Friday, September 30, 2011

I think this underlines the American capacity to generate political good sense. Now I know for many that's an oxymoron, but it's only arrived at that unwelcome status because of the raucous behaviour of the bear-pit celebrity politicians, whose acumen I have yet to uncover. Nevertheless, that's the noise that's obscured the real sounds of a healthy American body politic. One that's decorous, civil, shorn of any flim-flam, and straight to the point.

I love this example that I spotted in an article in tonight's Standard about Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senatorial candidate for Massachusetts; it's perfect, it's also an excellent instance of exactly why tax is good, and takes the wind out of the self-appointed all government is bad, head bangers. I'll let her words take over now: "You built a factory out there? Good for you. But I want to be clear: you moved your goods to market on the roads the rest of us paid for; you hired the workers the rest of us paid to educate; you were safe in your factory because of the police and fire departments the rest of us paid for. You did n't have to worry that marauding bands would would come and seize everything at your factory, and hire someone to protect against this, because of the work the rest of us did".

There's more: "Now look, you built a factory and it turned into something terrific? Keep a big hunk of it. But a part of the underlying social contract is that you take a hunk of that and pay for the next kid who comes along"

Smart, smart words. We need a Brit Politico who can deliver something as crisp and to the point, where are they?

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Two comments that I've got memorialise here otherwise I'll forget them, or at best lose them in the thicket of daily life, and both are too good to let that happen.

"I go into the movie. I watch it, and I ask myself what happened to me" Fine, perceptive words written by that wonderful American film critic, Pauline Kael. Twenty odd years on, I can still recreate the frisson of excitement of buying an anthology of her film criticism from the old Athena bookshop in the Trocadero. It blew away me. She's still my favourite.

"...most good writers are also good talkers, writing nonetheless begins where writing ends - in silence" I've just read that apercu in an online edition of the New Yorker. Damn, it should be turned into a tee shirt slogan, or sprayed on walls. It's what happens. End of.

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Take my hand someone and force it to write something.

Tonight's one of those unfortunate times when I'm writing less for the love of it, and more for the fact, I just want to see some words unroll across the screen, or my day will not feel right

Guess this is how sharks are supposed to feel; keep swimming or stop forever. Keep writing or the blog withers away. That's always been my worry. Some days the words pour out, other's it's a baleful trickle.

I have to put something down. These fingers need to flex and write the words they want to not feel themselves mastered by the demands of work and the office. Yet, tonight, I'm out of ideas. Even last night's quiet panic about an impending birthday is n't strong enough to morph into sentences. It's still there. I still have it. Just I can't articulate it.

Monday, September 26, 2011

As I edge nearer to what I call my mezzo-centenary - basically that birthday - I can't help feeling something like the bends going through my system. All those questions that I'm adamant everyone else, who's butted up to the same age I'm going to be soon, has wracked themselves with, I'm waking up with. All of those "What have I done?, Have I done enough? "Where should I be" anxieties.

The answer when the tremor eventually passes remains the same: I've lived, I continue to. I've done my best. There's been a catalogue of mistakes double sided with an equal amount of successes and much more plain ol' living.

As far as I know nothing changes the instant you surface on the other side of that birthday, it's the same as the day before, slow, continuous evolution. Yet, there's something fetishistic about the whole thing that's impossible to brush aside. Is it all about taking stock? Having a moment to pause? Is that it?

Sunday, September 25, 2011

Back to Brighton for the first time in several years.

It's not changed, nor has my reaction. I raved then, I rave again. It's so atypically British, in fact it's atypically anywhere, it looks like it's been invented, except it has n't.

It's the fusion of blissful weather, a long beach, ingrained raffishness, camp glamour, and sheer youth.

And it's the latter that's the green fuse that drives this mad city. It's was the fabulous quartet of near balletic frisbee throwers; a more than passbale jazz funk cum acid rock trio with a Bez like dancer outside a very hip beachside bar; the strident sax player a few beats away from an imperturbable Bela Lugosi human statue.

Then there's the Lanes, which seems to be an endless frothing stream of nose-studded vegetarian Guardian readers (I'm the last of the two). And hardly anyone over thirty anywhere.

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

A couple of nights ago I wrote and told a friend that I'd found a canoli in my jacket pocket that had survived intact for nearly 8 hours. This evening, running along Cheapside, with the urgency and sweat of someone racing to the operating theatre with a kidney needed for a transplant NOW, was a man holding a lemon coloured cupcake in a dainty foil holder. Who was that for?

Monday, September 19, 2011

The best way - may be the only way - to enjoy London, is to see it through the eyes of a tourist. I took a dear friend from California across the heart of this wonderful piece of creative chaos that's been my home for coming along three decades, and it was if I'd also seen it for the first time.

Polychromatic skies, amazing street lighting, wandering street musicians, ravishing displays of flowers, descent into the voluptuary that's Harrods. Late evening sitting on a bench by the Thames watching London illuminate itself. Arabesques of light from the Wheel to a St Paul's bathed in moon light, and a solid slab of blue bulbs lighting up one side of the Heron Building. It just needed a soundtrack and it could have been Woody Allen's Manhattan.

A perfect day and a great friend to spend it with.

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Spotted. In a deli near me. Chocolate cake with absinthe. Incredible. As a friend said, things like this make you wonder whether there's a higher entity that loves us. It's a sign. The union of chocolate and fin de siecle Paris's madness potion.

Sunday, September 11, 2011

Today's historians and certainly those to come are going to be sucking their pencils for years pondering over what the impact of 9/11 was. The tremors certainly have n't settled and like the mainland of Japan after this year's tsunami, the ground has shifted irreversibly, direction unknown.

Did the debt crisis precede that terrible day all those Septembers ago, or was it longer in the womb? Again, a point to be contested with answers either side of that date.

But let's say it did get tailwind. What did that force us to recognise? This: that bankers sanctify profit as private, but their debt, on the other hand, has to be borne by everyone. Privatised profit, nationalised debt.

A US friend sent me this apercu that sums it all up at least if you are American. It's delightful, almost haiku like in it's awful clarity.

It's also about grasping acquisitiveness, shamelessness, hood winking, scaremongering; capabilities that have transcended geography, as palpable in the UK as they are in the US, monstering both countries, and laying waste to the Euro zone.

'A unionized public employee, a tea party republican, and a Wall Street Banker are sitting at a table. In the middle of the table is a plate with a dozen cookies on it. The Wall Street Banker reaches across and takes 11 cookies, looks at the tea partier and says, 'Watch out for that union guy, he wants a piece of your cookie.'
I have no linear memory of what I was doing on this day ten Septembers ago. It's more a loose thread of incidents that unspools whenever I remember Sept 11 .

I remember being in my office, which I shared with a few others, looking at huge plasma screens displaying performance statistics, flicking between those and my own computer. Then the office door was flung open. And the day began. That day.

Whoever it was, burst out that a plane had slammed in to the Wall Trade Centre. After that my sense of chronology goes. Someone brought up the BBC on one of the plasmas that I remember, as I do more and more people crowding into the office, silent, awestruck, barely talking, barely comprehending.

I remember vividly telling someone that at least 50,000 people worked in the WTC complex. I knew that from numerous visits to New York and the simple fact of spending time in it's subterranean shopping complex, where I could go to either wait for a friend who worked on nearby Hudson Street, or to wander around the two storey bookshop (Barnes and Noble ? Borders?), and for this more prosaic reason, that was where one of the very few free public toilets in Lower Manhattan was.

I remember seeing each of the Towers waver, then fall. I've no idea of my inner emotional state, horror, shock, disbelief, certainly disbelief; there was something about that rolling, broiling cloud of dust that defied understanding. That was a trope of science fiction, except it was n't, it was fact, and within that whirlwind of dust and ash, people were dying.

Even now, ten long years on, I still wonder whether it was a film. It's the unreality of being witness to something so extraordinary, so terrible. It's the province of films, but it was n't, it actually happened. Three thousand miles away from London's sister state, I saw with dozens of others crowded into a small office, as did millions worldwide, people die. I still can't believe it.

I remember eventually leaving work sometime in the evening and into a shell-shocked London. Past a winebar on Walbrook that always heaved with noise and laughter, that this evening was overflowing with hundreds of subdued office workers simply watching television, just the occasional murmur of a voice.

I remember the anxiety of trying to reach my friend, an old girlfriend in fact, who worked on Hudson Street. Endless e-mails then the utter relief of getting a line from here; shocked, fearful, but safe.

I remember an e-mail from a cousin working in Canary Wharf, apprehensive that they were a target and that an airliner had been hijacked in the Netherlands and was headed there.

That's all I remember, perhaps I could squeeze more out if I tried, but I can't, this is really all I remember of a day I wish had been as anonymous as all those that preceded it.

Friday, September 09, 2011

Some years ago I was fascinated by a set of keys that somehow had ended their useful days on a bus shelter roof just outside what was the the local tax office.

I wondered for days how they got there; whose they were; what they did, it was, from what I could gather from the top deck of the bus, a collection of various sized keys. Utilitarian Yale lock keys, stern mortise keys, maybe a car key thrown on the loop, and possibly hidden out of sight, a set of suitcase keys.

I threw around notions of who the owner might have been; the one I finished on was that it was someone on a stag night, insensible with booze, with a ball and chain tied to his ankle, and whose mates had in that toe-curling Brit phrase thrown his house keys on to the bus shelter roof "for a laugh".

That was several years ago. The shelter's no longer there, so where the keys are now is any one's guess. Perhaps there's a place where all lost and forgotten keys gather.

It's rare that I get so enamoured of such marginalia, but I have seen something this week that's similarly piqued my curiosity: a rough heart drawn in a messy off-cut of concrete on Cornhill, one of the busiest streets in the City. It's heart that's maybe drawn with a finger in just setting concrete with the initials R and J around it.

Who are R and J? When was it done? Are they still together? How many millions of feet have pattered over this symbol of eternal love?

Sunday, September 04, 2011

One of my dearest friends leaves for a six month secondment to Abu Dhabi on Thursday and already I can feel a hole in London and in my life.

West London even now does n't feel the same and you're still here.

I wandered through Kensington and into Holland Park and nearly every inch of my walk saw a memory corkscrew out of the pavement: both of us open mouthed the first time we stepped into Wholefoods; standing by the bus stop, drenched after a sudden summer afternoon downpour; idling in Holland Park, talking amiable, cheerful nonsense; meals here, coffee there.

It's not even Thursday yet, and I'm missing your great sense of humour, your generosity; your zest for life, that infectious sense of adventure; your clear, wise words; your sense of justice and natural compassion. And these are a just a handful. Bluntly I'll miss you.