Biology of the Worst Kind

Updates - 2 July 2010

I'll be adding updating info, writing occasional new blogs, and adding pieces of writing on the This and That page at my web site: www.jennydiski.co.uk, so please check there.

The Sixties - out now in paperback

The Sixties is out now in paperback with an ancient picture of me on the cover as hippie. I looked younger and surrounded by foliage. That's how it was then.

Rape-Rape

This is part of my Diary piece in the latest London Review of Books: Read all of it here

(See also the latest from Bernard-Henri Lévi in the Huffington Post)

In 1961 I was raped by an American in London. I was 14, a year older than the girl Polanski gave half a Quaalude and champagne to, then had oral, vaginal and anal sex with. In defence of Polanski, various people have pointed out Geimer was a teenage model and was doing a photo-shoot her mother had fixed up with Polanski, who said he wanted to take the pictures for Vogue. As further evidence to mitigate Polanski’s crime people have pointed out that after she had been drinking champagne (encouraged by Polanski during the photo session) Polanski got into a jacuzzi and suggested she join him, but she said she had to go home. He phoned her mother and said she would be late, then he let her speak to her mother. Geimer replied ‘no’ when her mother asked if she wanted to be picked up and taken home, and she consented, according to one telling, though this isn’t clear in the grand jury transcript, to oral sex. She also told the judge that she’d had sex twice before with her boyfriend, who was around her own age.

What got my interest finally and fully engaged was the idea of a 13-year-old consenting to have oral sex with a 44-year-old film director. Not, of course, that children aren’t sexual or even apparently complicit sometimes in sexual play. She was clearly not an innocent. (Though previous sexual experience is not a bar to a rape conviction even where the victim is over the age of consent.) Nevertheless, in order for her to consent to oral sex, Polanski must have asked her. How did he ask? Some questions are more like questions than others. What is it like to be 13, a wannabe movie star (nearly all 13-year-olds are), in the presence of a powerful movie director in the house of a famous movie star (Jack Nicholson), being given a powerful drug and alcohol and then invited to give the great man a blow job or make yourself available for cunnilingus?

I was neither dazzled nor drugged into sex when I was 14 – I was embarrassed into it. I was walking along the street, one Friday morning, on my way to the Notting Hill Gate library, feeling cross after a row with my father, when a man with an American accent, in his twenties, suddenly appeared and started walking beside me. He asked my name. I ignored him. He repeated his question over and over again. That stuff happened. You just kept on walking when strange men spoke to you or exposed themselves. But this one was really persistent. He marched alongside me and then said that he was a singer and he’d written a new song. He wanted to know what I thought of it. When I said piss off, again, he started to sing. Loudly. These days, of course, I might well sing loudly in the street myself and not give a toss. But 14 is different. I was excruciated. A man singing to me full-throatedly as I walked down the road made me publicly ridiculous and clearly everyone on the planet was turning their head to stare at me. And laughing. I was beside myself with embarrassment. That, at any rate, was what my 14 was like. I hissed at him to stop and he said he would if I went to the recording studio where he worked and listened to him singing his song properly. It was just round the corner, a few minutes from where I lived. Then he started to sing again. He was amiable and quite funny, not frightening, if much too insistent....(The Whole Article)

All Eat All - from the latest London Review of Books

In 2001, Armin Meiwes, a computer technician from Rotenburg in Germany, advertised on the Cannibal Café website for someone to have dinner with. He received numerous replies, but some withdrew when he responded and he considered others not serious enough. Eventually he invited Bernd Brandes for dinner. The plan was that Armin and Bernd would dine on Bernd’s severed penis, to be bitten off at the table for the occasion (this failed and it had to be cut off). Bernd found it too chewy, he said, so Armin put it in a sauté pan, but charred it and fed it to the dog. Later, Armin put Bernd in the bath (to marinate?), gave him alcohol and pills, read a science fiction book for three hours and then stabbed his dinner guest in the throat, hung him upside down on a meat hook in the ceiling, as any good butcher would, and sliced him into manageable portions. The world was agog at the news of the German cannibal and his two trials, at the first of which he was found guilty of manslaughter (no law against cannibalism in Germany, and his ‘victim’ had consented, volunteered actually, to being killed and eaten) and sentenced to eight years. He was retried on appeal for first-degree murder on the grounds that Bernd might not have been in a position to consent once his penis had been severed and the blood loss taken its intellectual toll. Armin Meiwes was given life. So far so goggable, but then Meiwes gave a TV interview and explained, ‘I sautéed the steak of Bernd, with salt, pepper, garlic and nutmeg. I had it with Princess croquettes, Brussels sprouts and a green pepper sauce,’ and you begin to see, as the suburban lace curtain drifts into place, that the reality of cannibalism could be far less interesting than the idea of it. I think it’s the Princess croquettes in particular that cause the disappointment. More here

Woof

From The Sunday Times

November 23, 2008

The Philosopher and the Wolf: Lessons from the Wild on Love, Death and Happiness by Mark Rowlands

A wolf-dog is fighting with a pit bull terrier, probably to the death. A man, who has been pumping iron in order to keep pace with the power of his wolf-dog, grabs the embattled 120lb animal by the scruff, lifts it off the ground so they are eyeball to eyeball, and whispers, “Do you want a bit of me, son?”

By way of full disclosure, I should say that I am one of the older ladies with cats that Mark Rowlands refers to in passing in this emotionally lamentable memoir and meditation about himself as a young man with his dog. Rowlands was in his twenties when he bought Brenin, a hybrid wolf-dog puppy. It was the early 1990s and he was lecturing in philosophy at Tuscaloosa, Alabama. In his spare time he hung out with the students, getting through a bottle or two of bourbon a night, playing rugby and lending Brenin to his team mates because, of all their big, bold dogs, Brenin was the best “chick magnet. In fact, they used a slightly different expression: more colourful, but not really repeatable”. There is a good deal more testosterone in this autobiography than an older cat-keeping lady can easily relate to. The book is largely a distillation of Rowlands's personal philosophy (evolved during his decade-long relationship with Brenin) but even the philosophy seems to drip with male hormone.

Rowlands's initial training of Brenin is a serious business, which he justifies with Nietzsche's comment that those who cannot discipline themselves need someone to do it for them. Choke chains and a knee sharply in his side when he goes the wrong way show Brenin “the consequences of his actions”, after which the wolf-dog is not enslaved, but ready to participate in the ancient man-and-dog pack relationship, so much better, more decent than our usual apelike human social contract. Perhaps it is not a surprise to discover that parallel to the testosterone, misanthropy and hard-man philosophy here, possibly even an essential part of them, lies a gross sentimentality. The wolf, Rowlands believes, speaks to a part of the human soul that was buried deep when mammalian evolution branched out to our own ancestral primates. They are our ancient, noble-savage selves.

He proposes one of those great simplifying divisions people love so much (Mars/Venus, us/them) and pits our Machiavellian simian intelligence against the way of the wolf. Apes: bad, wolves: good. Humans, being apes, suffer from the requirements of social relations that caused us to develop the capacity to deceive, the necessity to lie, an addiction to sex as pleasure, the compulsion to make alliances and to scheme with and against our fellows. Yes, we have a well-developed moral sense and laws to go with it but, Rowlands explains, “Only a truly nasty animal would have need of these concepts.”

Wolves, conversely, don't require social contracts, they have pack loyalty, the philia of the Greeks, no need for deception and a capacity for passion that might cause them to kill each other in a fight, but not to scheme against their fellows. We humans make excuses for our wrongdoings (deprived childhood, mental disorder), while wolves commit only crimes of passion and take whatever violent punishment results. These temper tantrums, claims Rowlands, deserve less condemnation than crimes of intention, though it's always struck me that the victim is just as dead or crippled whatever the degree of spontaneity involved.

Rowlands's thesis is that the wolf exists solely in moments, while we are cursed by a knowledge of time and, therefore, an awareness of inescapable death. Withdrawing from society (“I was sick of humans. I needed to get their stench out of my nostrils”), he went off with Brenin and attempted to learn the lesson of the wolf. I'm not unfamiliar with Rowlands's sense of disgust for humans, but the question is whether one can exclude oneself from the disgust by taking on the supposed way of the wolf.

Living in moments does not require the wolf or the wolf-living man to find an overarching meaning in life, unlike the rest of us humans who search incessantly for purpose, setting and trying to achieve goals that can only result in disappointment. We know that in the end we will be extinguished. This makes us weak: “The ape that I am is a crabbed, graceless creature that deals in weakness; a weakness that it manufactures in others, and a weakness with which it is ultimately infected. It is this weakness that permits evil - moral evil - a foothold in the world. The art of the wolf is grounded in its strength.” If this has an Ubermenschian chill, Rowlands is clear that you must, when the chips are down, “live your life with the coldness of the wolf”.

The passionate and unswerving pack loyalty Rowlands learnt from his wolf would mean, he tells his students, that if one of them found themselves in a two-person lifeboat with Brenin and his master, Rowlands would pitch the student overboard. The students think he's joking. He isn't, but the other possible solution, that he himself go overboard to save dog and student, doesn't seem to occur to him.

Rowlands goes through a dark, epiphanic month of hell when Brenin gets an infection and needs constant care that still may not save his life (he survives the infection, but dies a year later of the cancer that caused the infection). This is what life is all about, apparently. Not the good moments, but the moments when you are the best of yourself, regardless of hope for a desired outcome. Brenin's moment was as a two-month pup, when, pinned down by a pit bull ready to kill him, he growled his “defiance” at being overcome, and scorned death and its agent.

Maybe us cat ladies just don't get it, but it does strike me that we might respect the dignity of animals more by recognising their otherness than by romanticising and making morality out of them. If we see animals as having lessons for us, or providing us with a way out of our culpability for overmastering the natural world, then aren't we using them as surely as when we eat their flesh?

The Philosopher and the Wolf by Mark Rowlands
Granta Books £15.99 pp256

Book of a Lifetime Independent October 2008

My Book Of A Lifetime: The Essays, By Michel de Montaigne

Reviewed by Jenny Diski

Friday, 31 October 2008

In 1585 Marie de Gournay, an awkward 18-year-old who spent her days mooching in her father's small library, read the first two volumes of The Essays by Michel de Montaigne, then a man in his mid-fifties. She fell immediately in love. Her mother administered a dose of hellebore to bring her back to her senses, but she determined that one day she would meet the writer, because in all the world no one understood his remarkable work so well as she. Three years later, she did meet him, and he spent several weeks in her house in Picardy recuperating from an illness and wallowing in her adoration. After his death she became his editor. A reader's dream came true.

Marie de Gournay was just the first of many readers to be seduced by Montaigne and to be made to feel by his writing that he spoke directly to them. Montaigne has stood by my shoulder, and whispered in my ear, too, though, of necessity, he is more ectoplasmic these days.

It's not just Montaigne; all avid readers know that the best writers rank with the great seducers. Montaigne was quite brazen about it. He wrote about himself candidly as no one had done before: "I am the matter of my book." He described what and how he liked to eat (greedily, biting his fingers in his haste), how he preferred making love (in bed, not standing up), how often he emptied his bowels, that one must fulfil the letter of one's duty to family and work, but always keep a back room in the shop for oneself and, above all, what it meant to have had a true friend and lost him.

He retired to his tower to write about life and discovered that he was his own subject of investigation. Learning about himself was the only possible channel through which to interrogate the larger world. But in writing himself down he was also signalling – quite consciously – to someone he had yet to meet to fill the empty place that solitary writing left. "Besides this profit that I derive from writing about myself, I hope for this other advantage, that if it my humours happen to please and suit some worthy man before I die, he will try to meet me... If by such good signs I knew of a man who was suited to me, truly I would go very far to find him... Oh, a friend!" Such a person need only "whistle in their palm and I will go furnish them with essays in flesh and bone".

Of course, he meant me. Every reader of Montaigne knows that they are the very one he was speaking to. That manipulation by the solitary writer of the solitary reader is the secret, erotic space of reading. It works very rarely, but when it does, centuries don't matter, nor the actuality of the writer's life. We are their best and only reader. Montaigne – and all those others – reach out from their towers and make intimate contact and keep us mooching in libraries.

Jenny Diski's novel 'Apology for the Woman Writing' is published by Virago

Mark Steel & William Leith Review. Guardian August 2008

Bits of Me Are Falling Apart: Dark Thoughts from the Middle Years by William Leith 208pp, Bloomsbury, £10.99 

What's Going On? The Meanderings of a Comic Mind in Confusion by Mark Steel 256pp, Simon & Schuster, £12.99 

The lack of a proper bed brings it home, it seems. So when comedian Mark Steel and journalist William Leith find themselves sleeping (separately) on a settee in the living room and a mattress in the office, the parlous state of the world synergises with the meaning of being over 40, and each bursts into publication. There are the kids, wife or girlfriend, house and proper bed on the one hand; and there's Steel and Leith cut loose from the bosom of, back to square one, personal inadequacies, the Iraq war, entropy, greed, the failure of socialism, the implacability of biology, on the other. And time - marching onward. Exactly how the state of the world bleeds into their personal pain differs according to each author's general relation to the world. Leith's self-obsession - his hypochondria, his lack of sustained relationships or continuing professional success - overwhelms current events, so that the state of the world serves mostly to point up his private miseries. He details the minute interior deaths within the body (ageing, that is), cellular misreadings, dramatising them as the heroic and dastardly doings of goodies and baddies, citing Saving Private Ryan and The Great Escape. His favourite books by the likes of Richard Ford, Amis and Updike have the kind of loser heroes a man can surreptitiously look up to, and Leith's own loserness reads more like strutting than real self-hatred. He rants against the world (ventriloquising Philip Roth), tries to meander into metaphors of science and war mildly and insidiously (like Vonnegut), pontificates (like Bellow) and makes broad and shallow sociological and political observations (like Tom Wolfe), all in a parroty, man-at-the-end-of-his-tether stream of consciousness. Leith suggests that Mel Gibson has summed up the human situation in Apocalypto, when a one-armed sage announces that man's essential problem is that "he wants too much, and eventually the earth has no more to give". How miserable must the human situation be if Mel Gibson has the answer to it? Leith's own need for a mortgage sets off a disquisition on the history and nature of capitalism (a busted flush, apparently); his own perceived lack of moral fibre gives us an excessively admirable Nelson as a contrast; his physical self-absorption references the late John Diamond's public dying; and his present homelessness (though is possession of an office to be entirely homeless?) instigates a description of John Cheever's 1964 short story, "The Swimmer". He tells us what Archimedes did and why Amundsen beat Scott to the Antarctic. The book is meant to be an interior cri de coeur, but it reads like old hat, and clumsily confected old hat at that. Mark Steel is more a stand-up comedian than a writer. His book shouts, rather as he does, and depends too heavily on the absurd exemplar and over-logical conclusion to make his point. "It's as if. . .", "I wondered if. . .", "Maybe when. . ." is how he repeatedly brings out the underlying ridiculousness of a situation. It's a bit clunky, and it feels as if the need to make a joke overrides the more difficult simplicity of just being funny. But he presents the relation between his problems and those of the world in a sharper, less wallowing perspective than Leith. He too is appalled to be confused at 40, but in addition to the failure of his marriage, his political certainties have fallen apart. Steel situates his personal angst beneath the civic confusion of the mass of disgruntled voters who have discovered that they're helpless to change anything. A million people marched against the war in Iraq and no one took any notice. The gap between rich and poor has grown enormously under New Labour. Blair's and now Brown's party is obsessed with wealth and turning a profit. Steel and the rest of us are baffled. As a paid-up member of the Socialist Workers party and Respect, he used not to be baffled - at least he was part of a group with shared convictions. The radical left was even starting to pick up some of those disgruntled voters. Then George Galloway pussy-catted on Big Brother, and Tommy Sheridan sued the papers about alleged visits to a swingers' club - and the left in England and Scotland became a joke. At least in other parts of the world, Steel moans, the left "comes to grief because they're shot, imprisoned or exiled". He can no longer avoid the fact that the left is in denial. When Steel doubts the SWP claim that the party has 10,000 members, he's told: "We have to redefine the definition of member." Time to cancel the subs. Time, too, to recognise that his bad marriage can no longer be sustained. Unlike Leith, Steel does some serious rethinking, and does not just suffer loss. He wonders, against his former SWP judgment, if small-scale, personal dissent against the local McDonald's or Tesco doesn't have more effect than he'd thought. If the organisation and networks of the old left were grafted on to the new popular forms of opposition, there might still be hope for a new socialism in which the young can participate. Both men are writing in and of their late 40s, complaining about finding themselves stuck in the human condition, suddenly aware that, quite possibly, there's less time to come than there has been already. For my money, Mark Steel whines better. It used to be that men went all weak-kneed and mortality-conscious in their 30s, but it takes longer to grow up these days. Just imagine how those of us in our 60s are feeling, and man up, guys. ·

 Jenny Diski's new book Apology for the Woman Writing will be published by Virago in November

Heston Blumenthal & elBulli Review. Sunday Times October 2008

The Sunday Times review by Jenny Diski

Credit Crunch is not yet available on the menus of elBulli or The Fat Duck restaurants; it's still only what's happening to the economy as these two books are published. Who could have foreseen it? Still, on a morning when local authorities had announced a loss of £42m, all 5.44kg of The Big Fat Duck Cook Book arrived, looking a little like a regatta with gaily coloured satin ribbon place-holders, silvered paper edges, silver-embossed feathers and duck feet on the black cloth cover and outer slipcase, and measuring 30 x 35 x 6cm thick. Just bad timing. Or good timing for any financier or pensioner planning to drown their sorrows with a plate of Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh, which is served with a gold-leaf-covered langoustine bouillon cube in a teapot for you to dissolve yourself with some frankincense hydrosol, and pour over sea-urchins' tongues. The book costs £100 - four-fifths of the cost of the tasting menu at The Fat Duck in Bray, itself a mere bagatelle compared to what the government is paying out to salvage capitalism.

Practically speaking, you'd be better off spending the extra £25 waiting two months for a table and heading off to Bray so they can make it for you. Hydrosols are the least of it. Molecular gastronomy is not a description that Heston Blumenthal or Ferran Adria at elBulli near Barcelona like any more (too boffinish, not arty enough), but whatever you call their cooking, the equipment, let alone the gold-leaf, requirements are daunting. “Spread out 60 Petri dishes, add the glycerine and gelatine and set aside until fully softened.” It's not impossible that you might have 60 Petri dishes - I've got hundreds somewhere behind my shoes in the back of a cupboard. But the setting aside? Set them aside where? Front hall, up the stairs? The kitchen work surfaces are all taken up with the dry ice, the centrifuge, overhead stirrer, pacojet, rotary evaporater, and vacuum chambers (“the use of vacuum chambers is essential to a number of techniques at The Fat Duck”). No room for Petri dishes. “The technical level of elBulli's recipes requires specialist equipment, exact measurements using the metric system and professional experience to achieve good results,” it warns at the beginning of the recipe section of A Day at elBulli.

In fact, neither of these books is designed to lie open by your chopping board while you run a truffle-oily finger down the ingredients list. They are showing off expertise and innovation. Moody photos of the chefs jostle with abstract art shots of the food, and elBulli includes a layout of the route that patrons take to pay homage to Adria in the kitchen before the meal - almost as thrilling as the two-page spread of the opening of the car park at the start of the evening. A kind of stations of the knife and fork.

Blumenthal's book might be the more vulgar of the two books as an object, but he is endearing. His virginal enthusiasm nearly redeems the overextended 125-page history of his life in cooking. His description of the development of ideas for his recipes and the trial-and-error experiments excuse the pages of detailed, impossibly difficult recipes that follow. You can even almost overlook the paragraph, in the science section, headed The Histological Structure of Foie Gras, which is nowhere complemented by another paragraph discussing The Moral Structure of Force-Feeding Geese So Their Livers Swell to Diseased Proportions. And the science section is really interesting, with articles by academics about the brain, the nature of taste and why we like what we like. It's good to know that diners found Crab Ice Cream much sweeter than the identical Frozen Crab Bisque, and that spearmint and caraway are chemical twins but molecular mirror images of each other. Left-hand spearmint, right-hand caraway. If only the book weren't so heavy.

Actually, Blumenthal is often closer to kitsch than to science. The Gold, Frankincense and Myrrh dish was originally preceded by Babe in the Manger: a communion wafer infused with the smell of baby - a scent specially created by perfumer Christophe Laudamiel (talc and faeces?). Also on the menu is an edible rose bush. Flaming sherbet fountains and beetroot/grapefruit lollies move the kitsch towards nursery nostalgia. Bacon-and-egg ice cream is now practically a cliché, and the dish Sound of the Sea is brought to your table with a conch shell from which headphones emerge to play waves and gulls in your ears, as a fan “smeared with sea odour” wafts the scent of the seaside directly to your nose. It's no surprise that Blumenthal had a magician teach his waiters how to perform sleight-of-hand tricks while serving. It's really a children's party.

A Day at elBulli, though, is not endearing in the slightest. It insists excruciatingly on the creativity and art of the chef who secludes himself every morning in a secret hideaway for “creative sessions”. I've never heard any real artist use the word “creative” about himself, but this drips with it. If you're one of the chosen 8,000 out of the 2m petitioners a year who get to have dinner (no choice, just the tasting menu) you will, apparently experience the “rhythm of the spectacle”. The dishes transgress, play, provoke and are ironic, but require “the sixth sense” of the good diner to get the “knowing wink”. Some dishes need the right weather: only when the dry north wind of the Tramontana is blowing over the mountains is it possible to make Pineapple Paper with Parmesan. Indeed, it isn't really food, it's an entire discourse. “Inventing a new language is a sign of creativity”, and they're not just inventing it, they're “making the language better”. You might want to experience Art in 4 Acts instead of supper, with instructions from the waiters on how to eat the food, and in what order each mouthful should be taken, but I'd rather have cheese on toast - the regular kind, not the spherication, molecular taste-hit cheese-on-toast benzaldehyde balanced on a bed of foaming cuckoo spit.

On Sleep from London Review of Books July 2008

If you set aside the incomparable cruelty and stupidity of human beings, surely our most persistent and irrational activity is to sleep. Why would we ever allow ourselves to drop off if sleeping was entirely optional? Sleep is such a dangerous place to go to from consciousness: who in their right mind would give up awareness, deprive themselves of control of their senses, volunteer for paralysis, and risk all the terrible things (and worse) that could happen to a person when they’re not looking? As chief scientist in charge of making the world a better place, once I’d found a way of making men give birth, or at least lactate, I’d devote myself to abolishing the need for sleep. Apart from the dangers of letting your guard down, there’s the matter of time. Instead of trying to extend the life of human bodies beyond their cellular feasibility, the men and women in lab coats could be studying ways to retrieve all the time we spend asleep. A third of our lives, they say – and that probably doesn’t take the afternoon nap into account. Even if we died aged what is these days a rather youthful 70, finding a way to stay awake would increase our functional life to the equivalent of 93. And if we happened to live to 93 then we’d effectively be . . . oh, even older. Plus the nap time. Sleep, we’re told, is essential, repairing the wear and tear on body and mind, but sex was once solely for the purpose of propagating the species and we pretty much found a workaround for that biological constraint.

Obviating the need to sleep would also take care of the second most absurd thing we do: wake up. You can buy an alarm clock advertised in one of those catalogues of marvellous necessities like LED digital-musical-weather-station-photo-frames and electronic nail-polish driers. The alarm clock is on all-terrain wheels. If you don’t immediately turn it off, it rolls off your bedside table and cruises around the bedroom beeping and flashing until there’s nothing for it but to get out of bed and chase it. Or there’s the airborne alarm clock which takes off from its base and flies around the room making a noise like an infuriated mosquito. Such extreme measures – which must contravene several health and safety regulations – suggest that waking up is not as popular as you might think coming round from unconsciousness would be.

At any rate, that’s how I’d look at the subject if it weren’t for the fact that sleeping, for all its inherent dangers and waste, is and always has been my activity of choice. Inexpert though I am in all other fields, I am a connoisseur of sleep. Actually, my speciality is not sleep itself, but the hinterland of sleep, the point of entry to unconsciousness. One of my earliest memories of sensual pleasure (though there must have been earlier, watery ones) is of lying on my stomach in bed, the bedtime story told, lights out (not the hall, leave the door open, no, more than that), the eiderdown heavy and over my head, my face in the pillow, adjusted so that I had just enough air to breathe. I recall how acutely aware I was of being perfectly physically comfortable, as heimlich as I ever had been or ever would be, and no small part of the comfort was the delicious prospect of falling slowly into sleep. Drifting off. Moving off, away, out of mindfulness. Leaving behind. Relaxing into hypnagogia (a condition I may always have known about and desired, if not been able to name), anticipating the blurring of consciousness. It must have been a familiar routine, because I was so filled with confident pleasure of what was to come. Daydreaming a story (princes, princesses, cruel guardians, rescues), trying to hold onto the narrative as the thread of it kept drifting away, or I did, out of reach into a storyless place, a gentle fog. The great delight was in deferring sleep, hovering on the edge, pulling myself back to the same point in the story and trying to move it along, but always dropping off, hanging by the story-thread, the fingertips losing their grip but managing to haul back to the tale on the waking side of the world. The trick was to sustain my stay in the no man’s land for as long as possible, knowing all the while that I would inevitably, sooner or later, lose my grip on consciousness.

So I remember it, and so it still is, at its best, the border territory of sleep. It is most readily reachable during a daytime nap, though the result is that ‘naps’ can take hours. The whole point is to extend the unsleeping moment, and to drop into a state where all logic and reason disappears, while I nevertheless retain an essential degree of awareness of the strangeness I’ve achieved. Euclidian geometry disappears and irregular objects and abstractions with a dimensional existence appear to inhabit and shape the reality of this space. Chairs, cups, laptops, gardens, or impossible, indescribable forms, floating and structural, replace the basic rectangles and polyhedrons of the regular world, and aside from their architectural purpose, their meaning, and they surely have a meaning, is unguessable, though just occasionally sideways, shimmering in some corner, if corners existed, there is a glimpse of something that would turn it all into sense if it didn’t immediately flit away. Thought itself becomes mad geometry, another building block of this alien strip of universe, familiar because I’ve been there so many times before, but always as weird and ungraspable as air and water.

And then finally and inevitably, sleep. A nothing: existing only in anticipation or recollection. Dreams are remembered afterwards as narrative or vague left-over feelings, but are not experienced by me, because in sleep there is no me. The dreamer sometimes mistakes itself for me, or I do for it, but really sleep is a state of coma, death, of involuntary spasms or paralysis that I can only know about if someone (including me) tells me about it later. Unconsciousness itself is desired, but only in anticipation or retrospect. Obviously, by definition. Sleep, while it is happening, is nothing to the sleeper. To an observer all kinds of things are happening to the sleeper while she sleeps. Watch the cat, twitching paws and whiskers, purring, gruffling. Watch sleeping people smile, or mutter, fidget, laugh and shriek. So the observer knows about it, watching you; you do not. Later, you can remember or feel, but the only actual experience of sleep is not-knowing. And not knowing thrills me – retrospectively or in anticipation, of course. That one has the capacity to be not here while being nowhere else. To be in the grip of unconsciousness, and consciously to lose consciousness to that grip. My first experiment with drugs was sniffing ether to make myself unconscious, then waking after what seemed an eternity of absence to discover that while I had been nowhere, just a moment or two had passed. Even the absence was mysterious to me, since when I came round, there were whole sagas of remembered dreams, as if I had experienced them, yet I knew nothing of them at the time. It was a great adventure in time travel and disappearance. But then the dreams turned very bad. Now and then I can treasure that second or two after the anaesthetist has pressed the plunger – count backwards from 10 – 10, 9, 9, 8, 7, 9 . . . 9 . . . 9 . . . Hanging onto the narrative for as long as I possibly can. The same brief encounter with being and not-being. But then there’s post-operative pain as a rule, though usually also the morphine to wake up to: a state of hypnopompia provided by the NHS.

Hypnopompia is the compensation at the other end of sleep. The brutality of waking, if you don’t have to catch a flying alarm clock, is soothed by the equal and opposite blurring of consciousness. Coming to, coming round. Slowly. Holding onto sleep, then hovering in hypnoland for as long as you can. Jung almost redeems himself from creepy spiritus munditude with the story in which he asks his new patient, a pathologically anxious, blocked writer, to describe his day in detail. ‘Well, I wake, get up and . . .’ ‘Stop,’ Jung says. ‘That’s where you’re going wrong.’ Not likely to be true, but perfectly correct. The hinterland between sleeping and waking is what compensates for having to start and get through the day, blocked writer, besieged schoolteacher or sullen secretary as I’ve been in my time. If you must have an alarm clock, don’t get a flying one, but set it to wake you early enough to give you all the drifting time you need. Between getting extra sleep or drifting, drift wins.

But because, in my view, sleep itself has nothing to do with me, it constitutes something of a danger. Apart from practical hazards, such as being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger or bludgeoned to death by a serial killer who is too insanely cunning even for the lab rats on CSI, there are more nebulous and sinister perils attested to in fairy tale and anthropology. I have never slept in a plane or on a train, nor, since I was a child, slept anywhere in public. It’s not for lack of trying, but I guess that I can’t allow myself to be so vulnerable to the gaze of others. On the other hand, the only pleasure to be got out of a long, sequestered, wakeful journey that everyone else is dreaming away, is to wander up and down the aisles in the deep of night and look at others sleeping. Of course, as children we sleep like babies, in all kinds of public circumstances, but then small children don’t make the distinction between self and other that prevents them from chatting to themselves in a room full of people and make-believing in full view of friends and strangers. I keep all that sort of thing strictly private – it’s the way of the adult – or try to, and although I do occasionally find myself talking to myself or the bottled water in supermarkets, I never fall asleep in public. It’s always extraordinary to patrol a planeful or trainful of people, trusting as newborns, sprawling in search of minimum discomfort, slack-jawed, legs apart, hair awry, skirts and trouser legs crumpled and careless, snorting and snoring in full view of a crowd of strangers. I suppose the assumption is that the strangers, too, are asleep, and a condition of mutually-assured unconsciousness obtains. But there is always me, at least, peering at the touching and terrifying vulnerability of the publicly unconscious. Vulnerable, not to sabre-toothed tigers but to being watched. I do not want anyone looking at me when I’m not looking at them. Like Yogi Bear, throwing a towel over his head when the warden comes along, if I can’t see you, you can’t see me. Do I worry about my spirit being stolen, like the Aborigines who are supposed to fear that a photograph will do just that? I think I just don’t like being looked at when I can’t turn and say: ‘What?’ Or perhaps that’s the same thing. ‘Are you looking at me? Are you looking at me?’

Who leaves when you fall asleep? They do, of course. So how can they look at you when they’re no longer there? Otherwise it would be you who is not there and everyone else is where they always were, getting on with what they were always doing. That would suggest, on the constant pairing of sleep with death (‘Death be not proud . . . ’), that when you die the world carries on without you, and that is clearly ridiculous. It is said that when Franco was dying, his ministers (lying, I hope) said: ‘Generalissimo, all Madrid is standing outside the palace to say goodbye to you.’ ‘Why?’ the Generalissimo said. ‘Where are they going?’ This is the first time I have identified with a Fascist dictator, but he was, in this single instance, completely correct in his understanding.

All of which may be the reason the phrase ‘fell asleep as soon as her head hit the pillow’ is as strange to me as cuneiform. The drifting ritual, and the early training (which is why the light in the hall is on, and the door open, wider) of listening for catastrophe in the night, means that I have always taken an age to get to sleep. Sometimes this tips over into insomnia. Not a chance of drifting. Just the mind growing increasingly frantic with thoughts lining up round the block to get their moment in the sun of night-time fretfulness. This is more like my Methedrine phase. I enjoyed hyperconsciousness then (until, as with the ether, the thoughts turned bad). These days I’m much more on the side of oblivion. It goes in phases, and if I had a scientific interest in it, I’d be fascinated by the transformation of the world in the early hours to the place of uncertainty and woe that it actually is. The veil of coping shreds as the hours go by and all the disasters and horrid failures that can undoubtedly occur, and indeed are crowded, stage left, simply waiting for their moment, make themselves known to you. People have always asked which is the reality, sleep or wakefulness, but no one ever dares suggest that the horrors of half-past three in the morning are indeed as likely to happen as not, and are at least as possible as they are impossible.

Reality cannot stand too much wakefulness. My longest period of sleeplessness (aside from the Methedrine binges) occurred for no reason I could figure, but, years ago, for two days and nights and some more, I simply could not get to sleep. I did the required tossing and turning rather than getting up and doing something useful all through one night and set myself to sleep the following day – it was a weekend – but nothing happened. All day nothing happened, and in the evening I lay in bed more mad with wondering about the cause and the fear that sleep had deserted me for ever, than with sleeplessness itself, and turned on the television just in time for the start of Fantastic Voyage. In that wonderful movie, Donald Pleasence and Raquel Welch among others are miniaturised in an attempt to save the life of a crucial Cold War US scientist with a blood clot on the brain. They are injected in a tiny submarine into his bloodstream and do battle with the monstrous currents of the circulatory system. They negotiate the waving cilia forest of the lungs and the sucking whirlpools of osmotic action. They do battle with an army of white blood cells charging at the foreign body inserted into their scientist host, and overcome the fearful turbulence of the heart valves to get into the aorta and finally into the electrical storm of the brain. And all along, one of them is a Russian plant, sent to subvert the mission and prevent the sub’s missiles breaking up the life-threatening clot in the frontal lobe of the enemy genius.

It is a thrilling film at any time, but after 36 hours of sleeplessness it took on the quality of oracular truth. I felt the tiny sub’s embattled passage through my every interior part. I became Donald Pleasence determined to fulfil his evil mission (for who else could it have been but him?), and Raquel, pneumatic in her scientific white overalls but dismissing her irrelevant though mighty breasts and luscious hips and lips, serious and brilliant neurologist that she was, focused on surviving in order to save the scientist and the beleaguered world. And what was more, there was a time constraint. The miracle miniaturising procedure would last only 60 minutes before they and their vessel would begin to grow and present a threat to their patient even worse than the clot in his brain. A race against time and wickedness, and I sat bolt upright in bed, living out every dangerous second of the passing hours. I must have fallen asleep eventually, later that night or day or whenever it was, because I haven’t been awake ever since, but I do live with a sense that part of me is still weirdly wide awake, unable even to blink my eyes, while Donald Pleasence and Raquel Welch fight it out, riding the tides of my pumping blood, as the clock ticks.

Review in London Review of Books November 2008

Help-Self

Jenny Diski reviews

• All in the Mind by Alastair Campbell 

I recently received an email headed ‘Literature and Madness Network’ inviting me to the ‘1st Seminar of the Madness and Literature Network’, which is to culminate in the ‘1st International Conference in Health Humanities’ in 2010. Leave aside the use of the word ‘network’, and the mystery of ‘Health Humanities’: at least the upshot is a conference, which is something I can grasp. What got me stuck for a moment was the Literature and Madness of the subject line, and the Madness and Literature in the body of the email. I find I’m always pretty near the edge of Alice’s rabbit hole, but the apparent randomness of Literature and Madness and Madness and Literature – the ‘do cats eat bats or bats eat cats’ quality of the switch – almost had me tumbling. Which? Does it mean what it says or say what it means? Does it matter? Carroll says: ‘As she couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t matter much which way she put it.’ Well, it does matter, I think, though I’m not totally sure. One seems to be a category (unfortunately) within the discipline of literature, while the other suggests two equal but different disciplines. Still, I’m at a loss to know what question is asked by either. But then I read the seminar title, ‘Fat beyond the Call of Duty: The Nature in Power within Psychiatry’, and I quite lost my footing. There are certain verbal nonsenses that induce the feeling – check the marmalade on the shelves and practise curtseying for when you land – that Alice experienced. Just close enough to sense and yet entirely meaningless. Unless, that is, I’ve drifted into a state where the sense of the world no longer functions: if it persists we call it madness. I was saved by changing the t in ‘fat’ to an r, and replacing ‘in’ with ‘of’. ‘Far beyond the Call of Duty: The Nature of Power within Psychiatry’. Typos can be dangerous. Reality may not be as exciting, but finding it can be a great relief to a troubled mind.

I describe this passing moment partly as an example of how easy it is to lose one’s bearings about what makes sense, but also, quite gratuitously, to avoid grappling with my real task for as long as possible. Although making sense in and of the world is not irrelevant to a review of Alastair Campbell’s first novel, All in the Mind, it was my initial plan, after reading it, to extend the preliminary discussion of the niceties of sanity and madness to about 2975 words, after which I would round up to a respectable 3000 words with a final sentence: ‘Alastair Campbell’s novel is about a psychiatrist who is having a breakdown while helping his patients come to terms with their problems: it is not good.’ But it turns out once again that I have serious superego issues (I use the word to get into the swing of the novel’s discourse) and so I find that I’m obliged to engage (ditto) in more detail with the matter of my task.

Campbell’s novel is about a psychiatrist who is having a breakdown while helping his patients come to terms with their problems . . . Oh, let me evade for a moment more. Campbell’s first book was The Blair Years. That was not a novel, but an account of being spin-doctor supreme in the government of Tony Blair. As Blair’s director of communications and strategy and then adviser, Campbell was involved, among much else, in presenting the massaged facts that took us to war, and dealing with the press after the death of David Kelly. He was a gleeful fixer, bully and phrase-maker for a prime minister who had streamlined the Labour Party (as in discarded anything that smacked of socialism) until it was indistinguishable from the Tories, and oversaw a government obsessed with wealth, targets and the corporate organisation of public services. Nothing in his public life inclines me to like him.

I don’t know Campbell personally, but he has been forthcoming about his private life. In an article in the Telegraph entitled ‘I’ve Been to Hell and Back’, he explained: ‘It happened in 1986 when I was 29. I’d been a journalist at the Mirror and was poached by Eddy Shah’s Today when it was launched. It was a disaster. I’d left a professional and political base I felt totally at home with and gone somewhere I felt a bit alien. I was over-promoted; I hit the bottle, got completely manic and cracked.’ He was banged up in jail in Scotland, then admitted to a private psychiatric clinic for a week or so. Since when, less dramatically, but more chronically, he has suffered from spells of depression which he finally decided to combat using anti-depressants when necessary. His breakdown was the subject of an hour-long documentary shown on BBC2 three weeks before the publication of his novel, and although he can’t be held responsible for the moody Byronic poses he was asked to hold for far too many seconds while the camera moved in for extreme close-ups of his eyes to peek into the anguished soul that lay behind them, he described his persecutory breakdown in considerable detail. He explained that he presented the programme in the hope that it would help to dispel ignorance about mental illness, give comfort to current sufferers to know that others had gone through similar experiences, and to assure his viewers, finally, that mental illness ‘does not have to be a weakness, it’s a fact of life’ (though I would have thought that weakness is also a fact of life).

So Campbell’s private mental distress is laid out by Campbell himself for all to see just as his novel on the subject appears. I am a great believer in keeping fiction and author separate. But there’s fiction and fiction. Campbell’s fiction and the recent documentary are too close to each other not to be connected by a reader: he speaks similarly in interviews of hoping the book will have a benign effect on attitudes to mental illness, and several of his descriptions in the documentary clearly foreshadow events and some of the characters’ experiences in the book. On the one hand, we know Campbell is an expert witness on the subject of his novel, and on the other, we know that a novel is not to be judged by the life of the writer.

Campbell himself is concerned about being wrongly judged. In an interview with the Bookseller, he was asked what he hoped for from reviewers and replied: ‘I think anyone who reads it fairly – as opposed to it’s got Alastair Campbell’s name on it therefore I’m going to say it’s shit – will be hard-pressed to say it’s not an interesting, pretty well-crafted book. But I am not going to pretend I was put on this earth to be a great novelist.’ If, however, this is a bad novel, published at a time when it is increasingly difficult even for good first novels to be published, then the fact that ‘it’s got Alastair Campbell’s name on it’ is relevant to a reviewer. Moreover, I can’t see that an experience of madness and depression excuses a bad novel on the subject from criticism; but then again, if the writer tells the prospective reader as Campbell did in the interview that writing is ‘therapeutic’ and ‘a way of giving a creative expression to a pretty horrific time’, life and art, as it were, become inextricable. I’m aware of the awfulness of mental illness, so I find myself needing to say that I’m very sorry for Campbell’s personal suffering before I quote again from the Bookseller: ‘One executive from a chain bookseller sniffed: “I started reading it for ten minutes, and I’d like those ten minutes back.”’ And when chain booksellers sniff about the badness of a book, things are very dire indeed.

Then we come to a further quote: ‘Campbell says that he will judge the success on what his friends and family say about the book, and on how it goes down with readers, making reference to the reader-driven success of the Katie Price books. “It will only sell if it is good, regardless of what people say about it.”’ That’s Katie Price, a.k.a. Jordan, who has an interesting take on authorship: ‘I’m not going to lie, I don’t sit there with a typewriter and write it, of course I don’t. I don’t have time to do that. I say how I want the storyline to be, each chapter is done, I read through it, change it and then it goes away to be written.’ Her publisher defends her as the ‘author’ of a ghost-written book. There is no doubt that Campbell has written his own book. It begins: ‘Professor Martin Sturrock was feeling stressed enough already, even before the phone call from Simon telling him Aunt Jessica had died.’ But can he really expect reviewers to forget his former role in the New Labour government when he uses ‘sell’ and ‘good’ in that combination in relation to – well anything, but in particular writing? He will, at least as far as I’m concerned, have to settle for the praise – printed on the jacket – of Stephen Fry (‘a trademark assured elegance . . . devastating penetration of the human mind . . . A brilliant debut novel’) and Anne Robinson (‘It is an unexpected pleasure to discover that Alastair Campbell can tell a tale quite so brilliantly’).

So . . . Alastair Campbell’s novel is about a psychiatrist who is having a breakdown while helping his patients come to terms with their problems. It is set over a single weekend – Friday to Monday. This, I suppose, is part of what he means by ‘well-crafted’, though ‘crafted’ would work better for me. The problem with such a scheme is that as you get to the heading ‘Saturday’, you know that you’ve got to get through Sunday and Monday before you’re done. Professor Sturrock, who rather oddly is referred to almost throughout the book as ‘Professor Sturrock’ by the third-person narrator, sees five patients over this period: David the depressive, Arta the asylum seeker who was raped after settling in England, Ralph the alcoholic government minister, Emily the facial burns victim, and Matthew the QC whose wife thinks he’s a sex addict. This crafting, too, has the problem that you know you are going to have to get through each of them suffering, resisting and then having their epiphany before the end is in sight. There are further structural efforts. Patients unknowingly intersect on their way to or from the consulting room: the QC’s taxi causes the bus to pull up short, making Arta drop her notes. Sometimes crafting helps a book, sometimes it just doesn’t.

Sturrock seems to be a practitioner of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy – the quick fix so welcomed by the cash-strapped, budget-driven NHS. He gives homework to his patients: write lists of all the good and bad things that have happened to you. Make a list of the best and worst moments in your day. Buy a packet of raisins, examine it and its contents carefully and then write about the experience. (My word, it gives you a perspective on your own troubles.) He encourages lucid dreaming. He gives David the depressive an elastic band to put on his wrist and snap every time he finds himself thinking negatively, saying to him: ‘That’s your positive-thinking band . . . Just try to think a little bit positively.’ There are glimmerings of a deeper approach when Sturrock suggests to Ralph the alcoholic that his drinking might be caused by ‘something in you that you want to forget. It may be something in your past.’ He’s also a bit of a philosopher: ‘He believed that humility was the key to self-respect and mutual respect.’ And he’s a ‘skilful and profound observer of human nature’ who ‘always tried hard to imagine how his patients felt’. He works in a hospital, where only the most difficult cases are referred to him, but also takes on private work – Matthew the QC and Ralph the MP, for example – because ‘the income helped him fund his various research projects, his current one being a study of the psychiatric impact of resettlement on asylum seekers.’ (Things must be even worse than we thought with the NHS if medical research is funded from private-patient fees donated by doctors.) He offers his patients buzz words like key triggers, and the phrase downward curve is unvaryingly used, along with plunge, to describe the experience of beginning to feel depressed. I dare say some or all of these techniques and insights are useful to people desperate for a solution to despair, but I believe that research has shown they aren’t useful for long. Even so, time is the thing with depression, and if a person and those involved with them can be tided over with elastic bands, key triggers and generalities such as ‘Sometimes these illnesses can be every bit as bad for the family as for the sufferer,’ then I suppose that’s a good thing. The question is, is it a good novel?

I don’t doubt that Campbell drew deeply on what he found when he had his breakdown, both personally and in the psychiatric community, but suffering and even observation don’t necessarily make a person think and write with more subtlety (‘as she was forced onto the sofa, she felt physically and psychologically powerless’). Subtlety may not be an essential quality in a self-help book, but it goes a long way to making a good novel. Still, All in the Mind functions well enough as one of those books for children called ‘Milly Has Two Daddies’ or ‘Dickon’s Mummy and Daddy Get Divorced’. It seems to be designed to explain mental illness and how it is treated to people who have never thought much about it before.

The stigma of mental illness is constantly referred to in the book, feared by all the patients and their families – even the QC finds it deeply shaming to be going to see a shrink. But then in his BBC documentary Campbell himself and the friends and family he interviewed expressed their bafflement at what was happening to him when he had his breakdown. Campbell’s partner, Fiona Millar, who coped with being Cherie Blair’s adviser for eight years, had no idea that Campbell was likely to sink into a depression after his ‘breakdown’, or what to do about it when he did. He got medical help only after she became paralysed down one side of her face and her GP asked her if anything unsettling was happening in her life. His journalist friends still look quizzical when he talks about mental illness and suggest that he just had a drink problem. If this book is read by millions who still know nothing about psychological distress, and are enlightened by it, so that they can either get or give help, then again that’s a good thing. Still, it remains a self-help book disguised as a novel.

Mind you, even if they are enlightened (up to a point) on the subject of psychiatry, readers won’t receive much help for any lurking gender prejudices they may have. Professor Sturrock, it turns out, has been making visits to prostitutes for years and is filled with self-loathing, which tips him into a crisis. When the crisis occurs, his wife chooses eventually to forgive him (forgiveness is very important in the essential epiphany-healing of Sturrock’s technique), but she does so ‘amid her shame at his use of prostitutes, and any failings in her that led him down that path’. Arta the asylum seeker, so distressed at having been raped in the country she fled to for safety, is told by Sturrock that ‘the basic vision she had of herself was as a devoted wife and mother. The rapist must not be allowed to take that from her.’ Sturrock’s wife, ‘though she had a second-class degree in fine art, had been a full-time wife and mother for most of their marriage.’ Not even a good second-class degree, yet with such a brilliant husband. And, most Byzantine, when he tries to imagine what it must have been like to be raped, Sturrock finds he can’t because he can only think of male rape, yet he can understand that ‘a heterosexual man was likely to be raped in a part of his body he shared with nobody. And so Sturrock believed . . . that male rape was less likely to destroy the victim’s long-term interest in a sex life with a female partner. Arta’s problem, as well as the dreams, was that she now couldn’t face sex with her husband.’ In addition, Sturrock also knew ‘that rape of a woman could change her partner’s self-image which in turn could badly affect not just his sex drive, but his self-esteem.’

There is no doubt that a lot of work has gone into writing this book. This is true of all novels, every damn one – eighty thousand words and more take a long time to write, and getting them in the correct order requires a good deal of effort. But though admirable in some Protestant sort of way, trying hard, even trying very hard, isn’t quite enough if you can’t write and lack wit. Sturrock monologues about a eulogy he is required to write: ‘When will I finish the eulogy? But you have an outline. It’s rubbish. It’s just a sketch. It has no life in it. It has no colour and texture. People’s lives come alive with stories and colour and texture.’ Well, people’s lives come, if you must, alive in a piece of writing if the writer can make the writing work. The words story, colour and texture are no more helpful to a writer than key trigger, downward curve and plunge are to someone in the grip of a depression without a way to use them effectively. If Alastair Campbell wanted to write a novel about such a thing as people’s lives coming alive, then he or his editor should have tried much harder to wrench the language away from the turgid and the thought beyond the banal. The craft of fiction is not working out a plan that looks balanced on a spreadsheet and then clothing it with words. The trick about writing a good novel is to be a good writer, though I understand that many A-level students these days are assured that there is no such thing as good writing, or even good novels, only what readers like. That’ll be the market. ‘It’ll only sell if it’s good,’ Campbell says. Or was that ‘It’s only good if it sells’? And there’s that rabbit hole again.

Jenny Diski is writing a book about St Helena. A novel, Apology for the Woman Writing, is coming out in November.

Other articles by this contributor:

It’s so beautiful · V is for Vagina

The Housekeeper of a World-Shattering Theory · Mrs Freud

Seriously Uncool · Susan Sontag

Diary · Jenny Diski tries to stay awake

Oh, Andrea Dworkin · Misogyny: The Male Malady by David Gilmore

Giving Hysteria a Bad Name · At home with the Mellys

Diary · On Not Liking South Africa

It wasn’t him, it was her · Nietzsche’s Bad Sister

Every Little Hurts

Obviously I had no intention of going, but The Poet set off and I cheered him on from my sofa in the solitarium.  It was the Stop Tesco Opening in Mill Road March, yesterday.  Mill Road, I learned, is called 'the most multi-cultural street in Britain' by The Telegraph - in what tone I can't say.  And I live directly off it.  It is a very fine road, full of shops selling ingredients for, or the food of every cuisine under the sun, well, Chinese, Indian, Korean, Italian, Japanese, Turkish, American, New Zealand; and bicycles, old fashioned hardware, electrical bits and pieces, organic this and that, as well as booze, printer ink, computers, electronic music stuff, toys.  There's a mosque, a couple of chapels, and a new age bookshop.  And Tesco has just discovered a triple fronted vacant shop to begin the ruin of it.

But my foot doesn't walk half a mile without pain, I've got a streaming cold that's refused to go away for a week, and as well as being entirely idle, I've got an aversion to crowds, actually an aversion to more than three people on the street at the same time.  I've avoided demonstrations, though mostly they have my whole-hearted blessing, since that march on Grosvenor Square in 1968 (was it?) when they got the horses and backed us up against the trees in the square and I was anyway speeding and it was all a bit much quite honestly.

But the drums and whistles of the Mill Road march could be heard all the way up in my solitarium.  Really great drumming, and I'm a sucker for anything with a powerful beat.  After about half an hour, I couldn't bear it, and headed off down the road, just like one of the rats in Hamelin, inveigled by the Pied Piper towards the river Weiser deep and wide.  And there I was on my first march for 40 years or so (OK there were a couple since). 

Actually, the march had just reached the top of my street when I got to it, and the proposed Tesco site is about 100 yards away from it, so to say that I marched would be stretching it.  I found The Poet, who waved me towards him in the crowd of a good few hundred.  I got there in time to hear the man from Al Amin, grocer and post office, make his speech and to  cheer, though I declined the placard The Poet offered me, even though it said  'Every Little Hurts'.  We reminisced with a couple of friends about the old days of throwing ball-bearings under the horses' feet to unseat the police, but decided that animal welfare considerations over rode such behaviour.  Anyway there weren't any horses, there were community police officers who for the most part were taking photos on their phones - not for the records, like they used to - but to take home to show their mums.  And then the crowd gradually dispersed to do their Saturday afternoon shopping in the deli, Al Amin and the co-op, or have a coffee in the Black Cat Cafe; the dreadlocked, the pink-haired, the grey haired and the bald went their amiable ways.  And, unless Tesco have not been cowed and continue their vile plan to ruin our excellent street, I have had my quota of exercise and activism for another forty years.