Friday June 1st
Out of the Rain
We ran down the high street and into the pub,
as we cheated the rain that fell from above,
dodging the puddles that had formed on the floor.
Such a beautiful day for a nuclear war.
You draped your wet coat on the back of your chair,
We emptied our drinks. The rain dripped from your hair.
A Guinness. Another. Then I went back for more.
What a beautiful day for a nuclear war.
We talked. Our first pets. Favourite songs and film stars.
We flicked pistachio shells back into the jar.
You tried not to yawn. You must have thought me a bore.
It was a beautiful day for a nuclear war.
The days have changed now but I keep that one apart.
I carry it with me, tattooed on my heart.
The Guinness. Your wet hair. The dress that you wore.
Such a beautiful day for a nuclear war.
The news was awful. It rained all day. I drank too much. But these were incidentals, mere footnotes in the book of love. For once, no crib cards were needed – although I did have a few secreted about my person just in case – for the conversation flowed like a simile in its pure liquid state. Gone was my usual shambling self, tripping up over my words, trampling on the flower beds of social interaction. Liz stripped me of my awkwardness, one layer at a time.
I wasn’t the only one who had plans to arrive early. I was speeding around the corner onto the high street when we ran into each other. Our coats drip-dried on our chairs while we supped on pints of Guinness.
‘These things are awful, aren’t they?’ said Liz.
‘Yes,’ I confessed. ‘I mean, no. It’s not awful being with you. I really enjoyed the other day.’
‘Me, too! But I meant the whole business of getting to know someone, whoever they are. Will they like me? Will I like them? What should I wear? What if I say the wrong thing? All that nonsense!’
‘Yes, exactly!’ I almost shouted. ‘But I can’t imagine you worrying about such things. You’re the woman who just turned up at Poetry Club one night and effortlessly performed a poem about a second-hand copy of The Joy of Sex in front of a room of complete strangers.’
I tried not to distract myself too much with that memory.
‘Oh, that’s different,’ said Liz. ‘Extroverts can be shy, too, you know.’
‘Shyness is nice,’ I said.
‘And shyness can stop you from doing all the things in life you’d like to.’
‘You recognised the reference!’
‘How could I not?’ she said. ‘It’s my favourite Smiths song.’
I felt weak from her loveliness. We talked and drank, drank and talked. We spoke of adored songs and abhorred films, failed relationships and foiled plans, impossible pasts and improbable futures.
‘What would you like to be when you grow up?’ Liz asked, as we got to work on our final pints.
I stared into my pint in search of an answer.
‘I don’t know. Just . . . somebody, I suppose,’ I answered after a while. ‘I don’t mean anything grand by that. I don’t want to be famous. Or rich. I just don’t want to end up being a nobody, that’s all. I’d like to be somebody. Somebody who’s really good at being me.’
‘Aren’t you good at being that already?’
‘No, not really. It doesn’t come easily to me.’
I took a big gulp of Guinness.
‘Well, whoever it is you’re being,’ said Liz, ‘I think you’re doing a good job of it.’
‘And you?’ I asked. ‘What about you?’
‘I don’t think I ever want to be grown up.’
The rain had stopped by the time we left the pub and I walked Liz to the bus stop. The bus was pulling up as we got there. She turned to ask me whether I’d like to go back to hers for coffee.
I must have panicked. I’d meant to say yes but before I knew it I was explaining how I don’t really drink coffee these days because I need to be careful with my caffeine consumption as it makes me vulnerable to spells of insomnia AND my GP warned me off it because my cholesterol levels are borderline high, and besides, I feel uneasy about this coffee culture that has grown up in recent years, most likely due to the popularity of Friends, because it just feels like we’re being sold a lifestyle, based on a kind of faux New Yorker sophistication, whereas in reality, it’s all about corporations trying to empty our pockets . . .
As the bus pulled away, I saw Liz looking down at me with disappointment from the top deck.
I walked through the puddles to my own bus stop and lifted my head up to the sky. It looked like the heavens might open once more. Come, friendly bombs, and fall on me.
Saturday June 2nd
The Schleswig-Holstein Questions
1. What was Schleswig’s profession?
A. Sailor B. Composer C. Owl D. Great Dane
2. Where was Holstein born?
A. Sweden B. Brentwood C. Schleswig D. Ukraine
3. What was the relationship between Schleswig and Holstein?
A. Brothers B. Lovers C. Troubled D. Secure
4. Which protocol was violated by King Christian IX?
A. Don’t know B. Don’t care C. Beats me D. Unsure
5. Why did Prussia become involved?
A. Why not? B. No clue C. Because D. Search me
6. The Baltic was of strategic importance. But was it an insect, a river or larger mass of water?
A. Bee B. Dee C. Eh? D. Sea
7. How do Guildenstern and Rosencrantz fit into it all?
A. They don’t B. They won’t C. Who knows D. They’re dead
8. Where would you rather be than taking this exam?
A. Outside B. At home C. Elsewhere D. In bed
Today was History. Having lived through an increasing amount of it, I felt a momentary wave of optimism that this time I might be of some genuine use to Dylan. I’d been hoping for a little bit of Tudors (I have read the first 120 pages of Wolf Hall and so consider myself something of an expert on the topic) or the origins of the First World War but then he started to get out his books on mid-nineteenth-century European diplomacy and my heart – like the ocean liner RMS Lusitania on 7th May 1915 – sank . . .
The Schleswig-Holstein Question.
I’d failed to understand this topic back in the 80s – and those were simpler times – so what chance did I have now? Stuart had already made him a full-colour timeline of key events so that just deepened my feelings of ignorance and inadequacy.
Fair play to Dylan, though, who did his best to keep me motivated throughout. When we were done, he took me and my hangover to the park for an ice-cream.
Sunday June 3rd
Here begins a new approach to book group. My performance last week was poor, even by my own shabby standards, and I’d been reflecting on this for a while. What has been lacking is motivation; it’s simply been too easy not to read the book, particularly when there’ve been so many other things clamouring for my attention. What I needed was an incentive.
I headed off into town to Bloomer’s Antiquarian Books to see if I could pick up a copy of this month’s choice, Robinson Crusoe. A collectable antique edition would surely provide the much-needed impetus for me to take it off the shelf and get the thing read.
Mr Bloomer is more antiquarian than most of his stock, and most of his stock is very old indeed. There is a particularly attractive nineteenth-century edition, he informed me, illustrated with engravings by Cruikshank, which he was hopeful of getting his liver-spotted, antiquarian hands on over the next few days. While there, I picked up a few other titles, including a first edition of Brideshead Revisited, a signed copy of Larkin’s The Whitsun Weddings and a six-volume set of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, all of which I thought might lend a certain air of erudition to my writer’s shed when it arrives next weekend.
I paid for these and put down a deposit for Robinson Crusoe, rather ashen-faced. Who’d have thought that old books covered in dust could be so expensive?
Monday June 4th
My beautiful satinwood writing desk has arrived. It has twin blind frieze drawers with almost perfect shut lines, baluster turned and knopped end supports on square-cut and C-scroll trestle bases and leaf-carved scroll feet. Its tooled green-leather writing surface comes in matching shades with gilded tooling and embossing. It was made by nineteenth-century furniture makers Miles and Edwards, whose patrons included several British Ambassadors to Paris and an Empress of Russia.
I practised sitting at it for most of the afternoon, adopting ambassadorial stances, looking up in annoyance at untimely interruptions from my non-existent first secretary and signing fake treaties. It made me want to dip my pen into an inkwell and to write an actual, proper letter, not fire off a quick email or text; to sit there methodically composing each sentence in my head before committing my pen to paper, just as I used to in all those letters to Sophie back in the days when she could still be bothered to read the words I’d write for her.
Tuesday June 5th
Haiku Club
haiku club first rule:
avoid words like antidis-
establishmentar-
It was Japanese Night at Poetry Club. This had been Mary’s suggestion, having admitted last month that she’d been flirting rather heavily with haiku.
It was interesting to see how we’d all managed to instil something of ourselves into the form: Douglas had written a haiku sequence based around the attack on Pearl Harbor; Mary took inspiration from a trip to Tokyo she’d gone on with her first husband (on which it appears she had also flirted rather heavily with her soon-to-be second husband); Chandrima focused on the ephemerality of cherry blossom as a metaphor for the transience of life; Kaylee took up the cause of discrimination against the Ainu people; Liz had me reaching for my pistachios distractedly while she spoke of tantalising kimonos; and I did my usual nonsense. Toby Salt declared the haiku to be too mainstream and chose to present his own poems in the form of the tanka and bussokusekika.
All this short-form stuff meant formal proceedings finished an hour earlier than usual. Discussion moved on to the battlefields trip. Chandrima was in charge of the itinerary and took us through what was planned and when. Douglas expressed disappointment that we were focusing predominantly on the literary aspects of the First World War and less on specific military manoeuvres. I updated everyone on funding, including the good news that we’d successfully been awarded a travel grant for £5,000 from the British Poetry Council; this means we can now afford to employ the services of Dr Dylan Miller, an academic specialising in First World War poetry, as our tour guide, as well as an accompanying actor, who will perform key poems on the battlefields that inspired them.
To my annoyance, Toby Salt spent most of this time trying to chat up Liz, bragging of his Twitter following (he has now duped nearly three thousand people), whipping out a proof copy of his forthcoming book and offering her a ticket to his reading at Saffron Walden.
It wasn’t until the end of the evening that I had the chance to ask her whether she was free to meet up on Friday.
‘I suppose so,’ she snapped. ‘Assuming your GP hasn’t warned you off me, that is,’ and headed out the door.
Wednesday June 6th
Odium Chloride
I think my body needs rebooting;
it’s sick from all the crap I eat.
I salute it with three fingers,
then press CTRL+SALT+DELETE.
For some companionship of the non-feline variety, I listened to Radio 4. The molecules from its background murmurings seeped through my semi-permeable membrane and by early evening, I’d osmotically absorbed the entirety of its daytime output, including programmes on the naturalism of Pliny the Elder, the ethics of marmalade, life in a Bulgarian shoe factory, a consumer affairs show entitled Ombudsman and a potted history of houseplants.
But I was particularly interested in a documentary on the harmful effects of salt. Salt is very bad for you. It causes hypertension and increases the chance of heart disease and stroke.
I kept thinking about it all evening. Salt is an utter disgrace! The world would be better off without it.
Thursday June 7th
I’ve just finished my submission for the next quarterly Well Versed poem competition. The theme we’ve been given is that of ‘Rebellion’. I have called my poem ‘As I Grow Old I Will March Not Shuffle’ and, by my own standards, it’s something of an angry affair:
As I grow old I will not shuffle
to the beat of self-interest
and make that slow retreat t o t h e r i g h t.
I will be a septuagenarian insurrectionist
marching with the kids. I shall sing
‘La Marseillaise’, whilst brandishing
homemade placards that proclaim
‘DOWN WITH THIS SORT OF THING’.
I will be an octogenarian obstructionist,
and build unscalable barricades
from bottles of flat lemonade,
tartan blankets and chicken wire.
I will hurl prejudice upon the brazier’s fire.
I will be a nonagenarian nonconformist,
armed with a ballpoint pen
and a hand that shakes with rage not age
at politicians’ latest crimes,
in strongly worded letters to The Times.
I will be a centenarian centurion
and allow injustice no admittance.
I will stage longstanding sit-ins.
My mobility scooter and I
will move for no one.
And when I die
I will be the scattered ashes
that attach themselves to the lashes
and blind the eyes
of racists and fascists.
Ordinarily, faced with writing a poem about rebellion, I’d end up with something about stacking my dishwasher in a disorderly way, or refusing to use the tongs provided. But from Monday, I shall be a Professional Writer and it’s about time I did some growing up and tackled more serious matters. Kaylee would be proud of me.
Friday June 8th
We went to the cinema; it was some awful romcom, one of those dull ‘will they, won’t they?’ affairs. But the film itself was a mere sideshow, a divertissement from the real matter at hand (Liz). In a sudden rash of promiscuity, we shared popcorn; I gallantly compromised on the salted variety, despite being a sure and steadfast lover of the sweetened version. I pointed out this sacrifice to Liz a number of times but she didn’t seem that impressed. On several occasions, our fingertips touched in the tub; the dark hid our blushes (at least I think it did, it was dark in there and hard to tell).
Afterwards, in the pub, we proceeded to discuss Toby Salt at length, with specific focus on his crocs.
‘If there’s one thing worse than wearing crocs,’ said Liz, ‘it’s wearing crocs with socks.’
‘That’s got the makings of a poem,’ I said. ‘Perhaps you could perform it for him at next month’s Poetry Club.’
She laughed and my heart skipped several beats.
‘Good idea. We could call it “The Crocs of the Matter”. By the way,’ she added, ‘I’ve changed my mind about my favourite Smiths song.’
‘Oh yes?’
‘It’s “Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me”.’
It was a fine choice. At the bus stop, Liz leant in towards me as if to whisper something but she must have got confused because, before I had a chance to think, she’d kissed me on the lips. Behind us, her bus pulled up. Liz asked if I was coming her way and would I care to hop on.
After what had happened last time, I’d meant to just say yes, but instead I listened to myself explaining that it wasn’t really the right direction and how it would probably add another twenty or twenty-five minutes to my journey time. I’d be far better off waiting for the number 5 as it stops just at the top of my road, although there’s a temporary bus stop in place, which means the walk is a couple of minutes longer than usual at the moment, and, sure, it’s an inconvenience but the roadworks should only be in place for another two weeks, and it’s nothing that cannot be coped with, given a little forethought and planning . . .
I’d missed Liz climbing noisily onto the bus as I was saying this, but, as it pulled away, I noticed her on the top deck, staring grimly out into the distance.
I stood there for several minutes, striking my head repeatedly against the bus timetable, before gathering up my stupidity in search of my own stop and the last bus home.
Saturday June 9th
The Nine O’Clock Water Shed
The NINE O’CLOCK WATER SHED
is the ULTIMATE solution for your ablutions!
Now YOU can ENJOY your showers
alongside NEW, FAST, AUTOMATIC daffodils
and OTHER flowers.
Why not SPONGE YOURSELF DOWN
while TRIMMING your PRIVET?
CEDAR-CLAD* to enable FULL NUDITY,
its DENSE ACOUSTIC QUILT allows
MAXIMUM SWEARING
and SCENES some neighbours
may find OFFENSIVE.
STURDY and RAUNCHY, this is a shed
with 18+ PERMISSIONS:
a shed in which to SHED
your INHIBITIONS.
* Also available in Pine, Beech and Quarter-Past Six.
Studio erectus! It took a team of four experienced shed-builders a whole day to assemble it. They didn’t finish it until nine o’clock this evening. I’m not surprised; it’s not so much a writing shed as un palais jardinière des lettres.
The crew turned up just as Sophie was arriving with Dylan. She had questions.
‘What’s going on?’
‘They’ve come to assemble a shed. Well, I say, shed. It’s more of a studio. Or un palais jardinière d—’
‘Is that what you’ve squandered your redundancy money on?’ she interrupted. I was sensing a little hostility in her tone.
‘I’ve not been squandering. If anything, I’ve been unsquandering. This is an investment.’
She snorted. It was not an attractive noise.
‘Did you not consider that it might be more prudent to save that money until you have some regular and reliable income?’
Sophie has considered herself an expert on personal finance ever since she once happened to catch an episode of Money Box on Radio 4.
‘Well, if I get hard up, perhaps Stuart can jump out of a plane for me. Preferably without a parachute.’
That went down as well as somebody jumping out of a plane without a parachute. Sophie made another unattractive snort and flounced off.
By the way, I should say that I am sitting in my shed as I write these words. I may be sitting on the floor but it still counts: I am actually writing in my writing shed! It is magnificent! A Wi-Fi-free oasis for literary endeavour. A cedar-clad creative hub! It is situated right at the bottom of the garden and the cat is yet to discover it. I wish I could say the same about Dave; he has already asked whether it’s available to hire for garden parties.
Sunday June 10th
Dave, Martin and Marvin helped me move my furniture into the shed along with the few other bits and pieces I’d assembled. Three hours later, I placed the final volume of Gibbon on the bookshelf and the job was done.
To celebrate, I broke open a new packet of custard creams and put the antique globe mini-bar to use for the first time. Glasses were raised to my future literary success, which promises to shine as brightly as the disco ball Dave had tried to hang from the ceiling until I told him to get down from my writing desk.
It was when they’d left that I made my second resolution of the year: by the time I finish this diary, I will have created something of note in that shed, a work of importance that will silence my critics (Toby Salt) and my doubters (Sophie, myself, etc.).
For once in my life, I need to focus. But I know my own foibles and frailties only too well. The world – with all of its temptations and distractions – must be blocked out for a while. And out of all those temptations and distractions, Liz is the most tempting and distracting of all.
I reached for my phone to tell her I’d be incommunicado for a few weeks; I was sure she’d understand. There was already a message waiting for me from her:
I’ve changed my mind again.
My new favourite Smiths song is ‘How Soon is Now?’.
Again, I couldn’t fault her choice. It was six minutes and forty-four seconds of undisputed magnificence (or three minutes and forty-one seconds if you were listening to the somewhat inferior seven-inch single). But I knew there was more to Liz’s selection than that. For once, I needed to rise to the challenge:
I’m sorry. I always go about things the wrong way.
I promise you I can be better.
There’s just something I need to do first
and I won’t be around for a couple of weeks.
Perhaps when I’m back we could catch a bus together.
Brian x
I pressed send and turned off my phone. Draining my glass of wine, I reached for another custard cream.
Eat, drink, and be merry – for tomorrow I write!
Monday June 11th
Not quite the first day I’d hoped for, if I’m honest.
Tuesday June 12th
Still settling into my new environs.
Wednesday June 13th
I think my chair was too low. I’ve adjusted it now.
Thursday June 14th
I don’t think it was the chair.
Friday June 15th
Saturday June 16th
Dylan came over. I am finding it very hard to write with all these interruptions.
Sunday June 17th
I’ve started to read Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. It has 1.5 million words.
Monday June 18th
Still reading Gibbon. It’s taking longer than I thought.
Tuesday June 19th
I have discovered that the Roman Constitution in the Age of the Antonines is not nearly as interesting as it sounds.
Wednesday June 20th
I threw Gibbon Volume III at the window today and now there is broken glass all over the floor of my writing shed.
Thursday June 21st
I need to find something to write about. Anything.
Friday June 22nd
Broken Glass
This glass, which
is broken
Saturday June 23rd
A Glass, Broken
Every day is a shard of glass
Sunday June 24th
The Glass That Shatters
The glass that shatters
Like glass
Monday June 25th
Spent the morning in A&E, having a piece of glass removed from my left foot.
Tuesday June 26th
I am surrounded by £10,000 worth of stupid shed.
Wednesday June 27th
4´35˝
‘How’s the writing going?’ asked Darren, as we sat waiting for the performance to begin.
‘Very well, thanks,’ I lied. ‘Still very much at the ideas stage but that’s actually where a lot of the work gets done.’
‘So what is it you’re writing exactly?’
‘Well, it’s . . . look, there he is!’
My merciful, ministering angel had just appeared on stage. Daniel Blink: erstwhile student of Philip Glass, and one of the world’s leading exponents of minimalism. We stood up to applaud him and then settled ourselves in for the performance.
It was while he was playing a cover version of John Cage’s composition 4´33˝ that I felt my literary constipation unblocking itself. I had the sudden inspiration to translate that piece into poetic form. I’d written a similar piece a while back but had never been entirely happy with it.
I shifted in my seat as 27th Club’s lyrical laxative kicked in. Darren had to persuade me from leaving early so eager was I to get back home. After Blink had taken his bows, Darren confessed that he felt rather circumspect about minimalism.
‘It left me wanting a little more,’ he said. I agreed with him, more or less.
I hurried home to write my poem, keeping well away from the shed. It ended up being slightly longer than Cage’s piece as I didn’t want to stop when in full flow. I may revisit it and edit it down one day. I wrote it on the sofa, beneath a cat, wallowing in front of Wallander and the sound of two weeks of ignored messages and notifications pinging into my phone.
Thursday June 28th
This is the Title of this Poem
and this its first line
and while this poem is perhaps
not one of my best,
it still has its moments,
such as the surprise appearance in line six
of a capybara, snuffling in long grass,
and a beautiful descrption
of the dance of light upon sun-dappled Umbrian stone
in line eight.
It also contains, in this very sentence,
the striking incongruity of Charlemagne,
kneeling solemnly at the altar
in Saint Peter’s Basilica, juxtaposed
with a muddy puddle, in which lies
one of Jeremy Clarkson’s driving gloves.
In spite of all this delicate brushwork,
this poem has generally been poorly received,
described by the Sunday Times
as ‘irritatingly self-referential’
and the Guardian as ‘promising much
but delivering little’.
Considerable schadenfreude
has been experienced on Twitter
concerning the typo in line seven.
Yet this poem harbours
no delusions of anthologized grandeur,
waits not for recital,
cares not to be remembered
for more than thirty seconds
after being read.
This poem is just happy to be here,
to have filled these pages
which were all so much nothing before.
It feels good to be writing again. I’ve been careful to do this with the curtains drawn so I can’t see my shed and my shed can’t see me. The cat seems pleased by my return to the house and I’m finding Mrs McNulty’s daytime sawing nostalgically soothing.
Less comforting were the messages on my phone that had accumulated during my confinement. There was a series of five messages from Liz, each successive one showing a steady increase on the Umbrage scale. The tone of the final message, though, had moved from annoyance to resignation:
I guess that’s it then.
At first I couldn’t understand why she was so upset but then, in my outbox, I noticed my message to her from 10th June. It was marked as undelivered; I must have turned my phone off too soon.
I looked again at the words I’d written as they teetered in my outbox, suspended in a permanent state of nearliness, like a metaphor for something that never quite happened.
Friday June 29th
Newcastle Brown Ale
This is how I remember it. He appeared
on my fifth week here, asking for food.
He’d washed up on the beach to the south of me;
I’d seen his footprints in the sand,
several days before. I’d been troubled by these,
like an astronaut who discovers giant steps
upon a not-so-lonely moon.
He strung up his hammock next to mine
and slept fitfully.
Later, he told me his name was Gordon –
although he should like to be called Sting –
and I noticed his thighs, welted
and swollen from the tentacled attentions
of jellyfish. One night, he told me of his dreams
of blue turtles
but by then I had tired of him:
the constant wrapping and unwrapping
of the tide-carried twine around his finger,
his insistence, as we swung gently in our beds,
that we put on the red light
as a beacon to passing boats,
that habit he had of standing so close to me.
On his last night, I watched him
as he slipped the note inside the bottle,
and launched it over the surf,
and, when its brown glass disappeared
underneath the waves,
I smashed the oar down upon him
until he’d no more breath to take.
Six weeks on, when the helicopter came,
there was nothing of him,
picked dry as he was, bones shining
beneath an invisible sun.
Every year, I raise a bottle to my lips
and set him free. This is how I remember it.
One might have imagined that, having had all this free time on my hands, the task of finishing Robinson Crusoe in time for the monthly book group meeting would have become somewhat easier. It’s a reasonable assumption but one that doesn’t take into consideration the fact that Mr Bloomer was only able to deliver my edition of Robinson Crusoe this morning, on account of it being ‘extremely rare’ and ‘difficult to source’. It was also ‘extremely expensive’ and that was ‘difficult to stomach’. I didn’t dare take it along with me to the meeting this evening for fear of it being doused in best bitter and essence of wasabi.
The rest of the group seem increasingly irritated with me at my failure to read the monthly book. On the pretence of not being able to squeeze anyone else around the main table, they made me sit by myself at a smaller table, shipwrecked on the rocks of guilt, marooned on my own personal island of shame. I’m surprised they didn’t call the police.
Saturday June 30th
In a Parallel Universe*
there is
parallel parking
for all of the cars
and
gymnasts drink
in parallel bars.
* this poem was sent by parallelogram
Dylan and I watched a film this afternoon called Donnie Darko, in which a ‘tangent universe’ erupts out of our own universe. It was all rather complicated but thankfully, Dylan explained to me various theories concerning alternative fictional universes. I nodded my head vigorously along to his words as if I understood him.
It made me think that in one of the alternative universes out there, there is an alternative world in which an alternative Brian Bilston is, at this very moment, enjoying an episode of unalloyed passion on an alternative sofa (one without the custard-cream crumbs) with the Liz from this world (although one who has been modified to return his text messages).
The Brian Bilston who lives in this world, and who is currently sitting on an unalternative sofa with an unalternative cat on his lap, writing in this, his miserable unalternative diary, utterly resents that alternative Brian Bilston, and hopes he puts his back out.