November 2018 Review

Am I the only person who leaves it way too long between changes of guitar strings? I had to clean the fretboard and bits of the soundboard with a slightly damp scouring pad applied gently, which is far more than you really wanted to know. And spray furniture polish over the whole neglected instrument. So I now have nice new bronze wound light-guage strings on my guitar.

I read Julia Blackburn’s Threads: The Delicate Life of John Craske, Ben Judah’s This is London: Life and Death in the World City, Hamilton Gregory’s McNamara’s Folly: The Use of Low-IQ Troops in the Vietnam War; Richard Taruskin’s Music in the Late Twentieth-Century; Anonymous’ The Secret Teacher; and Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden.

I saw Red Lights, 10,000km, The Wanderers, Season of the Witch, and The Apparition on MUBI; and I, Anna, and A Pigeon Sat on a Tree Reflecting About Existence, on Curzon Home Cinema; and Tout va Bien, Revenge, Taken, Taken 2 and Taken 3 on DVD. Those Takens are well-made ninety-minute action movies.

Sis and I had supper at Picture on Great Portland Street. We like the other Picture, but we like sitting at the bar in Great Portland Street more.

And the slump went on. How do I know I'm having a slump? I watch way, way too much You Tube. I feel tired and start to lose enthusiasm for the gym. These days I feel like I put a lot of effort into sleeping, especially into dreams with incredible levels of detail.

The trick with slumps is not to try to explain them with some pop-psychology cliche so worn out it gets used the script for a Channel Four movie. No, it’s not the weather. Nor is it the ‘andropause’, or a reaction to a friend dying. Any of those things might have triggered it, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is getting out of the slump. Slumps aren’t exited by the entrance, but by the exit. That came in December, when I used the lack of hot water at the gym for a week to give myself a decent rest.

There is also the fact that it’s one thing to wake up, drag yourself off to work and wish you didn’t have to do it; and another to wake up, drag yourself off to work, and know that you can stop doing it in about fifteen months, if you want to. The cure for that is to enjoy the days that one has to drag oneself off to. It’s also to remind yourself that only people with a long and ambitious to-do / project list get the feeling they are slipping. Everyone else goes home and watches the match.