Category: Uncategorized

Mubi has gotten more experimental since last I switched my interest to it’s little clutch of curated films. One film leaves every day, and one film arrives. My habit had always been to watch the one that’s leaving no matter what it is. Today it was a sixteen minute computer generated wide-screen contemplation of digital legacy, narrated by some dude on his phone on top of a hill in the wind. This is why I watch it no matter what. I wouldn’t have chosen it. But it kicked off some decent thoughts.

It naturally started with me thinking about this thing I’m doing right now in your face. My daily blog. Hmm. I haven’t gone into the stats for ages. Bear with me… 1533 posts including this one. Seriously, what the fuck am I doing?

“Whether or not you like it, it’s still going to be there,” says the narrator about the shit we leave online. Even if it’s deleted it’s still there somewhere. When I shuffle off I’ll stop paying for WordPress and most of these blogs will just instantly vanish when the subscription lapses. I guess that’s ok. It’s a living record and a conversation. I probably won’t still be doing it every day by the time I’m dead anyway. But once I stop giving WordPress their pound of flesh, pop goes the weasel unless I’ve worked out how to move it. Hey ho. But nothing is ever truly deleted online. It’ll exist somewhere.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I barely publish this anyway. I’m just shipping out a bunch of words every day to try and help me feel connected to myself, to you lot, to that world out there that’s been gently receding for so many of us for so long – that strange busy world we used to know.

“Our bodies are temporary but what we do is permanent,” says the narrator. But we make so much to pour into this digital void. “Look everybody look I saw a thing that’s visible!” “Here’s me and another human overusing our facial muscles!” “Here’s a person without very many clothes!” Billions of people like me and you creating things for free. “Generating content,” people used to say. Noise. Digital noise. Blah blah me blah blah.

I was helping a friend this morning who teaches people how to breathe on zoom. She loves it. She was an actor, and a fine one too, and now she’s turned what she learnt in theatre into a business where she helps executives to improve their communication skills and confidence with public speaking. It’s good work and it’s always lovely to hear men and women of all ages having little breakthroughs about all the things we have completely forgotten in this digital world – the way that our breath drives our movement and our thoughts as much as it does our oxygen. The balance of body and mind, and how easy it is to tip too far into one or the other. And just how to speak into the forward space with the appearance of confidence clarity and authority. She makes videos where she talks to camera about using the tongue or easing out the spine or intoning vowels. Those videos will still exist somewhere in 1000 years time, if the narrator of that short is to be believed. They’ll be kicking around with my daily noise and the billions of pictures of somebody’s lunch and the weird insects and the porn and the babies and the product shots and the health warnings. Maybe just on some dusty server in a museum basement somewhere marked “The social media bubble” and accessed digitally on occasion by PhD students of this foolish era of humanity.

This afternoon I drove a friend of mine to various paint shops where she’s colour matching prints and framing artworks that she’s been lovingly crafting for months ahead of an exhibition. They are beautiful and I’m proud to be able to help her. But once again, knowing how quickly the antiques I’ve been finding can deteriorate, I’m wondering if the Instagram photos of her art will outlive the art itself…

Or maybe it WILL all just burn. Eventually it will for sure, when the sun explodes into a red giant and consumes us – but that’s in 5.5 billion years. Those creatures will be the ones who hate us the most. “They plundered the minerals we would have needed to power communication devices that also sent pictures and videos.” “What things were so important to communicate that they destroyed so many resources in doing so?” “Pictures of cute cats.” “Ok. That makes sense I suppose.”

I was on my daily perambulations when I came upon this statue, in a tiny park near Vauxhall Bridge.

On the socle is his name: William Huskisson. His dates are given – 1770 to 1830. For information we merely have the word “Statesman”.

I become curious. For hundreds of years it would have been impossible to easily gather more information on this man. A library perhaps… Thirty years ago, if you’d spent £200 you might be able to ask Microsoft Encarta – the limited and subjective attempt at a digital encyclopedia before the internet grew up. Nowadays information has a superhighway that we don’t even question. Wikipedia might be written by the users. Perhaps it can be partisan at times and even more subjective than Encarta. But its incredible. And its free. And you should donate so it doesn’t get polluted like so much of the internet these days. I went there to find out more. Standing in front of this proud replica, I found myself laughing at the poor man, not for the way he lived, but for the way he died.

If he WAS a true statesman, as the statue tells us, then he was an exceptionally rare creature. We have none in parliament at the moment. We have rarely seen one in living memory. I’m not sure he was one. I have a feeling that the park we were in was his old townhouse garden. He gives the people some land, we erect a statue to pretend he was important. Deal done.

Unfortunately his lasting claim is not the way he lived. It’s the way he died. He was the first widely reported railway passenger casualty. And he was killed by that great innovation, Stephenson’s Rocket itself. Run over by a train with a top speed of 30mph, probably as it was going at less than 10.

In September 1830, William made an appointment to see the royal doctor, William George Maton.

“What seems to be the problem?”

“It is my waters. They are more and more urgent, more and more frequent. Even after I have passed, I am almost immediately seized by the need to pass once more. The act itself is accompanied by great pain, and despite a sense of need I am often disappointed by just a few small strangled droplets, produced with great discomfort.”

“Let me just inspect you a while…”

“Are you sure this is quite necessary, doctor?”

“It’s the only way I can be quite certain, Sir. Yes. Mmmm. Yes. You appear to be suffering from Strangury, sir. It’s an inflammation of the kidneys. You are to rest yourself immediately. I advise you strongly to cancel any public engagements, and remain at home. Drink plenty of water, lay off the sherry and dance clockwise around a horse every sunset wearing a top hat and matching codpiece.”

“Preposterous. I cannot cancel my appointments. And I shall not lay off the sherry What rot. Why, It is the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester railway on the fifteenth. The Duke of Wellington himself will be there. Even if we never saw eye to eye with his absurd ideal that a minimum wage should be laid into law, now he’s left parliament and the danger of such foolishness has passed, I would like to mend bridges with him. After all, he still has much power in the Lords.”

“Very well, sir. But don’t blame me if you end up dead.”

That’s the scene set. Off goes William Pisskidneys, secretary of state for war and colonies, to see the remarkable Rocket up close.

One thing I haven’t mentioned of William is that he was known to be rather clumsy. An exceptional man with figures, no doubt. He served the enshrined duty of elected officials in this country to be certain that the greatest possible sums of money are taken from the hands of the many and put into the hands of the few. Had he lived now he would have been a hero of the current cabinet, breaking the ministerial code with the fearless impunity that is traditional. But he would have tripped over paving stones on television interviews, and fallen down on the steps of airplanes. Even his statue has lost most of the fingers, not to mention that he’s forgotten his clothes and been forced to wrap himself in a sheet.

So we have a clumsy but clever man who is unwell. And we have a locomotive that can reach the impossible speed of 30mph. And we have The Duke of Wellington, and a hatchet that needs to be buried. And we have a grand opening that doubtless involves large amounts of free sherry. And we have low kidney function.

William got on a special train that was laid on for the Duke and the dignitaries. He wanted very much to talk to the Duke and bury the hatchet, but of course he was not alone in that. He had a reasonably long journey waiting for his moment, sitting in an unfamiliar moving locomotive, drinking free sherry with bad kidneys. By the time he saw his chance it is likely that this clumsy fellow was three sheets to the wind. “Do not alight here,” the announcer called as the Duke got out at the then tiny Parkside Station to stretch his legs. Just a bit of track really. Fifty people alighted after the Duke. Among them was William, hoping to seize his moment. His moment hadn’t come before the announcement came: “An engine is approaching. Take care gentlemen.”

Stephenson’s Rocket was the approaching engine – the famous groundbreaking train in its heyday was slowing down, approaching on the other track.

“Another train is coming. I must get out of the way. Where is the Duke? Perhaps I can shelter with him as it comes in and we can bond in a shared moment of wonder. It is coming closer. I must evade it. But which side of these tracks should I choose? How should I best position myself to catch a moment with his excellency?”

As the train approached in slow motion, William began to panic. A train on a track, so understood by us all, was virtually completely new to William. He crossed the line to one side, realised perhaps that he would then have the train between himself and the Duke, crossed to the other side, realised he might then get left behind, and attempted to clamber back into the train he had originally left, entering from the tracks and not the platform. The half door he was clambering over was not latched closed and it opened slowly under his weight, swinging him back into the path of the approaching Rocket.

It’s all happening in slow motion. There he is, tired sick and tipsy in his finery, turning to face the Rocket helplessly as he clings to the top of an open half door dangling over the tracks. There’s a scream as the great train applies the brakes too late. There’s his scream as he realises it’s unavoidable. In the carriage, the Duke stops mid sentence and drops his gin as he looks through the window. “By God, is that Huskisson? What are you doing, you bloody fool!”

Rocketing along at some 10mph the famous locomotive grinds the door off the Duke’s train and hurls our William into the track before rolling over and absolutely destroying one of his poor legs. He is rushed to the vicarage in Eccles by carriage with an attempted tourniquet but nobody really knows how to treat such a severe injury so they have tea and he makes a will. He is dead from shock and blood loss by 9pm. RIP William.

Now his statue, inexplicably wearing a toga, stands in a tatty garden in Vauxhall. One hand holds a scroll, the other has no fingers. He never got to patch it up with Wellington. Carpe Diem. Poor William. Sic Transit Gloria Mundi.

Apophenia is a word relating to the tendency that we have to connect unrelated things by the very action of seeking that connection. There’s a lot of it about at the moment.

On the 23rd May 2017, I was asked by email to come to a theatre in London and play the writer and thinker William S Burroughs for Daisy Campbell’s Cosmic Trigger. In a certain light we might be related, Burroughs and I. I was 23 when he died, but was aware of his work. This extremely mischievous and beautiful piece of theatre frequently had a different guest actor in to play him, with no rehearsal. I love doing that sort of thing, of course. I ended up doing it a few times and hell yeah it was an incredible and eye-opening piece of work to be involved in. Here’s my first speech – on page 23 of the script.

“In the early 60s in Tangier I knew a certain Captain Clark who ran a ferry from Tangier to Spain. One day, Clark said to me that he’d been running the ferry for 23 years without an accident. That very day the ferry sank killing Clark and everybody aboard. That evening I was thinking about this when
I turned on the radio. The first newscast told me about a crash of an Eastern Airlines plane on the New York-Miami
route. The pilot was also called Captain Clark and the flight was listed as Flight 23.”

This coincidence – recorded and repeated by Burroughs – is thought to be the beginning of what is now called “The 23 Enigma”. Burroughs and his friends began to record unusual coincidences they came across and found them littered with the number 23. They were looking for it. And so they found it. But would it have been the same for a different number? Or for Captains called Clark? Or anything else? Maybe. Maybe not. You never know until you look.

The joy of it is the mischief of it. If you look for it, you find it. It’s a thought experiment. It has great power, like any good thought experiment. Maybe there’s something in it. Maybe there isn’t. But it exists and once you’ve been exposed to it, it starts to crop up more often.

It’s March 23rd. The day both of my parents died, many years apart. Just a coincidence. A long time ago now – maybe 23 years since dad died. A double wham but at least then it’s over for another year.

Dad had read Burroughs and enjoyed the mischief. We once played roulette at the casino in The Isle of Man when I was a very young man. “Put your chip on 23. It comes up more often than any other number,” he told me with his usual twinkle. My memory has it that it did come in. Our memory lies outrageously to us. It tells us stories we want to hear. But maybe it did. I’d like it to be what happened. And magically, that’s enough to make it something that happened. I can never prove or disprove it to myself or to anybody else. It happened and didn’t simultaneously forever.

Today has frequently been hard for me with the double anniversary. Have I got the dates wrong? I don’t think so. I went and checked a few years ago.

I think of the forks in the road. I think of what my parents wanted from me versus what I’ve ended up making of myself. Dad would be fine with me having fun but he would definitely have preferred me to be making more money and being more obviously successful in my field. Mum wanted me to be safer than I’m comfortable being, and probably living in a country pile with an annex for her, rather than a London flat full of other people’s pets.

Perhaps it’s okay that suddenly March 23rd has become “British lockdown anniversary”. Maybe that’s why Boris delayed it so long – is he a disciple of Burroughs wanting to make another significant 23? No! He’s an oaf!

But it means I’m able to split my focus on this day. They say we should hold a torch vigil this evening in memory but won’t we get arrested? The 23rd March. Lockdown Day. Where future generations will think it’s cool to dress down in the evening and join great big “Tiger King” watch parties and then cry lots, put on a fat suit and arrest each other.

It’s worth looking into Burroughs and the other boys if you haven’t by the way. A lot of words, but you can dip in and out. Robert Anton Wilson. Timmy Leary. Powerful playful modern philosophers, breaking patterns to find patterns. Fractals and interconnectedness and fucking with the laws of nature through psychedelics and belief and maybe even actual magic. Never too self important though. Never. In terms of their application to confirmation bias and pattern matching it’s so much less tedious and ego driven than the latest crop of proto-mysticism we’re dealing with where talking heads on YouTube behave like they’ve just invented thinking. Back then the thinking was about releasing potential and opening the doors to playfulness and connection. Sure they wanted to make a living and be loved too, but that didn’t seem to be their prime mover. I dunno maybe I’m getting old but I’m mighty bored of a lot of the fundamentalism and smugness around accepted outlets for alternative thinking. I like a bit of muck with my weirdness. It’s all too self-important.

It’s 18.23 and I’m about 23 minutes drive away from where I need to be to help my friend do three self tapes. She’s got tons to do, although disappointingly it’s only 19 pages. I want four more. Still, her brain is exploding and it’s gonna take hours as it is. Happy 23rd.

By the time you read this it won’t be the 23rd anymore – but keep an eye out – 23 shows up all the time.

The reality of a cat is always easier than the idea of a cat.

With all the fragile things in here, with an open topped fish tank up high and a royal python in a tank at ground level, I wasn’t really sure it would be a good idea. But it’s always a good idea to have a cat. I forgot. That’s all.

Pickle exploded into my life and astonished me by not breaking things very much at all. Sure her poo was toxic and was frequently left as a present on one of our beds. But she showed a degree of understanding and sensitivity that surprised me at the time. She never jumped on my altar. She occasionally shredded things. That’s what cats do. But she didn’t break the piles of plates somehow. She was remarkably dainty. She would have ended up with her paws in the fish though – she was extremely good at catching flies and she’d have had a loach out for inspection. I’m not sure The Chairman here can be bothered with fish any more than flies, thankfully. And he still hasn’t met the snake. I’m keeping them apart.

He’s settling in, bless him. He sheds an astronomical amount of hair, and has taken to lying on my pillow when I’m not watching – and when I am. It’s just as well I’m not allergic to cats because he’s a major moulter – apparently it’s the season. My pillow has an extra layer. This is why counterpanes exist. I understand now. He’s calm already though, this little old fellow. He’s made sense of me fairly quickly and we get on swimmingly.

Today he slept on my pillow for pretty much the entire day and now he’s come yowling to me for cuddles. He’s got his arse in my face and he’s dumped a good skipload of fluff all over my jumper. I’ve been trying to get things done but he’s very distracting. It’s a good distracting. But… He very much likes to be brushed and I’m a very inexperienced and hesitant cat brusher. We’ve been muddling along in between me taking shifts on the business of life admin etc etc. I reckon he’ll be thoroughly spoilt by the time my friend manages to get back from Australia.

I’ve moved a little bit forward from where I was yesterday with the multiplicity of stuff that must be done. I very much need to find my bloody passport next though. It’s such a conundrum. The forms I’m filling in need the fucking thing, and what I don’t want right now is the stress of a last minute acting job in Tunisia when I have no idea where the damn thing is. In a dream I put it between two heavy things to flatten it down… Was that a dream? I could ask Mao-Mao for help but he’d just push his head into me and make a noise like a duck. Besides he doesn’t want me going anywhere as he’s just started carving out a happy home with me.

He lets me have my bed back to myself at night. Pretty shortly after the light goes out he drops down with a thump like a sack of potatoes and slips into the wardrobe. He didn’t get much exercise at the cattery, so he’s a bit heavy. I’ve rigged him some cushions in the wardrobe so he can moult on the tails of all my suits in comfort. But right now he’s with me on this chaise making it very hard to ignore him.

It’s taking me forever to write this blog. He is far too cute and soft and fluffy. It’s hard to believe that he’s a predator.

Today I found a bunch of old newspaper cuttings kept by my maternal grandmother, mostly about dad. She didn’t like him much on the surface but there was a strange love running under. She was a year older than he was and he was married to her daughter.

Despite traditional animosity, she collected the cuttings diligently – all about this unusual human who swept off with her daughter and seemed to spend the best part of his life steering around in anything from powerboats to vintage Bentleys to hot air balloons while somehow having time to help Max and I become people. I’m glad she kept them. I haven’t gone through them yet but I will – it’s a good time for it. It’s a time of year when I think about them a great deal – late March. We are coming up to the shared anniversary of their respective deaths, years apart.

I remember the balloon across the Alps thing in the article very well from my childhood.

I was at boarding school when he and his friend Gunter were in the air. Mrs Beale the art teacher got us all to paint our parents and it was a strong image in my head. I was eight. Balloons are cool. I remember the painting because dad loved it and kept it. I made a little stick man in a massive colorful balloon over some mountains. There was a sun and he had both of his arms up with joy. I got into trouble because I didn’t paint people in a garden holding hands. “You’re supposed to paint a parent!” “That’s my daddy, he’s crossing The Alps in a hot air balloon!” “Now what have we told you about your overactive imagination.”

I’d do it tomorrow like a shot, even though I’d probably drop the thing into the side of a mountain. Bring me a balloon and a frozen lake and I’ll give it a go anyway. Didn’t they use large bottles of booze as ballast? Sign me up. Come with me. Let’s get the hell out of here in a sodding great balloon with a bat on the side of it and go to Imaginationland where the trees and flowers look beautiful all the time ha ha.

Over 50 years ago now, dad and Keith from the article tried to race from London to Sydney in a vintage racing Bentley with a supercharger that steered from the rear. They drove it off the road in Afghanistan, but eventually rolled it into Bombay from whence they were supposed to get a specific highly monitored ferry to Perth (no repairs) before the Australia leg of what was then the inaugural Daily Express London to Sydney Marathon. They missed the boat. No surprises really – they weren’t in it to win it. They were in it to try and do it in a ridiculous but beautiful car. “Bombay Bound” was the title of a painting they had done of it. I’m lucky he didn’t get killed before I was born really. It was a different age. I’d give my eye teeth to drive from London to Bombay in that car or in one like it. It would probably make a great documentary – a journey of the soul and reconnection with my dead father. I’m not famous enough to get the doc made yet. Plus I’d get shot in the head in Afghanistan. But it’s on the list for if I get that call from Spielberg with, perhaps, an adjusted route to avoid the warzones…

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.

It’s ok to feel sad. It’s part of the process.

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…

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…