An Elephant of One's Own

If you're a Hollywood director, you'll know that a "teacher" is someone who stalks about the timbered end of a classroom, firing off Socratic questions and pertinent facts, a tall ship in the centre of a small inland sea of rapt attention. Girls prop their chins on their hands and gaze adoringly at him ( sic ). Behind him, waves of untidy equations rise and fall on a seasick blackboard. At some point, this "teacher" may instruct students to rip up a book or stand on a desk: querulously or with alacrity, it shall be done . And of course, years later, he'll be remembered with a mixture of amused affection and reverence. This blameless, worthy soul, dedicated to the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, will have "changed lives" almost in spite of himself. Friendship, maybe not so much, but influence, well, he's practically got the patent on it. I am not this "teacher". I don't know whether he really exists. Perhaps he does. I...

Toilet Graffitist He rasps the crap with crooked hands, Close to the cistern's swaddling bands; On the rim of the toilet bowl, he stands. The wrinkled turd beneath him crawls; He strains to daub the farthest walls, And, like a blundering dolt, he falls.

Onomatoplop! Picking yourself up and looking around, you notice immediately that the coconut hairs, here in the shade of the letterbox, form thickets around you. Houses always look like that, purifying and punifying and much too big, when you've just been posted into them: thing is to get off the welcome mat, always a dead giveaway. People are standing around, there down the hall. Finding yourself to be much, much smaller than any of them feels like nakedness: but hastily hitching your shame onto your shoulder, for a makeshift parrot, you mingle anyway, all foot of you. "Sorry, that was my makeshift parrot interrumping. You were saying?" You had just attempted a joke. It would have gurgled down well enough out there, in the street, among accustomed slops: but a moment ago's cool rebuffeting, now five fathoms deep beneath the rim of a wineglass, reveals you are no longer among slops, which is sort of what you wanted. Isn't it? You who sort-of would not be amo...

Being English, he would play the Tea card with care, using it carefully only a few times a day, in real emergencies. This, this having of a f*m*le head in one's lap, was such an emergency. He played the card, and managed to slide out from under her when she said Fine. The kettle went on. He was still young, a student, and still thought that life contained possibilities and important choices, and that not all doors necessarily concealed, for him, goats. Right now, in his college-supplied room in the "Annex", he thought there was such a choice, there, lounging on his bed. If he did and said the right things in the right order, there would be puppies. She would see to it that he would have puppies, and his whole life would be transformed. In order for this to happen, he supposed he would have to inspire "love", or something roughly in that semantic vicinity. He did not know how to do this. There was no set way of doing this, since his situation was absolutely uni...

I have never, that I recall, experienced anger on my own account (on others' account? sure, but that's a cheap thrill, overfished to the brink of banality by Hollywood and the entertainment industry). First-person anger is (alas?) inaccessible to me, since it is predicated on the belief that you have some rights, or that you deserve better than you've just been served. Those of us who were brought up to believe that we (unlike other people) have no rights cannot be angry. We can, however, experience rage. It works like this. Someone pisses you off. For example, they slap your bum . The instinctual part of you, the one that doesn't need permission to feel things, erupts in response. The emotion attempts, again instinctively (?), to enlist support from the cognitive area of your brain. It wants to feel "justified". In many people, esp. those of the "entitled" sort, the sense of justification is instantly forthcoming. The other has wronged you, and yo...

You won't get a novel out of me (or this). I did try. It was a long time ago - long enough for me to have been using a steampunk contraption called an "Amstrad PCW", with a two-tone screen, no hard disk, and 64K of memory - and I had this eccentric idea that to write a novel, you just sat down and hammered out at least 200 pages of facetiousness, packed with as many terrible puns as you could think of, all tenuously justified by a half-baked attempt at autobiography, in which the few real people you had actually known during the chosen period of your life were impatiently replaced with lifeless allegorical figures, whom you moved like chess pieces towards a contrived conclusion. It was an unlikeable abortion, as I realised almost as soon as I had typed the final full stop. I don't know if anyone other than me managed to read beyond the first two pages, but if they did, they must have wondered what the point of it was, and concluded that I was hard up, which I was, and...