At the tender age of 30

I wasn't hooked to any machine

Image: Geneva Tennis Club and knife-fight alley. Just for some atmosphere.

Let me tell you something about myself. And, no, I’m not Thomas Dolby.

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Here I spout some junk, just like Dolby did, in stereo.

I favour anarchy. In my heart I’m a bit of an anarchist. Or a communist. I’m not sure which. Because I use those labels to describe something in me that isn’t what the labels usually conjure up in people’s minds. No, I’m a communist anarchist; but I don’t particularly want to overthrow the government, not here, not of anywhere. I’ve saved for my pensions and, pitiful as they will be, I still want to draw them, and, for that, I need nation states, so, the anarchy bit, that can come after I’ve gone.

The problem with anarchy is that it will always stand juxtaposed to a nation state into which people have paid their pensions. Perhaps that’s why we have pensions at all, so that the nation state won’t be overthrown. Put it this way, if I founded a nation state and didn’t want it to be overthrown, I think a social security pension scheme would be a jolly good way of making sure it wasn’t overthrown.

So what do I have against nation states? Well, I think, on the whole, nation states have caused more trouble than they’re worth. They’ve elevated people to high positions and elites and given them oodles of cash that they only received because they’re crooked or wily or able to cheat and then sleep at night. On the whole. And they’ve waged lots of wars that have killed lots of people; and then they’ve put up haughty monuments to pay homage to their glorious (and inglorious) heroes, and it’s all a bit of codswallop. Because what the nation state does more than anything is grease palms, and decide who should live and who should die. It’s not that I don’t like pensions, I just think that we’d all actually be much better off without pensions and without tax systems that pay oodles of money to defence contractors, because without nation states we wouldn’t need defence contractors because there’d be no nation state to defend against other nation states, and so there would be no defence contractors.

Y’see the nation state is not only my defence and protection, it is the means by which I even need to be protected and defended. And if you think that, without the nation state, we’d all be susceptible to being ravaged and pillaged by marauding battalions of hooligans, you may be right. But the nation state doesn’t stop any of that. It simply formalises it.

The one about friends

I’d like to tell you about three friends of mine. Not because I want to tell you about them, but because by telling you about them, I’ll tell you nothing about them, or not much. I’ll tell you, instead, about me. What I tell you about people I know tells you nothing about people I know, because what I tell you, and provided I’m honest about it in terms of my own feelings, tells you how I feel about them, but it doesn’t definitively tell you anything about them themselves. Or how they feel towards me, for that matter. And if you knew these people, you’d not necessarily be able to agree or disagree with me about how I feel about them because that’s got nothing to do with you: how I feel about my friends is how I feel about them, and if you feel differently, then you see them differently, but there’s no definitive evaluation of anyone on this Earth. Not a single one. Mahatma Gandhi, Queen Elizabeth and the Dalai Lama were probably bastards to some people. And, if they weren’t, I think they tried too hard.

The three people I want to talk about are a friend, a person who’s very important to me, and the most important person to me in my life. Two are male, one female. (To avoid tied votes.) My brother, whom I owe £5,000 and who’s helped me out of many scrapes in life, may be miffed to learn that he’s not any one of these three (they’re each a different person, for the avoidance of confusion). Because “most important” doesn’t mean “most indebted to”. He’s had my thanks and he’ll get my thanks again when my will’s read, and then he’ll get his £5,000 out of my estate. So where’s the indebtedness? All debts are settled some day.

The most important person in my life

Let me start with that one, then: the most important person to me in my life. To be sure, I haven’t known him all my life. He was a student in Germany on a course that I did, but the year before, and the course involved a traineeship, which he secured with a big, kick-ass law firm. They asked him to seduce some sucker on the next year’s course to come down and join their jolly cohorts, and it was an offer of a traineeship on a silver salver in a city where I’d laid a guy who would put me up free of charge for three months, so I applied and got the job. A sitter. After three months, they kicked my ass outta there, but not before I’d sealed this friendship with the guy who seduced me. In  a manner of speaking.

So, he introduced me to his girlfriend, who was his fiancée and was really nice and charming and ever so Swiss and worked up where the TV tower was. There was an explosion of TV towers in Germany in the 1960s and 1970s and, if you didn’t have a TV tower, it was like your town wasn’t even on the rail network. Like, pfft, useless. No TV tower, no KUDOS. So Stuttgart had one in a place called Degerloch, which looked like some place where you expected Eloi to saunter around and Morlocks to appear as a siren sounded every now and again. It was compulsory. The TV tower was. Probably part of being a nation state.

Anyway, she worked up there and they decided to get married, being fiancé(e)d and all that, and they had no one else to invite, so they invited me. Or they thought I was the greatest thing since sliced bread to have at a wedding; so, anyhow, they dragged me down to Geneva for their wedding, which was held in a tennis club, where Roger Federer was knocking seven bells out of the world’s tennis champions and I was being challenged not to bring my knife into the tennis club, which I did, sailing past the guard and casually casting over my left shoulder, “Just watch me!” So they did. People did just watch me in those days. It was something I hadn’t yet tumbled to, but people felt that actually clamping me in irons was less fun that just watching me. Because I wore a kilt and was proud of it and had a knife – a sgian-dubh – stuck menacingly down my sock, which no gnaff of a gatekeeper was gonna take off me, because that’s what we eat our meat with. When we’re in the Highlands. Or Geneva.

I think the curiosity of this proceeding made an impression on the happy couple and their guests, but, whether it did or it didn’t, it ensured that we remained close friends for the ensuing couple of years. The closeness abated a little bit when they had their first child, a boy, and the truth dawned on me that had slowly dawned on me in prior years: that attendance at somebody’s wedding was often the last time I ever saw many friends; and the birth of their first child usually put the kibosh on a friendship altogether. Put it this way, we didn’t see each other for the next 18 years, during which time they had another two boys, and they didn’t even play contract bridge.

It was me who, 18 years later, took the initiative to contact them again. I’m not quite sure how it happened, but maybe I lifted the phone. By this time they were living in a swish part of town, having moved away from where we virtually lived opposite one another, and I popped over for dinner at their insistent behest. Found the house, parked on the driveway – imperiously – and rang the doorbell. I was admitted up to the first floor, where the living room, dining room and kitchen were to be found along with the garden — equally imperiously. It was January. A very pleasant evening was had. I don’t know if you’ve ever reacquainted yourself with a friend after 18 years, but the point is that we just started talking again: the whole thing just picked up as if the 18-year interstice – just hadn’t existed.

As I was escorted back down to my car at the end of the evening, Fred said, right, something very strange to me. He said, “At least you didn’t become an asshole.”

I was taken aback and didn’t know quite what to say, but the way he said it, I thanked him and we’ve seen each other regularly ever since. This parting shot of his, kept running around the cavity of my mind and it kept bugging me: and what did he mean with you didn’t become an asshole?

When the circumstances were right, I asked him some time later, “What did you mean when you said, ‘I haven’t become an asshole’?” And he said, “You know, like these people who get plenty of money and forget who they used to be, where they came from, what they used to be like, what they used to think, what they used to believe, and then give it all up, you know, to go a different way.”

I felt better after that. At least I knew what he meant; and it was kind of nice what he meant, because what he meant was that the person he met after 18 years was the same person he’d left 18 years previously: nothing had changed. As far as I was concerned, he was just as obstreperous, cantankerous and curmudgeonly as he had been before, so, I have to confess, nothing had changed in him either. We were the perfect misfit, like an odd couple, and neither of us had ceased to irritate the other in exactly the same way as we had way back in our late 20s. I don’t know if I would brass-neck it into the tennis club in Geneva with a knife down my sock these days, so maybe that bit of me has changed.

But there’s a problem, and it’s this: it’d have been far better for me if I had become an asshole; because not becoming one has pitted me against most of the people I’ve met since I didn’t become one, who are convinced I am one. An asshole. And the reason they’re so convinced is that they are. Assholes. They did sell out to faux concepts of respect and corporate policy, saying one thing and doing another, character corruption, even if no money’s involved. Selling out yourself to accommodate the prospects of advancement. Hmph – towards that pension.

Maybe what Fred said, when I asked him what he meant, about remaining you, was all soft sawder. What he meant was: “Why the heck didn’t you change, become an asshole, like the rest of us? Life’d been so much easier for you if you had.”

Maybe he didn’t either; just fakes it better than I do.

Asshole. The most important person to me in my whole life is an asshole. Like I didn’t become. If that’s not misfit, what is? Love him, though.

A person who’s very important to me

Is that what I said? Think so. We met while doing a stage play together. It was his first and my a-hundred-and-first, and so I offered encouragement. I like to be nice, if I can. Anyway, he spent most of the run with his nose in a book and didn’t really talk to many people. He had a name that I’d never heard before. Most people’s names I’ve never heard before, not before I meet them, anyway.

If you ever want to advance your acquaintance with anybody, one of the worst things that you can possibly do, it’s become their Facebook friend. On Facebook, you’ll have the most gripping and interesting discussions about things ephemeral, and then you’ll bump into these people in the street the very next day and neither of you will go anywhere near the subject that you got into such heated discussion on, on the previous night, on the Good Book. Anyway, in the end this guy, he hooked off Facebook and went somewhere else – Instagram, I think; because he doesn’t really like words; he likes pictures and he takes clandestine pictures of people in the red light district of Paris and things and gets chased down the street for being nosey, which I quite like. Actually, quite a lot.

So we have this kind of we-know-each-other-but-we-don’t-really-know-each-other kind of relationship for a while, and I happened to mention, whilst he was still on Facebook, something in relation to something he posted, God knows what, and he said, “Well I can’t see you or I can’t meet with you whatever blah blah blah because,” he said,“I’m in London right now.” And I wrote, “That’s funny,” I said, “tomorrow I’m going to London; would you like to meet up?” and he said, “Yes,” and I said, “Well, it’s not quite London; it’s going to be Twickenham – Twickenham with the rugby stadium.” And he said, “Well, I can find my way to Twickenham.”

So we came out to Twickenham and we met in – I think it’s called The Dirty Swan or something, down by the River Thames, in Twickenham; it’s at the back of some old Georgian houses, one of which is owned by a gentleman who, over the years, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many years ago, I purchased a half dozen or so antique railway clocks from. I had a passion for railways, and so did this gentleman, who was a genuine horror-ologist, who renovated, well, not so much renovated these clocks as reconstructed them out of a few splinters of wood and a bit of bent brass; but he worked his magic and charged a pretty penny for these clocks, which adorned my walls for a good many years; and Sunday morning was always a ritual rite, going around winding up the clocks with all my heart; beautiful.

Anyway, I ran out of money, so I had to sell the clocks, and the easiest way to sell the clocks was to sell them back to the man who sold them to me; because each of them came with a very impressive dossier of photographs and descriptions and the life story of the clock and all the rest of it and it was really very well done; but when he sold them to me he always said, “I will always buy them back from you, guaranteed, at 90% of the price that you pay me,” and that just seemed like money waiting to be collected and, boy, I needed money; boy did I need money. So, I contacted him and he said, God bless him, he says, “I’ve actually retired and I’m not really in that business any more.”

But he had his connections and he was good to his word: he was a gentleman of gentlemen; he was so wonderful to me, and his parting words to me that day when I brought the clocks back to him in Twickenham, were, “If you would ever like to buy them back from me and I still have them, it’d be a great pleasure to sell them to you,” and he didn’t do it out of business considerations; he did it because he knew that I loved his clocks.

Anyway, the deal done, my pockets were bulging with 50 pound notes – yes, they cost a lot of money – and I drove down the lane and, lo and behold! – there was this fellow sitting or standing by this Swan pub or whatever it was, on the banks of the River Thames and we parked the car a little bit further down and we went for a walk and we took some pictures of a public toilet and some rather interesting sculptures and some gardens and a boat house and various pictures and then we went off and had a look at this rugby stadium: the English national rugby stadium and we walked around it – I don’t think we could get into it but we walked around it and it was supposed to be what he had called a photo walk and I called it a walk and talk, because I just talked the whole time and we talked about how we met: he’d played the priest in the play. It was Twelfth Night, and I played Sir Andrew Aigucheek and he had about five lines in the whole damn thing, but one scene was where he was confronted with something he’d said or done with some other characters in the play, by Olivia in her garden, and he said something like he had progressed two hours towards his grave since doing whatever he’d done or seen. And on this walk, it suddenly occurred to me, that even in the smallest, tiniest characters in Shakespeare, you can always do a back story: always, always, always. There’s no exception. Even the herald who says, “Herald, ho!”: you can do a back story.

I have travelled two hours toward my grave. I mean, in a way, it’s kind of funny; but here you have a priest talking about travelling two hours towards his grave; not “I did it two hours ago” but “Since when I’ve travelled two hours toward my grave,” and the question here is, what is the back story? For, it’s not written for you, you have to work it out. Is he looking forward to his grave? Or does he fear it? And if that’s not a back story then I don’t know what is.

Now the fellow’s on the Substack, I think he kind-of followed me onto it, and felt his way around and decided he would do his photography here, and he’s added some words, and some of them I understand, some I don’t, and I think I’d be disappointed if I understood all the words that he put up here. Because it’s the ones I don’t that take me to places that are not dissimilar from the character he played in Twelfth Night, and we have the range of possibilities: really, it’s as wide as that. He anticipates with gratitude his arrival at the gates of heaven; and simultaneously he fears it with all his soul. And that’s what makes him a very important person to me.

He’s also in the same kind of business as I’m in, if you can say I’m in the business and not toying at it. His position will be a bit more secure than mine but his personal back story isn’t; and there’s a kind of interconnection there – compatibility, or complementarity; but, in a way, the mix is a good fit. I think so, anyway and that’s all that matters to me. We both changed our names during our lifetimes. That could be what gels us together.

And, so

And so to the friend – this is the female, who’s had an interesting trajectory through life; and I say that without really knowing whether she impelled herself into the various situations that she got into or whether she was impelled by others into them like some kind of inter-ballistic missile.

She’s been married to a man many, many years her senior (another wedding I was at, also in foreign parts, but which didn’t spell the end of our friendship, so there are exceptions to my hard-and-fast rules); and now her boyfriend (her husband died), her boyfriend is many, many years her junior (but still within the bounds of legality). She’s driven by the spirit: the Holy Spirit; the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and she’s very secretive about certain aspects of her life; and yet I’ve known her for exactly round-about 30 years. Half of my life, as good as.

And what is it that she keeps from me? Well, I’m not sure what it is, and it’s kept so comprehensively from me that it gets to the point where I’m not really that interested in what it is. You cannot judge a book by its cover but, if the book is clasped shut and locked, the cover is all you have to judge it by.

Isn’t it?