be interrupted, my surroundings were congenial and my mind was (mostly) at ease. My sensitive soul was no longer held down by heavy chains of duty and distraction – it would now (I had theorised) take wing. But I was gripped by a kind of dullhorror. Even in perfect conditions, I couldn’t muster the perfect mood to be all that I wanted to be. I simply could not do it. If nothing was stopping me, then what was stopping me? Because I was certainly stopped. Something had me by the entrails.
Unfair friends of mine saw my ambitions as pretensions. They, I was sure, were wrong. Oskar had been worse than unfair – he had been savagely fair. I did not know what to think. ‘I want to be a writer’
sounded
right to me, but with it came a kick in the guts from the you’re-telling-a-lie goblin. That was my ambition presented as a proud thoroughbred when in fact it was a spavined, half-blind mule. Certainly, riding it had not got me far. I had never even left the stables. For pity’s sake, I had roughly planned that I would be at least a proper journalist of some sort while attempting to write whatever it was I wanted to write, but I hadn’t even managed that! What did I do? I wrote council documentation. I explained your bin collection schedule. The shower, at least, managed to refresh me and slough off some of these fears.
Household rituals. I put out the cats’ food while the kettle was boiling for my coffee. What did they do during the night? Whatever it was, it gave them an appetite, and they chugged down their chunks of brown flesh with gusto. What did they do in the sleeping city...fuck and prowl, no doubt, glory in streets without trams and human feet. They were active, most active, in the dark and cold corners of the night and then sought out the brightest parts of the room in which to sleep. It was as though they stored upthe energy that fell on them during the day and released it at night.
Coffee for me, my energy source. I was hungry as well, lazy hungry. Breakfast would have been the obvious way out, but it was past eleven already, and too close to lunch. I switched on the television, and again had to chase the cats off the sofa in order to watch. Why did Oskar banish them from a spot they clearly loved? It seemed arbitrary and cruel. CNN prattled its anytime monologue. Television news, especially rolling news, especially
American
rolling news, is criticised for its incessant preoccupation with novelty, crisis, overthrow and calamity, lives violently stopped and systems at bay, but to me it seems to be a mantra of imperturbable continuity, the reassuring (to some) humming of the great wheel continuing to turn. All these horrors, it says, all these revolutions and tumult, they do not matter, my children, they have not altered the hourly bulletins, the opening and closing of markets, the drumbeat of the global system. It goes on with the supreme, hermetic self-confidence of the medieval monastic orders. It sings the hours heedless of day or night, matins and compline, business report and planetary weather. No wonder it seemed so suited to the international, interstitial spaces, the airport lounges and hotel rooms. These places are called bland, but they are not. They are the default, the canvas, the underlay, the transmission test card. Everything else is a localised aberration.
It seemed so unfair to stop the cats from sitting on the sofa, and in my low mood I felt that I would appreciate theproximity of their warm little minds. I lifted the nearest one – the one whose tail bore a white tip, the only distinguishing feature I could discern so far – onto the sofa beside me. It circled once, and then jumped back off again, apparently just to be bloody-minded. Fine. Be like that, see if I care.
Damn – I
did
care. I had been snubbed by a lesser mammal. Nothing snubs quite like a cat. What evolutionary purpose did it serve, this inherent disdain, this artful blanking? International weather revealed, to my
Unfair friends of mine saw my ambitions as pretensions. They, I was sure, were wrong. Oskar had been worse than unfair – he had been savagely fair. I did not know what to think. ‘I want to be a writer’
sounded
right to me, but with it came a kick in the guts from the you’re-telling-a-lie goblin. That was my ambition presented as a proud thoroughbred when in fact it was a spavined, half-blind mule. Certainly, riding it had not got me far. I had never even left the stables. For pity’s sake, I had roughly planned that I would be at least a proper journalist of some sort while attempting to write whatever it was I wanted to write, but I hadn’t even managed that! What did I do? I wrote council documentation. I explained your bin collection schedule. The shower, at least, managed to refresh me and slough off some of these fears.
Household rituals. I put out the cats’ food while the kettle was boiling for my coffee. What did they do during the night? Whatever it was, it gave them an appetite, and they chugged down their chunks of brown flesh with gusto. What did they do in the sleeping city...fuck and prowl, no doubt, glory in streets without trams and human feet. They were active, most active, in the dark and cold corners of the night and then sought out the brightest parts of the room in which to sleep. It was as though they stored upthe energy that fell on them during the day and released it at night.
Coffee for me, my energy source. I was hungry as well, lazy hungry. Breakfast would have been the obvious way out, but it was past eleven already, and too close to lunch. I switched on the television, and again had to chase the cats off the sofa in order to watch. Why did Oskar banish them from a spot they clearly loved? It seemed arbitrary and cruel. CNN prattled its anytime monologue. Television news, especially rolling news, especially
American
rolling news, is criticised for its incessant preoccupation with novelty, crisis, overthrow and calamity, lives violently stopped and systems at bay, but to me it seems to be a mantra of imperturbable continuity, the reassuring (to some) humming of the great wheel continuing to turn. All these horrors, it says, all these revolutions and tumult, they do not matter, my children, they have not altered the hourly bulletins, the opening and closing of markets, the drumbeat of the global system. It goes on with the supreme, hermetic self-confidence of the medieval monastic orders. It sings the hours heedless of day or night, matins and compline, business report and planetary weather. No wonder it seemed so suited to the international, interstitial spaces, the airport lounges and hotel rooms. These places are called bland, but they are not. They are the default, the canvas, the underlay, the transmission test card. Everything else is a localised aberration.
It seemed so unfair to stop the cats from sitting on the sofa, and in my low mood I felt that I would appreciate theproximity of their warm little minds. I lifted the nearest one – the one whose tail bore a white tip, the only distinguishing feature I could discern so far – onto the sofa beside me. It circled once, and then jumped back off again, apparently just to be bloody-minded. Fine. Be like that, see if I care.
Damn – I
did
care. I had been snubbed by a lesser mammal. Nothing snubs quite like a cat. What evolutionary purpose did it serve, this inherent disdain, this artful blanking? International weather revealed, to my
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