There is this coffee shop. And a girl. She is sat directly in my line of sight, a few steps ahead of me. From my table to hers would be six steps. I have positioned myself here so I can look at her. She is in profile. And now she is obscured behind a pillar, sitting back against the wall. She is writing. I can tell. I’m perceptive like that. She glances intermittently up towards the window.
Her glances pull no weight. They don’t even make it halfway across the room, before running out of juice and dropping back down to the screen. She is seeing without looking. Up in there she is conjuring worlds. Her notebook is open on the desk, red pen scrawled on top of black pen. A coffee mug is vying with the keyboard for her finger’s affections, but isn’t doing very well.
She can’t see me. She could if she turned I suppose but she isn’t. She has on no makeup. The kind of face you’d have no trouble imagining old. Her nose is curved a little at the bridge, her eyes burn lazily. No laughter lines. Sweet little shadows under her eyes. Her hair is blonde with streaks of brown and is lapping on her left shoulder like the folds of a renaissance robe.
Her left leg is crossed over her right but still touches the floor easily. Undistracted she types, and deletes, and types, and pauses, and glances, and types, and deletes. Going backwards to go forwards like a rugby ball. Her laptop is now resting on her knee, stuttering arrhythmically under the pressure from her fingers on the keys. Making the light skit off the screen towards me in some blinking Morse code. Tap, tap.
I wonder if I sat here long enough, years perhaps, if I could work out what she was writing just from studying her.
I can make anybody like me. Except clever people. I wonder what we’d say to each other. Thoughts would do more work than words. They always do dickhead. Yeah but even more so with her. We’d give our tuppence worth on long walks on Wimbledon Common. We’d gas about the manner in which things show themselves to us. I’d take no pleasure in agreeing with her. Our sameness wouldn’t interest me.
She smiles at her own internal monologue. She’d be close to her mother. She’d take ages to give of herself. She lets silence speak. She lost big once. Tap, space, tap, tap, tap, tap, space, tap, tap, tap.
I’m not sure this girl cares enough about me. She’s been gone behind the pillar for ten minutes. She doesn’t care. Meet me halfway. I’m leaving now. I won’t ever see her again. People appear in your life just like that, and just as quickly as they come they’re gone again. If I see her again i’ll…
I swear i will.
Does anyone ever sit and write about me. What story do they make up, how far does it diverge from what I am, which me would I prefer.
Hemingway wrote the below in a letter, aged only 24, to a friend living in Paris.
‘We can’t ever go back to old things. Or try and get the old kick out of something. Or find things the way we remembered them. We have them as we remember them, and they’re fine and wonderful. And we have to go on. And have other things. Because the old things are nowhere, except in our minds now.’
*
Which I find kind of heart-breaking, because transience affects me, but all of life is there in his words, and the lines in the face of the old man silhouetted against the fire are catching the light like tiny incandescent branches, and he looks a lot like I might if I ever make it that far, and he is shrugging his shoulders and leaning back in his rocking chair and smiling imperceptibly, and his smile is saying that this is the mysterious way of the world, and it doesn’t need to be heart-breaking, it can beautiful too.
Swear to God if you know where to look, youtube continues to be the most undeniably incredible porthole to a world so marvellously weird that the thought some apocalypse might one day bring about its extinction scares me on behalf of my futuristic brothers and sisters more than the apocalypse itself.
I can’t seem to get over my obsession with this video. I’ve tried.
smart ass spelling bee winner
So much about this is just golden. It’s fair to say the kid is definitely paddling around in the shallow end of the autism pool, which is not something to laugh at. But he just wiped the floor at the national spelling bee championships, and now he’s on CNN.
Our man Evan is bathing in the limelight, so I’ll take some shots at him with a clear conscience. But the other stuff. The news presenter trying so nobly to keep the momentum of the interview going. His expressions. The dramatic pauses. His gargling. The tuna sandwich. The spelling of the w-o-r-d. The respelling of the w-o-r-d. S-c-o-m-b-u-r-r-d-e-y. Is that Latin? Someone help me up off the floor.
And here’s where the real substance of YouTube comes in.
The comments section.
Check out Chen coming straight out of leftfieldwith some savagery.
The unhealthy thing about social media, at least for kids who have grown up surgically attached to smartphone screens, is that they opt for digital connection over the inherently human pastime of hanging out face to face. They’re living in physical isolation but having 58 simultaneous conversations with 58 other cats, all at the same time. In terms of not feeling lonely there is much to recommend this, but also something a little fucked up and matrix-style about it.
Being a luddite with no social media presence can take its toll too. Today is my birthday. It’s 11am and not one person has wished me the square-root of nothing. Here i am crying salty tears into my iced coffee longing for a facebook wall so people i haven’t seen since the 2008 festival circuit can wish me many happy returns. Or write happy days on my timeline, whatever that means.
In the age of reminders no-one has to remember anything, and so the Catch22 of opting out of facile communication with people you met on the 2008 festival circuit reveals its Hyde-side. No-one remembers your birthday. Which is fuel to the fire of the inherent fear in every one of us that we are completely alone. Which we are.
Luckily you still have time to make me feel less lonely.
Send me a text message. I’m on 07786548126.
Something like..
Or…
A compliment goes a long way.
If you want to ask a favour, that too.
If you want to get more eloquent, you could send me an email.
If I have the gift of prophecy, and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, and I have not love, then I am nothing.
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L O V E
What’s with this love thing. The most deficient word in the english language, the most complex, the most simple to them that know it, the most elusive to them that seek it, the most painful to them that lose it. The subject of countless books, songs, works of art, declarations of war, professions of faith, and BangBus porn-subscriptions. I remember asking my old man once if, out of all the big subjects in the world such as death, tragedy, religion, war, money etc, was love the most important. And looking at me like I needed a special-needs checkup, he replied of course it is.
The main problem with this word is that no-one really knows what it means. We all might think we know what it means. The trouble is that it means different things to different people. And it doesn’t help that when it comes to using it we’re pretty far from discriminatory. We bandy it around like snowflakes in a blizzard.
It’s the same four letter word, expressing joy for a bowl of Shreddies, a sunrise, Daniel LaRusso’s crane kick at the end of the All Valley Karate Championship, Snoop Dogg’s addiction to fried chicken, a particularly tasty apple, and the apple of our eye.
But there are so many different kinds of love. The Greeks broke it down into six different catchments.
Eros was for desire and sexual passion (which they saw as dangerous and irrational).
Philia stood for friendship – the lifelong type shared by brothers returning from the battlefield.
Ludus meant playful love, such as the love between children, and flirtation. The love facilitated by memorising the first twelve chapters of The Game and hitting Cheapskates on a Tuesday night.
Agape was selfless love, kindness, the love for humanity, what we might know as Christian love.
Pragma was the love and understanding established between long-standing married couples.
And lastly Philautia represented self-love, by turns both damaging, and if perfected, life-enhancing.
My quandary is about the love described in pop songs and sonnets, the romantic one.
A French man from the 17th century called Duc de La Rochefoucauld pointed out that some people would never have fallen in love if they had never heard of love. I suppose he was asking the question: is love a feeling we put a name to, or a name we put a feeling to. Is it something we seek so ardently we attribute all sorts of minor dalliances to it, or is it something so transcendental that only when it knocks us sideways, and we come to on the floor in a pool of tears that the realisation dawns on us… oh this must be love then. Some people fall in love every single day, and some people never fall in love once, in a lifetime.
Then comes love’s declaration. Also a prickly son of a gun.
Alain de Botton writes about the inconsistencies of saying I love you.
If I told Chloe that I had a stomach ache or a garden full of daffodils, I could count on her to understand. Naturally, my image of a garden might slightly differ from hers, but there would be reasonable parity between the two images. Words would operate as reliable messengers of meaning. But the words I was now trying to say had no such guarantees attached to them. They were the most ambiguous in the language, because the things they referred to so sorely lacked stable meaning. Certain travellers had returned from the heart and tried to represent what they had seen, but love was in the end like a species of rare coloured butterfly, often sighted but never conclusively identified.
My father, who had waxed lyrical about love being the most important subject of all, broke Alain de Botton’s theory down into slightly less romantic terms. Love is not a river or a stream, he said. Love is a high-walled impenetrable water tank. Two people who love each other are like two high-walled impenetrable water tanks lined up side by side. Saying I love you to someone means nothing to them, it can only mean something to you. When you say I love you, your love is not a tsunami breaking the walls of a dam and spilling into their reservoir to mix in a new ocean of hyrdopassion, the dam is holding fast.
The love declaration is only three words coming out of your mouth, to soothe your own desire, to give it a name. Two people can love each other simultaneously, but they don’t blend together to become one. Like the magnetic force between two magnets, coming close but never quite touching. The two loves can sit there contentedly side by side looking out across the horizon, with just enough distance between them for one not to start magnetically flipping out.
Natalie Portman says something like this in Closer.
If this is all coming across on the cynical side, love is messed up yo.
As always The Wheels Of Steel has the right idea.
The Wheels Of Steel is keeping its head, when every bike around it is losing theirs and blaming it on The Wheels Of Steel. When every other bike spends it’s life before getting stolen seeking out the attentions of easy lamp posts, my bicycle once again proves it’s sagacity, above all in affairs of the heart. Look closely and you’ll see, my bike has given up on the lamp post.
Instead my bike has locked itself… to love.
If love is messed up, it’s also sacred.
Which explains pops‘ water-tank most-important-thing-in-existence U-turn. In a letter to his lovestruck teenage son, Steinbeck made a distinction between the subject of our love, and the object of love itself.
Being in love is about the best thing that can happen to anyone. Don’t let anyone make it small or light to you. Glory in it, and be very glad and grateful for it. The object of love is the best and most beautiful. Try to live up to it.
*
Perhaps in the end, the emotion the other elicits, is the closest we can ever hope to get to the other. Maybe we should cash our chips in and just learn to love…
When I stopped working on the races I was glad, but it left an emptiness. By then I knew that everything good and bad left an emptiness when it stopped. But if it was bad, the emptiness filled up by itself. If it was good you could only fill it by finding something better.
Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
If he was a top-trump card, kids would whoop and holla when they got him because they knew the 98 score on power to chill on his jax trumped every other card in the pack. He’d lived out most of his young adult life with a corset on, the tightness of which symbolised the strength of his self-containment. Loneliness wasn’t for him. The company of other people, to give him what? His was a landmass surrounded by turquoise waters on all sides, well away from the maine.
On the off-chance he’d need to, he might seek company out. But always in a removed way that screamed out in veiled text that he wasn’t bothered either way. Even when his therapist flipped the script one day and told him his lonerdom was fear of engagement and his singledom was fear of rejection, he’d still beat the drum of one of the old Greek guys whose words echoed upstairs whenever he needed reminding. Self-sufficiency is the greatest virtue.
Seven weeks before he had given up drinking. And loneliness had crept up behind solitude and tapped it on the shoulder discreetly. My turn. And they had switched places. And now he felt lonely all the time. Perhaps not in the sense of needing to be with people. More in the sense of an awareness of the crushingness of how totally alone he was. Every single thought process which led to another thought process which led to another, was his alone. If he employed someone to a permanent position of listening to him speak his mind for twenty-four hours a day, an ocean would still remain present between them. Which led him to feel an ocean away from everyone.
Seeking help wasn’t really the issue. Since any help however well-worded wouldn’t penetrate. The issue had no core, nothing to get to the heart of. He could think of nothing more pathetic than wailing down the phone at somebody or staring deeply into a glass of sparkling water outside a café describing his symptoms and his ailments. And yet he had a sneaking suspicion he was doing his best to deny that he wanted more than anything for people to beat his door down and find him sat there in his flat at night, staring deeply into his glass of sparkling water, and ask him what was wrong. Nothing was wrong, he might reply. What is what.
There was a strange satisfaction in this death march. As if an unending set of enormous waves were crashing down on his head repeatedly, sending him spinning and tumbling into the depths, from which he’d surface just in time to catch sight of the next oncoming wave, to lock eyes and smile calmly at it. Then he’d go under again. It was calm and it was persistent.
A friend of his with a brain like a triple-decker bus and a heart like a champagne glass teetering on the edge of a table had told him that the colour would return. One day. The emptiness would fill up by itself. Or perhaps with something better.
The Godfather of Profiteroles aka Greg Wallace aka Greggie 2 G’s has been absent from our television screens for too long. Thank the Lord then that in little under a week, a new series of Masterchef is back to remind us why Bake-Off is an overrated bunch of turd.
Annoyingly Gregg has reigned in terrestrial tv’s most famous sweet-tooth and has discovered the joys of a morning run, and is managing to look boringly svelte these days.
You know it my brother.
But we all need reminding of the good old days, when the mere mention of puff-pastry was enough to turn Gregg into a gurning wreck. Nights-in as the creeping winter mist enveloped the world outside were never better than when watching Gregg react to each and every desert menu the budding chefs stuttered in his direction, in the way only a man with two g‘s at the end of his first name can.
*
Calvados parfait with mocha tuile
Vodka and buttermilk panna cotta with seasonal berries
Chocolate fondant with green olive and coconut merangue melt
Black treacle tart with spiced ice cream and roasted crab apples
Shitloads of snickers bars dipped in maple syrup
Mary Berry is three hundred badrillion per cent incapable of providing this level of entertainment.
When something goes well it’s nice to get all TopGun about it from time to time.
But you can have too much of a good thing. Like saying sorry all the time, the more you repeat something the more it starts to lose meaning and resonance. The below is God’s way of telling Americans to calm down and stop seeking out some physical manifestation of their relentless need to affirm the fact they feel good. Notice that every single one of the below takes place in the States. Except for the Aussie wicketkeeper which merits inclusion because it’s incredible. Colin Jackson’s aunt is blatantly American.
This morning I absent-mindedly bit into the nail on my right thumb, removing a sizeable chunk. One of those ones where you lock-on, achieve pretty good purchase, get a third of the way along, assess, then close your eyes and drag on through. I didn’t reach the quick, it wasn’t painful. But it was pretty schoolboy.
Cutting your thumbnail a little shorter than normal shouldn’t normally warrant a lengthy bit of reportage. But things get interesting when I throw in the curveball of owning 2016’s most retro mobile phone.
Not something the tap-screen populace have to take into account anymore, but for complete manoeuvrability, a phone of this size is one hundred percent reliant on the maintenance of average to full length nails at all times. When you tamper with this paradigm, the phone’s user experience jumps straight off the 58th floor. The buttons are just too small. Having long nails should be the focus of the first chapter in the nokia 310’s freaking phone manual.
Basically I’ve screwed myself.
This is how I’d usually use the phone, sending a text to a broad.
This is me this morning trying to press the exact same buttons.
On a particularly memorable raid during the Blitz in World War II, the Luftwaffe succeeded in bombing a key munitions factory by the London docks, whilst absent-mindedly taking out the whole of Lewisham and Deptford.
It’s a situation I’m newly familiar with.
Using my phone this morning is a total shot in the dark. With thumbs my size and no nail to focalise my aim, I have to press five buttons blindly in the hope one of them will be right. That’s a 80% probability I’ll screw it up. I have no choice but to blanket-bomb my keypad with the surface area of a bratwurst. Imagine how long a text message is going to take. It’s no wonder nokia went under.
So yeah if today’s text repertoire isn’t up to scratch, channel some empathy and feel my pain. It’s a freak predicament. I mean, imagine someone with fingers as fat as this deciding to take up one of world’s smallest and most fiddly musical instruments, like a ukelele or something.
Quite often on pills, on hot dancefloors, I bound up to total strangers because the chemicals have morphed their faces into those of my best friends. I run up to them and hug them. They smile back. They’re fucked too. And it dawns on me the face smiling staring back at me is not the face I thought it was ten metres ago. First off it shocks me, then embarrasses me, and then I realise it’s fine, and lovely because we’re both out of our trees.
Now, sitting here in the corner of a dimly lit pub in Brixton on a warm Tuesday night three days after the clocks went back, there’s a strong feeling of seasons changing and the battening down of hatches and a migration indoors. It’s October, but today it got dark at five fifteen.
Summer was huge and made my mind flip and went on long. And now in the opposite corner of the pub looking across the bar, I see you. Look at you. The slight of your hips. The way they lilt like a seesaw when your weight shifts. The desert boots I don’t associate with you. They’re there, in silhouette beyond the legs of a bar stool. And the line of your very straight nose that hooks into the horizontal that wades into that space above your upper lip, and the hair you don’t let fall over your eyes.
I see you every day. We’re always in the same places. I think that must be because we’re similar. It means we’re similar. There you are. Skipping across the road nowhere near a crossing, sitting in the corner of a plastic coffee place in a part of the city I don’t imagine you being in, watching you focus in on a book you’re trying harder than me to read because words jumble up in your head when you look at them. That’s what makes you so fucking intuitive, and why you scare the shit out of me.
I wonder if we see our friends on pills because in that heightened state we want so badly for it to be them. Because we’re so in love we visualise the people we love the most and we bound up to them.
He walked with a limp, half dragging the longer leg in an outward oval, bringing it back round to scuff the nearside of his heel. A mark he went over with polish and spit. His laces extended out from the bowknot precisely the same amount on either shoe. On rainy days he left the front door of the tenement with a smile. The sun was too much and it pierced him. The clouds were friends, but most of all he liked the rain. While others ran from it he paced, in measurements, splashing his shoes in the puddles in the wells of the concrete. Glorying in it. Love was not a language he knew, he couldn’t speak and could not understand. Had only been made to feel unsafe by eyes that wouldn’t love him. Most days it broke his heart the world. But not the days of rain, the rainy days of gifts, for splashing through, for arching back one’s neck to meet the rain face-on, to taste it on one’s tongue and listen. The sound of the rain falling to fill the hole that love left empty as an echo.
For three years I’ve more or less worked on how to calm my brain.
Seems to work.
This is my methodology.
1. BREATHWORK
The starter-pack is this video by Wim Hof.
You can put this on and follow it quite basically.
3×30 breaths and then 3x breath holds, takes 8 minutes or so.
Relax to tha deepest.
Once I found that I could do that quite easily, I then moved onto this brey. Takes double the time, and taxes your lungs five times more, but once you can handle it, it’s incredible. He sells it with a possible secretion of DMT, the spirit molecule, which I’ve yet to be convinced of.
Does leave me feeling amazing though.
While I do it I stick on the beginning of this album by East Forest and Ram Dass. The first three tracks usually cover the breathwork in its entirety, it’s a marvel and puts you in a headspace that’s on the money.
Once you’re done with that.
2. SHOWER
Boiler goes off, even in the dead of winter.
Two minutes. I had to work up to it. My mate Jules’s babymoma calls it the monkey shower, cos all she does is hear him bouncing up and down in the cold doing his best chimp impression.
It kills you.
But that’s the point.
The feeling after is other-worldly.
It can shake you out of any mood. Caffeine ceases to have any effect on you, it just becomes something smooth to be seen enjoying in the early morning as the mist swirls in the dawn-early light.
This is called the WIM HOF method.
I’ve been doing it for three years and any day I don’t I’m worse off.
*
3. MEDITATION
There are many different ways to meditate.
You could sit on a sofa and think about your ex.
Personally I spring for TM.
Transcendental Meditation.
It is a mantra-based meditation, which means you repeat a two-syllable mantra which can be given to you by a teacher, over the course of twenty minutes. It encourages you to go off onto journeys of thought, and as soon as you are aware you are thinking you merely go back to the mantra. It’s phenomenally simple and easy to adopt. David Lynch the Twin Peaks guy, is obsessed with it.
This video is a beautiful explanation of why we need it.
I did a course on it a few years back, with a slightly dodgy guy called Neil from Tufnell Park.
I’d say if you can, do a course, best money you’ll ever spend. The practice encourages you to do 2x blocks of twenty minutes every day, once in the morning as soon as you wake up, and then once in the afternoon. I only really ever do one.
This is the guy who popularised it in the West, Maharishi.
And this is good, a short introduction to it all.
The 20 minutes will more or less elapse like this:
i) Sit in the chair, close your eyes, repeat the mantra in your mind’s ear.
ii) Your mind will drift. Start thinking about Spurs (insert other nonsense).
iii) Realise you’re thinking about Spurs. Go back to the mantra.
iv) Start thinking about what you might have for dinner.
v) Realise you’re thinking about dinner. Go back to the mantra.
vii) Start thinking of the time your mother busted you with some sordid stash of something when you were twelve, die inside a little. Realise you’re not on the mantra.
viii) Go back to the mantra.
ix) Continue in this vein until 20m has elapsed.
x) 3 minute wind-down, eyes-closed, no longer on the mantra, but sat in the chair.
xi) Here, during the wind-down, the magic happens. Your mind clears of all thought, and for three minutes you inhabit a state of peace that is totally unfamiliar to anyone who has never meditated.
xii) Rest repeat. Try to find that state of peace all over again.
xiii) Eventually that state of peace will start appearing throughout the twenty minutes.
TM taught me something I never really thought possible. That I could exist in a place of unthought, where I have zero, like zero, thoughts going through my brain. Just silence, quiet, and stillness.
Simple as a buddhist monk In a temple practicing stillness Real still til you realise its realness
Lupe Fiasco
And the thing that makes the biggest difference, now, when bad days do their best to drown me, is the knowledge, through practice, that at any time, I can access that place of unthought. And dwell in it. As if no bad thought can touch me. I have power over my mind. Take a breath. Look at the sky. Feel grateful for the miracle. It won’t last forever.
It’s not unlike a super-power.
*
I’m no guru, but these three things over the last years have helped my peace of mind unending amounts.
I think I’d be a different person without doing this stuff as close to everyday as I can. No doubt.
