BiB

No, not the snappy case in Slavonic languages. The version of songs. Without words. That establishments choose to play.

Does a restaurant need a licence to play music? If you’ve got a restaurant, say, with a CD player sitting nicely on a shelf somewhere, do you need to have permission, perhaps even from the artist themselves, if you want to stick on a CD of theirs? If, say, I had an Anglo-Russian restaurant, serving beans on buckwheat porridge - I’ve thought of a name and everything - and I wanted to pipe Madonna to the punters, would I actually have to write to Madge at her castle in whatever county it is and ask if she and her retinue would mind awfully if I numbed the punters’ senses with her choonz?

It’s a phenomenon I thought was over. It was all the rage in fast-food establishments in the UK in my youth. They’d pipe in pop music with the tongue-desensitisers, but it would always be an instrumental version, or a cover version sung by the members of staff. Close enough to the real thing but clearly not yer actual, say, Bucks Fizz (who are, obviously, inimitable).

The weather here is stunning at the moment. I have put my winter being into storage for the four tolerable months of the calendar and reminded myself not to think of September-April until August 31st at the earliest. Life is so easily good. The Russian and I have reduced our drop-dead! count to factor in daylight saving. Hell, the sun has even made me give up booze for a while and enjoy it. I feel healthy. I feel warm. And I’ve noticed a benevolent attitude to the world and all its imperfections. I smiled like Laura Bush at the tram drunk yesterday. This contentedness, I presume, can only mean that I am about to become a religious fanatic or have a nervous breakdown.

So the Russian and I trundle out of the house a bit more. Our imaginations don’t stretch beyond food and booze so dinner invariably features. Still no idea where might be a decent place to go but the weather allows for strolling indecisiveness. “As long as we don’t end up at Thai Cuisine on Oranienburger Straße, I don’t mind.”

About an hour later, we take up our places at Thai Cuisine on Oranienburger Straße, a restaurant we both actually hate. Its only customers are English pensioners, who, I presume, end up there because they’ve got a reduction with their Green Shield Stamps. This time, we had the exotic distraction of actual Germans. Pensioners, of course. Discussing their pensions and insurance. Their conversation was a combination of indignation (at everything) (especially prices) and fear (of everything) (especially prices). The food is shit. Shit. Worse than I’d make. I ordered a soup, convincing myself it would be delicious. Ooh. Coconutty, prawny soup. That’ll be good. Except it was, of course, a prawn in a heated can of coconut milk.

The Russian and I discuss which one of us is to blame - “You. It’s your fault. If you hadn’t grown up in the Soviet Union, we wouldn’t have to fucking live in fucking Berlin.” “No, you, you grow aap in dyekadyent Vyest and not appreciate naasink and deliberately choose shit restaurant out of spite. If you grow up in Kirov…” - and instantaneous divorce.

We specify the wine - before I’d gone puritanical - to the waitress at some length. “This bottle, please.” It has a number, like the dishes. Oddly, the waitress then leaves the restaurant. Reappears a few minutes later. Gives us the wrong bottle. Not even the right colour. We feel guilty for making her shop for the wrong wine. She looks crestfallen. We look sheepish and apologetic. And then discuss whose fault it is, recycling the same accusations, when she leaves the table.

But the music. I asked the waitress for some pen and paper so I could jot down the fucking awful songs in their fucking awful instrumental versions. As I waited for one execrable number to finish and another to start, I scrawled ’shit’ with frantic, aggressive strokes of the pen. The Thai Cuisine instrumental compilation album, perhaps bought online for 1c, featured wordless versions of: I Just Called To Say I Love You and You Were Wonderful Tonight. All Out of Love - Air Supply! Cunting Air Supply! Without words! - and Crying in the Rain. Ferry Across the Mersey and Guantanamera. I waited with dread and noose at the ready for Rainy Night in Georgia. Or, oh god, no, with my finger poised for Dial-a-Firing-Squad, Hotel Fucking California. Or Whiter Shade of Pale.

We skipped dessert and trudged home in silence.

Is there anything more sexy than a man with a leg in plaster? Two legs would be showing off, but one cast leg, with satisfactorily revealed shin and calf, sported by a handsome, hobbling brute, makes for a fine figure of a man. I’m not sure if women pull off the look with equal panache. They probably do. But it is a sad realisation to appreciate, finally, that what really does it for you, as your hormones bob about springily with the vigour of the freshly awakened, is a man with a broken leg. How am I to achieve this look with the Russian? I can’t start pushing him down stairs as that would be rude and even if he agreed to satisfy my lust for plaster of Paris, how would we explain to the authorities - we’d be hard-pushed to keep cosmetic domestic violence secret in this cheesecloth house - that, yes, we understood it was violent misconduct in a way but we were two consenting adults in private and what has the world come to when you can’t even allow yourself an occasional minor fetish and, huh, I don’t go blabbing to the authorities when I hear the neighbours screaming, although, admittedly, that is sometimes from wild delight - honestly, I’ve heard rumours about this female orgasm business but it sounds terrifying in the flesh or, rather, through the ceiling - and, and… So I won’t resort to violence on my other half.

Anyway, I think the cast-lust is just a one-day affair. The sun’s out in Berlin for the first time since the wall came down and people are exposing bits of flesh right on cue. But today was a medical day and as I strode back into the world of the healthy, with reawakened joy at being alive and not being told I had twenty minutes to live - it was only ears, mind you - a fetish-creating hormone bubbled to the fore just as a man hobbled out of the same medical complex, beaming with handsomity and being helped by an equally handsome though unlame friend, with a freshly plastered leg. I think what clinched it for me, on the woof front, was the handicap borne with pride. It was a badge of honour. A membership card to Men’r'us. The offending (though not to me) leg must have got into this state, after all, during a game of football. Or a motor-bike accident. Or, oh no, drunken violence (perhaps at the hands of a girlfriend/wife who had pushed him down the stairs because she so fancied men in casts). I deleted all these images and fetishes and got back to living in the land of the able-bodied.

Going to the doctor’s was, as ever, total heaven. No. Untotal heaven. It would be total heaven if I could speak properly and understand what was said to me. Being only semi-communicative makes the process imperfect. But then it also adds a little frisson of excitement. I get to play the dumb bimbo. And that gets me talked down to by the person in authority. Which, let’s face it, is probably another fetish. I suppose I shall only truly reach paradise on earth when the Russian has a broken leg and is dressed up as a doctor telling me off for not looking after my health and prescribing me ear-drops.

“So vot’s your trouble?” asked the Frau-Doktor and I tried to set off on my ill-rehearsed spiel. Broken ear. Occasional dizziness. Goo. Itch. I’d learnt all the words and everything. Only, bugger me backwards, in my stage-fright, I forgot to mention that I was probably as deaf as a post too but had got used to it and so wasn’t sure.

She looked into my ears. I worried she would discover that my innards were one great yawning chasm. That I was a Tardis-made-man. There’s already plenty of me on the outside but, inside, there’s even more room for silence and emptiness. She barked intelligence on my normal-actually innards to her assistant who managed to be more of a bimbo than me, even with the gift of language.

The odd thing is the word for dizziness in German is Schwindel. Which also means swindle. I told myself not to get distracted beforehand but when I said to her I get the occasional Schwindel, she asked me what sort of Schwindel I meant - I’m not sure I could describe a type of dizziness in English, to be fair - and I let myself drift off and think about people pick-pocketing me, or the tax office deliberately miscalculating my tax or someone nicking the 50p pieces from my gas meter and stared back blankly at her. “Herr Inberlin,” she said, coinciding with my inner BiB, who nudged me awake from a comfy corner he’d found in the Tardis with a, “BiB, wake up, you fat fuck.” She told me I could get my balance back and avoid my dizziness with a few simple but mad-seeming exercises - sit on bed, head back, then lean your head to the side and allow yourself to fall in that direction - and then examined my nose, with some tweezers or other, and eyes by putting blinding - they make you not see. I don’t mean they’re magnificent - glasses on me and making me look this way and that before sending me off without so much as a follow-up appointment.

Every time I see a quack, I think, “This is it, BiB. Prepare yourself for The Big One.” A prescription for ear-drops and a discovery I fancy raspberries just isn’t the same.

…and turn. Toss and turn.

I am keeping an old pal company in his insomnia. When it would be much better to keep him company somewhere else. And so I am trying to exhaust myself, thinking this is just about not expending sufficient energy in the daytime, with fifty-hour walks. Now that the greyness and arcticity appear to have gone for good, it is, goddammit, even pleasant to do so.

But fatal, if an insomniac’s problem is a busy head, to go for a walk. All those people out looking and being interesting. They’re enough to cram your head full of sleep-preventing images till the winter comes back, though I hibernate well, so the eight dark, gloomy months of the year here have their purpose.

A couple of days ago, I needed an excuse to leave the house, a work-sesh behind me. I’d forgotten about the purposeless walk, what used to be known as ‘a walk’, and wondered how I could possibly justify going out of the house. But I haven’t had an idea since my importing-samovars-to-Tula business proposal was rejected out of hand so have had to, unless one presents itself of its own accord, create jobs that involve burning calories and creating tiredness.

So I’ve started destroying my documents so that I can go and apply for new ones. I trotted off to the town hall to remind the ladies there that I still live exactly where they know I live. “But would you mind printing it out for me again? Oh go on. I’ll give you €4.09.” But, darlings, it was all so much more stimulating than I could have hoped for. The town hall is chock-full of riveting snippets of information. Once I’d got my number, I settled in to watch Town Hall TV. Some failed to be gripped. Paid attention to their children. Or their newspapers. But I couldn’t take my eyes off it. For Town Hall TV lists facts and, for someone incapable of thought like me, facts are brilliant.

“Pankow has this many trees,” Town Hall TV explained with pride. And then there was a breakdown of make of tree. “And Pankow has this many people and is the largest district in Berlin.” My heart swelled with civic love. But Town Hall TV must have had consultants in who’d said that inculcating the locals needs to be done interactively. You can’t just bombard them with facts. Get them involved to keep them fresh. Just as I was about to burst from fact-excitement, Town Hall TV gave us a quiz. And not even about Pankow! But about the outside world, as if Pankow didn’t have everything a human could need! A flag appeared on the screen. “Which country’s flag is this?” asked the quiz. It was so Finland’s flag. Christ, this quiz was made for me. “a) El Salvador. b) Finland. c) Burkina Faso.” “b). b). Finland,” I shouted with all the force my pleuritic lungs could muster and springing to my feet competitively, almost ripping my waiting-room number in the process. “Is Burkina Faso the one that used to be called Surinam?” asked my neighbour, an old Berliner still indignant at having had to press a button to get a number in the first place.

Didn’t sleep a wink all night.

That walk was such a success, though, that I decided to repeat the performance yesterday without so much as a purpose. An old-fashioned, purposeless walk. But blow me if I wasn’t bombarded with all sorts of interesting events and goings-on. “This isn’t going to help knock me out this evening,” I worried, and then post-worried that that would mean the Russian moaning at me with sleepy indignation when, at 5am, having managed to lie still for 3 hours, I decided I needed to have a minor tossing-and-turning session, waking him up in the process. He doesn’t do insomnia. Indeed, he’s got the bed=sleep association so down to a t that sometimes, just when I think we might be about to embark on something sinful, his envy-inducing snores ring out. So I’ve taken to wearing a cow-bell on bed=sex occasions to keep him awake and that works very well.

Just as I was getting into my ambling stride, I saw a youth trying to catch my eye. He appeared to be heading a youth convention. He was the only boy and was tonnes taller than the six or seven girls. “Oh god, I’m going to be mugged in broad daylight by a group of 15-year-olds.” But I wasn’t. “Do you speak English?” he asked and I was thrilled to be linguistically unhandicapped for once in my life. “Can you tell me how to get to the Brandenburg Gate?”

That was sweet, wasn’t it? And respectful of tradition. To want to get to the Brandenburg Gate. I instantly had thoughts of Big Ben. And being asked directions to Big Ben. That would have made me bristle with some positive emotion for London. The trouble was, for the non-mugging youngsters, we were in Camden Town. Nowhere near Big Ben. Or the Brandenburg Gate.

“Hmm, well, you’re quite a way away, youths,” I said, thinking there was no point breaking it to them gently. The male youth took the news like a man and asked me to suggest a route nonetheless. A bus, perhaps? The girls all agreed. And I realised they were Danish. They gobbled advice to him like rather aggressive turkeys as he manfully led the show. His English was so good, at 15, that he could even put on a cool accent. He’d selected London for this linguistic outing. He used the word mate. And a glottal stop. I sent him on his way with his gobbling brood behind him.

Music of the type heard in discotheques - not a tune you could whistle and not a lyric for love nor money - boomed out of an establishment. I was on a busy street but this seemed to be taking the piss. Discotheque-volume music in the afternoon. And then there appeared to be a queue. Good lord. Could it mean that there was a new phenomenon of daytime dances? The French used to do those. As I got closer I saw the boom-boom was coming from a Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream emporium. Flyers for free ice-cream were strewn across the street. The Ben & Jerry’s staff, all dressed in blue, were struggling to cope with the throng. The girl who was on balloons was hard-pushed to inflate them fast enough, thereby keeping the party atmosphere alive. You can’t have a party without balloons, after all. I wonder if queuing for free ice-cream at a Ben & Jerry’s day-time discotheque was part of this cool-Berlin phenomenon that folk are so fond of talking about.

I won’t sleep till Christmas at this rate.

There is a bar in our neighbourhood which makes me shake my head and tsk my teeth whenever I walk past. It’s not in glorious Ruislip proper. Nor is it quite far south enough to technically be in the next area, the mere mention of whose name is enough to double property values and make everyone in London want to buy a flat there. No. It is in a sort of no-man’s-land in between. Not, unfortunately, a no-man’s-land that I can romanticise and say was former wall country - though one unremarkable-looking house does have a plaque to some victim or other of fascism on it. Which just goes to show that even resistance fighters can grow up in unremarkable-looking houses - where people were constantly making daring attempts at a dash to a perfect life in the West. Mind you, if any did do their dashing around here, it’s a slightly sobering and deromanticising image to think they dashed from Pankow (Ruislip) to Wedding (Northolt). This bit of no-man’s-land is, far more prosaically, probably so no-man’s-land-like because it’s along a fairly long sweep of mainish road with a good gap between U-Bahn stations and the U-Bahn is actually still just about above ground, or about to molishly bore its way into the (thankfully, suspecting and prepared) ground right there, which means the main road is divided in two by engineering which gets in the way of life nicely organically springing up. There’s no waving to your neighbour across the road, really, if a big train’s going to yellowly trundle past with Teutonic predictability every couple of minutes.

No-man’s-land, as befits the designation, is not pulsating with life. The pavements on this couple-of-hundred-metre stretch are even less pounded than elsewhere in Ruislip. A petrol-station is perhaps its highlight. A video-shop whose recruitment policy was only to employ ravishingly handsome working-class young men. A bric-a-brac shop (not-)selling the same ancient toaster. A market which I’m not sure deserves the prefix flea-. All in all, an uninspiring few blocks, fitting for a perfectly ordinary and OK residential area in a forgotten and forgettable part of Berlin.

One of the vacant commercial lets - there are lots of those, and those which do get let are usually for let again very quickly as, surprise, surprise, there turns out not to have been that much call for a shop selling coloured glass in a corner quiet even by Ruislip’s standards - was one fateful spring to be seen with a gaggle of youngsters inside clearly preparing it for a grand opening. Youngsters with a project! How enterprising. And they looked a certain type of Berlin youngster. Perfectly nice. Nerdy and cool. Can’t think if the girls might have shown a millimetre of midriff. The boys would have been too thin. Probably took a drug or two but preferred green tea. One of the girls might have been a lesbian once. Would ideally have liked their enterprise to open in Prenzlauer Berg, aber, na ja, the rents were probably too high down there and they were probably convinced - they were a good few years too early - that Pankow was the next big thing.

They beavered industriously away. It was going to be a bar, by the looks of things. The Russian and I feigned interest and enthusiasm. “Oh, that will be nice. There’ll be somewhere we can pop into in the local area if it’s run by green-tea types.” And then they installed shelves! And books! It was to be a ‘Leselokal’. A reading pub. A book bar. An imbibrary. They painted their sign. Quite a good font. Neutrally stylish. And stylishly neutral. The name was neutral too and alluded to the local area. Café No-Man’s-Land it was. (Not really.)

But it all seemed an age before it got off the ground. When was I going to be able to go and get pissed and educated? Sellotaped A-4 Word documents started appearing on the door. “Due to problems with the landlord…” “Due to problems with the electricity people…” and then the explanation, written in the carping language perfected by youngsters conflating grievance and privilege.

Hmm, this wasn’t looking good. Not only were there delays getting the place open, so the young entrepreneurs weren’t making any money, but was a literary saloon really what this area needed? And would the locals go for it? I had my doubts. But internally wished the youngsters luck.

Eventually it was open. The décor looked all right. There was the rash of early promotions. Which looked, as each customerless week passed, increasingly desperate. “Buy one (or even a half), get nine free.” “Beer, wine, hot drinks, snacks and as many books as you can get in your pannier.” They tried everything. “English night.” “Free sex.” But none of it worked. Soon it closed down and the young entrepreneurs tasted, for the first time, the bitter pill of failure.

The premises remained vacant for a while. But then, sure enough, the busy-bodies that we are, some other humans decided they’d give the location a shot. “Ooh, I wonder if they’ll come up with something unnecessary and inappropriate,” I pondered as I walked past, imagining myself as a ruthless business guru with rings on my fingers and gold on my teeth. These owners were older. Perhaps more local. A bit tougher. Less green tea.

Another pub! The youngsters hadn’t even bothered stripping the place. The bar was intact. The tables and chairs had probably been left behind too. All the new lot had to do was make it their own with the odd throw-cushion, perhaps a lick of paint and we’d see how Café Incarnation no. 2 did in comparison to its predecessor.

They didn’t change the name. But they did redo the sign. The font got a bit more bubbly. Some might say trashy. A lot more ‘fun’-looking. The books and shelves went. A telly appeared at one end of the bar. A pool-table and dartboard at the other. Plants and other non-Pankow fripperies were tossed out. Decoration was kept to a minimum. Though not in the Conran sense, exactly. More in the don’t-really-care-about-décor and nothing-to-distract-you-from-beer-telly-pool-and-darts sense.

Packed to the rafters every night.

As for any son of the Soviet Union, accidental or otherwise, and my late-adopted cultural heritage is very much accidental, the kitchen has become the centre of my world. Admittedly I don’t have to turn on the kitchen taps before I’m unafraid enough to set the world to rights, but, taps or no taps, and with my captive audience of one suitably silent true son of the Soviet Union, I have now taken to middle-aged kitchen rants.

Western men of a certain age are more than happy to talk bollocks too, of course, given half the chance, but if you really want a prime example of someone holding forth, preferably on a subject they don’t necessarily know that much about, you need to get yourself a time machine and fly off to the past. To the Soviet Union. Though post-Soviet Russia will do. Or my kitchen.

This type of ranter is well represented in Dostoevsky novels, proving that even the might of the Soviet Union was not enough to quell the irrepressible Russian soul. I like Dostoevsky as much as the next wanker, but I would always groan in displeasure, and put the book down for three months until I’d forgotten my objection, when a male character would inevitably say, “This is the way I see the world and here, let me talk about it in a 75-page monologue.” Or, using an alternative literary rant device, “This is the way I see the world and here, I just happen to have written it down and someone can now read it out in a 75-page monologue while I die noisily of tuberculosis in the corner.”

Though fair play to Dosters because anyone who’s been in a Soviet or post-Soviet kitchen knows that the characterisation is perfect. The type exists. Male, of course. Ideally with the first flush of youth well behind him. Has reached the serious-dressing stage. You can’t rant in jeans. A collar. A jacket. Preferably a well-rounded belly. Principled on all matters and with strict lifestyle choices (this is where I fail the Soviet test). “Shall we knock back a quick 50g (to help me bear the remaining 25 minutes of your rant on tea), Volodia?” you might say to a ranting Vladimir who happens to have turned up in your kitchen on a wintry Tuesday evening to hold forth on tea. “Vot? Vodka? On Tuesday? I nyevyer dreenk vodka on Tuesday. Vodka make you impotyent. Beeb, khow you kyen dreenk vodka on Tuesday? Ektuelly, I karrently writink book on vodka and impotyence. Let me tsyell you about it for 35 minutes. By ze vey, I not say you kyen call me Volodia yet. Please call me Vladimir Poligrafovich.”

A good Russian rant can be entertaining, though the length can be exhausting. The subjects can be mundane, e.g. tea, or trying, e.g. why foreigners are cunts. Jews are good Russian rant-grist. From how they don’t exist. I’ve been at that rant. To how they don’t eat meat, which is why they’re weak, which rant took place in the very room I type from, by an exiled Soviet ranter, and which has been mentioned before, who went on to rant further that the Estonians and Ukrainians were also cunts. And then took me to the map of Europe on the hall wall and, making a compass of his thumb and index finger, showed me how far into Russia NATO missiles would reach when NATO, inevitably, started bombing Russia any second now. (Coincidentally, the range was the exact same distance as the largest part-circle his thumb-and-index-finger compass could draw.)

And by the queerest twists of geopolitical and romantic fates, I have become the first queer, post-Soviet, non-Soviet ranter. It’s the Russian passing his unwanted rant genes on to me, while I have generously donated my empty western soul to him. While I rant, he online-shops. While I hold forth on Ukraine being further along the road to democracy and manage to blame the (considering-itself-)Russian population in eastern Ukraine for all the country’s ills, the Russian smiles a smile combining pity and magnanimity in superiority and thinks of holidays. While I spout that theists should stop thinking they’re important enough to deserve a god and that we’re just fleas. That we’re no different from fleas. No, we don’t deserve a god - drink can feature on these occasions - the Russian will briefly be shuddered awake by the more preposterous aspects of my russorant - “What? Actual fleas?” - before returning to an IKEA-reverie.

But I’m thinking if I can just youngen up my wardrobe there might be hope for me yet.

Earphones are the scourge of the stealth work-avoider. In the past, if I heard the front door opening or the screech of the Russian’s chair from the next room, I could panickily close any incriminating window and arrange my shoulders to reflect a stern hunch over an especially tricky translation. Or, though this was only a recent discovery, and could only be applied when I was willing to explain myself, press ’sleep’. What a brilliant button! So much less drastic, and traumatic for the computer, than pressing reboot or the big off button altogether. I can tell the computer suffers PTSD whenever I do that to it.

But the Russian must have recently decided that the noise of me, or noise created by me, or the noise of what I am listening to, when I allow myself, you understand, a rare break between almost non-stop translo-slog, is too painful a reminder of both my existence and proximity and has decreed that I am now to sport earphones. Which I vaguely loathe. I’m quite a believer in ambient sound and there’s no noise on earth or no music ever created that I love enough to want it to fully occupy my hearing. Bar, perhaps, silence. Occasionally.

So I was caught red-eared when the Russian came in from actual out the other day - we could have been burgled and I wouldn’t have noticed. Mind you, any burglar of our flat would go away feeling very hard done by indeed - and walked in on me, with a deliberately sudden whoosh of the living-room door, watching the I Like to Move It, Move It scene from Madagascar on youtube. I hadn’t been so embarrassed since my ex came home early and found me bunking off work with my hand very guiltily in a packet of crisps. “The translation’s about raccoons,” I lied brilliantly, but the Russian was not for fooling.

They almost did for Michael Douglas’s wife in Fatal Attraction too, remember.

My father was of the view that walkmans were the creation of the devil, or perhaps Protestants, because folk would listen to their music on the street and, by some strange musical brain-numbing and fear-quenching mechanism, would forget not to be run over by cars until they were as much as dead. My objection to having my ears hijacked is less to do with worrying about being squished to a pulp, though I agree that is a perfectly good objection, and more about having free aural space for spontaneity, burglar-catching and spousely-moan-avoidance.

Do the world’s great religions pronounce on earphones? Surely it must be a sin to insert speakers, however small, into any orifice.

When I write to my bank, there is normally very little for them in what I suggest and, potentially, a whole lot for me. Or, rather, potentially nothing for me, but that’s at least better than the something for them which I am writing to ask them not to take. Occasionally I might post them a cheque, which perhaps they get minorly thrilled about. But, usually, it’s just a letter saying, “Thank you for your letter. Please don’t charge me whatever it is you’ve written to tell me you’re going to charge me for.”

Do you know, the queer thing is, it normally works. I don’t much use the bank account I still have in the UK. I don’t often work for folk based there any more but when I do, and when they decide to pay, the money goes to that bank account. As I am perma-skint, I tend to use every penny I am ever paid. The balance on my UK account must average about 37p. If money goes in there, I carefully research the exchange rate and take the roundest euro amount allowed, factoring in the couple-of-quid charge, and hope that this won’t accidentally put me 14p overdrawn as then the bank will start sending pissy letters.

So I went 14p overdrawn again. Perhaps this pisses the bank off. Perhaps they see me as the quite naughty boy in class who just can’t resist being naughty. “I didn’t mean it,” I might write, in my defence. On the other hand, I don’t actually owe the establishment any money. I’ve had the account with them for 400 years. I explain, honestly, that I am expecting more money and the account will be back in credit (for about 18 nanoseconds) soon.

Promptness is key when writing begging letters to your bank. And I’ve foiled my own tactics on more than one occasion by choosing not to open letters that come with the bank’s familiar type-face. Spring just about appearing has made me change jackets and I’ve just discovered a number of letters threatening trouble which have gone nicely unopened for a good few months. Must have been empty threats. I’m still here and can remember nothing especially dramatic happening on the financial front for ages. No-one’s been kidnapped and held to ransom. I haven’t had a single letter written in bits cut out of newspapers.

In any case, I must have been in a brave mood when the last letter came. I opened it immediately and saw I was going to be charged some amount of money - they explained the arithmetic, but I’d fallen asleep by the time I got to the end of the spiel - because their charges had put me overdrawn. The letter I fire back is stored in my computer. I change the dates, change the amount they’re planning to charge me, and send it off saying, in a way that no doubt makes their hearts bleed, “…awfully sorry. But be a good bunch and don’t charge me what would be a ton of money for me. I didn’t mean it. Honest.” They first reply with a standard, “Sorry that you have felt the need to complain,” when I haven’t complained. I have grovelled, “and someone from the complaints department will contact you forthwith.” And then the letter comes saying, “…as a good will gesture, we have decided, on this occasion not to…” I high-five myself and think of how next to be feckless.

The computer happened to be off last time I needed to write and grovel. Quickly biffed off a hand-written grovel instead. And my formula went right out the window. Couldn’t remember the heart-rending turn of phrase I normally used. And decided humour and topicality were called for. “I know I have a credit rating that would have Robert Mugabe laughing in pity,” I began, “but, be good chaps. Have I ever lied to you in all the time we’ve been together? Have I? There’s money on its way. And it’s only 14p. For fuck’s sake. Honestly.”

The fine was debited form my account just as they promised it would be. Humourless old so-and-sos.

“This train goin’ Guildford, mate?” asked the man.

It was a nice welcome to England. I’d been chatting just the night before with an American gent who didn’t know how to respond when a stranger chatted with him friendlily back in the States. I flicked my brain to native-language-chat and problem-solving mode and looked helpfully and inquisitively at the board. The fact of the matter was that without the internet, which I haven’t yet had surgically implanted, or a leaflet of timetables, or a psychic connection to a timetable-memorising autist, I didn’t have a great deal more info at my fingertips than the asking man. But one look at him was enough for even the least perspicacious onlooker to conclude that I was in a better state for detective work than he was.

“Let me see, old man,” I began. But then I took a closer look at him and asked him to ignore that mode of address and re-began, “Let me see, probably not that old actually man whose features have been ravaged by alcohol.” It was only about 8 in the morning yet his eyes were gleaming with the euphoria of drunkenness. He didn’t reek of booze so I thought about giving him the benefit of the doubt. Maybe his glistening, blood-shot eyes were the result of some disorder or other. But no disorder, eye-affecting or otherwise, has a drunken leer as a symptom, I concluded, and got on with worrying about what the world was coming to.

Huge provincial men wearing white trainers and carrying the flag of some football team, or a nation I have never heard of, milled around.

“Hmm, well, the next train from this platform is going to Portsmouth. Oh, and to Bognor Regis.” I slightly couldn’t remember where Guildford was and waited for the screen to go through its selection of displays until it revealed all the in-between stations. “Erm, no, so this one won’t do. Er, that one’s going to London and beyond, but not to Guildford. Erm, perhaps you’d better go and ask a human in a uniform.”

The asking man tarried before setting off. He gave a big grin. His teeth had seen better days. He did his best to hide what appeared to be a generous covering of fading tattoos. Looked as if age might be doing him a favour by at least slowing the pace of a life lived with rarely a sober moment.

He soon returned. “Platform 5 in half an hour,” he revealed, no doubt sensing I was struggling to keep a lid on my curiosity, with a self-deprecating guffaw. “That’ll teach me to get pissed and fall asleep on the train.” I ticked off my suspicion on an internal spreadsheet and wondered that any human had ever allowed themselves, via the devil’s own agent of alcohol, to be making their way home, drunkenly and with unplanned detours, at 8 in the morning whilst others all around were soberly making theirs to righteous destinations and huge provincial men in white trainers carried flags on their way to some rally or other.

I stared briefly at the panel advertising the pending arrival of my own train and wondered, if I stared very hard, whether I might convince it to bring the ETA forward. I soon gave up hope and returned to my leerer. “So are you going to be in trouble when you get home?” I inquired, accidentally getting into the swing of the conversation while pulling up my trousers from mooning at a passing train.

“Naa,” he guffawed. “Divorced. Live alone.”

I struggled to delete an image of squalor and tins dancing before my eyes.

“The wife had to call the police once. Went up London. Was gone for three days.” He repeated his self-deprecating, what-am-I-like guffaw.

“…”

“… just flown in?”

“Yes, from Berlin.”

“Fuckin’ ‘ell, never get me on one o’ them things.”

“It’s only an hour and a half.” I wondered whether to add that that was a fraction of the time it took him to get from somewhere-not-very-far-from-Guildford to Guildford but chose not to, in case he’d run out of self-deprecating guffaws.

“Get home safely,” I wished him as I clambered onto my train, choosing not to think of the future.

It is taking me a very long time to come to terms with the demise of the former Yugoslavia. It was such a pretty name and the Yugoslavs were always such fun on Jeux Sans Frontières. Former Yugos are constantly trying to console me. “Thanks for trying to help, Branko,” I’ll say. “But look, Viljemka,” I’ll go on, “I just have to grieve over this in my own time.”

Of course I agree with the right to self-determination. I sent telegrams to all my Slovene friends - it took ages - congratulating them on accession to the EU and being the first of the new countries to adopt the Euro. I shuttle-diplomacied like nobody’s business when trying to make sure the young Macedonia (no FYRo for me, thank you) could find a satisfactory constitutional solution to appease a restive ethnic Albanian minority. It worked, thankfully, and I’ve been honoured with my portrait on the verso of the 5 Makedon note. (I asked to be bumped up to recto but that went to Alexander the Great so I settled for second best.) I recognised Kosova before President Tadić could even meet privately with me and ask me to delay declaring my hand, knowing the influence I had. But I stood firm. “Boris, talk to the hand,” I said.

And my Yugo-nostalgia shall peak, of course, or go off the scale, when all Europe (and Israel) (and Cyprus - Cyprus is technically Asia, isn’t it?) (and Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia - or is that area in Europe?) meets in Belgrade this May. Chuffed to bollocks for Serbia, of course, to get a chance to showcase itself - they’ve had a tough few years (it’ll take me even longer to come to terms with Zoran Đinđić’s death, actually) - but I will cry huge Yugo tears and have been sewing like nobody’s business so that I’ll be able to hang huge Yugo flags with lovely big red stars out my window.

So, at times like these, what does one do to assuage one’s pain? You go through your Yugo-pop collection of course. I’ve been assuaging like mad. Remembering the good old days. The Yugo new wave, which, I assume, we were all brought up on.

Now blogging has its limitations. Naturally, I consider every reader - even the ones who’ve ended up here by mistyping their google search and come here to find bib tits - an intimately close friend whom I would happily donate an organ to if the need arose. But sometimes, intimacy and bonds can only be forged, or, at least, are best forged, around a bonfire, under a starry European sky - sorry, non-Europeans. Your friendships just aren’t real - with cheap alcohol, guitars and enough mosquitoes to sap a blood bank. That’s the kind of occasion when you can really get down to business. When you can become true friends. When you can stroke someone’s back as they cry about their troubled past. When you can hold back someone’s hair to stop them vomiting in it. When you can discuss your favourite Jura Stublić i Film song.

And, darlings, I feel we won’t be true friends until I know your favourite. Scroll down to Film here. I’m off to get the tissues. Poleti Iznad Grada gets me every time.

Working and not playing seems, logically enough, to reap financial rewards. Skintness seems to be at its lowest level in weeks which means I’m allowing myself to do all sorts of daringly entertaining things, like paying bills on time, indulging in a spot of fantasy-flight surfing and, goddammit, even occasionally leaving the house. Mind you, hijinks have a cost all of their own. Snowy the god of snow is in an especially playful mood these days and is sporadically sending us the odd sprinkle. Which means the streets are full of puddles. The Russian and I had popped out for a quick spot of hijinkery and just to prove that I was in exceptionally high spirits at having left the house - I think we’d gone to the supermarket - I decided to jump in a puddle. To make a splash. What could mean fun more than splashing in a puddle? Except I must have got my angle of entry wrong because rather than it splashing outwards, as I had expected it to, the icy water splashed with perfect verticality clean up my legs, which meant effectively wearing a pair of ice-trousers, which was one of the least pleasant experiences I’ve had, and I’ve had a few (though I can’t really think of any, actually, apart from toothache).

Anyway, what with the hijinks, the lack of worry that an unpaid bill would have brought, a drop more leisure time than normal and life bordering fleetingly on the pleasant, the Russian’s mind is working double-shifts with voluntary unpaid overtime to think up loathsome tasks to cancel out the niceness. Occasionally I am winded by the frequency of his requests which seems to have nothing in common with actual need. How can he be asking me again to sweep the murky area where my feet hang out under the very desk I am sitting at now when I must have done it not more than some months ago and everyone knows that dust accrues only annually? I actually saw my beloved whoop for joy when our pet hoover died just as I was taking it out for a walk around our flat. (I think the way I could step on that pedal and make it suck its tail in at speed is man’s greatest technological advance.) Without a hoover, after all, the only solution is to sweep. Down on knees with dustpan and brush. That’s much more horrid labour than mere hoovering. And ergo, or, rather, Russian ergo, a very good thing.

Clap, clap, clap, the Russian will clap as he walks into a room that I am lounging in quietly. It is nothing to do with applause and everything to do with conveying to me that all this sitting around, relaxing, is very worthy of discouragement. “Ve oll laik to seet and do naasink. Not vörk, not eat,” he might say. “So the 23-hour days every day for the last month don’t count, then?” “Yes, but zat feeneesh tventy minutes ago.” And he’ll whizz off, clapping his hands until he has to stop to pick up a cloth to polish something with. “Put voshink avay.” Clap, clap, clap. “Put papyers avay.” Clap, clap, clap. “Sveep.” Clap, clap, clap. I lock the living-room door and explain that it’s all part of a very complicated keyhole-cleaning process.

So I was put on bathroom bin duty. The bathroom bin is, of course, only an interim bin. When something is hurled into the bathroom bin, that is just the start of its post-use career. All the inside bits of loo-roll that we don’t use to make toys with we throw in there and then, when the bin is overflowing or when I have been nagged enough to do it, it will graduate from there to the paper bin in the kitchen. From there, it will eventually go to the house’s paper bin in the yard. Then, once every two weeks, as the notes stuck up all around the hall this week explain with considerable alarm, the boys in blue - not the police - will come and pick it up and take it onto the climax of its recycling life.

I moped from the bathroom to the kitchen. Began the glamorous task of sorting rubbish. Inner bit of loo roll. Paper bin. Empty shampoo bottle. Plastics. Ooh, another inner bit of loo roll. Plastics. Oh, fuck, no, paper. (Fished it out. Corrected my error.) A cotton-bud. Ooh, where do they go? Probably the non-descript bin. And on and on. I worked myself through the pile. And came across a condom.

Now I’m always encouraging the Russian to have affairs. “Have an affair, darling,” I’ll say, when there’s a moment’s silence between the claps. “I’m 74. Much too old to tend to your needs. And you’re only 19 or something. Have an affair, darling.” “I not vont khev affair.” “Oh, darling, honestly, don’t be so conservative.” But coming across a condom shattered my delusions of modernity. I grimaced, held the offending item at distance as if it was a smelly sock and went to find the Russian. I prepared my best Gwyneth Paltrow English accent, pulled back the shower curtain (for he was showering, to excellent dramatic effect) and asked, “Darling, are you having an affair?”

“Vot you doing? Vot? Vot zat? Srow it avay.”

“Darling, are you having an affair? Why else is there a condom in our bin? And I know it’s not from us because couples don’t have sex in March, obviously. Are you bringing men home HERE?”

“How could I khev affair? You never leave khouse. It’s from them,” he said, motioning towards the living room from the shower.

“Them? What them? There isn’t any them.”

“Them. Our gyests from last veek.”

Our guests from last week whom I’d clean forgotten. The realisation that I was holding my friend’s condom in my hand made me grimace more fiercely, the Russian grimace with me and both of us holler yuk-like noises for the next three hours. I dropped it back in the bathroom bin and tried to put the incident out of my mind.

Just as well, really. Wouldn’t have known which bin to recycle it in anyway. Bio or packaging?

I can never decide when I stumble across posh England, be that in the flesh (which is rare, being abroad), or on the radio, or when it comes up in something I’m reading, whether I want to go and burn down Buckingham Palace or have a nice slice of Bakewell Tart. I mean, when you are faced with images of Charles and Camilla wandering awkwardly round a Bob Marley museum, should you draw up plans to anthrax Windsor or put the kettle on for a nice cup of tea? There are other options in between, of course, and I suppose I’ve unconsciously been following a third way, neither establishing my very own Republican Party or ever putting on a Union Jack paper hat. I think my sister once thought she was the radicalest person out, maybe even thought, if she didn’t have a family life to get on with, that she could go about bringing down the posh establishment somehow or other until she accidentally ended up getting invited to Buckingham Palace - I think she won the invitation in a Christmas cracker, or it fell out of a packet of Weetabix - and she was bowled over by how lovely it was and, blow me, but didn’t one of those minor princesses even come and engage her maternalistically in some patronising conversation or other. “Tell me, citizen, did you get here by helicopter?”

And it is quite a nice house, Buckingham Palace, and I suppose I don’t majorly agree with destroying things, apart from my internal organs, and I can’t remember if Buckingham Palace - oh god. When the police came to our school when we were 13 to tell us not to do crime, the gent giving the presentation called Buckingham Palace Buck House to be cool. We all snorted with 13-year-old derision. Then John F_ got in terrible trouble for doing an oinking noise - is one of the ones that belongs to us all or whether The Queen actually took a mortgage out and bought it good and honest. And if it is ours, then it’d be wrong to burn down something that’s being upkept with taxpayers’ money. (I’m not sure if that chap who used to sing in The Housemartins had thought of this thorny little problem when he suggested - admittedly, he would, the old softy that he is, have allowed for the building to be evacuated first - that The House of Lords be blown up.)

And it’s an awfully good location. I reckon if The Queen ever decided to move out, some 12-year-old estate agent in a suit would be able to find new tenants for the place in a jiffy. Not too far from public transport. Good parking. Plenty of storage space. The nearest shop’s probably on Trafalgar Square but then so’s the Tube, so not too bad. But the biggest selling point is the garden. Now it turns out my sister didn’t go to Buck House by helicopter, and neither have I ever done so, but she was in the garden. And I have, on my favourite flight ever, flown right over the bastard when, coming in to land in Heathrow one time, the pilot saw it was a gorgeous clear day, that he had a few minutes to spare and took us for a lovely, winding meander along the Thames. London looked predictably awesome. And everything obeyed the rules and was just where you’d expect it to be. The Millennium thingy still there. Tower Bridge standing cathedrally by. All the landmarks out in force. And then there was Buckingham Palace. And, good lord, but what a huge fuck-off garden they have for the centre of London. Get your A-Zs out, Londoners, or pop to Google Earth, unless it’s one of the places that’s been fuzzed out for strategic purposes. Enormous, I tell you.

Anyway, what a lot of people don’t know is that putting The Queen in a big house was all a social experiment before we had reality TV to do this sort of thing for us on a nightly basis. No, there were no free-access freak shows back in the 18th century or whenever it was. But, honest guv, it’s what happened. The authorities were worried about the increase in anti-social behaviour and wondered what they could do to poshen up the riff-raff. You know, seeing if chucking money at the problem really was the answer. Yes, yes, education, training schemes, all that too. But, aesthetically, seeing if taking someone away from their grim surroundings - The Queen was living in a one-bedroom flat on Thamesmead with her Greek husband who had his own minicab business - and giving them a few elocution lessons could transform the lower orders. And, look! It worked a treat. Only it was decided that it would cost too much to put everyone in palaces and then all documentation pertaining to the social experiment was lost in the Great Fire of London and everyone just thought, “Oh, god, they ain’t doin’ any ‘arm, let ‘em stay.” Which is how the monarchy was reintroduced.

Anyway, why we’re (the republican we) here is that there’s a similar social experiment happening right here in Ruislip. I have sometimes mentioned, in the course of my public onanism, the 100%-long-term-unemployment house across the street. And, until now, the 100%-long-term-unemployment house had obeyed aesthetic rules and been decidedly run down and grey-looking so that people knew to point and jeer at the house when they walked past. Occasionally we have tourists from Bavaria on a poor-Germany tour and I helpfully stand outside the house with a big arrow so that they know which one to pour scorn on. But the house is being emposhened. “I bet I’m paying for that,” I said to the Russian, but he was out so I quickly e-mailed it to him instead, lest an occasion to moan be lost, and then I dashed to find my tax declaration to wave at the 100%-long-term-unemployment-house unemployed and holler that I hope they were happy, except we do our tax declarations on-line now so I had to go and wave a computer at them, which they must have thought odd.

Still, the house looks gorgeous. I expect it’ll be Hochdeutsch and monocles in no time.

The trouble with growing up in an intellectual desert is that people were always telling you you were brilliant because you knew the capital of Botswana when really you weren’t. And then, at some point, when you have vaguely begun to learn to think, you realise what a total dilettante you are, and that intelligence isn’t measured in Gaborones. Being taught to think would have been where it’s at.

Anyway, isn’t dilettantism fab? I mean, I wouldn’t recommend it to people who know their onions. But it can give you some lovely epiphanies, being this dim. You know, like discovering the world is round (aged 27), that the tooth fairy doesn’t exist (aged 31), that civilisation doesn’t end at Brighton (aged 37).

Awful the lies adults tell you. “It’ a very good school, BiB,” they said. “You’re very lucky to be going there, BiB,” they said. And of course at the time the word of adult, especially if a stranger, was the word of god and I thought I was going to be the cleverest person in the world.

What a load of bollocks that turned out to be. A vaguely competent exam-machine. I submitted to institutionalisation well enough. Lumbered my way through. Got to the end. Was informed that my grade C ‘O’ Level in RE meant I was in the top 0.01% of the country for brain-power and if I didn’t appreciate it I could just jolly well go and join the school down the road which allowed in two unspeakable specimens: girls AND non-Catholics. Who knew which was worse!

Did leave there, actually. Struggled through ‘A’ Levels. Struggled through degree. Felt proud for a moment at having letters after my name and then had the crushing realisation that I was still as thick as two short planks when some smart-arse asked me, “Aah, yes, but what’s Botswana’s chief export?” Crushing.

Anyway. What were we on about? Oh yes, so education. Got the papers, the certificates, but still pig-thick. But there was, even in my stultifyingly horizon-straitening education one glimmer of enjoyment, one ray of vague unmediocrity, one morsel of enthusiasm. For languages. Nothing else. Maths could be satisfactorily concrete and finite. Instantaneous gratification. But then it got difficult. Geography was pants (and I already knew where Botswana was). Science a mystery. History fun enough when you got a time or place that tickled your fancy. But language was my thing.

My school was posh, or so it thought, so we did posh languages. All that Latin and Greek. Modern languages, bar French, which was genteel enough to pass muster, were left to girls and non-Catholics. Latin and Greek for us. If it wasn’t Flavia in the atrium, it was the slaves releasing the horses, or the table both praising and blaming, or the priestess making a sacrifice on the altar.

And it’s a language-love that’s stuck, and an enthusiasm that’s stuck and, even though it was there before school had coaxed it out of me, I suppose I have school to thank for developing my knowledge. But then they had to go and spoil it by saying, “BiB, knowing that Greek verb, you are ACTUALLY the cleverest person in England. No, you are actually the cleverest person in the whole world.” Imagine! Because of horses and priestesses. And I believed them, fool that I was. Until I got out of the Catholic ghetto and met some grown-ups and understood what a dimmy I really was.

Anyway, that’s fine. Dimness is all right. Translation suits the dim.

So I had a little dimness, dilettante epiphany. Perhaps based on false etymology. Almost sure to be. By having this dilettantish education, and very wishy-washy knowledge on any subject I have knowledge on at all, I don’t know my arse from my elbow. So I was translating away and the word “orthogonal” came up. Of course my dilettantish and untoned brain didn’t even make the connection. I didn’t dig my Greek ‘O’ Level out of some cerebral cranny and divide the word down into its component bits. No, just went to some online dic and was told, so that I could have a belated oh-yeah moment, that it meant right-angled. Of course! Ortho-words. Tonnes of those. Orthodox. Orthopaedic. Orthographic. And, der, -gon. Hexagon. Octagon. No end of -gon.

Then, accuse me of being morose if you will, I was overcome with an insatiable urge to give false etymology to a word based on this new knowledge. It might even be right, but I bet it isn’t, and I’ve so told myself that the word means what I want it to mean that I can’t bear for it to mean what I don’t want it to mean. So, going on a- equalling non-, as in arrhythmia or amoral, please someone tell me that agony’s original meaning is not having any angles. Wouldn’t that be lovelily gloomy? That extreme suffering was brought about by non-angularity. That the pain you experience as you shuffle off this mortal coil could have been avoided if only you hadn’t had such a straightforward life. “You know your problem,” we could shout at miserable people, “not enough angles in your life. Not enough pointy bits. All too smooth. Too straightforward.”

Problems, people, are good for you.

A friend of mine who disobeys all rules of propriety invited me to his boyfriend-who-doesn’t-live-in-Berlin’s birthday party at someone-else-who-does’s house. In one of those queer bits of the city where what passes for ancient is a car-wash with balloons up to celebrate its third birthday nestling under one of the early upward whooshes of a motorway. You’d think humans would have given the location up as a bad job but, oddly enough, people have gone and forced themselves to settle there just to show how versatile we are as a species and that no level of adversity is insurmountable. Especially not here in Berlin. We’ve been there done that on the adversity stakes. Nothing can shock us. Give us a bit of town under an early upward whoosh of a motorway called Wilmersburg or Charlottendorf and we’ll build a bloody house there and just bloody well go and live in it AND have an orange tan year round for good measure.

Still, you don’t expect people from Argentina to have to come and make the point for the Berliners too.

The friend who disobeys all rules of propriety has been around. A proper wanderer. Started out in life as a Mexican. Has lived in the States and Canada. Has lived everywhere in Europe. Has been to Asia to find himself. Got lost and ended up back here, having turned into a European along the way and it is only right that his peripateticness should see us be city-neighbours for the second time in our lives.

He now lives in one of those Tempelbergs or Schönehofs so I am statistically less likely to see him than I am to meet the Wild Ape-Man of Ushuaia but, once in a while, we will bury the hatchet, admit, goddammit, that this is one city whether we like it or not and agree to meet.

The Mexican’s gone majorly native as a European. I’ve been to Mexico with him. His relatives commented on how crap his Spanish had got. He speaks English with an Englishy/Irishy accent. He is now technically French. But I’m happy to say that he’s been on our shores for long enough to have even developed a certain northern European solemnity. He’s French at a dinner party. English if drunk. Scandinavianly black if the mood requires it.

Which is why it was such a bloody shock to be reminded that he is in fact Mexican.

So the party was being held by an Argentinian in some bloody Zehlenrade. I bade the Russian farewell and set out with a compass, a knapsack, some good solid walking shoes, a length of rope and 300 Greek drachmas which was all the foreign currency we could find at short notice. I managed to catch a lift part of the way from a Tyrolean shepherd in a charabanc who had come to Berlin to make his fortune. We shared a meal of bread and cheese and parted at Spahlem S-Bahnhof whence I strew breadcrumbs lest I get lost. I found the car-wash and the early upward whoosh of the motorway and knew I was nearing my destination. The snow was falling thick and heavy by now. I remembered an old wives’ tale from our village and walked in the footprints other intrepid travellers had made before me. I reached my destination exhausted. I crawled into the party-house on my knees.

Only to be greeted by various Spanish-speaking revellers. And, darlings, I’d forgotten just how happy Spanish-speaking people are. My friend veered psychotically between unbridled joy whenever he had dealings with an Argentinian, Chilean or Spaniard and then breathed out deeply and downed tempo when he had to come and talk to one of us miserable old northern Europeans.

But, darlings, what’s the secret? The Argentinians, Chileans and Spaniards maintained a fun-factor that when totted up equalled more fun in their combined couple of hours than I have had in my whole 37 years. And it was good fun. Nice fun. Fun fun. Good-to-watch fun. Exhausting fun. As the evening drew on, the Argentinians, Chileans and Spaniards bellowed with hearty laughter in one unconsciously demarcated laughorium corner of the room - the Euro-Mexican would ping back and forth like a pinball - and we northern types gently huddled quietly, conspiratorially, uneasily in our frownorium corner.

It can’t be Catholicism, because Austrians are Catholics. It can’t just be the sun. Somalia has sun. And, anyway, they were in Berlin, and the sun hasn’t shone here since 1534, and their solar memory can’t be that vivid.

I soon had to bid my Argentinian hostess farewell. The journey back was to be long and arduous. And the jollity was exhausting. I turned up my collar. Pulled my hat down over my ears. Accepted bread and cheese for the journey.

The blizzard had stopped by the time I got out onto the street. And the street was so lifeless that silences were competing with each other for perfection. Not a car took advantage of the early upward whoosh of the motorway. The greyness settled everywhere like a thick layer of dust.

And then a buzz from above. A multi-coloured plane swooped overhead. The Spaniards, Argentinians and Chileans waved and cheered. The Euro-Mexican donned a mask to show equal extremes of emotion. And then a trap-door on the underside of the fuselage opened and the Spanish-speakers hurled rainbows which hit the pavement, the trees, the houses, colouring everything they touched, and bounced all the way back into the sky.

The Ordnungsamt says it’ll cost a fortune to wash off.

But without the pictures. There should be pictures, as illustration is a good thing, and has caught on like mad. If clever types aren’t illustrating their points with cogent examples, then other types, who might easily be just as clever, are illustrating their words with pictures. You know, like, I want to tell you about a house. And, oh, look, here’s a picture of the house. Such a good prop to help foil any potential slip twixt brain and lip. So I’ll have to try and paint a picture for you in words, when some pictures would have done just as well. Would have done much better, in fact. But I can’t really take pictures, because of not really being able to do anything, and when I do own pieces of technology - I do have a camera, oddly, bought during a rash flush of seeming solvent - I like to hide them from myself to unremind myself that they exist. It often doesn’t matter too much, because what I’d do with a camera is no better than what I don’t do by not using it but it’s problematic with a mobile phone, say, which I normally like to have switched off in case I die and the Russian will be able to rifle through it.

So, darlings, some light Sunday-afternoon*, hint-of-spring, rainbow-weather, roaring-hangover, dreading-the-working-week (yes, planning to start some work on a Monday morning like normal folk), not-showered-and-dressed blogging. Some things-wot-I-have-seen blogging. Some really-my-life-doesn’t-deserve-to-have-a-website blogging. Some I-can’t-think-of-anything-else blogging.

Darlings, I’ve told you before that Ruislip is Ruislip. But there are the seeds, which probably won’t thrive, of gentrification. You know, the Lidl stocking lobster. The real gay hairdresser. And the odd café or two springing into existence if you don’t mind. We don’t give them our custom because it is now pavlovianly embedded in us to get as far away as possible from where we live whenever we leave the house. Fun can not be associated with Ruislip. We did have one friend who lived close by but we instantly had to lose touch when we simultaneously understood, as our eyes met over a suburban table, with stabbing, unforgiving clarity, what we had both surrendered to. And I haven’t practised walking blindfolded from Ruislip to the border of the next area enough times yet to have learnt where all the obstacles to an injury-free start to a night out are so I do still, on my way to somewhere else, receive visual evidence that I live where I live. Sometimes, if we’ve had two booze-free days in a row, say, I might even notice what I see.

Darlings, and all of sudden there was a Kaffee Togo in Ruislip. Africa! In Ruislip! Who had thought through the branding? We don’t want the outside world in Ruislip. We want the wall back, for fuck’s sake. Wedding, our nearest West-Berlin bit, seems a million miles away. No, if we’re going to go international in Ruislip, we need to start easy. Soften the culture shock. A Café Austria, say. A Café Luxembourg at a push. Ruislipians could cope with that. But odd that their sign said Kaffee. Coffee. And not Café. Until I finally clicked that they were selling coffee ‘to go’. Tossers. To go! In Ruislip! You’ll be relieved to hear I firebombed the premises to avoid any such linguistic misunderstandings in future.

That got me so livid I started noticing the written word non-stop. A clothes shop I’ve bought at multiple times, because every time I bought something they gave me a voucher for a reduction on my next purchase and I bought inexorably and inexorably on until I had to turn to crime to feed my habit before I realised that not buying things is even cheaper than buying things with 10% off, had showcased on its window, presumably written in the fresh sperm of its employees, “Sale continues inside store.” Continues? And in English? Admittedly, not in Ruislip, but still. I had to take my begloved hands out of my pockets so that I could make indignant tosser signs at the offending window and then started taking a run up towards the shop for increased momentum, to make sure they’d understand I thought this was awful toss, and in my enthusiasm accidentally shattered the glass their non-poetry was written on. Still, linguistic crime no. 2 solved.

A café was offering an ‘Anabolisches Frühstück’ - an anabolic breakfast - which I thought was overly caving into drugs in sport, even for the former East Germany. What sort of message is that to be sending to the kids? And this an Olympic year! I ducked in to see if these flagrant purveyors of non-sportsmanship were wearing dark-blue vests with DDR sewn on in a pleasingly square font. Some Turkish men sold standard Turkish fare. “Queer,” I thought. “I wonder if they’re lacing the kebabs with designer steroids.” Till it turned out I was being dyslexic again. Their Frühstück was in fact Anatolisch - Anatolian, euphemistic for Turkish.

Darlings, all too disorienting. I staggered home and resolved never to read again.

*got delayed. Goldfish attention span.

Our village is small. And getting smaller by the day what with the mine closing. When I go out on my bike to start my rounds, I see fewer and fewer of the houses have smoke swirling out of their chimneys. It’s an insult, almost, to the coal our community was built on. But Bllog still keeps its beauty. The grey stone cottages with their slate roofs. The chapel. The Glyndawr community centre.

News travels slow in the village. It was a couple of days before word got to me that Blodeuwedd was ill. Well, she’s right at the other end of the village. Had a right case of the sinuses on her. Stuffed up like nobody’s business. I made sure my cap was on straight, that my medical kit was ready and wheeled my bike up onto the hill.

“Hallo Nerys!” shouted Brythonwen from the post-office.

“Oh, hello Brythonwen! Just off to see to Blodeuwedd. She’s got a right case of the sinuses on her!”

“You never stop, Nerys…”

“Hullo Nerys!” said Creiddylad from the tea-room.

“Can’t stop, Creiddylad. Blodeuwedd’s got the sinuses. Give my love to Rhioganedd and the kids.”

“Dw i’n codi’n gynnar bob dydd. Codaf yn gynnar yfory,” mumbled Llwybyr, the village idiot, incoherently.

“Sorry, Llwybyr, didn’t catch a word o’ that. You know I don’t speak Welsh. Just got the accent, like.”

Language is a problem round these here parts. Right in the middle of the village, there’s a 4-million strong community of German guest workers. Ber-y-llyn, we call it. They came over when the mine was going great guns. Well, they’ve stayed and they’re a productive, hard-working bunch, I’ll say that for them, and though they keep themselves to themselves, they’re all right. Haven’t mixed much. It’s meant a right run on the German evening classes at the Glyndawr community centre. ’cause the Germans have got most of the businesses, see. Clever the way they done it and they’d creamed off all the opportunities before we could recover from the shock of the mine going the way of the dodo.

Well, I was hesitant as I made my way to the chemist’s. Had to stock up, see. That’s German-run too and they don’t like it much when us Welsh come in. Primitive, they find us. Won’t speak a word of local. Six years I been going to the Glyndawr for the classes but I still feel funny having to talk to the Germans. In Bllog! I know all the medical words of course but I still don’t like going and discussing Blodeuwedd’s Nasennebenhöhlenentzündung with just anyone and I’ve never much liked that Mrs. Waltraud Llewellyn what works there, even if she has married a local, Anynnawg, what runs choir practice down the Glyndawr.

But I was right pleased with myself this time. Mrs. Llewellyn was in a better mood and my classes down the community centre have really paid off. I chatted away about Blodeuwedd’s sinuses no problem like and Mrs. Llewellyn even went and wished me, “iechyd da!” as I rode off down the village lane on my bike.

Well, poor Blodeuwedd was in a right state. I administered her the medicine and told her to get some more coal on that fire. Made her up another hot water bottle and told her not to leave the house before Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Sant. Well, it’s only next week.

I rode home feeling right pleased with myself and with Bllog. Bllog has its fair share of problems but we’re a lovely little community. I rested my bike against the cottage wall, took my cap off and put the kettle on the stove in preparation for a good litre or two of tea. Got the buns out of the larder. Put the wireless on in the background. Cole Porter came crackling out. I love him. One of my favourites, along with Max Boyce. You can right imagine yourself off in a different world.

Then I don’t know what it was, if I’d accidentally taken an hallucinogen or something, but everything changed. The four walls of my grey stone cottage fell away. The whistle of the kettle on the stove fell silent. And Cole Porter got louder and louder.

“She can speak. Sie kann sprechen sprechen.
She c’n'inquire. In den Apotheken.
Be it Nasennebenhöhlenentzündung or nay,
Sie kann German talken und German walken any day…”

My nurse’s uniform was replaced by a lovely long white frock. All frills and sequins it was. My hair went all lovely and curly and had a great big feather sticking out of it. And out of nowhere appeared a huge great staircase, all illuminated and leading from nowhere to nowhere and I was right at the top of it. And on every step on the way down, on either side, there was a great big hulking man in black tie just waiting to swirl me down to the bottom. Like a feather I was as I blew from one man to the other, cascading downwards in their big strong arms.

“She can fly. Sie kann fliegen fliegen…”

When all of a bloody sudden I did hear the whistle of the kettle from the stove after all and the walls of my cottage sprang back up around me.

Maybe I’ll start a musicals club down the Glyndawr.

“Khev dinner on table ven I get khome,” went the Russian’s text, which I can’t claim oppressed-wife status for because he cooks 12 times out of 11, at least, and he was probably on his way back from a tough day of exams and all sorts of academic hardships, like getting stamps on bits of paper from recalcitrant women with short blond hair and glasses, so it was the least I could spouselily do to, for the first time this millennium, try to welcome him home with something bordering on warmth, wiping the flour off my flushed cheeks onto my apron and primping my hair so that he could be proud of his nest. Plus I was probably feeling guilty about something - he did try to pin Heath Ledger’s death on me, but I stood my ground - so shook myself up and admitted that it would be a scandal of enormous proportions if I couldn’t have a plate of some gruel or other waiting for him one evening in a million.

Thought I’d go for something a bit spesh. My beloved tends to dash for salt and mayonnaise whenever I provide any item of sustenance, even a glass of tap water, so I thought I’d better pull out all the stops. Throw in a bit of everything to disguise the main ingredient - bland nothingness - and confuse his palate into submission. And two courses. Nothing will make a Russian man’s mouth water like the prospect of a good, slurpy soup. With some good old-fashioned boring ingredients, like potatoes and cabbage. And carrots. Especially if you don’t blend it and it appears in the bowl as some bits of potato, cabbage and carrot looking dumbstruck and forlorn in a putrid puddle of murky water. Anyway, I cheated. There was a pre-made soup, which I sexed down with some boring ingredients, and then let that nicely fester away, while I went and dipped my fists into the packet of flour, which I had no intention of using, dabbed a blob on either cheek and my forehead, and got on with some main course or other and laying the table.

Seeing as it was such a rare occasion and it was so exceptional to have been unleashed on the kitchen, I wondered if I could be seditious and try to introduce some structural changes to the way we eat. We could do with them, after all. We’re both as fat as barrels and it’s not unknown for us to get wedged in the hall if we mistime our inward breaths and then have to wait, like Winnie the Pooh, for us to lose weight or the walls to sag.

“Small plates!” I said in my head with revolutionary zeal. Not really small. Not what couples who have wedding lists at John Lewis would call side plates. Just the plates we bought when we first got here, which are plain and spartan to the point of showing off and have ‘Romania’ stamped across the bottom of them. Off-centre. But then one of us must have earned some money and we bought big plates, the size of car wheels, to make ourselves be middle-class. A size=class-rule which didn’t apply on the wine-glass front, where we eventually got them bigger and bigger so that we could have a whole bottle in two glasses and still feel ungluttonous at only having had one glass with dinner.

I plonked down the small plates. On place mats. Three items of cutlery with the spoon across the top to remind me of school dinners. Wine glasses the size of vases. Another glass for water with a bit of lemon thrown in. Maybe even a napkin. And then put down some pre-middle-class soup bowls on top of the plates. It looked just like the dining room of a hotel on the English coast in 1977. Like in that execrable Suffolk shit-hole Southwold that we all have to pretend to like because Twiggy owns a weekend house there.

“Honig, I’m khome,” barked the Russian manlily to the click of the front door shutting out the wicked external world for another evening. “How was your day, dear?” I asked, flicking my apron onto a hook while helping him off with his coat and readjusting the shirt collar under his jumper to make sure he looked neat and tidy because it’s good for the soul to look neat and tidy, even if no-one else can see you.

“Honig, you go and sit and read your paper. I’ve ironed it for you. Do you want a gin on the rocks?”

“No, honig, but do zat sing for me you do. Vere you massage my tyemples. I khev such khard day.”

“Oh honig, baby, we need to take a vacation. You work too hard for that bad ol’ Mr. Boss.”

“Honig, you know I can’t tyake tsime off now.”

Dashed spouselily back to the kitchen. Served up the soup. The Russian ate it with relish. And salt and mayonnaise. And the Southwold 1977 look completely passed him by, so voracious was his manly appetite and so overcome with joy was he at the sight of some good old cabbage as tastelessly tasty as anyone could have made.

“But look, darling, see how clever I’ve been for the main course. SMALL plates. We’ll eat less. Be svelte in no time.”

Twelve portions of tasteless gruel later and we agreed that from now on we’ll only swap roles with carnivalesque infrequency.

OK, the link’s vague, but I can pretend what’s brought my attention to this idea is my constant pondering of matters affecting children in war and while that is something, of course, that disturbs my feeble mind when I think about it, I must say it was actually stumbling across the idea here that got me interested. So, a project, like the Shaggy Blog Stories book before it, making a book out of blog entries and making money for charity at the same time. Pimp the project and your own blog all in one go.

But philanthropy has been on my mind of late. Maybe it’s a late-30’s thang. Or hating my job. Or thinking it’s a silly contribution to make to the world, translating nonsense, when I could easily be doing something much more useful, like being a painter and decorator, or a school-teacher or a stevedore (although this last one’s only for convenience’s sake because my name is, by a queer twist of fate, actually Steve Dore). My translations are only good in the sense of getting one man to dig a hole and another to fill it in. It keeps a few of us queer types busy and the wolf from our door.

Yet I’d struggle with usefulness. Intellectually, I can agree with it, but then I think a desire to be useful need naturally spring from a love of the society you’re being useful to and, by extension, a love of your fellow man. And while I’ve loved a few of my fellow men in my time, I still think we’re mostly a shower of cunts. But there are all sorts of little devices for getting round that nagging little fact. Firstly, we mostly know we’re a shower of cunts with ghastly natures but we pragmatically reason that, seeing as a life nicely lived is more pleasant than one where we live according to our natures, we suppress our cunticity and counter one logic with another and attempt, at some level - a cultural one, I suppose - to be ‘nice’ to each other. Or at least not actively nasty. Good is cultural. (Darlings, I’ve got a feeling this is what Dawkins’s memetic theory is all about. I didn’t know meme was his coinage. But, anyway, a meme, being a cultural unit, so he says, I think, presuming I haven’t got the wrong end of the stick, which I might easily have, of course, is subject to a cultural version of evolution. Good or useful cultural memes survive. I think it’s how he explains away religion, in fact.)

Which I’m all for, actually. If we’re going to pretend we’re someone we’re not, and then actually, by dint of pretending for so long, actually become someone we’re not and be social (beyond our direct little social unit, I mean) animals, then I’m a great believer in making the whole charade as delicious as possible - not believing in god may add some urgency here, not that I’ve been majorly adept at getting my skates on, be it said. And not to say that the godly don’t do good either, of course - and doing good and being kind to your neighbour and helping the less fortunate and saving the world and eradicating poverty and violence and… and… and everything. And translation - at least not the types I do - just doesn’t contribute too much to anything.

Still, I don’t want to get too good lest you all be blinded by the glint off my halo. And then we have to retain a modicum of honesty, do we not, as we go about our daily lives. So I’ve thought hard about how I can contribute. Encourage charity, yes. But how can I push myself? How can I make it be the essence of all I do to improve the lot of my fellow men, all the while harbouring a cosy grudge against them? How can I be a misanthropic philanthropist?

Bingo! No, not actual bingo. Bingo, as in eureka. And, oddly, translation DOES come into it. Oddly, I need to make a fortune to do my good. I don’t know the first thing about anything other than translating, so I’ll have to carry on translating my bollocks off and earn a fortune. Then, to quench my disdain for my fellow man while also taking the reprehensible edge off the evil of my act, I’m going to buy cars for all the people I hate so that I can go and let down their tyres. Don’t you get all uppity with me. I’m going to try to target my hate at a remote community that needs means of transport. I know slashing their tyres will put a temporary downer on the good I’ve done but it’ll create a need for tyre-repair people, thereby creating jobs and wealth, and I’ll spend money on stamps in local, community-based, post-office co-operatives to send postcards home on my tyre-slashing trips.

No time to waste. But before you all have your philanthropic eureka moments, go and help War Child and pimp your blog in the meantime.

IsarSteve’s post about, and photos of, Stolpersteine - ’stumbling blocks’ built into the pavement outside the last dwelling-place of victims of the Nazi era, aiming, in this way, to keep their memory alive - made me want to get out of the house and go and scour the pavements of Pankow to see if commemoration had made it this far. There was a specific building I was aiming for, one that used to be a Jewish orphanage. I remembered a plaque on its façade with some details of what fate had befallen its residents - the deportation of ‘many of the school-children, apprentices and teachers resident here’ to extermination camps in 1942 - and, upon slightly more insistent inspection yesterday, discovered that that’s all there appears to be. The prayer room of the synagogue that used to be there survives, in some form or other, but twice I have tried to find it and twice I have failed and I worry about snooping around civic buildings too much to wander up every staircase and down every corridor. It’s hard to apply a hierarchy to those who deserve to be commemorated - I’m sure the project’s organisers would happily commemorate everyone they possibly could, and will happily lay a Stolperstein to any victim whose details can be corroborated and whose stone someone is willing to finance - but I thought it would be extra fitting to individualise the orphans of Orphanage no. 2 of the Jewish Community in Berlin, robbed as they already had been of their pasts, of a normal present, and then of any future.

After a mammoth session of being cooped up at the computer and only leaving the house to make a beeline, looking neither left, nor right, for addresses promising alcohol for the last god knows how long, it was overwhelmingly invigorating to go and get some daytime air into my lungs and stretch my legs as all about me regular Berliners, and not just those in search of alcohol, were stretching theirs. Sitting at home and working away, the only movement is from one room to another. Visual stimuli consist chiefly of the flickering of the computer screen and the flicking of dictionary pages. Society consists of the Russian as he does his best at being a one-man show.

So, as I wandered into the outside world, in the daylight, without having to concentrate on preparing to imbibe, there were so many stimuli I thought I might have a seizure. Even in Pankow, the Ruislip of Mitteleuropa! As I hadn’t attained any speed higher than 1kph since before the flood, the pace society was setting on our well-trodden streets seemed lightningly quick. Indeed, the hustle and bustle of cars, bikes, trams and youngsters running around all took place at such a different tempo to my working motor-slumber that it felt a bit like the depiction of the future in some future-depicting film. With traffic like in The Fifth Element.

I soon acclimatised, of course, and saved up culture shock for when I get to go somewhere deserving of the dissonance, rather than simply coming back to the present. I did worry, though, what would happen to poor Shakespeare if some clever type decided to bring him back to life - as the wonderfully bonkers Russian philosopher Nikolai Fedorov said we should. Not Shakespeare. Everyone. We owed it to our ancestors to bring everyone back to life and then make everyone live for ever - and he was plonked in the middle of London. Not that it need be Shakespeare, of course. Any old person would do, though at least Shakespeare might be able to get a play out of his experience before, presumably, going mad.

To avoid my Shakespeare scenario, I thought I’d better extend the walk, and make it into a proper walk, and commune with and observe my fellow citizens a bit longer before heading back for another session of conjugal bliss with my computer. A man pushed a hot-dog into his face with urgency, as if he was shredding a very compromising document, all the while managing to speak on his mobile phone. I altered my step so I could eavesdrop on a young German-Irish couple whom it was hard to place on the relationship continuum. They looked physically as if they’d got to the very-bored-of-each-other stage but their conversation was at the only-just-met stage and had the fatal intercultural twist so they had to feign interest in fantastically mundane aspects of each other’s worlds. “And what beers do you have?” asked the German, wishing he was somewhere else. “Guinness!” answered the Irish lady predictably and not without umbrage. “It’s an acquired taste. Very heavy.”

I sped on in my attempt at halting the further atrophy of my wizened musculature. Took myself through the Mauerpark. Was instantly gripped by fear at the sight of dogs and people playing football. “What if a dog comes towards me? What if a football comes towards me?”

A dog came bounding towards me, wagging its tail in a way that meant, “I’m going to enjoy biting you,” rather than, “I’m going to enjoy being stroked by you.” Before he took the lethal leap, he turned round, in that dim way that dogs do, to see if he had permission from his owner to maim. Such bad logic. His owner prevented him from maiming. I took the dog aside. “Why would it be OK to maim me while slavishly doing what your owner said? If he said, ‘maim,’ and you maimed, wouldn’t there be a contradiction in you being nice to him but horrid to me?” It cocked its head and issued a whiney pre-bark. I was getting nowhere. “Wie sagt man ‘contradictory’ auf Deutsch?” I shouted after his owner but they’d already wandered off to play god elsewhere.

Bounce, bounce, bounce, went the full-sized, proper, leather football being played with by four teenagers before trickling to a stop at my feet. One of them was walking towards me. I could have walked on. I could have left it. Let the teenager come and get it. But I’d already made my decision. The teenager and I had exchanged body language clearer than an SMS on a high-res mobile-phone display. I was going to kick the ball to him. I adjusted my stance. Remembered BaH’s advice not to toe-punt it, not to be a ’spitzer’. “Get this right, BiB,” I muttered to myself. “You’re doing this for England. You’re doing this for gaydom. Goddammit, you’re doing this for Obama.” A collective ssshhh rang out, sprayed everyone in spittle and brought silence. In far-off windows I could see people jostling to get a better view. I looked up to a cloud over my right shoulder in which the Russian’s face appeared. “Davai, davai,” he mouthed. I stepped up to the ball. Turned my right foot to the side. Quickly made sure my hair was OK. And kicked… A perfect delivery. It landed with just the right force at his feet. “Vielen Dank,” he shouted, his back already turned, not even realising he’d had truck with a homosexual.

I grabbed my crotch and walked home, counting the day’s stimuli.

It’s all anyone ever does these days, isn’t it? If we’re not connecting people here, we’re changing the communications landscape there. Our telephones are constantly being communicated to by someone or other who’d like to communicate some money out of us. The Russian can often be heard yelling down the phone at his babushka. I dash next door to give him some pointers. “Quick, tell her about your health.” He grimaces. “Quick, ask her about her health.” He acknowledges my existence impatiently and encourages me to leave the room.

But I haven’t got a second for any of this communication business at the moment. Not a second. Work, don’t you know. Oh yes, like a grown-up. Plus the Russian’s not in and his absences are always unpredictable in length and we’ll both die of acute moanitis if he comes in and sees me here or, worse, checking my stats, and then complaining at 11.45pm that I haven’t quite begun my working day yet and still have about 40 billion words to translate before the morning (and then yelping all night in bed, though not in an even vaguely sexy way, and waking up in sweats about undone work but realising all is sort of OK when the Russian says a reassuring, “Beeb, oll vill byee OK. Всё будет хорошо. You just mad”).

But, anyway, I’ve got this new policy going. A communications policy. You know, getting out there. Meeting people. Getting back on the dating scene. Except I had to scrap that bit when the Russian reminded me we were a couple. “Darling, sorry, I clean forgot we’d been together for a millennium now.” “Yes, iz very fanny. Saamtyimez I forget too. Zen I see your shyuz placed inkorrektly in kholl and remember ze joy of kommunal leevying.” Because I’m bored of my ivory tower now. And it’s stats what’s reminded me. I was having a minor ganderette through to see if anyone had come to visit me from an interesting place. “Darlink, vot you dooink?” came the disembodied voice of the Russian from an intercom system he’s had wired up so that he can spy on me from the next room. “You chekkink styets? Styop it. Do some vyerk.” “No, honestly, darling, it’s the last time. Honestly. This is my last ever check. Look at all those interesting places that people have come to visit from. Look, there’s a place called King of Prussia in Pennsylvania. Oh, just let me check that url. I’m sure it’s probably someone important wanting to turn my whole blog into a play…” But of course when I open the exciting-looking url, it’s just some regular old bastard service provider instantly flashing their ‘Connecting People’ or ‘Changing the Communication Landscape’ logo in my freshly despondent face.

Anyway, so I’ve taken on their words. Will make a paasitive out of a negative. Get communicating again. I’ve fallen out of the game. This translating away at home is rubbish. Go and befriend the neighbours. Pick up the phone. Text people. Write some e-mails.

“Drring, drring.” I braced myself. Rid my throat. Picked up the phone. “Hello,” went a drone with a job. “It’s your credit card people. Can you give us all your money and then borrow another different million so we can ring and hassle you about that and write to you twenty times a month?” “Bing.” Ooh, that’ll be an e-mail. “Er, yeah, sorry we haven’t paid that invoice. Yeah, there’s been some confusion about that actually. :-) Because we thought it was for such-and-such a piece of work ;-) and then that person left :-( and…”

“This is no place for gloom,” I reassure myself. “If you dash downstairs and check the post, there’ll probably be postcards from faraway places, cheques, invitations to balls.” I walk to the recycling to throw out the pizza ads and remind myself that I must get round to booby-trapping the letter-box. I pass the loathsome neighbour with the hairstyle that makes me want to kill him. “Hello,” I say with fake pleasure that England has honed to perfection down the evolutionary centuries. He walks past in total silence which makes me wonder if he can tell I put a glass up against the hall wall when their baby hasn’t stopped crying for four hours in a row and he and his girlfriend are screaming, no doubt about his hair. Butter-borrowing son of a bitch.

Still, today’s another day. And probably only four months till Eurovision.

“Darling, do you think my haircut makes me look like Hitler?”

“Absolyut not,” answered the Russian with conviction bordering on the complimentary. Odd for him to miss the chance for a bit of an insult. Telling me I looked like Hitler would have been a forfeit-free chance to say I was a bit of a wanker. “You don’t look heterosexual at all.”

“Not gitera (hetero), Gitlera (Hitler), you silly billy (if memory serves me rightly).”

“Oh, yes, yes, you look like Gitler.”

I went to a gay bar once. Alone. I’ve mostly stumbled from one long-term relationship to another but I think I managed to squeeze in ten seconds of singleness when I was about 9. Not that I haven’t gone to bars alone as a married man. No-one thinks you’re a prostitute in the gay world if you go to a bar alone. Unless you go to a bar alone when you’re 17, that is, and everyone else in the bar is 80. Then the punters would be justified in suspecting rent. But I’ve always been perfectly sanguine at going to a bar alone to drown my indifferences.

So I went to a bar. Drowned my indifferences. As ever, in the gay world, the bar was strewn with other indifference-drowning solos. Bars are our churches and I happened, on this one occasion, to have pride of place with our high priest, the barman. It’s a rather public confessional but we gays are as promiscuous with our words as we are with our affections and there’s no room for prudishness where the gay soul is concerned. Except our churches blaze trails and our confessionals can easily see the high priest confessing to one of his flock.

“Wan’ anuvva?”

“Oh, go on then… A bit quiet tonight, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, they won’ all arrive for anuvva while yet, will they.” He polished a glass with disdain. “Tend to come ‘ere a bit later, dun’t they.” Glanced over it and hung it up on the sticky-out rack. “Why, ya bored? You can get up on the bar and do a dance f’rus if ya like, can’tcha?” He chuckled and went off to serve anuvva punter.

“Is this your bar then?” I went on unimaginatively as he reappeared with a dishcloth flung nonchalantly over his left shoulder.

“Yeah, had it for years now, inni. Was in Spain before, wunni, wiv Brian,” I quickly played back the conversation thus far in my head - I’d forgotten my dictaphone - and was sure Brian hadn’t come up, “but come back ‘ere now, inni. Anuvva cuppla years and then I’ll give it up.” He shooed away the bar with his hand. “Do summink else then, wunni.” I nodded along consistently without proffering any suggestions of my own. “’s all right doin’ this when you’re young, innit, but I don’t still wanna be doin’ this when I’m owld.” His brows and mouth made one complete revolution at the mention of the profanity. “And Brian died, didnee. Car crash. Just like that. Can ‘appen that quickly.” He polished some more. I contorted my face as the occasion demanded. “Naa, ’s OK when you’re young, this, but not when you’re owld… Oh ‘ere’s a few more come in, look. Ya wun’t be so bored now as ya was, will ya?”

A few more punters had indeed trickled in. Amongst them a dish of cosmic proportions. A huge, great lumbering thing. A hint of shyness. He only looked up from his beer out of the corner of his glassy eyes. He examined his finger-nails with undeserved thoroughness. I changed my order to the beer he was drinking to increase my attractiveness. Needn’t have bothered as the late Brian’s other half was soon leaping to my assistance. “‘ere, whassyer name?” If beer hadn’t been taken I’d have minded where this was going. “Broke,” I said, unmindingly. “‘n whass yours?” he asked the cosmic dish, predictably. “Mmwike,” said Mike, combining shyness and aggression, his eyes darting left to right and lips stretched to breaking point.

The introductions done, Mmwike and I bumbled through conversation. Nice enough, it turned out, though his beauty meant any judgment I made couldn’t possibly be objective. I’m a pathetic flirt and invariably turn into a helpless himbo. “Um, Mmwike, sorry, I mean, Mike, so what’s a nice boy like you… [internally, "No, bugger, bugger, you can't ask that. That's Christmas-cracker-level chat-up. Um, pay him a compliment."] Um, Mmwike, sorry, Mike, um… [internally, "Oh, for god's sake, just carry on bumbling along."] Um, Mmwike, sorry, Mike, um, er… you don’t seem gay, really, not that gays seem anything and, erm, of course it’s all just stereo…”

“Naa, I ain’t.”

“Oh [internally, "fuck"].”

“Well, I am a bit.”

“Oh [internally, "yippety doo-da"].”

“I mean, only in the way all men are.”

“Oh [internally, "oh, he's insane. What a pity. Most men aren't a bit gay, are they?"].”

“You don’t seem speshly gay yerself.”

“Oh [internally, "oh, he actually is insane].”

We chatted on. He told me about his girlfriend. His ex-girlfriend. His daughter. His ex-girlfriend’s gay uncle whom they’d discovered the gay bar with. He liked it and came back (presumably when he was in one of his a-bit-gay moods). We drank. He told me about his drinking problem. Said he was a social worker. Then offered to drive me home.

Was this a prelude to one of his a-bit-gay moments?

I accepted heroically. “Sure it’s no trouble?”

“Naa, ’s on me way.”

We drew up at my front door. For tradition’s sake, I thought I’d better check where on the hetero-scale he was currently positioning himself. “Um, would you like to come in?”

“Naa, gotta get back. Workin’ in the mornin’. But it was nice talkin’ to ya.” True. It had been perfectly nice. “Gotta pen? I’ll give ya my e-mail.” (E-mail must have pre-dated mobiles.) We fumbled around and between us managed to exchange e-mail addresses. I probably hadn’t removed my coat before firing off an e-mail saying how nice it had been to meet.

A few days later, an e-mail appeared from Mmwike. I was secretly thrilled. Then berated myself for being so pathetic. “Broke, get a grip. He’s straight. He’s got a girlfriend and daughter.” But his beauty overrode all that.

“Thanks for your e-mail,” began his e-mail. “You met me on a bad day.” Oh, I hadn’t realised. Maybe he’d been there to drown real sorrows, though he hadn’t alluded to them in our chat. “I won’t have a chance to go out for a beer again soon.” Oh, that sounds final enough. Never mind. “But if you ever want to book me, one-on-one, for a couple of hours, let me know. To put it in plain English, I’m a male whore. Hope you don’t mind. See ya.”

Heterosexuals. Honestly. No morals.