Category Archives: Writing

Anyone who pretends to write should resist the urge to write about events while they’re living them: that’s a devilish urge. Often what makes you write is something unexpected that sticks in your craw after the event. That said, sometimes life gets urgent and you have to write something down to sort your thoughts out. It’s hardly literature.

It was my father’s funeral today. As the Son, one is on display: everyone looks at you. I shook hands with old diplomats I recognised from when I was a child in various countries, and who didn’t recognise me, middle-aged and bald as I am.

Afterwards in the restaurant I ended up sat opposite his brother, who’s even better at pinpointing your shortcomings than my father was. Did he seek me out, in my vulnerable state? I knew he’d find me in any case and go for my throat: there’s something soft in me that he wants to kill. My hands were shaking when I walked to the church.

Despite myself I ended up laughing and getting swept up in his words. I’m used to sarcastic banter, but it’s something else with people like that. I’m a grownup now, I’ve been around, as much as him, but I still wasn’t strong enough to resist. They are too powerful, people like them, they have an answer for everything and make you feel like a child.

The funeral was nothing to him: this was a chance to assert himself like any other social gathering. He wasted no time telling us about the boards he sits on, about his villa and his Maserati, and how puny my work is. No one could get a word in edgeways, and if they did, he found their weak points straight away.

I often saw him and my father do that to normal people, saw their reactions and thought, Get away while you can. Sometimes I was almost proud of them: they could make people do anything.

Three men and two women around a niche pub game. The game of kings! In the White Lion, the centre of my world. I’ve defected from the team I joined when I moved back and helped form a new team. I’m known as Judas on the old team. So be it. Nate-Dawg and I wanted to get together a team in the old style, revive the spirit of bar billiards. We scrambled to get people together before the AGM.

We’re practising for the new season, getting to know each other between shots. We’ll get all the rubbish shots out of the way now, we agree. Four pints in and we start to play well. A thousand plus scores, holes in the red off the back cushion. Good angles. Everything’s flowing, including the banter: a mix of praise and insults, as is the way. We’re coming for the old-timers in division one, we agree. New blood! The team spirit grows. This is a new bar billiards era, we agree. It’s almost a spiritual thing. It’s a community thing.

There are six pubs with billiards tables, and each pub has two or three teams with more or less amusing names. Each team has a captain. The competition is fierce. The team constellations change as players retire and new enthusiasts join. There are people of all ages, from all walks of life: tradesmen, businesspeople, academics, brewers, foreign students, council officers, tree surgeons, driving instructors, me…

At the AGM arcane rules are discussed, hands are raised, new teams are announced and schedules are set. The winning team in division one sets the agenda and leads the meeting. The laymen drinkers at the bar look over and wonder what’s happening.

What’s happening is democracy in action! This is Athens reborn, the Pnyx in the Rose! A dynamic, self-organising community. And pints, lots of pints! Nate-Dawg, captain of the White Lion Manes, gets highfalutin when he announces our new team: we’re all the custodians of this game, he says, and we want to keep it alive. A few nods, general agreement. I’m proud of him, our skipper.

My father died today. I was in the Subway in Anglia Square when my mother rang and told me. I was eating at the window. Pop music was playing. Buses rumbled by. A drunk was sitting across the street next to Poundland waving his hands. I’d finished my work and done my errands. I was feeling free.

At first it’s just information. You hear some words and answer them; I was still thinking about where to find a lampshade for the living room. I got up and walked down the street. My limbs felt weak. To passers-by I must have looked angry. I was self-conscious. I thought, we’re so busy judging each other but you never truly know what’s in the other’s head. Miserable thought. I ended up walking through various alleys I used to take as shortcuts to pubs, then down Marriott’s Way, along the path the tree surgeons have cleared by the river, across the footbridge, down the dirt path behind Aldi, across the carpark, up the hill and down through the streets to my house. A long, roundabout walk.

I’ve tried to prepare myself for this for a long time: the day he’d be gone at last. I was never naïve enough to think it would be a relief, but how do you prepare for something that’s never happened to you before? How often didn’t I tell myself he was a bad man? How often didn’t I wish him dead? So what was I trying to steady myself for? That his death wouldn’t make a difference to me, that he was in my head either way.

This is an odd kind of grief. My mother says his face was white and his mouth was open; if they don’t get there in time, they can’t close it. If they offer to open the coffin at the funeral, she says, don’t do it. I won’t mind that, I say, that would be the least of it. And you know they do all sorts of things at the morgue to make them look normal.

Without language we’d be dumb animals, everyone knows that. We form and deform ourselves in our words. This blog is an example of it. There’s a dignity in being able to speak, to write. Something happens when words come out of people’s mouths. The simplest phrase can make things happen and all of a sudden history has a new score, as the poet said. But words can just as easily obscure everything, cover things over. We’re violent in our nature – we wouldn’t have wiped out all our humanoid rivals and come to dominate the planet otherwise – and our language, our habitual ways of speaking reflects it. So how to trust our own words when they’re by nature self-serving?

What did we find in Todtnauberg, A. and I? What we already knew. What were we expecting – us, a couple of middle-aged European men with all the usual baggage? Some sort of affirmation, revelation? We didn’t expect that: we’re too jaded, too guarded. So what were we looking for? Why go to all that trouble and expense? An interesting trip? A cultural experience? No, we’re looking for something ganz Anders, something truly outside ourselves. We’re the same in that way, A. and me, despite our many differences and despite the fact that we’re now in different countries. We have the same, almost impersonal longing. There’s still something childlike about us, which looks out at the world and needs something much more than what we already know to become whole.

Absolute awe before God: that’s what we need. We’re a little tired of all the rest. We’re tired of talking about ourselves. We’re tired of the world, of art, literature, philosophy, politics, money, sex, booze, shopping, living.

On the surface we look reasonably well put together, talk a good game, have our affairs more or less in order. But in secret – a secret only we know about each other – we want what we’ve always needed: we want God. 

We believe the world is a gift from God. We don’t take it for granted. But we also believe the world is next to nothing before God, a grain of sand. We speak metaphorically. We chat endlessly and say very little. We’re only too aware of how little we can say. We interpret the things around us, ourselves, in shifting symbols and signs, depending on what we’re confronted with. We change our views according to what happens to us. We barely understand anything. We only see God in glimpses. And yet God is everything. It’s all we really care about. How to make room for that thought, that longing, when we’re so ill-equipped? 

My friends say to get on the dating apps, so I do. I enter a profile and scroll for a bit. At my age, most of them are divorcees with kids. I leave it out for a week, go back to it and realise you have to pay to be seen in the first place.

I play billiards in the pub S. and I used to live next to, with a friend who just got married. It’s particularly lonely to walk back to my house through shabbier streets. When I get home I scroll through this weird marketplace again. There’s a woman on the app who says, ‘Looking for a way out of the existential void’. I swipe left, then regret it. I try to swipe right to get back to her profile, but end up liking pictures of dynamic women with fake eyebrows and studied selfies who are looking for someone who can make them laugh. I google how to scroll back to someone, and it says you have to pay.

My payment settings are set to my old card, which has expired. I find Apple Pay settings and try to remove my old payment method. It says I can’t, since I have an active subscription on an expired card (an app that lets you identify flowers by taking a picture of them). I cancel the subscription, delete my old payment details and enter my new ones. I go back into the app, but it only lets you swipe back to the people you’d rejected after you’d paid. So she’s lost to me, The One! She could’ve saved me, I could’ve saved her! Now all kinds of things pop up on my phone: super swipes, spotlights, unlimited rematches, boosts, gold, platinum… I delete all of it and am ready once again to throw my phone out the window. But of course I don’t.

I meet a lot of people in the pubs and shops these days, hear a lot of stories; people are chatty here. It all seems random, but is it? How many millions of things had to happen to bring us together? What hidden works of history and bodies? We only know a fraction of them. What is it that lets it all come together in the moment when we address each other, sit down to speak, drink a pint, play bar billiards?

How lovely it would’ve been to have lived in the real world! To enjoy things fully the way some people seem to. Family. Football. Days out. Art. I wouldn’t have had to look on at life as if from behind a window, with this weird, vast space always in the back of my head. I wouldn’t have had to think about being in the moment as if it were foreign to me. I imagine I’d have had a career, a wife and kids, a car, and coped easily with the same routines day after day. I see how other men go about it, watch them almost with the eyes of a child, learn from them cagily, but sometimes in my arrogance they seem like one big illusion, the enterprises of men – something really decayed, removed from what’s essential in life.

Kafka loved an anecdote about Flaubert in which the latter sees a family on a fun day out and remarks: Ils sont dans le vrai. But is it that simple?

We’re all of us masters at hiding from the truth, it’s deep in our nature. We hide from ourselves, from each other and from God. Things themselves seem to hide from us – that seems to be their nature too. They emerge and pass out of sight, appear and pass away, like animals in the forest. Real life, says Heidegger, happens when beings become ‘unhidden’, when we help bring things out of their hiding places and step out of our own along with them, into the light of being itself. It happens in rare moments when we see links between ‘beings themselves, the human world, the work of God.’ It can only occur, he says, when you’re disturbed by a sense that real life is elsewhere.

But real life is slipping away, isn’t it? You can almost feel it — soon it’ll be almost nowhere to be found. We’ll have covered the world with ourselves and taught our own technologies to think for us, to hide us for good.

Settled now. Back in Norwich, in a rougher part of town. I chat to the locals and the immigrants. The Kurds in the shops, the Indians in the corner shops and curry houses, the old boys and the Spanish waitress in the Duke of Wellington. Apart from the usual hooded English lads trying to look scary, people are friendly and talkative. At last I can speak. They still don’t seem to mind that I’m foreign, as long as I get the tone; and I’ve been starved for talk.

They tell me crime gossip. The boarded-up house next door to mine was a grow house. The shop beside that, also boarded up, was owned by a man who kept a teenage girl locked up. The Tamils running the corner shop were robbed by Eastern Europeans. A drunk woman drove down the road with a missing tyre, bumping into all the parked cars. The nail bar and Turkish barber are laundering fronts. The burger bar round the corner doesn’t sell burgers: Albanians walk in and out. They’re no fools, the locals, they know what goes on, they just have little way of changing it.

And I’m back in the best pub in the world, the White Lion. Where we still remember each other’s names and stories, and can catch up: a place like home.