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. 


Plunge

I went to the match with Rob and Carol and saw Athletic lose 0-5 against a very good Whitstall Park team. We had a pint in the Hanson Arms beforehand. Rob and Carol stayed until dark and C. drove back across the moors to Saxton.

In the evening I typed out an account of our trips to Borley Church. No work attempted. I’ve been dreaming vividly—Lindsey, Claire, arguments with Dad. I wake up feeling scared about the lack of time I’ve allowed myself to do my extended essay.

I’m in a headlong plunge toward the new term and the third year at Watermouth and soon I’ll be without free time, without time to think or relax, in a very similar position to the one I was in just before my ‘A’ levels.

I have the same intimations of disaster, only this time I don’t think I’ll get away with it.

Familiar stones

A continuation of yesterday’s inactivity—reading, records and food.

I played Robert at Scrabble before he, Carol and I set off for Easterby and the football. We stopped for a curry at the Bahawal and I tried to communicate to them both my love for Easterby and the familiar stones of my hometown. We dropped Carol off at Egley and went to the match with Dad in his car.

A biggish crowd saw Athletic subdued by a slick Riverside Excelsior side who went on to win 2-1. Highmore scored a superb goal to pull one back, running on to a cross from new boy Frisby (one of Athletic’s best players). The ball must have left Highmore’s head at a tremendous speed and was in the net before the ‘keeper had a chance to move.

Despite the defeat I was in good spirits throughout the match, Dad and I finding cause for great amusement in the dour monotony of an aged fan behind us, his hair greased back over his thin skull, circa 1925. What an array of human types assembled in this one spot, people the like of which you see nowhere else. There were the usual herds of blank-eyed soul boys stumbling to and fro in response to the taunts of the Excelsior fans; they sang “We’ll break your fucking neck, McArdle, McArdle” (Excelsior's best player and goal scorer), to the tune of “We’ll take more care of you,” the British Airways ad.

I got a postcard from Claire this morning. She’s been on holiday with three of her friends in Austria, and she phoned me at teatime to ask if I was doing anything next week when she’s got an evening off.

I still in my heart of hearts weave fantastic conclusions to these occasional meetings.

Blithe spirit

We got into Holdsworth Square station at quarter past six this morning. Lee’s mum awaited in her gleaming new estate car and I got a lift onto Moxthorpe roundabout.

Dad got up shortly after I arrived home, looking old and tired I thought. Bags under his eyes. He said he felt “bitter and twisted” over some hassle at work about rotas, which meant he had to go in at 11.30 and so would miss Athletic’s match; he launched into tales of Scotland (he and Mum just got back) which I let wash over me I was so tired.

I went to sleep at about eight and got up again midday. Robert had arrived, Nanna P. and Mum were up . . . More tales of Scotland from Mum although N.P. was uncharacteristically pensive. She says the doctors have informed her that her thyroid gland is not working properly.

The match began at three. R. and I got to Cardigan Park early to find sparse crowds lounging in the sun waiting for the gates to open, and so we went for a swift drink in the Hanson Arms on Lockley Lane which was jammed full of men of the tap room lad variety, all of a sameness, for there was a stripper . . . A ‘busty beauty’ bared her tits on stage, blithely wandering around stripped to the waist and announced that there’d be two new girls who we’d never seen before on stage in ten minutes.

R. and I hastily downed our drinks and left, not wishing to witness the terrible scenes. As we did so our compere rebuffed saucy comments from the audience. This all seemed somehow typically Northern.

The match was entertaining, Athletic cruising to an easy 4-0 win over Pelby in the bright sunshine, and if they’d maintained their early dominance could have won by six or seven.

Back in the privet lined stillness of Egley I showed Robert the letters of Mrs. Coldman-Hicks, madwoman of Maynard Gardens, which I’ve brought up with me. He and Mum thought them amusing/sad/creepy by turns. R. also seemed fascinated by my accounts of Borley.

I’ve tried ringing Lindsey to get the number of the bus company but, equally infuriating, the ‘phone at Westdorgan Road is on the blink again.

Impaired vision

Gareth and Stu stayed over after the party. Spent the day in front of the TV watching the Cup Final. Everton beat Watford 2-0 in a mind dulling few hours of “entertainment.”

Lee wants to try for another squat but I’m sick of the hippy crapheads the word squat attracts...:

“Hey man, I’m so WRECKED. What did I do yesterday? Aw what!!? I can’t remember what happened yesterday.”

I saw Alex Margolin in the Frigate last night, back from Peru unchanged save for a haircut. He’s one of the few hippies whose company doesn’t nauseate me.

Ben showed up in the Pembroke with a cold greasy chip pinned by a safety pin to his shoulder and asked, for the nth time, “Do you want an education, yeah?” He talked about anarchy and about opening up the Church so he can spread his message, “for this town, for the people, who knows? For the world?”  He'd been busking in Attlee Square all day and said to me that The Clash and Peter & The Test Tube Babies were coming to Watermouth to help him prove the validity of busking as performance art. Occasionally he talks somewhat obliquely of “leaving this town” and going to Amsterdam with Alex and Sarah in a few weeks time.

I’ve missed many of his performances because I spend a fair amount of time away from the Vicarage, either at University or at Stu and Gareth’s. This was a deliberate ploy at first, to avoid Lee, (but now things seem to be healing between us a little, although there’s still a slight strain) but is mainly to avoid the austerity of the Vicarage. I am at Stu and Gareth’s now.

Morris turned up late last night too and said that Oculus have agreed to talk about the future of the Vicarage. Their request for planning permission was refused the other day and on the 16th of May an article in the Herald said that Oculus would now “decide what to do about the squatters.” Morris is again convinced that “we’ve got ‘em,” but no one takes any heed of his impaired visions anymore.

Minions of the state

Robert drove over from Dearnelow and he, Dad and I went to see Athletic play Hatherseats. The kick off was delayed fifteen minutes to allow the crowds to get into the ground. Hatherseats were easily the better team in the first half and outplayed Easterby completely: Ben Tester scored from a deflected long-range shot three minutes before half-time.

The seats in the Three Locks Road side were filled with Hatherseats fans and when Tester scored they erupted into cheers and clapping; as they did, the half-dozen Athletic thugs in front of us snarled with rage and swore and shouted at them, pointing at selected victims with clenched fists, telling them that they were “dead” afterwards. They spent the remainder of the game infiltrating the stand and drawing closer and closer to one unfortunate, their faces black with anger, their eyes blazing with murderous intent.

I felt separate from them.

It seemed certain that Easterby were going to lose, but after halftime they came out and took Hatherseats apart. Four goals in the last twenty minutes silenced the massed ranks of red on the Kop and I was glad.

Grant rang later and said he had just got back that teatime, so I arranged to meet him in the Woodhead Hotel at Lockley. He spent a lot of time telling me about a play he took part in last term at Gloucester in which he played the role of Moors Murderer Ian Brady. It involved a lot of direct interplay between audience and cast, and he said the former were transfixed in their seats, not daring to move. I should think he made a good Ian Brady.

We walked up to the Magpie and I felt oddly weary amd unable to pursue lines of conversation with any thoroughness. I couldn’t reach across the gulf between us with my words. I told him everything was the same since this time last year and I didn’t know what path to pursue, and he admits to being in a similar position to me. We talked about political violence as an escape from the numb passivity of life, the IRA . . . He said they are after power: “In a role reversal they’d act just like minions of the State. They all desire Power.”

I sensed the gulf between us once more.

We left the pub, bought a curry, then I caught the bus home, my head full of all the old things.

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.

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.

Maze

I feel saddened and pessimistic that Dad should so accurately have plumbed the depths of my 'crisis.' I can't use the word 'crisis' on second thoughts, as that implies a knife-edge life or death situation; rather this is a long drawn-out feeling of emptiness and blank confusion.

He says my signposts have been painted out. Were they ever painted in? I thought they were once, but not anymore. Dad says “he is not the Paul we once knew” and he attributes this change to the “Watermouth experience.” He's assessed me very accurately and paints a picture of my endless lounging, my plucking of books from the shelves - “a maze of no choice” - but rarely if ever doing anything productive or serious. I have been locked in this maze ever since I went to Watermouth.

When I first went to there, my plan, as naïve and romantic as it seems now, was based on the hope that the mere act of going to University, the inconceivable widening of horizons, the encountering of scores of new ideas and meeting new people, would somehow allow me experience and more experience. It sounds incredible to look back on, but it’s true. I’d read Colin Wilson and it all somehow became clearer, all the strands of thought and desire entwining, giving hints of a way forward. Before I went to Watermouth I started to get obsessed with unlocking the mystery of what we are here for and why. My thought was, ‘go to University, it will all happen there.’. . .

This intuition flung me to University with high expectations of what it was going to do for me; I discovered, with a kind of despair, that it didn’t change anything. I came to realise that the change must come from within me; I must Will it to happen. Now, having finished year one of a course which, if I’m ruthlessly honest, I don’t really enjoy, I find myself wondering what the hell I’m doing. I yearn for a change of some sort. I hop from tree to tree like a monkey in search of bigger and better pleasures, but I’m discovering that the pleasures are all ephemeral. Each time, I’m left only with the bare, ugly bones of what I’ve come for.

Perhaps I’m about to begin a lifetime of these empty struggles? I won’t ever find the ‘pot of gold’ because the pot of gold is an illusion. Could it be that this world of streets and cities and cars and fields, of laughter and tears and conversations, the occasional dark glimpses of deep despair but more often than not a mundane bustle and nothingness of feeling—could it be that this is the sum total of existence?

“Ought oughts are ought.” Where am I going? But all this is like so much coffee table philosophizing . . . I can’t accept that the questions I ask have no answers.

In the evening I couldn’t decide whether to go to Lee’s or to go see Athletic v. Caygill at Cardigan Park. I eventually opted for the latter. Dad and I met Rob and Carol inside the sparsely populated ground a bit before six. In the first half, Caygill were playing in red and yellow towards the Easterby End and looked the better side, but Athletic went closest to scoring in the opening minutes when Scarborough fired a shot in from a Bressler cross, which the goalie saved superbly. Athletic also had a shot cleared off the line with the Caygill ‘keeper beaten. At the other end, Nussey saved Easterby’s bacon a few times. Our best spell came with five successive corners and a couple of throw-ins nearly on the by-line which spurred the thin crowd to hoarse enthusiasm, but a red and yellow shirt headed away every time.

In the second half Caygill put on some pressure and it was desperate defense for Easterby. Right on the final whistle Nussey fumbled a cross and Scarborough headed it narrowly past his own post for a corner, but before it could be taken the referee blew for time. As we all surged for the exits the crowd seemed relieved; no one would’ve believed the home side had just been held 0-0. As we walked on for the cars, a large contingent of Caygill fans came flooding up a side road onto Lockley Lane but were chased away by an Easterby mob and the two groups continued rushing backwards and forwards shouting at one another until a police van arrived.

In the evening, Gromyko’s shame-faced defence of the Soviet downing of the Korean airliner riled Dad into a blazing mood and he adopted a look of fixed fury as Mum and I said that all sides were as bad. Dad: “That ruddy lot stink of death and evil,” he snarled.

Says Mum: “I’d love to have your mind which sees everything so black and white,” and Dad glares at her in angry bewilderment. . . .

Say yes to everything

Robert came in the morning for the match. I was treated to a monologue on Buddhism and the need to say Yes to everything; this reminded me of The Outsider. “You can't be a true Buddhist until you’ve accepted rebirth,” says Robert, and claims he has.

I can’t accept that all beings—insects, animals, even humans—will be reborn in different form. If ninety-nine percent of humanity are ‘animal minds’ who live, eat, sleep and fuck for generation after generation without seeing, as Robert claims, then what of the other fraction? I suppose those who are aware of the impermanence of all things are the ones who see suffering as self-inflicted misery that results from an inability to see the world in its true perspective. All suffering springs from this lack of Yea-Saying qualities in the self and it’s like this because we ignore the flimsiness of the foundations on which we’ve built civilization: we deny our own mortality and forget that all material wealth and power and happiness is impermanent. “We look after the body but forget about the Mind,” says Robert. We fail to accept the fleeting nature of our existence on earth and we turn money and possessions into gods that smother everything, including the Mind.

The last year has changed Robert’s life. . . . How much longer can he continue in the confines of his job and marriage? It seems as though as he grows his material world becomes narrower and narrower until finally he’ll have to make a decision.

Perhaps Carol will grow with him too?

The weather was blustery and showery. Croft Perseverance were Athletic’s opponents. The ball just wouldn’t run for Athletic, and a couple of certain goals were denied by agonising off-the-line clearances by Croft defenders. Athletic had more chances in the first half and should’ve scored.

The Shed was crowded because of the rain and a half-time brass band complimented the clichéd Northern backdrop of terraced houses and industrial wasteland up beyond Three Locks Road. Noticing this, a big contingent of Athletic supporters broke into a stentorian and ironic rendition of Dvorak’s “Going Home.”

Although Athletic outplayed Croft in the second half, they beat us by three soft goals in the last ten minutes, which brought typically fickle reactions from the fans—“You fuckin’ bastards!” etc., etc., this aimed at the Athletic bench. This annoyed Robert, and Athletic’s bad luck also angered a bewildered Dad who went on about it as though it were something which could be argued with. There is a smell of relegation in the air, and it will be a struggle to stay up.

Tonight Shelley rang from Watermouth; she, Stu and Shawn were at her flat and are on speed as I write this. She phoned through want of better things to do; she broke into occasional giggles and sounded as breathless and as full of beans as ever. I spoke briefly and awkwardly to Shawn who sounds to have had as empty and pointless a summer as I have. He hasn’t got a job and has alternated his time between home and Watermouth. He and Stu are down to look for flats for next term.

I put down the phone with mixed feelings, leaving them (no doubt) to pace the floor of Shelley’s flat all night. That world is so near, so ready to take my to its heart with open arms. Meanwhile I sit up here in Northern isolation and make plans to live and be in a way which is far removed from the hurly burly of the hard reality in Watermouth. Shelley’s call gave a premonition of how truly vain and fatuous are my hopes for a different way to the one of old.

This repetitious petty crap needed to come out. The feeling that I can’t continue in the habits of the past is coming home to me and it manifests itself in dissatisfaction with my University course. The last day or so I’ve been seriously contemplating a change to something like Art History. I don’t know how seriously my tutors’d take me.

But in truth this would be a superficial remedy and I get sick of saying ‘something more is needed.’. . .  But something more is needed. Another two years of what I’ve already had isn’t enough!

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.

Black monk time

I got a letter from Gareth this morning; he's been working, smoking dope with skinheads on his lunch-breaks. I’d said in my letter that I’d been “living like a monk” and he replies that he hasn’t. “But then I don’t live in the Third World.”

The rain streams down and has done since I got up. Paul L. and girlfriend left this morning. Jeremy rang to pass on an invitation from Ms. Hirst to go over to Midgeroyd tomorrow with he and Lee. Christine Wade’s sister Gillian is going too. If the weather is as rainy as it’s been today then I’ll get very wet, ‘cos I haven’t got a coat. I lost my overcoat last term and threw my busman’s jacket away while drunk in Easterby with Lee and Jeremy.

I have to make my mind up about Everything soon: where’s that intensely decisive act now, O wise one?

It’s getting gloomier and gloomier as the day slips away, and I feel thoroughly unexcited about my prospects. The greyness of the weather weighs in on me. I remember something which Jeremy said when he was here last, how he seemed surprised to discover that underneath this “cheerful” easy going façade I’m as fucked up as anyone else. Presumably he assumed my life was pretty well worked out and that my mind was rarely troubled by doubts and disturbances. It’s a deeply ingrained habit to put a smiley ‘normal’ face on things when inside I’m churning and raging.

It’s now mid-evening and Rob and Carol have just gone home, but will be back over tomorrow for Athletic’s Yorkshire Cup match at home to Whincliffe. Things sound very tight in the ‘paper tonight, the Chairman telling supporters that “you can forget about promotion.” The programme alone lost £250 last season and so we’ll have to be satisfied with team sheets for a long time to come I suppose.

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]