Machinations

Walking home from the Art College through Watermouth at one-thirty p.m., the weather calm, warm sun on my back, spring rushing down and the air filled with its smells and tempers—fish and chips with vinegar, warm stale beer, fruit on the stalls of St. Stephen’s market and the flat drone of the bookies' tannoy.

I passed an old lady on the street, her blue eyes piercing me as we came across one another on the pavement, her wrinkled face powdered, a pathetic vanity fooling no one. She spied my unlovely form, our eyes met, and I could see in them a look of hard, brittle coldness. She couldn’t know the quiet acceptance with which I viewed the world and her and everything that I passed—she just looked for a moment and saw the broad criminality of my face and the shabbiness of my coat and clothes.

I walked on, engrossed in reveries and words that wouldn’t come, and my mind with all its aches and pinpricks of vanity and self-aggrandisement dissolved away into the warm breeze.

Called in at 12 Westdorgan Rd. on my way home and Lindsey gave me a cup of coffee and some toast before she departed, to the station, to collect a consignment of RCP newspapers under the pseudonym Lindsey Black. She was sheepish when she told me this last bit. A man from the Irish Freedom Movement is coming down today from London but there’s no meeting organised for him to attend. Stu roused himself later: he and Pete had done the acid last night, and he had stayed home while Gareth and Pete went to the Flamingo. I saw Pete briefly and he enthusiastically described the trip to me. . . .

I realised fully today, and with a depth of understanding not present before, the magnitude of my blunder in choosing a University degree course. I can’t believe my mind worked as it did. All I can think of is the two years I’ve wasted, yet I’m bogged down two-thirds of the way through a course which means exactly nothing to me. I felt the urge to go to see my personal tutor and tell him everything, knowing it futile yet needing the emotional relief a confession would bring. My position can’t change and therefore my dismal machinations are useless. I even went to see the Fine Arts Secretary to ask her about extra-curricular courses run by the Poly, and although she gave me another room number to follow up I didn’t—somehow it all felt like a feeble attempt to rectify a lost position. My opinion on this has to change, and I know it probably will, but this is how I feel.

At six p.m. Pete and I met up with Lee, Alex, Ian and Gav at room 312 in the Art College. We returned to the offices of the Planning Dept. and, one by one, scaled the wall, ran silently across the low roof to the small toilet window (the only point of access) and slithered through, feet first. Much to Lee and Gav’s chagrin, the plastic bags of photographic paper had been disturbed. A few boxes were empty, and others seemed to have been deliberately opened and the paper exposed. Nine boxes of a hundred sheets each were gone.

So, after angry whisperings and theories and flittings to-and-fro, in single file we moved all the bags through the dark, derelict corridors and offices, down into the cellars, into an adjacent boathouse, and out onto the beach . . . I had a brief vision of us, like some well organised band of big-time crooks with our flashlights and gloves, as we efficiently carried off the loot.

From then on it was a simple (if risky) task to take all the stuff back up to Maynard Gardens and to Lee’s new room in studio 207, a tiny cupboard-like workspace with desk, sink and toilet that he’s very pleased with. Ian vanished, as only Ian can do and didn’t seem to view events with too kindly an eye I don’t think. Pete returned to Castle Mount Court and Mo, and Gav hurried off somewhere too, so Lee, Alex and I came home to Jervis Terrace.

I’ve inhibited myself by assembling loose, unstructured thoughts and word-fragments into a book form. There’s no freedom of expression here. Self-consciousness is not the way. Words dissemble, hence my yearning for other forms. No matter how much I might explore an idea or a thought or a physical object, it’s impossible to capture in words its totality as a pure and perfect expression of Reality. I could amass a library of adjectives to describe its structure and surface characteristics such as colour, texture, shape etc., but the essence of my subjects will never come across as they are i.e., simply, and with swift and incontrovertible awareness and acceptance.

The mechanics of reader comprehension inhibit the usefulness of prose as a descriptive tool and this I suppose is the reason behind poetry’s appeal. Poetry attempts to paint a picture in words and achieve an acceptable representation of existing ‘wholeness’, but prose is altogether more aloof and laborious. This is why I’m attracted to the visual arts, for they transmit awareness instantly, or at least as swiftly as the eye and brain can engage. This journal-script is ponderous because orthodox prose conventions are ponderous, and they at best gives the dimmest and crudest representation of my mental and physical experience.

The hacienda must be built

In the afternoon Lee and I hitched across the Pennines.

Dad gave both of us a lift up to the top of Debdenshaw Road to the beginning of the A64. We made sure we were standing in front of the motorway sign and stuck our thumbs out. A car stopped almost immediately, the driver a thin faced balding man, puffing on a cigarette. I thought him a little stupid for stopping right in the slow lane of the slip-road and not pulling over, but climbed in happy to have a lift so quickly.

No sooner had we set off again than there was a police car, ordering us to pull over. I recognised the driver immediately as Mr. Harding, our next-door neighbour at Wintersett Crescent ten years ago. He didn’t seem to recognise me at first. The car driver was taken and given a long talking to in the police Range Rover before he was released, sullen and obviously annoyed, to tell us that it was our turn for the slapped wrist treatment. Mr. Harding told us that there could have been a fatal accident: he’d seen five cars come round the corner in the time it had taken us to climb in, and two of these had had to swerve to avoid a collision. He’d done the driver of the car on several counts—driving without due care and attention, stopping on a dual carriageway etc. I felt sorry that we’d caused this innocent bloke so much trouble.

When I gave Mr. Harding my name, slowly the realisation dawned in his face that he knew me and he turned around with an “Ohhh Paul!” He said I’d made him feel bad, and although he toyed with the idea of letting us off with a caution he decided he couldn’t take the risk and so reported us. We might get away with it, but if we do get done then Lee, as a second-time offender, could be fined £50.

Lee was quite pissed off by his bad luck and the possibility of such a large fine. Harding gave us a lift in the Range Rover to the next service station. I was quite blasé about the whole thing, apart from concern over Mum’s inevitable over-reaction and the ensuing worry she’ll suffer.

We got a lift into Debdenshaw after about ten minutes cold wait and were dropped about two miles outside the city centre and walked the rest of the way, through a predominantly Jewish area part of the way. Lee and I both felt quite despondent as we trailed around the busy streets.

Barry finally turned up in his Dad’s yellow Capri. Doug was with him. Barry’s parents are in Venice for a Christmas holiday and when we got back to the Duckworth household only his 17-year old sister Claudia was in. They live in an enormous house full of cherubs—incorporated into the lamp fittings, cherubs holding up glass coffee tables, cherubs swinging from the ceiling lights, masses of white sheepskin everywhere (rugs, chair covers . . .), acres of the stuff in every room, red and pink décor and Romanesque divans . . . The entire effect was one of kitsch decadence, a small-time recreation of Baroque splendour which didn’t quite hit-it-off.

Guy rang at around six and Barry picked him up in the Capri. Guy too had hitched up & had come primarily for the Hacienda in Manchester  and a meeting with a few friends of his. I didn’t say much to him and he seemed to be very remote in a thorny, cynical kind of way. Barry’s RCP friend Patrick and a few other people rolled up.

Free tickets for the Hacienda were produced and so that’s where we went for the evening.

The Hacienda was quite impressive, a large converted warehouse decked out in austere industrial grey with diagonal black and yellow stripes. We sat and watched the videos playing on the large screens at either end of the club, smoked the ready rolled joints Barry had brought along or played video games . . . nothing special.

War on Christmas

Today the IRA detonated a bomb outside Harrods in London, killing nine people and injuring seventy five others. Four policemen and one WPC were among the dead. A thirty six minute warning was given, but for some so far unexplained reason, Harrods was not evacuated.

I felt a cold shock when I heard the news; Mum was upset and full of despair.

How can the RCP uncritically support the IRA when the latter detonate devices clearly aimed at civilian targets? Of what military use is the killing of Christmas shoppers? It seems fair enough to fight fire with fire and wage war on the Army and state apparatus in N. Ireland, but. . . .

Robert thought the bombers “sick” and could see no political excuses for the IRA’s operation. But people too readily dismiss the excesses of the Army, the RUC and Loyalist paramilitaries in the six counties as IRA lies and propaganda—example: the petty and spiteful seizure of an IRA man’s beret from his coffin as it was being taken for burial.

The RCP will have a near impossible task mobilising working class support for the IRA in the light of such attacks; it can only do their cause harm. But there is a war going on in N. Ireland between a large section of the Irish people and the British Army.

Robert and I went to see Athletic play Cross End. He hasn’t changed, and only asked me about my appearance, and whether it was the “urban vagrant” look (whatever that is). We got to the virtually deserted ground and stood shivering as the meager crowd trickled in.

Cross End looked much better in the first twenty minutes, but Athletic scored first, a Hubbard corner, dropped right in on the goal-line which the ‘keeper could only palm weakly away, giving Highmore an easy job to score. In the second half Athletic scored again and Tidemore got the third. Newlands scored a brilliant goal with fifteen minutes left. Highmore sent Scarborough tearing up the field; he passed it to the wing where Wicks crossed it perfectly for Newlands, who ran in at full tilt to head it into the back of the net.

As we leaped into the air a middle-aged man standing next to us shouted “Text book stuff!” amid the cheering. It really was a brilliant goal. With two minutes left Highmore scored again and Cross End had been run ragged. 5-0!

I went to Lee’s in the evening and played chess. He showed me the ciné film he took at school in autumn 1980 and we cringed at the way we were then: such a set of tasteless people! It was strange looking at those silent images passing on the screen, locked forever in that day, that Common Room that turgid afternoon three years ago. I was sixteen then and I hope I’ve changed since that day.

It was also a little odd seeing a vision of Ian on Lee’s film, a glimpse from last term. He sat nonchalantly smoking a fag in Room 312 at the Art College, wearing his forage cap, silhouetted against the window, his face in darkness. He seemed utterly out of place there in Lee’s tiny room. How quickly you can forget the feel of certain things after only a few days absence.

I walked home through the fog.

Islands

I agree with the RCP's aims, if not always their methods, but this said, I need to find my own personal response to the questions they ask; I must suffer, and see all of these things; I have to do this before I could even consider joining. As an organisation, it seems to be composed of individuals who are seeking an answer to their own personal sense of alienation, lack of success, call it what you will, and who do so by immersing themselves in revolutionary brotherhood and sisterhood . . . They're all somewhat grey people who haven't managed to find happiness in the 'usual' forms and channels and have therefore opted into a new kind of society, made up of ideologues ("social misfits" as Del would call them).

It's almost as if they've chosen the Party because of what they lack, not for reasons of affirmation, intellectual clarity or boldness (as surely it should be). I put my name down yesterday as a gesture of support, to make up the required 15 members to allow the RCS to get Union funding.

"Everyone of us is an island. If it were not so we should go mad at once. Between these islands are ships, aeroplanes, telephones, wireless - what you will. But they remain islands. Islands that can sink or disappear for ever . . ."

"It is important not to betray the self," says John Fowles through one of his characters in The Magus. I feel like a commitment to the RCP would be just that: a self-betrayal. I must work it out, live it, and do it all for myself. And no one else can do this for me.

Late yesterday afternoon, Lee and Ian went back to plunder the cellars of the empty pub, bringing back another forty eight cans of Carling Black Label which they are going to give to the Combined Arts party at the Art College on Monday in exchange for £20.00. They called round at about teatime and Ian spent the evening playing about with Barry’s synth. We got quite drunk and by the time Barry and Trevor showed up we were slumped drowsily in my room listening to records, all the lights off save that from the electric fire. Although Ian was fairly drunk he didn’t seem any different to his usual, quiet self. I fell asleep on my floor at 5 a.m. leaving Ian and Barry talking about something or other, and when I woke up I was cold and uncomfortable and it was 9 a.m.: Lee and Ian were sleeping on my bed.

I went back to bed after they’d left & finally got up at six to find Lindsey and Stu in Pete’s room, Lindsey in particular hardly speaking, a brief glance at me from under her hair, but not a word. . . .

I feel pissed off, very low and somehow overcome by the effort of having to communicate and talk with people, knowing that I never can or will be able to adequately do so. Lee saved me from myself by showing up: we are holed up in my room being very unsociable and waiting until everyone leaves.

Circumstance

Today has been a miserable struggle through wind and incessant downpour: snow has been predicted in the next few days. I slogged to and fro on the mundane errands I had set myself, huddled and bent against the sodden skies.

I put my name down for the newly-formed Revolutionary Communist Society, which Lindsey and Liddy have organised. There are eleven people interested, mainly second, third and fourth years. I signed on the dotted line with mixed feelings. Some would say ‘why sign at all?,’ if this is my attitude, but it can’t do any harm to participate in the promised reading groups . . . I don’t want to commit myself to marches, demos and paper sales I’m not prepared to give that sort of 100%.

The term is finished – things have been winding slowly down in the usual inexorable way for a week now . . . This is my problem: I’m trapped within circumstance and allow myself to just drift through life, without seizing hold of chances. Too often I’m dictated to by circumstances. This was the premise put forward to me when I went to see Don Carwardine to get my end of term report.

I received a 2/3 for ‘Romanticism,’ and a 4 from Ted Coates for ‘Black Americans.’ The latter slated me for my lack of participation in the seminar, a failure to follow ideas through and persistent absenteeism and lateness. Mr. C’s report dwelt on my lack of drive in his tutorials; he said that too often I sit back and seem to let others do the work, and when I do make contributions I won’t (or can’t) elaborate on them further. He also said I was reserved, with an attitude that was “not quite laid-back, and not quite good old diffidence” . . . It was somewhere in between, and he used a particular word that I can’t now remember, but it struck me as odd that I couldn’t see these traits for myself. I thought I’d made quite a fair contribution in his tutorials, and so his comments were all the more surprising. He likened getting information from me to getting blood from a stone, and as he spoke I remembered Mr. Ingham’s sixth form report comment about my “lack of ambition.”

Afterwards, Lee and I expropriated more products from the cruel grip of the bosses (ha); two torches from Sainsbury’s, and a book on ‘Modern Music’ from the University bookshop.

Today too I finally severed myself from all possibility of going to University in America. I went to see the Dean, Mr. Hass, and I told him briefly of my money situation. He listened silently, nodding his assent occasionally and opening his mouth only to ask the infrequent question in a trace of a Germanic accent. He said he'd write a letter to all the people that mattered and notify me of my release. I came away from that room knowing my future course for the next eighteen months at least.

Yesterday I wrote and sent a letter to Mum and Dad reassuring them again about the bloodied clothes and sending a photo' of Lee as evidence. When I got back from University a letter waited from Dad, which was much more cheerful and gay in tone than his last; it cheered me up to read it.

CND, RCP, SWSO

The day has gone by innocuously enough; Lee atoned for the last night by rolling up at one and we went into Watermouth with Barry. An unpleasant Saturday afternoon near Christmas, the town awash with people. Around the Attlee Square clock tower a large group of students had gathered in the road and were singing in aid of peace. Crowds of people thronged around them—contempt and amusement from some—the traffic tailing back in several directions. All the University SWSO crowd were there: ‘dog-faced’ Mickey with the mohican, Martin Hegarty, Guy’s friend Felicity . . .

Lee and Barry and I were full of scorn for them—as if ANYONE will listen; it’s like preaching peace and morality to a psychopath with a machine gun. Sitting in the street is useless. When Heseltine had his face splashed with red paint on a recent visit to Manchester University, the CND bureaucracy predictably condemned the act as “intolerant.” CND will go on singing and linking hands until the fateful Day itself, all their undoubted commitment and sincerity smashed to pieces against the brick wall of the State. And I suppose on this point, I agree with the RCP.

I was spending money “like a man with no arms” as the saying goes, and somehow I’ve got through a little under £40 in two days. I’m now £150 overdrawn. I wrote to Mum and Dad about the year abroad, and in my letter I hope I made my position clear. I also wrote a typical sort of letter to Claire.

Michael P. had stayed at Lee’s halls watching a Jimmy Cagney film and was summoned by a telephone call. We met him in an amusement arcade near the seafront. I’ve only met him once before, a brief moment at Easterby Art College when I paid a visit with Grant last Easter. He had long hair down to his shoulders back then, but now wears it slicked back with a parting down the middle, ‘twenties fashion. He’s thin and small and looked quaint in a black tuxedo jacket, grey waistcoat and white shirt and bowtie. He doesn’t speak much, but when he does it’s with a heavy Easterby accent that’s music to my ears.

We walked home.

How it goes

The US Marines are withdrawing from Grenada and a provisional government is to be set up and ‘free’ elections to be held. If the people elected another anti-American government, who’s to say that Reagan wouldn’t send his boys back in?

There’s an RCP demo about Grenada in Hyde Park tomorrow but I probably won’t go. Lindsey is travelling up there.

I got a letter from Mum and Dad and I felt so awful about not keeping in more regular contact, so I wrote a letter to them. Dad’s finding his new job easy but tiring, and getting back into the routine seems a bit of a trial: “We will have to see how it goes,” says Mum. Dad needs the company I think. I got a card from Andrew too, and at the moment he’s spending £20 a week commuting from London to his job.

The mist closed in again today, leaving the sun a pale yellow disk glimpsed through banks of scudding fog, the two tower blocks near us rising up into the murk until lost from view. Kids roundabout keep letting off bangers.

Dennis Nilsen was sentenced to twenty five years in prison for the murder of at least a dozen men in London. The jury decided he wasn’t mad and so condemned him to a life behind bars. He may as well be dead. “I have judged myself more harshly than a jury can ever do . . .”

Tonight I read some of the letters of George Jackson from Soledad and San Quentin prisons. Perhaps on reading these, some people might realise why America is as bad as the USSR and as rotten to the core and riddled with racism and prejudice.

Barry and Guy have gone to a party in New Lycroft. Ade has left us again until Nov 19th and Pete and I may get some speed tonight, because I’ve an essay to do before I go away on Sunday.

The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal

Last night John Turney cornered me in my room as I was trying to read The Magus. I saw his eyes flit across my desk towards this journal, lying unconcealed. “What’s in that book?,” he asked me bluntly, as if he meant to put me on the spot. He said he’d been in and read it the other day, and teased me (“you’ll never get off with her”), before trying to pass it off as a joke.

I was left feeling very unsure. For better or for worse all my weaknesses and emotional excesses are exorcised on these pages. This is how I am.

But amazingly, it seems that he'd come into my room for advice, or rather to clear his mind by talking to someone, which he then did for several hours, a long monologue about his friend Martin who he’s fallen out with over the latter’s “sinister” attempts to undermine John in other peoples’ eyes—they had a disastrous holiday together in Greece and things came to a head in Holland where they stayed for six weeks—all the usual intrigue, romance, ‘eternal triangles’ etc., etc. John says he’s writing a play in order to purge himself of all his vindictiveness and anger.

He criticised the RCP too; he characterised its leading lights (people such as Pat Roberts and Carl Cotton) as “narrow,” perhaps even dull people, even though they're well suited to the RCP’s current party-building needs.

He described a quality in Carl that I’ve noticed before too, namely the way he never divorces himself from Party business. He comes across as someone who (in John’s words) “brings their office work home with them”; he’s cold and aloof around we students, alienating everyone with his impossible-to-escape RCP opinions. He judges on the basis of political commitment or the potential for such. Trevor said he’s praised Lindsey as the only person at Watermouth prepared to get herself involved in the mundane necessities of building a revolutionary Party.

 I must rank with the worms in his eyes. I’m sure he finds the world of students thoroughly contemptible, but mockery, sarcasm, condescension and belittling people isn’t the way to win support. Friendly conversation is.

John sees himself as unsuited to this era of RCP history and firmly believes that the people involved now who are creating the “vanguard” who will become Party “heroes” when the Revolution eventually does triumph, as he’s certain it will. I’m sure if that day comes, there’ll be a lot of people who, having shunned the drudgery of six a.m. paper sales, will happily take up their unquestioning places behind the barricades. Stu is one of those people, and if The Revolution erupts in my lifetime, I know which side I’ll be on—and it won’t be that of the Government or the Police. Meanwhile, I don’t want to forsake the idle pleasures of capitalism just yet while they still have something to offer. Why can we still find refuge in capitalism? I wonder what Carl’s answer to this would be?

I don’t like the RCP. Secrecy, utter commitment and a quasi-military organisation might be necessary at this time, but will that tendency be reversible when the RCP becomes a mass party with nationwide support? Will this country’s much vaunted ‘democratic tradition’ come to the rescue and stop the British revolution going the way of the Russian? I often wonder if one day, the Carl Cotton’s of this world will have people such as I put up against a wall and shot.

I got a letter from Claire this morning. “Can you ever smell perfume on my letters?” she asks, which makes me wonder. . . I spent most of the day in an ill-temper. I tried to hitch in to campus but stood for ages with no luck, until finally a car put its indicator on as if to stop. I thought my patience had been rewarded, but the bastard drove off laughing. I gave up and stalked home moodily.

Devil's advocate

A foul wet day. I got a lift into Watermouth and bought tickets for myself and four others to see P.i.L. on Nov 1st. I don’t like their latest single, but J. Lydon is one of those people who’ll go down in the standard histories as “important,” so I suppose I want to see them purely for the historical spectacle.

I trudged around the streets in the rain, fulfilling all my mundane objectives. The glimpses I caught of the sea made me want to go and look at the grey angry waves, but the drizzle deterred me.

Mo still hasn’t found anywhere to live; she keeps going to see places but is always put off either by their poor condition or the price. John hasn’t, so far as we know, even rung anywhere up yet. He spent most of the day asleep in Barry’s room, and I think Barry is getting a bit pissed off with him.

In the afternoon I had a tutorial and as usual I hadn’t done any work for it but conned my way through. I got back at teatime to find Lindsey, Susie and Barry watching the TV. It was an uneventful evening; we went out for a drink at the Jervis Arms.

Derek, Kevin and John stayed up all night in heated conversation and I think things got a little ‘heavy’ and politically pointed at times. John claims that at this era in its history, the RCP is all about party-building, and so it needs the Carl Cottons of this world. Apparently last night Kevin criticised John’s lack of RCP involvement; John attacked Kevin in turn, which left the latter “shattered” according to J. “I acted as the Devil’s Advocate, putting doubts into his mind to see how he’d respond.”

I think my decision over the summer not to go to the RCP meetings was a decision motivated primarily by fear. Looking back it was such a feeble, negative response, and a transparently obvious one I’m sure. Instead of this feeling of helpless confusion, what I needed and still need is some sort of cogent response or concrete argument in support of my position. Stu has a good answer: Given the RCP’s demand for total commitment, if you’re not prepared to give that whole heartedly then it’s pointless giving any. Despite my hasty judgements, Barry’s friends do doubt the Party and are critical of its attitudes and the “Genghis Khan” elements within it such as Pat Roberts.

I still can’t make my mind up about changing courses. I’m sick of waiting for a Way to emerge from the tangle of confused options that clog my mind. What do I want to do? Only I can decide that, but even this act of self-will escapes me.

Fixtures

Last night, not long after we got back from the football, we set off to the pub for a few drinks, and there ensued a brief but intense discussion about the RCP. I stayed silent for much of the time.

Doug feels alienated and find the Party’s inflexibility a little irritating at times; all questions or criticisms founder emptily against the brick-wall of the RCP’s ‘my Party right or wrong’ syndrome. The Party demands 100% commitment and nothing less; Doug took the line that living a life in the best (Marxist) way possible for yourself simply wasn’t enough and was, in fact, futile if you weren’t involved with wider party politics, etc. He was quite forceful about this.

Eventually, after everyone else turned up, we stopped at the pub off-sales shop and walked to Marion Place. Katie greeted us at the door. She cultivates coarseness in herself, and was full of knowing smiles and ‘deep’ looks. Their clean, large house is magnificent compared to ours and it soon filled up, developing into a fairly good party.
'
I got pleasantly pissed and found myself embroiled in one of those self-induced and hatefully enjoyable meetings with Rowan alone together in her room. Then I met one of the girls who lived in Jervis Terrace over the summer; she seemed very naïve and innocent. I met other people too, fleetingly in the crush of the corridor or in some dim room; Guy was pissed, and after asking me if he could, head butted me and knocked me over. I saw Lindsey and Susie and Gareth and Stu briefly on the stairs . . . lots of other faces . . . fragments of situations, too many and too complicated to recount in detail. . . .

I drifted up the stairs to find Barry, Guy and Miles Beattie plus assorted others watching a video of The Young Ones. Ade and Doug lay on the bed, the latter with his head in Lindsey’s lap, she with her arm draped across his chest. For an instant the old hurts sprang up like flames inside. “Oh dear, Lindsey’s involved,” said Susie pathetically, sitting on the steps. . . .

My evening ended down in the basement in a windowless room whose walls were papered with words such as “Lust” and “Bonk," scavving dope from a soldier home on leave from N. Ireland and his hippy friends while Katie and Rowan stared unblinkingly at one another, playing their Staring Game.

When I got back to Jervis Terrace everyone else was asleep and it was five a.m.; I had to wake Ade up to let me in.

Today Doug took Barry and I for a drive to see ‘Nick’s Hill,’ a mysterious mound a few miles north of Watermouth. We followed Hill Road through suburbia until we were out into the countryside, the fields rolling flintily away towards the chimneys of Langridge Cliffs power station and the grey blur of the sea.

At the Hill itself there were a lot of Sunday trippers, Mums and Dads and kids who kindled memories of not too distant occasions with my own parents on similar outings. A restaurant and pub stand on a low plateau facing on one side the tremendous grey vista of the flat plain striding toward the horizon and London, and on the other the Hill itself, a perfectly conical mound rising from the bushy landscape, its even slopes dotted with shrubs and clad in a paler grass than everywhere else. The wind was bitter, cutting through us as it roared in from the sea, and although a few people had braved the ascent up the slopes, we weren’t feeling so strenuous so we braced ourselves against the wind and strode back to the car.

Doug left at teatime to go back to London, to be replaced by yet more of Barry’s RCP friends—John again, and Derek Caraway (who they all call Del), a replica of John with a gaping shark-like and down-turned mouth, and the quiet Kevin, who reminded me of a character from a 1930s Boys Own comic. They were all in fine form and I slunk into my customary position along with the rest of the fixtures in the room.

When John and Del got together the sparks flew. The three of them went out for a drink with Barry and came back at closing time in high spirits. Barry and Pete and Mo have gone to bed and the other three have taken acid and driven off into Watermouth in Del’s car.

Derby

I wrote to Mum and Dad, and a typically limp letter to Claire before Barry, Guy and I set off to the football and the local derby with Bedgrove.

We met at Guy’s local, The Wessex Ram, near Sutton Road, and drove to the ground. We parked the car a discreet distance away and joined the scattered crowds all heading the same way. There was forty five minutes to go before kick off and the Bedgrove fans were already a massed bank of yellow and red on the South Terrace, diagonally to our left. At times the noise was terrific; “You’re gonna get your fucking heads kicked in . . .” etc., all the old favourites, all aimed at our side of the ground. I tried to separate their faces out as individuals, but they were small and blank with distance.

The game itself wasn’t very distinguished and Bedgrove were two up after just twenty minutes; the South Terrace went berserk, while the figures around us muttered dumb acknowledgement. For too much of the match though, events off-field detracted from the events on, and our eyes were drawn irresistibly to the spectacle of dozens of Bedgrove fans kicking with their boots at the large double gates at the front of their cage. The police hurried quickly onto the cinder track between the pitch and the fence and stood with their arms and bodies braced against the gates as a section of the crowd threw itself repeatedly at them, the cops fending them off by prodding with truncheons through the mesh. At one point we all thought the gates would go and the mob come pouring onto the pitch.

Watermouth applied intense pressure for the last quarter of an hour and forced several corners and free kicks, but Bedgrove held on and at the final whistle our section of the crowd fled. The streets leading from the ground were full of hurrying figures, bent against the bitter wind, some even running and casting anxious glances behind from whence drifted the faint sound of triumphant voices.

We called in at Guy’s for a cup of coffee before driving home. Doug, yet another of Barry’s RCP clique of friends, was waiting when we got back. He hides the RCP hardness beneath a more amenable, less intimidating façade, but deep down it’s there all the same.

Mickey Mouse

John Turney (who left early this week and made a brief appearance last night when we were all in The Westdorgan with Carl Cotton-even the normally house-bound Ade had come along), went again this afternoon, looking very smart with Brylcreem-d hair and a paisley cravat. Carl C. left this morning too; he, Barry and Trevor slept three-to-a bed last night.

When John and Carl get together I feel out of my depth; the political grasp and confidence of those two makes me despair for myself, and makes me feel like all my ideas and thoughts are like so much insubstantial chaff. While John and Carl were in the house our world here seemed to stand on shaky, crumbling foundations.

Students. The word should be spat out.

Stu and Gareth have finally found a place to live, a bed and breakfast for £20 per week not far from us in Tremont Place, which is temporary until they find somewhere more suitable.

Do I stick with my American Lit course or change to History of Art? A recent survey in the Guardian said that these two courses were the “Mickey Mouse” courses at Watermouth, and the ones least likely to provide their students with a job, which of course is just a typical situation for me to be in. I’ve heard rumours that Watermouth’s History of Art course is poorly taught, and Mo knows two people who’ve dropped out for that reason.

Mo and I are alone in the house; everyone else is out. I’m saving myself for the excesses of tomorrow night’s party at Marion Place, and an afternoon visit to Empire Lane to watch Watermouth Trinity. I’ve reading to do and an essay to hand in on Monday for my Black Americans course, and I must write home too.

I got a letter from Grant in Gloucester, written while sitting alone in his room, the weather pissing it down outside. He complained of everyone being “stand-offish.”

A prophecy

I attended my first tutorial of the term on Romanticism at eleven thirty. I hitched there and back, which I quite enjoyed as it was a superb warm autumn day.

The tutorial went OK, just a discussion about how the course is going to be run with two other tutees and my Personal Tutor, Don Carwardine. I have to present next week’s tutorial on Blake’s America, A Prophecy to the group. As D.C. rambled on quietly, my indecision over what to do about my course raged within. I’m still very undecided about what to do and as a result I’m not particularly bothered which course I take. Mr. Ingham was right—I have no ambition. Still, I left the tutorial feeling optimistic.

Mr Carwardine asked me to stay behind and asked how my summer was. I told him about Calverdale and my three months of inactivity and how this accorded well with my nature. He seems to be taking more notice than normal of my progress, and perhaps I’ve been identified as potential failure material?

As I wandered back towards Wickbourne Road, campus was in one of its bright, sparkling, lively moods and I kept seeing familiar faces. I bumped into Lindsey, her friend Liddy and Carl Cotton, who aim to be the nucleus of a potential RCP movement at the University. I know Lindsey has her reservations about being increasingly enmeshed by the commitment but Carl—who lives, breathes and sleeps RCP—no doubt dispels all her reservations when he’s with her.

He and Lindsey came back to our house in the late afternoon after a day of selling Next Steps, and she sat quietly on my bed with usual downcast eyes. Carl was critical of Barry’s band schemes: “I thought he’d grown out of that frame of mind when he was 15.”

Once Barry’s paid our rent of £208 he’ll have exactly £1 left to last him all term, and he wants to borrow £50 from me, an idea Carl doesn’t think much of. “I wouldn’t lend it to him.”

Middle class revolt

This morning Dad gave me a lift up to Admiral Street and I signed on for the last time. I was anxious in case I met anyone from the RCP again (they’ve been harassing one of Lee’s friends), so I slipped into the office and out again very quickly, but the coast was clear.

In the car back I was congratulating myself; it’s so stupid, this self-inflicted anxiety. I’ll be OK now until Barry or Carl Cotton dredge the unpleasant sensations back to the surface and I have to face them again . . .

Dad went up to Nanna B.’s in the afternoon. She rang earlier to ask if he'd take her to Gillrigg to visit a friend; he’d intended giving her a run out, but not taking her all the way to Gillrigg, and so for half an hour or so before he set off I was treated to his aggrieved complaints about the selfishness of his mother: “If I ever get like that you have my permission to get rid of me.”

Yet he takes it all lying down. He says this is because there’ve been countless rows between her and us in the past and he wants no more, but his desire for general calm has led him into a cul-de-sac of personal misery. Both he and Mum are burdened by their respective mothers.
Our relatives seem such a drag. I dislike most of them.

With a sigh, Dad set off, dropping me in Farnshaw so I could go to the dry cleaner’s. It was very pleasant just wandering about in the mild air, everything seeming very leisurely and unhurried, but my journey was unsuccessful (half-day closing) and I had to walk home empty-handed.

After a bright start, the day has degenerated and it’s colder. Rain threatens. There’s a big dispute going on in the pages of the Echo and on local news over the introduction of halal meat into Easterby Schools. To pre-stun or not to pre-stun? There’s much debate over the morality of animal suffering and the “cheek” of minority groups “imposing their alien cultures on the majority,” and thereby (presumably) subverting white Protestant England.

It’s a pretty immaterial question really. The smug millions whose consciences are eased because “at least my Sunday joint doesn’t cause anyone any suffering” should take the time to visit an abattoir and see the room where the animals die, watch the skilled killers at work and smell the stink of fear and crap and blood. But all this said, vegetarianism smacks of odd priorities to me. I wonder how many bask in muesli-ridden middle-class meat-less self-righteousness unmindful of the millions who die worse than animals in other, larger slaughter houses across the globe? But I’m no different and the fact that I eat meat doesn’t separate me out from the vegetarians because I’m as blind to the world’s problems as anyone.

I dislike the naïve tone of this sermon-rant, and really it’s no big anger that seizes me, just the merest of thoughts.

I don’t mention any of this with a view to saying ‘stop’ in any real, practical sense, but merely to acknowledge that all ‘civilization’ is the flimsiest of foils, and that civilization's sustaining principles are those of crass ignorance and brutality. Billions of devotees take these to heart and uphold them with a savage loyalty. What hope is there for man as a whole? We’re all cut off from one another anyway, in real terms. . . .

And with this, I’ll climb down from my podium because I’m going out to meet Deborah, Steve and Jeremy at The Moon Inn.

Tang

I rose blearily at eight-fifteen to catch the bus into town to sign on. Autumn definitely detectable in the air which was damp and chilly; I could almost smell the tang of foggy mornings and wet leaves.

As I made my way to the dole office, there was my RCP bogeyman Keith and his blond friend, selling the Next Step. “Hello Paul” he said, almost knowingly. I smiled weakly. He gave me a leaflet advertising a demo’ in Blackpool on September 5th, and asked me if I wanted to go.

I hedged. “Goodbye, I’ll see you on Saturday” I lied, both to him and to myself.

Lee and I made another unsuccessful trip to try get blood from the abattoir. It had turned into a warm and stifling day and the smell around the abattoir was worse than ever. It made Lee feel ill. I can see how the workers there must get hardened to it, for it was only our second trip bit the sight of drums full of sheep’s heads and blood trickling across the loading bays wasn’t quite as horrible as the day before.

In the evening it seemed as though the telephone never stopped ringing: cousin Nicola, Barry, a friend of Andrew’s, Jeremy . . . Barry told me he’s drawing £460 out of the bank soon to buy a synthesizer and next year he and a friend who’s coming down to live in Watermouth are getting a group together.

He’s been working most of the summer apart from a fortnight in Spain (“no drugs”). Andrew’s mate treated me like an old friend. I told him Andrew was now in London and he said he remembered seeing me at Andrew’s party in ‘82). He's now living in Watermouth and said, “maybe the three of us could get together sometime?”

Jeremy was full of his trip to see Ms. Hirst.

Except for the birds

Dad and Mum ran me in to Easterby on their way to Robert and Carol’s and I tried to ring Lee but had no luck. So I wandered about at a loss. For no particular reason I was on my way towards the library when I spotted two figures handing out leaflets outside the job centre by the Northern Building Society.

RCP!

For some reason—later I tried to work out exactly why, perhaps simply just a blind and unthinking eagerness to make contact with some part of that other world, my life at Watermouth—I made a bee-line straight for the nearest of the two, a dark-haired man in his mid ‘20s sporting the now to-be-expected circular wire NHS specs.

He was selling copies of the Next Step and I introduced myself, and mentioned that I know Carl Cotton and Barry. He told me that an RCP group is being set up in Watermouth and that one has just got off the ground in Whincliffe. We had a long talk, or rather, he talked and I listened and nodded. He asked me for my phone number and I told him I didn't have a single fixed address and that I lived with friends. “What’s your local?” he asked and I gave him a vaguely truthful answer this time.

I rang Lee and waited at the library. My mind was in turmoil. Repeatedly I ask myself: what is it I disagree with? I think maybe it’s the RCP’s tactics and the way they extol their policies more than anything else, but maybe here I’m just being prejudiced by my dislike of Carl C. and co.

The RCP isn't something you should just ‘join’; you should feel and I don’t feel their policies. . . . I should accept that I can’t hide any longer from the questions the RCP raise for me about myself. I think deep down I’m frightened of discovering that everything I see and hear and do can be so easily explained by historical materialism and that that will take the “mystery” out of life.

When I see that written down on the page it makes me sick. I’m running away! I haven’t lived or seen or read and I don’t know or feel enough to know what I’m doing or to put what I’m doing in a larger perspective. This applies to my Nietszchean ravings . . . I write the words but don’t feel their full emotional impact. What I say is what I say. What I know is different. I need time. . . .

But perhaps this is all just flannelling justification for something the implications of which I daredn’t face up to?

When Lee showed up I was in a distinctly different mood than when I’d set off from home. We walked up Whincliffe Road to the abattoir that sits in the midst of a big area of semi-industrialised dereliction. We could soon smell a stench that caught in the back of our throats and we could sense fear as we approached the big anonymous factory buildings. We were nervous for some reason.

Outside, an empty lorry that had brought a cargo of animals was caked in shit and was being hosed out. Nearby in a concrete pen, sheep huddled silently, and from the bowels of the factory we could hear human shouts and a squealing pig.

Lee asked someone for some blood (for our photo-shoot) and it took four or five tries before we found our way into the heart of the abattoir, past rows of hanging, skinned carcasses; a lone man was skinning sheep heads, other skinned heads hanging neatly nearby on hooks; there was a room of white clad figures chopping up slithering piles of glistening guts . . . The stone steps, the yards and even the walls were stained with dried blood.

We couldn’t get any fresh blood because it had all been sold minutes before. We went back out into the hot sun feeling unclean. Lee’s vegetarianism was reconfirmed.

It’s such an awful way for those animals to die, the same sort of awful way that Jews died in the gas-chambers, their hardened, cheerful executioners shouting to one another above the bustle and noise of routine butchery.

Lee left to cycle home and after buying a couple of singles, I went home too. I briefly saw Grant stalking through Queensgate shoppers; he and a “curious” Nik may be coming down for the photo-shoot tomorrow.

Jeremy won’t be there; he’s visiting Ms. Hirst again, just him and Gillian Wade this time, who seems to have taken quite a fancy to his “la la la company” as she herself puts it. He showed me a card she sent him full of ‘witty’ comments and clear attempts to mimic his airy sarcasms. A case of Hirst’s ‘matchmaking’ according to Jeremy.

[Audio version]

The world stands complete

Robert and Carol called round this morning on their way for a week at Conishead Priory. Robert was looking forward to it a lot, but Carol seemed subdued; she's just had two teeth pulled at the hospital and is suffering with a swollen face.

They were soon off leaving me to an afternoon of idleness. Mum went to the hairdressers and Dad went on one of his much-grumbled-about trips to see Nanna B. The weather was hot and sunny once more.

At four I got a call from Grant . . . I held my breath . . . a fail in Economic and Social History, a fail too in Communications Studies, but a ‘B’ for English Lit. He couldn’t believe it and was ringing me in an inebriated glow of enthusiasm after going out for celebratory drinks with RJ and Jackie. “I haven’t felt this good in a long time,” he told me, and really did sound full of excitement and just general happiness.

I couldn’t help the cynical thought that flashed through my head: it’ll be no different for him when he goes to Gloucester. It wasn’t—and isn’t—for me. I can’t help thinking that, like me, he’s one of those people who cart the source of their own misery around with them, like a prisoner his chains. But, time for celebration; more than anything he’s relieved to finally have an escape route from the trap of his domestic situation. “What have you been doing?” he asks, and I truthfully answer “nothing.”

I got a second letter from Susie and felt ashamed at her comment on my comments about boredom in my previous letter. Seeing it written in black and white puts my own situation in sobering perspective. Fool!

Twelve days until September.

I read some war poetry by Sassoon and Graves, etc. I felt yet more shame that I can so blithely talk of ‘misery’ and ‘suffering’ when I know nothing of true anguish. In a perverse way I would be curious to see how war would alter me as a person, but thrown into the cauldron, I'd no doubt be mewing pathetically for “mummy” and “home.” It was bad enough for me enduring the first few days at University, so God knows what new depths of self-pity I’d plumb if I was in a war.

I was really affected by Sassoon.

I thought of age, and loneliness, and change,
I thought how strange we grow when we’re alone
And how unlike the selves that meet and talk,
And blow the candles out and say good night.
Alone . . . The word is life endured and known.

I find it incredible to think that anyone can write a poem like “Before Action” by W. N. Hodgson, incredible that anyone can marshal and rationalise their thoughts so clearly in the face of so immediate and awful a death. He asks for strength to be able to bear the prospect of losing all earth’s “delights and glories” and does so in such a calm manner; surely there must’ve been tears and despair at the thought of becoming yet another member of “the unheroic Dead who fed the guns”?

I suppose that we ‘rise to the occasion’ in such circumstances. . . .

In the evening I watched a screen adaptation of The Magus, a book I’d intended reading over summer (but left my copy in Watermouth). It left me itching to read the book and I got an inkling of how big an impression the book had made on Patrick and why he felt as though he’d been ‘dunked in a bath of cold water.’ If the novel is anywhere near as thought-provoking as the film then it must be excellent. I must read it.

Patrick read it and drew parallels with his own situation, and then he acted. He quit the RCP. It was a big step when you consider his utter involvement with them. I remember how he struggled to convey his shattered complacency to us when we did LSD, and I could see it too, in a way, but gripped as I was by my LSD-self-consciousness and natural awkwardness, I couldn’t span the gulf which separated us. I couldn’t tell him that I understood too.

Out of the film’s symbolism, allusion, analogy and pantomime I drew out the ‘message’ that there's no message. Exploration brings you back to where you started and it’s all about looking at what there is to hand in a different way. The things around us are all there is, there’s nothing more, no ancient gods to be petitioned (gods who never replied anyway). No Yahweh, no Allah, no Horus or Isis or Zeus, just frightened people filling the Void with their reassuring figments to block out the emptiness and push it from the mind. There is no other way. These lives are all we have.

And when Mum says she spent a lifetime always planning for tomorrow and now that tomorrow is here, she feels desperately uncertain, unsure, and cheated somehow, I begin to understand why the world immerses itself in the commonplace and the known: “I have suddenly awoken in midst of this dream but only to the consciousness that I am dreaming and that I have to go on dreaming in order not to be destroyed: as the sleepwalker has to go on dreaming in order not to fall.”

Mum puts her recent strangeness down to this realisation and says that “Sometimes I just want to scream at everyone and everything.” The other day she said she felt like putting on her coat and going: where is unimportant; it’s the act of going that matters. “It’s easier to philosophize at 19 than at 49” she says. It’s hard to accept that our lives have been built on sand and perhaps harder still to realise that this will go on and on and that I—helpless, unable to do any different—will also despairingly participate in this, knowing full well that the time will come when I too will be in Mum’s position.

Is my interpretation right, I wonder, or am I on the wrong track completely? Reading the book will get me deeper and tell me if I’m right and more of what Fowles really is getting at. Are we really “men moving in a mist”? I'm nineteen and I’ve ‘solved’ everything?

“The world stands complete and has achieved its end in every single moment.”

Shaheen is cool

I signed on in the morning and on the way back, Dad and I stopped to wander down past Cardigan Park. The white walls of the ground were quiet and smelled of dereliction. At one end of the ground a demolished wall let us see into the ‘stadium’ (ha ha) and out across the weed-strewn Easterby End and onto the luxuriously green pitch. “Shaheen is cool,” says the graffiti on the wall.

In the afternoon, Andrew and I went to see Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life at the Farnshaw Odeon. It was OK, not as funny as their efforts of old, and as to solving the riddle of life's meaning, I suppose they got quite close: sex, food and death, with a lot of pointless bits in between.

After tea, we watched a programme on Beeb 2, Iran: The Revolution Betrayed. The overthrow of the tyranny of the Shah’s regime was followed by the usual in-fighting between the various factions, resulting in the ascendancy of the Mullahs, Iran's most powerful authoritarian group, who now exert a more terrible power than the Shah ever did. We sat in our comfortable armchairs and watched an interview with an imprisoned and tearful sixteen-year old, a victim of rape. Two hours after the filming, he was shot.

The Iranian revolution rolls on with the fanaticism and blindness from which it sprang. Just as in Russia, the conspiratorial, elitist subversion of a revolution creates a conspiratorial, elitist and authoritarian state. ‘My Party Right or Wrong.’ Look and learn, RCP! (but look at me! Sitting on my complacent bourgeois backside and patronising a world’s revolutions in one breath!).

I sometimes think there's something wrong with me. I’ll turn into a bitter old crank one day. The TV fills me with disgust at adverts and programmes alike, raging against grey-suited newsmen, government officials, everything, anyone. . . . “You’ll never become a Buddhist,” says Andrew, half-smiling, half-serious, after one of my regular tirades against all and sundry, tirades which start as a joke but which always have a grain of sincerity to them.

Peace of mind is far away.

[Audio version]

Pinball wizard

I’m sitting alone in the caravan, it’s mid-evening and it’s growing gloomy. The sun has just set behind the hills above Kearshaw. Purple clouds tinged with dull red are framed between the silhouettes of the wall behind the caravan and the leaves of an overhanging sycamore.

Everyone else has gone to the pub for the evening. I declined for no real reason apart from a general desire to laze about here, plus I was aware of these pages calling me.

We’ve been on a longish walk today. For once the weather suited me perfectly and as we tramped up the road from our field towards Forefield I felt as full of zap as I’ve done all week. It was a windy day and the sun and clouds played constantly across the lone bulk of Pinshaw Hill across the valley.

We could see Thwaitegarth and Stonesdale, two small insignificant grey smudges on the long shoulder of the hill which was stained with the colours of shale and heather. That great hump of rock rising majestically from the valley was impressive and reinforced how small and limited the valley bottom actually is. Calverdale is narrow and when you're down in the fields most of the high hills are lost behind the nearer horizons that frequently only extend up as far as the topmost fields.

From time to time the sun broke through and warmed us for a while but it was a weary slog until we reached the summit of the road. Once there we branched off across the moor and Calverdale opened out below us, the white streak of the stony path we walked on up above Gilsey visible against a gloomy grey hillside.

Up and up we trudged, across terrain littered with rubble and patches of shingle, passing small cairns until finally we reached a fence which marked the boundary of Greetsdale. Last year Mum and Dad were caught up here in a fierce thunderstorm and the area is notorious for lightning strikes that often kill sheep. Just beyond the fence we stumbled across two tiny ponds and Dad and I explored them, finding several discarded dry skins of dragonfly larvae still clinging to the tips of the reeds. We also found several frogs and both larval and adult newts. 

By this time we were all ravenous so a few hundred yards further on we sat ourselves on a partially overgrown slag heap to eat, and spent a good natured, light hearted and ridiculous ½ hour before walking back. We had a good view down into Greetsdale itself, a bleak and sinuous little valley amid heather and a wide flat dreary expanses of brown moor. Down at the head of the valley we could see an old railway carriage being used as a sheep shelter, and last time Mum and Dad were down there they found a wooden sled, built to be dragged behind a horse.

We retraced our steps through a chaos of old mine workings and turned right along the edge of the Calver valley. Robert and I lagged behind talking and for a little while I forgot the tiredness and weary stumbling of my boots.

Robert argued strenuously in favor of pacifism and opposes “lobbing bricks and splitting heads open.” As so often happens, I was pushed back on my heels, falling quiet and turning my eyes earthwards.

-- “You watch your mates who are in the RCP and see how much unhappiness and annoyance they leave behind them,” suggested Robert.

I immediately thought of Susie’s open dislike of the RCP, Shelley’s cool reserve, and Pete’s uneasy parrying of Carl Cotton’s sarcastic comments. I thought also of Barry’s claim that Universal Utopian Happiness would be attainable if only we could fulfill mankind’s material needs. I at least had the confidence to shoot that one down in my own mind. Robert said that he before he came across Buddhism he felt like a pinball being flicked helplessly to and fro from desire to desire and thought to thought. I could identify only too well with this familiar feeling.

I am that pinball at this moment, and have been for the past few months. I’m all at sea, rudderless, rolling from this to that, drifting onwards without a gleam of hope. All my past thoughts, opinions and decisions are insubstantial groundless cries, and the more I hear, the worse it gets, the more desperate I feel. The only things I’m certain of are mortality and how an appreciation of this can alter peoples’ perspectives in ways that are ‘meaningful’ and constructive. Any real political change only happens on the inside. I should use these truths as the foundation for my own new beginnings.

When Robert talks about pacifism I feel ashamed at my own loose agreement with the use of force as an instrument of change. When I read about Reagan’s moves in central America in the 'papers, his branding of the independent Roman Catholic Sandinista regime as a Communist threat, and Thatcher’s nauseatingly predictable defense of this policy, I’m filled with vengeful desire for retaliation.

To what extent is it justified to assassinate those leaders who, as a direct result of their personal decisions, threaten defenceless people? On a moral level, I suppose the answer is ‘not at all.’ “You make yourself as bad as the people you oppose once violence is used,” says Robert, but what good is a moral victory if you’re being beaten, humiliated and trodden on? He believes pacifism is effective eventually, and he uses the impermanence of everything to back this up, arguing that non-pacifists always fail to acknowledge this point and therefore fail to realise that violent change is fruitless.

But doesn’t this reduce everything to senselessness—even morality? Isn’t this just a morbid crumbling into hopelessness?

There’s got to be some personal standard set I suppose or we would all just disintegrate into gibbering despair.

TV eye

I got a dole cheque for £23.65 today and a postcard from Lindsey. She's in London at the RCP Conference; Pete’s there too. She sounded surprised at herself for enjoying it.

Carl Cotton rang me last night, very late, just after I’d gone to bed under a cloud and feeling none too healthy (I haven’t felt too good since I went out with Lee and Jeremy at the weekend and I keep getting irritating aches and pains that are probably my body’s protest at enforced inaction). My absence I put down to poverty (coward), but I went back to bed thinking I probably should have gone, if only for my own good.

Suddenly wide-awake, I lay in bed thinking about Carl and the RCP. I felt my mind filling with a great empty nothingness and I couldn’t focus properly on anything. I finally lay my head down unable to think at all. My ideas were indistinct and weakly formed, like I was seeing them vaguely beneath the surface of mud.

I watched two TV programmes with Andrew and Dad. Both were on the subject of war journalism and censorship. The first roused no comment from Dad, but the second raised his hackles and he came out with all the hoary old arguments and platitudes, and the old huffing puffing “I love my country, I’m patriotic” crap.

I just couldn’t see how he could trot this out yet again after sitting through two hours of (what seemed to me) fairly honest stuff. How can anyone be so blinkered and totally bigoted? I felt an impossible anger—anger that he should be so infuriatingly blind to military ideologies, anger at the lies and falsehoods and that censorship keeps people from understanding the true horror and violence of war, and anger from wanting an end to the fucking mess once and for all.

But I think I ought to shut up now as there is nothing so boring as a zealot and I suppose I’m the wettest liberal of all in that it takes a TV programme to get me going.