Remember what is possible

I went to campus to collect my grant, intending to see tutors but never quite managing it and instead sitting about for hour upon hour with Stu and Gareth before going into town and buying Robert an LP of Tibetan ritual music he’d asked me to get.

A desultory evening, TV-bound, thinking about the things I have to do and never quite manage, or do badly (today’s miserable lines being a prime example). The fire is gone and I don’t know what I must do to rekindle it—sit down and think, I suppose, but this seems a near impossibility in a 5’ x 9’ room piled high with records, record player and clothes and while I’m also prey to a chaotic regime of no-thought and disorder.

This journal is all about trying to construct some structured meaning from transient chaos; this is why it’s most difficult when my life is at its undisciplined worst. All I can do is trudge on and remember what is possible.

I am a word on a page

I’ve been putting off writing here and now it is such a relief to escape back into this script, although often this writing bears little relation to anything outward anyone else could see.

How to avoid melodrama? The pages prior to these don’t satisfy. I fail to tell the stories of my days, but I try at least, which is probably more important. Perhaps one day this secret scribble will find its place, but at this exact moment, university, past, present, people . . . it’s all nothing.

I only care about the future. I love life more each day I live it. And if even this means nothing and makes no sense, it doesn’t matter; the answer’s in the attempt. So I channel every ounce of my soul through this hand and pen because this is all I have and will ever have and all the future you-who-reads-this has to tell of me and what I was and how I felt. I have my ‘now’ and you—an older version of me, perhaps, or someone else entirely?—have your own ‘nows,’ and these words are all we have.

Language is metaphorical. History is just words, the only reality we have, a construct of reality. I try to escape the bookish perpetuation of old words, language as metaphor for ‘out there’, ‘in here’, ‘me’. ‘I’ am a word on a page. As soon as I learn that, I’ll be free of the futile attempts at capturing everything that regulates my being through language. I can be free of the book and the page and the word if I can only see it.

Words get me well. “They all talked at once, their voices insistent and contradictory and impatient, making of unreality a possibility, then a probability, then an incontrovertible fact, as people will when their desires become words.” William Faulkner, The Sound & The Fury. p.109.

I feel like a trip into town in pursuit of my ideals of company and wild sociability. 


To become more

I rang home over the weekend and spoke to Mum and Robert.

Everyone had just got back from their respective holidays. I told Mum I was coming home on Saturday for a fortnight or so. Robert and I talked about Easterby Athletic. I’m not really looking forward to going home. I know exactly what I will do and how it will be, all the “sweaty apathy and daydreams” described above—depressingly familiar.

On the other hand, I find the idea of a change of circumstance refreshing . . . I’ve said it before, but I need saving from myself—more so now than ever, because the older I get the more I’m aware of time slipping away. If this sounds ridiculous coming from someone just one month into his twenty-first year and who, to all intents and purposes, has all the time in the world . . . but that’s just it—I don’t have ‘all the time in the world.’

Soon I’ll be 22, then 25 and in no time at all 30 and unable to believe it (like Robert). I see no way out of my present state.

The thought of defeat fills me with real dread. I suppose like Hazlitt says youth believes itself to be immortal. Well, I hold to a belief and a certainty that I’ll succeed as far as my own satisfaction is concerned. This is never voiced in so many words but I think it remains true. I can write, but too often the fancy phrases and important words conceal an emptiness, a vacuum, at their centre. All the tools are there but the purpose (and so the meaning) is missing.

I say I want this narrative “to become more” but I haven’t mastered it in its present form yet!

x and y

I went into town with Lindsey and we wandered about the shops doing nothing in particular, Up Ledwell Street we bumped into Shelley and her younger brother Tim; they’re off to Greece this summer. Shelley has moved house again; she is living with David and co.

Lindsey holds a low opinion of Shelley's friends (“she seems to enjoy demeaning herself in front of them, acting like a little girl. It’s sickening”). We didn’t stay in their company long and I bought a bottle of Mosel wine and we went to the pier; while I got drunk, Lindsey went off to work at the Admiral and I came back to Westdorgan Road and slept off my muzzy-headedness for a couple of hours.

I’ve done nothing with myself the past few days, and increasingly I sense time slipping away from me. A month has gone by and I’ve achieved little. The plans I laid down towards the end of last term have been defeated by simple aimlessness, not through any lack of money or impracticality. My life lacks substance.

I like to blame this on living here, but that’s been my (inadequate) defence ever since the Jervis Terrace days. Now I feel I’ve even a less grasp of the essentials than I had back then. Something eludes me, and nowadays I don’t even have a very clear idea of what it is I’m doing wrong or ways that I could improve the situation.

Words! What little they actually tell.

All this sounds alien when I reread it, mainly because I’m so unused to writing about or thinking about myself lately. This journal is filled with talk of others: “x and y went so and so, did this or that . . . I spent the day with z,” etc. . . .

I hardly ever read nowadays.

Misanthropy

I finally bought my coach ticket and I return to the South on Tuesday.

I can’t say I’ll be sorry to go. A fortnight is just long enough here. Mum and Dad went to Rob and Carol’s in the morning to fix up a shelf but I stayed bed-ridden until the very minute of their return, throwing clothes on in a frantic shame (it being 1.30 p.m.), and as a result, I didn’t get out of the house until three. I was quite looking forward to the evening; I planned to meet Deborah, Jeremy and Steven Bates in Farnshaw, but as it was only Jeremy and Steve turned up.

Peter Wood, plus a large group of his friends and other Egley Grammar School types, occupied one corner of the Red Grouse. My entry into the pub’ was greeted with jeers of ribald laughter, so I stared back unsmilingly. Steve has confessed to Jeremy that he finds me arrogant, so things began a little awkwardly but alcohol soon loosened us up; we met Richard Houlding in another pub and went with him to the Builder’s Arms and from there to a curry house.

The macho men were out in force, their aggression fueled by alcohol, and one particularly foul example of humanity called Glen threw his weight around, threatening to “deck” the stony-faced waiters who clustered around him. As we left, a separate group of soul boys scrapped it out on the pavement and I cursed them and all of humanity out loud.

 I think my enthusiasm for this narrative is lacking somewhere, because deep down perhaps I know I’ve reached the end of the line with this. I must not lose all voice while I struggle to resolve my ‘problem,’ which to outside eyes appears as no big deal, but because I keep thinking how I want to go beyond the simple day-to-day reportage level of usual diaries and desperately want my writing to yield something other than half hearted characterisations of the typical days events.

In short I want to become a writer—this is the crux of my dissatisfaction. Because of these things and more I must discard the present format. . . . Four years and no progression, no evolution onto better things.

The days glide innocuously past and present no real challenges or remarkable events. All the better, because my romantic notions of home demand that things here remain perpetually the same. It’s a pity but true. I’ve noticed even at this early stage (my past not being too far removed from my present), that Easterby is changing.

Old familiar landmarks are being demolished, roads are altered, junctions widened, and to my horror I find myself adopting a reactionary attitude, which is one aspect of my mental outlook I particularly want to change. Just for a moment the full impact of Dad’s influence on me emerges. I doubt it’s something I shall ever be free of.

Self remembering

This afternoon I moved all the armchairs but one, the TV, the sofa and a sideboard out into the kitchen or Barry’s garage-bedroom. He seemed quite satisfied with the TV down there. Lindsey got home from the Admiral late this evening and we talked about nihilism and thoughtlessness and she said she isn’t keen on the idea of staying here another year, especially after Susie leaves for Germany in the summer.

I warmed to the idea of my stay here over the afternoon, especially after I’d got my things sorted out and some degree of order imposed on the chaos of half-unpacked boxes and suitcases. But doubts remain, and I foresee difficulties in carving out a track for myself in this environment. The physical separation from the Grey House is mirrored in the mental sphere, in forgetfulness and self-doubt.

Jason called in briefly at quarter past nine and stayed half-an-hour or so. It’s 1.20 a.m. and Barry and Stu are still up, listening to music—The Doors at this moment, “Not To Touch The Earth,” is loud from the garage beneath.

I’m drawing to the end of another untidy journal and my thoughts naturally look beyond. My dissatisfaction with this form is a fairly constant and ever-growing preoccupation at the moment, and this is something that will get worse, not better, as time progresses. Progress—a word to be conjured with, implicit in which is the idea of evolution and steady improvement. All I see is the same endless limping from one month to the next, one year to the next . . . Words dissemble, words not quick, words lie on the page to taunt with their stark inaccuracy and brute second-handedness, life itself glimpsed and experienced but gone, gone, never to be captured in all its glitter and crackle and drear on the white angularities of a two-dimensional page—not by a biro-driven chronological narrative anyway, not in its present form.

Perhaps if I expanded this account to record my days in all their minute eternities from dawn to dusk, each tiny sensation and flow of idea mirrored and translated into a fluid flow of words. The hissing breath of time rushing by.

“Purple Haze” pounds through the floor now and it is 1.31 a.m. Monday morning and I write write write for the sheer pleasure of writing and wish it could always be so. Too often of late I’ve found my mind in the dread grip of torpor and lethargy, unable or unwilling to pierce the dreary fog of lazy thinking and the crudity of reality-approximating words. I finish each entry for the day or week with the dead weight of frustration and uninspired fatigue inside. I find it genuinely difficult to write about each day as it comes, especially if the day is routine.

I find it hard to separate out the surface fabric of my did-so-and-so-at-such-and-such-a-time life from the richer inner patternings and textures which mark me out as distinct and separate from friends and other people. I half-plan to continue on the typewriter, which I think would be a good idea and would give me a clean start. Read between the lines and see what is there, pierce the surface drudge of descriptive language and finite vocabularies to see what the words mean, see how they fit the intuitions, events, places, and moods I attached them to.

This text must change, must expand, must grow to fit all the things I want it to be, to realise the potential of Words and Mind moving together, so I can become a writer in the truest sense. This requires selfishness, self-motivation, self-remembering, and above all observation. I must look, see and learn at all times, until it becomes a habit, and see in new ways too, not the cobwebbed ways of the past.

Pry open the hidden texts, images, sounds.

Happy memories leave a bitter taste

Robert and Carol came today and stayed into the evening, back from a week in Stakedale with kids from school which they said they enjoyed, save for the drunken excesses of the rest of the staff.

As twilight deepened into night, the five of us talked about the tragic nature of time and life, the existential nature of perception, the grasping ego, and how we return to the places we love time after time because in pursuit of an illusion and an anticipated reality that hardly ever conforms to the ‘actual’ reality. Happy memories spur us on, but we never find what we’re looking for. The best we can hope for is that we stumble across some new moments of insight and enjoyment . . ..

We can’t process the moment of harmony, the moment whose essence escapes us the more we stand back and intellectualise it. For one brief moment we realise and we can see.

There were moments in Calverdale when I felt I couldn’t say exactly what it was I wanted in going back there, but at others—such as the time on Half Stile Hill watching the eclipse, the river Calver beneath us bathed in golden green light—the pulse of certainty was strong and I knew: ‘This is it . . .’ Our fixed mental conceptions of a particular place, event or person victimize us and we find time and time again that the reality of now—the present moment—fails to live up our expectations, and we’re surprised and disappointed.

I’m reminded of the story I read somewhere of a man who went back to the house where he’d grown up and where, as a boy, he’d helped his father plant a seedling. In the intervening years, the seedling had grown vividly in his mind into a mighty tree, yet when he returned to the house he found out that the sapling had been cut down not long after his family had moved. What then was the greater reality for that man? The treeless garden of the present, or the sturdy spreading tree of his mental landscape?

Most people would say the former, yet for the man, the mental tree was real for many years. We’re the incurable victims of our preconceptions and fantasies. We can’t be freed, for these tendencies are linked inextricably with our hopes and desires. Where lies freedom from the cycle of conditioned responses and action . . .? We spend lifetimes pursuing our illusions while here and now reality slips through our fingers even as we see it, feel it, hear it . . ..

Robert and Carol left for Dearnelow at ten-thirty. They’ve booked a fortnight in the caravan in Calverdale for August.

Maze

We walked to Forefield and back along the road which passes our field, a trip of twelve miles altogether over the high moors between Calverdale and Currackdale.

We stopped at the highest point of our journey, nearly 2300 feet above sea level—1400 feet above the valley bottom—and had our sandwiches and coffee. The somber brown moors of Hurstdale Clough, Fair Moss, and Lockwith stretched away beneath bright clouds. There were no sheep and few birds at this height, but the weather was a little warmer than yesterday, so much so that on the outward leg I had to hide my face from the sun for fear of getting burned.

As we made the steep descent into Forefield the round mound of Birk Fell rose up against the sky from the surrounding hills. We paused in Forefield and Mum and Dad had tea at a café while I sat on a bench near the village cross before we set off back. It was a killing climb beneath glowering skies and a few heavy spots of rain, but I raced ahead and waited at our previous stopping place. We got back to the caravan after five and I quite enjoyed the return leg which had me thinking “this is what I traveled 300 miles for,” a thought I’ve tried hard to pin on one particular aspect or moment of this holiday but have so far failed to do so. I can only conclude that the greatest pleasure lies in anticipation of the future, but at the moment that future becomes actuality the essence of the pleasure slips away leaving a disappointed and let down feeling.

When I’m in Watermouth next week this holiday will seem full of meanings and poignancies. I’m a victim of nostalgia and sentimentality and I’ve been brought up to perceive the world in certain ways at certain times: I’m victimised by these perceptions, trapped in a cycle of conditioned thoughts as effectively as if I was a rat in a laboratory maze.

Cul-de-sac

At dinnertime I made one of my infrequent visits to Grant’s in Lodgehill.

Dad dropped me on Easterby Road and I walked up to Grant’s house. The pavements were covered in hailstones.

Thankfully, Grant was in good spirits and fairly cheerful. After listening to music, we went out for a walk and made our way to Woodhead Park. We were caught in a cloudburst of hail and sleet, so we dashed for cover in Hainsworth Hall. The swirling snow blanked everything out and Grant was genuinely anxious about being in the open when thunder crackled overhead. He ran ahead of me in the storm.

Hainsworth Hall seemed a haven of peace, quiet and musty warmth in the midst of that white gale lashing outside the windows. We drifted from gallery to gallery in an almost disinterested fashion. I enjoyed the timeless tranquility of those silent, echoing, wooden halls, as if the outside world wasn’t really there, just a picture behind the windows. We sat for an hour or two downstairs in the cafeteria drinking the acrid tea and coffee and talking before wandering back to his house.

In the evening we went to the Bridge Inn for a drink and walked back to my house to listen to the new Fall session on John Peel. I remembered three of the four tracks from the concert in Gloucester. By nightfall about a quarter of an inch of snow had settled & it covered the roads and gardens in a pure, unbroken white blanket.

Grant too seems to feel he needs to make some change for the new year, some kind of decisive act. (Perhaps these resolutions are made annually by most people and it’s a sign of our failure to exert any self-control over our lives that we never keep to them?). He keeps talking about having his ears pierced, as though this trivial action will symbolically reaffirm his resolution, just as I toy with the idea of shaving my head to strengthen my determination to change.

In both our lives, there’s a need to seize control. I for one feel as though I’m drifting helplessly through life like a rudderless ship, and that one day I’ll open my eyes and I’ll be thirty, and the years will have slipped by and I’ll be as far from real understanding as I ever was.

I’ve suddenly noticed how I don’t have any conception of what the immediate future will bring, whereas before I went to University I felt that just going there would somehow be a catalyst to trigger happiness. This I felt on some level other than that of simple speculation, imagination, a less than concrete sense of the Possible . . .

Those spring months of 1982 were quite happy and certain ones for me. I knew where I was going and things were good. I felt like I was getting glimpses of another plane, a world separate from and yet sensed through and linked with the ordinary one. Kerouac’s novels pointed to this, and in that respect I defend him strenuously. His writing inspired me, fired me, gave me a breath of the tragic nature of the world. We’re all imprisoned within bodies that are subject to disease, decay and ultimate death, and while we can explore immortality with our minds, we know we’ll be dead within a certain number of years.

Kerouac captured this forlorn sense of melancholy for me, although I see now with the ‘wisdom’ and premature cynicism of my age that the man was a failure, was trapped in the emotional cul-de-sac of what I suppose Colin Wilson would call ‘the old existentialism’. He drank himself to death. But still, he touched a chord in my heart. So I went to University and the reality of that wasn’t what I’d anticipated, and now as we enter 1984, I’m “hanging in the air . . . without help, without fundamental beliefs.”

There’s no dream-vision of what the future should bring.

Flux

Bitterly cold. It was the coldness which woke me up and, eventually, forced me out of bed. Everyone was scurrying about, cursing the freezing temperatures and trying to warm themselves on our electric fires.

Quite an idle day; little doing.

In the afternoon, Del took Barry, Pete and I out to in his car for something to eat in Watermouth. He treated us each to a meal of mixed grill and prawn cocktail with ice cream and fruit salad to finish . . . He owes the bank £400 and has been told he must not, on any account, write out another cheque. So between the four of us we totted up a £13 bill and Del wrote out another cheque . . . There was some hassle over the money and the ageing Greek waitress’s servile smiles vanished suddenly. So much for Christmas spirit. More and more I smell the stench of hypocrisy and greed at Christmas. It’s just one huge capitalist con trick.

We left feeling full, piled into Del’s Hillman Imp and he took us on a tour of Knoyldon and Woodside, where he spent the first nine years of his life. Knoyldon’s narrow winding streets and picture book facades look worthy of exploration; there’s a squat ancient church that, says Del, is linked with witchcraft at certain times of the year. It was a journey back through time for him as he was seeing these streets and schools of childhood and infancy for the first time in fourteen years. He got very quiet and sober and we could tell that the nostalgia of the moment had got to him.

As we drove he pointed out features he particularly remembered. “It’s odd how the salient memories are those concerned with death and tragedy” . . . The turn-off where Cilla Black’s niece was knocked down and killed . . . the stretch of road where a hunchback Hell’s Angel and companion collided head on with a car while overtaking a bus . . . the Ryvita factory on the hill in which a man was beheaded on his very first morning of work as he scooped to clean out a machine . . . These incidents, like marks in a book, have mapped out and particularised Del’s memories of his childhood, just as similar such events mark all our lives out as unique and special and individual to us.

There was something magical about that drive, the deepening dusk, the blue and pale world “fluxed in declining light,” something about the succession of street corners and pavements streaming past the car window, unthought of places next to lampposts and shop windows, all terribly alone and separate somehow, fragments of lives forgotten and never mattering to anyone, anywhere. So much desolation and striving. Words are just marks on a page. These things dwarf me. I’m lost for descriptions and none of it can ever be fully conveyed or captured by these cold constructions in ink. I don’t think in words and find it difficult to make them yield their meaning. But whatever their inaccuracy and shortcomings: I have to try, and have tried. These pages bear witness to the effort.

The car journey with its sudden confluence of so much memory and experience left me feeling thoughtful, thinking that maybe Nietszche is right and that history is one long retreat into nihilism, into unbelief and into blind struggle, that maybe we have to save ourselves from these numbing conclusions and useless thinking, but not by becoming blind again but by some other step maybe, into acceptance. But for me right now these are just so many words, and I feel them in the abstract if I feel them at all. One day perhaps . . ?

Pete wonders if when we’re old we’ll look back and hate ourselves because of how little we achieve. Maybe we’ll wake up in our late-‘40s, married with children and a home maybe, a lifetime of memories behind us . . . As soon as we got back Lee was walking up the road to greet us, in unrestrained and festive mood, and I plunged back into the present.

We played stud poker (for money) most of the evening and Barry and I ended the game heavily in debt, but were genially forgiven. Late we embarked on another reckless robbery attempt. We drove through steady rain to a boarded up house on Wickboure Road being used as a storehouse for Debenhams. While Del and I acted as look-outs, Lee and Barry whittled away at the putty around one of the windows with a penknife, getting most of the glass out but finding a wooden board beyond that was too much of a match, so we gave up.

Everest model 90

At around midnight last night, two half-expected visitors, John Turney and Derek Caraway, descended on us whirlwind-like, the former fresh from a few days in Amsterdam, the latter just escaped from stagnation in Milton Keynes.

“First thing he did when he got to Holland,” says Del of John, “was go with a prostitute.” Replies a grinning John, “I wanted a woman with a bit of experience . . .” Their live-wire energy/parody/piss-taking routines threaten the easy torpour we’ve existed in since they were here last. I hope they find a place soon; I can’t stand the constant hints, nudges, innuendo and references to sex and my lack of it. With playful malice, Trevor said I was conning he and Del about the date of Mo’s upcoming birthday party “because he doesn’t want us to talk to Her” (emphasis on this last word). He just doesn’t care. But how I do.

Stu went ‘home’ at midnight and at two-thirty a.m, he and Gareth turned up with bagfuls of work and we stayed up all night. I finished Corregidora at six; it’s a hard, uncomfortable book to read. I slept until eight-thirty while Gareth and Stu worked and when they left shortly after nine, Del gave me a lift into the University.

I met Shawn Bennett and we had a couple of drinks up at The Town & Gown until I had to leave to go to my tutorial at 2.45. On the way I bumped into Lindsey & arranged to meet her and Susie in the cafeteria of the library after my tutorial ended.

In the library coffee bar Susie and I talked about the gradual but inexorable rift that develops between one-time friends who don’t spend time together anymore. Shelley is becoming a part of my past now, a figure from my history, and so it is with Penny, Rowan and Shawn too to a certain extent, Alex Margolis most of all, . . .

As we waited in the Cellar for our food to be served, I looked across at Lindsey and for one brief instant, all the feeling and emotion I used to have for her came welling back to the surface. I could’ve kissed her, held her right there; I loved everything about her . . . but I can’t allow myself to be drawn back into another hopeless, helpless situation. I have to remember the past and how I behaved. I just want to be as good a friend to her as I can be.

Talking to her was like banging my head against a brick-wall so I left her and Susie drinking, went to the library, met up with Pete and Mo (Pete drained and pale from speed), and came home.

Lee came round mid-evening with a £5 typewriter (Everest Model 90 – "Made in Italy”) that he’d picked up from a charity shop and repaired. It’s a real bargain, and types perfectly. I typed a letter to my bank manager. I received a firm but polite letter today about my overdraft. Lee told me that he, Michael and Ian had gone back to the crypt of the demolished church in Smith Square and found an opened coffin.

He stayed the night.

How hard it is to really know anyone in this life

What have I done today? Very little.

I got up at two and sat about idly, winding Pete up most of the day. . . . I’ve done no reading lately and I’ve quite let work and other things slip. I started off the term well but things have deteriorated.

I’ve got to read the 200-odd pages of Hermsprong for tomorrow at eleven a.m., but it’s nearly half-ten already and I’m only on page 26 and so I may have to stay up all night.

Barry has gone to Masquerades by himself. Earlier today he went round to see the girl he met at the Cellar and she and her friends are going to the club tonight too, so Barry once again sets out with raised hopes. Ade returned today to tell us his “love life is just about going again”; he’s in Barry’s room listening to records.

I keep pretending both to myself and to others that at the end of the year I’m going to shave my head and give up all drugs and drink, but I should realise that this would require more mental resolution and effort than I’m capable of . . . Why would I want to do this?. . .

It’s not important.

I still can’t decide about America—I wish I could make up my mind. I can’t even answer this simple question, so what hope for me? Decisions! Current financial position: £104 overdrawn . . . I look at Grant’s poems and they make me think how hard it is to really know anyone in this life.

This diary says so little. No doubt there are innumerable thoughts and passing shades of mood that have touched me and marked the last two days, but my words have such limited power against the great yawning gulfs of time they strive to combat. One day when I read these words again I’ll curse my lack of skill at fleshing out these transitory moments. What’s clear now won’t be when the surrounding chaff of living and peripheral thoughts have been swallowed up by the years.

This narrative is dull and uninspired because I’m a bit drunk on the whisky Mo brought back from London as her payment towards rent.

The names of the dead

I met Lee in Easterby mid-morning and we took the bus into Whincliffe. Lee had seen some black army fatigues for sale at a militaria and army surplus shop there for £6.50. On the bus, Lee told me that before he left his Mum was crying as she remembered him as a “pink baby” . . . “Now you look grey . . . like a corpse,” she'd said, tearfully.

In Whincliffe we caught the 88 bus to Cartbeck and then walked. We passed street after street of ornate red brick Victorian terraces, countless shabby second-hand electrical and junk shops, and the occasional late-Victorian church, whose spires soar everywhere above the chimney tops. Eventually we reached the shop, but we were out of luck. “Come back tomorrow,” said the middle-aged mother of the owner. “He’s gone to get some new stuff in.” The shop was a treasure trove of post-WW2 military clothing and hardware: a Nazi flag (genuine I was assured) was on sale for £25.00. Tacked to the ceiling was an enormous hammer and sickle flag alongside the stars and stripes.

We walked back via the overgrown and neglected Ivywood Cemetery, which was filled with black tombstones. We wandered through the long grass and sturdy trees, reading morbid Victorian verses on the stones. Lee found a glue sniffing hang-out—an empty can of lighter fuel and evidence of a fire between two gravestones. We were puzzled by four gravestones inscribed on either side with a name, date of death and age: it contained seventy four names altogether. The occupants of the graves had all died in February and March 1908. Was it an epidemic, or just poor people who couldn’t afford separate tombstones? When I asked Dad later he seemed to think perhaps it was a ‘flu epidemic.

Soon we found dozens more, containing hundreds of names, the dates of death all ranging from 1914-18, 1920 and 1923-24, so perhaps they were all ‘flu victims who had had to be buried together, and apart from everyone else. As we walked to the exit, Lee found some mushrooms which he thought were psylocibin, and we saw two hippies obviously scouring the ground nearby for the same. We ate one each and picked a few more but threw them away because we couldn’t be sure, and we didn’t want to be poisoned.

It’s now twenty-five minutes past midnight and I’m sitting at the dinner table. Mum and Dad are long since in bed. All is quiet save for the tick-tick-tick of the clock & the hum of the ‘fridge in the kitchen. It’s been an odd weekend. I’m planning on writing to Claire before I sleep, but tiredness might foil me. I now want to see her before I go away—but then I remember how wooden and awkward I am when I’m with her.

I’m back at square one. “Perhaps we could go somewhere?” Perhaps we could, Claire. . . .

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. . . .

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.

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.”

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.

Cloud of unknowing

I had another poor night and woke up amid soaking sheets. I felt clammy and thoroughly out of sorts.

Everyone else was up making sandwiches, packing flasks and preparing for our hike. We set off in the cars to Gilsey and parked near the cottage where we stayed last time. Everything had stayed as it was; it's as if this place will endure forever.

We took the track up the eastern side of Gilsey Beck and sweated through bracken-choked woodland until we came out at an area where the beck widens and is bordered by wide grassy meadows at either side. Here, the grey refuse from lead mining is piled into small slag heaps. We stopped for a little while before pushing onward up the Beck. The lethargy of the previous day still seemed to dog me, weighing down my feet and deadening my responses to everything.

Finally we reached the ruined shell of an old lead mining office and Andrew took my photograph, just like 1980 when we were last here: I posed again in an identical stance, leaning against the same wall like before. Inside the structure, weathered carvings were scored into the stones, the dates and initials of people long forgotten. Across the narrow steep valley we could see another, more complete ruin staring back with empty windows.

We rested at the head of Gilsey Beck and ate our sandwiches. While everyone else went off up another little valley which led off into the hills, I fell asleep on the grass, but soon began to feel uncomfortable in the hot sun. I was disturbed a few times by inquisitive sheep.

An old grizzled shepherd descending from the hill tops with his white panting dog talked to us about his memories, as a six-year old, of this “fine, wild country.” Mum told him about our deer sighting and he wondered if perhaps it had escaped from a deer herd at Steadbeck Lodge: "I've only seen two my whole life.” He bade us goodbye and limped off up the track behind us with his dog.

It was a long wearying tramp back along the opposite side of the Beck. We followed the dusty straight track as turned up above Gilsey, and plunged down into the village on aching feet. We got back to the caravan at about four.

The evening was sunny, marked by a typical piece of Robert philosophizing and a silly argument between Mum and Dad after Dad tipped the cooking oil away. He felt humiliated in front of us all and sulked off on his own down the road while Mum sat sleepily in the caravan with a long face.

After the plates had been cleared away we got into a general discussion. Robert asserted that death gives life meaning and that it’s only because we lose sight of the inevitability of aging and mortality that we adopt shallow, transient attitudes. “Death could come next week or next month; people don’t appreciate that.” He pointed me out as a perfect example of this thoughtless attitude with my lounging and lethargy—(Robert:“I do it too!”)—and I felt my face colouring and heat springing into my cheeks.

But Robert doesn’t know how my thoughts go. I acknowledge these facts which condemn us all. For a moment too an old familiar sensation caught hold of me, a feeling of helpless not knowing, a sort of sudden desperate realisation that I’m not sure of anything and really am ‘all at sea’ as far as certainties are concerned. It’s a feeling I really didn’t expect to experience here. But what's the use of talking like this when I give myself up to sloth so consistently, so willingly?

Andrew and I wandered off after this, and we stood in the corner of the field gazing across at the adjacent mound. “I hate the mysticism and sentimentality attached to these places,” said Andrew quietly. Poor old practical Andrew. To him it's all just fields and trees and moors, which in a way I suppose it is, and nothing else. I can see why he says what he says, but I also appreciate the mystery of this place.

We went for a walk up the Forefield-Stonesdale Road, in the direction of Forefield. It was a soft evening, a hint of sun tingeing the stone walls, and Andrew had to go back because he’d forgotten his camera, so I stood and waited for him, leaning on a gate gazing across a field. As I did so, an old wellington boot-clad baggy-suited figure came clumping down the road towards me, and as I gave him a glance he turned, staring at me with hostile eccentric eyes.

When Andrew came back we climbed up and up, getting quite good views over towards Sleightshaw and the dark silhouette of the moor beyond. He took a few photos of the dark seething clouds rolling in before we had to sprint down the road amid a terrific downpour.

Back in the caravan we huddled in dim fluctuating gas light. Outside the sky echoed and shook to the thunder: in the enclosed valley, the reports of the thunder were much shorter and more concentrated Rob and Carol set out in the torrential rain for a walk along Blea Gate but we stayed behind watching the lightning fork all around. Mum, as usual, began to get worried at Rob and Carol’s absence, but after an hour or so they returned having just seen a family of deer quite near the caravan.

Robert was full of the “eeriness” of the area.

A dewdrop, a bubble, a dream

Robert strikes me as being consistently sad and down at heart. Maybe this melancholic streak (which he’s inherited from Dad) accords with Buddhism’s acknowledgement of mortality and destiny in death. I have it too but it’s often overridden by the everyday joys of youth. It’ll emerge in time I suppose, abiding and permanent.

I’m scared of getting old. My life now is full of zap (no matter be it bad zap, still zap all the same) and I don’t want to lose the great sweeping tides of feeling and end up middle-aged in mind and outlook. As Carol and I listened to Roxy Music’s first album today, she told me that inside she feels just the same as she did in 1972 when she was 18. Dad too has often said that inside he feels just like he did when he was my age. I can’t believe I’m almost nineteen. It doesn’t seem so long ago since I was the kid who regarded nineteen-year olds as adults.

Now I'm part of that world too.

I planned on going back to Egley, but just as I was shoveling down  food so I could catch the last bus, Mum and Dad showed up, fresh from Badon. They had a good time and visited Avebury, Silbury Hill, Castle Coombe etc. Andrew got a 2.1 degree, much higher than the 3 he’d expected.

It was a fine evening, so Mum, Dad and I walked down through Saxton village. The sky was clear, the green peaceful tree-topped hills were bathed in warm light, a scene marred only by the raw scars that mark the new bypass that has cut straight across the little path that used to lead up past the farm and into the grass and woodland beyond. We paused at the pub for a pint, overshadowed by cool green trees, before continuing on past the village and out along the road towards the roundabout.

Mum picked wild daisies and I ribbed her by telling her that she was committing a crime. This semi-jocular banter continued all evening.