Cuttings

At three today Lee and I investigated a couple of apparently empty houses standing side by side on Goodwood Road, beside Dee’s Diner.

As Lee stopped to peer through the letter box and I sidled conspicuously along the pavement, a neighbor shouted and we fled, adopting an air of contrived nonchalance as we did so. It’s difficult at present, and we haven’t yet recovered momentum after the Sutton Road setback.

The other day I asked Ian about moving in, trying to pin him to a definite commitment, but all he would say was, “I don’t feel like it” and left it at that. This left me feeling frustrated and helpless at others’ apparent lack of effort or will to move. Lee scarcely ever mentions the housing situation although he knows that Gav and co. know about Mrs. Coldman-Hicks’s death and will soon be scouring the streets for available properties. It’s hard getting rid of the disappointment of last time. The more I think about it the worse it gets.

It’s one of those familiar and by now routine Sundays. As usual, I’ve trudged to the newsagents and bought the papers and in kitchen or toilet or in my cell poured at length over the league tables, drinking cup-after-cup of tea as the day has slipped by.

Turney turned up as per usual at eight or so, continuing the trend of the past four Sundays. He’s intolerable at times and fuck knows why Lindsey spends time with him; he’s a real manipulator and scarcely seems to care for anyone, least of all women who he sees as good for a fuck and little else. Yet although I dislike his presence at one moment, I find myself laughing the next.

As expected he was mouthing off about the Barry / Z troubles, and he seems to live and breathe this episode in our lives—it’s all he talks about—Barry and Z’s wall, the way we are “showing those cunts,” etc., etc. It grows pretty tiresome after three or four hours. He told me Barry thought I was ignoring him yesterday afternoon in town when we’d all accidently crossed one another’s paths because I’d rushed off to see the football results; this he took as a slight—according to Turney at least.

Lee’s here too. He came to the Univ. library with me this afternoon and I’d intended staying until it closed to do some work for my Faulkner tutorial, but nothing achieved and so I returned to Meadspike via Dee’s Diner at five.

I phoned Andrew to arrange a visit in the next few weeks and fulfilled the Sunday ritual of TV and chicken madras, then bed.

I’m looking forward to continuing my current dabblings with the idea of chance (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle etc., “nature as fundamentally indeterministic”), psychology (abnormal and otherwise), subliminal and waking suggestion, dream control, etc. . . .

I’m collecting all my cuttings together into a scrapbook and want to write seriously, this a view to the future. I have several boxes of newspapers waiting to be sifted through.