Bullseye

It’s a routine Sunday afternoon—fading light, Bullseye on TV and no doubt a curry later, the shadow of tomorrow’s new term never far from my thoughts. I’ve been watching a Greta Garbo film, The Fall and Rise of Susan Lennox. Athletic have beaten Holmeshaw Vale 5-1.

I am in Gareth's room, the fire is on and the dusk is drawing in. He's due back any time, although I have a sneaky idea that he may not bother. I have four-and-a-half thousand words of an extended essay on the “interpretation of the Beats as a social phenomenon” to invent and type up and until Wednesday to do it. I have put it off and put it off but now it can't be avoided.

Term starts tomorrow: I haven’t done any work for that, let alone my exam commitment Stu has two exams on Tuesday and Thursday, Barry one exam and a dissertation. Lindsey hasn’t even attempted her dissertations. She seems resigned to being kicked out.

John Turney was round here earlier full of his verbal victory over Z. and co. the other night. “I hate that lot,” etc. I suppose this is his ‘justification’ for smashing four holes in Z’s wall. Lee was here too, remorseful, and he keeps suggesting we make amends, presumably by mending the damage.

JT has an envious ability to talk to people and to strike at their very centre, pinning them at the end of his verbal fork. He does this to me all the time. Every time now when he’s here he slips in references to Lindsey fucking Jason which make her visibly writhe and curl inside. 


Paralysis

Rob went at teatime yesterday and I was up until three a.m. watching a fifteen-hour rock and pop video marathon on TV.

More of the same today, bed, food, sun and TV, boredom too in the afternoon on my own while Nanna P. and Mum and Dad went for a run in the car. It was a typical Sunday afternoon, cricket on TV and a salad. It is going to be Difficult (emphasis intended) doing any work here and I can already sense the paralysis creeping into my brain and body.

Soul mates

Saturday has come and gone and I've hardly left the house, content instead to slump in front of the TV most of the day or to continue reading Colin Wilson, picking up where I left off weeks ago.

I’ve lived on a diet of sausages, soup and tea—cup after cup of it. I’ve watched In The Heat of the Night, Airport, the film version of The Likely Lads, a documentary about still born babies. . . .

I’ve deliberately avoided going round to see Lee as he has eleven days left to finish his two essays. I haven’t seen or heard from him since Wednesday afternoon. Lindsey has been away all weekend with her family and Susie has gone up to Leicester to visit Conrad’s parents, so I’ve been left to my own devices.

Laziness and its soul mate Boredom are my biggest enemies.

Hot under my skin

My condemnation of Gav and Alex and their ilk seems, on reflection, a little like the pot calling the kettle black.

In the white heat of contempt I don’t pause to look at my own failed bargains with myself. I promise myself so much and reward myself with so little. At least Gav uses every free moment he’s got. I don’t.

I paid the rent today, which was five days late. The landlord phoned us up in case we’d forgotten. So after handing over our money at Botham Street, I walked into town via White Deer Park. On Midden Road I saw a large blue-green dragonfly. This surprised me because to my knowledge, there aren’t any stretches of open water nearby and the area is quite urban.

Then, as I walked along Queen’s Road, a young woman rushed from a house across the street ringing her hands and in a state of agitation, shouting about “the dirty revolting working classes, they make me hot under my skin.” She passed me and ran off down a side road still shouting, beginning a tirade against “dirty fat women” which was lost to me as she disappeared from view.

No one seemed to take much notice.

Watermouth seems to have a large population of grotesques, derelicts and just plain nutters. You see them occasionally in the Cathedral grounds or pacing the pavements around Maynard Gardens.

When Jeremy was down I remember this: as he, Lee and I walked back from the pier, a young woman ahead of us with black hair, her face a ghastly orange beneath the street lamps, and carrying two heavily laden plastic bags, started shouting and cursing (“fucking-this,” “fucking-that,” etc.) at the passing cars and people. The last we saw of her she was squatting on her haunches on the traffic island at the bottom of Andrew St. with her trousers round her knees, calmly taking a shit, oblivious to all but herself.

Then there’s the young long-haired man in trench coat, woolly cap and kickers who’s always deeply engrossed in conversation with himself or some invisible friend, gesticulating with his arms, jabbing a finger to emphasise a point, and speaking in a rapid nasal voice so unintelligible that it sounds like complete gibberish. Sometimes he carries a newspaper and unfolds it, holding it up to show his nonexistent companion some feature of interest or importance.

Or there’s the old lady on the pavement near the Pembroke, she of the muscular, active outdoor variety with a bird like urgency of gait and bright gleaming eyes. The other day I saw her standing at the side of the road with a piece of pink toilet paper in her hand, thrusting it at the approaching traffic with a look of insolent determination on her face and going through the motions of wiping her arse.

The house has been empty most of the day; Lindsey’s at work, at the Admiral. Susie has gone out this evening with Conrad and the rest of Atom Dance Eight. I’ve been watching TV all day.

I was disturbed late on by a blazing row next door between husband and wife, she screaming that “you can’t tell me what to fuckin’ do!” while the kids sobbed and shouted for them to stop.

TV eyes

An anticlimax after the excesses of yesterday; we wandered about in a very subdued, tired, and unenthusiastic haze. I didn’t get my things organised and packed until the evening, and by the time I'd ‘phoned the taxi and had two thirds of my stuff delivered to Westdorgan Road, it was going on for half-past nine.

Barry and Stu were the only ones in when I arrived, and they helped me carry my things into Gareth’s now empty room. Almost immediately I began to feel I’d made the wrong decision, Barry whining round for money to go down to the Frigate to meet Kamran. The atmosphere felt wrong, somehow.

My room is quite small compared to the roomy quarters I’ve considered ‘normal’ since March, and it lacks character. It also costs £18 a week (I paid Gareth £36 yesterday which puts me temporarily in the red). I worry my presence here will create tensions and constant niggling aggravations. Perhaps I’m wrong—I hope so, but I feel an intuitive premonition that things might go sour, and I'm quite down hearted.

I didn’t get much sorted out before, to my chagrin and irritation, Barry, Stu and Lindsey came back from the pub and were in my room watching TV. I have to move it out of here, and I’ll probably come in for criticism for this, but move it out I must.

Two of a kind

Lee and I watched the second and concluding part of a documentary on mass-killer Kenneth Bianchi. After arrest, he invented the symptoms of multiple personality disorder, and under hypnosis faked the emergence of an evil alter ego, ‘Steve Walker.’ He deceived numerous psychiatrists, which alone was incredible enough—but the extent to which he must have planned the deception is unbelievable. How far can you go in calling him ‘evil’? He was eventually certified as ‘knowing the difference between right and wrong’ and therefore sane and gave evidence to convict his cousin, Angelo Bono, of some of the murders.

The idea of these two psychos cruising around the night time streets in a van so spooked Lee that he decided not to risk the long walk home.

Yesterday morning a WPC was gunned down in London when someone fired a machine gun from a window at the Libyan Embassy at a group of dissident Libyan demonstrators. Eleven demonstrators were wounded and a siege is now in full swing, the Embassy surrounded by armed policemen. There seems to be little chance of a resolution in the near future.

Secret nocturnal initiations

At three p.m. I called at Grant’s. We played records and went to the Print Biennale at Hainsworth Hall. We came across Grant’s friend RJ, who is still living with girl friend Jackie in Lockley. He’s applied to do Politics at UEA. The Print Biennale was very well attended but bored us stiff, save for three prints, “Death Kiss" I & II and "The Poet Searches for her Muse."

We went back to Grant’s briefly and then out for a drink at the Moon Inn in Farnshaw centre. The streets were virtually deserted.

Grant came back home with me and stayed to watch the second part of Channel 4’s Jesus: The Evidence which has raised a storm of protest for its “irreligious bias” and appraisal of the theory that Jesus may not have existed. Tonight’s episode has us laughing at its visuals, which seemed deliberately over the top, and advanced Professor Morton Smith’s “intriguing speculation” that Jesus practiced “secret nocturnal initiations” (hypnotism?) that showed initiates the reality of the Kingdom of God. Professor Smith inferred this from a recently discovered letter from Clement of Alexandria he found in the end-papers of a seventeenth-century book.

Maybe the earliest version of Christianity (practiced by Jesus himself) and the ‘occult’ traditions of the Kabbalah might not be too different in terms of their end result—a mystical state of union with a ‘principle of God’ that confers the feeling that Heaven can be reached on Earth.

This idea is reminiscent of those proposed by Colin Wilson.

What-must-I-do? . . . what-have-I-done?

I exchanged my shoes and took the bus into Whincliffe to go to the army surplus shop in Cartbeck. I got to Whincliffe OK but suddenly found I couldn’t remember in which direction the shop was. Result: I trailed around the rain-swept streets for an hour feeling foolish.

This evening I watched a good play on television, Keep on Running by Andrew Armitage. It was set in July 1967 and the protagonist was a sixth former named Alan whose rebellious ways get him into trouble, but he finds a ‘friend’ in the headmaster, who is disillusioned with teaching and with growing old. The night of a school disco, Alan blunders into the headmaster’s study with a girl and is shocked to find the headmaster still sat at his desk. To cut a long story short, the headmaster tells Alan about all the people he sees who “end-up” and never do anything with themselves, and impresses upon him the need to “be outrageous, to show your arse,” to “write a novel or something, but do.”

Alan gets angry at the headmaster presuming he has anything to impart; the usual misunderstanding between generations etc., and storms off back to the disco. He stands at the door and, as he sees the smooching couples and the stifling mediocrity of everything, realises that the headmaster was right. So he rushes to the turntable, takes off the schmaltzy chart hit, and instead plays “Purple Haze,” shouting that “This is the music, this is it!”

He receives the slow hand-clap from the unimpressed couples so runs out with the record, back to the headmaster’s study, where he finds that the headmaster has hanged himself from the chandelier, a ‘Teach Yourself Italian’ record intoning away mindlessly in the background . . . “What-must-I-do?”, . . . “What-have-I-done?”

I thought it was quite impressive, and I think Mum did too, but Dad just frowned and looked bewildered.

Floating

I spent £21 on a new coat and new shoes, an extravagance which made me feel a little guilty. The sun was again glaring down as I sweated my way around town, walking all the way along Leckenby Road to see the empty mills of Southampton Woolbrokers Ltd which Lee had said was worth a visit.

I called in on Nanna P. She had a “turn” on Monday and thought she was dying. “I felt like my head was separate from my body and was floating around the room.” She still looked ill although she was vocal enough and trotted out the expected tedious stories of Uncle Kenneth and Shirley and “ar’ Nicola.” Her wheelchair stood in the hallway, folded and awaiting use. . . . She says she gets a pain in her head which sounds to me like a potential cerebral haemorrhage.

Her Mum and Dad died of these.

I came home, had tea and watched TV all evening. Old routines. My mind has frozen up as I try to write this, evidently because the torpour of my existence the last few days has allowed it to fall into a dull, forgettable state. How slowly I write—how slowly the thought processes are clumsily parodied by word formation. The Acker-inspired torrent of Sunday night is the least self-conscious thing I’ve written since I came home.

John Turney rang at 11.30 p.m. to remind me to bring him a biography of Stalin I’d promised him.

World at war

Barry came back from Tasha and Lucy’s soiree in a gloomy mood of resignation, as his great hope Elisa—the Clare Grogan girl—had (as Barry put it) “got off with some flash spade in a leather jacket” and more or less ignored Barry who’d invited she and her friend to the party in the first place. He felt she was obliged to at least talk to him, and I wondered if she’d been put off by his obvious intent.

“You’ve got to set your stall up to sell your goods,” he says. I’m no good at flogging what ‘wares’ I have to offer; consequently I don’t bother and none get sold!

Today has been a forgettable and uninspired day of lounging about; Lee stayed to watch The World At War at 7.15.

You'll never get rich

Nothing special. We were watching the Spurs v Forest match live on ITV when Lee rang the doorbell.

Things quickly turned chaotic; Lee climbed up into the loft, Pete and Mo cavorted on their bed and Barry and Ade plugged in their guitars and demolished us with sound. Lee and I left, borrowing a screwdriver from the next-door neighbour (“Hope you’re not going to break in”), and proceeded to attempt to break into a boarded up and derelict pub on the Wickbourne Road.

We spent the evening at The Westdorgan up on Holmes Avenue. Stu turned up mid-evening, hair dyed black; he’s the same as ever. We rounded things off with a Chinese take-away and watched Bilko.

Dummies

I spent the night on Lee’s floor and I got up quite early by my standards. We watched a kid’s show on TV and then in the afternoon went for a walk up Old Priory Road to Gaunt’s Hill Road.

The hills were shrouded in a mantle of cold wet drizzle and mist, the distant sea hidden behind banks of grey fog. We went back to Varney Hall and had something to eat before I walked home. I got lost on Jervis Golf Course.

When I got back, I had to run the expected gauntlet of laughter, teasing and commiserations over my short hair (“baldy,” etc.). Barry and friend Ade drove down last night bringing John Turney with them, plus masses of stuff. The hallway was cluttered with Barry’s £460 synth, and he and Ade told me they are concentrating on getting a group together. The flat—not built for seven people and a tip anyway—was just ridiculous; we could barely move.

Our night out was already planned, a trip to Lindsey and Susie’s new flat across the other side of Watermouth. We took Ade’s car, but Ade himself didn’t come as he was tired and on the way we stopped at an off-licence. It took about an hour for us to negotiate our way through the maze of one-way streets.

Lindsey and Susie’s flat is small but very clean and very tidy and makes our place look filthy in comparison. There is just one main room, with cooker, fridge, shower etc., off which lead their two bedrooms. Lindsey looked as dark and pretty as ever, and I melted into the background. Shelley arrived and we all tucked into the food L. and Susie had made, and the room became a stage for John Turney. . . .

After the food, we all piled into Ade’s car (three in front, five in the back), and risking Barry’s license, drove along the seafront to The Sanctuary (it was called Antoinette's last term), a depressing night-club in the basement of one of the large Georgian hotels for which Watermouth is famous. It cost £2 to get in. The club was full of Siouxsie Su look alikes, black the predominant colour, and sickened us all off. Scores of bored, boring people sat about pretending to be different but looking like so many predictable dummies. Clubs are pretty shit places anyway, but this one was shitter than most, and we left after half-an-hour, preferring to leap about on the beach, play on the rides and swings and throw pebbles at one another.

We drove back to Lindsey and Susie’s and stayed until well past midnight. Ade’s car broke down in Watermouth so we walked the rest of the way back.

Witnesses

I’ve done nothing again today; I got up at eleven after planning to go have my hair cut first thing in the morning. I’m so lazy. Dad went out in the morning and again mid-afternoon leaving me half-heartedly flicking through books, still obsessed with what to do when I go back to Watermouth.

I alternate between periods of decision and good spirits, and uncertainty and gloom, often all within the space of a day. But I keep all of the latter feelings bottled up inside and don’t make any show of them to anyone else. I keep my own counsel and trundle on through my life scarcely revealing the inner traumas I go through every day. That’s why people are surprised to discover I’m not as calm and cheerful as I seem.

Tonight the Middle East is in the grip of crisis, with Syrian-backed Druze militiamen threatening to overrun the Lebanese army and sweep on to Beirut. All that stands between the rebel forces and Beirut are a few hundred UN troops and the possibility of massive American military involvement grows nearer. Off the coast, two thousand US Marines await the order to go ashore, and if they do, the Russians won’t be pleased, although Dad says they’ll not do anything.

Mum said grimly that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that the world will end following an escalating crisis in the Middle East. And to all this add the already bad East-West relations because of the Korean Airliner massacre  (it was announced today that the Russians expelled a US diplomat from Moscow for spying), and things look bleak. Mum is worried. She sat through the news looking very tense.

Against this darkening backdrop, and just for an instant, all my wrangling over my course and life look insignificant. But tomorrow, as always, the global perspectives will recede with the daylight and mundane bustle of another fatuous day.

Ripping yarns

I was glad to get away to Lee’s at eight last night.

Tommy and Jeremy were there already; Lee’s Mum had gone to Scarborough to run an antiques stall and although she’d only been gone since the morning, the house was already a tip.

We watched a video of Salem’s Lot before getting bored and deciding on a little diversion, which took shape as a midnight mission to frighten the occupants of a tent which was set up down by the allotments. The idea was to creep up, groan and scream, and just generally scare them shit-less.

We discovered they weren’t home and hid under a tree to wait. We’d pinched the battery out of their torch and after they came back Lee threw the battery at the tent. Out they came, silhouetted against the orange sky, brandishing an axe; I felt vulnerable huddled in the undergrowth. Our ‘victims’ began to lob stones into the bushes and to scan the darkness with their torch (spare battery evidently). I felt even worse; it was too much, and we broke cover like scared rabbits and I sprinted until my lungs were bursting. A few hundred yards away we stopped in the safety of darkness.

We wandered back a long way round and could see down into the darkened field where the tent was and watched the torch beams sweeping the trees, pinpricks of light in the grey darkness. The tent people had mustered reinforcements and eventually we were all quite relieved to get back to Lee's in one piece. We planned on going back but everyone felt too tired and sleepy. Tommy went home in the early hours and Jeremy and I slept on the living room floor.

I woke up at eleven o’clock this morning. Lee’s Mum isn’t due back until tonight so we bodged about watching TV, eating, and tidying the house. We played a board game with the enthusiasm of little kids and I missed Athletic’s home match against Hatherseats Bridge: Hatherseats won 2-1

The Spinners also lost on Saturday in their opening league game at Caygill; even though they lost 3-1, they sounded to have played well. The side is very young this year and I think they’ll be a struggle to stay up.

It was early evening when Jeremy and I finally left Lee’s. We walked back through silent and shabby estates, dead except for the kids who cruised about on bikes and played with grass cuttings on the verges. It was dusk when I got back: Dad accused me of being a “fair-weather fan” for not going to the game.

It’s come in cold the last few days and autumn is bearing down fast. Grant phoned this evening to ask how the photo-session had gone and when I told him it hadn’t he said he’d come down. We’ve arranged it for Wednesday. He and Nik are going to a printing place for unemployed people tomorrow to see about getting their book together.

Make no delay

Another day spent with Lee; he phoned me mid-afternoon and came round an hour later, supposedly to dye a shirt black, but that never got done. My cheerful optimistic mood continues.

We went down to Farnshaw and I cashed my dole cheque. We looked round the second-hand clothes shops but ended up in a cemetery which I’ve often noticed but never been in before. It stands on a small hill overlooking the railway station and Kirkgate and seems to have been completely overlooked.

There can’t be above fifty graves there, all of them black with soot, a few headstones but slabs laid flat mostly, inscribed with the names of the dead and with epitaphs reminding readers that we are mortal and must die too. Lee found one grave dating back to 1689 and a couple to the eighteenth century, but most seemed to be from the 1830s and 1840s. It seems incongruous to me that this plot of land has survived for three hundred years while all around it the world has changed

It’s a shame that it’s so neglected, overgrown and filled with rubbish. I went up to Farnshaw and bought a pen and some paper to write down some of the epitaphs:

All you who come my grave to see
As I am now so you must be
Prepare in time make no delay
I in full bloom was call’d away.

We wandered back via Douglas Mills warehouse where I bought two shirts, inbetween laughing until tears were streaming down my face at the tacky clothing therein. Lee stayed until well-gone nine.

Later I watched a 1979 horror film, worth watching if only for the effective bald-headed yellow-toothed vampire which appears in the second part.

A fly buzzed

It’s approaching one a.m. and I’m sweating to death, with only the whine of the flies to keep me company. It’s too warm to sleep.

Today we had blazing cloudless weather for the second day running. Mum and Dad spent part of it watching cricket in Moxthorpe; they stayed out until eight thirty, enjoying what Mum described as a “perfect golden evening.” She says she’s worried that I don’t get enough fresh air. “You’ve hardly stirred since we came back from Calverdale,” she chides anxiously and she still thinks I could be unwell.

Not unwell, just a dullness and weariness brought about by day-after-day of unremitting—and quite self-inflicted—mental tedium. Trial by boredom. I “hardly stirred” from morning until night, watching the final day of the World Championships from Helsinki, between times pacing the house restlessly. Lethargy weighs me down as surely as if I was prisoner here. The one thing plays on the other; it’s a vicious circle and the more bored I become, the harder it is to muster motivation to escape.

I can count my friends here on one hand

Jeremy called in last night and stayed until well gone midnight. We were almost like two orphans, and spent a long and not particularly thrilling evening having a strange, ill-at-ease sort of conversation that touched on deeply paranoid subjects.

When I think of all the work I have to do my reaction is ‘What is the point?’ The academic drudge doesn’t ‘do’ anything for me and I doubt if all the effort in the world would really alter the feeling that all I’m doing is ploughing on and on through book after book, with nothing truly relevant to me as a person or the way I live my life. I wish I had the guts and assurance to just say “Fuck it” and jack it all in, strike out on some new path. But knowing me (as I do so horribly well) I’d end up vegetating on the dole, without even the cover of a degree course to give my existence some point.

Out, out, brief candle!

Andrew left at twenty-to-twelve; Dad ran him down to the station. He said he was nervous and hated himself for his irrationality. He aims to find somewhere of his own to live within the next week. As I write this, he’ll be in a pub in London somewhere. His nervousness will have gone now he’s actually arrived. He’ll be OK.

Mum's in a bit of a mood at the moment; no doubt she’s worrying over Andrew, but she seems stalled and very fed up. We watched Kenneth Clarke’s Civilisation this evening which featured the famous “life’s but a walking shadow” speech from Macbeth, which Mum said didn’t help her mood.

She says she’s been brooding on the passing of time and the ultimate point of “it all” for a long while now. I copped the blunt end of her mood when she quite snapped at me. “Just because I don’t blab everything I think to everyone all the time, you all assume I haven’t a thought in my head . . . you’d be surprised.”

After dark I watched for the Perseid meteors, which reached their peak last night. In the first few minutes of watching I saw several, and after about half-an-hour I’d recorded seventeen and a handful of sporadic meteors. Most were mere sparks, flicking across the edge of my field of vision and gone in an instant. but two flashed across the sky and left trails, which I observed with binoculars.

The first was a bright bluish ball of light which whizzed across the sky leaving a pale glowing train of ionized gas in its wake. This persisted for at least thirty seconds before it gradually distorted and broke up. I managed to drag Mum and Dad away from the television and into the darkness, and their patience was rewarded with a few meteors and a satellite.

After they’d gone in with aching necks, I tracked a couple more satellites as they glided silently towards the horizon and extinction in the earth’s shadow. It was a breath of the old times: when I spotted the first and most spectacular ‘fireball,’ looking for all the world like a firework rocket, I got a thrill of adrenalin, a real kick.

Carousel

I had another poor night. Over the last two days my throat has worsened and it’s now painful even to swallow liquids.

Mum and Dad seem to think I have tonsillitis, but when they saw my anxious face they reassured me that having tonsils taken out doesn’t necessarily mean hospitalization. I haven’t been in hospital for even a night since I was born. I spent the day in idle lounging, justified for once by my illness.

In the afternoon it started raining and kept on steadily into the evening; a grey depressing mantle descended upon the house. Dad, Andrew and I watched the British 250cc and 500cc Grand Prix from Silverstone on the box; in the latter race, two riders were killed and we saw one of them lying motionless on the track, his helmet spinning uselessly nearby. The race was halted and run again, and the Americans took first, second, third and fourth.

I’ve just read a leaflet commemorating the death of the Bishop of Whincliffe last month. “We rejoice in the certainty that he is now in that great company which no man can number, who now see Jesus face to face.”

No, he lies in the ground, face to face with nothing but the black earth and the worms, while this blind eternal carousel spins on indifferently above him, as it will above us all eventually.

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.

Tedium

Dad took Nanna B. out for a run. She’s had a prolapse and is going into hospital on Tuesday for an operation; Mum says that at her age it's quite a serious thing.

Andrew and I were left to lounge in yawning tedium in front of the television watching the cricket.

Outside a breeze has taken hold, although it’s still an oven both inside and out. The setting moon is a dim reddish crescent.