"You've done this many times before"... a useful mantra from an odd place.

 “You’ve done this many times before, this is just one of those times.”

The above quote is a line spoken a number of times in Craig Warner’s theatrical adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel, Strangers on a Train. It’s first said by Charles Bruno but becomes repeated by Guy Haines, a mantra between them. I’ve read the novel, but only after having read the play many times to learn the lines, I can’t find it there, it might be a play only addition.

The play version of Charles Bruno is a more pathetic person than the novel version - at the very least, his hold over Guy Haines is less strong - but the line is an example of Bruno being something of the master manipulator he thinks he is. At the point it’s introduced, he’s been sending Guy daily letters reiterating the exact steps he should take to kill Bruno’s father. The notion being that Guy has rehearsed the steps so often by reading the letters, the actual act should be no different.

Of course, if Guy had a backbone, he’d send the letters to the police and use it as proof of Bruno’s murderous intentions but he doesn’t, so he obsessively reads them instead. There is something psychologically powerful in repeating and reiterating the instructions again and again, something which makes it inevitable that Guy will follow them. It reminds me of the Roman stoics who would rehearse the worst outcomes of an event so they would be ready for them if they occurred.

It’s also an interesting line to have in a play. As someone playing Guy, I’ve read those lines multiple times, said them aloud in rehearsals and will say them over again during the play’s run. In a very real sense, when I ‘kill’ Bruno’s father on the fifth night of the run, I’ll have done it ‘for real’, (at least for an audience invested in the action) four times before. Poor Bruno’s father, he never appears on stage but is killed over and over again.

Weirdly, it’s a line that has been playing in my head a lot this week, both in reference to the play and in reference to going back to work at a school. This is my 17th new year and I find going back after the summer holidays as much as I ever did. There’s something comforting in remembering that I’ve done it many times before and that this is just one of those times. It also helps with the play, although I’ve learned the lines, I don’t feel like I have. They are all in there and come out when the scenes play, but if I were to sit down and try to cold remember them, it’s like they’re not there - but I’ve successfully got through the scenes many times before, tonight will be just one of those times. 

It also applies to my writing and this blog. A little hour snatched after school and before rehearsal is the only time I have to write this and it wasn’t till this morning that I had any idea of what I wanted to write about. I always think of something though. I’ve written a blog post many times before, this is just one of those times - I should trust myself.

And it might not be the finest entry on this blog, but it’s something, and something relevant to the art of writing and my life at this moment. It’ll do anyway.

Next week I perform the play and then after that, I won’t be doing it any more. I’ll probably miss it then.

Under The Glass: On Renovating a House

 “I pity wretched Strephon blind 
To all the charms of female kind; 
Should I the queen of love refuse, 
Because she rose from stinking ooze?”
Jonathan Swift - ‘The Lady’s Dressing Room’

The above quote is from a poem about a man called Strephon who is distressed when he goes into the dressing room of a woman he idolises and sees all the work that has gone into making her beautiful. He discovers, to his dismay that the woman he loves is just as human as the next person, “Repeating in his amorous fits, Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!” 

Swift’s conclusion is to pity Strephon’s either/or attitude to women’s beauty, and to say that he should appreciate the work and effort that goes into, “Such gaudy tulips raised from dung.” In some ways, it’s a lesson I’ve had to learn from my house. 

When this posts, I shall be moving into that house. As I write, it’s the Sunday before. Yesterday I was cleaning up the front room, ready for carpets to go down on Tuesday and I discovered that one of the walls was damp. This was after more than five-thousand pounds of damp-proofing being done. The day before, one of the radiators in the back room started squirting water and the ceiling is hanging on out of nothing but habit. Needless to say, when I do move in, most of the downstairs will not be liveable. I only hope the radiator is fixed soon so I can get the boiler going again and have hot water.

I knew the house was old, probably turn of the century, and that it hadn’t been very well looked after. It had been empty for almost two years and before that was owned by a landlord who obviously had a habit of hiding problems rather than fixing them. A shop round the corner informed me that the owner before that was an old lady and I think I found some of her wallpaper, she was very fond of geometric shapes and lines with small flowers over the top in some pretty dingy colours.

At first I thought that all I needed to do was have the damp-proofing done and fill in a little gap in the back room floor. However, big chunks of the floor in that room simply came off. It turned out someone had put screed on it on top of vinyl floor tiles and it was just peeling off. I could simply pull parts off with my hands which were roughly the thickness and consistency of cracking an old easter egg. Where the concrete was nearer the damp parts, it was this stubborn sludge, which probably took me more than thirty hours to chip, scrape and knock off. Then I pulled the vinyl tiles up.

Upstairs, there was this creepy poem on the wall. I didn’t recognise it at first until I showed it to someone and they sung some of the Aerosmith song that was in Independence Day.

 I pulled some of that off, then saw a loose bit of anaglypta wallpaper. I didn’t much like the texture and planned to paint the wall so I tugged at it and it peeled all along the wall, all along the ceiling and back down the other wall. I did this a few more times until I was in a sea of wallpaper. 

Of course, the bits that were left (which were mainly old wallpapers going back who-know how long) were stubborn and needed twenty-odds hours of chipping and scraping each. These revealed walls that were more polyfilla than wall, weird bodge jobs and plaster dating from before this millennium. 

I followed this process in the other bedroom, the back room and the hallway. I couldn’t face doing the stairs - and nor could I reach all of them. Every room I’ve stripped has shown holes, cracks and various dodgy things. The plasterers had to wrap the rooms they’ve plastered with a gel mesh to make them plasterable.

There were tiles in the kitchen and bathroom which stopped doors from closing and were coming up. They were plastic and glued onto white porcelain tiles that had been there before. The wet from the dampness had got into the glue and they were pinging up all over, so I pulled the rest up. I liked the porcelain tiles more, but the glue needed scraping off them. As I pulled the tiles up, I smelt bleach where people had presumably mopped the floor placed on them, soaked through and trapped between the layers.

The biggest headache has been power. As a tenanted property, the electricity and gas meters are ones needing a plastic stick and a card. They are old and bulky and very ugly. The gas one is low down in the front room, the electricity is high up in the hallway. So high up I couldn’t reach to even see the information screens. I had to borrow a ladder from a nearby lumberyard before I got my own stepladder.

 What’s more, being left for years, they’d both accumulated large debts, which were extremely difficult to write off. When I sorted that out, I scheduled someone to install smart-meters so I could switch to a better company, he couldn’t do it because the current electricity meter is installed so unsafely.

The very first job I did was the easiest. Mine is a red brick house and people have scraped and carved their names in the bricks. I don’t mind those names, I sometimes wonder who ‘Roy’ was. I did mind the swastika though. I picked up a red brick that was laying around and scraped that symbol off the wall. Still the easiest and most satisfying job I’ve done.

Yet, through it all, I’ve grown to love my house, even as it throws problem after problem at me. I’ve named her Jane, after Calamity Jane. Today I found out the area I’m moving to is the second most deprived ward in the country, there’s a whole youtube genre of people taking their cameras and filming poverty porn around the streets I’m soon to call mine. I feel a bit sorry for poor old Jane, old and unloved as she is and peculiarly, each set back seems to make me more determined to create the cosy, productive hideaway I’m after. I’ve worked hard on Jane, three hours after every work day and another eight on Saturdays. It's been difficult.

 Although she won’t be totally ready when I move in, I’ll still have access to bedrooms, heating and hot water, a washing machine and more space than I ever had in my London attics. She might not be home yet, but she will be. Like Strephon in Swift’s poem, I’ve seen the stinking ooze, but like the narrator of the poem, I’ll appreciate her beauty all the more for that. 

Under the Glass: On Houses

 

"To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.” - Samuel Johnson, Rambler 68, November 10th 1750

There’s a reason I called this site The Grub Street Lodger besides my interest in Grub Street. I was a lodger, one of those strange, single men who pay to live in someone’s spare room or attic, which  I then filled beyond bursting with books. I have had six addresses since setting up this site, and one of those was for almost ten years. 

I wasn’t the only one. My three big Grub Street heroes were all lodgers. 

Oliver Goldsmith never owned property. Famously, it was whilst lodging in Wine Office Court when he was dunned by his landlady and called on his near neighbour, Samuel Johnson for help. Johnson then rooted through Goldsmith’s papers, found a finished novel, The Vicar of Wakefield and sent it out, selling it to John Newbery’s nephew for sixty pound. (Despite not thinking it worth printing for two years, it ended up being a steal, becoming a highly successful work). Goldsmith also lived in Arbour Court, where there are stories of him helping the landlady hang up the washing and entertaining the children with magic tricks. Another time, he lodged with John Newberry himself in Cannonbury House, where he strode the fields of Islington, seriously trying to think of funny things for his comedies.

Another lodger of Cannonbury House was Christopher Smart, who remembered those days as a time of domestic bliss with his wife and children. He remembered this in less salubrious lodgings in Mr Potter’s private mad house, which was a lodging paid for him. Whilst there, he felt himself emasculated because he had to formally renounce his future claims on his mother’s property and any future property of his wife. He later died in another rented dwelling in the Liberty of the Fleet Prison, where he lived as a debtor.

Samuel Johnson himself has two house museums dedicated to him, the on in Gough Square and his birthplace of Breadmarket Street in Lichfield. He did own the Lichfield house for a short while but had to put it in trust when he couldn’t pay the upkeep. When he visited, he never stayed there but put himself up in guest houses. 

Owning a house wasn’t the aspiration in the eighteenth century it is now, but I found comfort in being like them, and so many other fascinating people and writers who had no place to call their own. I am, however, no longer in their number. I am a homeowner (as long as I keep up mortgage repayments, but my name is on the deed). 

It’s a phrase that sits strange with me. I never exactly did a moonlight flit, I’ve carried too many books around with me to do that but I could be gone within a weekend, and had to a couple of times. Now  am fixed, tied to a place and address in a way that I never have before. It’d feel an odd thing to say that the house has become part of my identity, I haven’t even moved into it yet, but I am a part of its identity, another name in a long list of owners. 

My new house is not an eighteenth century house, built, probably at the beginning of the twentieth century (or a smidge before), but there was something about it that appealed to me. Pretty narrow, the house reminded me of a London town house in miniature, with red bricks that put me in mind of Gough Square. Rather like Gough Square when Lord Harmsworth bought it, my house has been neglected for the past few years and I have been working incredibly hard to make it a comfortable place for me and my books, because, as Johnson said, “

To be happy at home is the ultimate result of all ambition, the end to which every enterprise and labour tends.

On Idler 32: On Sleep

 I have a few books to review but my thoughts on them have not properly formed yet, so I go, as I often do to one of Johnson’s essays. The one I picked was from the 25th of November, close to the date I am writing this but from the year 1758.

It’s about sleep and that appealed to me because I am currently feeling very sleepy. However, Johnson’s thoughts on sleep spin off into some very uncomfortable directions, ones that may keep a reader awake.

He begins neutrally (and Johnsonianly) enough, by talking about how we are so used to sleep that we accept it as a given and ask few questions about it. Yet sleep is a very strange thing. Even in the twenty-first century we have only flimsy ideas of what it is and why we need it. We have theories about the repackaging ideas and strengthening neural paths. We know good sleep knits our bodies back together and reduce stress - we still don’t know exactly why or how.

Sleep is a huge change in us. We go from moving, active souls to ones dead to the world (even those who move around a lot as I do). As Johnson says; “the gay and the gloomy, the witty and the dull, the clamorous and the silent, the busy and the idle, are all overpowered by the gentle tyrant, and all lie down in the equality of sleep.”

Sleep is a great leveller. All people need it and succumb to it eventually. Even Alexander the Great needed sleep, and regarded that as one of the main things that reminded him that he was human. There have been people who tried to do without it, Margaret Thatcher famously said she only had four hours of sleep a night, we don’t know how that affected her or helped cause the dementia she suffered late in life. Ronald Reagan also claimed to sleep four hours a night and succumbed to it, Trump claims to have only three.

Johnson also notes that sleep is the end of waking emotion, that all emotions are turned off by sleep - and that we are glad to do it. This is where he starts walking down a very dark path. 

“There is no height of happiness or honour, from which man does not eagerly descend to a state of unconscious repose.” Even the happiest, most fulfilled person reaches a part of the day when they want nothing more to do than sleep. In some ways it makes us equal, there is not state or position in life which we don’t want to let slide into unconsciousness. Those “distinctions of mankind are more show than value” if even the greatest can’t bear to be conscious of their greatness for more than a few hours. Johnson sees people’s desire to sleep as a sign of their unhappiness at being awake. “All envy would be extinguished, if it were universally known that there are none to be envied, and surely none can be much envied who are not pleased with themselves.”

What’s more, sleep is not enough. We try and escape ourselves in other ways too. As well as sleep, Alexander took away his consciousness by drinking. If it’s not drink, it’s a daydream, being lost in a good book, music. “Almost every man has some art by which he steals his thoughts away from his present state.” To Johnson we need sleep because being awake is such a painful state.

Although Johnson would lay in long, he wasn’t very good at getting to sleep and would have people talking to him till late in the night. He mentions this as well, saying that company is just another way of being outside oneself. “In solitude we have our dreams to ourselves, and in company we agree to dream in concert.” 

In the end, for Johnson all we really want in life is “forgetfulness of ourselves”. That is a gloomy thought but I’m in a gloomy mood. Off to bed. 

On Idleness

 On the day I write this (a couple of days before I post) I find myself reflecting on yesterday. Yesterday was a Saturday, I was not at work, I had no rehearsals (for I’m in a play) and I had no plans or particular desires. It was a lazy day and I spent it doing things that had no real purpose yet it was a day that was very satisfying and very productive.

I did some chores, doing my laundry and hoovering the house. I made a weird little playlist, inspired by some weird little playlists I made years before. I painted a silly and slightly wonky mural in the back garden of a punk seagull singing karaoke into a pink swirly lollypop. I also finally finished Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

I need to let the book digest a little before I can talk about it much, but in that final volume the narrator, Marcel, realises that the wasted years of his life haven’t been wasted but were actually the accumulation of all the experiences that he needed to start on his life’s work. I can’t say I fully vibed with Proust (and will explain all that in another post) but he does share this sense of laziness and missed opportunities with two authors I do love, Samuel Johnson and Michel de Montaigne. 

Samuel Johnson saw himself as a great slave to idleness, frequently berating himself for his laziness and beseeching God to forgive him for the times he has been idle and praying for strength and resilience to resist its bewitching allure. He saw laziness as a swamp that would suck him into greater vices - particularly those of masturbation and sexual fantasy. He found nothing productive in laziness, as Proust did and instead saw it as an insidious sucker of resolve and confidence, always undermining the best efforts of mankind in general and himself in particular.

Yet, despite this private disgust at his own laziness, Johnson called one of his projects The Idler and speaks of it in less fearful terms. He jokes about how easy it is to feel good about achieving some small successes as so many people are too lazy to do anything and says that those same people label anything that is merely impossible. As much as he hated it in himself, he did admit that laziness is one of the less vicious sins, as a truly lazy person is too lazy to do anything really heinous.

Montaigne also talks a lot about laziness. It’s clear that as a child, he was frequently castigated for his idle temper and says how the risk was not that he would do something bad, only that he would do nothing at all. The worry of his family was not that he would be an evil person, only a useless one.

Even as an older man he admits his soul is so lazy that he doesn’t measure his “fortune by its height but by its pleasantness.” However, Montaigne, being the self-accepting person that he is, has no problem with these priorities. By the end of his essays, having struggled through the forbidding notion that philosophy is about learning to die well, then as a way to live well, understands that it’s good enough to have lived at all.

I come back to one of my favourite quotes, from the last essay;

“What great fools we are! ‘He has spent his life in idleness,’ we say. ‘I haven’t done much today.’ - ‘Why! Have you not lived? That is not only the basic of your employments, it is the most glorious.’"

How much happier Samuel Johnson would have been had he came to this conclusion. Even Proust has to justify his lazy, wasted years as grist for his mill and fodder for his book. We should all take those words of Montaigne to heart, accept that our lazy days are still days we have lived and that’s all that’s required of us in this life. And sometimes .. sometimes those lazy days are the ones where we produce the things that really last.

Like this terrible painting that could live on this wall for decades to come.

The Journey to 'Death of a Dream-Pedlar'

Death of a Dream-Pedlar had a long and tortuous journey to the place it is now - a brilliant book available to buy in ebook, paperback and hardback form.

Under the Glass: He Who is Tired of London...

 

My least favourite Johnson quote is also perhaps his most quoted. I’m not sure if it’s my least favourite because it is the most quoted - a form of quote overplay. It is of course; “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.”

The quote was on the wall of the Museum of London, on the sign outside Dr Johnson’s House, on a range of fridge magnets and Oyster card holders - and on dozens and dozens of quaint pictures and ‘quotes’ images.

More completely, Johnson said; “you find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

Well, intellectual or not, I’m leaving London. I’m even willing. Not just willing, but looking forward to it.

I moved to London almost twenty years ago to pursue a Masters in writing. I’d actually got confused over which university had accepted me and found myself living quite the distance from the university. Not that it mattered much, I only went one day a week. The rest of the time I was working thirteen-hour shifts at The White Swan, a Wetherspoons just outside Highbury and Islington Tube station (and a few minutes walk from both Kit Smart and Goldsmith’s retreat in Cannonbury - but I didn’t know about them yet).

I kept a letter to the local newspaper about the place. 

“If anyone required encouragement to give up smoking and excessive drinking, I suggest they walk past the White Swan at Highbury Corner any day of the week. Never have I seen such an unpleasant looking and miserable group of people as those gathered outside - their features and demeanour showing the ravages of a lifetime of alcohol and tobacco abuse. It really does serve as an excellent deterrent.” Seems a bit harsh.

Whilst still doing my Masters, I got a job at The Big Bus Company as a Tour Guide. Learning the huge amount of information during a beautiful May fortnight was a wonderful thing. It was helped that the person training me was the very talented Miles Tredinnick. The experience of actually being an tour guide on an open top bus was less enjoyable. Whilst May had been glorious, the summer itself was a bit of a washout, the teams on the pavement kept filling the bus with customers who didn’t speak the same language as me and I got into an argument about some time off I’d booked four months in advance.

It was then I lived in Putney. I was the lodger of a ninety-four year old Hungarian Jewish lady who’d survived the Nazis and the Soviets and claimed to have invented those shirts with the stripy bodies but solid collar and cuffs. She was now an artist, a member of the Royal Academy. She was also a lifeline to me when I lost the bus job and was in a long period of unemployment before I got a job at Whittard’s Coffee and Tea, until it went under two months later. 

The next job I had was at ‘The London Bridge Experience and Tombs’. I was essentially a barker, trying to get people who were on their way to work to come into a shitty rip off of The London Dungeons. I was dressed in a ripped suit with white face and black eyes, blood made from corn syrup was smeared over me. Once I had to wash some windows with a seven foot tall man and a little person. The owners never remembered my name and called me Christopher Biggens. They essentially dropped me when I was off with Swine Flu, which I caught on my birthday.

I’ve only been mugged once. Not long after, some people tried to break into the house but I scared them away with lots of noise - these both happened when I lived in the posh area of Putney. In all the supposed rough (idiots would say ‘no-go’) areas I’ve lived, I’ve been safe. Only in Putney was I ever threatened.

There was the time in the house in Harlesden when a dead body showed up on the lawn. He’d got drunk and decided to get home by climbing over all the fences, bashed his head and died from the head injury in our garden while we were asleep. That was an eventful house. For a time, I lived with a rickshaw driver/drug dealer who’d be full of ecstasy and come onto me when I was getting ready for work. For a time, the house filled up with vets and sick animals. A Charlie Chaplin impersonator lived down the street and would walk to work swinging his cane.

Then there was the bad flat. I rented it off a man and it wasn’t his flat. The owner turned up one day demanding to know who I was. The boiler didn’t work for three months. Everything was filthy. There was a man running a pirate radio station and every plugged in speaker in the flat gently played the sounds of reggae, even if not actually turned on. I did have one lovely Saturday chatting with a guy and drinking pints of chilled vodka. 

This place has been much cosier, though oddness still seeps in. I’ve gained a relative financial security for the first time in my adult life and, thanks to Dr Johnson’s House and The Reviews Hub, I’ve been able to got to all sorts of cultural, theatrical and other events for free. 

There really is all life can afford in London, but frequently, the only life I can afford are the difficult, uncomfortable and scrabbly bits. The fact is, Johnson is right, London is wonderful and contains a bit of everything. It’s just, for those not blessed with a yearly pension from the monarch, the sides of life it most often shows are the sides that tire you out eventually. He seems to forget it’s the same city he wrote about in his younger days where you had to make a will before stepping out the door. I have loved my life in London, I reckon I’ve squeezed about as many drops out of it as a poor person can, and I’m looking forward to building a new life somewhere a little smaller, more comfortable and cheaper.