Around Shoreditch and Spitalfields

These are the gates on the Commercial Road to Petticoat Lane Market. It's supposed to be famous, and one of these posts I'll put some pictures in so you can see how tatty it really is. Those buildings in the background are the City - the Gherkin (30 St Mary Axe) and the Heron Tower. I used to think the contrast could not be greater, but now I wonder...

Although this is the tatty sight to the left of the gates, and the photograph doesn't do the grime justice, at least the people who live here, maybe some stall holders,  have places of their own, whereas many of the people who work in those fancy offices are sharing flats and houses at exorbitant rents in what sound like fancier addresses but aren't. 

This is the Crisis head office on Commercial Road, just along from that tower block. It has a cafe, which is not full of homeless people at all, but Shoreditchians - late twenty/early thirties boys and girls who would be as cool as they think they are if they worked in Soho.

Otherwise, the rest are local sights: fancy gates on Wentworth Street, painting an advert for the Horse and Groom, Curtain Road; street art on Commercial Road; the exterior and interior of The Diner, Curtain Road.

This is where I take a stroll if I take a stroll lunchtime. Not a decent bookshop in the area. Not a cinema, the nearest being believe it or not, in Islington (!) - the Rio and Hackney Picturehouse being even further away than the Everyman and Vue, Islington.

Lunch Glorious Lunch - Shoreditch

I may have remarked that the office I work in is a depressing tip. I'm not sure if I've made that clear, but it's not the place I want to eat lunch in. Whereas in Heaven-By-Soho I was quite happy to pop out to Yoshino for sushi or Stockpot for a takeaway salad and eat in the office, I really don't want to eat in the squalor that is our Bishopsgate office. So I've been going out at lunchtime when I can. It's not cheap, but I don't seem to want to spend money going on vacations this year, so, here are some of the lunches available up the road from my office in Shoreditch.

Beef and Stilton salad at The Book Club; burger and cheese at The Diner, Curtain Road; Chorizo and potato breakfast at the Bishopsgate Kitchen, Brushfield Street; Eggs and fries at the Bishopsgate Kitchen; five choices lunch at Sahara, Great Eastern Street; Frittata, Ham and Eggs, Lamb Burger, all at The Book Club, Leonard Street.

Most of these are around the £8 mark, which keeps a lot (nay, all) of the City office workers out, as "City salaries" are not what you think these days. The standard is consistent, good and the food is tasty. That's a duck egg with the chorizo breakfast. The keyboard that keeps appearing belongs to my trusty Asus netbook.

Revised 2012 Resolutions

Are you having the 2012 I am? I know at least one person who has moved to an exotic island in the Mediterranean, and quite a few who have changed jobs, which I guess count as Life Events, but my life and that of many others around me has been one Grand Nul so far. I spent the first two months of the year in the grip of some debilitating something that not only removed my will to live but also meant I had to grasp handrails to get upstairs. Seriously, it was that bad.

So let's review those resolutions...

1.  Spitalfields isn't Soho - get over it and set off for the Central Line prompt at 17:00. I'm doing well on this one, especially after changing my morning routine by getting up an hour earlier (!). And with the recent warmer, if not more pleasant weather, I've been going into Shoreditch for my lunches, and I'm starting to feel some minimum connection with the area, especially since finding somewhere unutterably cool but not busy to write at lunchtimes.

2.  Go to the gym at least three days a week. Not only that, but I changed my routine shortly after feeling that what I was doing wasn't working. I put myself in the hands of Renata the Ju-Jitsu champion, and those routines are working. It's making a difference, but it's hard work.

3.  Not eat chocolate late in the evening and avoid excess carbs at lunchtime. Okay. You understood this one was aspirational. Right?

4.1 Take two week-long holidays abroad and a couple of short breaks in the UK. Nah. Not been in the mood. Crap weather. Pass.

4.2 One weekend, take the sleeper to and from Penzance. Still a possibility.

5. Spend more time researching stuff that's useful to my various projects. I'm doing this, but exactly how useful it's going to be, I don't know.

6  Do my "36 Views of St Mary Axe" photography project. I still have time for this. I can't take photographs in cold weather, so I'd better strike soon.

7  Read "Finding Time Again" so I've "read Proust". Result! See this post.

8. Make Saturday Special - details to follow. Still haven't sorted this one out.

9. Make the best of the seven-week Olympic period. So close, so close.

10. errr... that's it. 

So here are some changes.

2. Go to the gym every night after work - even if it's just for a quick swim. Only reason why I can skip is an 18:00 movie. Or not being in London. Or off sick. 

3. No more office cakes. Do bedtime prep after 21:30, because a lot of my compulsive chocolate-eating happens after 21:00. If I know I'm not trying to stay awake until 23:00, I may cut that back. More fruit salads - with single cream for the mouth feel and satisfaction - and more vegetable stews. Stop buying bars of chocolate and packets of biscuits, even if it is from Garcia in Notting Hill. There's more to say about this, but not now.

5. Commit to the analyst blog. Or stop thinking writing stuff for it. I'll discuss this later.

7. Finish with the freaking Riemann-Roch theorem already!

8. If the weather is remotely acceptable, head out of the house early to have breakfast somewhere. N'importe ou, just anywhere. 

10. Go to a weekday AA Meeting every fortnight - every week would remind me of why I get fed up with them. Maybe even tour round some of the ones I used to do in my early days.

I've felt flat for much of the year so far. A lack of movies I want to watch is one factor, the grim weather is another, and the Met Office tells us that the air quality and pollen this year is the worst it's been for a very long time. You're not affected by that nonsense, I know, but I'm a delicate plant and I am. Nothing quite satisfies me: not food, not music, not books, not the gym, certainly not work, heck, even chocolate doesn't do it for me. The closest I've been all year was walking back from Holborn to Waterloo at half-past eight on the first warm evening of the year after seeing Goodbye First Love at the Renoir. How much simpler does a pleasure get? Or maybe, because it's so rare, it's not simple at all.

The Making of A Bachelor Boy

I had a summer cold recently, so my brain went slightly AWOL and I wound up reading all sorts of MRA / Manosphere / Game blogs. What hadn't occurred to me, being Urepian and hence used to a feminised and non-militant Christian Church, is that them there Yankee Christians can be pretty darn right-wing when it comes to the subject of love and marriage. They do go on about commitment, love, men's and women's roles and the like. They mean it as well. These guys want to stay with the same woman for their lives, provided she follows certain rules, most of which amount to, you know, being a contributing, sexually-available wife instead of some entitled sex-rationing bitch on wheels.

Seriously. They want to be with the same woman for their lives. I mean, I know that's what marriage is about, and that's why I never even thought about getting married. I could no more get married than I could starve myself down to fifty kilos. I got confused when I hit adolescence and thought I would be happier if I was married or in relationships, and was therefore unhappy because I wasn't or couldn't be. What I got wrong, I now understand, wasn't that couldn't be happy in a marriage, but the circumstances under which I could be happy.

I don't do oxytocin, as I have remarked recently. It's the hormone that lets you trust and love. Either I don't produce it or have a greatly enhanced capacity for oxytocin uptake - in other words, no sooner is it released than it gets hoovered back up before it can do any damage... I mean, before it will help me bond appropriately. Also, I'm an extrovert. Yes, I know, you think extroverts need to have people around all the time, and I am never around people except at work, which doesn't count, so that looks odd, but that's not how it works. Extroverts fear boredom, introverts fear being swamped. I'm not scared of being swamped by people when I stay home and read, I'm trying to avoid being bored. Also, I'm intellectual, which means ideas are more interesting to me than people. Also, I'm an ACoA with a drink problem (that's "recovering alcoholic" to you), which means I have a totally dysfunctional sense of who would make a good partner, plus a desire for sensation over feeling. Or something like that.

In other words, all I really wanted to do was get laid. I know you think that's what all men want, but they don't. As those American Christian Manosphere guys reminded me, the vast majority of men really want a lifetime partner, which is why they get married. Screwing around a lot is Bad Boy Alpha, maintaining a working, sexual marriage over a lifetime is Real Man Alpha. It takes a lot of the same tricks, though some of them have to be spun differently. I had / have absolutely no intention of sharing my life (aka "putting someone else in a position where they can have the Courts take away two-thirds of my salary and all my assets, just because she stayed over one night and left a pair of panties in my wardrobe") with anyone. Not because I'm worried about losing what few assets I have - though there is that - but because I was and am scared of getting bored.

I think sex is one of the best things ever. Sex with an attractive, intelligent stranger, so I can have an interesting chat while getting my breath back, is about the best way I know of spending a night. I have done this a few times, and there was only one time it went a tad sour. However, while I'm pretty good on the first night, I'm not so good the second time round with the same girl - unless there's a while between nights. It's the novelty I want. Also back in the day, it was the excuse for a drink and a really late night.

So when regular girls came along, I thought I was being shy and awkward, but actually it was my self-defences: this girl will bore you in ten minutes, or you will bore her in five. I couldn't make the connections with "wife material" women, because the radar they use to detect suitable men doesn't register me at all. When I made a connection, it was with a girl who had similar problems to me. Those problems in men make us less than we might be, but basically sane, whereas those problems make women unstable with a trajectory to craziness or depression. Also, the other real burden I had was that I thought I was supposed to be a nice guy.

Stop sniggering. This was back in the 19... never you minds. These days everyone knows women really want coke-dealing, gun-running bikers rather than sober, responsible providers, but back in the dark pre-backlash decades, women spun the "nice guy" line, because it was what they were supposed to say, and some of us men were dumb enough to believe it. Of course, I was only pretending to be a nice guy: just ask any of the women on whom I cancelled relationships, didn't call afterwards, behaved like an asshole with (that may have been the booze, but it was often me), and certainly didn't offer to marry, engage or move in. But because I was a snivelling, no-confidence, co-dependent I couldn't just shrug my shoulders and say "That's who I am". No, I had to apologise and feel bad about it. More confidence, fewer delusions, more money to pay for weekends away, hotels and taxis, and I would have been laying them from Lands End to John O'Groats with a clear conscience and a smile. Not once would I have thought my life was empty and meaningless, because I wasn't looking for meaning from women - if I want meaning, I'll read some philosophy - I was looking for a night's sex and company.

But when I was in the depths of alcohol and co-dependency fuelled self-pity, pain and confusion, and I was there a long time, I thought the way out was to be Normal. I never actually envied the Normals their lives, but I envied the way I imagined they felt: self-satisfied, smug, sure of being right and when the going got tough, downright self-righteous. That's what I wanted. Not the wife, children, house and partnership track. I wasn't alone in thinking that: everyone who feels psychic pain from unidentifiable causes "just wants to be Normal". So that's what the Therapy Industry sells them.  Whereas the point is to understand what I made of myself as a reaction to what was being made of me, and then to do what it takes to enjoy life as I am, not as someone else thinks, or even I think, I should be.

I know all this now. I had to accept my inner ACoA to get here. It's too late to use this knowledge: like many single men of my age and vanity, I don't want what I can get, because it would make me look bad, and I can't get, nor afford, nor have the energy and time for, what I want. Dignity and vanity both commend a single life. Except it's not that easy and you and I know it.

Evangenlical? Who? Huh?

An ex-girlfriend has recently joined, or at least attended her first meeting of, an evangenical church in Bradford. This isn't about the sect. It's about my ex-girlfriend.

(Full disclosure: I was once and the age of about eleven a Billy Graham convert. I went to an Earl's Court rally, though I was in an annexe and only saw a televised version of the main hall I went down the front when he called for people to step forwards, had a tutor, or pastor, or whatever they called them, who tried to discuss Biblical texts with me. This lasted about six weeks, and though I tried, I really wasn't getting it, and I think the tutor knew it as well. I wonder what the drop-out rate was? Organised religion, or indeed organised anything, remains a total mystery to me. If asked, I'd say it was the idea I have to follow some leader rather than make my own mind up, but that's just a rationalisation. It takes hormones to be a joiner, and I don't do whatever the joiner hormone is that they haven't found yet.)

So you can guess that I don't get what a seasoned adult with two children and three marriages is doing getting involved with evangelicals. (I know you think there's a clue in the question, but read on a little.) I've been to an evangelical service, exactly once, as a politeness to a girlfriend's relatives, and a sad affair I found it as well. The group in Bradford look a lot slicker and have a decent merchandising operation going - I mean, have a range of inspirational literature available. I'm going to be blunt here: evangelical religion is for troubled people. Not 'troubled' in the sense of 'need to stay on their meds', but in the sense of 'not sure where all the pain and confusion are coming from, or why, or what to do about it, and so with a ton of unresolved emotional baggage around rejection, lack of love and need'. That kind of 'troubled'.

Emotional baggage can be dumped. The catch is that if your experience is like mine. I didn't get a new Hermes-filled Loius Vuitton set of "healthy positive emotions and reactions" when I lost the nylon-filled cardboard stuff. I got a messenger bag in which I carry the immediate feelings of the day. I don't feel bad any more, but I never quite feel good either, and nor would I call it being well-balanced. It's more like being... on standby. I don't have emotions about stuff that's nothing to do with me, but then nothing in my daily round is anything to do with me, so I don't have any emotions. But I could have them, if anything happened that was to do with me. On standby. You're right, it is pretty vacant.

That's hard to live with, especially if you're used to a level of drama, however specious, as part of your daily emotional diet. Evangelical religion offers that. It offers drama, meaning, belonging and purpose, the assurance that your daily struggles have a significance beyond grubby bill-paying, and the promise that you are on a road to living right. The catch is the same one as afflicts what looks like its mystical opposite: Eastern spirituality and its various techniques. It's a solution that comes from outside, whether from a Christian God or a spiritual Unity and Peace. You're still trying to fix yourself, but this time with God or Inner Peace.

I suppose what's puzzling me is that it's this woman I used to know. She's no more religious than I am. She works in insurance, fer Christ's sake, and no-one who works in insurance can possibly be religious. Go to church, yes, be religious, no. Part of me wants to say "who are you and what have you done with my friend?" and another thinks she will give this an honest try, and the whole thing will break against her innate realism. I hope she's not doing it to please someone, because that hasn't helped her in the past. But maybe she does oxytocin, and is looking for someone and something to believe in, because she can. That doesn't work for me, but maybe it will work for her.

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.