Sebastian Michael's Blog: EDEN by FREI, page 32

{Vernation}

i am

these days it appears

attractive to young men

attracted too, of course, but that’s not news

and not newsworthy: young men are

attractive

by definition

even people who aren’t generally attracted to young men can see this 

and even if they can’t see it, they are still

attracted to them

irrespective

their gender their inclination their

orientation

their emotion their wisdom their inhibition, their assessment of any given

situation:

whether they want to or not and believe that they are or that they aren’t

people

all people

are

always

attracted to

young men

(except those few who are not and they are few and are not and are therefore the

exception.)

the rule

is confirmed

what’s new is that more than before

more than ever

as far as i ever can tell

(and often i can’t)

or recall (and i could if i would)

men half my age or just slightly older or occasionally just slightly younger still too

come to me, seek me out

not i them

of the men i have met, spoken to, spent time and been with lately

most, though not all, have been those 

that are half my age or slightly older or on occasion slightly younger even

and who have come to me, sought me out

not i them

this flatters me, of course, maybe honours me, but more than that does it

fascinate me

because i don’t do anything to attract them, not 

consciously: if anything i do the opposite

i grow a beard 

i wear a jacket left me by a friend more than ten years ago, which was vintage then

my shoes are worn out and my jeans

though skinny

threadbare

i don’t go to the gym i don’t wear my lenses i don’t 

cultivate 

a young voice or vocabulary

yet 

young men

more than they ever have done before, even when

especially

when i was their age

come to me, seek me out

i don’t go after them. on a park bench at a party in a bar

even online

i mind my own business more or less

i say hello maybe, or

greet a smile with a smile

but that’s it

i don’t do anything more; maybe

that’s what it is

maybe that’s what makes me

suddenly, perplexingly

attractive 

to young men: it may be that

in the past, when i was 

their age

i was just trying too hard to be

something, someone, some other 

person than the one that they saw

because they saw through me then to me now

and now

what they see is what they get

and if they are friendly and kind and intelligent too

(apart from being attractive: being young, they’re always

obviously

attractive)

i see no reason

why they shouldn’t get

what they see if

what they see is

what they desire

is life not give and take after all and are we not in it

to share of ourselves

as we lose ourselves in each other?

 

my summer of love leaves me warm hearted light headed and simple of soul

there is 

so much 

delight

in being

human

Plea

There need to be nooks and crannies; there need to be inbetweennesses.

There need to be othernesses and odd-ones-out that defy gravity, expectation, formula, form. The enemy of perfection is impatience, I know, and yet I find me a-longing, what for I know not. Could it be as banal as attention? This Monday was bluer than I have rhyme for or reason. Or song. And it was the Blue Monday, by name. Need I dramatise myself better, spectacularise myself? Invite preposterousness, scandal, sensation, or noise? Or simply dress up and say: “oi!”?

“The problem,” Sedartis muses, in what seems a reconciliatory mood, “with standing in the room shouting loudest just to make sure you get heard is that you don’t hear anyone else in the room, let alone perceive what is happening quietly, under the din. The greatest menace and greatest wisdom have this in common: they enter the fray in silence. The menace by stealth, it creeps up on you, seemingly harmless, sometimes friendly even, or if not friendly, then quaint. The wisdom though simply spreads, where it can, unspectacular, slowly, like the proverbial dawn, until it is really quite splendid and inescapably heralds the day. I’m mixing my metaphors. You get my meaning.”

I inwardly nod. None of this seems new to me, none revelatory. “The problem with standing in the room silently, or muttering to yourself, is that you may not just be forever ignored, which is one thing, and bad enough, but taken for mentally unstable, dangerous even, certainly weird. There is nothing in itself wrong with weirdness, but when your task is to be taken seriously, that’s unhelpful. Your task is to be taken seriously. Accept the challenge.”

This piques my interest: how then, I wonder at Sedartis who has been with me, dispensing his snippets of ‘insight’ liberally as Father Christmas sweets to a child for the last twenty months now, do I make myself heard while being able to listen, do I speak but not mutter, do I send signals, not simply make noise? “That is easy,” Sedartis, unsurprisingly now that I think of it, claims: “You stand in the room, upright and tall as you are, not flustered, not blustering, not puffing yourself up, not screaming, not shouting, but saying what you have to say, with confidence, clear. When you’re spoken to, listen. When you see someone in the room who isn’t being paid any attention, go to them: pay attention. Give yourself a rest now and then and sit quietly in the corner to observe. There, if somebody joins you, you may yet have your most meaningful conversation. Keep an eye and an ear out for the people regaling themselves, roaring with laughter. More often than not they are harmless, even if they’re annoying. But be alert. Keep a feeler out for the subtleties, the changes of tone in the room, the small movements, the quiet arrivals. The sudden departures. Listen out for the music that’s setting the mood. Who do they dance to, who stand aside for. And then you may just have to pick your own moment. Because this room has no host. So it may never happen that someone who knows you invites you to say a few words and bids the others, ‘pray silence!’ You may have to pick your moment and command the attention. As you are. Without fuss, but with authority, flair. Then, though, know what you’re talking about. That moment may just be brief. So be prepared and worth listening to, even if just to one or two, three or four. That’s enough. Be patient. Be humble. Be strong. And if you speak any truth at all, prepare to be shouted down, even chased from the building. Such, I’m afraid, is the world. Your reward may never materialise: do not expect a reward.”

I do not expect a reward, do I?

“Yes you do,” Sedartis thunders, now vehemence in his wrath. “Rise above this need to be appreciated.” Is that even possible, I now seriously ask myself and Sedartis in tandem: isn’t being appreciated simply another expression for being loved?

Sedartis is quiet. Have I managed to shut up Sedartis? Really? I feel a minuscule pang of guilt, but triumph as well. It doesn’t last long.

“George.” I don’t think Sedartis has ever called me by any of my names before: “Your need to be loved is only human. You cannot, nor should you, be super or let alone subhuman. But learn to be loved in manifold ways, unspoken, unreciprocated, unneedy, generously, unspectacularly. Appreciate love when it is not shown, not expressed, but still felt. Yours is a singular, path, maybe lonely, at times: fear it not. You’ve been given advice on this matter before, and you will be again: heed it, it was sound. Accept love, don’t crave it: give love, don’t take it for granted; be love, don’t overstate it.”

∞² Revival

As the day draws to a close, and the sun now lingers – mellowed by the dusky haze – over the horizon, down vaguely to the right, for a while, before bidding the shore goodnight, I start feeling just a tad chilly, and I’m not alone.

Much as there was no gong and no whistle, no starting gun and no fanfare to announce the beginning of the Boscombe & Bournemouth Nude Beach Stroll this midsummer Sunday, so there is no clarion to call people back into their clothes, or to summon them into the pubs and the bars, or back to their houses, should they have no friends, and made none during the day, or simply show no inclination to hang out into the evening.

Instead, with the colder air breezing in from the sea, and the rays at their acuter angle subdued, you start to spot a jumper here, and a cardigan there. The hats come off, for a while, as they are no longer needed for shade and not yet against wind, and the T-shirts go on, and once you’re wearing a top there really is not much of an incentive not to also wear something around your wriggly rump any more. So on come the shorts, gradually, and the jeans and the chinos, without anyone making a deal of it, big or small, and by and by, the beach and the seafront, the deckchairs, the benches, the plastic seats outside the beach huts, and all the promenade, they start to look ‘normal’. Then again, I’m bound to find myself asking, what’s ‘normal’? And it’s not a facetious question, this, here. A Sunday talking to people – all kinds of them – strolling and pausing, stopping here for a drink, there for a tea, meeting friends of my new friends and their friends who introduced me to theirs, my frame of reference for any such thing as normality has been blown wide open, and it hadn’t exactly been narrow to begin with.

There was a university lecturer from Leicester whose sister lives in the country with her husband and their three kids; they all were out and about, the kids mainly playing down by the water, the adults mainly standing around, nursing pints. There was the former MP whom I thought I recognised, but I didn’t: I got her mixed up with somebody else, and from the wrong party. She was there with her boyfriend and he had bumped into some mates who were actually kicking around a ball for a while. That was quite a sight, for, I warrant, these were not athletes… There was a bus driver and the obligatory cab driver too, and several nurses and teachers. Some middling managers of one enterprise or another, and a sizeable contingent of hipsters, in every sense of the word.

The overriding feel of the entire day was nothing so much as its extraordinary ordinariness. Perhaps it’s the mindset: the easing into this ease, the deliberate nonchalance of letting it all hang out, quite literally, and not paying attention, to any of it. All day long. I suspect that regular goers to nude beaches find none of this anywhere near as noteworthy as I do; I imagine that they’ve been saying so, all along.

For me, it was new. Though not, hand on heart, entirely unexpected. I don’t know what I expected, but planted in my mind from somewhere had been a vision of a perfectly normal day in the sun, with perfectly normal people doing perfectly normal things, in the nude. And that’s just exactly what it was. More or less. Of course, there was something of a garden party atmosphere, with all this milling and strolling and stopping for chats and Pimmses and fruit bowls and the ubiquitous tea. Of course, it was an especially leisurely day. In an especially ordinary way.

Is nudity a great leveller? Of course it is. Is it liberating? In some sense, no doubt. Is it practical? Absolutely not. Do I wish me more nude days in more towns of this world, just like this? I’m not even sure. One of the things that makes the Boscombe & Bournemouth Nude Beach Stroll on the last Sunday of June every year such a special occasion is, perhaps, that it is, after all, special. And it really helps being by the seaside. Near a small town. (Or a couple of them, to be precise.) It helps being in England, maybe, I don’t know. There is still – after all – an unruffled no-nonsense albeit quaintly eccentric friendliness in this country that, with all the madness in and around it, manages just about to keep it sane. At least so it feels. Especially on a day like today. Or is it all just nostalgia? Am I hankering after a world that has changed beyond recognition, that simply no longer exists, and projecting upon what is there my idyll, in a quirky distortion?

Not from my experience today. The people I met and spoke to today are just exactly as I’ve always experienced them, only more so. Maybe that’s what the nudity does, more than anything: it lays us bare, of course, that’s pretty obvious, but does being bare make us more vulnerable? Certainly. In every way. Does being more vulnerable make us more honest? Very possibly. Does being more honest make us better humans? I like to think so. Honesty in all cases in all circumstances in all situations? Maybe not. Maybe a civilisation needs to mask part of its face some of the time (maybe some part of it even all of the time?), maybe in order for it to be civilised in the first place, it needs to be clothed, in something or other. Skins, textiles, manners, etiquette, agreed upon forms of conduct, the compact of the exchange to make it bearable, pleasant even… I’d been taken, all through the day, with how civil everyone was. How unirritable, how forgiving.

Perhaps that’s what it does to us, being naked: could it be that perhaps it encourages us, allows us, even, to forgive?

{Memories of the Past}

a surreptitious glance in a doorway: you

had been waiting for me

but how long?

i can’t remember, i remember

seeing you at the cinema and us

exchanging glances

(those were the days, mostly, of

glances)

and us not speaking, i was too shy, you shy too

so i started walking

across the river, there: a café, old style, what

was i doing in there, could it be, really, that you

waited

outside while i was having coffee inside?

or did i pop in to see if i liked it, but didn’t, or whether

you would follow (but why would you? it was an old style café, and you didn’t), so i

popped out again, straight away? that seems more likely, certainly it seems more

reasonable…

you were in the entrance as i came out and i saw you again and you me and it was clear

you’d been waiting for me, there

in the doorway

but we still didn’t speak

how was that even possible: it was obvious

you had been waiting for me, yet

we didn’t speak, i not to you, you not to me

i was incredibly young, you a bit younger

there by the rhine, in basel, at that time

of glances, mostly, and quietly aching

silences

 

you were there too maybe two, three years later

now on the southbank

in london

you looked different, a bit, though not much

you had those same eyes, longing

uncertain, a

querying glance, that

glance

that i must have had too

it was the era of glances, of not saying what any of us wanted, ever, of

uncertainty, being afraid

but of what?

of being found out

of revealing too much

too much to the wrong kind of person, of being

vulnerable

literally, viscerally, in danger of injury, death

or afraid merely of actually having, enjoying, of living a moment, such one 

brief encounter?

who knows

those were days of unspoken desires

at night time

near rivers

only this time i actually asked you

for a light

or you me?

i you or you me one of us asked the other for a cigarette or a light or for both and

another glance was exchanged and a flame lit up and in that flame we did not look at each other again, we just looked at the hands touching, cupping the cigarette, and that

once again

just was that

how curious

how timid, how cautious, how wary i was

of you

always

and yet how much i wanted to be with you

sill

 

and then there you were in st james’s park: another you, another glance 

i on my way home

you on your way where? i didn’t ask and you didn’t say

it was nice

there

to finally meet you

at night, late

by the pond, not the river

to feel your hands on me, taste your lips

such a long time ago now

such a situation between two and three, thereabouts

when that park is not closed and not open but we both were

closed and open and there

those were the days of

such stolen moments, so

rare

i miss them no more than i miss you

and i don’t miss you i’m just maybe sorry

a bit

that it took me so long to pluck up the courage to finally meet you

albeit briefly

we wasted, it seems, a few opportunities, you and i, but

you live and you learn, and nothing

but nothing

can be rewound, reconfigured, restored, it can not even be really

relived, it can

of course be

in one way or another

remembered, redeemed?

(to what end? none other than to know that there was such a thing as a path, a trajectory,

or an arc:

a semblance of something resembling a story

a sequence of inconsequential instances, now implanted, the shapes

along which the currents of time have mostly been channelled, each curve, each bend

not just leaving traces but forming them too

until

at last

there’s a torrent

and the river, the brook or the stream

floods its banks and

ignores

these patterns, these half

designs half

instinctive behaviours half

needed half wanted half detested half worn and half

overthrown memories

only half

ever

because the half that sits underground under consciousness under skin under mind

remains there forever somehow, and

so be it

albeit not always appreciated not always valued not always wanted or loved

you are always

a part of me still, and always

welcome

to stay

 

whatever became of you, i do wonder

and then i forget that i ever did

because life goes on and

there are many more rivers to cross and bridges to burn and transgressions that must be traversed and

comings together

to fathom, just

know that i never not wanted

to know you

Mars

I knew this would happen. I knew I could stay this, but not forever, I knew I would have to confront it, I knew I would not get away with staying away: I’m on my way home. The fact that I entertain a notion of ‘home’ is in itself a symptom of growing up, surely. Growing in. Growing through. Through the crises, the awaynesses of it all, the doubts and the fear.

Between Horror and Terror I stand on the Seat of the Gods and I feel me a warrior. Hah! Who would have thought that I could answer the call. Hold my head high and keep my gaze straight and look upon Earth in the distance and say: I salute thee, Mother, and I charge thee to welcome me back. “Be a Man” he said, and I knew what he meant. No controversy, no hesitation, no confusion and no offence. This rust coloured dust, this thin-skinned robustness. This unflappable sense of the just. Of the righteous. Of the direct, of the cause and the anger. The Anger. The wrath.

The outrageousness of it all. There’s nothing twee about it, nothing humorous, fun, camp, harmless or charming. Ere I lose my sense of proportion I shall steel my spine to this ire. Stupidity, wantonness, cruelty and fear. The stubborn ignorance of greed. The tyrants, the egomaniacal butchers and keepers of slaves. They are an outrage. One as destructive, as unenlightened and as inhumane as the other. There the slaughter of innocents, the imposition of rule; the indoctrination, the violence, the cult. Here the wilful deception, the making of unholy myths, the falsing of facts, the aggrandisations and the buffoonness; the rhetoric, the gestures, the meaningless phrases, the orange, the hair.

The beateous soul in my sinuous body wishes it were not so, but “nature is war,” and until I dissolve into the particle waves and the unnamed insubstantiality of connexion, I have to make a stand and be counted. Too long, maybe, have I tried to avoid this. Too long shied away. Too long have I hovered above ground thinking it all – the dirt, the blood, the grit (that word I never, ever, liked or was even willing to use), the bone and the marrow, the shit, the severed limbs, the crushed skulls and the unwanted guts spilling into the mud, the jealous, the mean, the preoccupied with survival – thinking them and it all quite beneath me. It is, of course, quite beneath me, under my feet: will I or no, I trample the trodden no less than the soldiers who scavenge the field, I only know how to behave. Politeness. There is virtue in civil conduct and in a refusal to simply succumb, but form on its own now won’t function. Sad, sincerely, but so.

The scorn. To be put in this position. To not be released. To have to respond. To be set against something so real. So unavoidably ugly. In this land of the alien. On this inhospitable neighbour. My sense of humanity and what I want it to mean here is challenged, de-ranged. I am out of joint but not out of scope. These forces can not be contained, perhaps, but they can be conquered. With spirit, with wisdom, with core. With arguments? No. With reason? Not likely. With strength (not with force) and with purpose. But it is still a war. There are battles that need to be won.

I survey the Plane of Utopia and pronounce this my moment of muster. Here of all places. This desert has nothing that I want to own except my presence, and that is now no longer negotiable. There comes the instance when you know that all else is mist. The haze doesn’t clear yet, in the distance, but I do sense the bridge. This tying together of thoughts with the elements that are also in me, lest I ignore them. The substance that I fashion to my own design. Titanium and graphene. If there be materiality, let it be exquisite, sophisticated and strong.

There is no feebleness in wanting good.

There is no harm in seeking softness. No despair in keeping faith.

There is no shame in hope, no loss of self in selfless love.

Embracing all of it, being it and sending the signal. I take me a clue from the lingering trojans and inwardly smile, even laugh. Haha! Now is the time to go forth. I have no fear and no loathing and nothing to prove. Less, still, have I to lose. I have quite left me behind my despair. I see me one coming towards me whom I may yet be willing to join, or he me, and if that be so then so much the better, there is a lion yet to the eagle, but it is not the content, and not the end, it is but a chance to make some things completer, and I’m sure now of the simplest of things: I am.

∞² Revival

I imagine the woman sitting across a small plastic table from me, wearing clothes. I confess I have done the reverse thing before. Of course, who hasn’t? Or hasn’t anyone, ever? I don’t even know. It’s not something I talk about to my friends: have you ever sat on a tube train or on a bench in the park or in a cafe, or stood in a pub, and imagined the people there naked? All of them? Or even just some of them? And taken the thought further into their world and wondered: how do they make love? Do they ‘make love’, or do they have untrammelled, wild, passionate sex? (Why do we have to say ‘have sex?’ Why, in a language that verbs like no other, have we not adopted ‘to sex’? As in ‘how do they sex?’) And with whom? What do they look like, and sound like, and feel like, in the shower, afterwards? What will they have for breakfast, if anything? Who or what do they see when they cast a glance in the mirror, naked? Is it normal to ask yourself these questions? Or is it weird. What isn’t ‘weird’?

Now, I’m sitting opposite a middle aged woman who has a certain amount of volume to her body – her breasts sag a little, her tummy folds over the patch of pubic hair that adorns her vagina, her arms wobble a bit as she gestures, which she does a fair bit – and I wonder what does she wear, normally? She has spread towels over a half dozen plastic chairs on which we all sit. My small backpack leans against mine, and part of me feels tempted, still, to just reach down now and take out the shorts and the T-shirt, and put them on. Part of me though feels relaxed. Quite remarkably so. Her ‘girlfriend’, the woman’s, is pouring tea from a pot into half-size colourful mugs which have on them motifs of beach life in England. They’re handcrafted and pleasant and add to the general feeling of familiarity. There is nothing remiss with this world as I see it, it seems, and I wonder why do we call our partners, if we have them, which I don’t (or still don’t, I’m hardly ever entirely sure which), ‘boyfriend’ and ‘girlfriend’ when they are clearly way into their forties or fifties, and what, then, is a transgendered friend. Surely not my ‘transfriend’? The ‘girlfriend’, who is certainly nearing her mid-forties if not in fact pushing fifty, is of a similar build to her partner/lover/otherhalf/technically-wife-though-they-be-not-married-even-though-now-of-course-they-could-if-they-wanted-to, while pouring tea into the mini mugs that are more sturdy than dainty, but lovable all the same (a bit like the couple themselves), recounts the story of their progeny – the mugs’ – and how they – the couple – got them from a friend of theirs who in turn had made them herself especially for their beach hut here, outside which we are sitting, as a present. But my mind isn’t on tea or on mugs or even on the extraordinarily large buttock that advances on me alarmingly as she bends down to pour the sixth mug.

Instead, my mind briefly wanders into un- or only tangentially related territory, and I wonder can we not just call this, ourselves, the Rainbow Community. We’ve adopted the flag, we enjoy the concept, it’s served us well, it does the job and it’s friendly. LGBTTQQIAAP sounds, frankly, ridiculous. It may be inclusive, but as a word it’s unpronounceable, and as an acronym preposterous. And though it list everyone anyone can currently think of, it’s bound to be incomplete. There is certain to be someone out there somewhere who does not feel their gender or sexual identity adequately represented by either ‘lesbian’, ‘gay’, ‘bisexual’, ‘transgender’, ‘transsexual’, ‘queer’, ‘questioning’, ‘intersex’, ‘asexual’, ‘ally’, or ‘pansexual’. Rainbow, let’s face it, does the trick, as in: “Brighton and Hove is a haven for the Rainbow Community, there is no real reason why Bournemouth and Boscombe shouldn’t be too.” I have a feeling the idea can hardly be new, and I surmise it has probably been tried or at least aired before and for some reason or other rejected, or dismissed, by at least some. But, my mind goes: we need better than a string of letters that looks like an unsolved Enigma code and has no sound. ‘Rainbow’ is fine, seriously, it may have hippie connotations, and the peace movement of the 1990s may have a claim on it too, but so what. It’s embracing. It’s non-ethnicity specific, it’s even pretty. It’s natural. Rainbows happen all over the world. All the time. Like living, like loving. Like questioning, querying and doubting. Like being naked under the sun. For whatever reason, to whatever end.

We could call ourselves the Turing Community, with a reference to the unsolved enigma that is being LGBTTQQIAAP, and to honour a human being who has done more for humanity than most others and suffered terrible injustice as his reward. I resolve to try it out on my new friends here, at the next opportunity and say something like: ‘The Turing Community has really made great strides this century, but the struggle is by no means over.” Upon which they are bound to ask: “What’s the Turing Community,” to which I’ll reply: “us, the Rainbow Community,” and there’ll no doubt be a long discussion about what we should call ourselves, and whether we can even think of ourselves in any way as a ‘community’. And that could be fun, or at least diverting. Or stimulating, who knows…

Before I can do so, we are joined by another friendly couple who are participating in the Bournemouth and Boscome Nude Beach Stroll together with their little dog. The dog is panting a bit in the heat now, so he gets a bowl of water as a priority. Everybody gets up – that is my big burly new friend, who’s effectively adopted me as a Nude Beach Stroll newbie, his somewhat demur friend who has not been saying much since I tagged along with them, and their sunny woman friend whose welcome it was that convinced me and won me over so quickly. The British ritual of kissing friends and close-enough friends of friends even if you have never met them before on the cheek, once, takes on an additional layer of ‘slightly awkward’, because parts of peoples’ bodies that are usually unnoticeable enough, wrapped in some clothing, now dangle and wriggle, and you just have to get used to the odd nipple or tip of a cock brushing against you, and make nothing of it. As do these kind folk, whom to be with I feel happier and more comfortable about all the time.

There is now a veritable plethora of people represented around this little impromptu tea party, and instead of toying with gender nomenclature, I imagine them going about their ordinary business during the day naked. That’s just as entertaining, I quickly realise, as imagining them clothed. The host couple, it transpires, are both social workers of some sort, though one, it appears, in the statutory, the other in the voluntary sector. The mixed couple who have just arrived are semi-retired, it seems, but I can’t quite disentangle their various community involvements and interests from their part time professional activities which lie broadly in the region of ‘consultation’. My burly new friend is a carpenter, and his partner – the one who strikes me as a little suspicious, or possibly simply wary of me – a lawyer. Their woman friend works for a big company on the outskirts of town. In personnel.

I imagine being employed by her big company on the outskirts of town and needing to see her about my annual leave or my P45, and wandering through a large open plan office full of naked people sitting at computers doing things that to me are incomprehensible in the way, say, cricket is, but not quite as fascinating or soothing, and knocking on Sarah’s door and hearing her friendly, warm, sunny voice call, ‘come in!’, and finding her sitting there at her own desk with her big broad smile, and her very red lips and her quite strawberry hair and her freckled nose and her large-nippled breasts, and her necklace that has a Buddhist, I reckon, symbol on it, or maybe it’s just generically spiritual, and her interesting silver green-shade coloured nails, and her offering me a seat.

There are many things inherently impractical indeed about being naked. You don’t want to, for example, sit down in a leather chair where you know someone else has just sat, for maybe half an hour or longer, talking to their Human Resources manager about a recurring health issue. What exactly is the issue, you wonder, and is it contagious?… Or the carpenter. Now, in some respects that makes a little more sense: making furniture is proper physical exertion, and why should he not do so free from textiles, but perhaps, for reasons of personal safety, no more than topless. I like his chest, Paul’s, as it bounces when he laughs at a joke I wasn’t quite listening to and therefore didn’t quite get, and I like his magnificent belly which doesn’t seem fat so much as voluptuous. He is wholly, and wholesomely attractive, though not in a classical, or traditional, or obvious way. His personality beams and bestows on the people around him assurance. I like that. His living partner (of many years, it turns out) is the exact opposite. Dry and wry and analytical. They obviously complement each other, and although he, the partner, hasn’t warmed to me yet, I sense his underlying suspicion, if that’s what it is, slowly ceding. It’s maybe the tea, maybe the realisation I am not going to be a threat to him or his relationship, ever; or perhaps it’s the cookies. I wonder could it possibly have happened that we’ve been served hash cookies, without being told, but then dismiss that idea as absurd. I would have fallen asleep by now, because my tolerance of dope is practically zero.

I suddenly long for a prosecco and wonder is that an option, when I’m pulled out of my disjointed but pleasurable reverie (in the nude) by hearing my name spoken, loud and a little provocative: ‘and what is it you do, Sebastian?’ Clare asks me with a look of frank expectation. She’s the girlfriend of the host couple and the one, I believe, whose social work is more statutory. I’m momentarily startled and before I can prevent myself from thinking the thought I wonder, but for a fraction of a second, what happens when nudists get involuntary erections, but I gather my senses and I reply: ‘I am a writer.’

{Success}

The young man I’m on a date with is really unbearably cute. ‘You’re really unbearably cute’, I tell him. ‘I know’, he says, with the smile of someone who really does, and an involuntary shrug: ‘I try. I succeed.’

It’s happy hour at The Troubadour, my favourite haunt and quasi home from home, and so I look forward to an early evening mojito. This, here at The Troubadour, is contingent upon the other person also wanting a mojito. Or at any rate the same cocktail: you get two for one, but only as long as they’re the same drink. Why is a mystery to me, but not one that has ever bothered me enough to prompt me to enquire about its reason: it’s rarely a problem, since I’ve come across few people in my life who don’t like a mojito and for those who don’t, there’s always the option of a bloody mary. Or any other standard you’d expect on a short but traditional menu. I worry not.

Robert, the friendly and forever charming and helpful waiter appears, and as I propose this way to start the evening as an almost foregone conclusion, my young and very new friend throws an unexpected spanner in the works: ‘I don’t drink alcohol.’

‘What, not at all?’

‘No, I used to, but I didn’t really like it, and I got too drunk a couple of times, so I’ve stopped altogether, but you go ahead.’

‘Are you sure?’

This is dodgy territory. If I drink and he doesn’t, doesn’t this unbalance our universe – in which, at least for the next few hours, we are meant and agreed to proceed together – and not necessarily in anyone’s favour? I’m concerned now that this date may not go so well after all…

‘Yes absolutely, I really don’t mind. Seriously.’

His smile remains confident and sincere and so I turn to Robert who is waiting on us patiently and benign, while this short negotiation takes place, and I order the mojito nonetheless. Robert, bless him, reads the situation just fine and innocently asks if I want the happy hour anyway. I’m stumped once again, but before I can say anything more my young friend says, sure, go ahead; and so it comes to pass that I’m on a date with an unbearably cute young man who doesn’t drink at all while I’m being brought two mojitos by Robert, who does not bat an eyelid. They look incongruous on the table in front of me, these mojitos, next to his elderflower cordial (or whatever it was), but just for about the first five minutes or so. Soon I ease into the conversation, and the glow of a man half my age (almost literally, I think) who is so comfortable with everything and with himself that I feel, this is perfectly all right, I can enjoy this, I can relax.

The date, unsurprisingly, is a resounding success…

London

The Tape ends in London, where I tell my future self that I had “never been on a holiday after which I found it so difficult to return home.” It was my longest trip since leaving high school in Switzerland, after which eleven of us went island hopping in Greece for nearly a month. I don’t feel like coming “back to my own cooking” – which at the time, and for many, many years to come, consists mainly of pasta, fried eggs and the occasional oven-baked fish – “and my own washing up.” The only thing I do feel like is to “bring to fruition all the plans I’ve formulated about Edinburgh.” It feels good to have “talked to so many people in so many different places;” in fact, “it feels like there’s a theatre, and friends and family are already assembled in the front rows, but the curtain hasn’t quite risen yet.” But that’s good, I emphasise: “it’s a kind of pressure – good pressure – a supportive expectation, which spurs me on to follow through on what I said I wanted to do.” Of course, I am aware, “I don’t know if it will succeed, but it’s worth a try.” And for that sentiment alone I still, today, salute my very young and very optimistic self of 1988.

A few changes are imminent: “I feel I have to leave 14 St Alban’s Street soon, just because of the temperatures in winter.” These I remember with less pain now than I know I used to experience at the time. The place had no central heating, and while the kitchen (which was also the hall) and my bedroom were so small that you could just about get them warm with an electric blow heater or by putting the oven on and leaving its door open, that was an expensive and hardly ecological way to heat your home, and we all had no money. So in winter, we took all the food out of the fridge, put it on the grand piano in the living room, switched off the fridge and closed the door to the living room, and that was it till the spring: our own ridiculously eccentric walk-in larder.

That building no longer stands. A little while ago, I walked past where it used to be, and to my surprise and momentary disorientation I found that the whole block, which had housed some shops, possibly a bank, certainly a pub, and our flat as well as several others, was simply gone. I imagine a new office block, or mixed residential commercial development is going up on the site. This used to be owned by the Crown Estate, I imagine it still is. Our landlady though was an Italian poet who had been living in London for about twenty years by then, who had six grown up children, and who was not only subletting individual rooms to us flat sharers, but also ran the small music rehearsal studios downstairs, called St Alban’s Street Studios; and when these were overbooked, musicians would sometimes come up to our flat and use the grand piano in the living room to practice. I loved living there; it felt in an almost old-fashioned sense ‘bohemian’, I was still new to town, and this was a place with an unbeatable location, directly behind Piccadilly Circus, in a tiny street wedged in between Lower Regent Street and Haymarket, used mostly by taxis to change direction in the one way system, or as a shortcut. (But not every London cab driver knew of it, even though it was so central and therefore undoubtedly part of ‘The Knowledge’. On one occasion, I had one who was so surprised that there was a street in the West End he’d never heard of that he switched off the meter and offered to take me to my doorstep, just to find out…)

The terms of the lease on the flat stipulated that our landlady was not actually allowed to sublet any part of it, but was meant to use it solely for herself and her family. It can’t have been long after this, my final audio diary entry, that we were told she was going to lose the flat, unless she could convince a court that we were not really renting our rooms from her, but living there on a friendly basis, in a quasi artistic arrangement. This was utter nonsense, of course, even though two of our flatmates had, at times, been staffing the reception of the studios downstairs, for one pound an hour… No wonder, therefore, our feeble attempts at making our tenancies sound like anything other than what they were, without perjuring ourselves as witnesses in front of a judge, got absolutely nowhere, and soon the decision was made for me: I had to move out, as the Crown Estate took back the property. Ironically, a full quarter century later, the same landlady got into trouble again with her neighbours, over the flat where she had actually been living all this time. Also over subletting rooms, now on AirBnB. Again there was a court case. Again she lost…

On The Tape, apart from sensing a move come on, I also “feel I have to change jobs just for the sake of diversity” – by which I probably mean variety – “and getting to know something new,” by which I probably mean learning it. I record, and relate, that there’s “no hurry about that, although first initiatives will start now towards the end of the year.” Other than that, I now have “lots to do regarding Edinburgh next year,” and apparently I had been doing some workshops on Tuesdays prior to the trip, because I now tell myself that these are starting up again. Perhaps I’ll even “enrol for the City Lit course.”  The City Lit course was a then well known – almost in a small way legendary – part time acting course; legendary not so much necessarily for the content or the teaching (though it was led by two magnificent and much loved Canadians), but for the fact that admission was granted on a purely first come, first served basis, rather than through auditions, which meant that people quite literally queued up overnight to get in. I obviously followed through on this, because I certainly did queue up all through the night, two years running, and I met in that queue people I’m still friends with today, one of whom built from scratch first the Southwark Playhouse and then Arcola Theatre, two of the best known and most respected London Off West End Theatres today, at both of which I’ve had plays of mine staged.

The final note of this holiday, I hear myself say, “is summarised perhaps in the word ‘fantastic,’” by which I mean not so much that it had been exciting, but that I met really nice people, among them many friends of friends; that I had been able to stay with people all the way through except in Edinburgh and Paris; and enjoyed being with people I knew and knew very well.

I end The Tape by telling my future self that I had just had a walk through St James’s Park, after coffee at the ICA, and that it feels “a bit like decision time.” It’s a time of looking back and of looking forward, and if this was a break in-between, then the part that starts now is going to be a busy one: “I feel quite determined to finish my studies; I feel determined to do Edinburgh next year. I won’t apply for Drama School, I’d rather finish the evening studies first.” This is a degree I was taking, at what was then known as the Polytechnic of Central London and has since been renamed University of Westminster. In Social Sciences. I’ve always held this to be the most useless degree imaginable, but it was a valuable experience all in its own right, and it turned out to be far from useless, but for reasons I could not really have foreseen. Clearly, though, it was simply an extension of my general education, rather than in any way a vocation, since my heart was then already firmly on theatre, from whence it has rarely ever really strayed. But the earliest possible moment therefore for me to go for a full time Drama School would be “next year,” while in the meantime “I’ll try to do a City Lit course;” and everything else, I declare, is up for grabs. It was, I say in the most languid voice that I’ve ever heard anyone, including myself, use to say anything, and that now brings an indulgent smile at myself of back then to my lips, “a totally invigorating and satisfying experience. I feel very grateful for having been able to do this, and for having been received with such hospitality and friendship.”

Finally, I reckon that there’s “a lot of travelling to do” (which I do, over time), and “a lot of living in different places,” too, naming Paris and Italy as likely contenders, which is something I haven’t done: after St Alban’s Street I crashed with friends in Hackney for a short while, then I lived near Marble Arch for a few years, then in Ashley Gardens near Victoria in precisely the flat that our former landlady has since also lost (though that block is unlikely to be torn down any time soon, as it is a gorgeous residential two-tone brick building, in keeping entirely with the Westminster Cathedral, which stands directly next to it). After that I moved into The Anthony in Earl’s Court, where I’ve been living ever since. Always London: maybe my first, and certainly the longest love of my life…

Saturn

Dione, Tethys, Mimas, Enceladus – your friendly moons’ names sound like characters to me, in a pastoral play. Even Titan and Iapetus; they have been overthrown, dwell in the pantheon no longer: neighbours now, living downstairs, or, to wave at, across the street. Your rings, though no more mysterious now than you, are elegant still; and you are inviting too. Against thy will, methinks; like the old rustic who grumbles at first and enjoys the thought of himself as forbidding but turns out to be really at heart rather congenial.

I am at the stage now where I feel there are fewer surprises. Fewer certainties too, and fewer woes. Fewer intransigencies and fewer instances of despair. That can only, I sense, be a good thing. Journeying has put me at ease with myself. I feel millions of miles still away from where I envisage that I should be, but this seems natural now, and of little concern. The hereness and thereness of it all: the potentialities of the potential. The meta nomenclature of the id. The closer I get to being myself, the more I disperse myself across the quanta of energy: thought. Insubstantive meanderings that then turn out to make sense after all. At some point, at some level, in some way. Not conscious, perhaps, but innocuous, calm.

I sit down on one of these rings and let my legs dangle in the brook of what looks like a void from afar that surrounds it, and my toes tingle at the excitement of being and wriggle with a childlike and clean and unjaded joy: they haven’t walked as far yet by far as it seems, they have merely meandered. Over the meadows of this spacescape, this English garden, this Ermitage. I feel my thin body, pale and slender but resilient and robust, as it was back then, when I was a boy. It never preoccupied itself with itself. The etherealness of it all, the curiousness. And always, always the wonder. Nobody joins me, yet, and maybe nobody ever will now, and it saddens me not, I am free.

From where I perch on my borrowed bank, my legs suspended, my hand – the left one – playing with marbles, the molecules, the droplets, the pebbles and the whists of yellow-blue algae that get trapped in my fingers, cool and gentle, soft and strong, my eyes, inclined toward what lies below and therefore what also above, my face reflected (reminiscent, perhaps, after all, of Narcissus, though he, I know, does not belong here any more than he does on Mercury) my lips catch my attention and for a fleeting moment I wish me a one for them to be kissed. The longing, the curiosity, still, and the awe.

I am on the brink, I realise, and at this point, sooner or later, there does come the point where you have to decide. Do you jump, assuming that you will fly, or don’t you, fearing that you might drown. Why do I do this from here, and not where I started? Have I conspired with circumstances to manoeuvre myself onto the fence of a planet whose patron is the god of the farmer of all things to finally return to the George in me and embrace him as much as release him in exactly the same gesture, at exactly the same time, for exactly the same reasons and to exactly the same end? It wouldn’t surprise me. Hardly anything would. The universe finds a way, of that I have long been certain, and whatever happens next is bound to happen, just as what happened before was in its own languid way quite inevitable. All the querulousnesses of adversaries (they were friends in disguise), all the insurmountablenesses of obstacles, varied and frequent and each in its own right unreasonable, from here, from this tholin perspective, rotating at speed, and wobbly, a little bit drunk on the juices of life, but steady and safe in myself now – as far as there even exist such notions as ‘steadiness’, ‘safety’ and ‘self’ – look irrelevant now and benign. My right hand that has been holding on to the ice, to the carbon, the substance, such as there was, in a vain grip on something the brain interpreted as ‘reality’, still, after only another decade or so of faint hesitation, lets go, and, much as expected, I sink not, and nor do I soar: I float, once again, now earthwards, I’m sure.

{QED}

now the problem of the giraffe taking a shower is a very serious one which has never really been solved. it is also very much doubtful whether it ever will be solved, since it is such a great one.

the giraffe taking a shower has the great problem that the water running down his beautiful long ears, down his beautiful long neck, over his delightful belly and down his beautiful long legs, reaches his beautiful long toes when it is not likely to be quite as warm any more as it was when it rinsed over the beautiful long ears. in fact is is very likely to be rather cold. thus the giraffe taking a shower finds himself confronted with the everlasting difficulty of an undisintangleable dilemma. this sounds unlikely, i know, that is we all know, you and i know it sounds remarkably unlikely, but it is nevertheless very true: should he, the giraffe taking a shower, risk burning the tips of his beautiful ears, or perchance freeze to the bone his beautiful toes. if he sets the water temperature too high he will invariably burn the tips of his beautiful ears, or at least get very hot in his head, which is almost equally uncomfortable; does he, however, try to avoid this by tuning the water a little colder, he will of course not burn his ears but by the time the water will have run down all his beautiful long neck, his delightful belly will already shiver a little and when the water finally reaches his beautiful long toes it will be plain cold and he will awfully chill his sensitive footends.

so this, as most easily can be understood, is the problem of the giraffe taking a shower. what is he supposed to do. should he drop the idea of having a shower altogether and instead take the occasional bath? that, of course, might seem like a sensible alternative. but how complicated a thing to do. for a giraffe. no one could expect him to just simply fold his neck when he wants to wash it, and how can he reach his beautiful ears when his beautiful long legs still are not half as long as his beautiful neck. oh i can tell you, a giraffe has no easy life to live. his problems are many and none of them is a small one, let alone short. he or she, the giraffe taking a shower, is a poor creature just like you and like me…