A Pleasure and a Calling

by Phil Hogan

the habitual is what I love most and am made for;

I might forget a face but, I have to tell you, I never forget a house.

But, I hear you ask, with some scepticism (and with that gun to my head) … of all the many splendid houses you’ve sold in your seventeen years in the business, you just happened to have the key to that particular one? To which I would answer, of course not – I have the keys to them all.

What is life without the unexpected crash of something to remind us of how the rug can be pulled from under you in an instant?

I know now that you can’t know everything about everyone. You have to think of it as a thrilling, ongoing project. Crossing the threshold of a strange house is like the opening line of a gripping story. At its best, penetrating deeper, it is like falling in love.

But I also have my standards. No hidden cameras, wires or microphones are used in the making of my ‘art’. I don’t peep through windows. Where is the pleasure in that? I am not a stalker, or a voyeur. I am simply sharing an experience, a life as it happens.

Perhaps my aunt would have died more peacefully had she condemned a little less and loved a little more.

THE WEEKEND IS NOT ideal for snooping. People come and go more randomly but less interestingly.

The truth is that death is never far away. It cannot be helped. I have learned that much.

The truth was, my aunt knew little about what I had done. Guessing at it was enough to horrify her, to feed her imagination, her fear of what I might one day do.

I am driven by nature, unable sometimes to distinguish wants from needs.

My best moments have resembled feats of comic heroism.

If I thought about him, it was only to hate him for involving me in his death.

Poetry, I admit, is the locked room to which my mind cannot quite be relied upon to find the key,

It is like a work of art. You walk towards it until all you can see is the paint. And when you back off again, what you had is gone for ever. Nothing is the same. You know too much.

The only difference between the sane and the insane is how many people you can get to agree with you.

It is normal people who have a ‘double life’. On the outside is your everyday life of going out to work and going on holiday. Then there is the life you wish you had – the life that keeps you awake at night with hope, ambition, plans, frustration, resentment, envy, regret. This is a more seething life of wants, driven by thoughts of possibility and potential. It is the life you can never have.

You are obsessed with what is just out of reach. It is the itch you cannot scratch. Tortured by the principle that the more you can’t have something the more you desire it, you are never happy.

I am happy on the fringes, listening and watching, excitedly awaiting your next move. I dissolve into the surroundings and breathe your air. I come in peace. I bring my love.