Wednesday August 1st
Chandrima has suggested that all members of Poetry Club should read a poem at Douglas’s funeral tomorrow.
I sat on the garden bench with a dozen anthologies spread out in front of me, slowly reddening under the mid-day sun. It took me ages to find anything appropriate; most of the popular funeral poems seem overly morbid, maudlin or mawkish, and I’m not altogether sure that’s what he would have wanted.
I tried Kipling but couldn’t find anything quite right. In the end, I settled on Noel Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’. He would have enjoyed its comedy and redolence of colonialism.
Thursday August 2nd
Funeral Shoes (Stop all the Crocs)
Stop all the Crocs, cut out these foam clogs,
Don’t let your footwear go to the dogs,
Silence the pavements from the Crocs’ fearsome slap,
Bring out the dustbin, put your Crocs into that.
Let the easyJets gather and circle in glee
To write on the sky the words CROC: R.I.P.
Organise parties and grand cavalcades,
Host dinners, bake cakes, throw victory parades.
He was her North, her South, her West and East,
Her Mini-Milk, her Fab, her Chocolate Feast.
But such thoughts were all packed away in a box,
From the moment she saw him wearing Crocs.
Crocs are passé now: discard all your pairs;
Lob them onto the waves, recite a prayer.
Watch them drift out to where sea and sky meet,
And beg for forgiveness from your poor feet.
Douglas’s funeral was not well-attended. Poetry Club represented about half of those gathered together to say their farewells. But amongst the others assembled, much consideration had gone into providing him with the kind of send-off he would have wanted: there was a guard of honour; his coffin was draped in the Union Jack; the ‘Last Post’ was bugled. And then it was the turn of Poetry Club with our selections: Rossetti, Dickinson, Barrett Browning, Tennyson, Wordsworth. Toby Salt read an extract from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, in its original Chinese.
We walked across the road together to the pub. As Toby Salt’s footsteps clacked behind me, my loathing of him reached new levels. I was munching on a cheese sandwich and wondering what kind of monster wears crocs to a funeral when Liz came over.
‘Funerals aren’t much fun, are they?’ she said.
‘Not much,’ I said. ‘About as much fun as weddings, I suppose.’
She looked at me for a moment.
‘What is it that you’re afraid of, Brian?’ she asked.
I wasn’t quite sure what she was getting at so I started to murmur things at the carpet.
‘Death. Life. Spiders. Toby Salt’s poetry. These cheese sandwi—’
‘Happiness?’
I looked up sharply. I knew the answer to that.
‘Happiness is a social construct. Probably.’
Liz sighed. From the corner of the pub, I could hear Toby Salt’s voice droning on about his new book. Any moment now, he’d start bellowing out a poem.
‘Is it?’ she said. ‘Is it really? And what about me? Am I a social construct, too?’
‘No, of course not! You’re—’
I tried to think of the right word. Real? Palpable? Beautiful? Treacherous?
‘You’re—’
Tangible? Corporeal? Sexy? Amphibious?
‘You’re—’
Amphibious? I was just thinking random adjectives now. For once, I had Toby Salt to thank as I heard him launch lustily into a Petrarchan sonnet and, mercifully, I was snapped out of my reverie.
‘Sorry, Liz. But I’ve got to go. It’s been really good talking to you again.’
I fled the pub, cursing myself and my stupid brain. Words, why do you always fail me when I need you most?
Friday August 3rd
Dylan is in Marbella from tomorrow with Sophie and Stuart. He has sent me a link to where they’re staying. It’s a villa with two heated pools, three bathrooms, a Jacuzzi, an on-call maid and dinner service. There is ready access to a local golf course.
I thought again about the prospect of our week together in sodden North Yorkshire. He’ll find it such a let-down, which I suppose is how he must find me.
If only there was some way I could make a success of my writing. I looked out at my shed’s accusatory silhouette. It occurred to me that I’d been going about it all wrong: it’s not about where I write but what I write. I’ve just not stumbled on the right topic or format yet. I closed my eyes and focused for three solid minutes but could make no further progress.
Saturday August 4th
I think I have it!
I’d been moping around, worrying about my money problems, and thinking about Douglas’s funeral and our poetry readings, when the answer suddenly came to me . . . DEATH!
It had been a real struggle to find a good poem for the service. The selections were fine as far as they went but they all seemed a little too familiar, impersonal and rather dated. There is, it would seem, a real dearth of decent modern poems about death.
This was the gap in the market I’d been hoping for! Could I write something that might corner the funeral market in the way that, say, ‘Happy Birthday’ had the whole birthday thing sewn up? Or Slade’s ‘Merry Xmas, Everybody’ dominated the festive season? If I could, I’d be quids in.
The more I thought about it, the more advantages I could see. I wrote out a mini-business plan, including a section on market potential:
1. Everyone dies at some stage in their life, typically at the end of it. That’s a large market segment to go at, particularly if this segment could be targeted pre-death.
2. Everyone experiences grief and bereavement. This represents a fantastic opportunity for a poem written with tact and sensitivity.
3. Competition is weak and divided. Existing death poems have typically been written out of personal experience rather than a cool assessment of market requirements and an in-depth understanding of the voice of the customer.
I sat back in front of an old episode of Rebus, smiling to myself. I just had to write the thing now.
Sunday August 5th
First up with any new project: a visit to the bookshop. I bought a new anthology of poems on death and bereavement as well as a few other titles: Grieving for Dummies; Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s On Death and Dying; Death: A Graveside Companion; Coping with Loss; A Guide to London Cemeteries; and James Joyce’s The Dead and Other Stories.
Arriving home, I realised I’d forgotten this month’s book group selection: Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. I went back to the bookshop to pick one up and, while I was at it, Allan Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems and three walking maps of the North Yorkshire coast. It had been an expensive day but I managed to find the money from somewhere.
Monday August 6th
It is proving much harder than I thought to write a really good funeral poem. It’s very easy to move from the universal to the personal and – as a result – potentially limit a poem’s audience. To circumvent this problem, I am considering a multiple-choice format:
Farewell, my dear departed father / mother /
sister / brother / granddad / granny / lover /
auntie / uncle / cousin / friend / associate*
(* please delete as appropriate).
I will miss your generosity of spirit /
good sense of humour / patience beyond limit /
growth mindset / assorted flaws and imperfections /
joie de vivre / Fleetwood Mac record collection
not to mention those beautiful blue eyes / green eyes /
brown eyes / grey eyes / powerful, muscular thighs /
bow ties / wimples / dimples / broad hips / soft lips.
You were unique. A one-off. You will be much missed.
But Death, alas, snatched you from us far too soon /
after a good innings / last Tuesday afternoon.
And we gather here in this church / crematorium /
cathedral / cemetery / multi-faith emporium /
synagogue / prayer room / forest clearing at midnight
to wish you well as you go into Allah’s light /
on an exciting new journey / with God’s good grace /
screaming into the void / to a better place.
I’ve given it a provisional title of ‘Farewell to [Insert Loved One’s Name Here]’.
I considered its merits: it keeps its options open; it’s multi-faith; it could be extended to include other scenarios without too much difficulty; it’s designed to reach the broadest audience possible. But I couldn’t help thinking that once the multiple-choice answers have been decided, there’s not a whole lot here. Also, is it too impersonal? Might it be perceived as opportunistic?
No, I wasn’t happy with it, I decided. I’d just have to have another go at it tomorrow.
Tuesday August 7th
Beat Poets
Some say it’s for their own good
but I don’t think you should.
Some say I threw the first punch. Some say I threw the only punch. Some say it was all academic anyway as poets aren’t very good at punching and that’s why I missed and grazed my hand on the bench behind him.
It was Toby Salt’s comments about Douglas that did it. But I was already in an agitated state of mind; I’d spent the whole day wrestling with death but the words still weren’t falling as I’d hoped. By the time I turned up at Poetry Club, I was in a foul mood.
Toby Salt had already told us that this was probably going to be his last Poetry Club.
‘I’ve moved on, you see,’ he said. ‘Important things are happening and I’m not sure I can commit any more to this.’ He gestured disparagingly at the shabby back room.
Chandrima looked crestfallen. Mary irritated. Kaylee sullen. Liz cross. I felt my mood lifting.
‘It has a certain charm, of course,’ he went on, ‘but it’s all rather small-town stuff whereas I now operate on, shall we say, a different plane.’
‘A different plane,’ repeated Chandrima dejectedly.
‘Well, yes. You know, with the radio and TV, the broadsheets, the festivals and competitions. And my poems operate at something of a loftier altitude to the ones here. You must realise that.’
‘A loftier attitude,’ said Kaylee, sulkily.
‘Take Brian with his funny little poems about goodness knows what! They’re hardly going to win any prizes, are they?!’
‘Prizes,’ repeated Liz, disdainfully.
My irritation had begun to return.
‘The scansion! Those rhymes! He’d struggle getting those printed on greeting cards!’
‘Greeting cards,’ repeated me, properly riled now.
‘It’s not just Brian. I mean, take Douglas. How he wasted not just my time – but yours – with his ridiculous hoplophiliac ramblings on military conflicts through history. There was a man without a single poetic bone in his body, one far more interested in fighting and viol—’
And that’s when I punched him. Or tried to. But I slipped on the collection of pistachio shells underneath my chair as I lunged forward and my fist went whistling past his ear. The others restrained me from inflicting further damage upon myself while Toby Salt looked at me with amused contempt, shook his head, then walked out of Poetry Club for ever.
Wednesday August 8th
I looked again at the words I’d fought with yesterday. I’d been attempting to create a more contemporary feel to the whole dying thing:
You are gone from the world. I feel so alone.
My head is a rock. My heart is a stone.
Then I think of that summer, our apartment in Rome.
With me, in your thrall, and you, on your phone.
The motif of the mobile phone would make it play more strongly with Generation X and Millennial audiences, I hoped.
The memories come as if to atone:
A daytrip to see the Millennium Dome,
Long walks on the beach, our feet in the foam.
With love in my heart, and you, on your phone.
But was that wise? If I was honest with myself, the market share of those segments, in death terms, was not nearly as significant as that all-important ageing baby boomer market.
But then came that day, the last you’d have known.
You in the street and a car coming home.
I think you may well have been on your phone.
With me, at the wheel, and the smash of your bones.
The whole business of the poem’s narrator running over their lover was also troubling me. It did not strike me as the stuff of elegies.
Now, on your coffin, we have thrown our last stones.
Sleep soundly, my love, with the worms in the loam.
I pray where you’ve gone is a free Wi-Fi zone.
With you, in the ground, lying next to your phone.
I looked at my own phone from the relative safety of the sofa. There was a message from Liz:
Are you OK?
What a pompous idiot Toby [Salt] is!
Well, you weren’t thinking that in Saffron Walden, when you hung on his every word, I considered retorting, but I am not by nature a mean-spirited or vindictive person. I replied with the rather more conciliatory:
All fine here!
Good riddance to him.
And I was fine, not least because the last laugh was on him. I’d looked up the word he’d used yesterday:
HOPLOPHILIAC (noun): a person who harbours an unnatural love of guns and other firearms
And it just happened to be the solution to 15 across of the crossword.
Thursday August 9th
I checked in to Twitter for the first time in several centuries. In my absence, my following has blossomed. There are now forty-three people hanging on my every tweet. Toby Salt has nearly five thousand followers. His page is a relentless mudflow of self-promotion: his latest competition success; upcoming book signings for This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave; another piece in the Guardian.
I returned to my funeral poem but progress continued to be slow. At some stage I must have drifted off to sleep on the sofa because I fell into a dream. I was a police inspector called in to investigate the death of a poet, who’d been found in suspicious circumstances. He was lying on the floor in the hallway of his apartment, with the pages from his latest book stuffed into his mouth. At the post-mortem, his body was found to contain traces of many harmful toxins, a lethal cocktail of dactyls and spondees and several lines of iambic pentameter.
I think all these deliberations on death are beginning to have a deleterious effect on me.
Friday August 10th
I read ‘Now I Am Dead’ again:
Now I am dead,
please do not weep for me.
Your tears won’t bring me back,
now I am dead.
Now I am dead,
you can clear out all my shoes.
I’ll not need them where I am going,
now I am dead.
Now I am dead,
don’t forget to do the bins on Friday
(this week is general landfill),
now I am dead.
Now I am dead,
you can crack on with that loft extension
I’d never much cared for,
now I am dead.
I seem to have fallen into the trap again of making it too personal, although there may be themes within it that resonate universally (death, the bins, etc.). At least, there’s a decent balance of poignancy (‘your tears won’t bring me back’) and practicality (‘you can clear out all my shoes’ etc).
All the same, I don’t feel very confident that I’ve cracked it. Regardless, I’ve sent all three poems off to a few local funeral parlours to see if they might be interested in including them in any information packs they may hand out to grieving customers.
Saturday August 11th
Catastrophe
don’t know
what drives me crazier,
your amnesia
or pyromania
even now
I still think about
the time you forgot
to put the cat out
Dylan told me that Stuart hired a Maserati in Marbella so they might better experience the ‘majesty of the Sierra Blanca foothills’. He said this somewhat pointedly, as we boarded our third train of the day. In total, it took four trains, two buses and one three-mile walk to make it to our North Yorkshire idyll, a mere fourteen hours after setting off.
It was pitch black when we arrived and it took us another forty minutes and one irritable late-night phone call to the owner, Mr Briggs, to locate the front door key, which we found under a brick in the disused barn next door. The cottage is beautiful, though – and will be even more so once we locate the Wi-Fi password.
Tomas is house-sitting for me and will look after the cat. In turn, the cat will be Tomas-sitting. Last year, I asked Mrs McNulty to help and the cat has yet to forgive me. It was also the first time that the RSPCA were alerted to my Twitter presence.
Sunday August 12th
Our holiday hasn’t had the most auspicious of beginnings: a day spent in vain pursuit of the Wi-Fi password. Mr Briggs was hopeless. He was pretty sure it had an ‘a’ and an ‘l’ in it, and quite possibly a ‘p’ or should that be a ‘t’? I grilled him about the names of his first pet, his mother’s maiden name and the name of his primary school, but we are no nearer to the truth.
Dylan got fed up with waiting me for me to crack the code and headed out for the afternoon, having borrowed one of my walking guides. I would have joined him but holidays aren’t all about doing what you want.
Monday August 13th
Gérard Depardieu is in Pieces!
Gérard Depardieu is in pieces!
He is dreaming of the Remora 2000 again,
steering it solemnly past the gobies,
while sharing silent jokes
with the clown tangs.
Gérard Depardieu’s head is all jumbled!
He is no longer sure
of the Remora 2000’s thruster capabilities
and at what kind of depths
it can safely operate.
Mais regardez! Voilà une tête flottante!
Tell the catfish he is coming!
He is slowly assembling!
Tell them Gérard Depardieu
is getting himself together at last!
The incessant rain has forced us to avail ourselves of the cottage’s entertainment facilities (excluding the Wi-Fi, that is, as we are yet to crack the password), the full list of which is as follows:
1) Three VHS video cassettes: Babe: Pig in the City, Pokemon: The Movie 2000, and volume 2 of a box set of The Thornbirds.
2) One slightly soiled paperback copy of A Surgeon in her Stocking by Tina Solomon, a Christmas tale from Mills and Boon’s Medical Romance series.
3) Board games: Monopoly (without the board), Scrabble (without the tiles) and Noel’s House Party, still wrapped in its original cellophane.
4) A 500-piece Photo Jigsaw Puzzle of Gérard Depardieu in a Submersible. At this stage, it’s unclear to us whether this is complete or not, although we have yet to locate Gérard Depardieu’s left ear.
This must seem a far cry from Marbella for Dylan but he’s putting a brave face on it all and doing his best to keep my spirits up.
Tuesday August 14th
On Reading a Mills and Boon
His fingers ran down its spine tentatively,
a surprising sensitivity contained
within those powerful, muscular digits.
‘Read me,’ it gasped.
Preliminary material was dispensed with.
Plunging in, his hands reached firmly
beneath the covers, spreading its pages wide,
as he sought out its hot inky centre,
and buried himself deep within it.
It was all over before you could say
‘our love became a burning mist’.
They lay in silence, limp and ashamed.
We found Gérard Depardieu’s left ear after all, alongside the racing car and the boot in the Scrabble box. But we were unable to find a section of the submersible’s on-board computer, which as the jigsaw box informed us, can automatically maintain a fixed depth as far down as 610 metres for up to ten hours. We also have a piece left over: it is blue with three nobbly bits.
By the evening, the rain had abated but not soon enough to prevent me from making inroads on A Surgeon in her Stocking. It was the last thing that beautiful but feisty midwife Ellie Forbes wanted, but when brooding Italian surgeon Alessandro Montieri walked into the obstetrics ward that December and back into her life, she couldn’t help but think that all her Christmases had come at once.
I read sections of it out loud to Dylan; we haven’t laughed so much in ages.
Wednesday August 15th
O do not ask if I am beach body ready
O do not ask
if I am beach body ready.
Observe how the folds
of my stomach ripple
like the wind-pulled waves.
Rub your hands
over these pale buttocks,
sand-smoothed by time.
Note my milk-white limbs
like washed-up whalebones,
stranded and useless.
Consider these tufts of hair
on my back and shoulders
which sprout like sea-grass.
And listen to the lapping
of my socks
at the shores of my sandals.
And still you ask me
if I am beach body ready?
We made it to the beach and laid out our towels in the drizzle. We bit into our hard-boiled eggs and gazed out at the grey sea.
‘Why did you and Mum split up?’ asked Dylan, still staring off into the distance.
I paused while I considered this.
‘I think she thought me to be something of a disappointment.’
‘A disappointment? In what way?’
‘Not in any specific way. Just generally. A general disappointment. Like a film you’ve looked forward to watching for ages, and then you see it, and you realise it wasn’t worth the wait. The plot makes no sense, the dialogue is stilted, the casting’s all wrong. A bit like Babe: Pig in the City.’
He smiled. This time, it was his turn to pause and reflect.
‘Did you used to write her poems?’
‘Your mother was the reason I started writing poems. I’d write her one every day.’
‘Then what happened?’
‘She stopped reading them. Or I stopped writing them . . . I forget which.’
‘Why?’
‘You see, poetry . . . it doesn’t really solve anything. It shines its light on things but it doesn’t give answers. It was never going to keep us together.’
‘I’m glad you’re a poet.’
‘I’m not a poet. I’m just somebody who write poems.’
‘Same difference,’ said Dylan, and we packed up and headed back to finish reading A Surgeon in her Stocking.
Thursday August 16th
The Incidence of Oxymorons
Alone together at last,
I told her how I thought that –
in my unbiased opinion –
the incidence of oxymorons
in the English language
had been growing smaller.
That’s old news, she said,
claiming it had been the case
for almost exactly ten years.
Strongly held convictions
were thrown across the room.
Things got pretty ugly.
But this felt strangely normal;
ours was a bittersweet relationship,
a tragi-comic civil war
of violent agreements
and deafening silences,
going nowhere.
For the first time in years, I dreamt about Sophie. We were arguing. I’d spent the day writing poems for her to find when she came back from work, scattering them around the house like confetti. She wondered why the fridge was empty when I’d promised I’d go shopping and why the house was in such a state when I’d promised to tidy up.
She said it would be good if ‘just for once’ I could drop the ‘obsession with poetry and join the rest of us in the real world.’ Later, I found a Post-it note she’d left on the kitchen table. It said: ‘Brian, I give up. Can’t live with you anymore. I am off to Mum’s’.
It was the saddest haiku I had ever read.
Dylan woke me up.
‘I’ve got my results!’ he shouted. ‘Seven A*s and two As!’
I hugged him and held him close. Later, we headed out to pick up the trail through the woods until we reached the foss, the sudden thunder of its fall drowning out the last vestiges of my troubled sleep.
Friday August 17th
We followed a different route today, tracing the slow curves of the river until it broadened like a fan as we neared the coast. We searched the bank for stones, flat and oval, the size of our palms, and launched them down the river, with varying degrees of success. Legs bent, I watched the stone as it sliced shallow scoops out of the water – one, two – and Dylan started talking – three, four – about how they were moving to America – five, six – the stone barely touching the surface – seven, eight – travelling further and further – nine, ten – disappearing from sight.
Saturday August 18th
We handed the keys back to Mr Briggs, who laughingly told us he’d remembered the Wi-Fi password after all! It was BRENDA678. Brenda being the name of his favourite Large White Yorkshire pig and 678 being the number of pounds that she weighed.
Travelling back, Dylan and I avoided all reference to yesterday’s conversation, but it hung uncomfortably over us all day, like a bag strap dangling from the overhead storage compartments of a succession of trains (three). Sophie made no mention of it either when I dropped Dylan back. I got home and closed the door, surrounded by a heap of unpaid invoices, junk mail and funeral-parlour rejection letters.
Sunday August 19th
I took a closer look at the funeral-parlour replies. They all started with the phrase ‘It is with much regret’. The one exception came from Jenkins & Pain (strapline: It’s a Grave Business).
I read the brochure that they’d enclosed:
Here at Jenkins and Pain,
we know what it’s like to lose a loved one,
so why not leave us to take the strain,
while you get on with your mourning.
We handle all aspects of corpse logistics –
from the mortuary table to the grave –
at prices you won’t want to pass on.
You’ll be dead made up
at our discounts on restorative cosmetics.
Or why not take advantage
of our Bury One, Get One Free offer?
Don’t look a gift hearse in the mouth!
But whatever it is you’re looking for –
interment or entombment,
aquamation or incineration –
Jenkins and Pain are at your disposal.
But the accompanying letter snuffed out any faint heartbeat of encouragement; for the ‘small fee’ of £300, they will carry copies of my poems in their reception area. I put it in the bin with the others. It is clear that my funeral-poem idea – or Project Death as I had inwardly come to think of it – is not going to be the instant money-spinner that I’d supposed.
With a heavy heart, I began to update my CV. It is time to re-join the great majority.
Monday August 20th
It has been nearly fifteen years since I’ve had cause to update my CV. What’s troubling is the paucity of changes I’ve had to make to it: the substitution of the words ‘solutions’ for products; a more contemporary font. If curriculum vitae means ‘the course of life’, then the course mine has followed appears to have been a dull and meandering one.
CURRICULUM VITAE REVISITED
Personal Statement Haiku
Underachiever
seeks work to fend off bailiffs
and boredom of life.
| Experience | |
| Current Position | Sitting on a sofa is where you’ll find me at, while writing this CV trapped beneath a cat. |
| Previous Positions | |
| Recent times: | Supine. Horizontal. Prone. Lying prostrate on my own. Sprawled. Reclined. At my ease. Angled (one eighty degrees), |
| Before that: | Slouched. Slumped. Bent-backed. Stooped. Hunched. Humped. Bowed and Drooped. |
| Even earlier: | Walking. Crawling. Catatonic. Sitting. Lying. Embryonic. |
| Education | I hold a lower-second class combined honours degree in Theoretical Woodwork and Sociocultural Apology. |
| Hobbies & Interests | Music. Reading. Crosswords. Memes. Football. Murder. Custard Creams. |
I suppressed nearly all the references to poetry. Most employers won’t even look at anyone with such a background; there is a strong correlation with untrustworthiness and unreliability.
Tuesday August 21st
‘Do poets use LinkedIn?’ was a question I’d often pondered in quieter moments, along with:
‘Do Poets drive?’ (conclusion: not if they can help it)
‘Should poets drive?’ (conclusion: probably not)
and ‘Who would win in a fight between Auden and Eliot?’ (conclusion: unsure – although it would probably end not with a bang but a whimper).
But as I looked today at my LinkedIn account for the first time in five years, the answer seems unequivocally yes, if Toby Salt is anything to go by. He has 500+ connections, including radio and television producers, newspaper and poetry magazine editors, arts correspondents, publishers. I have three connections: Tomas, Timothy Pain from Jenkins & Pain Funeral Directors and Cora Nesmith from the Mongolian Yurt Company.
Wednesday August 22nd
I was idly perusing the job pages today, minding my own business, when I was disturbed by an unwelcome intruder in my kitchen.
Radio 4 had been on all morning and I’d already absorbed programmes on the Dewey Decimal classification system and a debate concerning the ethics of driverless cars. But the schedule appeared to have moved on, and a vaguely familiar voice emerged over the airwaves, amidst background sounds of stamping, hammering and whirring. I heard the words ‘This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave’ and I realised I was listening to the nasal tones of Django from Shooting from the Hip. It was a programme on the history of letterpress printing and Django was talking from a print shop in Swansea, where Shooting from the Hip produced their artisanal, hand-crafted special editions.
‘Letterpress printing is one of the great lost arts,’ he was saying. ‘In construction, it is as beautiful as a Toby Salt poem. First, one must—’
I switched it off in irritation and took a look at my phone. A notification on LinkedIn! I’d barely finished ‘optimising’ my LinkedIn page – or making it fractionally less pessimised: had I worked some magic already?
I took a closer look and sighed deeply: the message was headed Stuart Mould has invited you to join his professional network.
Please send help! I am being assailed in my own home.
Thursday August 23rd
I’d been stuck in the house for four days and I needed to get out. I called Tomas to see if he wanted to meet up. He was busy, unfortunately, but asked whether I’d be interested in coming along to a lecture he was giving this afternoon on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in between cleaning shifts. I sat at the back, near the exit, struggling to understand a single word he was saying. I looked at the rest of the audience. A lot of nodding was going on. I was trying to stop nodding off.
‘But, of course, we place our own interpretation on the world around us,’ Tomas was saying. ‘Wittgenstein knew this. “The world of the happy,” he wrote, “is quite different from the world of the unhappy”.’
That was something I could understand.
I thought about the world of Toby Salt with his new book and his prizes and his media appearances.
I thought about the world of Stuart Mould with his positivity and his relentless acts of charity and his unflagging confidence that things will get better.
I thought about my own world. How I’d messed things up with Sophie. How I’d messed things up with Liz. How I’d squandered all my money. What my world might be like without Dylan in it.
And I thought about how the world of the unhappy is quite different from the world of the happy.
My phone pinged. Another LinkedIn message from Stuart. He’s has been endorsing my skills. It’s all a sham, of course; if he was being truthful, he’d have endorsed me for Blundering, Bungling, Fluffing and Muffing.
Friday August 24th
I have now applied for fifteen jobs in total. These include roles as various as quantity surveyor, solutions engineer, accounts assistant, project manager, haberdasher, window dresser, trainee hair stylist, Oxford Professor of Poetry and several customer-facing roles in the fast-food industry.
In other news: I have had another LinkedIn recommendation from Stuart Mould and I seem to have put out my bags for recycling on the day for general landfill.
Saturday August 25th
Stuart Mould has invited you to join his professional network
I. Stuart Mould has invited you to join his professional network
He is wearing a tuxedo and the smirk
of a man unfamiliar with the concept of rejection.
Stuart Mould has four thousand and fifty-eight connections.
Small wonder given he holds the keys
that unlock the door to inner peace.
It’s all there in his results-driven profile.
It appears Stuart Mould will go the extra mile
as your Life Coach and Dream Architect.
I don’t know why but I click accept.
II. Stuart Mould has endorsed you for the following skills
Marketing ✓ Leading Teams ✓ Targeting ✓ Weaving Dreams ✓
Scuba diving ✓ Semaphore ✓ Lego building ✓ Harp (Grade Four) ✓
Chess playing ✓ Home baking ✓ Soothsaying ✓ Lovemaking ✓
Balefulness ✓ Masturbation ✓ Aimlessness ✓ Procrastination ✓
III. Stuart Mould has written you a recommendation that you can include on your profile page
‘Bold strides this colossus in the workplace
with footsteps firm and full of flawless grace,
noble of purpose and so fair of face,
greeting PowerPoint with such fond embrace.
O Mighty Strategist! Leader Complete!
The Pivot-fabled Slayer of Spreadsheets!
Analytical Artist! Office Athlete!
Leviathan of the Corporate Elite!’
As if it were not enough for him to haunt me in the corporate networking world, he now has to do it in real life, too.
‘Hi, Brian!’ said Stuart loudly, when he dropped Dylan off this morning. ‘How’s all that job-hunting going?!’
‘I’m not looking for a job.’
‘Of course not! You’ve not been updating your LinkedIn page at all!’ he chuckled.
I went to close the door. He put his foot in it.
‘Look, Brian. Honestly, any help you need to get yourself on your feet again,’ he grinned at my slippers as he said this, ‘then just say the word! I know things have been hard for you.’
He gave me a sympathetic look then put his hand on my shoulder.
I shrank back and he appraised me once more.
‘Don’t feel too bad about failure, Brian. It’s just a petrol stop on the road to success! Anyway, I need to go! Charity free-running event! Young carers and vulnerable children!’
He parkoured off and I retreated back inside to Dylan.
We proceeded carefully. All mention of What Dylan Told Me When We Were Skimming Stones was avoided. If no one talks about it, it can’t happen. Everyone knows that.
Sunday August 26th
Six Haiku Book Reviews
I | IV |
| Did not finish it. Got the pip. Shame. I had such Great Expectations. |
Woolly yarn about the history of tank tops. A Farewell to Arms. |
II | V |
| Dystopian tale. Neon leg warmers and Wham! Nineteen Eighty-Four. |
.well aged hasn’t it :Button Benjamin of Case Curious Re-read |
III | VI |
| A group of lions struggle to find acceptance. Pride and Prejudice. |
Pop group clones itself. It all ends in tragedy. The Thirty-Nine Steps. |
It is now Toby Salt’s turn to invade my personal space again. His ferrety eyes stared out at me from the pages of the Sunday review section. I proceeded to draw on him: horn-rimmed glasses and a large phallus emanating from the top of his head. Next to his photo is a five-star review (presumably out of a hundred) by the paper’s poetry editor, Sefton Warbrick, who writes:
This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave is a remarkable tour de force by one of this country’s finest emergent poets. Let’s be clear, this is not a volume for everyone; the uninitiated won’t be getting their hands dirtier by attempting to fathom its inner cadences, the beauty of its lyrical lilt, its ghostly echoes of Eliot and intimations of Ovid. Let’s leave them to the twelve-bar blues of their democratic doggerel, playground poesy, and sing-song simplicia. If poetry is the new rock ’n’ roll, then God help us all. What Salt gives us is opera.
I wondered whether Liz has ever caressed Toby Salt’s magic flute. After a few minutes, I looked down at the paper and noticed how my ballpoint had punctured the page and ripped Toby Salt’s stupid papery face to shreds.
Monday August 27th
Bloodshed
They found him, several days on,
head stoved in by his Remington,
sitting as if slumbered at his desk,
were it not for that ungodly mess
which had seeped into his sonnet.
And there, cut out and pasted on it,
at the centre of this macabre scene,
was Matthew Chapter 5, Verse 13,
the initials BB scribed underneath.
The Bible Butcher, thought the police.
We were waiting for Meet Me at the Gallows, a Goth band from Cheadle. Darren had turned up wearing a high-viz urban gilet and carrying a large fluorescent sign on a pole which said STOP: CHILDREN CROSSING.
‘Sorry. New job starts next week. Had to come straight from the training course,’ he explained. ‘Didn’t have time to go back and change.’
I nodded my head as imperceptibly as I could in the hope that no one would notice that we knew each other.
‘By the way,’ Darren went on, ‘Stuart tells me you’re looking for a job at the moment.’
I shrugged indiscernibly.
‘Only the instructor today mentioned they had a couple of vacancies, if you’re interested. Pay’s not great but the hours are short.’
I looked off into the mid-distance.
‘Anyway, what I’m saying is that I could put in a good word for you on the whole lollipop front.’ He winked and then tapped a finger on the side of his nose.
I was about to raise my left eyebrow silently in response when he thrust his giant lollipop at me and shouted, ‘Go on! Give it a go! Try this one for size!’
Only the sudden arrival on stage of Meet Me at the Gallows saved me. I used the distraction of their presence to edge steadily away from Darren and establish a human shield of goths around myself. I could see him glowing in the distance as the band launched into their crowd-pleasers: ‘The Bloodied Veil’, ‘The Rose that Blackens on the Branch’, ‘Suicide in Crouch End’, ‘I Can See Blood Upon Your Hands’, ‘The Bible Butcher’, ‘Crumbling Bones’.
All in all, a really fun evening for all the family. Four stars. Would recommend!
Tuesday August 28th
I lay on the sofa and waited for the job offers to roll in. Somehow, in the middle of all this excitement I must have dropped off to sleep because the next thing I knew, I found myself in an airport, waving goodbye to Dylan.
Everyone was smiling sympathetically at me. The airline staff allowed me go right up the door of the Airbus A320 but a sudden shove from behind and I suddenly found myself on the plane and Dylan, Sophie and Stuart were waving me goodbye. I staggered to my seat and watched the flight attendant perform her flight-safety demonstration although the plane was somehow already up in the air but then I looked more closely and saw that the flight attendant was actually Liz and she was grinning at me, and the plane began to nosedive and my seatbelt was missing and I reached underneath for my life vest but it wasn’t there, and then the door of the cockpit flew open and there was the pilot and it was Toby Salt, and he and Liz both started to laugh hysterically beneath their oxygen masks, and then I woke up.
I looked it up in my Dream Dictionary but as it’s an old edition it only references the Airbus A319 and so I was none the wiser. What on earth can it all mean?
Wednesday August 29th
Aura Boringalis
an admission:
my aura is beset
with grey emissions
I have such drab
and dreary
energy fields,
my inner dullness
is revealed.
i fear my chakras
have congealed.
Mrs McNulty’s sawing has reached new levels. Whereas once it was restricted to the daytime (as laid down in the Daylight Sawing Time Act (DST) that we’d agreed three years ago), forming a not unpleasing accompaniment to my household chores, she is now to be heard woodworking away into the small hours of the morning. I’ve long given up asking her what exactly it is that she’s making as she just cackles in response to any enquiry.
I went around to complain. As she opened her door to me, she recoiled backwards unsteadily.
‘Your aura!’ she hissed. ‘It’s black!’
I wasn’t altogether certain of what an aura was but I had a sudden flashback to old Ready Brek television commercials. I looked at my sleeves, my jeans, my shoes.
‘Mrs McNulty, I’m dressed all in black. Are you sure you’re not confusing my aura with my clothes?’
‘Don’t you see? This means it will happen soon!’
‘What will?’ I wondered whether she was referring to the annual street party, flyers for which had been posted diurnally through my letter box, and which I’d been doing my best to ignore.
‘You have so much negative energy.’
I found it hard to disagree. The street party was nothing but a nuisance.
‘Your energy fields have turned black! That can only mean one thing: death is coming!’
I realised she’d moved on from talking about the street party. I attempted to bring up the subject of her sawing but she slammed the door in my face before I could continue. I went back in, thinking dark thoughts, and waited for news of a job.
Thursday August 30th
Three rejection letters arrived today. I headed off to book group in pugilistic mood.
Frustratingly, they broke the first rule almost straight away and began to talk about Fight Club. They then proceeded to break the second. I yelled STOP! and went limp but they carried on regardless. If I’d known they were going to talk about it, I’d have taken the time to read it.
I sat there sullenly with my dry roasted peanuts for the rest of the evening, unresisting to their jabs concerning my lack of commitment, slowly getting punch drunk.
Friday August 31st
It is Friday night. I am sat at the kitchen table, with four more rejection letters spread out around me, and with a cat on my lap and a glass of wine in my hand. In order to get everything into perspective, I have made a list of all the good and bad things to do with my current situation:
Bad Things
1. I am broke. I have squandered my redundancy money on a writing shed I do not use. This is all thanks to Toby Salt’s advice in a poetry magazine.
2. My attempts to become a writer have been a total failure. Unlike Toby Salt’s, whose rise to fame is as dramatic as it is inexplicable.
3. I now have to find myself a proper job again (see 1 and 2, including Toby Salt-related sub-points).
I appear to be unsuited to every vacancy.
4. I have messed things up with Liz. Although this is mainly Toby Salt’s fault.
5. Dylan is leaving. This is because of ‘Stuart’ although there must be some kind of Toby Salt connection in there somewhere. Perhaps they are brothers.
6. I have forty-three followers on Twitter. Toby Salt has 7,872.
7. I am on the verge of being kicked out of book group on account of not reading the books, due to all the distraction with this Toby Salt business.
8. I did that thing I shouldn’t have done.
Good Things
1. Poetry Club is now mercifully free of Toby Salt.
2. The cat still loves me.
3. I have this bottle of wine.
Dylan once told me to concentrate on the positives so I shall try to do just that. I will pour myself another glass of wine and write a poem to cheer myself up.
The pleasure of a glass of wine
to toast the passing of the week;
the merlot serves to wash away
its sour and sweat-soaked reek.
Sitting back I let it soften
the dog-toothed edges of my mind,
thwarted frown, unfurrowed brow,
I pour another glass of wine.
I try not to think of TobyS alt
&my disused writing shed,
replenisch my glass a fewmore times
untilthe bottles onlydregs
two emptied botttles infront of me
so rubbage around in the cubpoard
find 2stellas and some whiskers
drinkem down! like a drinky think
sing bomenhian raspberry
yes! I loveyou cat!
mommajustkilllledaman
gin
theres some
SCARABOUCHE!
gin
nothing
nothing really
matches
any way the windows