Cambridge (2).

Little city glowing in the heat-haze next to the river.

Tight streets spitting out grumbling, lost souls in the middle of nowhere. The entropy of the afternoon.

Great pillars of learning drew veils over themselves - not today - smirking in the comfort of age from high over our heads.

Thirsty for the shade of noontime trees, whose limbs tangled feebly with the sun's density.

Foetal, wrapped around and around yourself, thumb quietly pushed into mouth: frivolous sounds are admonished - as with monks.

Here is where the modern world cannot penetrate - yet the 21st century is assimilated without blinking.

Cambridge (1)

• allus wuk ard wen tha at school] said my father] enough times during my adolescence for me to be able to regulate the beating of my heart to the utterances of his syllables
• all-us-wuk-ard-wen-tha-at-school[ thump thump[ breathe in[ breathe out[ all-us-wuk-ard
• i could regulate my very life to his metronomic words but they never had any value as an imperative> being a teenager i exercised my right to ignore them
• his advice swam weakly around my head when i shut the fucking geography teacher in the store cupboard and turned the lock] and when i put the drawing pin on the french teacher?s chair and when i went up to school on a saturday night to put dog shit through the head of year?s office letter box> how d?you like that] laughing until i was almost sick
• i didn?t wuk ard> in fact i did next to nothing] scraping four gcses and more/or/less condemning myself to a lifetime of hand/to/mouth existence
  
• my father was livid> thou art a bluddy disgrace> tha ant listened to owt a teld thi] his face ashen with disgust and rage
• to me then> a working class lad frum tarn with modest/tending/towards/mediocre qualifications> cambridge was always a distant ambition> the shining castle on the hill> the fruited plain of the hymn
• i woke up a bit when i was 16^but by then it was probably too late>i never got within a million miles>
• so imagine how i felt when i visited cambridge for the first time in my life> blue fish and i both with the same awesome sense of failure chilling us> neither of us are fucking stupid love] this could?ve been us
• i failed
  

Strangers.

A stranger on a train, although I was sure I'd seen her somewhere before.

She was adamant, though - you've never met me in your life. We just happen to have co-incided. This day and this train have thrown us together like the two distinct halves of the unborn universe, and we'll spring apart again once the energy of our collision has dissipated.

I soon learned she was an Australian woman, though I never thought to ask her what business she had here on this foreshortened island - I was too busy trying to bring myself around to her way of thinking to pose many questions.

If we'd never seen each other before, then perhaps she was the remnants of any number of dreams whose ashes I had swept into a single pile and tried to forget about; the narrative long since broken, and existing more sharply at the boundary between wake and sleep.

I saw her again on two other occasions. The first time, I poked my tongue out at her and was so busy concentrating on doing so that I almost fell over my own feet. The second time, she was with a man, who was wheeling along a large piece of luggage.

I sit in confusion, asking why my existence unfolds like a scene from 'The Orange Girl' - eyes ever-peeled, and then the trail which had gone cold flares up briefly, perpetuating another breathlessly angry chase pertaining towards nothing at all.

Not oranges but a large piece of green luggage - the signposts of a life; books, perfume, clothing. Only the most important signifiers are carried. Would that I could have spilled out its contents in the middle of the street and constructed a vision of her.

Seven.

Seven chocolate muffins in a line on the table before us: one for Bluefish, one for myself, and five that were a figment of my imagination.

In asking myself how the snake of muffins moves and propagates as the train passes, it was then that I gained an insight into what numbers really mean, and how scientific theories live and die.

I wondered whether the five make-believe muffins were part of the 'seven-ness' of the group, or whether I should dismiss them as arbitrary artifacts of an over-active mind and hungry stomach.

Should a man impose any order at all on a group of (some tangible and some not) muffins?

If I had two tangible chocolate muffins and five imaginary bananas, is the 'seven-ness' of the group of muffins broken forever?

And what of the five muffins that exist in my head? They do not provide sustenance, and I am not permitted to feed them to Bluefish, but does that mean they can never be legitimate objects of investigation?

It depends on your view of what constitutes a number, and where they come from. I have been terribly lazy in not thinking about such matters for most of the duration of my life.

If the equations (terribly complicated ones) say that the collision of two imaginary chocolate muffins on a train results in the emission of a single tangible muffin with Bluefish's name on it, then this is a legitimate matter for scientific investigation.

If the experiment fails, then we conclude that our exotic branch of number-manipulation must either be cast aside forever, or taken away for significant surgery to be performed upon it.

If the experiment is a valid one, and Bluefish can generate real treats for herself by manipulating my thiought processes; and I realise this with the force of my imagination, then truly can we say that the human brain has dominion over nature.

Shame.

Tonight the British National Party won its first-ever seat in the European Parliament* - thanks in no small part to people from the place I call my own.

I know little about the European Parliament, but I am nevertheless ashamed that the far right claimed one of the six seats in the Yorkshire and Humber region, with voters in my own Barnsley increasing the BNP vote by nine per cent compared to the last election.

It strikes me that there are ways to do politics, but always within accepted parameters: tax-and-spend, or cut to the bone? Big state or small? Integration with Europe or not? Devolution or not? but politics is not science. That is, even when there are revolutions, our understanding of the world is not turned on its head forever. Politicians, even those who operate the buttons of power, are not on the shoulders of giants in the same manner that Stephen Hawking stands on the shoulders of Isaac Newton, and somebody yet to come will one day stand on the shoulders of Hawking.

If science has its crises which lead to dominant paradigms being overthrown, then politics too has its moments of tension and conflict - but when they are finished, the process continues in much the same way as it did before. A new leader, perhaps, with a fresh fiscal policy or a desire to decrease civil liberties, but in the lives of ordinary people, politicians nevertheless operate very much in the background.

In the last hours, however, places like Barnsley have sown the seeds of a dangerous anti-politics, where manifesto and debate are replaced by a series of binary opposites: British good, non-British bad; white good, non-white bad. The political process ceases to float quietly in the distance, but instead kicks the door down in the early hours and dishes out a beating based on skin colour or nationality.

Barnsley has nodded its head to the politics of fear, loathing and intimidation. I visited there over the weekend, and, as I walked up the quiet street leading from the train station, I saw for myself the British National Party's message, adhered to the window of a house: People like you vote BNP.

People like you. It's a simple message, tapping into the common bond which unites us all, the umbrella under which we each carry out our daily struggles. People like you in towns like Barnsley turn the clock back and vote for the machine of terror and hatred to chew up and spit out everything else which doesn't conform to a specific list of parameters.

And its teeth are sharpened with unemployment, with the mass hysteria over members of parliament and their expenses, with the misery of a wet summer. People like you vote to lash out blindly, to apportion blame where there is none, to endorse racism, and to pull the cord from a town's life support machine.

This isn't politics - it's intimidation. And I can't believe so many of you fell for it. Oh, Barnsley - what have you done?

*The BNP later won their second seat, again in a less-than-affluent northern area.

Haystack.

Crises of confidence have been arriving like waves recently; purging everything I hold dear with their purity and perfect logic.

I have endured one for each of the last three nights, a paralysis which lasts for a few seconds, and the swallowing back of every negative thought that my mind so expertly conjures.

During one such episode of self-assault, I explained to Bluefish that I sometimes wish she could pick apart the haystack, and prove to me decisively that the needle does not exist.

She arrives in England in three days, after almost six months of waiting. I won't hold her to her promise of teasing apart all the hay in my brain - it fills the cavity of my skull - for she would very quickly be exhausted. It is her imminent arrival which causes the unceasing questioning.

I've been here before, but the situation was reversed. Flying to South Africa with its garbled language and broiling weather and vast distances for the sake of love. Seventeen hours the first time and ten the next. It was less than two years ago but nevertheless seems like a distant, impossible dream which recoils from me when I reach out to touch it.

I do not wish for Bluefish's England to be the same truncated, ungraspable memory. Think of just about the furthest place you can travel to from here - it makes Johannesburg International Airport look like a walk to the shops - and that's where she's coming from, to see me and me alone.

A redeeming feature I must be, for there is little else to hold her interest, save for the sun drying the rain, and the rain repudiating the sun. No strange language to fascinate and appal, and any natural beauty drowning in the river of human shit.

This is England, my darling. I long to dismantle its haystack and present you with the needles instead of the wisps, but you might need to do that yourself. And this is me: go to work, write a bit, do a bit of studying, worry, complain. I hope that, together, the country and the man are enough so that, when you return home, it is only a temporary hiatus before you come back to your surrogate nation and my perplexing, intense love.

England.

Only in England:

• would high-profile members of the government and opposition parties be forced to resign from their positions because of a duck island and a moat;
• would one of the fastest-growing employment sectors be in government-funded Job Centres, helping the unemployed to find work. (The Russians used to hire men to put guns together, knowing full well that nine out of ten of the completed weapons would malfunction. Better to assemble broken guns than do nothing at all. Better to have a job telling others that there's no work, than not to work at all.)
• would many times more people cast their vote at the denouement of a television talent competition than will vote in the forthcoming elections;
• can we reduce politics itself to the aforementioned talent show. How many women has he slept with? Can he lie convincingly? What on earth is he thinking wearing such a disgustingly-coloured tie? Vote for the other guy.
• do we use cricket as a political weapon. That Mugabe had better stop killing rival politicians, or we'll bloody well not send a team to Bulawayo. That'll teach him!
• do we truly expect eviscerated political parties to disappear off the face of the planet. The few remaining MPs with core Labour values are huddling together in the cold, asking themselves if they'll ever come anywhere near forming a government again.
  
• are we able to turn atheism into a form of religious thought, complete with its own tenets.
• do we say 'only in England,' and believe that our biases and uncritical thinking divorces us from the rest of humanity.