Looking the wrong way

The sun makes me squint, unseasonable glare furrows my brow into tight knots as I watch the waves tumble gently against a discarded coke can. Three swans dip their heads down into the water in unison, feeding in a delicate balance of choreography. Out in the harbour the boat pointlessly christened Offshore Rebel lolls lazily. Out the corner of my eye kids play and dogs run, a couple with a his and hers set of canines walk briskly past. His is daftly enthusiastic, lolloping along, tongue out to one side gormlessly pursuing flung fragments of wood, hers is frantically trying to scramble its two inch long legs in pursuit, whilst keeping its head at a perfectly, competition winning angle.

Dogs and kids.

We nearly got a dog a few years ago.

“It’ll be company for you whilst I working late on my MA,” she’d said. I’d quite liked the idea. My folks have had dogs for as long as I can remember. I like the whole routine of walks and I love the unadulterated adoration they give you.

I can’t remember why we didn’t in the end.

Possibly we decided the landlord would never agree to it.

Possibly we decided that if I had to be out on the road for fourteen hours it’d be unfair on the dog, especially if she was also out.

Possibly we decided the ten foot by eight garden wasn’t big enough.

I suspect it might have been because we couldn’t agree on what sort.

“Something daft and friendly. We’ll go to the local dogs’ home and see who likes us,” I might have said.

“We could get a Chihuahua,” she possibly replied. And yes her friend’s Chihuahua is lovely, but I couldn’t quite see myself owning one.

None of which is really the point.

The two Steve’s come back from the toilet and sit down next to me in the Dorset sand. They’ve decided to drag me out of my moping and out camping for the weekend which I appreciate, frankly, to a pathetic extent. We sit in near-silence for a while choosing only to comment on the austere senior navy pose or salty-sea-urchin beard of the various amateur captains sailing past. We mock the name Sheer Calm for being one of worst, and most absurd, puns I’ve ever heard.

“If you had a boat, what would you call it?” asks Google Steve.

“H’mm,” I mull for a moment. “Dave’s boat?”

Jesus, I think to myself. I really need to start thinking about words again if that’s the best I can manage.

Walking back along the coast we spend a little time on a concrete path. Two little boys overtake us in a race. The younger propels himself along on a silver scooter, the elder whips his hips from side to side on some sort of flexi-board. It looks fun, although my complete natural lack of balance would probably make it impossible. The older kid wins, just, but I suspect he deliberately made it a tight race. Too kind to just leave his brother in his wake, too competitive to actually lose on purpose.

Dogs and kids.

The book I’m struggling with is, amongst other things, about a man in his early thirties trying to come to terms with the responsibilities of fatherhood when his girlfriend, stuck on the other side of the world, discovers she is “a little bit pregnant.” It’s also about what happens when you lie so much you can’t even tell yourself the truth. Amongst other things. There might be comic and narrative reasons for these plot devices, but still...

It’s a lot of time to be thinking about something.

Someone, I forget who, said something along the lines of whenever we put pen to paper we a little bit of ourselves remains in the marks.

Three Weeks.

Twenty-one days ago:

“I know we’ve been having troubles, I know we’ve been fighting too much, but we’ve both been under a lot of pressure,” I implored from the kitchen doorway. Two steps down and three across she makes coffee and refuses to meet my gaze. “Can’t we give it another go? Make an actual effort to make it work? Twelve years is too long to throw away this quickly.”

Her spoon spun the hot water into a tiny whirlpool. A little blackness slopped over the rim of the mug.

“I mean, we’ve hardly been spending any time together. We’ve both been too busy. And then when we have it’s been too pressurised, so much so that it was inevitable it’d snap. Things will be calmer in the autumn. It’d work again. We just need to-“
She threw the spoon down across the work surface, splattering a trail in its wake. Strangely it was silent when it hit the floor.

“But I don’t want to spend any time with you.”

And with that the foundations upon which I’d built my entire adult life crumbled away like they were but dust.

Eighteen days ago:

Everything felt heavy as I stumbled onto the bus on the Old Kent Road. The party celebrating the end of our course had seemed to be occurring just outside of my reality. The few people who knew had tried to distract me, but in the end all I could do was pour innumerable cans of beer down my gullet and in the early hours stagger off.

Sitting upstairs the ambulance’s blue lights turned my skin opaque. I read the text message she’d sent the night before, from out of her sister’s spare room, visiting the nephew we once shared and now I’m not allowed to see.

She called me sweetheart and ended with a kiss.

Knowing it was wrong, knowing it was a mistake I rang her.

“Hi,” she said, and we mumbled through our conversation, conscious of listening ears at both ends, until I said:

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

“Really?”

“Yes. Really.”

I got off the bus and walked down Sevenoaks Road to our house; the trees felt cool in the rain’s afterthought and my heart swelled hard against my ribs.

Sixteen days ago:

I pulled the pump out of the airbed and frantically tried to screw the cap back on. A gush of air whistled across my knuckles.

“Did you sleep in the bed whilst I was away?” she asked from the bottom of the stairs.

“Uh-huh,” I hate the airbed. It’s uncomfortable and the lounge is always too hot when I go to bed and during the night a chill slips down the chimney and pinches my neck.

“Why won’t you sleep in the bed?”

“It doesn’t feel right.” I closed my eyes for a moment.

“It’s your bed too. Come on,” her fingers had snuck up on me whilst I wasn’t looking and they brushed the back of my palm.

Fifteen days ago:

“I’m sorry if I gave you the wrong impression.”

“I thought you’d had a change of heart. Come to your senses. You sounded so emphatic.”

“It was just a reflex.”

Thirteen days ago:

“You know what?” she asked with that sad-tired smile that told a million fairy tales. “I’d really like to climb a mountain with you. Just one more time.”

Eleven days ago:

“People keep offering me places to stay.”

“Don’t go anywhere. Please.” We both sat silently, neither of us exactly sure why she shouldn’t. “You don’t just disappear into the night after this length of time.”

“No. No, you don’t.”

Eight days ago:

It probably wasn’t what she'd had in mind, I thought to myself, as grass sprung under my boot, but I couldn’t help myself. The words were uncontrolable.

“You can’t accuse me of not supporting you as an artist and at the same time claim that I’ve no ambition of my own, that I’m too wrapped up in you. It’s either or, surely?”

There was no anger which surprised me. The slopes of Pen Y Fan seemed to pull all the aggression out of me. There was, instead, just the words tumbling across the still mountain air.

“Are you breaking up with me because I’m not an artist?” She didn’t answer, but instead looked down at her boots taping out a beat to the rhythm of the hill. The mud and water clung to leather like memories.

“Help me out here, because I just don’t know.”

It’s hard to be more impetuous when all the other wants to do is sleep and work, I thought but didn’t say. Then I wished I had said, and then I was glad I hadn’t, because in the end what would have been the point? How would it help?
And a few hours later she clasped my shoulder in the dark of a pub car-park and cried tears of the bereaved.

Another couple of hours later she slumbered in the passenger seat and I whispered the words to the song going round for the umpteenth time, unable to change the CD without disturbing her.

“As ah walk through this land of broooken dree-aams, ah have visions of maaannnyyy things, love’s happiness is just an illuuusssion, filled with sadness an’ coooonnnfussion.”

Five days ago:

I was driving along the south-circular to supermarket, Front Row was bubbling in the background and a novelist I never caught the name of said:

“Of course all great literature is about love. It might pretend to be about something else occasionally, but deep down it’s always about love. After all, what else is there worth writing about?”

I sat in the car-park, the strip neon lighting reflecting back in the windscreen and pinched the bridge of my nose till I thought I might pass out.

A few hours later and something stupid had been said and:

“Shall I move out now? Shall I just leave in the morning?”

“Please. No. Stay.”

“Why? How exactly does this help, Dave?”

I didn’t know, except that I couldn’t bear the thought of her running away.

Four days ago:

I looked around the studio flat and simply thought: “Oh fuck.” It’s horrible. The staircase up to the attic featured holes into the abyss, the walls were smeared yellow from cigarettes, in the kitchen panes of glass was missing from the windows. If I’d lain down, had I dared, in the living/bed space and stretched out like a star I would have been able to touch all four corners.

“Are you sure it’s six-hundred and ninety a month?” I asked the estate agent who shruged unapologetically. “And that’s not including any bills?”

An hour later and I walked through another door, only this time it felt different. It was light, clean. Not enormous, but not miniscule. Affordable, even.

“I think I’ve found a flat,” I told her later over dinner.

Over the evening she cried and frowned and screwed her face up like someone’d spat in her soul. It made me feel terrible.

“I love this house,” she said. So do I, I thought. “We could be housemates?” She wasn’t entirely joking. For a second it was tempting, but then the thought of her with someone else in the next room made me feel sick.

Three days ago:

We spent the night with different groups of people for the first time in what felt like forever. The bus back from Dalston seemed to be endless and it was a quarter to one when I finally slipped through the door. The clunk of the locks woke her from the slumber on the sofa.

We sat amicably for a while and then she hugged me so tight that I think I may burst. She kissed me tenderly on the cheek.

“You can still kiss me on the lips, you know?” I said.

“But I shouldn’t.”

“Why not? If it feels nice?”

She did so.

“It does feel nice. It’s lovely,” she said with that tired-sad smile back again.

Two days ago:

I reached across and held her tight, the Sunday morning air held in place by the duvet. Her back pressed against my chest and I nuzzled, then I kissed her shoulder.

Then I remembered and everything ended once again.

Later I was forced to ask: “What’s wrong? You seem really cross about something.”

“I’m angry about the cuddling and the kissing this morning.”

I could have protested, but the words were running dry and I felt I had to save what was left, to hold them precious until the final gasp. Instead, I poured myself another cup of coffee and wondered if this would be day I woke up.

Something Changed

I wrote this two weeks ago, but haven’t been able to find the strength to post it:

“These aren’t the words I intended to write today. In fact, these aren’t words I ever imagined that I would have to write.

I wanted to follow up last week’s piece with something called Worst Case Scenario whereby I’d take slightly-fictionalised possible outcomes of global warming, environmental collapse, energy shortage and economic meltdown and project possible outcomes. All very depressing, but all in tune with what I’ve been reading and thinking about.

However, it’s easy to forget, when looking at this sort of thing, about everyday life. Yes, I am concerned about climate change and would like to do more to try and affect it, but it’s not a subject that consumes me. Maybe it should, but it doesn’t.

Because I’ve just had a far worse scenario presented to me and that is life without Beck.

I know I shouldn’t be putting this in the public domain, and I’m sorry to her and to everyone else, but I’m going to have to tell a lot of people about this, most of whom are on the mailing list for this blog, and I don’t think I can face having to have the same conversation again and again. So I’m taking the easy way out and writing it down.

Beck has broken up with me. I have absolutely no desire to end the relationship. Even after twelve years I was excited about what the future holds, I was looking forward to how upcoming changes in our lives would affect the relationship dynamic. I felt it would make it stronger. I guess I was wrong.

I won’t pretend to understand why she has broken up with me. I don’t. I can’t. Nothing seems to make sense this morning. I feel as though I’ve been turned inside out, as though my very essence has been extinguished. I feel cold and empty and alone.”

I sat down the morning after she told me and wrote the above piece. Two weeks later it still holds true. Despite my best efforts, and a little wavering on her part, she remains resolute. I still don’t understand. Possibly, I understand even less. Two weeks of talking and I have yet to hear an actual reason for splitting. Yes, there have been difficulties in our relationship, but nothing exceptional, nothing that I did not feel could be overcome with a little effort. If we wanted. It’s like a vacuum has sucked my nerves away. I am hollow.

To make matters even worse I can’t write. There’s only one story I want to tell at the moment and that seems to have little chance of coming true.

Listen

Can you hear it?

The soft thlump of iron shoes on damp turf, the gentle ear splitting crinkle of chain mail ringlets jostling, the high-pitched twang of twine slung between the tips of a beech bow. There’s the rasping, nervous breath of the men next to you, the shouts and jeers, mingling with the dawn’s dew, a dozen tongues, accents and dialects like alien languages all fumbling into one with fear.

This is 1346 and we are waist deep in farmland mud just outside the small French town of Crecy. We’re English and we’ve just developed a system that enables men armed with longbows firing in tandem to be the most destructive force on the planet.

Or maybe it isn’t. Maybe this isn’t Crecy, maybe it’s Poitiers in 1356 or Agincourt in 1415 – that was particularly successful for the English. Henry V’s army so decimated the French that they happily surrendered and agreed for him to be crowned King. Unfortunately, he managed to die a few weeks later from dysentery and it all began over again. So maybe it’s not a battle that the English win. Maybe it’s Orleans in 1429 or Castillion in 1456.

It doesn’t matter. What’s important is the dry smell of shit at the back of your mouth, the burning sweat on the back of your hands. It doesn’t matter when or where you are if you’re going to die.

This is the One Hundred Years War, the war between England and France which actually lasted one-hundred-and-nineteen-years. On and off. Over a century of near-continuous warfare between what are today peaceful neighbours, except we still laugh about hating the French and they, I am sure, do the same about us. So keen were the English, though, on fighting in the fourteenth century that we also managed the fifty-year long War of the Roses, the first major English civil war.

How did we get here?

We got here because of land and because of trade. Like most wars, really. Edward III of England had a claim to the French throne through his Mother. She would have been Queen had not the medieval inheritance laws been decidedly male biased leaving her cousin, Phillip VI, to succeed her brother instead. But what Edward really wanted was to regain Normandy and Anjou, the lands he claimed through Kings William the Conqueror and Stephen, the lands that had been lost to the French by Edward’s Great-great grandfather, John. The lands that had formed a natural bridge between England and the southern France English ruled territory of Gascony. The Angevian Empire once spread from Hadrian’s Wall to the Pyrenees and Edward wanted it back.

That’s the unfunny thing about Empires. They never end. Rome might have appeared to be all over in the fourth century when the Ostrogoths sacked the city for the umpteenth time, but the Emperors of Constantinople, of Byzantium, of the Eastern Empire never gave up trying to regain Western Europe until the Turks crushed them in 1453. And still Rome remained the hypothetical justification behind the medieval Germanic Emperors use of the term Holy Roman Empire.

The British fought, killed and died in America, in Malaysia and in Palestine, so desperate were we to hold onto our lands. The French did the same in Vietnam until the Americans took over in defence of an ideological capitalist-democratic empire.

Once you have it, you don’t want to relinquish it.

But all things must die.

As I write this a cat has killed a bird and left its corpse on the lawn. The recent combination of guilty heat and torrential showers means the decomposition process is occurring at an unexpected rate. I’ve yet to clear the body away. It’s just left rotting away amongst the tall blades of grass, merging back into the soils of life.
Everything happens in cycles. Nothing is new. What has been will be so again.

The 1789 French Revolution was a decade long foray into pre-socialism, but Europe’s oldest sovereign nation couldn’t exist without a single dominant character at the helm and so Napoleon, came to the fore. Revolted by the upstart’s appointment the rest of monarchist Europe formed a coalition against the French. Old against new.

In 1932 a former Lance-Corporal and frustrated painter from Austria became the Chancellor of Germany. Initially the world saw Hitler’s rhetoric and hard-line stances were seen as essential to drag the country back to its feet after the economic meltdown post-world war one.

History is like a mirror reflecting the past so it happens simultaneously. It’s like an onion, underneath the skin it’s just layers of the same stuff over and over again down to the core.

In 1797/1938 Napoleon/Hitler smile tightly and make their promises to Archduke Charles of Austria/ Chamberlain. No more, they promise. The Netherlands, Milan and Venice/The Rhineland, Austria and the Sudetenland are sufficient. Lands which had once been French/German will be so again. It is enough.

They are lying. They were lying then and they do so again now and every minute for ever more.

By 1802 Napoleon’s Empire stretches from the Spanish coast and into western Russia, from the Netherlands down to Sardinia. By 1941 Hitler’s territories run from Norway to North Africa and Greece, from Belarus to the Pyrenees.

Still, on they march.

Once it starts it will never be enough.

Listen.

In the distance there is the thump-thump of shells being fired and detonating in the soft earth, there is the metallic shriek of tank tracks crushing brick. A President speaks beleaguered rhetoric in a language that is not yours. There is no innovation in destruction today. Today, there are just people dying. This is Georgia. Today is tomorrow or next week or in the spring. Or in 1968 and Prague or in 1955 and Budapest.

Georgia has been Russia territory twice before. Once part of the Russian Empire, it briefly declared independence after the 1917 revolution before being absorbed back into the USSR.

No-one escapes an Empire easily.

History repeats ad infinitum.

In 1962 US spy planes identify nuclear warhead silos in Cuba. Kennedy and Khrushchev get itchy palms and the world holds its breath.

In 2008 Poland agrees to the installation of US sponsored ICBM defence systems within its borders.

Russian General Anatoly Nogovitsyn declares Poland a legitimate target.

Robert Hunter, the former US Ambassador to NATO, antagonises Russia by telling the BBC that it’s just “Saudi Arabia with trees”, not a world power.

In the 1930s The League of Nations declared that Germany’s rearmament posed no threat to Europe.

I blink in the unexpected sunshine and wrap a plastic bag around my hand. I bend down and try to pick up the bird’s corpse, but it breaks apart between my fingers. Its innards have turned to mush at my touch. There’s the faint smell of stale mustard.

I look up and see a cat sitting on the utility room roof. It cocks its head to one side, as though to ask ‘why bother’, as I tie the bag in a knot.

Its tail flips from side to side thudding rhythmically like distant mortar.

In the fourteenth century France was a pivotal part of the trade routes, it was the linchpin between the kingdoms of Spain and the rest of Europe. Marseilles was the only Mediterranean port to threaten the dominance of the Italian city states. In 2008 Georgia plays an equally pivotal role in the transportation of oil and gas, thousands of miles of pipes cut through its mountains, arteries pumping black gold to the world.

We never change.

An arrowhead momentarily glints in the French sunshine and then thousands block out the light like a plague cloud. They soar through the air in a beautiful arc and you raise your shield over your head, praying that the taut leather will be sufficient to protect you. In the glimpse of centuries the beech stick, steel head and goose feathers metamorphose into a hard, metallic cylinder with a burning tail. There’s a gasp as the air is pulled into a vacuum and you are gone.

Even pent-up, stressed-out, paranoid, wannabe writers need to take an evening off occasionally.

“So, I’m in this thing, tonight,” Beck says looking up from the watching a middle-aged German man covering a Johnny Cash song.

“Thing?” My fingers type extremely slowly, forcing the words out. Writing is like getting blood from stone today*. “What thing?”

“This performance thing? Responding to the play?”

“You never mentioned that before.” I sa, but I don’t believe myself.

“You can’t have been listening.” Or perhaps I have just temporarily forgotten?

“Oh, the thing with what’s-his-name?”

In my defence you can substitute what’s-his-name with the name of a performance artist/curator whom Beck’s worked with before. Nice guy, interesting artist, shameless self-publicist through email, facebook, myspace – every conceivable form of electronic communication. If he gets your details you’ll be bombarded with a constant stream of updates. He just can’t help it, especially in the run up to an event.

The ‘thing’ in question is a series of performances delivered off the cuff by artists responding to a play they’ve just watched. Live art feeding direct back into the audience, enhancing the theatre experience.

Or something like that, at any rate.

“What’s the play again?” I ask a little later.

“I told you.” She’s talking to me, but her eyes following the flickers of the computer screen, images of Canadian front rooms reflecting outwards.

“I know, but-?”

“Moll Flanders.”

“Oh! I bet it’s the same performance as at my pub recently.”

By which I don’t, obviously, mean the pub that I own. The brewery owns it. I just pump pints, but it does have a moderately successful fringe theatre tacked on the side. Embarrassingly, despite describing myself as a theatre fan, I’ve never been to see a play there. I’ve always meant to, but never quite found the time. The things I wanted to see were always on when I had to be elsewhere. I even carried the box office number around in my phone for a year or so with the best intentions. Then the phone died and I started working nights.

“Do the flyers have a red background with a blonde woman staring up to the camera?” I’m suddenly enthusiastic.

“Eh? Probably.”

“Hey, why don’t I come along too?”

“You don’t have to. Aren’t you busy?”

“No, no. Well, yes I am, but I’d like to come.”

The play’s not quite what I was expecting, but okay, even though the stupid girl I end up chatting to afterwards thinks differently. She sounds like she was breast-fed foie gras when she says “Of course, I couldn’t possibly be involved in any theatre like that. It offends my socialist principles.”

Darlin’, I think but politely restrain myself, economics can be socialist. Justice and morals can be socialist. Plays and fiction and art with a deliberate political aim can be socialist. This was just a bit of fun. Now piss off back to your country estate.

Anyway.

The point is that if you constantly force yourself down everyone’s throat then at some point it’ll come back and bite you.

For example: How easy is it to misread ‘invitation to a performance,’ as ‘invitation to perform’?

After the play I lurk around, trying not to talk to the lady of the manor and sucking on a bottle of Budvar, when a guy dressed as a pink rabbit marches out of the toilets and up to the bar. He hands the staff a CD and harangues them to play it. A thumping dance beat fills the tiny room and he begins some sort of interpretative dance in which he appears to worship a funnel.

Beck wanders over chucking quietly. I raise an eyebrow and wonder how rude I can be. Does she know this guy? Is she laughing because it’s funny or ridiculous?

“Who the fuck is he?” grumbles the curator storming past, his face a mix indignation and pure bafflement.

“I’ve come all the way from Bristol,” the rabbit protests, looking crestfallen. “I’ve got to catch the train home in a few minutes.”

You start off from an incorrect presumption and see what happens? Everything can fall apart. It wasn’t even the same version of Moll Flanders. The fringe version is, I suspect, sillier and involving less flouncing around to harpsichords, but then who’d have thought there’d be two stage adaptations of Defoe’s novel in the same city at the same time? Who’d have thought it a good idea to travel across the country, bunny suit under arm, for a thirty-second dance slot?

*: See? I’m even resorting to tired clichés.

Beer, how do I love thee?

It’s August in an even year and so I’ve been to CAMRA’s Great British Beer Festival at Earl’s Court. Not that it only runs alternate years, just that I seem to go in 2004, 2006 and now 2008. So, I spent Tuesday evening with my old boss, a real Scotsman and a pretend Scotsman supping pints of real ale from around the country, snacking on strips of deep-fried pig skin, in somewhere which by resembling a sixties brutalist car-park has absolutely none of the ingredients which make a good pub.

Except for five days a year where it has the best selection of beer anywhere in the country.

Good old concrete hell Earl’s Court. Even it can’t spoil the joy of discovering a different micro-brewery or the fun to be had watching the bemused expressions of foreigners wandering through the hall. The GBBF, as it’s pointlessly known, has no entertainment other than to drink beer. Even the Germans like an oompah band whilst getting intoxicated.

It’s not all wrong side of middle-age men with pot bellies and beards, although there’s an unusually high quota of them, there’s also a surprising number of young women, city types and people wearing hats made from balloons. One of whom I ended up talking to, or rather listening to, was a public defender and despite having to be in court for nine o-clock the following morning was hitting the cider and perry stand pretty hard.

“But, you know, he’s probably guilty, so fuck him, yeah?” she cackled.

(Perry, incidentally, what’s that all about? Twelve months ago nobody drank perry. Re-brand it as pear cider, give it an advertising campaign with an Oirish voice-over and some cock and bull story about how the old cider makers used to save the pears to make their own special drink to keep, and every bugger’s drinking the stuff.)

Anyway. Beer. Pubs. Love them.

I talked recently about my romantic devotion to the perfect pub, or indeed the imperfect local, but it’s the beer as much as anything that gets me excited.

“Ah, come on, man,” says the Greek guy who works behind the bar with me. “I don’t know how you can drink that stuff.” But then when someone offers to buy him a drink he takes a bottle of Bud - and I mean crappy imitation American Bud not the real Czech stuff.

“It’s all in the water,” I try to explain. “The great thing about British beer is it tastes of the land it comes from. Regional brewing is dictated by the hops and the water where the brewery is based.”

“Like Stella is Belgian?”

“Well, no, because that’s brewed in Cardiff.”

I guess you can’t explain it, and even going to a festival, isn’t the same as actually travelling around the country and trying them in their homesteads.

I could go on about all the wonderful beers I’ve tried and loved. About how the Midlands is the spiritual home of brewing, but the best beers probably come from Yorkshire. About how I’m becoming a little obsessed by beers from Cornwell and Norfolk, but don’t worry.

I won’t.

Instead, I think we’re back to romanticism.

It’s the same with my ideas about pubs. The history, the flavour, the sense of tradition that comes from good beer. You never get that with Carling. But it’s also partially a romantic invention of the drinker. It is, at the end of the day, just water hops, sometimes malt, sometimes barely, occasionally other bits and bobs. The context is imposed by the drinker and the brewer alike.

Certain men find the idea of sitting alone in the pub, reading the paper or just thinking somehow a noble past-time. Just stopping off for a quick pint and to set the world to rights and perhaps bump into an like-minded soul and with whom to pass the time of day in suitably manly fashion.

This is, alas, romanticising drinking and I, like many, am guilty.

Usually when I’ve already had a couple.

A few times recently when I’ve been out in town, everyone’s disappeared into the public transport network, and I’ve missed the 2305 and so rather than hang-around Charing Cross until the 2345 I think I’ll have one more and read my book for twenty minutes. Fortunately, contrary to the Daily Mail’s opinion that city centres are no-go areas because of marauding twenty-four hour drinkers swirling aluminium chairs above their heads, it’s surprisingly difficult to get a pint after traditional opening hours in central London.

So, I think it, but don’t necessarily do it.

Tuesday, on my way home from the beer festival and I miss the 2323 at London Bridge by seconds which means a thirty-five minute wait. I go for a bit of a wander around and come across a pub, The Bunch Of Grapes, still very much open. Despite whole weeks of my life (probably) spent hanging around London Bridge I’ve never spotted this pub before and I’ve got that ‘a-bit-tipsy-but-feeling-really-sober’ feeling going on and think that I could happily handle one more.

I glance at my watch, it’s now 2336. To be sure I’m on the next train I’d really need to leave no later than 2350.

I stand in the doorway for a moment. It looks an okay pub. So-so, but not great. Young’s on tap, which despite relocating the brewery to Bedford and selling the Wandsworth land for housing is still quite a good pint.

(You see? Context.)

2337.

No. This’d be drinking for the sake of drinking. There’s nothing noble or dignified or romantic in it; it’s just being a bit pissed.

I head back to the station.

The irony in all of this comes Saturday night. I do an evening shift during which some Australians come in and ask for ‘proper English beer.’ I do the whole waxing lyrical thing about the Greene King IPA and Abbot Ale, which whilst not bad beer, are hardly amazing. They opt for one of each and for the second round switch to Fosters and a Guinness respectively. It’s seriously hot in the pub, though, so when I get home I have a cold lager simply to cool down. After all my adoration for the merits of ale, I have a bottle of Carlsberg.

“God, you drank that quick,” says Beck as we head for bed.

The Distractions of Blackjack

Wednesday night and the humid stickiness drains every. Every limb feels weighed down by excessive moisture when we call a relatively early end to our workshopping session at the Royal Festival Hall.

Ruby and I amble down the platform at Waterloo East chatting about nothing in particular, aware that there’s two whole minutes until the train is due. So engrossed are we, that we barely notice there’s been nine minutes delay when the train arrives. It gathers more passengers at London Bridge and we keep talking.

Ruby’s explaining how to cheat at internet gambling when I glance out of the window and think: “Don’t we usually pass that block of flats on the left, not the right?”

“So there’s this website you can go to-”

“Hold on,” I interrupt. “That displays says the next station is Orpington.”

“It might be wrong. Ask someone.”

I turn to the bald gentlemen, diagonally opposite, hiding behind a paper.

“Er, where’s this train going?” But by now I already know the answer, because even the colours are wrong. This is not a Brockley service. It has a toilet, for god’s sake.

“Sorry,” he says with a slight jerk. “I was hoping to find out how to cheat at blackjack.”

Which kind of sums things up, really.

I haven’t written anything of worth for nearly two weeks. Well, the odd sentence perhaps, but nothing consistent. Despite a positive final tutorial I’m having a slight crisis of confidence. There’s the nagging doubt that what I’ve written, this great big wodge of paper neatly clipped into a green ring-binder, might actually be a little bit… well, shit.

Not funny enough.

Poorly executed.

Shallow, unsympathetic characters.

Just. Not. Good. Enough.

This is far from the ideal time to be suffering what I guess is ‘writer’s block’ (or just general panic, depending on your point of view). It means that I’m going to kind of limp, battered and bleeding over the course finish line rather than charge triumphantly, confidently through it and onto better things.

But, as my tutor helpfully pointed out “it’s too late to change your mind, now.”

True, but possibly not that useful or reassuring.

Back on the train I text Beck to see if she fancies a sojourn out to Kent to rescue us, but irritatingly she’s on the train we were supposed to be on and any mission of mercy is going to be significantly delayed.

“I don’t want to worry you further,” says the bald man with the newspaper, clearly enjoying himself, “but there’s a conductor coming.”

You never see a conductors on London trains there isn’t the space to check tickets, but of course this is a Kent train and the rules are different. The prospect of a fine looms as not only are we on the wrong the train but, as I suddenly realise, I arrived at the Royal Festival Hall via Camberwell and that tutorial. Which means I came on the bus and don’t have any sort of ticket let alone a valid one.

(sigh).

It works out okay in the end. I hide behind Ruby’s Brockley tickets and we claim stupidity. Having already met a dozen or so people further back on the train who’ve done exactly the same thing, he lets us off.

At Orpington the last train back into town is due in two minutes and it’s a fast one, first stop at London Bridge. Back in town we have to wait just four minutes on a cramped Brockley service before it departs. When I eventually walk through the door, to the sound of Beck’s giggles, I’m only an hour later than I would have been. Only problem now I’m wide awake and my intended early night impossible.

Still. Hardly a disaster, but I just hope that I’m not on the wrong track generally.