‘Inexcusable to travel — or even live — without taking notes. The deathly feeling of the monotonous passing of the days is made impossible.’ Kafka ‘Once the life of the mind renounces the duty and liberty of its own pure objectification, it has abdicated.’ Adorno 1980 Tuesday, January 1st The day’s first engagement, Kenny Everett at 3.35, presented David Bowie in a padded cell (Kafka’s metaphor for the world) and a kitchen with exploding appliances and windows, singing ‘Space Oddity’. His expression was of bewilderment, fear, his Little Boy Lost manner, used to uneasy effect. Meanwhile the media paraded predictions, people projecting their own psyches onto the future. Soon I returned to my two-track machine to regain the purposeful & creative element so necessary. The chief achievement was ‘Catalogues’, starting as a rhythm track with tin, bottle and shoebox percussion, then gathering layers. Finally it had a stereo vocal, an alliterative, nonsense-cum-critical lyric with stuttering rhythm. I worked some time on different versions, very tensed and eager. Listened to it on the stereo while Father and Chris Garner (colleague in Midnight at the Tron Kirk, with a crowd as far as the eye can see. Cheering and Athens) talked shop; predictions again. Some very bitter coffee compounded the shouting is all one can hear. I followed Mark and Nick Gardiner as we wandered effects of my nervous mood, and I continued my bizarre habits regarding upstream and down, swigging champagne and beer, shaking hands and kissing sleeping hours. self-consciously those who offered themselves. If I wasn’t drunk, I very quickly assumed the characteristics. Silly greetings — ‘Happy New Wave’, ‘Texas?’, Nick Scraps: dinnertime conversation touched the possibilities for my future (Father counting the coloureds, Mark mounting bus shelters. ‘I worm my way into the thinks missionary work!) and the over-exuberance of Douglas Ashmeade last heart of the crowd, I was shocked to find what was allowed’ — the possibilities night; lifting his kilt to his guests, insulting his wife. are always beyond one’s capacity to reach, so one drifts with a permanent half smile, forcing mischievousness from time to time. Glimpsed: Guy Peploe, ‘Igor’, The hamster grates his teeth up and down the bars of his cage, widening the other EA peers, university people; returning at 1.30, kissed Delie Letham and furrow in his jaw, as if his life depended on it. friend, kicked beercans, played temporary Samaritan to a drunkard, meeting Mel’s friend from Aberdeen, and Rosy, whom I kissed, then passed awkward Wednesday January 2nd remarks with. Punks, blacks, Americans (‘this is the wildest party I’ve ever been to’), young Scots, drunk, and old Scots, drunk. A fire-eater with a painted face. A In the papers NATO screams for Soviet blood and the Pope warns of the horrors political conversation with a socialist; ‘Can you imagine screwing Margaret of nuclear war. Thatcher?’ And on to the next proffered hand or mouth, wondering what absurd remark to make to someone one would never normally meet. Mark’s friend, Ali Sim, takes the Introversion / Extraversion test and scores 24/48 — a dull boy who hesitated at each question and couldn’t correlate the repeats. character. This evening I resorted to the pathetic, childish gesture of turning it off An uneasy night in which I heard scratches and bumps from the attic, or so it at its inaccessible socket just as Father was about to return from the phone. He’ll seemed, was followed by a tense day; the sky seemed to whine with missiles, my have no trouble deciding who was responsible, but will take it as another body couldn’t stay warm in the house, and to venture outside would have taken example of my supposed desire to flout him out of spite. more resolution than the new year has yet seen. With horrible blindness the world blunders, with Afghanistan its trifling pretext, On my Aiwa 2-track it was reggae night, delicate dub chords on a fat, happy bass. into the glaring arena of destruction: a new Cold War is beginning, the SALT On Peel, PiL and Simple Minds, whose ‘Real to Real Cacophony’ rekindled a lost treaty spins away, and with a fulfillment of the initial moves which one can’t love for the crisp, modern world in which I once saw myself wandering as in a believe possible to anyone with foresight, the political giants close for the vast hall of mirrors. ultimate, absurd conflict. There is a limit to the number of times one can shout ‘Bastards!’ at the TV screen, the words don’t exist to show people the ridiculous Thursday January 3rd incongruity between pretexts and consequences. Have the warnings of two wars not been enough? Is the death sentence the only solution for our case? The satisfaction of an early start degenerated into self-disgust as I spent the morning walking in the lifeless damp from electronics shop to electronics shop. I The fact that my response is rhetoric shows that I don’t understand the gravity of was shopping for a cheap keyboard instrument, but found nothing appropriate. it either. Insanity would be the response if it weren’t the stimulus. But the clusters of entranced people before the video games, and particularly my reluctant fascination, depressed me. It may be ‘subjectification’ of the potent Kierkegaard & Anais Nin. trivia’s effect — from the merchanidise to oneself — which gives rise to the self- contempt, or perhaps the conflict of the two strata of one’s character; the Friday January 4th apparently dominant idealist struggles with more base but deep-seated desires, and is not sure if it’s right to repress them. Mark reprimands me for telling Father I find my public school education ‘an embarrassment’ (in fact I gave a qualified agreement to his specific, loaded The delicatessen: on entering I discover the Polish couple in discussion, he phrasing), calling it ingratitude. Should I be grateful for the privilege of serving leaning on his broomstick, she arranging a shelf. I ask if they have any bread in a closed institution (boarding school) with authoritarian, homosexual masters (although I’ve already noticed the empty trays) and they say no as if sympathetic, moulding me, or for being taught by archaic and prejudiced (the criticism is not then immediately switch back to Polish, in anxious, urgent tones. of prejudice, which is unavoidable and not even pejorative, but of the claims to objectivity and the unstated allegiance of the prejudice to the Establishment) ‘Natural’ jealousy between the cats. methods? I am jealous of the TV, which has intervened in our family life to the extent that I was always at the bottom of the C stream, though I don’t think I’m we are virtually strangers. It commands more attention than any member of the unintelligent. A latent talent for art was neglected because of narrow favouritism family, and always wins when there is a conflict (as there is when I want to play in the art class. In fact the only positive result of this education (leaving aside the someone a composition of mine) because of its superlatively undemanding detrimental effects of missing other experiences in Athens and Dedham — but perhaps boarding school was an important formative experience, if negative) was peers. Certain instincts had to be repressed, I learnt, especially the need for learning how to process photographs. Certainly I learnt how to disappear in the approbation: it could not be solicited, but had to be awaited patiently. Emma midst of a crowd, how to be an outsider. A composition I wrote in Mackenzie never misses an opportunity to sing or dance if there is an audience even half- House began: ‘I am a social outcast, walking on the sands of time…’ — in the receptive (and often when they are absorbed in something she cannot follow), Senior Common Room there was a scuffle to read it, and I preferred to destroy it and it sometimes seems that every little movement has been dramatised for than let it be read. specific effect on others. Perhaps I share this need to be appreciated, but have felt it repressed. As a result I feel that I have to communicate the same hostility, The escapes — to Athens & Montreal — were always unsuccessful, I was always implicitly, to her. She, however, lacks my sensitivity in these matters, and takes returned to the self-righteously Spartan classrooms, the pompous mottos, the my lack of enthusiasm for license to perform, and for a dourness on my part disciplinary rugby, the cliques with their ‘hate sessions’… and the sentence was (‘Billy-Goat Gruff ’). Recently, piqued when she came into my room to ask my from my parents: always with regrets and consolations, but never doubting that it opinion of some trousers, I cried ‘Will you never learn?’ And the other night I was essential for my correct development. was surprised when she said of my imminent departure: ‘We’ll miss you.’ (Father was probably embarrassed to be spoken for like this — his message, not just But it’s buried in the past now, my memory is mercifully brief, and all that implicit, is exactly the opposite!) Miss what? The brooding, snappy presence remains is a few injuries to my personality (Mother once said: ‘Nicholas, you have about the house, proud of the unease he creates in the family structure, the no soul.’ It’s there, but has developed a hard shell by the same process as that by constant bizarre or aggressive music? which an oyster makes an unbearable grain of sand into a pearl) — and perhaps one of these injuries makes it impossible for me to respond with the diplomatic I sat eating a lemon in the breakfast room.