Patrick Gale: A Place Called Winter

Most outcasts banish themselves.

(Dr Gideon Ormshaw as quoted by Little Bear / Ursula, p 187)

Much as I'd like to deny it, and whether true or not about 'most', this does apply to me. I could have remained a closet gay; I could have become a part of the gay 'community'; I could have remained primarily interested in the country of my birth; I could have done more effort to stay in the country of my heart; and so forth and so on.

Then again, I only regret about half the cases. I do regret those that were a result of my wimpiness; I don't regret those that were a result of my individualism. It's obviously best to really belong; it's a lesser evil not to belong at all, than to belong outwardly where one doesn't belong inwardly.

 

 

 

Mark Haddon: The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

ALL THE OTHER children at my school are stupid. Except I’m not meant to call them stupid, even though this is what they are. I’m meant to say that they have learning difficulties or that they have special needs. But this is stupid because everyone has learning difficulties because learning to speak French or understanding Relativity is difficult, and also everyone has special needs, like Father who has to carry a little packet of artificial sweetening tablets around with him to put in his coffee to stop him getting fat, or Mrs Peters who wears a beige-coloured hearing aid, or Siobhan who has glasses so thick that they give you a headache if you borrow them, and none of these people are Special Needs, even if they have special needs.

But Siobhan said we have to use those words because people used to call children like the children at school spaz and crip and mong which were nasty words. But that is stupid too because sometimes the children from the school down the road see us in the street when we’re getting off the bus and they shout, ‘Special Needs! Special Needs!’ But I don’t take any notice because I don’t listen to what other people say and only sticks and stones can break my bones.

(Christopher John Francis Boone (narrator), p 43)

 

This is exactly why I tend to mentally wince when I hear people (who often don't even belong to the particular targeted minority) claim that such-and-such word should never be said, because it's offensive, as it were, by definition. I have friends who use words like faggot or poofter and it's all right because they don't mean it nastily; there are many more people who would never dream of using these expressions, yet are latent homophobes for all that. (Some of them are not even latent, except perhaps to themselves.)

I remember a real-life example similar to the one in the quote: years ago, where I lived the word 'Gipsy' was a perfectly neutral expression; if one wanted to be offensive, there were many other words to choose from. But as the majority population on the whole hated the Gipsies and only talked about them disparagingly, some activists (many of them 'white') decided that 'Gipsy' was an offensive word in itself and decent folk must use 'Roma' instead. The result? Ten years later most people said 'Roma' ... and most said it with a sneer and as much, if not more, hate.

 

 

Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway

"And what is there to do?"
"Continue, slowly, and wait for luck to change."

(Mr Frazer & Cayetano Ruiz inThe Gambler, the Nun, and the Radio) 

Recently I've begun pacing myself, because there's really nothing to really strive for unless and until my luck changes. If it doesn't, all that remains is to have a wee bit fun now and then while waiting for the final curtain to fall.

 

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The end of the day had always belonged to Nick alone and he never felt right unless he was alone at it.

(Nick Adams in Fathers and Sons) 

I'm not a loner by nature, it's more a case of having been most of my life unhappily lonely because of circumstances, but to properly unwind before turning in I do need to be for a while on my own.

 

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Then there were times when you had to write. Not conscience. Just peristaltic action.

(from On Writing (published subsequently to The First Forty-Nine Stories)) 

 

Usually I don't have enough time to blog nearly as much or often as I would like to, and I miss it. It doesn't matter that nobody reads this blog, it's about the pleasure of putting one's ideas down on paper or making them appear on a laptop screen, which pleasure comes regardless of whether or not anybody else will see them.

 

Alasdair Gray: Lanark

I like advice from anyone, but advice which can't be rejected doesn't deserve the name.

(Duncan Thaw to his painting teacher, Mr. Watt, p 281) 

This is why I never actually did like advice from my parents. They'd gladly advise me on anything ... and then be ostentatiously offended if I in the least diverged from what I was advised to do. It was as if advice, even unsolicited advice, wasn't something to consider, but something to unquestioningly obey, or else be guilty of gross ungratefullness.

 

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Q This spate of information about the fiction you enjoyed suggests a terrible lack of interest in the life around you.
A Not lack of interest but lack of anticipation.

(the author in a sort of FAQ attached to the Kindle version, p 568) 

 

This is why I've always been an avid reader: for most of my life, reading a book promised interesting and/or pleasant time in front of me, while 'real life' didn't.

L'automne propre

Apparemment, l'été est finalement passé : quand je me suis réveillé ce matin, la température dans ma chambre était enfin de nouveau sous 24 degrés Celsius même avant que j'ai ouvert la fenêtre. Et il a plu pour la plupart de la journée, comme avant-hier. La vie paraît encore un peu meilleure.

Patrick Gale: The Aerodynamics of Pork

[....], never treating children as children. He laughed at, not with.

(about Huw Peake)

Obviously, I'm prejudiced about this one. It wasn't the first gay prose I've ever read, but it was the first gay 'full novel' I did, and after having read dozens of novels which in the vast majority pretended homosexuality didn't exist at all, or at best showed it as a minor character's 'quirk', it was beyond refreshing to read a novel in which most of the main characters were gays and lesbians, despite its being set in 'ordinary' surroundings (there are just a few pages happening at something you could call 'gay scene').

And yet the book reflects the fact that even as a young gay you don't spend all your time thinking about gay-related issues, however important these are for you, you have myriads of other things to think about, myriads of other aspects forming your personality and your life. The book is full of observations which could work as well in a 'straight' novel.

An example is the quotation above about one of the main character's father. This is so like my own parents, and one of the reasons why since about mid-adolescence I never again thought of them as of my 'nearest and dearest'. They were like my favourite high school teachers: people you like, but people  who seem unable to treat you without condescension, and with whom you can therefore be on polite, but not on really friendly terms.

Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending

My memory has increasingly become a mechanism which reiterates apparently truthful data with little variation.

(Tony Webster (narrator), p 64)

 

One would think that growing older, and having been through more, you would have more to recollect, and in one sense you do; at the same time it seems that the older I am, the more I'm actually returning, again and again, to a number of the same memories. (Not just memories: the same is true about topics / opinions, songs, to a certain degree even books, and so on ...)

 

Autumn's approaching

Seems like I've got through another summer. Somewhat strangely, it was even more tiresome than usual, despite not being as torrid as several of the most recent ones, and despite my not boozing as much as a consequence. Maybe I'm ageing faster than I'm willing to admit to myself. (Incidentally, yesterday it was 30 years since I first crossed the English-Scottish border. Thirty fucking years. As were allegedly the last words of David Cassidy, "so much wasted time". Then again, it wasn't all wasted. There were a lot of good times I wouldn't have dreamed of happening in my wildest dreams those three decades ago.) Anyway, time to do more again than just keep going.

 

 

The Dutch

I've mentioned here already my soft spot for the Dutch, which even made me try to learn the language - an attempt I had to temporarily give up on due to lack of time. After having read Ben Coates's Why the Dutch Are Different I scrapped the idea altogether. I still think the language sounds beautiful, still admire the Dutch for their tolerant attitudes towards gays and drugs, like their Golden Age landscapes and so on. But I can't really love a country that flat, a country that overcrowded, and a nation that indifferent to the concepts of privacy and solitude. Of course, the book must exaggerate a bit, otherwise the Netherlands would have no autistic adults - they would all commit suicide well before adulthood - but still ....

Ben Coates: Why the Dutch Are Different

The problem was, in my opinion, exacerbated by the tone-deafness of a political class who lived in areas with few ethnic minorities, with immigrants more likely to give them a good price for retiling the bathroom than to take their job.

This is indeed a major part of the problem. The Western middle classes are so much more 'enlightened' about immigration not because they are more ethical than the Western working classes, but simply because they perceive immigrants as a personal convenience, rather than as a personal threat.

James Robertson: The Fanatic

He felt a growing need to sum up, to explain, to record his thoughts and his memories. He was - even in his thirties - entering his middle age.

(John Lauder, p 286)

I have been keeping various diaries since high school, but as early as after college I would every now and then attempt to whittle down these records of particular periods of my life into mere summaries that would simply give the general outline and only briefly mention the most notable details.

English cringe

Much was written about the Scottish cringe, the inferiority complex of some Scots, feeling that they should 'better themselves' by becoming 'more English'. The English cringe is something different. It is the reversal of the centuries-old habit of most of the world (except the Scots and the Welsh) to say 'English'' when meaning 'British'. Today some Englishmen, afraid of being politically incorrect, do the opposite: they say 'British' instead of 'English'. Which is just as ridiculous.

A case in point is Ben Coates' book Why the Dutch are Different. At one moment he states, "In Britain, patriotism is sadly rather tainted by association with a kind of small-mindedness and xenophobia. Symbols such as flags have been appropriated by far-right groups, so someone wearing a T-shirt with the flag of St George on it is likely to be sneered at and dismissed as a racist or a hooligan. Anyone who declares their love of their country too vigorously runs the risk of being branded a narrow-minded Little Englander, or worse."

He says "in Britain", but then actually talks about England. The flag of St George is the English, not the British flag, and the Scottish Saltire, far from having been appropriated by the far right, is ubiquitous throughout the country. Similarly, a Scot overdoing his love for his country may be called a lot of things, but certainly not a Little Englander.

Similarly, I've read a book called Medieval Britain: A Very Short Introduction, which was well-written enough, but actually dealt with medieval England. Scotland and Wales were only mentioned in the context of English efforts to colonise them; in fact, more space was given to Ireland and France.

I could go on with examples like these ad nauseam. What is it that makes some people unable to simply express themselves truthfully, and instead of saying something wrong say something just as wrong, but wrong in the opposite way?

Cracking sternocostal joints

Not cracking as in 'excellent'. Cracking as in 'cracking fingers'. Until a few weeks ago it hadn't even occurred to me that the joints between the ribs and the sternum might crack at all*, but unless my sternum (which is where the cracks actually sound/feel to come from) can crack by itself, it must be them.


* in fact until I've just looked it up now I thought there were no joints, that the ribcage including the breastbone was just one solid bone, like a red deer's antler - so much for what I still remember from biology lessons  ...

Alan Partridge

I first came across the character when working in an Amazon warehouse; before the Christmas of 2011, I, Partridge: We Need to Talk About Alan seemed to sell rather well. But I only learned who he was from a documentary about British TV comedy a few years later, and apart from some excerpt there, I only saw him the other day in Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa. Not bad at all; the humour might occasionally get a bit cheap, but mostly it was to my liking, so if I come across more Partridge on iPlayer I probably won't hesitate to watch him again.

A kind of long weekend

The longest weekend one can get without taking a day off: ending a night-shift week on Friday morning, and only returning to work for a back-shift week on Monday afternoon. Meaning one can make the Saturday a real rest day, sandwiched between two days off.

I deserved it too. The preceding day-shift week was even harder than these usually are, what with some overtime every day except the last one. In fact on Monday, Wednesday and Thursday it wasn't even worth it switching on the laptop; on Tommy's birthday I only remembered about it late in the day; and towards the end I apparently pulled my right calf (still a bit stiff even now).

While during the last, night-shift week I was training a workmate; this entailed sharing the place and often the tools, notwithstanding which we were supposed to do almost twice as much as I do on my own. Moreover on two of the nights some barbarian played there loud music for a few hours, making it almost unbearable. A rather exhausting fortnight.

But as I've mentioned, today I'm having a rest day, the rain drums on my windowsill and I'm at peace with the world ...

Tactile deprivation

In Paul Greer's novel Less the main character sadly ponders that while two gays can't walk hand in hand on a street in Morocco, two straights can't do it in Chicago. I suspect that he's right: that in general, the easier it is somewhere for two gays to openly show their love, the harder it is for two straights to show their friendship and not be perceived as latently gay. Homophobia, instead of vanishing, simply taking on a different form.

And between gays and straights ... Even my best friends, who are in every other way perfectly relaxed about my sexuality, would be wary of touching me as freely as they would another straight. For my part, the more attractive I find somebody, the more studiously I avoid touching him. And the less you can touch people you love, the more unpleasant are touches of those you don't, so you avoid that as well.

Consequently, reading about all those people who are so distressed at suddenly being unable, because of the lockdown, to hug their nearest and dearest, it's actually hard to be compassionate and not just grin and think "for fuck's sake, you only have to endure for a few weeks or months something I've been suffering from almost all my life, and in all probability will go on suffering from until I die".

Paul Greer: Less

Name a day, name an hour, in which Arthur Less was not afraid. Of ordering a cocktail, taking a taxi, teaching a class, writing a book. Afraid of these and almost everything else in the world.

(p 44) 

One of the primary problems of most of my life. Too fearful not only to be achieving things, too fearful even to have leisure and fun.

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And yet he is somehow deflated. To travel to the other side of the world - only to be offered a brand he could so easily buy at home.

(about Less, p 201) 

One of my disappointments after arriving in Glasgow was the number of Poles. Not for some ethnic reason, but because I'd grown up near enough to Poland's border to watch its TV - if I wanted to hear more Polish, I hadn't had to move a thousand miles.

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He is remembering (falsely) something Robert once told him: Boredom is the only real tragedy for a writer; everything else is material. Robert never said anything of the sort. Boredom is essential for writers; it is the only time they get to write.

(about Less, p 203) 

I'm just a blogger, but this applies to me as well: either there's nothing much to blog about, or there's so much happening I don't have the time to blog about it while it's still fresh in my mind.

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Your way of going through the world, unaware of danger.  Clumsy and naive. Of course I envied you. Because I could never be that; I'd stopped being that when I was a kid.

(Carlos Pelu to Arthur Less, p 224)

What I said above, and it really was like that from my early childhood. Either my parents warned me too much against various dangers; or I took their warnings too literally and/or seriously; or indeed, both.

Sneezing into one's elbow

In mid-January I read an article which mentioned sneezing into one's elbow. I couldn't understand why anybody would do that - into a handkerchief, if you don't have one or can't pull it out quickly enough into the palm of your hand, if you're don't want to soil your hand then into your forearm ... but why do the gymnastics of pulling to your nose that part of your arm which takes the most effort to get there?

Then coronavirus came and I began noticing people being actually advised to do this. So I accept people probably really do it, and think it quite a normal thing to do. But it still seems strange to me.

H. G. Wells: Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul

They neither visited nor received visitors. They were always very suspicious about their neighbours and other people generally; they feared the "low" and they hated and despised the "stuck-up", and so they "kept themselves to themselves"..

(about Arthur Kipps's uncle and aunt) 

These two are bringing Kipps up instead of his parents, so it's no surprise that, despite his inclinations, these attitudes of theirs adversely affect his social skills. As the identical attitudes of my parents adversely affected mine.

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Here there was a homeliness, a familiarity. He had noted as he passed that old Mr. Cliffordown's gate had been mended with a fresh piece of string. In Folkestone he didn't take notice and he didn't care if they built three hundred houses.

(about Kipps) 

I was never much observant of my surroundings, tending rather to be lost in my own inner world, which wasn't nearly as bland, as vapid, as insipid. This always changed when I came to Britain, which for some reason feels more like home than the places where I was born, growing up or living for the longest time. But it always changed back again after returning from the Isles.

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He was an outcast, he had no place in the world. He had had his chance in the world and turned his back on it. [...] This was the end of his great fortune! What a chance he had had! If he had really carried out his first intentions and stuck to things, how much better everything might have been!

(about Kipps)

Sadly, having had my only chance to stay in Britain forever, I became complacent and lost it, sentencing myself into a self-imposed exile for the rest of my days. 'Self-imposed', because I can't blame anybody else other than myself for what happened. For 'exile' see above.

Different language studies approach

Not only have I postponed my Dutch studies altogether; I've changed my way of treating my other languages as well. Previously I'd have one day in a week dedicated to Gaelic, one to French and one or two to Swedish. Which over the long term meant I was making hardly any progress in either, in fact quite possibly losing ground in some. One can only code-switch so often.

Now I'm doing (at least four-week-long) periods of doing* just one of them, with the other two on hold until their respective periods come. Time will tell whether my theory that this will enable my brain to recollect what it knew in a time not much longer than previously, but then focus more intensely, and thus learn more and/or faster, proves right.


* Not just really studying - up to a point it's also about mere exposure, like during a 'Gaelic' period sometimes turning on RnanG but never P1, playing Runrig often but Brel hardly ever, and so on.