Sometimes - when I am lying on the sofa, reading, or sitting at my desk, trying to hammer Hungarian grammar into my memory, (or when I am doing almost anything, to be honest) - my mind wanders and I decide that I feel hungry: well, perhaps hungry is not quite the right word; maybe 'peckish', to borrow a favourite usage of a former friend of mine, would be a more accurate description.
On such occasions, I put down my book and stare at the ceiling, running through an inventory in my head of all the possible things to eat I might find, should I go into the kitchen.
Usually there are quite a few perfectly adequate possibilities that won't even need cooking - fresh bread; good cheese; ham; sometimes (although rarely) salami; olives; leftovers (the best food in the world, except for the bits of roast lamb the cook is allowed to eat while carving); crisps (the equal best food in the world).
If sweet treats are more the way my thoughts are running, I know I will almost always find dried figs and dates in the cupboard, and more often than not there's a mini-Magnum snaffled away somewhere in the freezer, plus a few slices of cake or some biscuits - generally not quite at the peak of freshness, it has to be acknowledged - lurking in the cake tin.
But these things - and even more exotic possibilities, involving cooking, such as steak and a rocket and tomato salad or a fresh piece of salmon, with a dash of soy and balsamic, plus fresh spinach - are not, on these occasions, quite what I'm looking for. Indeed, nothing at all in existence fits the bill of what I'm after at these moments, unless somehow the potential embodied in the smell of coffee or of grilling bacon can actually be captured and eaten.
In the same way, occasionally, as I'm faffing about aimlessly on the Internet, I realise that once again I'm hunting for something I can't define - not a particular piece of information or a response to an email, but some indefinable essence of something, some evaporating wisp of an idea that I can't even visualise, let alone put a name to.
Am I alone in this? Is this just my own individual madness, or is it a common syndrome I suffer from? Perhaps it even has a name, this odd, ineffable sense of longing for something that can never be defined, let alone attained.
(Postscript: I just read this on the lovely First Known When Lost blog. It seems strangely apposite.)
Tuesday, 17 July 2012
Monday, 16 July 2012
Nothing is New
My good friend @deniswright alerted me this morning to a Guardian report about New York's passion for a Hungarian writer called László Krasznahorkai. I'd already read about him, as it happened, in the London Review of Books, and it had become clear to me then that he was, as my little sister once said about the news, when she wanted, aged about six, to change to another television channel, "too interesting" for me, in the same way that Finnegan's Wake always has been.
Having read the article Denis sent, I returned to the book I am reading at the moment, Becoming Dickens, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, which meant that almost immediately after reading this in Denis's Guardian article:
"Krasznahorkai spoke in English ... offering the opinion that the full stop 'doesn't belong to human beings, it belongs to God', which is why he doesn't much care for paragraph breaks"
I came upon a description of a kind of pantomime one-man show put on each year in London in the 1830s by a character called Charles Mathews. It was called an "At Home", and Charles Dickens loved it. It was one of Mathews's characters that particularly caught my eye:
"Miss Never-End, 'who despises colons and semi-colons, and never in her life could be induced to make use of a full stop'."
Have we become wiser, with our reverence for Miss Never-End's modern representative, or is Krasznahorkai wearing the latest set of emperor's new clothes?
I am not actually posing the question from a position of entrenched conservatism. I genuinely do wonder what is the purpose of fiction that is very hard to get through, despite being, in small chunks, undoubtedly beautiful and fascinating in its detailed description of an individual experience of existence.
To give a taste of the kind of thing a reader deals with in Krasznahorkai, here is an example, (via his translator, George Szertes, of course, and who knows how much of the passage's beauty is in the original - my Hungarian is nowhere near up to judging - and how much added by the translator [but that's a whole other question]):
“In the tense silence the continual buzzing of the horseflies was the only audible sound, that and the constant rain beating down in the distance, and, uniting the two, the ever more frequent scritch-scratch of the bent acacia trees outside, and the strange nightshift work of the bugs in the table legs and in various parts of the counter whose irregular pulse measured out the small parcels of time, apportioning the narrow space into which a word, a sentence or a movement might perfectly fit. The entire end-of-October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision: a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metaled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they don't hang together. So with the door left open as if forever, with the lock that will never open. There is a chasm, a crevice.”
I suppose I am really unsure about what fiction is supposed to do. I find it hard to rid myself of the idea that, given reading is an optional extra rather than a necessity, a writer's duty is not to be difficult, but to entertain at least a little - and then, within the entertainment, anything can be smuggled in. Thus, George Eliot, in Middlemarch produced a work in which the reader identified with certain characters in a quite soap-operaish kind of way - or at least I did (barracking from the sidelines, willing Dorothea not to marry Casaubon, et cetera) - and then, within that framework, produced one of the most extraordinary portraits of human existence ever written, studded with perceptive observations and wisdom.
Once duty in fiction shifts from the writer to the reader - I must read this, it's dense and tough but it will surely be good for me, like All Bran - I can't help wondering if the writer hasn't betrayed his audience. I'm not suggesting that Gone with the Wind is better than Finnegan's Wake. I think I'm saying that neither of them are really successful - or perhaps, in the case of Gone with the Wind, that it is successful on its own terms but I find it unsatisfying and, in the case of Finnegan's Wake, or Krasznahorkai's work, that I'm not sure what the terms are that these works are trying to succeed on, but they don't seem to be terms that include giving pleasure to readers - and, if they aren't interested in their potential readers, what is their reason for being, for what is a written work made for if not for a reader?
Having read the article Denis sent, I returned to the book I am reading at the moment, Becoming Dickens, by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, which meant that almost immediately after reading this in Denis's Guardian article:
"Krasznahorkai spoke in English ... offering the opinion that the full stop 'doesn't belong to human beings, it belongs to God', which is why he doesn't much care for paragraph breaks"
I came upon a description of a kind of pantomime one-man show put on each year in London in the 1830s by a character called Charles Mathews. It was called an "At Home", and Charles Dickens loved it. It was one of Mathews's characters that particularly caught my eye:
"Miss Never-End, 'who despises colons and semi-colons, and never in her life could be induced to make use of a full stop'."
Have we become wiser, with our reverence for Miss Never-End's modern representative, or is Krasznahorkai wearing the latest set of emperor's new clothes?
I am not actually posing the question from a position of entrenched conservatism. I genuinely do wonder what is the purpose of fiction that is very hard to get through, despite being, in small chunks, undoubtedly beautiful and fascinating in its detailed description of an individual experience of existence.
To give a taste of the kind of thing a reader deals with in Krasznahorkai, here is an example, (via his translator, George Szertes, of course, and who knows how much of the passage's beauty is in the original - my Hungarian is nowhere near up to judging - and how much added by the translator [but that's a whole other question]):
“In the tense silence the continual buzzing of the horseflies was the only audible sound, that and the constant rain beating down in the distance, and, uniting the two, the ever more frequent scritch-scratch of the bent acacia trees outside, and the strange nightshift work of the bugs in the table legs and in various parts of the counter whose irregular pulse measured out the small parcels of time, apportioning the narrow space into which a word, a sentence or a movement might perfectly fit. The entire end-of-October night was beating with a single pulse, its own strange rhythm sounding through trees and rain and mud in a manner beyond words or vision: a vision present in the low light, in the slow passage of darkness, in the blurred shadows, in the working of tired muscles; in the silence, in its human subjects, in the undulating surface of the metaled road; in the hair moving to a different beat than do the dissolving fibers of the body; growth and decay on their divergent paths; all these thousands of echoing rhythms, this confusing clatter of night noises, all parts of an apparently common stream, that is the attempt to forget despair; though behind things other things appear as if by mischief, and once beyond the power of the eye they don't hang together. So with the door left open as if forever, with the lock that will never open. There is a chasm, a crevice.”
I suppose I am really unsure about what fiction is supposed to do. I find it hard to rid myself of the idea that, given reading is an optional extra rather than a necessity, a writer's duty is not to be difficult, but to entertain at least a little - and then, within the entertainment, anything can be smuggled in. Thus, George Eliot, in Middlemarch produced a work in which the reader identified with certain characters in a quite soap-operaish kind of way - or at least I did (barracking from the sidelines, willing Dorothea not to marry Casaubon, et cetera) - and then, within that framework, produced one of the most extraordinary portraits of human existence ever written, studded with perceptive observations and wisdom.
Once duty in fiction shifts from the writer to the reader - I must read this, it's dense and tough but it will surely be good for me, like All Bran - I can't help wondering if the writer hasn't betrayed his audience. I'm not suggesting that Gone with the Wind is better than Finnegan's Wake. I think I'm saying that neither of them are really successful - or perhaps, in the case of Gone with the Wind, that it is successful on its own terms but I find it unsatisfying and, in the case of Finnegan's Wake, or Krasznahorkai's work, that I'm not sure what the terms are that these works are trying to succeed on, but they don't seem to be terms that include giving pleasure to readers - and, if they aren't interested in their potential readers, what is their reason for being, for what is a written work made for if not for a reader?
Sunday, 15 July 2012
Street Theatre from the West Country
My older daughter, who lives in Bristol, (and is available for commissions [loves doing portraits and paints beautifully, as well as draws, should you be looking for the perfect present]) found three young entrepreneurs outside her house yesterday, selling compliments for 20p. "I bought one", she said and "they wrote 'lovely hair and nice attitude'. Awww ... They were also selling jokes for 20p . They were saying 'buy one compliment for 20p, and one joke for 20p and you get a free laugh!'"
So far so good. But, in my daughter's words, there was:
"a sad ending to the story: Came out of my house about an hour after I took this picture, to see the girls running merrily up to various pedestrians on my street. They then approached a rather scruffy looking chap, cradling a bottle of chardonnay, they announced 'compliments for 20p!! feel good!' to the man, who stumbled out of their way, turned to them and shouted 'FUCK OFF YOU STUPID LITTLE CUNTS!!' . He stumbled off down the road. There was a shocked silence... the girls looked deflated and a bit frightened. I tried to rectify the situation slightly by shouting back at the man something like 'DON'T BE SO RUDE!', but i think it was pretty ineffective... a little bit of innocence was lost today in bristol :-(."
So far so good. But, in my daughter's words, there was:
"a sad ending to the story: Came out of my house about an hour after I took this picture, to see the girls running merrily up to various pedestrians on my street. They then approached a rather scruffy looking chap, cradling a bottle of chardonnay, they announced 'compliments for 20p!! feel good!' to the man, who stumbled out of their way, turned to them and shouted 'FUCK OFF YOU STUPID LITTLE CUNTS!!' . He stumbled off down the road. There was a shocked silence... the girls looked deflated and a bit frightened. I tried to rectify the situation slightly by shouting back at the man something like 'DON'T BE SO RUDE!', but i think it was pretty ineffective... a little bit of innocence was lost today in bristol :-(."
Saturday, 14 July 2012
Grudging Praise
Following on from my objections to Starbuck's turning up in Vienna, I suppose I should admit that they do do some things well. I only realised this clearly the other day when I was at Luton Airport, standing in a corridor between WH Smith's and Starbuck's (yes, I know they don't use the apostrophe, but they ought to) waiting for my flight to Budapest to open for check-in.
In WH Smith everything was a bit grubby. The ceiling was a series of plastic perforated chequerboards, into which lights and fire-sprays had been recessed. Every now and again one of the chequerboards would be replaced with a square containing four fluorescent tubes, inadequately disguised by pierced metal covers, and in a couple of places a space had been carved out to accommodate a large beige plastic air-conditioner. These machines were grimy and had patchy stains like the burns you sometimes see in formica in cheap hotels, where some former occupant has put down a cigarette and forgotten about it. In one place, any kind of cover was missing, and you could look up into a dark cavity full of blackened piping. Most sinister of all, at intervals across the ceiling, almost unnoticeable unless you really paid attention, were the glossy inverted domes of CCTV cameras.
Arranged along the top of the walls, at the point where they met the ceiling, were metal-framed plastic panels announcing on a dull blue background that WH Smith is No.1 for magazines. Beneath these were ranks and ranks of metal shelving, filled with books, magazines and sweets, set out without any discernible effort to produce an attractive impression rather than just shoving the goods within reach of the public. The floor was covered in murky grey-green linoleum tiles, which had become splotched over time with unidentifiable, but seemingly indelible, black, slightly rubbery-looking splatters.
The whole scene was pretty uninviting and so I was surprised when a group of Poles elbowed me out of the way in their eagerness to empty the container I was standing beside. It contained fridge magnets of telephone booths and post boxes, both of a design too pretty to be considered practical for current manufacture, and of the lamented Routemaster bus.
Having been displaced by the Poles, I went across to the Starbuck's opposite. Their ceiling was uniform, a system of clean steel mesh, their flooring was wood, intercut with dark ceramic tiles that looked a bit like stone. Their tables were wooden, their chairs were wood or padded leather - or leather-lookalike - designed to look like something in a comfortable club. There were wooden bookshelves with products arranged attractively on them, as if they were on a dresser in someone's cottage kitchen - and near them wicker baskets, not plastic tubs, piled with more goods. Over the (wooden) counter lamps with metal bowl-shaped shades shed a warm light on customers.
Where WH Smith's interior was semi-industrial, the whole design of this place was intended to make you feel that you were not in an airport but a domestic interior. The use of wood and wicker, instead of metal and plastic, was beguiling in such surroundings. I had to take my hat off to the people behind the whole enterprise. They had got the outward look of the place so right. Given the effort they'd put into the exterior features of their business, though, I found it even more baffling that they hadn't addressed the central thing they do with a similar level of concentration. Their coffee is, quite frankly, disgusting and no amount of interior design can change that fact.
In WH Smith everything was a bit grubby. The ceiling was a series of plastic perforated chequerboards, into which lights and fire-sprays had been recessed. Every now and again one of the chequerboards would be replaced with a square containing four fluorescent tubes, inadequately disguised by pierced metal covers, and in a couple of places a space had been carved out to accommodate a large beige plastic air-conditioner. These machines were grimy and had patchy stains like the burns you sometimes see in formica in cheap hotels, where some former occupant has put down a cigarette and forgotten about it. In one place, any kind of cover was missing, and you could look up into a dark cavity full of blackened piping. Most sinister of all, at intervals across the ceiling, almost unnoticeable unless you really paid attention, were the glossy inverted domes of CCTV cameras.
Arranged along the top of the walls, at the point where they met the ceiling, were metal-framed plastic panels announcing on a dull blue background that WH Smith is No.1 for magazines. Beneath these were ranks and ranks of metal shelving, filled with books, magazines and sweets, set out without any discernible effort to produce an attractive impression rather than just shoving the goods within reach of the public. The floor was covered in murky grey-green linoleum tiles, which had become splotched over time with unidentifiable, but seemingly indelible, black, slightly rubbery-looking splatters.
The whole scene was pretty uninviting and so I was surprised when a group of Poles elbowed me out of the way in their eagerness to empty the container I was standing beside. It contained fridge magnets of telephone booths and post boxes, both of a design too pretty to be considered practical for current manufacture, and of the lamented Routemaster bus.
Having been displaced by the Poles, I went across to the Starbuck's opposite. Their ceiling was uniform, a system of clean steel mesh, their flooring was wood, intercut with dark ceramic tiles that looked a bit like stone. Their tables were wooden, their chairs were wood or padded leather - or leather-lookalike - designed to look like something in a comfortable club. There were wooden bookshelves with products arranged attractively on them, as if they were on a dresser in someone's cottage kitchen - and near them wicker baskets, not plastic tubs, piled with more goods. Over the (wooden) counter lamps with metal bowl-shaped shades shed a warm light on customers.
Where WH Smith's interior was semi-industrial, the whole design of this place was intended to make you feel that you were not in an airport but a domestic interior. The use of wood and wicker, instead of metal and plastic, was beguiling in such surroundings. I had to take my hat off to the people behind the whole enterprise. They had got the outward look of the place so right. Given the effort they'd put into the exterior features of their business, though, I found it even more baffling that they hadn't addressed the central thing they do with a similar level of concentration. Their coffee is, quite frankly, disgusting and no amount of interior design can change that fact.
Friday, 13 July 2012
I Was a Poet, but I Did Not Know It
When my children were little, I earned money, while staying at home, by being a transcriber. Little did I know that those women of my acquaintance who, having made the decision to not stay at home with their children but to continue instead with their glittering careers (composed mainly of long afternoons in stuffy offices trying not to fall asleep as their colleagues droned through dull meetings) and consequently looked down their immaculately made-up noses at me (no, no, it didn't rankle at all, I'm not in the slightest bit bitter, hem hem) were utterly wrong in assuming that transcribing was a menial task.
It turns out that, as a transcriber, I could have been a contender - in the poetic world at least. There is in fact, according to the 10 May 2012 (note, not 1 April, as you may assume by the time you've read the rest of this post) issue of the London Review of Books, a man called Kenneth Goldsmith who publishes poetry - or rather 'poetry' - that consists of transcriptions of radio broadcasts.
He has, for example, created a work called Traffic, which is his transcription of an entire day of traffic reports from New York. He has 'created' another called Sports which - you guessed it - is a transcription of the radio commentary of a sports event (a baseball game, as it happens, but I imagine it could have been taken from cricket or golf or even synchronised swimming and still produced a pretty similar result). He has also 'created' Weather - by now, I need not go into details; I assume it's pretty simple to work out the content of that one.
Goldsmith, with what I have to admit is an admirable level of honesty, describes what he does as 'uncreative writing'. He also happily admits that his books are 'impossible to read straight through. In fact', he goes on, 'every time I have to proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep repeatedly.' He claims that 'writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance'. If he is so concerned about textual abundance, I can't help wondering, why has he chosen to add to the problem with works such as Day, a retyping of one issue of the New York Times, and Soliloquy, a transcription of every word that he, the 'poet' Goldsmith, spoke for a week.
Unfortunately, Goldsmith is not an isolated prankster. There's a whole lot of these con-artists - sorry, I mean 'neo-modernists' - out there it seems. Another prominent figure in uncreative writing circles (where being unoriginal is the most highly prized quality, I assume) is a person called Tan Lin, who reckons, 'It would be nice to create works of literature that didn't have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats' (which makes you wonder what definition of 'literature' he is working from) and states that 'Today no poem should be written to be read and the best form of poetry would make all our feelings disappear the moment we were having them.'
My response may be absurdly blinkered but I can't help it. It can be summed up in just one word and that word is 'Why?' Why would what Lin describes be the best form of poetry? Why are transcriptions of newspapers or traffic reports worth any of our attention (except when we want to know the news or to find out whether the road home is navigable)?
If you have nothing to say, don't bother. Transcribing stuff is not a substitute for creating content. No-one has an obligation to write - there are already plenty of books in the world and keen readers are diminishing in number. On the other hand, if we are going to redefine poetry then I'm going to start a new school that is not about putting things down on paper at all. My poems aren't going to be written in any way - quite the reverse. A sequence of poems will be a sequence of hours in which I sit quietly reading. From now on, each time I finish reading a book, I'm going to call the whole process of having read it 'a poem'. And when I've created a hundred 'poems' - or maybe several hundred - I'll be expecting a Queen's Medal or even, perhaps a Nobel Prize.
It turns out that, as a transcriber, I could have been a contender - in the poetic world at least. There is in fact, according to the 10 May 2012 (note, not 1 April, as you may assume by the time you've read the rest of this post) issue of the London Review of Books, a man called Kenneth Goldsmith who publishes poetry - or rather 'poetry' - that consists of transcriptions of radio broadcasts.
He has, for example, created a work called Traffic, which is his transcription of an entire day of traffic reports from New York. He has 'created' another called Sports which - you guessed it - is a transcription of the radio commentary of a sports event (a baseball game, as it happens, but I imagine it could have been taken from cricket or golf or even synchronised swimming and still produced a pretty similar result). He has also 'created' Weather - by now, I need not go into details; I assume it's pretty simple to work out the content of that one.
Goldsmith, with what I have to admit is an admirable level of honesty, describes what he does as 'uncreative writing'. He also happily admits that his books are 'impossible to read straight through. In fact', he goes on, 'every time I have to proofread them before sending them off to the publisher, I fall asleep repeatedly.' He claims that 'writing needs to redefine itself to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance'. If he is so concerned about textual abundance, I can't help wondering, why has he chosen to add to the problem with works such as Day, a retyping of one issue of the New York Times, and Soliloquy, a transcription of every word that he, the 'poet' Goldsmith, spoke for a week.
Unfortunately, Goldsmith is not an isolated prankster. There's a whole lot of these con-artists - sorry, I mean 'neo-modernists' - out there it seems. Another prominent figure in uncreative writing circles (where being unoriginal is the most highly prized quality, I assume) is a person called Tan Lin, who reckons, 'It would be nice to create works of literature that didn't have to be read but could be looked at, like placemats' (which makes you wonder what definition of 'literature' he is working from) and states that 'Today no poem should be written to be read and the best form of poetry would make all our feelings disappear the moment we were having them.'
My response may be absurdly blinkered but I can't help it. It can be summed up in just one word and that word is 'Why?' Why would what Lin describes be the best form of poetry? Why are transcriptions of newspapers or traffic reports worth any of our attention (except when we want to know the news or to find out whether the road home is navigable)?
If you have nothing to say, don't bother. Transcribing stuff is not a substitute for creating content. No-one has an obligation to write - there are already plenty of books in the world and keen readers are diminishing in number. On the other hand, if we are going to redefine poetry then I'm going to start a new school that is not about putting things down on paper at all. My poems aren't going to be written in any way - quite the reverse. A sequence of poems will be a sequence of hours in which I sit quietly reading. From now on, each time I finish reading a book, I'm going to call the whole process of having read it 'a poem'. And when I've created a hundred 'poems' - or maybe several hundred - I'll be expecting a Queen's Medal or even, perhaps a Nobel Prize.
Tuesday, 10 July 2012
Street Theatre
It was a wild night at our place in Budapest. After days of intense sun and no wind or cloud at all, thunder came rumbling in and flashes of lightning split the darkness. My husband's playtrack shifted with appropriately lightning speed to 'Stormy Weather', which is more his usual style than Joni Mitchell. I sat on our corner balcony and watched events in the two streets that converge directly beneath us.
Around midnight there was an explosion of shouting from one of the flats at the bottom of the building. It was so loud that people came running out from a nearby restaurant and stood before the windows behind which, presumably, the accompanying fight was taking place. From their reactions, plus the roaring fury of the voices, things were looking pretty hairy in there. There was talk of calling the emergency services. However, the obvious strength of our neighbours' rage was so great that it was almost certain to be unsustainable. Sure enough, after ten minutes, the howls of anger diminished to whimpers. Some pretty vigorous door slamming followed and then quiet descended once again.
But not for long. A taxi driver came hurtling round the corner next, racing down the street at frantic speed. When he saw an earthmover rising up in front of him, blocking his way (the street is being dug up and cobbled so that it will soon be a semi-pedestrianised zone) he braked violently. Then he threw his vehicle into reverse and started backwards at equally high speed, ramming straight into a heap of as yet unlaid cobbles that, presumably, he hadn't noticed.
After a pause during which he tried unsuccessfully to move the car forward and free of the stones he'd got caught up in, he leapt out, revealing himself to be a middle-aged man with a dyed comb-over (very Death in Venice but only in this solitary respect, to be honest) and rapper clothing - bright white shoes and similarly dazzling white shorts, a large black nylon sleeveless basketballer's shirt and lots of medallions and crosses on chains. Having assessed the situation, he passed his hand through his meagre hair and spat. Then he reached back into the car for his mobile.
For about five minutes he sprang about, gesticulating and yelling into the telephone and, almost before you knew it. a whole fleet of fellow taxis were gathered about him. Amidst more shouting and leaping, the stranded taxi was liberated. The other taxis melted into the night almost as quickly as they had arrived, and our man was left kneeling at the rear of his car, trying fruitlessly to reattach a broken piece of chassis to the back bumper.
All the while - indeed, since late afternoon, outside one of the classier cafes on the adjoining street, a drunk had been the centre of a different kind of narrative. For some reason, around five he had come staggering along and, pausing, the idea had come to him that this would be a pleasant place to spend a few hours. Having settled himself just beside the doorway of a cafe-bar and opposite the outside tables of the corner restaurant, he produced a bottle and began to drink. In between swigs he made announcements to the street in general, trailing off from time to time into little moments of interior reflection - or possibly falling briefly asleep. Various members of the cafe-bar's staff came out to look at him as he made himself more and more at home. When he started to sing, three of them all appeared together. Luckily, his attention was soon caught again by his by now nearly empty bottle, and, by the time he'd drained it, the urge to sing seemed to have passed.
Even from the third floor, it was obvious that the drunk was filthy. He wore a grimy blue-plaid shirt, its buttons undone, black smeared trousers and matching boots. His skin was that rusty colour that drunks' skin often becomes. Perhaps because I was looking at him from above, seeing the top of his sweaty head - that very first part of the anatomy that most humans thrust into the world - I found I couldn't help thinking about how, despite the state he was in, he must once have had a family. To someone, at least for a while, he must have been a beloved son. Yet none of the passersby seemed to notice him - and those that did steered a wide berth.
At least they did until a young man - not an especially attractive or caring looking type, just a bloke in shorts, flash trainers and a polo shirt - emerged from under the awning of a restaurant table and went up to the drunk and offered him a cigarette. The drunk accepted the offer and, after lighting his own, the bloke knelt down in a way that was oddly moving and, cupping his hands around the drunk's, lit the cigarette he'd given him. Once he was sure it was going properly, the Good Samaritan (and ,despite recognising that smoking is bad for you et cetera, I think the bloke was a Good Samaritan), stood up and reached out his hand and shook the drunk's hand warmly. They exchanged a few words, the bloke shook the drunk's hand again, I think this time slipping him some money, and then he went on his way.
The drunk looked after him, possibly as astonished and admiring as I was. He smoked his fag and, when he'd had enough, he carefully stubbed out the flame and stowed what was left behind his ear. He turned and at first I thought he was going to crawl across the pavement for some reason, but then I realised he was merely making an ungainly attempt to stand up. Eventually he managed this, collected up his belongings and set off in the direction of his mentor.
A snatch of music from the little record shop further down the street must have caught his ear, for, instead of walking, the drunk began to waltz unsteadily with an unseen partner. All was going well. I was thinking increasingly sentimentally about seeing the best in all humankind and doing good unto others. Then the drunk spun his wobbly way into our street and, perhaps registering the fresh cleanliness of the cobbles, remembered there was something else he had to do. Squaring up groggily to the wall of the house opposite, he undid his fly and began to pee. I went inside.
Around midnight there was an explosion of shouting from one of the flats at the bottom of the building. It was so loud that people came running out from a nearby restaurant and stood before the windows behind which, presumably, the accompanying fight was taking place. From their reactions, plus the roaring fury of the voices, things were looking pretty hairy in there. There was talk of calling the emergency services. However, the obvious strength of our neighbours' rage was so great that it was almost certain to be unsustainable. Sure enough, after ten minutes, the howls of anger diminished to whimpers. Some pretty vigorous door slamming followed and then quiet descended once again.
But not for long. A taxi driver came hurtling round the corner next, racing down the street at frantic speed. When he saw an earthmover rising up in front of him, blocking his way (the street is being dug up and cobbled so that it will soon be a semi-pedestrianised zone) he braked violently. Then he threw his vehicle into reverse and started backwards at equally high speed, ramming straight into a heap of as yet unlaid cobbles that, presumably, he hadn't noticed.
After a pause during which he tried unsuccessfully to move the car forward and free of the stones he'd got caught up in, he leapt out, revealing himself to be a middle-aged man with a dyed comb-over (very Death in Venice but only in this solitary respect, to be honest) and rapper clothing - bright white shoes and similarly dazzling white shorts, a large black nylon sleeveless basketballer's shirt and lots of medallions and crosses on chains. Having assessed the situation, he passed his hand through his meagre hair and spat. Then he reached back into the car for his mobile.
For about five minutes he sprang about, gesticulating and yelling into the telephone and, almost before you knew it. a whole fleet of fellow taxis were gathered about him. Amidst more shouting and leaping, the stranded taxi was liberated. The other taxis melted into the night almost as quickly as they had arrived, and our man was left kneeling at the rear of his car, trying fruitlessly to reattach a broken piece of chassis to the back bumper.
All the while - indeed, since late afternoon, outside one of the classier cafes on the adjoining street, a drunk had been the centre of a different kind of narrative. For some reason, around five he had come staggering along and, pausing, the idea had come to him that this would be a pleasant place to spend a few hours. Having settled himself just beside the doorway of a cafe-bar and opposite the outside tables of the corner restaurant, he produced a bottle and began to drink. In between swigs he made announcements to the street in general, trailing off from time to time into little moments of interior reflection - or possibly falling briefly asleep. Various members of the cafe-bar's staff came out to look at him as he made himself more and more at home. When he started to sing, three of them all appeared together. Luckily, his attention was soon caught again by his by now nearly empty bottle, and, by the time he'd drained it, the urge to sing seemed to have passed.
Even from the third floor, it was obvious that the drunk was filthy. He wore a grimy blue-plaid shirt, its buttons undone, black smeared trousers and matching boots. His skin was that rusty colour that drunks' skin often becomes. Perhaps because I was looking at him from above, seeing the top of his sweaty head - that very first part of the anatomy that most humans thrust into the world - I found I couldn't help thinking about how, despite the state he was in, he must once have had a family. To someone, at least for a while, he must have been a beloved son. Yet none of the passersby seemed to notice him - and those that did steered a wide berth.
At least they did until a young man - not an especially attractive or caring looking type, just a bloke in shorts, flash trainers and a polo shirt - emerged from under the awning of a restaurant table and went up to the drunk and offered him a cigarette. The drunk accepted the offer and, after lighting his own, the bloke knelt down in a way that was oddly moving and, cupping his hands around the drunk's, lit the cigarette he'd given him. Once he was sure it was going properly, the Good Samaritan (and ,despite recognising that smoking is bad for you et cetera, I think the bloke was a Good Samaritan), stood up and reached out his hand and shook the drunk's hand warmly. They exchanged a few words, the bloke shook the drunk's hand again, I think this time slipping him some money, and then he went on his way.
The drunk looked after him, possibly as astonished and admiring as I was. He smoked his fag and, when he'd had enough, he carefully stubbed out the flame and stowed what was left behind his ear. He turned and at first I thought he was going to crawl across the pavement for some reason, but then I realised he was merely making an ungainly attempt to stand up. Eventually he managed this, collected up his belongings and set off in the direction of his mentor.
A snatch of music from the little record shop further down the street must have caught his ear, for, instead of walking, the drunk began to waltz unsteadily with an unseen partner. All was going well. I was thinking increasingly sentimentally about seeing the best in all humankind and doing good unto others. Then the drunk spun his wobbly way into our street and, perhaps registering the fresh cleanliness of the cobbles, remembered there was something else he had to do. Squaring up groggily to the wall of the house opposite, he undid his fly and began to pee. I went inside.
Monday, 9 July 2012
Hotel Nonsense
I have already said enough on the subject of hotels and towels, but I feel I've hardly begun on the other mad things you find when you stay in one or other of the world's big chains. Here are two examples of loopy messages left for room occupants in a place I stayed recently. Each of them is probably the result of memos, meetings, policy documents and inter-departmental protocols. Each of them is batty:
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| Wearing a shower cap is such a mood changer - especially if you do it in a crowded restaurant or diplomatic cocktail party |
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| Who would have thought? |
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