Too Much To Declare

"Which stop is for the town centre?" one of them asked.

"Well, where do you want to see?  London is very large," I added, perhaps unnecesarily.

After consulting each other they decided on Victoria. "We would like to find cafes and bars."  I suggested that Victoria wasn't the best place for that, and told them where to change to get to Leicester Square from where they could explore Soho and Covent Garden.

Two Polish law students, from Gdansk.  They wanted to find a post graduate law course they could take in London University.  They were pleased when I told them how to find the LSE.

"Have you got any Polish friends in London?" I asked.

A few weeks ago I posted several possible first lines - but none of them pulled me enough to make me think this is the one.

A friend suggested one of my random-phrases-in-a-conversation as a title "The Reluctant Man."  Well, maybe...

The important thing is for me to find a strong, individual, sustainable narrative voice.  Once I can find a character (or two) I want to write a story through, I sense that they story itself will become clear.  And, to avoid what I call "autobiogrising" (when the writing is trying to incorporate "what actually happened" into a work of fiction) I want this narrator-character (or possibly characters) to be as far from my own as possible.

A couple of weeks back I mentioned beginning to read The Observations by Jane Harris  (Faber paperback £7.99) - which has one single funny and convincing narrative character. (a 15 Irish girl born in 1849)  This voice carries the 525 page book, past some slightly unfeasible plot twists, no problem.

So many novels, however well written, do not convince as being the thoughts and feelings of the hero [ine] or narrator.

I, like most of you, assumed the self-publishing process could be pretty swift - and, compared to the over-a-year that ordinary publishes usually take to bring a book out - d.i.y publishing can a hell of a lot quicker.  However, my novel - like any other - needs a dose of 'publisher's editing' before it's finally ready for print - and the person I want to do that (who has helped me through the last two drafts) is busy for the next six weeks or so. So everything's got a bit on hold.

Of course I should be planning a marketing campaign (any suggestions welcome) but I never decide what to eat until the waiter takes the order.  In other words - until I know everything in the project is finally go-go-go, I find it hard to take specific decisions.

First my mum.  She rarely phones unless I'm ill, but now she needs a twice daily report on my flu.  I try to decide, live, how I'm feeling... better certainly, but on the other hand...  Perhaps I should announce a miracle recovery.  "Are you feeling like lunch?"  "Actually, I've only just had breakfast."

Then it's my half-sister's turn.  She wants to talk about the legal contract we are due to be signing with some property developers.  Da-dee-dah, dah de dah.  I answer her questions and keep cool.  She obsesses about her 2  'children' c 25 and 29.  As always she hints of her envy at me having the biggest share of the land profits if there ever are any.  I do all the hard work on it and have the know-how.  Dah?

I venture out for the first time in six days to my French cafe over the river for a quiche and salad.  Back I unplug the phone...  and when I replug it, of course my other sister phones - the one you know about.  She is going on safari holiday on Thursday, I'm about to send the money she lent me back, but she manages - probably Guilty - to sound as miserable as ever.

Actually, talking to sis in this mood is rather like an attempted seduction by a strange kind of junkie..  "Go on, you know you want to - come down to the Land of the Permanent Mains Hum with me. Let's talk about throwing ourselves in front of the Moscow Express.  Let's act out the theme tune to M.A.S.H...."  If only I agreed with her unstated belief that life isn't worth living, we might become very close.

1   I once won a fight in a boxing ring.

2.  Everyone else who lives on my side of the street is a nun.

3  Once I skipped bail in Australia, for a speeding charge, and resisting arrest. They took my finger prints.

4  At my first boarding school, I used to pee out of the window at night, because we weren't allowed to use the loo.

5  In the seventies, I  lived in house that had been the scene of a gruesome Edwardian murder commemorated in Madame Toussauds.

6.  I had a tab of E at my fiftieth birthday party.

7.  Oh, I don't know - I'm allergic to penecilin and rye bread, and hate the taste of corriander.

[8. I confess to hating chain letters/ e-mails, even from friends]

Scroogy spoilsport

Meanwhile, memes are a bit easier on the brain than James Joyce or Wittgenstein

[Thanks for the link, subville, to Blogthings]. 

But, while writing the post below I remembered a little incident before we knew for sure that my girl-friend was pregnant.  She was having some break-through bleeding.  Could this be a feeble but genuine period?  We went to the main library in Southampton to try and find out.

The book was very earnest and stern.

Don't expect me to get the language right from memory, but it told me about The Necesssity of Foreplay (with diagrams of an unerotic woman's body to tell me where to touch) Being Sensitive to Her Needs and How to Give a Woman an Orgasm.

Someone else would have found me a place to live and moved me, unpacked the boxes...

Actually, that quite a few wishes.

This evening I began to take these pills the GP has prescribed.  They make my face feel hot, make me feel listless, tired. Frankly deeply depressed.

I am meant to take the pills for six weeks, until my blood pressure drops. Then I can have a general aneasthetic while they repair my unbilical hernia.

The only reason for my blood high pressure - I think - is having to sell my house and move.  And pretend to my mother everything is all right.  And visit the hospital and the doctor.

Should I be worried?

Still that's life - roles are seldom reversed.  Sis would never have go involved with anyone like Vanessa; and I would have never have got involved with anyone remotely like her [eternally almost ex-] husband.

The good news that she my [younger] sister no longer any right to Worry about me or make helpful suggestions.

I'm not broke.  I can find a way though somehow...

Why?  What was so particular about yesterday?  Is no one else I know (beside Kevin at number 2) getting any hits at all?  Perhaps it was all those Comments welshceltgirl and I exchanged over the weekend.  Maybe I have been up there for weeks.  It could be, of course, that the system is totally random.What does it matter?

At about the same moment, I found a book to read:  The Observations by Jane Harris, set in Scotland in the 1860s, narrated by a servant girl.  Every page is bringing a new smile to my face.

Which for a 91-year-old I guess is a vote of confidence.

My mother was delighted.  Back home she sewed my sister's new cushion covers, although she did have help threading the needle.

What appears to have made the big difference is the anti-anxiety pills, which she has to go on taking until she sees him again.

"Do you think," the doctor had asked gently, "most people are luckier than you?"

1 The Alec who dumped his girlfriend in 1965 when she got pregnant, instead of getting disastrously married.

I have been thinking a lot recently about Indignation - about how it can hold us paralysed, comfortable in moral certainty but cut off from - well, from our souls.

When I started this blog 19 months ago it was primarilly to get what had happened between me and Vanessa out of my system.  In fact, as a blog novice, I thought I could place my latest post after the second latest - so I could produce a Dickens-like narrative of my sorry story. (Interspersing with other stuff about my more distant past)

But that's not the way it works.  And instead, Too Much to Declare has turned into a hotch potch of things -  often, a kind of blog therapy with little reference to my obsession about Vanessa.  Most of the posts that have worked the best are those in which I effectively forgot that what I was writing could be read by others and often expressed thoughts and feelings some of which I'd find hard to share with friends.

However, all the time, though (far less recently) I could rely on getting some kind of sympathy by describing what my relaionship with Vanessa.  Of course several get-a-life/you-were-a-pathetic-victim-of-an-unscrupulous-bitch Comments, but basically I succeeded in presneting myself as the fall guy and she as the villain.

Often, I wanted to write about different, more positive things.  But, although I have sometimes said in passing there were good things that happened - the details didn't neatly fit into the paradigm I had created, and I left them unsaid.  And when a stranger, in June last year, made a coherent but curiscating attack on me on a post I had written the previous October, I felt Indignant and never replied.

So - let me say it now.  Vanessa didn't fool me.  I fooled myself.

Now, this post isn't a mea culpa (and it's far too long already).  I'm not grovelling in guilt, and I'm not about to re-run the whole thing from a different perspective.  I am not taking all responsibility for what happened away from her.

But I am accepting my share of responsibility, which I haven't actually done before.  And I am telling you now that she was a lot more complicated and sympathetic person than I presented her.  Most of all, I got so involved in being the White Knight in her life that I never confronted her with the real situation.

A saying from an unknown source:  Being in love is accepting the absolute reality of another human being.  That's all very well, if you don't lose touch with your own reality.

Perhaps, by writing this, I am finally geting in touch with my reality again.  One way or another, it feels like moving on.

She has always been a safe driver.  But then she has always been someone who avoided feeling guilty at all costs.  Who avoided all forms of risk.

Our personal lists vary - bureacratic bungling, discrimination, stupid health and safety regulations, inequality, the monstrous behaviour of our ex partner, detention without trial, bad driving, long queues at the post office... And most bloggers, myself included, have at one time or another raged against some sleight or injustice.  Some do it all the time.  In a way, there are the easiest posts to write.

Easy, and often justified.  Yet where does the raging get us?

For instance - my Doctor's Surgery seems to be the most incompetenly and aarrogantly run in the entire country.  "The phone number has been changed" says the recording.  The new number given is another recording and immdeiately cuts you off....  So to make an appontment you have to go down to the surgery at nine in the morning - to be given a slot precisely two days later.
Once that day's slot are used to up, you have to et in the orderly queue the following day... or make an appointment in three weeks time...  And to crown they whole process, they are not interested in your name but your date of birth...

I could go on.  And initially I did get very worked up about it.  But as I'm only visiting my GP/Drug Dealer to get a prescription to lower my blood pressure (so the hospital can carry out a minor operation) getting worked up feels rather counter-productive.

And then I thought about all the energy I have wasted getting indignant.  How much my arteries must have hardened over the years bangin my head against brick walls.

And calming down I notice how many people - particularly middle-aged men - are working themsleves up into a lather about the most trivial of things.  And I think:  Do I want to be like them?  Do I want to die young or ossify into people like my long-deceased grandads?

Yes - there are lots of things wrong with our lives (though, in comparison to most people in the world,,,)  But I'm not going let my indignation for it make it worse.

Things can only be changed with patience, persistance, collective action - and trying to communicate with the bitch who assures me the  booking system is the only logical one the surgery could possibly adopt.... Remember to smile... and... er.. 

This afternoon, my mother complained that she had done all the reading she could manage for the day and there was nothing on telly.  She was bored, waiting for the Antique's Road Show, and a house martin to show up on her bird table. 

(it's okay - I don't understand either)

The only way for the UK to win is to break up into England, Scotland, Wales... or better still into separate counties . The only countries to vote for "us" were Malta and Ireland, both with strong Brit connections - so Wogan's tribalism works both ways.  The only time the UK has recently won was two days after the 1997 Election, when briefly "we" were popular.

Yet most of the songs are in English.

But the voting is far more sophisticated than just voting for neighbours.  Wogan doesn't seem to have any knowledge of relioius affilations - but most of all immigrant commnities. I bet you 9/10 members of Eastern European commnities in the UK would have watched and probably voted tonight...

As a would be psephologist, I would have liked to have time to examine the full figures.  But for example, Austria has a large Turkish community - and they gave Turkey 12 points.

Fatuously, Wogan expressed surprise that Latvia gave Russia top marks because of the Latvian Government is quarreliing with Russia - but there is a substantial Russian minority.

Blah, blah....  My biggest surprise tonight was when Turkey gave Armenia 12 points.  There are virtually no Armenians in Turkey - those who weren't massacred by the Turks in the First World War fled the country...

... might it it be something to do with the two countries sharing musical tastes?  And that a lot of the voting is something to do with this, and political tribalism plays second place?  Portugal this year turned up their nose at Spain becuase the song was dreadful and nothing to do with Iberian music, perhaps.

I could go on, but this is beginning to feel distinctly nerdy.

My favourite of the night (ie about the only song I'd ever want to hear again) was the Hungarian entry:

But today I came back from my mother's by bus and train.

For the last few weeks I have been driving my mother's Fiesta up and down the A3.  Quicker but fraught.  Of course it wold have felt a lot better if it had a stereo sytem.  Better if it were a Saab. 

But, what i disliked most was what it turned me into - frazzled, frustrated, impatient.  I don't think I have driven badly - although I have managed to pick up two fines - onefor an illegal  turn (3 point infact, but not worth arguing - there werne't any points involved) And one for going 37 mph down a hill in a village, which was  naughty but hardly heinous.  Nevertheless, my driving frame of mind made me feel I had regressed to a place I had left behind.  Recently I've felt so much more calm.

I have been driving for 45 years - an overland trip to Iran and back.  I have have driven in more countries than a lot of people have visited - and enjoyed doing so.  Give me a Summer night drive down rural roads in a decent car and music system...  but not now, rushing home across South East England, with too much on my mind, too much traffic and no one in the passenger seat.

What I need is a lucrative job.  Part time would do.  The kind I used to have before I decided to become a fiction writer.

I don't mean a non-executive director of a plc company, any more than I mean tossing chips into fat at Macdonalds.  But, for example I'd make a great consultant - media, human relations, strategic planning.  I cold make it up. (if you are a potential employer, the previous sentence is a joke)

Alternatively, I need to find someone to share their house with.   In fact, it's high time since I stopped being single.  I'm definitely sufferering from Singledom-Fatigue.  The problem is that up til now I have always fallen for women who were economically needy.

All that could change.  In the seventies I fantasised about putting an ad in The Times: BOUNDER SEEKS HEIRESS.  Now, the language is out of date, but I'm sure I could be a bounder.  What do you think?

Alec Weston, Consultant Bounder.  I can see the Website already.

As agricultural land at the edge of a village they are worth  little.  As building land, with extra facilities for the local community, they would be worth a fortune.

The fields were given to my father by my great-grandad as a 21st birthday present in 1936.  Twenty five years ago, long before he died, my father put me in charge of trying to get planning permission.

Over the years, I have become (somewhat shamefully) a development expert.  I have interested dozens of developpers, turned down several, got to know planning law and the local council planners.  So far without a spectacular result.

But in 2001 we came very near - the Government changed the planning rules at the last moment, though even if they hadn't they may have been other snags.

Still - this was they year I met Vanessa; no wonder she got the impression I had endless pots of money.  In some ways the land has been a curse.  It has let me believe, deep in the heart of me, that I am much richer than I am. And full of liberal guilt.

Now, again, there is a good chance the land will be developed.  A good chance - but long odds.  For some time I have joked that permission to build houses will come through it time for me to live in a better quality of old people's home.  Maybe it's not a joke.

But it feels surreal - on the day (see the 'fecks' below) I discovered that my share of my uncle's estate is less than I expected - when my house is soon to go on the market, with not much change, when I get into a huge money panic - it's surreal to take phone calls and write e-mails about two fields which may - or mayy not- be worth millions of pounds.

It's too high because:

I hate the hospital.  ever since I woke up this morning I felt like shit, even with no operaton in immediate prospect.

I'm having to move house, and the operation (due on June 1, now postponed again) meant 6 weeks without lifitng more than a knife and fork.   Thinking abot all this made me tense.

I have so far refused to take  my GP's blood pressure pills, hoping alternative medicine would bring the pressure down; so far it hasn't.   But I suppose I will have to go and see the loathesome GP again (motto; all we clever doctors can do is manage your decline, decay and disintergration) and seeK a new prescription

Why are my Visitor and Pageview figure always lower on Thursdays than any other day of the week?

Is it just me?

I'm scared.

I'm scared of selling my house, and not having enough money.

Scared I don't know where to live.  How to begin thinking about it.

Scared about my hostpital appointment tomorrow.

Scared about physical decay.

Scared I'm lost.

Scared of not being what others want me to be.

Scared of not being what I want to be.  Of not knowing.

Scared of love.

Scared I'll never be in love again.

Scared the list is endless.

Not this morning.

I've need to leave the house in 42 minutes.  41 minutes and counting.  Got to leave.  Start driving down to the south coast. ..

Coffee isn't working.  Can't get emergy to shower or shave.  Now what was that nice dream...zzz..z?

Usually after blogging negative stuff, I immediately feel better.  There's the shit out of me, safely on the screen (no cheap gags about al fresco defecation, please).  As a rule, having blogged, I stop obsessing about whatetever it was I was obsessing about.

However, today it didn't work.  I blogged about having to sell my house (The Elephant in my Blog, below) - and I began to feel very, very sorry for myself. D-E-P-R-E-S-S-E-D The statements on the screen fed back to me worse than they were before.

Luckily a friend phoned.  In fact a Friend.  We talked for a long time and now I feel much better.

In fact I'm in denial. 

But I have got to sell my beautiful house - the house I got converted seven years ago to live in pretty well til death parted me from it.

I have been able to put off seeling until now because of my uncle's money.  It was wise to put off selling because until this July there is a £23,500 redemption penalty on the mortgage.

And the mortgage is the problem.  The £2,200 monthly payments.  Why so huge?  Vanessa, of course.  I have wanted to forget her.  For months, she has hardly been mentioned in my posts.  But that doesn't mean I didn't get into big-time debt on her behalf - and now I have to face the last, and the worst, of the consequencies. (New readers, should follow the tags - or read the first post I ever wrote; indirectly, it was she who brought me here.)

Of course house prices have gone up, epecially in London.  But I won't clear enough to buy anything like this place, in anything like its location.

Imaginary Shrink:  And you have only recently discovered this?

Well, no.  I have known for years.  It's probably dairy products... No diet would work unless I eliminated it completely.. Anyway, I'm seeing someone next week about it.

I.S. What's taken you so long?

Well, er.  you see (20 minutes of diversionary walffling.  I.S. checks his watch, stifles a yawn)  You see my mother would be so upset.  She wouldn't Understand.

I.S. Ah?

She likes cooking lunch for me - chicken with bread sauce, or white sauce for the cauliflower.  Soya milk would freak her out. She'd get into such a panic if she couldn't make a sauce for me.

I.S.  Ah.  So, Alec, do you imagine the huge size of your belly to be your mother's fault?

Well - yes.  (more waffling..)  If only to make this post more readable and dramatic.

I.S.  Mmm.  I have to tell you I'm very selective about taking on new patients and I find your flippant drama-queen act quite irritating.

But I can change!  I can do anything.  I believe in a Brave New World!

Often, though, I'm haunted by the mood of the dreams I've forgotten.  A subsonic, sardonic commentary on my waking life, making it feel predictable and barely worth living.

At night I visit my own kingdom - a city full of towers, built on a hill, with a large army and several heros and villains - often played by me - and an extensive but ever changing undergrond railway system.  The kingdom has a coherence, but I never sleep long enough to put it together.

There's the office block, that turns into a Uni and then a Primary School for men and women in their fifties.  There's the flat where I live, inexpicably, with a girlfriend I have long broken up with.  In the garden there's sometimes a swing, sometimes a patio where I buried someone I murdered - when I've had indigestion.  Is it next to the Cathedral so massive that it has to crush me unless I wake up?

It is easier, a bad translation of the bible tells, us for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.

Apparently, in Arameic or Hebrew, the symbol for camel is very close to the symbol for rope.

And that's much more likely.  Why would a camel even attempt to pass through the eye of a needle?  While a piece of rope... in fact one could thread a rope through a needle, if one first undid it, and fed it through the eye, strand by strand.

That's what it must feel like in purgatory.  Being unravelled and rethreaded.

The prospect was distinctly disturbing.  Until now Gladys had thought after death her life would continue in purgatory much as it did now - a perpetual disappointment.

I am probably going to publish my book under my own, real name.  But my Alec Weston moniker is easily decodable by relatives, and if they ever made the connection, the conseqencies might be unpleasant.

So, on the one hand I want to promote Low Life Games on a web site, without hiding behind anonyminity. 

And on the other hand, I would like to go further undercover to express my own feelings without fear or favour.  Over the last few weeks, I have begun to feel a little inhibited.

The plan is - at a date before too long - to delete the more personal and contentious posts, perhaps republishing some of them elsewhere, putting a link in to my new above ground site, and perhaps tell Friends if and when I start blogging subversively with another name and e-mail.

That's the plan.

As soon as I have written it down I have doubts about it.

And then I remembered going on a similar walk exactly ten years ago - May 1st 1997, election day.  There was an indefinable air of excitement in the air that afternoon when I came back through Roehampton, part of Putney.  Labour posters all over the place, like bunting. (the only posters for David Mellor, the Tory candidate covered a pub which has since closed and stays empty).

That evening I spent with my sister, a journalist an her husband, a senior aide to Tony Blair.  When I told him Labour was going to win Putney, he simply did not believe it, despite the opinion polls.  Team Blair was expecting a majority of about 60 - about what they have now.

But the people spoke - loud.  And we did not want any more to do with the Tories.  Putney fell decicively along with so many others seats  (Remember the white faces?  Portillo in Enfield?)

Don't believe the the nonsense that it was 'The Sun wot won it.' Labour would probably have won a big majority without all Blair's compromises with Thatcherism before the election.  But this was the last thing my brother-in-law wanted.

He was, and is, only slightly to the left of Atilla the Hun.  Before the election, people kept speculating that in office Blair would be decidedly more 'socialist' than his speeches.  But I knew, with bro-in-law advising him, there was not a chance of that in hell.

Still that night, precisely a year ago, for a few delirious, deluded hours, it felt as if we were all part of a revolution (I say all, but my sis and her husband had gone to bed)  But repesenetivie democracy doesn't work like that.  The people speak - and are told by the politicians and their media friends that they - the people - meant something else entirely.

But Tesco is all around me (around most of us) bullying rent reductions from landlords, closing every independent shop in sight, creeping nearer and nearer my front door.  Its blue and red decor tempting us to buy under false pretences - 'Fair Trade', factory-farmed Organic, Fat Free that's loaded with sugar.  Cheap!  Cheap!  Celebrate your lack of principles!

Tesco is a cross between the convolvulous/ bindweed that is strangling my garden, and a cut-price brothel.

Yeah, yeah.  But today, for extraneous reasons (and for the first time in months) I gave in and briefly became a customer of the Tesco Bordello in Brook Green.

"I hate this shop," I muttered, looking along the shelves of hi-fat, hi-yeast, lo-care cake products for my soda bread.

"You're not the only one," the woman next to me grinned.

At the counter, the check out woman asked if I had a Club Card.

"No.  I come here as little as possible."

She laughed.  "I don't blame you."  She gave me my change.  "If I didn't have to work here, I'd give it as wide birth too."