Movie Step Nines

I was watching the Stephen Bochco / Chris Gerolmo series Over There again recently.  In one episode, Brigid Brannagh's character explains that since getting into AA she has to tell everyone all the bad stuff she's done, and drops a detail-free hint about various infidelities on her infantry-soldier partner in Iraq. Over a sat phone link.

In case you were wondering, that's not how it's done. What she's referring to is a Step Nine, though how anyone in early sobriety understands that Step Nine is relevant to them is beyond me. I didn't. But this is the movies.

Step Nine says  "Made direct amends to such people, wherever possible, except when to do so would injure them or others." There are two key ideas: one is making amends, the other is about not making it any worse

Amends first. Step Nine is not about getting forgiveness from everyone you've ever inconvenienced, nor is it about apologising. It's about the recovering alcoholic stepping up, admitting their wrong-doing and offering to make amends for it. Apologies are not amends. Step Nine amends mean repaying debts you welched on, replacing things you broke or stole, admitting guilt where you had fobbed it off on someone else. Stuff like that. For parents and partners, it might be behaving as they should have been behaving from the start, a lifelong amend.

The amend is for the wronged party, the admission is for the recovering alcoholic. But there's a restriction. They are not allowed to be self-indulgent, wallow in self-pity and mess things up even more than they already have. This is the "except where to do so will hurt others" clause. And it's this clause that Brigid Brannagh's character breaks. What the frack does she think she's doing, confessing her sins to a man thousands of miles away fighting a pointless war? And what kind of advice was her sponsor giving her? Generally Step Nine is for the second year, when the alcoholic has grown used to being sober, recognised a bunch of their baggage in their Fourth and Fifth Step, and is better prepared to behave and judge situations as a normal person would.

What her character was doing was, of course, a plot device. Given that the next thing the guy does is get busy with the Nicky Aycox's eighteen-year-old blonde hot girl driver "Mrs B", soon after her return from an AWOL, he's not the most balanced of people. But that's where the writers wanted to take the story. My guess is that Bochco is on the program and wants it to play a role in all his shows - because it is.

Steps Eight and Nine are where this recovering alcoholic learned to get his self-respect back. It's where I learned to be independent of other people's judgements of me. I can stand up, admit my fault, apologise and offer amends, and the other person can tell me to go to hell. That's their prerogative and I have to live with it. I don't have to beg them to forgive me and nor should I, because some people could play an endless game of blackmail with that. Which is not how I want nor should live my life. I confessed and offered to make it right, and that's all I can do: if you don't want any part of it, I can't make you and nor should I try. My self-respect does not depend on your approval.

A real Step Nine would look calmer and more serious. Much more awkward. Six people would make a ninety-minute movie, running through most of the emotions the wronged people would be feeling, from cheerful indifference to a deep and irrational bitterness, to a happy ending where we discover that the wronged party knew they were just as much in the wrong as our ex-drunk. In the course of the movie, our man gets a job, helps work on a house, and does other stuff, and those turn out to be amends as far as someone else is concerned.

Summer In Shoreditch (1)

Outside at Byron, Hoxton Square. Large skips are compulsory on all streets in Shoreditch. Two views of the square itself on one of the ten days this year it will be warm and dry enough to sit in. Notice the White Cube gallery in the background. Outside Ruby cafe on Charlotte Road. A PR agency. The Strongroom courtyard off Curtain Road. The City from Charlotte Street. It's a contrast I can never quite get over and you don't see in the West End.

Burgers in Shoreditch

That first week of the seven-day Summer 2012 I had a yen for a burger. Also I was fed up of scuttling from the office to somewhere in Spitalfields for take-out and scuttling back, which is all you can do when it's cold and/or wet. So I resolved to try some places in Shoreditch and Hoxton Square. So here they are...

First, the Red Dog Saloon, Hoxton Square. French fries, blue cheese, good slaw.

Next, The Book Club, Leonard Street. Cheese and bacon, thick chips, yum.

Third, The Byron, Hoxton Square - I was keeping it simple that day. Still yum.

Fourth, Ruby Cafe, Charlotte Road. Again, I was keeping it simple, and the beef was excellent.

Fifth. The Strongroom, Curtain Road. Simple, decent and honest.

Sixth, and yes, this isn't a burger, but fish and chips at Jamies on Bishopsgate. By then summer was over, it was pouring with rain and this was as far as I was prepared to scuttle.

All the burgers were good, solid, well-cooked and well-presented. All the places were interesting and had friendly, efficient staff. All the prices are about the same: say around £8-£14 depending on the exact combination. The Strongroom was cheapest and the Red Dog Saloon the most expensive. Jamie's wasn't as expensive as you might think - I've paid more at the fish-and-chip shop in Covent Garden, and waited longer to be served. 

Street Art in Shoreditch

I work less than a quarter of a mile from the heart of Shoreditch. The City of London is alleged to be a world centre of financial expertise: I'm dubious about the whole idea that anyone can be any good at investment these days. Shoreditch / Spitalfields / Bethnal Green / Hoxton is an undoubted centre, if not the centre, of street art in the world. And it's on my doorstep.

We had summer a couple of weeks ago, and the artists were out. One guy spent a week doing this amazing piece.  Click for details - it's worth it.

Late May London Moments

Window cleaners on Holborn at half-past seven in the morning; lovin' the new interior of Caffe Nero; chalk graffiti on a utilities cabinet  on Commercial Street; art under the arches at Waterloo; the City from Waterloo Bridge, full zoom and pixellated; that Matalan three girls poster, I want the one on the right; recruiters in Caffe Nero at eight in the morning. After a few polite bits of small talk, she said in as loud and boisterous a manner as it looks "so, we'd like to talk about your plans and thoughts for the future, and when we can get you to leave GSK". Ba-boom!

Escape Artist in the Covent Garden Piazza

Street performers are as much, if not more, part of Covent Garden than Tuttons. I was wandering through the other evening with an ice-cream from Thornton's and a new wallet from Fossil when I chanced across this guy. I stayed to watch, and very entertaining it was as well. Before starting on the escape act, he had done some juggling with the diabolo and three knives. Since I can barely hold one knife to eat without it falling on the floor, juggling three is pretty neat trick. Then he did the escape trick.

The trick is to take a deep breath and expand your body as the assistants are putting on the chain and rope. When it's time to escape, let all the air out and shrink yourself. That's why the chains can be made to fall off. I'm not sure about the straight-jacket, but I think it's an acquired trick with a shoulder-movement. Doesn't make it any the less impressive.

On Finishing In Search of Lost Time

A few weeks ago I finished reading the final volume of In Search of Lost Time. The Penguin edition is in six volumes: The Way By Swann's; In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower; The Guermantes Way; Sodom and Gomorrah; The Prisoner and The Fugitive; Finding Time Again. Full disclosure: I gave up about a third of the way through The Prisoner and The Fugitive because the endless  obsessive details and worryings over Albertine's faithfulness and doings started to feel repetitive after one hundred and fifty pages. Otherwise, I have slogged through the lot, even if reading The Guermantes Way felt like hitting my head with a hammer at times. I'm glad I did.

I have memories of trying to read Scott Moncrieff's translation when at university and suffering badly. I find the Penguin translations effortlessly readable and without the give-away signs that it was written to be "accessible". If you're a reader, you know you have to read Proust. You don't have to do it now, and some knowledge of the history of the time will help, or the younger amongst you will be wondering why he doesn't just track Albertine's smartphone with Footprints.

You don't review Proust, and more than you review Beethoven or Aristotle. Along with Musil's Man Without Qualities, Joyce's Ulysses, James's Late Novels (The Wings of A Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl), In Search of Lost Time is canonical. I glanced through it about ten years ago one Saturday morning in a Waterstones and bounced right off it: the subject matter seemed to me frivolous and ultra-refined. One day I just bought the Penguin edition volumes and put them on the shelf to read later, and three years ago or so, I was ready to read it.

Everyone starts with The Way by Swann's and very few get any further: it's actually quite a tough read in places. Instead, start with In The Shadow of Young Girls in Bloom, which should remind you of being a teenager and has the most laugh-out-loud moments, as well as some of the most memorable images and episodes. I suspect I will appreciate The Guermantes Way more the second time around, but I'm not at all sure I'm going to rush back to Sodom and Gomorrah, Proust's look at the homosexual and lesbian scene amongst the aristocracy. By today's standards, even in comparison to The Well of Loneliness (one of many books I've read and almost completely forgotten: I remember it as being emotionally but not physically explicit), his treatment seems tame, but he thought it was scandelous at the time.    

You need to know who these people are he's talking about, so you need to read the others before reading Finding Time Again. And if you're under fifty, don't bother reading it at all, because you won't have the life experience to make sense of it. I would not have understood what on earth he was talking about ten years ago, but oh boy do I now. The second half is a prefect description of the sense of change, falling and increasing irrelevance that one feels as one's hair gets greyer: Proust's narrator returns to Parisian society after a long period in a sanatorium and finds it full of people he's never heard of, who would never have been allowed past the door when he climbed his way through the window - the narrator is a social climber. It's a meditation on the exact ways his High Society has now become marginal and a memory of itself: mod out the details and it's about your life, but only if you are the narrator's age. As I get older, I get further from the rest of the world, which is full of strangers I don't want to do with, and what means more to me are the memories. Proust felt the same way. Reading that second half of felt like having some of myself explained to me.

The whole project is about the importance re-living one's life through memory. Important, that is, if you're a reflective, distracted, intellectual who wasn't too engaged with the practicalities of the world. Which is me. The point about his madeleine is that it brought the events back to him with a richness that they didn't have at the time. Only through memory can he understand what happened and see it for what it was. This isn't the "we need to live more in the moment, and pay attention to our lives" cliche: Proust's point is that it's exactly "living in the moment" that prevents us from understanding its significance and depth. That's what memory is for: it's only when we have time to remember an event fully that we can see what it really was.

This is why everyone looks at photographs, and older people write private memoires. This is what we have left of our lives. Proust didn't need a day job and was a great writer, so his memoire will have to stand for all those of us who do and aren't.