I’m sitting in the car on Cheyne Walk. I stopped here on the way back from the shop. Just behind me was The Kings Head and Eight Bells pub, where I had my first yard of ale and belched it down my front. Back then it was somehow still a spit and sawdust pub. I even had my first pint there aged something like fifteen. Now they’ve painted it white and they want to sell you cornichons and truffle glaze. Fifteen year old Al wouldn’t get served there no matter how tall he was. Fifteen year old Al wouldn’t like it there any more than this version does. Twenty quid for no food. Closed anyway, of course. And no delivery.
To my direct left is Shrewsbury House, containing the flat I used to live in with my mum when she first moved to London. This little bit of road is steeped with memories of my big brother and I. There are photos of us in the nineties, swanning around in our colorful clothing, not a care in the world. Those were crucial years spent arriving in London and living between here and The Isle of Man – thirteen to about seventeen. Then I moved in with my brother and mum moved to where I am now. Mum was about the age I am now back then, and she was dating which I didn’t like. “When you think back over this, you’ll notice how young I was,” she said once when I argued with her and told her she was out of touch because she was old and all the stuff you say to piss your parents off.
It’s funny sitting here. The memories are sharp. It was all so new, two protected island boys and a glorious younghearted recent divorcee making sense of the city from the shelter of a middle class enclave. I didn’t even know how to walk to South Kensington from here initially. I’d walk to Sloane Square and get the tube instead. If it was late at night I’d jump in a black cab and hope I could weasel the fare from the bank of mum. I thought Shoreditch was another world. I barely knew how to get to Victoria. I’d come home with my teenage worries and mum and I would try to work them out. Max and I would play at being grown ups, cooking our own food and going and doing things.
It’s funny being trapped in time like this. These moments and these versions of me are just a ghost away. Back then I rolled oblivious past this unrecognised ghost of a man in a red car. Right now that half forgotten younger me is laughing by on my left, invulnerable It’s summer. It’s Spring. It’s Autumn. It’s winter. It’s lockdown. I’m going to church. I’m going to feed a cat. They’re both alive, mum and dad, and I have the freedom that comes with being fancy free. They very much aren’t and the buck has been stopped here for decades, and I’ve been lost in it.
To my right the Albert Bridge, costing us untold thousands I’m sure but a great way to mourn – to make things more convenient and make a bit of light in the darkness. I’m taking joy from it.
We are finally out of the clutches of the dark. Vernal equinox, and the shadows are clinging on, but the day is back to supremacy, and the night will shrink and dwindle from now for months to come. Well come, light. We need you. It’s been a long December.
I’m having another one of those evenings. I went out.
You can walk around outside in London with a memory of not needing a coat, but there’s still a chill. I’ve driven the car up to Knightsbridge and I walked around the empty high street. The excuse was shopping for food – there’s a mini Waitrose up there. In truth I just wanted to go to one of the bits of London near me that would normally be busy. It’s Friday night. It’s so unfamiliar.
There are no laughing people spilling out of noisy doorways onto the pavement. The roads are floods of unstable and badly lit moped drivers playing with their lives to bring you that Five Guys Burger. It’s just delivery drivers overtaking empty buses. The honking crowds of pissed off uber drivers and minicabs have gone. The hordes of people desperately connecting after a week in a cubicle are on Zoom. The black cabs are still driving around with their lights on, hoping. But there’s not much to hope for. It’s still a ghost town.
I’m outside Harrods. Mecca for Mammonites. The lights are on, as they are across this empty town. You can still stand on Primrose Hill and look over a brightly lit city. The lights are on. But everyone’s home.
Before Christmas I came very close to booking a week at at Airbnb in a small skiing village in France early next month. “It’ll definitely be over by then,” I found myself believing. I figured I could drive out there and then go very fast for a few days and try and leave some of this emotional shit stuck to the mountainside and get my adrenaline kick. I’m kinda glad that caution got the better of me and I didn’t book the place. I’d have wasted my money. Even if it’s possible with Covid we also have Brexit to contend with. I expect by the time I’d filled in all the forms to get into France I’d have to leave again.
Home is nice, but progress was slow today. Mao-Mao helped by letting me play with him for about 8 hours and then watching me fold a shirt. He seems to have integrated immediately and even made a little nest for himself in the bedroom cupboard. But he is wonderfully fluffily distracting.
And yet I still got sad, despite the friendly fluff. It creeps up on you. I think the thing I miss the most is the idea that I could go anywhere tomorrow. Even if I don’t go anywhere, to know I could. Some day…
I’m going to drive home, stroke the Chairman a bit more, eat pie and fall asleep. Tomorrow will feel less raw.
The Chairman has arrived in my flat, sparking the beginning of a New Regime. No longer will the cold blooded animals reign supreme. No longer will surfaces be free of hair. No longer will furniture remain unscratched.
He’s a bit blind. He’s thirteen years old. He’s extremely fluffy. He has a nervous tic because of some missing teeth. Right now he’s rolling around on the bed beside me as I write. He wants to try and put his bum in my face. He was originally called Homer, which is apt considering his eyesight, but my friend is no fan of the classics. She only had The Simpsons for reference. “I don’t read books,” is how she put it. So she calls him Mao-Mao. That’s the name I used when I picked him up at the cattery. But to me he’s already The Chairman.
I had to drive to Henley to get him. He’s been staying in that cat hotel for months. My friend had no idea she’d end up stuck in Australia. She reckons it’ll be another six months out there now, and with prices starting at £13.00 a night I can see why she needed me to go get him. Even though they all hang out in wrought iron beds there, it’s much nicer for a cat like this to have their very own pet human to roll around with. He’s been resident at the cattery for quite some time now. The owner wanted over a grand and wasn’t afraid to tell me. A grand don’t come for free, but she managed to get it squared off.
I still had to prise him out of the cattery. With nobody going on holiday these days, the catteries are struggling too, and clearly this lady just loves cats. “If it doesn’t work out I’ll take him back for just the price of food,” she told me. Oh it’ll work out. It’s already working out. We’ve been sniffing and stroking each other all night and just as long as he doesn’t get into the fish we’ll be fine.
I’ll need to change my habits a bit now he’s with me though. He’s old and frail but affectionate and docile. I reckon he’ll end up sleeping next to me. Right now he’s lying on his back next to my arm batting the air, making contented grizzling noises and occasionally twitching. I need to make sure I don’t roll on him in my sleep or step on him when I stumble to the loo at night. I mustn’t leave clothes all over the floor either as he drops hair everywhere. That’s useful. I’ve been lazy about that recently. He’ll be a distraction when I’m trying to work, but a pleasant one.
I’m yet to see if he leaves me stinky presents but it’s possible in the early days. Right now we’re learning how to be friends, and he’s finding his way around the cornucopia of random smells and sights that make up my flat.
His age is likely an advantage. He hasn’t shown much inclination to go leaping on shelves full of glasses or piles of books yet. He didn’t seem interested in the fish thankfully, and he hasn’t even noticed Hex yet. That’ll be the interesting one. Hex is pretty happy living just above ground level – he’s a ground dweller so I’ve put him on a long footstool in his long flat tank. He’s been sleeping under his rock all day after eating yesterday, so he hasn’t noticed this new creature. His lid weighs a ton so there’ll be no accidental mingling. But at some point they’ll clock one another through the glass – two affectionate and lazy predators from opposite corners of evolution.
Meanwhile I’m going to sleep with a friendly cat in my lovely bed. This is great.
The Western Riverside Waste Authority Recycling Facility is the latest mouthful of a name for Wandsworth Dump. I’ve been a frequent visitor of late, hauling low loads of bollocks in the Audi before trying to work out which bin to put things in. “No vans” says the sign as you turn right into the driveway. I remember my brother and I in our early twenties swearing and pulling the van onto the pavement and walking in carring a load of crap. You couldn’t do that nowadays. It’s heavily monitored. CCTV everywhere.
The entrance has been turned into a long line, like a passport queue or a ski lift – designed to cut back on traffic on Smuggler’s Way by folding the cars together. As you move down it, over aggressive bumps, you pass lit up displays telling you all sorts of things you have to do. When you get to the end a man in hi-vis ignores you, but a sign tells you you have to reverse park into one of the bays. You get to see the range of skills that still manage to pass a driving test in the approach to this maneuver. Woe betide anybody who goes in front first. I’ve seen how the hi-vis people talk to them. It would make anybody feel stupid.
Once you’re in a bay it’s a free for all. It’s busy at the moment. Huge bins are in a constant state of filling as we all do our lockdown DIY. The categories are limited. Organic Waste. Wood and Timber. Small Appliances. Clear Bag Mixed Recycling. General Rubbish.
The general rubbish one fills fast, and there’s a reason for that. Even if they’re trying to recycle things, they give up quite easily. I had a good pane of glass the other day. “Where do I recycle this?” “General Rubbish.”
The little bay where you leave things for others to take is closed for the Cove. People have still been trying, unable to take that last step. When I arrive I run my eyes over a load of pictures propped up on a bin. I don’t want them but they’re attractive. Prints, and a large framed photo of The Eiffel Tower. No resale value, but somebody clearly hoped they’d find new life. While I’m emptying my car of bits of bed I watch one of the hi-vis people grab all the pictures in batches and impassively sling them into Mixed Rubbish. His movements are slow and sustained. I hear the frames shatter, while he appears not to. There’s a finality in it. They’ll go to landfill, along with so many other things that might recycle if reduced to their component parts but his job is not to break things down, his job is just to keep the pathways free of nasty things that might infect us, like art.
Batteries are efficiently sorted in bins. Fabrics are overspilling from all the new lockdown Kondo acolytes. Cans of hazardous liquids sit in the sun waiting to be attended. I carry my old hoover over to “Large Appliances” and place it neatly by another one. I tried to fix it. I really did.
When I was a kid I learnt to tinker. I got pretty good at it – fixing up appliances. I can usually backwards engineer something and work out where it’s gone wrong and do something to make it work again. I’m nothing on Brian, who I once saw take apart a smoke machine and improvise a hotfix in less than twelve seconds in time for the start of Carol. I take longer, but I don’t like giving up on simple electrics. But I tried all the obvious things and concluded that it was just fucked. I imagine somebody at the dump will go “this one just needs a new ooplamagork”. But I drew a blank after checking all the stuff I knew.
Seeing all the discarded items it helped bring home to me how disposable everything is these days. Growing up we had the same Hoover for decades. I’ve been through three of them in a year, and that’s not even counting the steam mop and Brian’s carpet cleaner. Even things full of rare minerals like mobile phones – we’re encouraged to upgrade them every couple of years and they start to scramble themselves if you have them for too long.
New stuff isn’t better than old stuff that works. We should all try to get better at fixing things generally. YouTube can teach us to fix anything so long as we can put up with the personality of the person doing the teaching. My friend Mel taught me to reattach the fan belt on her washing machine over the phone once. It can be satisfying, working out how something works and fixing it. So long as you don’t electrify yourself, it’s worth having a go while we’ve all got a bit more time. I changed my plug sockets in April and put up a load of chandeliers. If I can work it out…
Learning plumbing would be the real win…
Not Wandsworth Dump – Brighton last week. But it fits the subject…
I’m lying for the first time since I was eight in my grandmother’s bed after its epic journey here in terms of cost and time. From Jersey to London over something like twenty years, mostly via my uncle’s storage, more recently via Shurgard. Finally here, built and in use at long last.
My old bed is already in pieces in the stairwell, ready to get hauled to the dump tomorrow. I’m turning my attention to my old room next. Then to the living room. Then the corridor. I figured even though the carpet is horrible up the stairs and through th corridor, it is quite pleasant to paint the walls over disposable carpets, so wherever possible I’m going to continue doing walls first and carpet second.
I’m beginning to take ownership of my flat. This might sound odd considering I’ve lived here for over a decade, but it came to me basically free so I’ve never quite been able to get over the sense that it’s not earned or that it isn’t really mine. Like as if mum is gonna show up and say “what the hell have you done with my bedroom?” This process of putting my mark on it is helping me properly accept it as a place I’m allowed to be comfortable in. If this room is anything to go by it’ll be a haven expressing my eclectic taste and the wealth of strange and lovely things that seem to glom onto me as I stumble through life. The piles of random shit are occasionally yielding up pleasant items to display, or useful items to employ. But they are mostly just taking up space. I’m thinking another drive up to Tennant’s is in order before long.
Two more nights before the cat arrives, and in an incredible stroke of fortune a friend who lives very close to me happens to have been given an extra hoover, so I can replace my one which packed up and is also lying on the stairs ready to go. I’m expecting a fair amount of hair from the old pussycat. I’ve also cleared out Pickle’s lavatory area and all it needs now for full function is a litter tray which I think the catmum will be ordering on Amazon – she’s already got the carrier. It’s been a good day of excavation today.
I’ve got about three carloads for the dump tomorrow, and a little bag of wood from my old bed that I’m going to take to the woods in Spring and burn ritualistically. The bath is full of plastic bags. But today feels like progress. The living room is still chaos. But I’m starting to see how it’s all going to be possible…
I thought I was just going to return home today, but impulse thought better of it and as I was about to go north to London I instead went east down the coast to Hastings. A friend of mine recently moved there.
We ended up slogging through woods in search of bluebells and fresh air and sunshine. The latter two showed up, but it’s clearly too early for the bluebells so we just enjoyed the light in the trees.
Later on, as I was sitting in a carpark waiting for our fish and chips to cook and watching the most brazen drug deal I’ve ever witnessed, I realised it’s the ides of march. A time to be careful, if ever there was one. A time to watch your back. Somehow I didn’t quite manage. Nothing came of watching the atrocious drug handover, but on the way home – driving at a reasonable speed on a long straight empty road – I failed to notice the shadowed yellow camera and felt that distinctive double flash at my back like knives in the capitol. Et tu, Gatso? 35mph, I reckon, in a 30 zone. Nothing wrong but the numbers, but enough to mean I can’t rent vans if the letter comes through unless I can plead first offence, do a course and avoid the points- (I’ve been very very lucky the last 20 years with those stupid things. I keep alert). Beware the Ides of March. Bollocks. I was listening to the radio, and a bit tired so my focus was on hazards and traffic. I wasn’t on the lookout for cameras. They’re stealthy. Correct driving awareness in the UK is about 75% camera lookout, 25% hazard. I made the costly mistake of watching out for dangers.
Anyway it’s just a flash at the moment.. I’ll feel a bit sick opening my letters for the next few weeks. But it’s not going to ruin my week until it happens.
I’m home and happy after another extended weekend at the sea. This week coming, as ever, I’ve got more to do than I can do in a week, so I’ll aim for as much as I can and try to stop distracting myself by fucking off to Hastings. I’ve got a housecat coming to stay, possibly for as long as six months. I’m rescuing him from the cattery. He comes in on Thursday, so I’ve got two days to make this Aladdin’s Cave cat friendly. Wish me luck… Maybe I’ll find my bastard passport.
Words change their meaning as we sail in this ship called life. No word really means the same thing to two different people, as our context and experience is so personal.
“CANCER”
There’s one. We’ve all got an image. Maybe we first think of a person, maybe ourselves, maybe a crab, maybe even a tropic on the side of a globe.
“HERO”
Well, that used to be easier. Spandex or camouflage, doing extraordinary things maybe. Although nowadays it has lost power. “Sober Hero” – “Food waste hero”. It is so overused it means nothing much.
“WICKED”
Well that has mostly gone back to being naughty, but there was a period in the nineties when it was well cool.
Right now though I’m stuck on this one:
“SAFE”
You can put money in one, or drop it on a cartoon cat. But I’m talking about the one we hear every day. The one that is supposed to be a state of being we desire so much that we will sacrifice liberties to get to it. Everybody has a different location for their “safe” though. Some might only feel safe if every eventuality is covered, and even then they worry. Personally, I’m my father’s son. He taught me safety. He taught me how to safely stand on top of a moving car. He taught me how to safely ski faster than anybody else on the mountain. I feel “safe” when I’m within my capacity, even if I’m at the limit of it. But I don’t aspire towards safety. I’m happy to be at risk a little bit. I don’t want to sign away too much for things that might happen. I’ll deal with them if they happen, so long as I’m within my capacity. Or I won’t manage. And so long as I survive, I’ll learn.
Ok, so if you said “I’ll give you £1000 if you can win a speed-sawing competition against this lumberjack!” I would decline as I wouldn’t feel safe racing with a circular saw. I’d be outside the limits of my known capacity and I love having arms. If it was a skiing competition, I’d give it a go even though I’d probably lose, because I’m aware of my limits enough that pushing them would likely not cause me to break my neck, and if I did it would be because of my own split second bad call on the depth of a mogul or the thickness of some ice.
I’m not going to foist my idea of safe on anybody else though. It’s mine. My capacity is mine, my understanding of my limits, mine. Some of you would nail me in in a speed-sawing competition and then I’d destroy you in a memory test. We are all so different and we all have different edges. We shouldn’t impose them on other people.
The police on Clapham Common last night are trying to tell us they overreacted in order to keep us safe. Again as if safety is the APEX of civilisation. NO! We deserve the opportunity to be a bit at risk. To hold a careful vigil during a pandemic and not be subjected to a show of force that is utterly disproportionate. We don’t need outside forces carrying clubs enforcing our safety… Urrgh. Save me from safety. Save us all from it. Let’s be a bit edgy, and just not be idiots.
I drove to Birmingham and back today, dropping off some bits and bobs for work. Lou came with, and we stopped outside her parents house to hand some flowers through the door. They have been vaccinated – both shots. They still don’t see anybody else and maybe it wasn’t safe for her to say hello to her mum on Mother’s Day and pass them presents – just like it isn’t safe for fathers to be present at the birth of their children even though they kissed their wife as she went into the hospital.
We didn’t hug them. We didn’t touch them. We let them guide the interaction and it involved distance despite both shots. For their safety? For ours?
This is not coming from them, it’s coming from some nebulous view of what is safe and what isn’t. We can get angry with unsafe people, perhaps. In this secular world, we can evangelise safety. But it means something different to everybody.
“Stay safe,” I get in email sign-offs, and I know that by the standards of the writer I’ve never been safe in my life. But by mine I have been. I just like the edges. I don’t want to have my voice taken away and replaced with a comforter. Gaahh
I’m not even drunk. This sort of rantfest is more familiar to drunk Al where I write angry shit about somebody I’ve just met and then pass out as soon as I hit publish.
But I just don’t want to be constantly told that the reason for an attack on our remaining liberties is for our safety. The police hit that vigil because they felt weakened by their implication in the case. They had complicated reasons as well, sure, to do with the rule of law and fear of losing control and misogyny and distaste for liberals and fear of being seen to do nothing. Safety was just a word used to justify an overreaction. If we stop thinking of safety as an aspirational state it can’t be used an excuse anymore…
By now, oh constant reader, you might have gleaned that my home is full of knick-knacks with barely an inch of space anywhere. “I love it here,” my brother said, romantically casting his eye over the sea of assorted and colourful guff. His home has just as much bollocks in it. It’s just a bigger home and better organised because he is forced to find places for it all or have it broken by the kids or thrown out. I get why he likes it though. It’s like being a kid still at mine, you’d be surprised to hear. I’ve basically built a fort in my living room, but instead of it being cardboard boxes it’s books and pokers and prints and ooh let’s have a snake and a load of fish and, I dunno, put an altar with stuff on it from at least eight official faith structures plus one I’ve made up and a load of music scores signed by the composers and the biggest TV in Christendom and some vintage ski-boots.
I’ve left it all there and decanted to Brighton. I can hear the sea ceaselessly rolling the windy pebbles to port. Lou is drifting off to starboard.
Brighton is a haven. Lou is a haven. But not in the way of being a holiday from stuff. Her thing is textiles. It’s good she gets it. She understands my flat.
“My shelves have fallen apart,” says Lou as I arrive. “It’s no surprise. I think I found them in a skip.” Ha.
It’s no surprise they’ve collapsed either. You could sneak a whole army past Polyphemus using the cashmere in this room alone and you wouldn’t even need the goats. I’m being obscure, yes. But fuck it, I might have played the Cyclops a hundred times over the course of The Odyssey. It’s my blog. I can be as obscure as I like. Especially since the idiot in chief in the UK farts classical references when he isn’t giving backhanders to his mates.
The previous paragraph is a perfect example of how to simultaneously annoy two opposing demographics at once. I’m proud of myself.
We fixed the shelves. Then we put all the items back. I stopped counting jumpers when we hit 100. There’s enough for a different jumper for her to wear every day of the winter. We shook and folded the lot because the moths are breeding somewhere and they are as unwelcome as they are hard to get rid of. We put them back with a strict system, which is a largely alien process for me with shelves. Now she knows how to get all her cashmere. She’s still gonna wear just the same two of them. Just like I’ll never read most of my books.
Long drive again tomorrow but nobody’s paying me this time. But I’ll sleep well. Textiles again. I’ve started to understand the practical difference between different materials for sleeping on top of. All of my sheets and pillows were polycotton when I met Lou, and I didn’t know or care any better. Now I’ve got some brushed cotton for winter. It makes my old pillows feel scratchy…
This place is a cosy palace. No scratchy pillows here. I’m going to drift off to dreamland. Have a delightful Sunday.
My flat has an internal stairwell that turns a tight corner. There’s also a fire escape, but the door is very narrow. People don’t like bringing things up here. It’s ridiculous when I think quite how many large boxes I’ve hauled up here over the years.
The first fridge was wrestled in by two lads who told me with haunted eyes “never change your fridge”. They were right to warn me. Brian swapped it out one summer when I was at Wilderness, and his friend dropped it on his foot in the process. There’s still blood on the carpet. Last Christmas I replaced my oven and Team Know-how found a way to avoid taking the old one away. My nephew and I got it out and it was extremely unpleasant. For three months afterwards I was woken every morning with excruciating pain after doing something nasty to my shoulder. I still curse those workshy lads with all the tools and knowhow and equal amounts of laziness. They had a trolley thing for stairs. But they found prehistoric mouse droppings which meant they wouldn’t take it. “Health and safety”.
Anyway, I’m thinking about it because Max and I got a double bed into the spare room this morning. The base was touch and go. We tried the stairwell and it jammed halfway up. We were going to take it apart like I did last month in another flat with a sofa and a handsaw. Thankfully we just thought it might be worth trying to get it through the fire escape first. That involved another bunch of stairs. And by the skin of our teeth, we did it. It’s in. A bit torn. But in.
There’s a romance to it. It was my grandmother’s bed in Jersey. She used to tell me stories in it. Since she died, the replacement cost has been paid over and over and over again to storage companies, I spent my entire fee for a Holiday Inn commercial shipping it over from Jersey – (along with everything else) – and today, finally, it’s in. I didn’t want to just ditch the thing or put it on eBay for £150. So Max and I wrestled it into the flat at last, and I’ll dream in it before long.
I’m not fit though. I’m as unfit as I can remember being. I get out of breath much quicker than I ought to. Now, sneezing hurts my back too from the carrying. Hopefully it’s short term. But … I built the bed so if my back goes I’ll have a comfy place to lie. I haven’t put a mattress onto it yet as I’m giving my back a rest. But it’s a nice piece of furniture. It fits together logically and it feels sturdy. I think there’ll be some good dreams in there before long once there’s a mattress on it. So long as that ormolu doesn’t fall off and conk me on the head.
Glacier slow, but piece by piece. There’s always so much that needs to be done. And I’ve got a cat coming to stay for a while starting next week. Not a furniture scratchy cat though I think. A loungy little prince house cat. I’m thrilled. I’ve missed Pickle something chronic, and this poor little pudding is in a cattery while his companion is stuck in Australia. Best get a working hoover.
It was New Year 2020. I was at Tristan’s old place on Cambridge Park Road. Me, Lyndon, my nephew Campbell and Tristan were outside, drunkenly and enthusiastically talking. I reckon they must have been smoking and I just went for the conversation. I still find myself doing that twenty years after I gave up smoking. You have the best chats in the smoking area.
It was a mild night for New Year. Probably about 1.30am and we were outside happily. Four lads on the street in loud drunk conversation. I’m not even sure why we ended up so far from the recessed doorway of the flat – out beyond porch and front lawn. Most likely we were worried about noise and neighbours. So we were on the public road with tinnies at about 1.30am on New Year’s Day.
She was wearing heels so we heard her coming. Thirty something, professional. New Year tipsy, but with an extremely alert mien and walking fast tall and visible. She’d clearly been at a big party and she was walking home alone – maybe from the bus. We all instinctively cleared space for her to walk by, while pointedly continuing our conversation with one another. We moved in silent concert so she could pass without going between us. She changed her route actively and walked through our conversation. I saw she had her keys in her hand. As she cut through this expanded group of drunk tall men she didn’t say anything to us, and we said nothing to her, but for the briefest moment she shot me a look that I didn’t understand. It was a mixture of attack and a request. “Behind me,” it seemed to say, without it really even being clear she had communicated anything at all. “Behind me. Fuck off. Behind me. Fuck off.” That’s what I read in that deliberate split second of contact.
I might not otherwise have really noticed him at all, that grey haired shuffling man. With his smart hat and dark suit like he was a ghost from ages past, but very much made of flesh – wiry and short and hard in the face.
He was following in her wake, about four car lengths behind, matching her pace, pale eyes fixed on her with something like hunger. Immediately weird. He literally put the hairs on the back of my neck up, like he was Nosferatu. We took our cue “Evening mate! Happy New Year. Lovely night, isn’t it? Good sign for 2020.” We all engaged him in friendly chatter and politely blocked his path a moment. Just niceties. Enough to slow him down and make it clear to him that we had seen him. He tipped his hat. His vowels were clipped. He could’ve been a magistrate, or a justice of the peace. My own RP vowels. Vowels we have somehow been encouraged to trust. A relic of times past but still an active Pavlovian signal. The vowels they use to lie to us every day.
By the time he was through our group she had gained some distance from him, and yet we didn’t stop him for long. We delayed him momentarily with our politeness. Meanwhile she had abruptly turned right into one of the big blocks with gardens and was out of sight.
We remained there, one of us still talking as I processed this strange moment. Clearly he had been following her for some time and she had been very aware of it.
I tuned out my friend’s monologue and watched his back as he shuffled away from us. Would he walk past the place where she turned? Was he just insensitive and going home? What could I do without making the situation worse? Was it my place to even think that?
When he was level with the path into which she must have gone, he stopped. He turned to face the house. And he remained standing there, stock still. Ten seconds. Twenty. The houses on that street are big and divided into flats, with multiple entrances.
He stood. It was like all his senses were on high alert. Tiny hairs in his ear primed for even the tiniest sound. Nostrils flaring. Breath all but held. Thirty seconds. A minute. He froze like a sniper, all of his focus on the place he had last seen her. Two of the lads with me had gone right back to talking, and the rise and fall of their alcoholic blither underscored his silent watching. It was fucking weird, this man dressed in the skin of respectability, sniffing after this woman like a nazgul after Frodo. My skin was crawling. I half expected him to suddenly move with supernatural speed. Did she live there? – Or had she ducked into the garden to finally shake this tenebrous creature? Was she standing behind a bin waiting for him to go? He must have stood for three minutes with barely a movement – hard full focus on empty space, unaware of our equal focus on him. Then he wheeled back ninety degrees and continued to walk away from us at last with a different gait – less of a shuffle. Going home. Fun over. “That guy was fucking weird,” I remarked, and swept back to the drunken friends. We went back to our friends. He went home. The only person with their evening ruined was her.
It stuck in my mind. It surprises me how clearly it all comes back to me considering how much I would’ve drunk by that stage. But it was weird. And yet, depressingly, it happens every night.
What did he think he was doing? I learnt as a young man to be aware that if there was a woman walking alone late at night she might be feeling unsafe. I try to cross the road away if I’m walking faster, or make a phone call on my mobile to a friend so I’m easily audible, or choose a slightly different route just because why be part of the problem. Because it IS a problem. Because of creepy fuckers like that old guy? Yes but more. Much more. And I’m part of it.
I’ve seen it in young men too. “You’re cockblocking me,” shouted a guy maybe 23 on a night bus, chest out at me after a woman I didn’t know suddenly sat next to me as I was heading home happily reading my book. “Pretend you know me,” she shot in under her breath. I understood and two minutes later I had a twenty year old trying to pick a fight with me. “You don’t know her. You’re cockblocking me!” To even use that phrase openly – what was he thinking when she had gone to a stranger for help? He clearly understood I didn’t know her, so evidently she was actively trying to get him to back down and he wasn’t and wasn’t and wasn’t. In a strange irony, I ended up having to walk her to her door – she lived near me. “Are you sure you’re ok with me knowing where you live after the night you’ve had?” “You’re fine. I’ve got an instinct for this. It’s not my first time doing this.” I think she even took my number and messaged me the next day to say thanks. This was like fifteen years ago… Just pings back to memory. “It’s not my first time doing this”. How often? And I’m not saying whoopee me here. She made the whole thing happen. I just got swept up.
MEN. WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING?
Seriously. If you’ve ever been that guy. Stop it. And we all have. We all are. Have some respect for yourself and for others. I’ve done it. You’ve done it. What you feel is not what others feel… That’s an important lesson generally – (useful in acting as well). Just because you fancy somebody and you’re horny – it really doesn’t follow that they either fancy you or are horny. (Just because you feel sad it won’t make people cry.)
This is of course in the light of this godawful news story about that poor woman in South London. With the home secretary having to say “every woman should feel safe”. They should. And we as men must help by taking responsibility, each and every one of us, for our behaviour. The old creepy guy, if pinned down, would try to make out like he didn’t think he was doing anything wrong. He was though, even just by failing to take into account how uncomfortable he was making another human being. And by being oblivious to his free power in this world, where whatever happened with poor Sarah is still happening and we are all too aware of it. It makes my blood boil. How do we teach these boys, these men, these creeps, these successful professionals? Me? Grrr
So that’s just poured out of me. I’ve been driving all day. 400 miles of it with radio 4. It shot by. Would’ve been nicer with Lou in the sputnik seat but it was all done and done and dusted anyway and I just had to think lots. And I thought about those women, that situation, and the question of how do we actually genuinely teach men of all ages to understand the generational stuff they’ve got for free? And I’m not free of it. I’ve fucked up before, misread signals, failed to see past my desire, let my balls do the thinking for too long. I can do better. We all can do better. And I’ve got as much work to do as anybody.
It was International Women’s Day this week and it looks like a woman in South London just got murdered by a cop on her way home.
AlBarclay 