18
th
November.
In my inbox this morning:
The longest most intense orgasms of your life - Rock hard erections - Erections like steel - Ejaculate like a porn star - Multiple orgasms - Cum again and again - SPUR
-
M is The Newest and The Safest Way of Pharmacy - 100% Natural and No Side Effects - World Wide shipping within 24 hours.
I don’t understand how most of these spam messages reach me because they don’t have the correct surname in the addressee box, only the correct initials, like ‘D.S. Jones’, ‘D.S. Ford’, D.S. Bellwether’ and, my favourite, ‘D.S. Human’. Today’s was addressed to ‘D.S. Limp’.
19
th
November.
A slightly deranged outpouring from Dad when I phoned him today, complaining that he hasn’t had any Premium Bond wins for six months. He holds several thousand pounds’ worth. I’m pretty sure he would obtain a better return from a good building society account, but he gets much more fun out of Premium Bonds. It always gives him a kick when a warrant for fifty pounds turns up in the post, sometimes two at once, but apparently he has been going through a barren period.‘Six months! What a liberty!’ I explain to him what he seems to have forgotten, that it is a lottery, and there is no guarantee how often you will win a prize, or indeed that you will ever win a prize, only that you never lose your stake. ‘It’s done by a computer program designed to produce random numbers.’ ‘You mean Ernie?’ he said. ‘I know all about that. But you don’t think those blokes up in . . . wherever it is, up north somewhere, Blackpool, d’you think they can’t make the computer pick whatever numbers they like?’ ‘Why would they do that?’ I said. ‘They’re not allowed to hold Premium Bonds themselves.’ ‘No, but what about their relatives? Their mates?’ ‘Dad, if the system was corrupt I think it would have been discovered by now.’ ‘I’m not saying they feed their family’s numbers into the machine, they’re too fly to do that. But they can favour certain areas.’ ‘Areas?’ He had lost me for a moment. ‘Yes, areas, areas,’ he said impatiently. ‘The places where the bonds were bought. They know which numbers come from where. They can reduce the odds for people they know. I bet you more people win prizes in Blackpool than anywhere else in the country.’ There was a kind of crazy logic to his speculations, and I was impressed by the amount of thought he had given to the subject. ‘I don’t think so, Dad,’ I said. ‘Well, I do, and I’m going to write and complain,’ he said. ‘OK, Dad,’ I said. It is something to keep his brain exercised, I suppose.
I have started to collect brochures of care homes in our section of the city, getting addresses from the Yellow Pages and the Social Services. A depressing task. I shall have to make a shortlist and look at them myself before Dad comes up for Christmas. I haven’t dared to broach the subject with him on the phone. Perhaps I will next time I go down to London - there will be one more day-trip before then. Not only will he strenuously resist the idea of leaving his house - the idea of moving to what he calls, with a kind of intonational shiver, ‘the North’ will make it doubly upsetting. His England is London and the south-east: the great metropolis, the seaside towns of the south coast with their piers and promenades, and a nice bit of country in between, nothing wilder than the South Downs. His wartime postings to East Anglia and the Shetlands he saw as exile, almost to another country. When he comes to stay with us he finds everything beyond our leafy suburban street strange and rather threatening: the different colour of the buses, the broad ‘A’s and cryptic contractions of the local dialect, the grids of grimy terraced houses surrounding huge carcasses of abandoned mills waiting for demolition or conversion. The surrounding country, much admired for its sweeping moors, rushing rivers and picturesque ruined abbeys, holds no charms for him. Show him a fine panorama of peaks and valleys and his comment is likely to be, ‘Nowhere to get a cup of tea round here, is there?’
20
th
November.
I had an email from Alex Loom today: ‘Still working on that chapter, but here’s something to amuse you while you’re waiting.’ She gave the address of a website called
The Suicide Note: AWriter’s Guide.
I’ve read it through several times, and I’m completely unable to make up my mind about it. Is it a serious document, or a sick joke? Or a cunning device to put off potential suicides? It certainly exerts a horrible fascination.
The first thing you must decide is what method to use. Are you going to type your note on a typewriter or a computer? Or are you going to write it out by hand? A handwritten note is more personal, and will therefore have a greater emotional effect on your readers. But if you compose it on a computer you will be able to read it through and edit it. After all, this is the last thing you will ever say, it is your final statement to your family, friends, and the world. It may be read out in the coroner’s court, and quoted in the media. It may even end up in an anthology of suicide notes! So you want to make it as clear and unambiguous as you can.You might consider composing your note on a computer and then copying out the final draft by hand to give it that personal touch. But don’t make the note
too
polished. Switch off your computer’s spellchecker and grammarchecker. A few mistakes in your letter will give it an effect of urgency and authenticity.
I felt the cold touch of the uncanny as I read that last sentence: it was as if the writer had hacked into my journal entry of a few days ago and stolen my observation about the effective artlessness of that girl’s suicide note.
Give yourself plenty of time to write your note. Don’t leave it till the last minute, when the pills or whatever are already doing their work. You may panic and forget all the things you meant to say.You may lose consciousness before you have finished the note. It’s best to start writing a day or two before you actually kill yourself. Sleep on it, and read it through the next morning, like professional writers do.You will see all kinds of ways to improve it.
Here I began to wonder if the author of this document was sadistic-ally teasing the poor desperate creatures who might have lighted on his website while searching the Internet for sympathy and succour under ‘Suicide’, or whether by treating the whole business in such a cool matter-of-fact way he was aiming to shock them into understanding the finality of death and perhaps rejecting it as a solution to their problems. Or was it simply a tasteless parody of writer’s manuals?
It’s best to write your letter in the first person. Referring to yourself in the third person will seem affected and insincere. Avoid literary quotations for the same reason.Write in your own voice, using vocabulary that comes naturally to you. Don’t search a dictionary or thesaurus for a more impressive-sounding word than the one you first thought of. At the same time, avoid clichés like
‘I can’t take any more’, ‘My life is not worth living’, ‘I want to end it all’
etc
.
They have been used so many times before that they have lost all their expressive effect, and your readers will become bored and lose interest.
The author of the ‘guide’ had obviously studied a lot of suicide notes, and was familiar with some of their characteristic strategies and pitfalls.
You may express a wish for the kind of funeral you would like, but don’t make it too extravagant (e.g., kilted bagpipers playing a lament over your grave) or your relatives will resent the trouble and expense you put them to . . . Don’t give instructions or reminders to your partner like, ‘Remember your raincoat is at the dry cleaner’s and will be ready for collection on Thursday.’ You may think this makes you sound like a thoughtful, unselfish person, but your partner will see it as a ploy to make them feel bad, and others will think you were stupid to be thinking about such trivial matters instead of concentrating on the business at hand . . . Make sure you leave your note in a prominent place where it is sure to be found, otherwise you will have wasted your time writing it; but don’t mail it, in case you take longer to kill yourself than you planned, in which case you might be prevented.
Alex evidently thought the document was a joke, something to ‘amuse’ myself with, and I have to admit that I laughed aloud in places, but in a slightly guilty way, appalled that humour could be wrung from such a subject. And who was doing the wringing?
22
nd
November.
We went to a private view yesterday evening at the Old Wool Mill, one of many buildings in this city which have changed their function in the last decade or so. There are warehouses which have turned into nightclubs, banks into restaurants, and factories into arts centres, as the traditional manufacturing on which this city was built, mainly steel and wool products, gives way to the postmodern economy of information, recreation and style consumption. There is a feverish public appetite, relentlessly encouraged by the media, for new styles in fashion, food, home decor, electronic gadgets, everything. Artists, who have been committed to ‘making it new’ since the advent of Modernism, but at their own pace, now find themselves overtaken by the rate of change in popular culture, and struggle to find ways of making marks on paper and canvas, or assembling three-dimensional objects in space, which no one has thought of before. The exhibition at the Old Wool Mill is called ‘Mis-takes’ and is a collection of photographs, photocopies, faxes, and other images which for one reason or another suffered a malfunction in the reprographic process and thus produced new, unexpected and allegedly interesting artefacts. There were photographs which had been over-exposed by opening the camera body before the film had been rewound, photographic images either intentionally or accidentally superimposed on each other because the film spool was not advanced, unidentifiable images produced on a digital camera by randomly altering the default settings, palimpsests produced by printing out five-page fax messages on a single sheet of paper, and photocopies of pages in books which had been spoiled because the machine jammed, or the book was twisted as the platen moved across, producing wave-like swirls of distorted text, stark shadows and white spaces. One exhibit was a blank sheet of A4 taken from a copier whose operator had omitted to insert a document to be copied. It was entitled
Oh
, and was on sale for £150 (£100 unframed). According to the catalogue, the artist, by introducing or accepting ‘mistakes’ in the reprographic process, was interrogating the accepted opposition between ‘original’ and ‘reproduced’ works of art, and the necessity of accuracy, uniformity and repeatability in the application of technology to artistic creation, thus carrying forward to a new level the debate initiated by Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. Nothing could illustrate better my thesis that much contemporary art is supported by an immense scaffolding of discourse without which it would simply collapse and be indistinguishable from rubbish. I was saying as much to Fred in the midst of a crowd of chattering, wine-sipping private viewers when she raised her finger to her lips, which I took to be an indication that someone who would not take kindly to this remark was nearby, probably the artist, which indeed proved to be the case. When you’re deaf, as well as not being able to hear what other people are saying, you don’t realise how loudly you are speaking yourself.
Fred’s partner Jakki was at the exhibition with
her
partner, i.e. new boyfriend. ‘Boyfriend’ seems too youthful a designation for Lionel, a stocky, balding, middle-aged accountant, but heaven knows he looks young enough beside myself, light on his feet and spry as a ballroom-dancing champion, able to waltz through the party throng with four glasses of wine in his paws without spilling a drop. Jakki is also younger than Fred, in her late forties I would guess, a sharp-featured brunette with a trim figure and good legs, which she makes the most of by favouring short skirts. She has a wide, perpetually mobile mouth and fortunately very good teeth, which she bares in brilliant smiles that range from the ingratiating to the lascivious depending on her mood or the circumstances. She has a loud voice and a Lancashire accent which reminds me of comediennes on the radio in my childhood, though she has little sense of humour. In every personal respect Jakki seems antithetical to Fred, but they get on surprisingly well.
It had been agreed that the four of us would have supper after the private view at a new Italian restaurant in the city centre Jakki had heard about, called the Paradiso. As soon as we passed through the door I knew that Inferno would have been a more appropriate name as far as I was concerned. The walls were clad in marble, the floors were covered with ceramic tiles, the tables were glass-topped and the chairs made of hard wood: sounds ricocheted off these surfaces like machine-gun fire. The place was full of diners and the air resounded with the roar of their conversation, the shouts of orders passed by the waiters to the open kitchen, the clash of crockery and cutlery and glassware as dishes were served and removed, and several other contributory noises which I couldn’t actually distinguish and only learned about later from my companions, like air-conditioning and, ludicrously, ‘background’ music. Even they - my companions - found the cacophony a challenge to conversation, and were reduced to bending forward over the table with their noses almost touching in order to communicate. But communicate they did, whereas after a few attempts I gave up with a helpless shrug, and occupied myself solely with the food, which was quite good, if slow to appear, and with the wine, of which I drank more than my fair share. I was tempted to remove my hearing aid since it was serving no purpose except to amplify the circumambient din, but I remembered that Evelyn Waugh used to signal his boredom with people sitting next to him at dinner parties by laying aside his ear trumpet, and publicly taking the little plastic prostheses out of one’s ears might convey the same message.