their children. Something I had been working on recently, and unconsciously, as Greene relates, perhaps for years. Definitely no children, it was with C, though I certainly wasn’t in love. And then a girl. And then M___! Definitely children. Only a matter of time, which makes this waste of time so much the more crushing, and comments, like in Amelie, by the man who she returned the box of childhood memories to (drinking at the bar!), that one day you wake up and you’re fifty, so much more profound for me, but no, that’s not what I mean, just the opposite, so much the more banal and real and true, that is more what I mean, the banality of it, jesus, and the truth.

M___, who says she wants good looking children. And nice. They’ll have a nice father.

but that’s the way it is: one day falls into more

Monday:
lesson at five, and it breaks up the day.
get up at nine
Go for a “run”
wasted time
on the metro - message from Pigeon, hoping its from Jan, wanting to cancel the lesson. Pigeon with a job offer.
More from Pigeon in the evening, after I text her twice on two phones, soon getting the delivery report after I send her a message saying I’m not sure she got the message. He’s typically English. Already, I started to wonder about me and M___. Am I really determined. Have I tied myself down? Really no more travelling?
Monty Python

[legs hurt, like binge drinking and then nothing, letting down my tolerence]

get up and its ten o’clock. There’s not been a day for years where I haven’t got up without cursing myself, or desperate to get up early. Constantly tired. my calves are hurting.
agencies
H&M
sit for a beer with her brother
on the internet
and then a rezany, half and half beer, just because I wanted to buy somethign more in the shop - a strange inclination that focused first on non-alcoholic.

the morning, conversations in my head, interfering with those with her. I forget whom I was debating with, but it was that. I do very often have real Socratic debates in my head. I think I really have to attack my addiction to drinking as I did smoking, convince myself I don’t need it, or but on occasions.

Much of it is lost - really, nobody, and this is a certainy, could ever write a biography of me that would ever give anything of me. The substance is lost - because the substance at many times are these quicker than the speed of sound thoughts that are so often lost to me - and if history is anything like as internally complex, as I suspect it is, then we get little, although, I sometimes feel it is true that people grasp me to a degree by externalities, if they have a semblence of affection, at least. Getting off the tram in Flora, walking with her as I said goobye, it was a debate with Jeremy [Paxman] - no, indeed, further back than that, when I was a deputy for an MEP in Brussels, for a conservative MEP. I had been jostled to the ground forcefully by a kind of SWAT team on a busy street. [my fantasies in my head, of resquing kids from burning buildings, compared in my mind to fantasies of sex recorded by Nancy Friday]

To the metro. Looking at a pretty girl beside me (I don’t know if I do stare more than others, but certainly I never miss an opportunity)

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