Tins.

One of the abiding memories of my childhood concerns my grandmother, and a very specific method of mischief that I would mete out to her on a regular basis.

Gran had cupboards stacked high with tinned food - everything from peaches to salmon to dog meat, all arrayed in neat piles in a cupboard close to ground level, where little hands plotting no end of misery could do their worst.

I would delightedly strip the labels from every tin I could reach, condemning the poor woman to a meal of custard with luncheon meat, or cherries in gravy.

'Do you realise what you did to me on Tuesday, love? Fruit cocktail, and the jelly that lines the inside of pork pies! Think of your poor old gran having to eat that!' Such revelations caused me to begin to cry - but with laughter.

Not once do I recall ever being admonished as I indulged her taste for combining food in unusual ways. I was instead confronted with a calm tolerance derived from a love which endures.

It was some 24 or 25 years ago when I discovered how fascinating a pastime it was to rob tinned food of its identity. My grandmother is still around, aged 87, and on her better days reminds me of the incidents I describe above.

I wish she could have more better days. My dominant emotion when I see her is: "If one person I can think of didn't deserve to be thus reduced, it is you."

On the occasions she recognises me (they correlate significantly with the occasions when she correctly takes the rainbow of prescribed pills) I keep the conversation light - you have no idea, gran, how upset I was when the cat woke me up at 5am the other morning, demanding breakfast! I oughtta make a pair of gloves out of him! Do you want to go racing down the corridor in your wheelchair? I can give you a push if you like, and see where you end up? She laughs, and the lady of 20 or more years ago is momentarily recovered.

You truly didn't deserve to be thus reduced. I can't even find the words - 'reduced' makes you sound like you're somehow a non-person - it's as flattering as the term 'invalid.' Another way of looking at it is that you are not reduced, but shifted - the world I inhabit is one you have grown tired of, and I can only expect you to return some of the time, and only on your terms.

The places you spend most of your time are alien and inacessible to me, but you can and do report back. You went to church four times on the same day last week, and also to the market, without so much as leaving your room. The church, apparently, was bloody awful, and you aren't going back there any time soon.

Nobody can invalidate the truth and complexity of those experiences. They are not the offspring of age, or illness - they are real, and we treat them as such. Tell me about the market? Was it busy? Did you buy anything nice? So it proceeds - broken pieces of experience rain down, and I listen intently. What a lousy church! You're probably better going to the one down the street next time....

Association.

I have been thinking about my ex-girlfriend a lot over the past couple of days.

There are two ways in which I can contemplate something - either actively, or inadvertently. When I think of something actively, it takes the form of a statement where I ascertain: "This is what we did," or "this is the part of the disagreement that we were unable to resolve."

Inadvertent contemplation is different. Like a dream, it takes its cue from clever associations that need to be worked out before their meaning can be fully derived.

A couple of facts need to be made apparent before I go on. The former partner to whom I refer first dropped into my life in May 2006. At that point she was living in Huddersfield, a town in northern England.
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It occurred to me a few hours ago that I'd not heard a particular piece of music for some time, a piece connected to the football club I support. It's not a problem, though - I know exactly where to go on the internet to find it.

I now direct you towards the following URL. Turn the sound down if you don't want to wake the neighbourhood!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnHHFWfpoYQ

The football match referred to in the above link took place in Huddersfield, in May 2006. At that point, my life revolved around the place - visiting my South African girl, and desperately trying to source tickets for the away section at the stadium.

This is inadvertent, or unthinking, thinking. My mind is for whatever reason directing itself back to May 2006, but it is not content to uncloak itself and produce a stream of statements to be ascertained. Instead, it pretends to divert itself from the process of conscious thought, only to complete the circularity with a reference to a two-year-old video on the internet.

Dreams.

There is a discontinuity that exists between the sleep-state and the waking state.

That is: a dream can appear to be real. It is as though the sequence of images are taking place not behind the eyelids of the sleeper, but in front. An analogy would be of a television programme breaking out of the screen, and the characters continuing their lives in your own home.

I speak of a discontinuity because, upon waking, I sometimes feel relief that I had 'only' been dreaming. No matter how realistic or terrible the images, I can no longer be pursued once my eyes snap open. Likewise, I can turn the television off, over, or leave it on, for there is a boundary that the people who live inside it cannot cross.

It is always the case that the inhabitants of the television can never cross their particular boundary. Is it not always strictly true, though, that dream-images cannot pass from their dimension into one more familiar. More succinctly, images, ideas or suggestions can pass, but their effects on the non-sleeping mind are short-lived, or subtle.
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I woke up on Friday morning convinced that I was screaming.

Certainly, in the dream that shook me from my torpor, I was screaming. Perhaps my mouth was open and nothing came out. I could hear myself, though - a loud emission of terror.

I had arranged it so that I could come out of my front door, take a couple of steps, and alight in an area of south London that I visited in April.

An acquaintance I have seen only fleetingly in the past decade or fifteen years accompanied me. Open the door in Yorkshire, step through it, and there's south London.

Despite this, an odd realisation struck us. Shit - it's a quarter to eleven! We have be in London for three at the very latest! If we don't get that next train, we'll never make it in time! The train then proceeded to pass through the front door, and arrive instantaneously at its destination.

All the while, the song Karma Chameleon played in the background.

I then woke up silently screaming. For a good five or ten seconds, the sleep-state persisted, tottering and fading away in such an alien environment. Hours later, I find myself whistling as the words 'you come and go....' reverberate through my mind.

Bridge.

I feel that a relationship is the yoking together of two people who had previously floated about independently.

Alternatively, it is the building of a bridge between the same two people. Neither individual has ownership of the bridge, and it is the task of both parties to prevent it from falling into disrepair, or from collapsing entirely.

Once it collapses, communication becomes impossible, and one of two outcomes occurs. The first is the realisation that we no longer have anything to talk about, resulting in immediate and extensive reparation to our bridge.

The second is the realisation that we need to talk - because we are aware that we are no longer feeling as we should - but when we try to enter dialogue, one person or the other is not listening. Dialogue is thus reduced to monologue. When I get better conversation from myself than I do from others, it's time to shed that other.

I bring to mind now the parents of an ex-girlfriend, one I was with some four or five years ago.

Their marriage had clocked up almost thirty years, and their relationship bridge had long since crumbled into its constituents. Conversation consisted of details of their respective working days, thereafter lulling into silence.

What, then, persists once silence dominates? Is it possible that a relationship can hang together on a series of non-verbal cues?

I imagine a situation where my partner finds me repellent, with the exception of one solitary gesture: say, the way I adjust my glasses when they fall down my nose. For my partner, that movement brings about a feeling of delight, passion, and love.

Can the weight of that delight, passion and love negate the loathing and pity apparent at all other times? I'll try to answer that question later....

Unwell.

The photograph in the last blog entry is, unsurprisingly, not actually of me arguing with a member of the paparazzi whilst drunk.

It was - less excitingly - a picture taken whilst I suffered with a virus. The similarities between the drunk me and the virus-riddled me are numerous!

I realised I had been inflicted with it last Saturday night when walking back from work. Ordinary objects of nature took on new forms and characteristics: tree stumps were dancing, or were they waving their arms helplessly as they burned in a fire that I couldn't see?

A metal bridge loomed in the distance, resembling a sad, green mouth in a child's drawing. Or was it a monocoloured rainbow, hung there by man?

When sleep came, it was brief and filled with images of destruction and fatalities that caused my body to jerk and thereafter wake up with a thumping heart.

The body that jerks and the body that wakes up are one and the same, but illness seems to cut the cord which connects the two. It wasn't me dreaming such terrible things, so why have I just been dragged away from sleep - again?

Sleep and virii serve to confuse - dreams are more real than the waking which follows them: a man sweating and cursing on top of a bed. I think I prefer it that way.

Celebrity.

NOGGA: I'LL RIP YOUR F*****G THROAT OUT, YOU C***!

THIS is the shocking photograph of foul-mouthed logistics star Paul Nogomet lunging at a Celeb! snapper.

Troubled route man Nogga, 29, lost his cool when our photogapher caught him in a tender embrace with a mystery blonde.

The £22,000-per-year ace hit glitzy Barnsley to celebrate Genericelectricretailer bosses swelling his pay packet by a whopping two per cent as they fight to keep hold of him.


Dressed in a shapless red t-shirt, Nogomet flung himself at Reg Lightwriter as he emerged from the exclusive Sheath! nightspot.


Slurring his speech, Nogga demanded that Lightwriter hand over incriminating film 'before I rip your f*****g throat out, you c***.'


This morning, concerned friends of the route-planner rallied around him. His agent Roger d'Agent said: "I can confirm that there was an incident on the forecourt of Sheath! nightclub involving my client and a photographer.


"Paul was provoked, and he was standing up for himself. He wanted to have a few drinks in his home town with a female friend. As ever, though, the Press can't leave him alone."


South Yorkshire police confirmed they had received a complaint from a 47-year-old professional photographer.

Loneliness.

The lonely people in the world can be split more-or-less into three distinct categories:

• those who accept their fate and seek not to change it;
• those who seek to change it and cast off the label forever;
• those who seek to change the situation, cast off the label, but thereafter engineer their return to loneliness.

Of the three groups, the last one is probably the most interesting and worthy of further investigation.

Such people have have shown themselves capable of being entertaining, sociable, and fun. The scales have fallen from their eyes (whether the scales were put there by a traumatic event, or existed from birth) and the novelty of conversations with strangers, a retinue of lovers, and a feeling of having [re]connected with the world sustains them for weeks.... months.... a whole year.

Sooner or later, though, and without warning, their eyes must surely heal up again. They realise that they attended some event in a crowd of 50000 people a fortnight ago, and the delayed shock arrives: I was the loneliest person there.

The person I got talking to on the train the other morning? I was just going through the motions. I no more cared to spend my time with you than I wanted a passing delivery van to puncture the side of the carriage.

With that recognition, the tumble from the firmament begins. Gravity takes its hold, and one falls inevitably back to the earth of one's solitude.

When the hardness of the self is struck again, a renewed determination not to step outside the ever-decreasing circle of one's own being occurs. A statement, followed by a promise: I departed, but now I make my return. I shall not relinquish you again for something extrinsic!

The third category indicates a person who becomes sick of the self and its inability to leak into other selves. Its negation is one who has leaked enough, and has nothing left for himself.