Dream *

Cab driver casts head to look at mirror - 'Steve! Steve!' 'Get back in the bus. I watch as we reverse towards hill. Imagine leaping.

We passed a student at halls of residence, linked arms with woman. 'Can someone move the vehicle?' he asked, as if his linked arm privileged him. Inside empty van, his girlfriend leant her front against desk. Others prepared to travel that way as if in a rec room.

In pool. Lots of people enter, too crowded. One girl I like. I leave, with sister (?). Change. Exit via poolside. I thank the woman working there, 'Thanks so much,' I say. She seems baffled, as if a bookshop owner. Slip past her out door to street.


* Dream based on radio report calling UK's house market typical of a system where house costs outstrip ability to pay, so house prices soar - 'The Price of Property.'


going out, going steady

Photos with the Italians, two of whom have dedicated the board to me. I have been on autopilot all week, guarding my health.

My voice is already starting to fail at the station. 'It suits you, ' but as we sink our first pints it becomes increasingly hard to be heard. 'Why don't you phone C?' Her phone is vibrating in my pocket, the letters of her name dark against green. That night we drink and sing.

A Harvey Pekar story: a lost voice and surgically removed nodule. 'How do they do it?' he marvels.

On Saturday we walk into Winsley, passing lamas. I am struggling to speak.

Bath and Spanish sausages, open-air karaoke, barbecue with a beautiful view. A stand-up, musicians and TEFL teachers - some relocating to Bradford on Avon.

We return for a Thai meal. By now it is almost impossible to speak.

On Sunday we see M. to the station.

On Monday I am diagnosed with laryngitis.

Research for a Character in A Room for Romeo Brass

Walking home along the Knavesmire I see some kids - fifteen or sixteen year olds - drinking down by the racetrack in the twilight. I have a bottle of red in my bag and ask if anyone has an opener. I uncork my bottle and sit down against a post.

I am introduced to everyone, about twenty of them. They think I am the coolest teacher they have ever seen, offer me grass and say they have seen me around, usually from the window of a cafe in town. I enjoy drinking outdoors. I ask a blonde girl, who is showing off to me by sitting astride someone's chest on the grass, why she broke up with my new best friend the week before. 'Are you crazy?' I ask her. I lecture my new best friend on Live at the Royal Albert Hall 1966 in which Dylan is heckled: 'Judas!'

'Scarper!' someone shouts and everybody scarpers. I'm not one to run away. Kelsey Park, Beckenham; when a policeman approached holding his torch I walked towards him as everyone else bolted. I watched as he poured out my wine.

This time, I run at pace among the trees before stopping still. I watch as the torch grows fainter and then brighter, and having ruled out running up the hill to the road, because it could be guarded and because there is nowhere to hide on that long road, I walk towards the light.

The policewoman is accompanied by a boy, about twelve, easily the smallest of the kids I have been drinking with. I am holding a cap and bottle of wine. I watch as she pours it to the ground.

'What are you doing here?'
'One of the boys ran off suddenly leaving their cap and this wine behind, so I tried to return them.' I say. She leads the two of us up to the road and radios her team beside the white kissing gate. Just then, out of the corner of my eye, I catch my partner returning from her shift, walking up the road towards us.

'What am I being held on?' I ask.
'I didn't say you were being held on anything,' she answers. 'If I was to hold you for something it would be for providing alcohol to minors.'
'It's just that that's my partner, and I've got to get home and tidy the place.'

*

A couple of weeks later, I pass a group of teenagers heading into town. It is impossible to recall which teenagers I met that evening. I keep my eyes to the pavement.

'Judas!' one of them shouts after me.

The Literary Life

I have never been at ease dining with poets, a feeling which probably stems from an incredibly slow meal after a reading by Douglas Dunn and Henry Shukman in York. I was interviewing Henry for a small magazine, and it was an interview on the run. I recommended shirts and trousers as he changed in his hotel room. I managed to steer most comments he made about poetry onto music, a field with which I was much more comfortable.

During the meal itself I was at the wrong end of the table and unable to contribute, except to field questions about previous comments I had made without apparent basis. Had Simon Armitage really recommended the creative writing department at St Andrews? I wasn't sure.

But this month, my partner was chairing a reading in Bath by two writers from her department. Afterwards, it was suggested, the four of us and a friend would go to Martinis, an Italian restaurant whose pizzas were particularly admired, and which purchased fresh fish every day. I had read the menus and the atmosphere seemed suitably rosso.

As usual, I managed to mildly misrepresent myself in the post-reading discussion:

Matt: Would you say this exhibition was representative of Keith Vaughn's work?
Gerard Woodward: It's a retrospective.

'I have kids, I want to go home.' We left the gallery owner to his lookout and bundled into the evening street. But instead of taking a left towards Martinis, we took a right towards rugby pub The Rummer. I asked my partner what was going on.

'We're going to meet Colm Toibin,' she told me. I frantically asked her for a potted bio. I followed her shakily into the pub.

In the corner, we were met with a parabola of backs. Every space into which a chair could have been navigated had had a chair already navigated into it. Introductions were being made and I was aware of my bit-part status in this situation: someone's partner, unpublished and unremarkable. And in the corner, ruddy, wizened, slightly baffled but handy as an old sailor, was Colm Toibin. At least, he could have been. I had no idea what Colm Toibin looked like. To his left, younger, with jet-black hair and a confidently raised pint, was another candidate. An Oxford manner. I turned on my heels and left.

I texted my apologies and, sacrificing my spaghetti-and-red-wine meal, caught the bus home.

Things weren't so bad, I thought, as I forked cold smoked tofu into my mouth and replied to e-mails while listening to The Fall. I drank several cups of roibosh tea and got an early night, realising that I had missed out on any excitement.

At around 3am my partner stumbled in moaning that she wanted to die. Drinks, a meal, a kebab and a vomit in the street to the good, she got into bed naked (perilous in our unheated 17th century bakehouse) and then dashed a glass of water I had brought her so hard onto the floor that the jolt snapped its stem. I cleared the glass and mopped the water, then dressed her in pyjamas and socks.

And her meeting with Colm Toibin? They had arrived at the pub too late to meet him.

Piste à Piste

I have just received in the post a tour du monde musicale from my language teacher/confidante.
Alongside a map detailing each stop along the way, several of the pieces of music are accompanied: sample bags of coffee from Guatemala, a beer mat from Liverpool, loose tisane from Montreal. As a whole, it reminds me of the polaroids - stood before various wonders of the world - sent to Amelie's father by his garden gnome.

Like Amelie's father, I am sedentary - in his case it is due to age and force of habit, in mine laryngitis following la grippe. In less than a month I will travel to the Czech Republic for the first time, to live and teach until December. While I want to pick up the basics of the language, steel myself for change and get a sharp haircut, rather I languish, unable to speak, and quick to tire.

My musical tour also recalls the films of Wes Anderson; in their intricacy, laid out like the cross-section of a plane engine. Anderson's films - especially The Royal Tenenbaums - recall the writing of J.D. Salinger, whose protagonists share a similar psyche. This age has always been a touchstone for me. I am drawn to the work of Balthus and Gorey.

Dream, March

At station, young girl (among others). I take her hand, lead her up stairs. Slide aside curved door to reveal a bed. The room curved as if part of a lighthouse. Hold small firm breasts and hips.

Later find way back. Queue until I am told I can walk through turnstile. It has wire divisions. I am scrunched up against an elderly lady. Having passed through I am at the spot where I met the girl.

Dream 14/3/7

Dan there. We don't discuss anything. After the performance he is addressing artworks - like prints - which I had thought unique. Mike says 'I've got a book ready. My first book.' A couple of pages of poetry and he calls it a book.

-

Girls lifting a pen to the board to please.

A student stays behind
allows herself to be seen to see
to take pause and separate herself.

'Seven years of friendship,' only said to conclude.

'He thought that he had detected, in the voice with which she had framed her last couple of questions, the old familiar female clang, that broken sound as of a thin cracked bell which all women emitted when they felt threatened but wanted to appear confident.'

'The linguists and philologists of his previous acquaintance had easily succeeded in backing him into a false position of patriotic insularity; with that temporary, alien look in their eyes and their coffee filters and their French wives in constant need of whispered idiomatic bolstering ...'

Howard Jacobson, Coming from Behind

One from Edward Gorey

Recent events


Spanish 11/12 year olds:

'Matt! Matt! Can I go to the loo?'
'Mark! Mark! Can I go to the loo?'

Italian 16 year olds: Greta, Ilaria, Alice, Elizabetta, Sylvia, etc



Mr Phillips, John Lanchester (disappointing)

He writes 'more clear,' and uses food and drink to describe colour: 'a girl's beautiful tea-coloured midriff.'

Reviewing paintings at Tate Britain:
'... it implies that people are different at different times and contain lots of aspects to themselves. We are all many. Seven out of ten.'

'She was the sort of person you could tell at say a fourth meeting that you'd had a dream about them, or even, conceivably, if you really were getting on, that you'd had a crush on them for ages.'



Requiem for a Dream - Selby: all carnival, even though elderly and alone.



Bath Literature Festival


Carrie chairs Tim Liardet and Gerard Woodward debate in Victoria Art gallery.
Exhibition of Keith Vaughn's work.

Matt: Would you say this exhibition is representative of Keith Vaugn's work?
Gerard Woodward: It's a retrospective.

Brian Patten's comforting cadence.

Howard Jacobson on The Very Measure of a Man: 'You like it? Many people don't.'

Comedy is necessary to encompass the human experience.