How To Manoeuvre A Sten Line Ferry, Fishguard Harbour

One fairly hefty Stena Line ferry at her moorings at Fishguard Harbour

... starts to move sideways...

...and then rotate...

...before straightening out...

....and heading off to sea

It's done with bow- and stern-thrusters, water-jets that add an astonishing amount of manoeuvrability to even a large-ish ship. It took about three minutes to spin the ship round. 

Cool: The Complete Handbook (Harry Armfield)

Back in the day a guy called Harry Armfield wrote a book called Cool: The Complete Handbook. Amongst other things it has the best movie list, reading list and music list I have seen. Armfield describes Classical Cool, whose icons are Steve McQueen and Miles Davis. Cool is not about accessories you had - though some, like the Zippo lighter, are iconic - not was it about being pretty, though that helps. It was about how you comported yourself: with a certain individuality, a touch of anti-establishment attitude, and an ineffable distance from the concerns, values and rules of everyday life. It is logically possible to be a parent and cool, but so far no-one you know has managed the trick. (What teenagers call "cool parents" is a different thing.)

Classical Cool can embrace a wide range of people and callings. There are cool mathematicians (Alexander Grothendieck, who eventually quit his teaching job and became a hermit); there are cool physicists (Richard Feynman, who did his physics in a strip club in Rio, picked up air stewardesses and looked like a handsome cowboy); there are cool magazine editors (Anna Wintour), there are even cool programmers (Linus Torvalds, godfather of Linux) and politicians (Winston Churchill). Cool had an unresolved relationship with drugs, and is as austere as a Palestrina Motet. It's restrained, understated, off-beat, non-conformist: it's a sibling of the idea of the Gentleman. Classical cool is masculine. There are classically cool women, but not many. Feminism is not cool, nor is therapy, and anyone who holds intimacy and closeness to be amongst the highest of human values is never going to be cool.

A number of Amazon Marketplace suppliers have second-hand copies Armfield's book and a couple of weeks ago, when I was thinking of those lists, I ordered one. It was as good as I remember it. It was written in 1986. You may not remember 1986. I think I was there at the time, but I don't remember a lot of it. 1987. That was the year that followed it. David Harvey, in his best-seller The Condition of Post-Modernity, identifies 1972 as the year when the old world was replaced by the post-modern world. I will beg to differ. It was 1987. The second summer of love, Ecstasy was actually made of MDMA, Balearic beats finally made sense and the behemoth that is dance / club culture rose from the deep. Classical cool as a cultural force vanished by 1990, the exact symbolic moment being when Kate Moss was chosen for the cover of the Third Summer of Love issue of ID magazine.

Dance culture was the opposite of Classical Cool. It was based on taking a drug that made you love everyone around you. It needed you to dance for hours, mostly like a prat, with unstoppable enthusiasm. It isn't about the Art, it's about the Vibe: the audience don't care how the DJ's get the sound, as long as they get it. Classical Cool was never compatible with day jobs, capitalism or careers and it was pretty much closed to the masses. Dance culture is populist and the Opium of the Office Worker. Cool is the moving camera of Robert Altman: Dance is 3-D and CGI.

Dance / Club Culture doesn't care who you are or what you do, as long as you are prepared to put on tonight's themed costume join in the crowd. All you need for entry is whatever it takes to get past the bouncers. All the nerds making their wonderful dance music of whatever genre are not cool. The Yahhovians I see in my building every day are variously funky, trendy, a couple are hot, but none are cool. Nobody playing Angry Birds has ever been, is now or ever will be cool. Classical Cool is too austere for these times, when people need distraction from the ghastly economic and employment uncertainty they face on a daily basis, as well as the now seeming financial impossibility of their ever living the lifestyle.


If you are under forty-five, read Armfield's book, and you might understand why certain of your older relatives and co-workers can't quite take you seriously. If you are under thirty, the world it describes will be simply quaint. Read it and learn. Then both of you move on to Bernhard Roetzel's Gentleman.

Restaurants: Five, Fishguard

Five
5 Main Street, Fishguard, Pembrokeshire SA65 9HG
01348 875050

One of the risks of staying anywhere between the M25 and Abroad is that there may be Nowhere To Eat. Or worse, that there will be but it will be well-meant and horribly average. That was the first place I ate in Fishguard, for lunch, and I will spare its blushes.

The next place, ten yards up the road from my hotel, was pretty much what you want a restaurant to be. The service, since it wasn't busy (Tuesday night is never busy anywhere) was admirably snappy.

I think that an eating-house should only be allowed to call itself a restaurant if it serves an amuse-bouche before the evening meal. This was black pudding and monkfish, exactly as tasty as it sounds.

I went for the goats cheese and poached pear on bruchetta. The goats cheese was very soft and came from a happy goat, since angry goats produce the more familiar chalky-textured cheese. I want to know how to do pears like that, or indeed, where to get pears like that. Their chef obviously does.

I chose the goats cheese because I wanted the fish pie as my main course. I am never going to cook a fish pie at home, so I like to order one when it's on offer. This had mackeral, salmon and prawns, very light on the potato and heavy on the fish, with some garden peas, peeled (!) broad beans and fresh asparagus on the side.

Telling my usual tale of being forbidden alcohol, the waitress found out for me that the summer fruits and pancetta were inseparable from a champagne sauce, so I opted for a brownie with vanilla ice cream: the brownie was basically a chocolate fondant and the peanut brittle was laced with sea-salt. And that's not a complaint.

I went back the next evening. Why experiment when you have found a Good Thing? They go to bed early in Fishguard, last serving is 21:00. Best to book, especially in the season and at weekends.

The Victim: Me
The Damage: Three courses £30 - £40 a head excluding drinks
The Verdict:  I liked it so much, I went back the next evening

Never Go To A Funeral On Your Own

If you should find out that you are coming to my funeral, and you will be going there on your own and won't know anyone there, then my friend you are excused. Turn round. Go home. With my blessing. I have been to a funeral solo and it is not how it should be done. It was six weeks ago, in mid-May, and while I got over the immediate impact, I realised this week I haven't really processed it.

Funerals are supposed to remind us of our mortality as well as of the life of the deceased. We are supposed to reflect on our life with and without them, and become aware of the little losses we will feel over the next year every time we do something and they aren't there as they used to be.

Everyone else had come with wives and even with children. I had never met any of these people, and I'm not sure many of them had met each other. Those people could share their grief, squeeze each other's hands or put arms round shoulders. I couldn't, so it was probably a good thing I wasn't feeling tearful. Actually I don't know what I was feeling at the time. I may have looked like I was on Mars.

The other people from the same part of his life that I was in did not show up. Unless I didn't recognise them nor they me, but I doubt it. I don't think I expected them to be there, but given that they were the only other people I knew, they were the ones who left me in the lurch. If that makes sense. There was nowhere to go with whatever feelings I had.

There was a long moment when I really thought that smoking a cigarette would be a good idea. I quit smoking in 1995 and after the first year have never had a craving or an urge for a cigarette. Until then. The original plan was that I would go back to work and go to the gym, as usual on a Thursday. On the way back to the station, I knew I had to go home. I stopped in Richmond to get some cake and chocolate (uh-huh, yep) and spent the afternoon and much of the evening watching DVDs. I even watched Rent - it's a great movie for when you're feeling a little emotional and then along came this...



...and because I'm a human being living a real life, of course I burst into tears. "Will someone care / will I wake tomorrow from this nightmare?" At the time I thought I was letting out feelings over my friend's death. The next morning, I got on with life, maybe a little subdued, but not emotionally hungover or upset.

I wasn't letting out feelings about my friend's death or my own mortality. You forget that I regard a quick and timely death as a reward for passing the endurance test that is life. I didn't feel sad for him. He died quickly and with all his faculties, despite the cancer drugs. His wife and son are left to get on with their lives, and they are both sensible, practical people who will do so with application, pausing every now and then to feel a twinge of sadness. They have a lot of support from their friends, and me, if they ever need it.

Yes, I was looking at all those people and once again there's a whole crowd I don't know that perhaps I might have thought I should. The funeral was making me feel isolated and lonely again.

Funerals are a religious service and I don't do religion. The more time passes, the more I see the Middle-Eastern influences of Christianity and the more those influences seem wrong for the times I live in. In my world what's gone is gone, and what remains are the lessons, the debt and the mess to clear up. (No. Good stuff never lasts beyond the moment.) No matter what happens, we will pay our taxes, our due bills and re-fill our refrigerators and petrol tank; we will go to work, where we will be surrounded by people who need us to behave as usual so they can do their job. The Middle-Eastern tradition was developed in a world where people could take weeks out to mourn or fast or attend ceremonies, and where those ceremonies served to gather together people who needed to be gathered together anyway. The Middle-Eastern tradition invites us to feel emotions and behave in a manner that is unsuitable for the Western world, and therefore to feel guilty if we don't feel the way it says we should. And I don't.

Nobody needed me there and there was nothing I could do. Why would I go somewhere I'm just going to feel useless? You may say: to show my respects. That makes sense in a Middle-Eastern setting where there's a functioning community and extended families, and my presence and actions will be noted and judged, but I live in the suburban world where my presence and actions are invisible. You may say: to show my support for the family. I had already done that.

I went because I thought it was the "right" thing to do. Well, guess what? It wasn't. I sat through a ceremony I think is a sham, humming along to lyrics I don't believe. Nobody needed me to be putting on a show. I was reminded that that when I die, I will not be found until the smell of my decomposing is noticeable by the neighbours. (Actually, I'm okay with that. I'll be dead when it's happening.) And mostly I was reminded that I have one nearby close relative and my few friends are otherwise scattered across the globe. Yeah. I needed that. The point of going to a funeral is to share our grief. I had no-one to share mine with. I should not have been there.

Which is why you are excused if you are travelling to my funeral on your own. Turn round, go back to work, go back to the world. With my blessing.

Waiting For Barry Manilow, Covent Garden

So I was on my way into work Thursday morning, weaving through the side streets of Covent Garden (actually, with the exception of Long Acre, all the streets of Covent Garden are side-streets) and suddenly I saw this...

The tables told this was serious waiting...

...for the man whom many consider to the heart-throb of all time...

Ladies and Gentlemen... Barry Manilow will be in the building!

Why I Stopped Watching "In Treatment (Bi'Tipul)"

In Treatment is an HBO adaptation of the Israeli series Bi'tipul about a troubled therapist and a bunch of his patients, each of whom reflect some part of his own problems with his life. Gabriel Byrne is the therapist, the seriously sexy Michelle Forbes is his cheating and frustrated wife, and there's Blair Underwood, Mia Wasikowska, Dianne Weist and Josh Charles supporting. This is a serious cast. The production and directing credits are pretty serious as well. The script structure is tight. It's pretty impressive.

And I decided at week eight of series one that's enough. I gave up fairly quickly on the Josh Charles / Embeth Davidtz couple squabbling about whether she should have an abortion, because it was obvious they shouldn't even be under the same roof let alone be parents. Dysfunction isn't drama. After about five episodes I passed on Melissa George's thirty-something sexy but unbalanced anaesthetist who has had, when the series opens, a one-year crush on her therapist. Yeah, I don't think so. He looks old, tired and dead in spirit. I don't care how unbalanced she is, no woman would keep going for a year with someone with so little joy in life. This left Blair Underwood's US Navy pilot and Mia Wasikowska's terminally messed-up teenage gymnast Olympic hopeful with an absent super-model photographer father and caring but wet mother who doesn't want her to train any more.

Right. Let's just say "terminally messed-up teenage gymnast Olympic hopeful with an absent super-model photographer father and caring but wet mother who doesn't want to train any more" again. Notice anything unlikely about it? Read the biographies of top athletes, or talk to the parents of high-performing athletic teenagers, and you will find out that in order for a teenager to get to be even a regional contender, let alone an Olympic hopeful, the parents have to turn their lives over to providing logistical, financial, moral and domestic support for their child. The idea that a teenage girl could make it to being a US Olympic hopeful with an absent father and a mother who doesn't want her to do it is terminally, totally unrealistic. And it's utterly unnecessary. Mia Wasikowska's performance is so compelling we would be fascinated if she was just on the school team.

So now to Blair Underwood's US Navy pilot who performed his mission as instructed, but because he was given some wrong co-ordinates or because some insurgents had moved a bunch of kids into their base, a bunch of children got killed. He is known as the "Madrassa Murderer". At first he seems to have no qualms about this, but in the end, it and what gets stirred up by the process causes him to commit suicide by mis-flying on a Top-Gun style training exercise. Of course he had to be in moral agonies about bombing a bunch of school kids. Let's have him wonder if he's gay through some pretty crass dream symbolism, and then have him talk about how he just loves hanging out with his two gay friends. Of course that, and the harsh and unloving upbringing from his father caused him such emotional turmoil that he couldn't take it any longer. Spot the politically correct liberal sensibilities.

Military pilots are chosen because they have the temperament to drop bombs, knowing that some innocent people might be also killed, and then sleep well at night and especially because they have got the temperament not to crash their planes out of guilt. How did the Allies and the Germans conduct all those bombings of civilians in WW2? If the pilots were in agony about killing civilians, the bombing campaigns would not have lasted more than a week. And what on earth he is doing seeing a civilian shrink when the Navy psychologists would be all over him is anyone's guess. I'm guessing that in real life, the civilian shrink would have to be security-cleared, vetted by the Navy shrinks and have gone through some military orientation. (Now that would be a story.)

Those two unrealistic stories are there for reasons. First, so that we will be more interested in two of the characters than if they were just ordinary Joes. Second, to suggest that successful, high achieving people can be screw-ups as well. Now the latter is true, just not about teenage gymnasts or Top Gun combat pilots. The writers guessed, and rightly, that we might not be too interested in the problems of a highly-paid derivatives trader, conceptual artist or soccer player. Third, the screw-ups can't be too similar to the audience, or the audience will feel the pain, make excuses and change channel. (Bickering married couples are there for contrast: isn't it terrible how some marriages just don't work, whereas we get along really well, don't we darling?) Fourth, and this is crucial, at least in drama, therapeutic screw-ups must be caused by family: schools, employers and local and national government must never be to blame for anything. It seems we can get help dealing with how Daddy and Mummy messed us up when we were seven, but not with how the incompetent egoists who ran the company messed us up when we were thirty-seven by dumping everyone out on the street with an IOU for their severance package. In the carefully Bowdlerised world of mass media drama, Capital and State are invisible, leaving only the Family visible to take the blame. It means the writers are restricted to family dysfunction, and like I said, I don't think dysfunction is drama. I may be in a minority on that one.

Its compression of the lengthy process of classical (as opposed to CBT or short-treatment) therapy into nine thirty minute episodes meant that what we got was a concentrated dose of dysfunctional conflict on a par with a bad episode of Eastenders. What was sucking me in was the sick feelings not the interest of the process. You might like that ride, but it's not good for me.

The Sound of Laughter In The Next Room

Have you ever felt you belong with a group? I see one of the Group and feel better, relax a little, or perhaps start to anticipate something good. I see a look of welcome, pleased-to-see-you on their face. We exchange some greeting, catch-phrase, and start to go somewhere neither of us need to name, or else wait for the Others and pass time with some chat that means something to us. That's what it's like for children, teenagers, undergraduates. For adults, maybe something similar, maybe with overtones of favors done and received as well. Mothers see the neighbour who baby-sits the kids on Wednesday evening, and whose children she takes on the school run Tuesdays and Fridays. Tradesmen see the guy they call on when a day's plumbing is needed, and who passed them a couple of day's plastering last month.

This is not a feeling I have. I must have had it once, to know what I'm missing. Or maybe I have just deduced it from what I've read and heard and seen of other people's lives. I could not even tell you what kind of people would give me that feeling, and I'm not at all sure who would feel that way about me. I have for years thought of myself as invisible - but the truth is that it's other people who are invisible to me. I'm pretty sure no-one talks about me in the pub after work, but I know I don't talk about them except in the abstract. The other people are invisible to me because we have nothing in common. How do I know that? Don't be silly. You know who your tribe are just by looking at them. Maybe you react to the a part of the mix of pheromones or whatever else chemicals we all give off as signals to each other.

I feel the hurt from this most when I meet someone who my instincts - those messed-up co-dependently-trained untrustworthy instincts - tell me I should get involved with. When I don't, through cowardice or good sense or just because I know she's already got a partner, that hurts. It feels like denying myself and it hurts. I've heard people talking about "sexual anorexia" or "emotional anorexia", but it's not the same thing. I understand anorexics feel a buzz when they deny themselves food. (I felt that buzz once myself in early recovery on my way to Phone Service one Saturday morning - and stopped off for breakfast at the Earl's Court branch of Balans immediately.) I don't feel a buzz when I deny myself people, I feel sadness.

You would think that by now I would have "got over it" and "moved on". However, no-one adapts to that - though there comes a time when you have to have the manners to stop going on about it in public. Conversely, it would be nice if the public would stop throwing people across my path and reminding me of it. Is this why most old people don't go out? Because they don't want to be reminded of their age and irrelevance? I used to go to a Thursday evening boxing class: between it and the train timetable, I wasn't back home until 21:00 and the traditional physical jerks that emphasise explosive strength don't suit me. But I kept with it for quite a few weeks. Many of the others did at least one if not two other classes a week and they chatted before the start and shared a handful of in-jokes. Not much, but just enough to suddenly make me feel that once again I was on the outside. And that upset me, so suddenly I found the logistics inconvenient and stopped going. I noticed that every now and then some new people would try the class out and not come back. Was it because they thought "no, this is an in-crowd thing and I want some hard-core exercise without a reminder that I'm not part of a little group" and didn't get upset with themselves for not feeling part of the group? They felt, in other words, that it wasn't the place for a "group"? Which sounds pretty "well-adjusted".

The exclusive gyms, exercise classes, schools and even pubs (The Blind Beggar anyone?) are exclusive because what they really offer is networking: the guarantee to their members that all the other people there will be reasonably congenial and possibly useful company. No time-wasters, tyre-kickers, glommers, celeb-spotters and other parasites, misfits and plain ordinary people.

A group is formed round some common experience or activity that its members want to share. This is why commuters aren't a group: they don't want to be there. It's why office workers often aren't a group: the nature of their work by and large isolates them in themselves (compare a bunch of analysts with their heads stuck in their computers with a bunch of guys in a foundry, who have to co-operate or they will be seriously injured by hot metal).

At some stage in our lives - I'm guessing it's well before eighteen - we need an experience of what being part of a group is like. We need to see and feel what it is like to exchange favours, to help and be helped, to trust and be trusted. Then we can see the world around us as somewhere we have a place in, that can be trusted, can be helpful to us and to which we can be helpful. These are not experiences that can be "had later", but lessons that need to be learned when we are still forming ourselves. Otherwise we make the adaption to a world that isn't helpful and can't be trusted and become, in the words of the song "cold, alone, just a person on my own". That was my experience.

I and others like me might have adapted like that, but it doesn't mean the urge, need or instinct to want to belong dies. That's still there. It's what lies behind our sense that we're incomplete and it's what causes the sudden bolt of loneliness when we are somewhere we would like to belong and know we arrived too late. It's why the sound of laughter in the next room is so tantalising and cruel.