There’s a particular grubbiness that comes with travel. You start showered and fresh in clean and comfortable clothes, upbeat and hopeful that this will be like travel in the movies; sunlight flaring on the windows, heads resting on shoulders, laughter and smiles with a lightly jazzy soundtrack. But in reality the grubbiness has set in.
She liked to ‘leave dishes to soak’, an act of self-deception that I’ve always abhorred.
The unrequited love of ones’ only living offspring has its own particular slow acid burn.
At the end of the day, the harsh reality is that if you’re a fan of Kate Bush, Charles Dickens, Scrabble, David Attenborough and University Challenge, then there’s not much out there for you in terms of a youth movement.
There is a point in the future where even the worst disaster starts to settle into an anecdote.
Lonely’ is a troubling word and not one to be tossed around lightly. It makes people uncomfortable, summoning up as it does all kinds of harsher adjectives, like ‘sad’ or ‘strange’. I have always been well liked, I think, always well regarded and respected, but having few enemies is not the same as having many friends, and there was no denying that I was, if not ‘lonely’, more solitary than I’d hoped to be at that time.
And it’s true, I have a perfectly fine face, eyes that may well be ‘kind’ but are also the brownest of browns, a reasonable-sized nose and the kind of smile that causes photographs to be thrown away.
That was a memorable day to me, for it made great changes in me. But, it is the same with any life. Imagine one selected day struck out of it and think how different its course would have been. Pause, you who read this, and think for a long moment of the long chain of iron or gold, of thorns or flowers, that would never have bound you, but for the formation of the first link on that memorable day.’ Charles Dickens, Great Expectations.
I know from your letters and from seeing you after your play that you feel a little bit lost right now about what to do with your life, a bit rudderless and oarless and aimless but that’s okay that’s alright because we’re all meant to be like that at twenty-four. In fact our whole generation is like that. I read an article about it, it’s because we never fought in a war or watched too much television or something.
My wife at fifty-two years old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, ‘Douglas, that’s just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.’ To which I’d reply, ‘But none of this is a surprise. I’ve been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It’s the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or forty-three. It’s that face.
The idea that someone, man or woman, should receive any kind of extra attention or affection or popularity or respect or adulation, simply because of a quirk of genetics and some arbitrary male-media-defined subjective notion of ‘beauty’ seems to me inherently wrong and unacceptable.
Conversation, the gradual unveiling of oneself, one’s quirks and characteristics, opinions and beliefs; what a fraught and awkward business that is.
Apparently the nation’s future lay not in innovation and development but in global finance and telesales, in the entertainment industry and coffee shops.
Whenever I hear Edith Piaf sing “Non, je ne regrette rien” – which is more often than I’d like, now that I’m at university – I can’t help thinking, What the hell is she talking about? I regret pretty much everything.
And there it is again, the look. There’s no doubt about it, if Sylvie had a receipt, she would have taken him back by now; this one’s gone wrong. It’s not what I wanted.
In fact he was rather boring on the subject, but I kept quiet and took comfort in that old saying about fallen apples and their distance from trees.
Why, I wondered, did people seek out portrayals of the very experiences that, in real life, would send them mad with despair? Shouldn’t art be an escape, a laugh, a comfort, a thrill? No, said Connie, exposure brought understanding. Only by confronting the worst traumas of life could you comprehend them and face them down, and off we’d trot to watch another play about man’s inhumanity to man.
We can just hang out and walk and read and talk and stuff.
In portraiture I look for people that I recognise – ‘Look, it’s Uncle Tony’ – or for the faces of film stars. The Madame Tussaud’s school of art appreciation.
Then they kiss again, and she goes to work, and he goes to work, and so the days go by, faster than ever.