Thoughts on getting old

Last night Gareth, Stu and I set off for the Phoenix cinema to see Andy Warhol’s Bad and Lindsay Anderson’s Britannia Hospital. Graeme caught up with us before we'd reached the train station. We had a couple of drinks in two pubs near the station and for a moment even contemplated stealing a taxi as it stood, door open and engine running while the driver nipped inside, but we dithered too long and he came back out.

The films were quite good and I was glad we’d gone to see them. Bad was about an agency run by a middle-aged lady that dealt in revenge and was especially sick (mutilations, pet-murder, etc.), but it was all done in a blackly comic and somehow slightly fantastic way.

It was well past 3 a.m. when the films ended and we got a taxi back to campus. Lindsey, Shelley and Rowan were still up; Barry was asleep on Shelley’s bed. Rowan had taken speed and was writing, writing in her room her “thoughts on getting old.” She'd written seven sides by the time I eventually went to bed at five. Right before I did, Tim’s friend Stefan went belting up the corridor to the fag machine and, not able to stop in time, plunged headfirst through the window at the end. After standing up and brushing glass from his clothes he wandered away bewildered but unhurt.

I awoke in the afternoon to bright skies and cheerful sun. I got another letter from Grant, written as usual on a sheet torn out from a calendar. He sounds pissed off with work and the whole Easterby scene. I went round to give Pete his letters, knocked, and blundered in to find, to my excruciating embarrassment, Mo in bed and Pete washing at the sink. I fumbled an apology and fled.

We had the usual game of football up at the airhall late in the afternoon; I spent most of the match in goal and our side won 11-6.

The dialectic of sex

I went to bed at 7 last night, woke up again at midnight and read sixty more pages of Moby Dick until very late into the night. It was past midday when I got up. Tried to carry on reading my book but lounged about doing little instead.

Penny and Lindsey don’t want to come on the pub crawls because they are “male-dominated” and “sexist.” We were quite amazed at this, for this had never entered our heads and it spawned a heated discussion: “By saying this they’re the sexist ones” . . . “we invite them because they're our friends” . . . “we want them to come” . . . “by going off and not telling us where or when they’re going, they’re being anti-social” etc., etc. Penny overheard the above and “didn’t think it was very funny.”

Fuck off then

We had a pretty disappointing evening out in Watermouth last night. We'd intended going to see Steel Pulse; started out at the Broadway Bar and we were just ordering drinks when Shelley strolled in with new haircut and peroxide job. We drank cheap ‘Happy Time’ cocktails. I only had two but Stu had six-or-seven and we gossiped about people, especially Penny’s semi-serious attraction to Stu and her giggly talk thereof. Much amusement as Shelley told us about Graeme asking Penny out.

We finally made it down to the sea front and the The Oasis but all the doors were locked and it was dark: we soon found out that the concert had been canceled, so feeling disappointed we went across the road to an amusement arcade and whiled away some time, much to Shelley’s bored annoyance.

Got back to Wollstonecraft late to more corridor scenes and ‘pranks.’ Gareth and Barry sprayed some random bloke with the fire hose as he walked up to Biko’s. Security was called and we fled to our rooms and hid, stifling laughter. The wronged party soon came looking for us wielding a snooker cue and later we saw him with two friends peering up at us as we hid in my room. Big laughs!

I only managed thirty more pages of Moby Dick and I went to go to bed at 5.30 a.m. just as Stu, Barry and Shelley were about to do some speed. Stu was in a talkative, argumentative mood.

Got up at ten and lazed about until my seminar at two. I was a bit worried because I’d only read a sixth of the novel but I had nothing to worry about, because for most of the two-plus hours, we sat silently as Miriam H. talked and talked. I want to finish Moby Dick and get back on track as far as work is concerned (Cooper, Hawthorne, Poe, readings for my Black Americans Contextual, my own never embarked-on reading lists, etc.).

I’m going to bed early tonight for want of something better to do. But what Rowan said is true; if I don’t bother to make an effort then people will just start saying “fuck off then” and leave me to my fate.

An everlasting itch

Last night Stu and I went halves on a gramme of speed we bought from Pete for £12, which is pretty cheap.

All day I’ve tried to read Moby Dick and although I’m quite enjoying it, I’m finding it slow going. I’ve read about a hundred pages so far.

Ought and isn't

I had a pretty disturbing dream that Nanna P. died and I was upset, doubly so because I hadn’t kept in touch . . . My subconscious reminds me to write. . . . It's a bit unsettling.

I got up at eleven and helped Pete carry old clothes down to the mini-market. He set up a stall and made about £15 by the end of the day. I bought another Coltrane album at the market (Live At Birdland, 1963); he's one of my favourites at the moment, even though Penny condemns his music as “vile” and Barry says it’s all a “big con.”

It was a sunny enticing day with hints of spring in the air. The woods and fields climbing away beyond Rousseau towards Gaunt’s Hill looked so promising I wanted to go for a walk.

I got a superb letter from Dad after quite a long silence: it had me in fits of laughter, especially his descriptions of a ridiculously inane conversation with Uncle George. In my last letter to Dad I said that, in a way, I envy Robert his Buddhist practice. He writes: “Rob travels a stony path just now, and while his Buddhism eases his doubts, he still ‘cries out in the wilderness’ and at times I feel desperately sorry for him.” Robert's hinting that he might shave his head: I just can’t imagine him bald, but it's a sign he's now getting very serious about it. He even missed Saturday’s home game against Arkthorpe to visit the Monastery in Cumbria.

Dad mentions his autobiographical saga has found vitality again after a bad patch. Things seem OK on the home front.

I read Moby Dick today: so far I've got through about fifty pages. A lazy and bored atmosphere has settled down on Wollstonecraft. Lindsey's in quite a lot of trouble with her tutors over the tutorials she’s missed and all the work she hasn’t done, and she showed me the two ominous-looking notes she’s received warning her not to miss another tutorial (“it will not be tolerable”) and requesting she meet with her personal tutor (“as a matter of urgency”). She’s worried.

There's so much to say here in these pages: about the things I mention in my letters, about thoughts triggered by words I’ve read, about word associations, lines and phrases. I should note them down, for my own future reference. So much ought to be and isn’t. . . .

I've been thinking more about history and its role in determining individual consciousness, actions, ideas etc., and I wonder if perhaps history determines the fates of some individual to a greater extent that with others. If Hitler hadn’t been born then the Weimar Republic would’ve spawned another tyrant, but is that the case with Helen Vaughan or Emily Dickinson? (Did Emily Dickinson get her "immortality because of an experience, her own experience"? not the ultimate product of a system")?