If I Stop Living This Life, Everything Bad Comes Right Back

The Cost of Living Like This is a novel by James Kennaway, published in 1969, and set earlier in the 1960’s. It has a protagonist I identified with immediately. He’s called The Economist and he’s a forty-something married man having an affair with a nineteen year-old secretary in his Civil Service office. He has terminal cancer. The novel is a fine, understated but hard-hitting portrayal of what it is like to carry on a regular life with a pain that won’t go away, and every now and then takes over your whole being with its intensity. When we meet The Economist, even the morphine cocktail he carries with him won’t do the trick. Read the novel.

Why would a young man at university identify with a middle-aged man dying of cancer? I had no idea then, but I do now.

For a lot of my life up to age about forty-something, despite whatever emotions I seemed to be having on the surface, my underlying state was emotional confusion, pain, emptiness, and loneliness. Sometimes it would subside, perhaps for days, but then it would come back as distracting and all-encompassing as ever. Kennaway’s character is the only one I have read who goes through that cycle of feeling.

(Sure, if you want, make rude noises about an old man comparing his indulgent adolescent feelings with the genuine suffering of a cancer patient. You have a point. You’re also missing one. You can stop reading at any time.)

I have no idea where that state of confusion, pain and emptiness came from, though there are several candidates: the trauma that happens to some infants when they are circumcised, or a distant father, the family alkie genes, moving schools and homes when young, a bad reaction to the hormones of adolescence… who knows?

What I wanted was for it to stop, and if it wouldn’t stop, then I wanted some distraction or something to make it go away for a time. I didn’t do that consciously, but it was what I was doing.

One distraction is drugs, and I’ve never been near them. Without really knowing it, I realised when I was a teenager that if I ever found a drug that got me out of it, I wouldn’t be coming back in again. Heroin is that drug. So I knew once I started with drugs as a painkiller, I’d wind up on heroin. Junkies aren’t cool. Junkies are, well, junkies. Somewhere in all that pain, I had self-respect enough to not want to be a junkie.

Another distraction is religion, and as a young man I did the Billy Graham thing for a few weeks, until, I think, the guide or whatever they call them, decided that I didn’t really get it. I don’t. I get religion as an intellectual and cultural construct, but not as an emotional experience and certainly not as a social thing. It’s like marriage and following football: I know people do it, I just have no idea why, and never will, because I just don’t understand the words they use when they try to explain it.

Another distraction is people. I did not understand it at the time, but I was using people to try to make the pain, emptiness and confusion go away. People can’t do that for me or anyone else: what I might do with them, from playing Risk! to having sex, might be a distraction, but just hanging with the Bros and Hos can’t. When I met The Crowd at the Dog and Duck Friday night for a drink, The Crowd were just an excuse for the drink. I didn’t know that at the time, but that’s what was happening. After all, only sad alkies drink on their own at home. Using people as painkillers is morally suspect: people are supposed to be treated as ends, not means.

All I wanted was for the pain to go away. That and the practicalities of paying the bills were the two aims I judged everything by. When a combination of sobriety, exercise, ageing, and cultural consumption eases the pain and smooths the logistics of life, that counts as a win.

I have two things I do.

The first is physical exercise. Like all boys of my generation, I thought nothing of a two-hour bike ride in an afternoon, just because. It was what we did. There were a few years I didn’t do any exercise, until I started swimming again in my mid-twenties. This was before gyms were a readily accessible thing. I started weight training when I was thirty-three, and with the exception of about four years or so, when I paid the price in elevated blood sugar levels that turned my head to a fog, I have exercised ever since. Self-respect again.

The second is culture and entertainment: reading, movies, TV, music. I’m good at that. My culture is pretty darn heavy and involving - I have Schiff playing Bach as I write. Jollies the brain up. Not so sure about Bordieu’s book on Manet though, that’s a bit of a wade.

But here’s the thing.

The pain never really goes away.

If I stop living this life, everything bad comes right back. There is no cure for alcoholism, or drug addiction, or poor eating habits, or any of a dozen other things: at best there is a way of living in a way that minimises the impact, denies the habits a chance to get started. Emotional fracked-up-ness is the same.

So when I hear people suggesting that the best thing in life is human relationships, that having sex when I want it will make me feel like a man, that there are other people who can understand what I’m feeling and thinking and that time with them is the best time ever, and all that other stuff… this may all be true, but it doesn’t make the pain go away, and that’s all that matters.

Bye-bye Tidal, Hello FTTC, Bye-Bye Yolt

The Highly Significant Birthday is approaching. I have booked the week before and after off. In case I get some uncontrollable emotions, or just don't want to get out of bed. Sometimes, though, I'm not sure I can tell what is actual emotion and what is pollen and too little sleep. So my posting is going to be a bit erratic.

In other news, I dropped Tidal. Listen, I searched for "Shoegaze" and it came back with about three entries. A colleague at work searched on Spotify, and it returned pages of the stuff. So I cancelled Tidal and signed up for Spotify.

The king of shoegaze compilations on You Tube seems to be the unlikely-moinkered Tabitha Mustang. If you've never heard any shoegaze, try this



I finally gave up on my old-school copper broadband service from Talk-Talk, and upgraded to their FTTC (fibre to the cabinet) service. Which has churned out 40Mbs down and 10Mbps up so far since. I even speed-tested it, and got pretty darn close, even though the route included the wireless-ac to my laptop. 40Mbs down by the way, is slightly more than what we old telecom folk used to call a DS3 (34Mbs). Back in the mid-1990's I am told, selling a DS3 across the Atlantic meant celebrations involving champagne and nightclubs. Now every home can have one.

And then one day my Yolt app demanded my passport number and other KYC (as we in the retail banking trade call it) details. And it would not let me get to the control panel without it. I was upset by this, because I don't like software strong-arming me, found the Contact Us email on their site, and asked them to DELETE MY ACCOUNT several times in all caps. Which they did without any fuss. My suspicion that they were about to launch actual banking services via the app was confirmed a day or so ago in the news.

And over Easter, I listened to Parsifal and Gotterdammerung on Spotify. Probably not quite CD quality, but it confirmed to me why I'm not rushing to get Wagner in my collection. The first movement of Parsifal is musically astonishing, whether you understand German or not. But the second act is a lot of singing, and the music probably means a lot more if you know what Kundry just tried to suggest to Parsifal.

Heavenly Glory (this is a Michael Porfirio Mason in-joke)

I would have published this then, but the pollen knocked me flat on Easter Monday

Longford River

I have an earlier post about the Longford river, and here's what a bit of it looks like between the DPD depot and the culvert across the Air Park. I imagine someone who knew their willow from their oak would see in a flash that this was an uncultivated mess in dire need of some sensible pruning and shaping, but... oh wait, that much is obvious, even if you don't know what kind of trees those scraggly things are.

A Baroque Binge

Towards the end of last year I read two histories of music: Burkholder et al A History of Western Music, and Sadie and Latham's Cambridge Music Guide.

A while later, thinking over what I had read, I realised that the music I really, really like comes from the Baroque period - though I dislike Baroque architecture and am not too keen on Baroque painting.

But the music… tuneful, rhythmic, complicated in an ear-catching way, endlessly creative, and clearly written for performance by near-virtuoso musicians. It is at once familiar and novel, rewards attentive listening and yet fades politely into the background when you want it to. This is because much of it was written for audiences who were often talking, dining or dancing, and so the composers could pull all sorts of musical tricks that their fellow musicians would admire but would go straight over the heads of the audience. It's musicians' music, yet still entertaining and sometimes sublime.

J S Bach, G F Handel, and Antonio Vivaldi are the Holy Trinity of the Baroque, and I have a bunch of music by them. I also have some Purcell, Monteverdi, Couperin, Rameau, Geminiani, and Hasse from earlier years. So over a few weeks I treated myself to something I knew I would like, rather than something (like Schumann symphonies) I know I should try to appreciate. This is what I picked up:

 (And the first three volumes as well)

I'm so glad I did. Lovely stuff.

All from Foyles, which has a small but perfectly-formed music section. It's not as sprawling as the much-missed classical department of Tower Records, Piccadilly, but they make good choices. Once you get past the piles of compilation box sets.

Why I Don't (Yet) Have Any Wagner on CD

Richard Wagner wrote thirteen operas, of which there are no recordings I’ve seen of the first three, Rienzi is regarded as an apprentice-piece, and The Flying Dutchman as the first where Wagner comes into his own. The Dutchman stands with any nineteenth-century opera by any of the other big names, and the remaining eight are as far beyond the rest of the operatic repertory as Shakespeare is beyond the rest of theatre. Those nine are:

Tannhauser (210 mins)
Loengrin (235 mins)
Rheingold (160 mins)
The Valkerie (235 mins)
Siegfried (250 mins)
Gotterdammerung (275 mins)
Tristan and Isolde (235 mins)
The Mastersingers of Nuremburg (275 mins)
Parsifal (245 mins)

I have seen all nine, all at the English National Opera. I got started on Wagner with Solti’s recording of Parsifal on Decca, and I borrowed that from Richmond Library because I was reading Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies, and Popper hated Wagner, so I wanted to see what the fuss was about. I was sucked in from the opening bars. Parsifal is a lot of twentieth-century music that slipped into the mid-nineteenth century.

I do not own one of his operas, and I have a boxed set of Ligeti and all of Berio’s Sequenzas. Recently I thought of buying a couple. I haven’t got round to it.

For one thing, Wagner operas cost upwards of £35 each, though there’s a recent Ring cycle for £45. For another, it really matters who is performing, especially for those of us who started with Solti. I’m not buying a live recording, because it’s just not possible to get the depth and precision of sound a studio can provide. If I’m paying that money, I want to put the headphones on and hear the details. There are not many interpretations available, since recording Wagner costs a lot more than even recording Mahler.

It’s the sheer time needed to listen to Wagner. It’s not background music to focus in and out while writing blog posts. It’s sit-down-and-listen-and-don’t-do-anything-else. So is a lot of that 19th-century orchestral stuff, and that doesn’t always suit me. Those running times, and those are without fifteen-minute breaks between acts, and in some cases, an hour for an evening meal. The Mikado clocks in around 130 minutes, and Carmen at 155 minutes. I’m pretty sure the mid-week performance of Mastersingers I went to started at 4:00PM, and a Tristan at 5:00 PM.

My life at the moment is more suited to the pleasant complexities of the Baroque. When, if, I ever stop working, I will buy Wagner’s operas and spend the whole day listening to one, as it should be.

And remember, if you're married, and there was music when she walked down the aisle to you, it was written by Wagner:

Recovery Is A Means To Sobriety, Not Fun

When I first got sober, the task itself was a challenge and a source of excitement and discovery. After a good few years, when I had regular employment and some degree of emotional sobriety, the thrill of physical sobriety was gone. I have to remember that it’s something I do every day, and can lose any day. That’s why I still go to meetings.

The same has happened with the self-development stuff. Early nights needed for the early mornings prevent the parties and even the opera and the theatre; the careful diet discourages blow-outs and gimmick food; sobriety cuts out booze and drugs, and that has serious consequences for anyone’s sex life, let alone mine. Life has turned into a stream of comforting and bland white-food experiences.

At which point, you said all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. Which is one of those things people say without really understanding it.

What is work? One answer is that it’s something we would only do if we were being paid to do it. I like that one, but that misses the essential bit. Work is anything we do that is goal-directed, rather than for the fun of the thing itself. Employment is work, because the aim is to get paid by doing whatever the boss need me to do. Shopping for food is work. The gym is work, and so is making the bed, ironing the sheets, reading a non-fiction book, tidying a room, cleaning the car, making a painting, taking photographs, networking in the pub after work, chasing girls… a lot more things are goal-directed than you might believe. Sleeping is goal-directed activity, and so work, which is why I wake up exhausted every morning.

Being dull is about being poor company, withdrawn, shy, not being funny, amusing, pleasant, not knowing how to take part in the chatter, the teasing, and the all-round bonhomie. It’s about Jack not being fun for other people rather than having fun for himself.

Being a dull boy may not be such a bad thing, if the only company you have to keep is forever getting into fights, debt, unplanned pregnancies, and going in and out of jail, or if the people you know are gossipy, back-biting, empty-headed, and don’t do much more than eat, drink, shop and get high.

What is it about work that makes Jack a dull boy? Trick question: it only makes Jack dull if it’s that kind of work. Drudgery for someone else’s benefit.

A lot of the self-improvement stuff can be habit, but habit does not mean drudgery, and it is all for oneself.

The trick is to remember that there was a time I didn’t do it, and how I felt then. I could consider that I could stop, and what the consequences of doing that would be. And sometimes, instead of saying “this is just this again”, to say “this is what I do”.