Journal

1996 was a year. So much came apart to be rebuilt, with some symmetry and many jagged pieces.

Our fractured marriage ended, with Maggie moving out. My mother died.

We were living in a cul de sac, off the Avenue in Southampton. My mother’s nursing home was within walking distance, across woods and fields. She was 88.

Alex and James stayed with me. They were 14 and 12.

I inherited some money and left the National Motor Museum. Subsequently, I joined up with my old friend Fred, managing his business called Whole World Golf Travel.

I also began an MA in Contemporary Art and Theory at Winchester School of Art. It was a part time course, over two years.

On the top floor, in the hospital, an old lady is lying in bed.
Her eyelids are fluttering in REM as we speak. They don’t open.
In another room there is there is an old lady lying peacefully. Her daughter and granddaughter are with her.
In the final room, as we enter, and old lady accuses: ‘Why are you making me ill? Why are you making me ill?’
She insists, over and over. ‘I may as well be dead’ I look her in the eye. ‘We are not making you ill.’
‘Go away’

Not thinking, nor thoughtless. Not action, nor inaction. Not one thing, nor anything. Emptiness is love without boundaries. A circle, whose circumference is nowhere and whose centre is everywhere.

To unlearn the habitual patterns that rule one’s life. This does not mean abandoning or repressing, just being aware. By being aware one is free, unburdened. Neither one thing or any other. Unfixed….Unborn

In July 1982, our first born was a few weeks old. My Dad was a month short of his 96th birthday but he was dying, in a nursing home a short distance away from the flat in Milford. Was happy. How had we got here?

Maggie and I were married in‘79. I was trying to be an adult; doing what I was supposed to do, or so I imagined. Be responsible, get a job, make ends meet. It was hard work. Where did the romance and creativity go? Curiously, I was recruited by the East Boldre Players, an amdram group in our village. I could pretend, at least.I was at his bedside. He looked up and said; ‘They are all there, can you see?’

Stuff flows through me, like a river. Is it real? Is it right or wrong? Does that even matter? There is  the unacceptable addiction and the siren lure of guilt, the ghost of Christianity. To be overcome by kindness, love even in the midst of chaos.The head above the parapet. Bang!

Tasha was my first proper girlfriend. She was the older sister of a schoolfriend. She thought it was time to lose her virginity. I was seventeen and a virgin too, in the penetrative sense, living in my parents’ London flat. They were out. She had come round. It was a matter of practicality and nervous anticipation. Sensing her impatience, I could barely get it up. Instructions were issued. I had to wank a while, in embarrassment. Eventually it happened. It was hard work. There was blood on the sheet. When it came to laundry, I said I’d cut my finger.

Nine months later, I was taking A Levels. It was History, out at Ealing, the morning of the day that the Stones were due to play Hyde Park. On the way back, I met a couple of friends at Paddington tube. By the time we got there on foot, the crowd spread out a quarter of a mile from the stage that was set up by the Serpentine… The rest is history, of course.

When I was seven, I was sent to prep school, Prep being an abbreviation of preparatory.

So I was being prepared, but for what? Other peoples’ expectations. But that wasn’t who I was.

I decided on a strategy: from now on I would pretend to conform to those expectations, while remaining essentially detached.

This strategy more or less worked for the next five years. I loved football and cricket and singing too. Despite the institutional brutality, I mostly succeeded. The strategy held up. Or so I thought, visiting me in the backroom, basement or attic of emotional exile….

Then I was sent to ‘Public’ school. Only it wasn’t public at all. I was thirteen, unlucky and decidedly private.

Institutional brutality was now expanded. Senior boys, prefects were authorized to beat wrongdoers with a paddle. Self satisfaction in combination with sadism was the prep for success. Hormones raced. There were no girls. During the Easter holidays of my first year, my parents took me to Malta. We stayed in a grand hotel in Valletta. My first orgasm came in a dream about our waitress. This was private, naturally.

Back at boarding school, it wasn’t all bad ,friendships were made. I still meet up with Phil, from time to time. Last summer, we spent the day on his boat that is moored at Gosport.

I’m getting on a bit, 75 next month. When do I find this ‘I’? Is there something to be found, a soul perhaps?

I’m no more certain now than at any time. There are narratives of course and they change too, theories, fictions.

The conceptual mind is a filter, within the body, itself a filter; always changing. Consciousness escapes identification as an object. What seems fixed and permanent is an illusion. As the waves roll in over the sands of time, ‘impermanence is the footprint of the absolute in the relative.’