I’d been letting things slip. Well, ‘we’, she had said, and at the time I hadn’t been sure if it was a rare bout of generosity: she had been blowing hot and cold for so long now I didn’t know which way was up. The bills had been coming in; final reminders stacking up on trays which had been improvised to rank them in order of priority. At work, I had taken to preparing all of my accounts at an eisel with charcoals, pencils and oils - that the clients on the whole liked this kind of attention wasn’t the point, as I had known it wouldn’t be from the start; the gesture had been noted. Otherwise there were too many things to mention, and it’s not even as if these financial and career predicaments were the most important - for me they patently were not, and my blase demeaner certainly wound up my boss more than anything else - rather it is just that these were the things people most noticed, whatever else I did being taken as evidence of the creative temperament which I was taken, ludicrously, to be for the work I had drifted into so long ago, for which so much is forgiven.

The other forms this [] took I’d be hard pressed to describe, nor even to recall them all, so complete was the shift from my older life, and my break from others and, some would say, the world at large. I may have hinted already at the disdain to which I held many of my fellows and peers, in their focus on money matters and careers at the expense of all else to the degree that might be expected in a Great Depression but not at the height of a boom that I but seemingly nobody else thought would soon burst. I ceased to listen to the news. It did nothing for me but to bring me down. Ceased too to participate in any of the cultural actitvities that might have made some kind of a conversational brdieg between me and these people. Conversation thus dried up. And rapidly. I became so quickly an alien, drowned in what, I could never quite tell, it seemed such a derealising experience, but perhaps it had been around the point of a turn in a season on television, the replacement of one tranche of films with another, the arrival of a number of grand issues in the press and the like. Having no opinion, I merely concentrated on those around me. It was astounding. The spectrum of emotions and drives, intellectual tendencies, judgements, all of which became known time after time by such signifiers as ‘cynicism’ pushed themselves up in my mind beginning in the morning, just like acid in one’s throat after a night on the town. It got to the point I would see anything as an alternative. And I found so much, so quickly; in turning away, and being pushed away from everything that had once been all I would ever need, as superficially dynamic as it was, everything forever renewed, swept away, I found so much. It happened in various ways, but one I recall.

You see, I had been subscribed to a service for a number of years, and had seen it as that and no more - as a service. People would give me books. Now, books will get passed around a creative industry, which, at a push, I would see it all as despite my disillusionment, certainly rather than viewing it all as a business like any other; depressing it may be given some of the people, but the people were different, more interesting, more alive, than many I have met in the business world. So I would get books on fonts. Books on the latest tools in design: animation, image manipulation, or on composition or photography. That I could live with and was all well and good. I have still a number of books on my shelves that were passed around and not asked after. But it was the others. The kind that get passed around every office. At work and elsewhere. Popular books. Books about business. About ordering my mind to be more suitable to the business world. Ancient knowledge and wisdom transposed into the business world. How to be the type of person that achieves success. How to structure my life. That was the bulk of it, if I remember right. Novels too. Fine. Other I didn’t count. So I’d get A fairly disparate bunch, some people would have said, although for me every single one of these could be categorised into a handful of publisher’s favorites. Each one in any case presented me with a dilemma, be it big or small. For each of these was a gift. But not only a gift but a reaching out. People at times trying to say something. Something that they felt did not often get said. You could see it in their eyes, poor bastards. Others, the business books and the like formed a very different, much simpler but no less problematic quandary; often given to me by important people. In any case, each of these drives, each of these times I was taken aside and handed some worthless book, cartridge or scroll, each of these ostensibly individual drives it was part of a huge pattern of human behaviour repeated across the whole country, if not the whole of the English-speaking world. And for this reason this service came to my aid every time. I entered the name of the book, it sent me a few notes about what it contains, and sugested opinions on its prose style, advice and so forth. I trot this out - sometimes the exact phrases which were clearly intended to insult the intelligence - and everyone’s happy. They because they are content in the certainty that they have in some large or small way enriched my life, if not changed it for the better. Me, in knowing that I have saved the time even of flicking through the rotten trash, and having avoided being changed in such a way.

Like I say, I turned away. And for that I have a group of people to thank. I took the train one day to [Sunderland]. There I managed to make my way to an old asylem. Looking back I suspect I had heard about it. Certainly nothing is quite clear to me as to how I ended up there.

In any case, the asylem itself is like something out of an American film. In any case, in as much as concerning the way it is run. It’s an old cathedral, having evolved in its usual way, from religious focus-point to tourist trap to a derelict preseved building passed on to anyone willing to care for it for a pittance through a committee wishing it go to a good cause rather than become a nightclub or some such. Flashing backlights of various sizes and shapes were fitted behind the stained glass windows, lighting the figues and inscriptions. And behind these partitions and insulation, and three or four flours on a simple metal frame and, finally, to expand what they found still to be a restrictive space for its new purpose - based on it would seem, a return to a Victorian attitude to the mentally ill - a glass passageway masked as nothing other than a series of wooden frames holding arches of flowers, which leads to a spiral staircase and down to a series of rooms built in an excavation beside the crypt, these being lit by sun-tubes which are themselves masked by a shallow water feature. I think now I may have kidded myself I was there for this architecture, in this old forever run-down town I knew so well, more or less abandoned for years - a PR disaster one might be tempted to say - following flood warnings and epidemic scares and the like; so much that the government film shot to encourage people to return began with a black and white B-movie and various disasters, more than were in fact ever in the news, such as with colonies of rats sweeping by and what was, I understand merely a rumour or urban myth (though others claim, of course, that the truth was kept out of the news by the D-committee, suppressed by the government and doubtless would cite the film itself as a kind of clever double bluff or reverse psychology of some sort) that a number of the old deep seem coal mines which were opened up and coated, and used to store nuclear waste have for years been burning underground. That even that film, exceptionally imaginitive as it was, did little to revive the town’s fortunes meant at least a few more ‘pork-barrel’ projects as they’ve taken to calling them.

In any case, I took a few pictures. Walked around. But finally came to the old church. The asylem. Admired again the architecture, and then confronted myself. Camera in hand I was walking round the place taking shots. I was then a little annoyed by a van stood in the way of a shot I was lining up. I was at the time listening to a fascinating French midnight show I’d taken to recording and listening to on the journey to work and while running and the like, and I suppose I had been prepared to wait a while if this van was to be there a mere few minutes. There was, after all, on the grounds one of these amateur golf courses cum graveyeards they’ve erected in a couple of places in the North - a perfect synergy it seems to me, with a niche of people who would take the time to go to a driving range but who would be too intimidated by a busy fairway going to play while in the meantime the border of the trees expands with seeds and saplings planted over bodies planted in degradeable coffins in civil and humanist ceremonies, old trees on the other side pulled up as this inches forward over time until they choose to close it up, money for the land now made from the patchwork of ‘graves’ held in trust. Anyway, I came to examine the van to give clues as to whether it would be worth waiting, missing the first train back, when I read the discrete sign on the side - mobile confessional. Again I got the strange feeling that I knew more of this place than I had let on even to myself. An eery feeling that, and yet at times comforting, that, perhaps my life is just a little less directionless than I had thought (if life being directionless is something which we should worry about at all).

I knew enough about it, though it wasn’t clear to me. Only when I later read a little about it all did I realise I was reading but nothing was striking me as new, though it was nothing if not novel. The mobile confessionals were an idea taken on from mobile libraries - we’ll see why in a moment - and intended to make therapy or psychiatry that little less intimidating. There’s another niche out there, not just frustrated golfers. A niche, and a big one, of men and women injured by the generations long denial of the existence of society, of a responsibility that links us to each other, both in our own country and between them. And a promotion, too, of values so abstracted [] that millions of people are only too willing to believe in fires burning underneath them containing uranium. The van drives out to towns and the old confessional from the church is taken out and sat on the high street or some square or another, theatre backdrops surrounding it giving information and directing the queues. A psychologist inside, not looking, not judging, but giving information and advice.

So, it was an innovative place. It had not always been so. The care initially taken over the look of the place had not, it seemed, been reflected in the attitudes and methods of the staff. It had been one of a number of government projects commissioned for public relations[up].

It was some time in the thirties a man arived at the centre some time after midnight on New Year’s Day. He was clutching coal that by the look of his hands, had been passed from one to another in the nervous gestures he continued to exhibit as they took him in from the rain. “I’m bringing Coal to Newcastle,” he said. At least, they wrote it down.

Perhaps he was the kind of man who worried about how his life was without direction. Perhaps he had wondered to the institute with intentions little different from those that led me there, obfuscating camera in hand, but in either case it was true that in a matter of months he was subjected to electroshock therapy, dosed with various pharmaceuticals, prevented from keeping a diary in which he wondered about the intentions of his caregivers, and indeed about his own consent, given his state of sedation at the time he consented to the treatment.

It was one Thomas Bendrix who turned up at the clinic that day, but, unfortunately for the staff who treated him (fortunately for himself and many others) one John Worthington who left two years later accompanied by the parents who had been searching for him in vain for the months before his arrival. They had thrown a lot of money at trying to find him, and had by no means exhausted their supply. And this is where it begins to ressemble a film synopsis, a story that drew me in through old newspapers and various websites. Drawing me in beneath the surface. Because one of the numerous private investigators sent to find Worthington had become rather obsessed by the case. It was in fact more or less his first, besides the odds and dead ends of ‘oddballs’ like himself. Edward Hamilton had come upon his employ as the fulfilment of a childhood dream after having exhausted an incredibly long list of failed jobs and professions, from computer programming to security, to postman and even soldier (dishonourable discharge) and fireman.

The story of Hamilton, as revealed in a later court case in which he was accused of breaking numerous more or less trivial laws and judged innocent of them all by a unanimous jury acting on the nullification rights, fascinated me for some time and not least because of the debate surrounding this right to pass a verdict which though logically insupportable is favourable to condemning the defendent to a sentence which would in the context be disproportionate or against the public good.

The story didn’t survive against the revelations of energy self-sufficiency. Everything that day was in place for something else. Many of the big newspapers hit the stands with a picture that even in these times could take the breath away, and that before even the headlines had been glimpsed and taken in.

There had been a storm in Norfolk in the early hours of the morning before. Norfolk had had its figurative fifteen minutes with the floods, and this would have been little more but that power cuts were in the news. A little known profession exists, and has indeed existed for decades. This involves men in chainmail suits dropped from helicopters on cradles which hang more or less like cablecars onto the high-voltage wires of electricity pilons, a number of which had on this occasion come down in the storm and were thus in want of repair. The chainmail suit forms a Faraday cage, that is as effective insulation from the deadly wattage, allowing the men to perform what might for many be unthinkable feats of maintenance while the line remains live.

Just what was needed then for the three broadsheets which, as part of a deal with Arcayn had recently agreed to simultaneouly launch their weekend editions with ‘MobiusPatch’ videoloops and animations.

Even I, the ‘cynic’, who, having seen the campaign for this step and conversations about searches in the British Library for old books which contained flip animations on the corners and the like to replace the strip cartoons I had often felt to be a corrective to the insanity of everyday life, had expected little from these and was thrown as I stood outside at the night hatch of the petrol station, breathing deep the fumes and watching the flickering beside me on the flecked ice of the metal frame of the charcoal stand, the agitated glow of the worker reaching up to the live line, blue, well, not sparks, nor a glow, neither would I call them beams, but… What does it matter?! This very human story was pushed down and out.

Hamilton was an eccentric. A misfit in every job he had every tried. A failure at school, but that type of failure who has an incredibly inconsistent record; one who can be at the top as well as the bottom. A natural obsessive, completely unselfconscious in his eccentricities and requiring few of the comforts in life we view as necessary.

Hamilton tracked the boy down in the course of a year with three changes of office each of which contained his home-made furnishings.

He and Wilkinson senior became good friends. At first it had seemed that he was a crank at best, and an outright con artist at worst - he was too extreme for it to be anything other than an act - and Wilkinson left him to it only through desperation and a conviction, held at times against his wife’s better judgement, that redundancy in these things was all to the good, but with his regular reports and detailed expense accounts which always seemed too low to be worth any conman’s while, he was won over. There would never be any small talk, but Hamilton was a gregarious man when he could be directed towards something and sit down with a drink in hand to make his report. It was clear in watching him that he considered that he had been reprieved from a life that could never be real for him, and in which he could never play a part. On oath it was related by this burly, chiselled and dependable man, Wilkinson, the kind of man you cannot but listen to, cannot but believe, that this Hamilton who was more or less twitching and stuttering through the court case was a man for whom nothing which exists could ever be strange and so a man who, no, is not attracted to a seedy underground world of private detectives, but who is, rather, a man who could not view that world as a world apart merely to satisfy those who allign themselves with a more commonplace hypocrisy. That no, he does not find such a world romantic, though yes, he does live like a literary character as if it were selfconscious, but for him the world is real.

Hamilton was let out, and had not a word to say to anyone, merely stopping to light a cigarette as Wilkinson beside him made the briefest of statements.

But the obsession did not end. Forced out of his business, Hamilton made a rather odd turn. Wilkinson had confided to him now about his son, and his continued problems with his mental health; a disorder that might be related to the treatment.

Hamilton got his hands on some papers from the institute. Wilkinson to this end financed him toward buying a Phd from an American company, certification in psychiatry. The Wilkinson boy registered as his only [pupil], and made a request for records which could not, given the observation of all relevant protocols, lawfully be denied.

There followed a claim against the hospital based on a problem involving Wilkinson’s consent. Basically, some of the documents had been signed Bendrix, some of them Wilkinson. So far so trivial. Of these latter, however, a critical few manifested the shaky, uncertain signature of a hand influenced by a dose of sedative that would seem to preclude the necessary ‘considered consent.’ In place of an offered out-of-court settlement the hospital were keen to close to forestall further negligence claims, Wilkinson senior accepted what was in essence a ruling share in the private company involved in the private/public partnership. Things began to change. When the young Wilkinson - slighted in one newspaper as a “cabbage” - returned to the institution, the situation had changed. In part institutionalised, in part damaged by the interventions of the old [employ], young John still needed help. All he could recall of any benefit in the old regime was the various occupational therapies on offer. But here too there was much progress to be made.

The muzeum of journalism in Cannock Chase had been part of a project to ‘bridge the generations’. Erected, again, in an old mill, protected, for all its theatening Coke-Town-ish overtones from even so much as an aerial or satelite dish on the roof. There the presses rolled, or in some cases hidden speakers reproduced the thunderous sound of the presses when they once were in motion. Now, it may or may not be true that political pressure relating to the forever-peaking threat of socialism meant that certain instalations and the like were not eventually a part of the muzeum, which was as a result more the dusty encyclopedia-in-conrete of old than other recent efforts, but whatever the flaw, the muzeum was an albatross almost from the start and consequently much space was then given to a cousin, the muzeum of television and, for at least the [] a tenuous connection, televisual journalism, beside it. Wilkinson, in the time he had been out, had visited the muzeum, or rather, been taken too it. He had once been a big reader. On hearing of what was then slated as the muzeum’s imminent closure or downsizing, he made a chance observation to his father, possibly no more than a dreamy [], that the old printing presses were wonderful, that he could imagine doing such a job, and that, indeed, he could imagine doing so many other jobs described in the old books he had once habitually read.

Wilkinson senior made a proposition. It was declined offhand in every quarter. He was not, however, used to being refused, and the times he was it only made him more determined. His son had gone to describe the jobs he did in the occupational therapy sessions, and had described them as frustrating, for him if not some of the other, more severely affected patients. He always knew, he said, that if somebody bought one of the items they made, it was for the added charitable value of the product rather than any belief that the item was, on his favorite William Morris’s test, either beautiful or useful. Wilkinson researched, inspected and then made a bid on the oldest working press at the muzeum and returned to the table of the government body with the invoice. He told them they had the choice to put a positive gloss on things, at the great fuck up they’d made of two bloody projects, as he told them. Things got moving. It was perhaps a year or so before the patients were involved in operating these printing presses, which were now housed . Some doing the routine work, of which there was plenty of, some setting, and some, some illustration, and some, led by Wilkinson senior who used to love nothing more than trailing all over the country around second hand bookshops, selecting out of print books to print - something that involved reading the contemporary press reviews, cross references to other works, and, of course, a good number of books themselves.

This press is one of the things I discovered.

But I don’t suppose you can ever really talk about how your life has changed, so quickly do you lose grasp of how you lived before. The substance is lost to you, and the frame of reference. Suffice it to say it was a kind of epiphany, that journey, and the researches I made after it, and that if you’ve had an epiphany yourself you’ll know what it means, same as if you’ve fallen in love or grieved you’ll know what it means, and not a second before.

I fought hard to be here. Fought to get out of what was left of the countryside. I thought boredom would kill me there and thirsted for anything that might change the daily routine on top of the monthly routine, the yearly routines that follow time after time.

You’ll never meet a man as tough as a farmer today, so far has the competition come, and my father was the toughest, and took my betrayal on the chin. Well, if only I could be that tough today. Getting up in the morning to be outside all day. Seeing the seasons come on and fall away. Working hard outdoors. No, I’m not that man for that, but I could have been made that man had I only not let mistaken idleness and the temperamental inability to take instruction from the man who’s life I did not yet have the capacity to understand, and had he not mistaken that caprice and flinch of faux rebellion for a determination to get on in the world.

Regret’s a foolish, weak emotion. And the same impulse in me now, in this wish to be away from the situation I myself got myself in, as it was in me as a boy to want to be elsewhere, to be in the city in stead of the farm my father had had so inconsiderately been born into. It was my decision and I should have the gall to live by it.

But what I wanted to say was that I look upon this place, this town, as I looked upon the city before it, as foreign. That whereas others might read the history of London and see the glories, I see what Pip saw on first stepping off the coach, and to Newgate market and the rest, and the town after it was but a drabber compromise.

I exaggerate. It’s a tendency of mine. I could have been a farmer inasmuch as I could have been out of doors. I could have stood the early mornings. I could have stood even the hard graft. I just didn’t like the chemicals. Never trusted them. And though I learned to get accustomed to watching the animals I’d loved all year round slaughtered or taken away in cattle trucks crammed together, still I never had anything but the strongest repulsion for watching the chemicals treating the field once I’d smelled them and seen them in their neat form and once I had read the contents, which had a effect on me in direct proportion to the extent I failed to understand the strings of compound chemical symbols and trademarks.

No, I never had that reaction of Pip’s, though I sometimes remember it that way, looking back with all the baggage I’ve acquired. Instead, those first days in London I felt I was in a state of constant wonder. There were times I’d walk in the countryside and it would be constant stimulation of every sense, and more, the blood flowing as my feet rhythmically tread into the gentle give of the earth, the birds singing or simply cutting up the air, the breeze in the trees, the smells, good or bad but ever varied, and the taste of the air and pure feel of it in the lungs,

The creativity of advertising is something that sometimes consists of little more than the ability of intelligent men and women to form metaphors that will be acceptable to . []

One such metaphor came to me the other day after I had been stopped by an apparently harrassed foreign delivery driver for directions. I broke my instructions down into bite-sized segments of barely-grammatical simplified English, he climbed back up and made his way. I then realised that for the first time in my life I had been up to the task of giving impromptu directions to somewhere neither just round the corner or which could be dismissed with a you can’t miss it, clearly and correctly. For my first year or so in London I carried a metal credit card-sized map of the tube stations in the handy celophane holder of my fag packet - after my father my brain regards as herecy the idea that anything might not have a purpose, however hidden it may be, and is tireless in searching for one - I kept my wallet and phone out of handy reach in those days, sure it would be snatched from me, but it was a constant godsend to have that map as near at hand as my fags invariably were stashed. My grasp of geography is abysmal and my knowledge of any area builds slowly through discrete landmarks and known routes which seem innocent of any instinct to tesselate and interact. I would bridle slightly that friends were never angry with me for being late, but rather that they would laugh uproariously at my explanations of how it took longer than expected getting from such a place to such and such via so and so, pointing out that there is such an such a bus, or that such a street is only monutes walk from so and so, avoiding the underground altogether. There, that image of the hapless absent-minded and clueless creative type would show up once again, for my mind to settle into as the head settled on my beer at the bar. But in my mind those various coloured lines no more could be overlaid onto a mental image of the city as could Marx’s theory of surplus value onto the development of capitalism in the England of the nineteenth century. Not for years at least, until that wagon from Eastern Europe took off again up the hill, I carried on on my hapless way with neither fags nor a map in my pocket, the belated and by now barely significant realisation that I could pass as a Londoner shifting through this metaphor of discrete and unconnected uncontextualised lines to the intellectual equivalent of a dream that seems from the other side of a consciousness brought into being by a song or the jarring bouyant idiot voice of a morning radio show, to be more vivid than life itself and which is only escaping from the moment of realisation that such a beautiful thing can exist, and which is only indeed destroyed the more by the desire and struggle to retrieve it. For all of my adult life I had been travelling in my life as I had travelled in London, often quickly, but in discrete tunnels and lines which only on occasions cross-sected and interacted. I would focus on my career, and see where I wanted to get to, on my love life, the same, but never would I see the big picture. I grasped at the thought, at the metaphor and it fell apart. The significance I had felt evaporated as I probed.

I suppose few of us amble through life anymore, and for most of us not only is it not obvious that happiness is a journey, not a destination, but pointing it out seems one, other or all of churlish, smug, flakey, as we used to say, and in any case, there’s not for us one destination but many, one for our career, for our personal lives. It seemed to me walking down that street - at least, this is the most I can make of that thought since that day - that at any one point in my life I had been focused on one or another of these goals while the other parts of my life carried on moving, almost as the tube trains keep on running when you don’t need them yourself. That I had been singlemindedly following my career when Cassie came along. That I had been deeply in love when my father got progressively more and more ill - he hid it from me, yes, but I allowed him to. That I had most recently been bizarrely focused on letting myself and everything go out of an obstinate need to avenge a growing sense of disaffection from my job, London, this country and it’s [] in a rotten culture. And that was really it. It had been a determined focus. Not neglect. But the kind of persistently and severely self-defeating behaviour that exasperates teachers of adolescents, wives of born-again alcoholics, gamblers and other addicts and which cannot be described for any length of time by any of the usual indices of parental errors, fear of rejection or low self-esteem.

If I were preparing a [] of my revelation, it would be thus: I know London better than my life. [There again, that’s not true, I wouldn’t do that at all… my career came easily to me as so many things did not, and though the difficulty of these other things can be contrasted with such a natural endowment of talent, albeit in a narrow area, and though I should not reproach myself for those areas I do not have such talent, and perhaps where few of us do, I think it seems to me deep down, before I give myself a chance to think about it and analyse it all, that I have focused on one thing at the expense of others.]

But just as the modern day for most of us proves [] to dreams (I’ve wondered idly in the past how Freud benefitted from the largely idle lives of his monied clientelle, able to endlessly ponder dreams surrendered to their consciousness without the crass [] of an alarm clock), I had soon more or less shaken free this thought of mine, walking up the road and casting my eyes over the headlines, and the flickering animated photographs that have already become familiar to all but harrassed picture editors, when the trilling hum from the tram alongside me suddenly ceased for it to roll heavily to a hault, and, with a momentary pause of a few steps round a streetlight and negotiating a blind man’s stick, then the attenuated and retarded crescendo of rolling into motion again as supply reached one third power-as the generators kicked in. Already it was familiar, and I had detected in the people around me not a single grumble. People are of course too proud of their insouciance for that. But here was another power cut, and being as I was in the frame of mind of something being brought home, as it were, well, it brought home to me, well, something, I was to decide precisely what later.

The power crisis, after all, had been much discussed and had seemingly been mounting for years now, had been the factor in the downfall of no fewer than three prime ministers - although one, admittedly, could never have been more than a stopgap put forward almost as a sacrificial lamb with no one willing to take on the shambles - but it would never have been more than a symbol for me. It was true that the way others took the crisis deeply affected me, but even that. No, the diminuendo of the hum of the motors, that part of what I had once seen as the music of the city piqued something else in me; something that again dopplered to and from me just like those delicate dreams handled with such violence on waking every morning into the sensual clutter and burly of our lives mediated by machine, something that I could only then guess at, toy with, trying to reconstruct something that, but for its significance, its weight, had entirely departed from my mind. That I did so swiftly is little guarantee that I did so with any accuracy, but the tram had scarcely opened and closed its doors at that pace which, when one is familiar with London’s tempo, is little less than eery, than I had made a resolution.

Yorkshire, 2024-2027, I couldn’t say for sure, for me and Shanks lived apart and would see each other infrequently but seldom then for a beer and chinwag over old times. We would get out and about. He was as certain as any American that his country holds pretty much everything any man or women of sufficient intelligence, curiosity, imagination and adventure could ever wish to see in a lifetime, and consequently on this occassion we were up in the mist and constant drizzle of the Peaks. Consequently on this occasion too he was getting to me. When the weather was bad he would be a stickler for taking bearings and sticking to the map and demanding of me opinions as to whether a lake of a certain size on the map could conceivably be the same as one barely visible through the mist and rain given the weather and season. I had always enjoyed excursions with him and enjoyed immensely his company having always felt comfortable with him however long we had been apart, and none of that spurious yet intrusive guilt of seeing friends who stayed in one drab place while you went away was ever there with him (God that was draining those times I went back: men and women who if they loved their home town and their lives in it as much as they claimed they did had no reason to be so resentful, and yet if they hated it as much as you suspected they did, and as much as you had yourself, had little reason to stay. They were just one manifestation of these phenomenon in life, invidious and insidious to the point of ubiquity, which exert so much more influence on your life than any indication of their importance, relevance [] would suggest since because of them I couldn’t gauge my reaction to London, could neither prise apart what fraction of my apparent [contentment] there was mere self-satisfied surprise at getting so far without a major balls-up from deeper reponses, nor hold any real comparison of past lives up to the new without the constant interference of these egregious bastards who were so unthinking yet gregarious to anyone who had had the lack of taste to have lived their whole lives in one miniscule village). But I had been getting cold this time every time he stopped to study the map, the wind was up and whippping rain often painfully into my face, not to mention quickly sapping all the heat from my body, blowing through my clothes which were more oriented to fashion than function, certainly when compared to his. I had been getting irritable with him. But then one time as we were stopped and I was beside him making the effort to at least pretend to study the map and the landscape around us so that he would be less fretful and more certain, with my backing, of his own opinion, which I felt was invariably right, I looked up to see a huge bird. So large indeed I initially took it to be a sports kite. Shanks stared motionless after where I had pointed in the distance, then folded up his fabric map with less care than was usual, and then yomped off, beconing me on. He immediately forgot his prior cautiousness as regards to route and sticking to the tracks which had largely grown over once autumn turned into winter and I struggled to keep up with both his pace and his narrative as he began to regale me on just one other of his many pet specialist subjects he betrayed no awareness of until the mood took him, that is, the emergence or reemergence of the Eagle owl to the British Mainlands. In this subject, as all his others, indeed, his passionate grasp of his various interests cross-sected and interacted like that tube map that so confounded me for years, and I rememer how he worked in a digression about energy policy to fill in one of my lacunae concerning rigs in the North Sea Oil fields of old which some suggest the Eagle Owls may have landed on in crossing from Scandanavia, and one which looking back shows him to be more clued in, even back then, than nineteen twentieths of the newspapermen today but which I would struggle to recreate with any accuracy. Once again, these things to my mind were discrete things; something that I used to feel better about only when I would reflect on how, relatively speaking, I was less [] than many of my peers who would speak of the economy in one breathe and the problems of society in the next without seeing connection of any kind between the two: something that gives scant succour these recent days. Any case, walking off again so quickly with the packs and with then blood flowing rapidly around through my muscles and brain, freshening my thoughts as we talked with a kind of counterpoint both on and off the subject - he always liked to have a theme but at once would seem uncomfortable maintaining any degree of earnestness and would flit back often to commonplace things, [], [work], though he hated too talking shop, and whatever tragicomedy he was making out of whatever girl or girls he had at the time - it seemed again so effortlessly pleasurable with him and I was left thinking again, as always, why it was we didn’t manage to organise more such outings, since, after all, I forever convinced myself I had no time, but I could have found it, made it, and besides, such a trip would instantly improve any time management and motivation I could put into any project, and once again I was left thinking that of course, he had this feeling more often than I, with the energy he put into everything he turned his hand to. We didn’t catch sight of the bird again but got ourselves duly lost in the process, and had to yomp down through sheer heather, bracken and briars towards a road more audible than visible, finally getting directly back to a pub whose kitchen had closed and ordering both Chinese and curry to cut the chance of us getting something either too small, too inedible or too late to sate our hunger and have us relax into the evening, which we assuredly did, devouring them both successively.

Shanks had gone on that day to talk a little about his life, which, to my then perpetual amazement and my now [] regret, he lived more or less based in our old town from hand to mouth, and from one job and one relationship to the next. Stories which ran on and on and into the next not so much at all because he was self-absorbed as because he was in love with life and the serendipity he had always known and in the statistical certainty of which in the absence of all else he believed and was prepared to evangelise, and because, too, I had little of my own to add less from modesty, though he seemed generously to interpret it as that, being, embarrassingly for me, endlessly curious and admiring of what I had achieved - a word with a bitter resonance for me today. I remember little of it but one preposterous story I would certainly have doubted were it not for the fact that I had done so with him numerous times in the past over a number of years only to have later testimony or proof. [If it weren’t for the fact that practically the only way I tend to fend off illogical and unscientific thinking by the idiots who seem to be drawn to me is by talking about the flaws of inductive reasoning [smysl?] I’d say certain people really do have luck in terms of meeting interesting people and events.] He had been involved in environmental groups for many years, since we had been kids, and this time in protests against road building. And he had always too had a wide circle of friends. Well anyway, as he told it, he’s got a mate who works for a major earthmover company as an engineer and was assigned to sort out a few vulnerabilities given the protest fad elsewhere, in the US and on the continent, for sabotage. Anyway, this guy not being remotely ideologically inclined but rather being averse to boring assignments on door handle assemblies and window wipers and the like, and on top of that being temperamentally unsuited to being tailed by overeducated agency staff who in his opinion were incompetant and apt to do little of any consequence but ruin the peacable comfy atmosphere he had spent years attaining for himself in the company by asking endless needling questions, he leaked a few documents, via Shanksy of course, which would then perhaps lend themselves to the development of technical fixes for sabotaging the various units serving the frontlines on the road-building programme. Lo and behold, caterpiller tracks were soon not merely jamming but irreperably warping, with protesters miraculously using precision-engineered cams, and not only that, but the newer units with a powerful new generation hydraulics were suffering from the bends, that is, rams that had to coordinate together through computer control were failing to do so. Apparently, Shanks’s mate had been vexed that his suggestion of a different form of sensor than was initially proposed and later enacted had been poo-pooed despite the fact that it would have eliminated such a problem. In the event, it seemed the both of them had enjoyed it.

I would go and get away to Yorkshire. It would not be a solution to any of my more recent blunders and slights at work but could be something of a rapprochement with Cassie. She had seen me at any rate going and travelling all over without ever inviting her, and it doubtless looked as if I was escaping her as much as work, or London. It was time to make sense of my life a little.

It wasn’t that we didn’t spend time together. We did. But just as I would reproach myself after catching up with Shanks that I didn’t make time, that I was too comfortable a man, forever telling myself I had work to get on with, but at the same time forever procrastinating with it, using it as an inanimate scapegoat for my own lack of drive - something which if anything is more craven than choosing a man or woman at least, directing some animosity which at the very least, if destructive, is a force - I would get back home and loaf. We would sit together and watch TV. Eat together and though we still followed the now stale anacronism of sitting at the table together to eat, we would listen to the radio news. Even sex tended to be little other than one of us directing apathy towards the porn channel, the equivalent of snacking on hunger pangs brought about by skipping breakfast, too much coffee and a poor diet.

I don’t know if it was that or conversation which was the bigger disappointment. We had nothing in common anymore. Well, little to talk about. In common is a pathetic defense. I know couples (or rather, I used to know couples, and in thinking of them I summon people unchanged by life as I am not, as the me and Kirsten we used to be, are not) who talk about precisely those things where they differ, different lives and friends they can share. I made the effort. We both did. But it was for me a kind of travesty, a reminder that i had failed in what had been a fond aim, more so than my hopes in my career ever had been - fundamental as they had been at times they had been formed of insecurities and a need to prove and assert myself against something. It was just that in my work even when I tried at the sabotage that came so easily to Shanks, barely floundered. However cynical I became the cynicism was expressed less corrosively than the clients themselves. Everything I threw at them seemed to be acceptable. And my conversation, worse of all, turned into a travesty, words betraying me. I’d talk about everything I cared nothing for.

I could give a thousand examples. More. Words stuck in my head and would repeat on me, aghast at hearing this idiocy no less than when I had been her merest admirer and I had been hanging onto her despite her beauty, her intelligence, her wit and charm, and despite her idiot meathead boyfriend and the fact that not only half the hopeless romantics in South London but also half that otherwise divergent demographic of boors, muslebound half-wits and fat-wadded City boys were ready to blunt their knives on the reinforced tyres of his playboy 4×4; looking back at that, what really had been a quixotic and out of character jostle with fate, as if I were trying only to punish myself, I not only felt like I had let myself down, but worse, that I had let her down, for the worser thing was that after all I had the basis of everything of love with her, so that I still felt the sting of her pain almost worse than she did herself, though I couldn’t talk of how I felt for fear of seeming rediculous or false: back then I had hated that man, dreamed of myriad manners of vengence, commeupance or his death, and trying at times to loose myself from her unintended and painful hold (she tried hard herself to let me go and lessen my pain, but her solicitude only demonstrated how just was my love) I veered to resenting her her unforgiveable and uncharacteristic lack of taste in this man, and tried at times to shift that to hate itself by telling myself deep down she was only superficially clever, like that detestable creature himself, and that therefore she could never know how much better I would be for her; she gave me a chance and I betrayed it. It was easier not to think about it all. I would think about the words, yes, as I did back then, but how much better not to think about it all!

Because thinking of that journey, with her. Tracing it as if on a map. Stark. I could see how I had always misrepresented myself. How easy on looking back to see how every one of us who hoped to displace that oaf must have seemed feeble and lacking to her. After all sometimes I see now how easy it is for women to fall into looking at men as men look at cars, and looking back I could scarcely deny that despite his myriad character flaws - such a supercilious and cold [] with a mind which though sharp was as warped by ribbon development along predictable contemporary lines as the most inorganic of cities, he was little more than his CV and his CV was little different from one of those geek backstories to one of those digitalised newsreaders - a part of me (the less developed part it’s sure) envied him his car, his house, his [], saw that rediculous, wasteful, arrogant monstrosity in the same tech spec. manner as a couple of teenagers might, in terms of 0-60, top speed, engine capacity and all the rest, just as I could see all the women who met that oaf as seeing him as earning power, height, chest size, IQ as opposed to [], and all the rest of it. We all seemed unsure of ourselves, and all of us judged ourselves forever against something we so evidently despised so much, the male equivalents of women forever soliciting comments about weight loss. At first every word I uttered was a competition. My eyes would flit around the room as if after an invisible squash ball. Every line had to be a witticism or demonstrate my learning in some way. And now, most recently, it’s talking about the television, current affairs, celebrity, all the fatuous things which I hate and which would never enter my head if it weren’t for this insidious[][][]

“She doesn’t look after herself much does she. I mean, she could afford to get some decent clothes or something!”

The words, spoken in a evening in watching TV, cut into me. Actually cause pain as they pulse in my head. Time was when I would never say anything except when I felt I had something to say, which was rare enough. Encountering people in corridoors I would avert my eyes and say nothing. Later I found people, women especially, though it’s true I didn’t notice the men, and then when I did it brought a tinge of gladness, even pride as opposed to anxiety, could find me cold, even intimidating, and I began to feel a kind of grudging envious respect for anyone who could just talk about anything, any kind of nonsense, who could make small talk and not feel like they were betraying themselves with insincerity but rather that it was a kind of foundation, a potential step towards a [] sincerity. Later still I learned how useful it could be, how learning a foreign language is impossible without this skill of something from nothing that all but the most peculiar women have at their disposal and think of as as natural as breathing. For me it was always selfconscious and the times I indulged in small talk to be civil to a man - perhaps a friend of a friend, but especially here a female friend - and he didn’t deign to reciprocate, then I felt a murderous hatred. All of these things, though were a means to an end, just as Chrissie later came to feel that all the wining and dining of her oaf had been - he had had a way, she said, of making her feel more or less obliged through a debt of gratitude; something alas she only knew how to resent in retrospect-men like him always know how to work on women like her who give the benefit of the doubt long after others would have stopped. And certainly it had never been meant to be employed with this girl who had been as near to corporeal[] as I thought I would ever know, as delicate and beautiful and impossible as a dream falling or flying away as you wake - and how often have you, if you are at all sensitive, felt, that dreams are never as beautiful as they seem when they are escaping like that, scared away by the clatter of the real world upon waking.

We had been an incongrous crowd, a band, others might have been tempted to think, of latent loners drawn together from various inclinations, some more and some less admirable, running from the sexually avaricious Jude to the networking Kev (Jude would have done the same if only he had not considered us worthy of little but his contempt, and certainly he would for once have snorted out rather than in to any suggestion that we could in any fashion help him) and the hopelessly romantic or infatuated.

Kirsten herself had briefly washed up at my flat following a break-up. She looked like a model, considered herself an actress but introduced herself as out of work with a look in her eye that I took at the time to be a burning arrogance and scorn, but later looked back on as a wearied anticipation of the singleminded sexual strategising and attempts at cunning that had been her only experience of the male of the species. She had the kind of long thick black hair that provided at all times a contrast to her pale face, framing the strong features, principally her blue green eyes and her mouth, though her small thin stub nose which seemed at first cutely incongruous on her relatively long face soon itself became, for me at least, a part of this sublime, perhaps due to the freckles dotted around it, and the apparent attempt she had made to play all this down - it could be nothing other than a concerted attempt given the evident cost of her clothes even when she dressed down in this way - her greasy hair in particular but also this whole ensemble including the inchoate rebellion of the faintest dots of acne on her foundation-less but impeccable complexion seemed to laugh off her attempts at sabotage. She had hips, on long shapely legs, though barely any breasts to speak of, which only piqued - and almost instantly at that - my curiosity as to how they would look without the almost rustic shawl she was wearing over the insubstantial and figure-hugging sporty top that dropped off to the visible orange inside stitch of the worn waistband of her old-style jeans, since the subtle variations of smaller breasts are more fascinating to me than those larger which may fall outwards or in, droop and sag or [] like muscle itself and which may be warm or cold soft or firm to the touch but often nothing like so distracting as those smaller fried eggs that distract not at all from an otherwise alluring body and a pretty face. If eyes are the windows to the soul, my soul was quite obviously in those seconds after I first opened the door (I fear saying split seconds would be too optimistic) ticking through the same clockwork motions as I don’t doubt every single heterosexual man she had met in her adult life. It’s in that sense that being a beauty is like being an oppressed race, in that every second encounter is eminently predictable and exquisitely disappointing if you let yourself hope.

I had become something of a cynic back then. I had wanted to build up my work forever into the future which remained a vague personal utopia defined by discrete images little more coherent than shots in a cheap holiday brochure. The fact of its distance forgave much. That is, I allowed myself to behave as I would not in this beautiful future with a beautiful wife, house, dogs and the rest of it. That I would have to earn. In the meantime I was faced with an unexpected and perhaps enviable dilemma in a glut of slutty girls more impressed with my career potential than I allowed myself to admit I was myself. Car crash TV made flesh, these girls were invariably as magnetically attractive to my loins as their empty heads were magnetically repulsive to my intellect, which if I were in a copywriting mood or among the pseuds and dudes I was unfortunate enough to land with back then I might quip would explained precisely why the 69 might have come to be such a favoured position, but that aside it’s clear I didn’t have anything like the consistency of will power required to turn them down - because the absurdity is such that I did not even have to make the [] of persuing them - when my ability to insinuate myself with the more intellectual women I took to had not improved with age and had every indication of falling, not when this was so easy, not even when I realised the very real contempt that welled up in me when I was with them, the embarrassment when I was in a queue with such conversational philistines.

One time I took one of them back from a wine bar. It was an escape. Just as going to the gym is an escape. Much of the time I just needed to get away from idiot conversations. It was undemanding. Small talk was all they knew. And though I would reproach myself with keen self-scrutiny and vitriol when I had time on my own, I didn’t come by that often and allowed myself less. Besides, this way, I used to tell myself, I turn a little of my [] outwards, at women worthy of little more but who are in any case too stupid to notice, and the alternative was to torture myself by clinging on to women who rarely had men worth their while, and who never would, and who certainly would deign to nothing but friendship with me: later I would snap and sated with [] I would decide I was due such torture and I took up with Kirsten. This time though we were just getting towards the inevitable: for form’s sake we had gone through the usual routines and I had leaned forward and dispensing with some of the latter intemediary steps of the courtship ritual I had experienced of late, I began kissing and pawing her before pulling her roll-neck sweater over her head. At this point she reached for her phone in her bag on the floor beside the settee. I rushed to indicate I had rubbers and she smirked, keying her phone for a little while. I was puzzled, and said so, saying something sarchastic about spoiling the mood, she explained (still laughing) that she was searching for video cameras, that somehow she hadn’t found time while I was making the coffee; in fact, no, she didn’t even do that, initially she assumed I was bluffing and didn’t explain at all but pulled a face like a schoolgirl might to a teacher. Spoil the mood it had and I couldn’t go on with it. She unzippped me and sucked me off while I leaned back and reflected on how digital cameras on their introduction were by law fitted with a form of sound reproduction of a shutter on old-style film-based stills cameras; it was no doubt in part so groups might relax from a pose, drain the lactic acid from their smiling muscles and the like, but it was no small part so nobody could take inappropriate pictures of strangers. I could see little reasons for the ability to synchronise all appliances to a mobile. Perhaps it was no different. Stands to reason of course, much of it, but it sent me into something of a depression nonetheless. That’s one I bring to mind now and it seems to me it’s not unrepresentative. They were pretty girls. A remarkable proportion might even have been models. Physically flawless. But it seems now I often felt like that, down, after such a meeting. Strange that I cannot really say. There were girls before her, and certainly girls after her. I took it in fact like a rider falling off his horse. I might have even gone out into town, found a club and found a girl that very night. Certainly I told it that way, which, granted, back then, didn’t say much.

It may have been her who stopped me just fucking around. I wouldn’t say I held a flame for her, and in fact, on the contrary I’d maintain that it was my apprehension that she was stratospherically out of my league and my consequent ability to be almost standoffish, certainly at my warmest, merely friendly, that led her quickly to repudiate the impression I must have left in what, though she never said as much nor even hinted - at any rate beyond the threshold to get through to my thick skull - must have been a stereotypically draining and boringly predictable first encounter. I was helped in this first, by the fact it never once became conscious, never became one of these kind of if-only strategies desperate men employ to bag girls thy consider out of their league - and I mean desperate here not in the sense of sexual desperation, that grasping after any girl that might come one’s way I have seen a thousand times and never once of course to anyone’s particular [], nor these hopeless romantics among whose number, as I have said, I consider myself, but a different kind of desperation, like a stalker’s desperation, a peculiarly male lack of self-esteem coupled with a huge self-regard, the kind of guy who feels he is misunderstood and knows as soon as the object of his desire sees him clearly she could not help but love him. More than that though it may have been that I had just got shot of a lodger who had seemed at first sight normal enough but who had come to reveal himself as incredibly needy, friendless but not, alas, reclusive nor even vaguely solitary, a guy who was not in the least secretive about his employment but who was nonetheless, though evidently scrupulously consistent in the details of his setpiece anecdotes and revelations (it was clear that he considered them exactly thus, as winning []) he managed at once to be both vague and overly precise about certain things in a way that was hard to put one’s finger on, but which had been picked up independently by friends with whom I hadn’t discussed him. He found it impossible to make the tea when I was reading a book or some such without regaling me not only with these oddments of life in a [] and would, which was worse, sometimes even return to his own room having done no more than boiled the water, steeped a tea bag until it was swimming in scum or left toast popped up. He had been merely the logical conclusion of a string of lodgers who had been either preturnaturally irritating, slovenly, or possessed of a kind of warped intellect. I had wanted him out and it had been nightmare trying to get my way. I came to believe that anybody who wanted to stay in my flat could not be sane, and that it would come out sooner or later. That she was as beautiful as I felt her to be only confirmed me in this suspicion, and especially with this need to play down her looks, with her acting and the look in her eye I was certain I was taking on a woman who would come to be a neurotic nightmare. I only only hoped she might be at least either solitary or so gregarious I was likely to see little of her. If she wasn’t going to be girlfriend potential, and I was certain she was not, then she certainly would be little more than an anonymous lodger of whom, yes, friends could tell me I was lucky for me to wink or push out my bottom lip and nod, and on occasions, yes, ripe for a good letch, for an eyefull, to take in perhaps her legs and arse as she did her ironing, as she liked to do in company.

No, I wasn’t chasing her, not even unconsciously, I would argue, since if so the strategy hatched by my id, if that’s the right term, is more devastatingly devious than anything I can conceive any mind of mine [] let alone pulling off, but I did consciously use her as a kind of prototype. That is, once it became reasonably clear that she wasn’t crazy, I began to see her as the ideal girlfriend. Ideal, that is, in every sense except mental my own mental stability, since I knew even then that such a girl can drive a man crazy. Any man, that is, who is not himself given to irrational trust : that took the edge off wanting her. This process took some time. I came to see, for example, there was no flecks of vomit on the underside of the toilet seat - I came to know my neighbour, the only one in the block I exchange words with, by spending much of a night out on the top floor landing following the forceful ejection from my flat of a lodger’s boyfriend, during which the door slammed behind me; following a few months vacilation in which I convinced myself over and over and against my own tendencies that she was ultimately not my responsibility, I finally decided, on learning that she was essentially estranged from her family to moot my suspicions that she was suffering from an eating disorder, voicing concerns that she seemed often to throw up and wouldn’t mention anything, and that one of the signs of eating disorders was down on the arms, upper lip and so on, the body’s way of trying to conserve heat and thus energy at a time when it is direly limited. Now the first bad sign was that he wasn’t familiar with the word ‘down’. Well, I suppose the first bad sign really, was the down on his upper lip, which on a twenty-odd year old is scarcely a sign of maturity, but then that was part of the reason I convinced myself that she was my responsibility after all, since this pisshead was never going to be of much help. Then what word could I use but hair, to which ‘you trying to say my missus’s hairy?!’ seemed almost a reasonable response. Now it may well have been that once again irritated by the [] of my life, I had attempted more to shake it all up into an interesting form than sort her problems out - I’ll grant my unconscious that - and that it certainly did. Others, and I’m talking now just about the women,

In one sense we have always been alike. Cassie likes to have to earn you. She typically finds something to hate in people who take to her immediately. She takes her time to settle into an opinion and finds it hard to respect the regard and friendship of those who . As I have said, she errs from the off towards trust and works from there, whereas I err towards a form of [] cum disdain but trustworthiness is a mere one of many virtues, and indeed the fact she [] the benefit of the doubt in this is a symbol perhaps of how little she values it relative to others, say, wit, , a kind of self-restraint which can be however overridden at will, and various intellectual and creative hooks of personality and individuality. With Jude, yes, she made a big mistake, but not only has she changed since then, she also at least mistook . With this standoffish [], this need not to win over this beautiful young girl but much more important, to preserve the one potential area of sanity, the one refuge from what I had not yet allowed myself to see was the variously louche, shallow and [] London that I still then felt I was out to conquer and so, like Don Quixote and perhaps every form of desperate man faced with a woman (except, in some cases, I feel compelled to add, the desperate romantic who witholds his favour), projected upon it countless virtues it did not possess.

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