marginal gloss

unhistoric acts

Thu, 16 May 2013 22:06:37 +0100

‘The poet has his memorial in repetition, and the statesman in stone and bronze. The scholar’s hand lies always on his book, and the thinker’s eyes on canvas travel the room to rest on each human face; the rebel has his ballad and his cross, his bigot’s garland, his wreath of rope. But for the poor man and the giant there is the scrub bed wooden slab and the slop bucket, there is the cauldron and the boiling pot, and the dunghill for his lights; so he is a stench in the nose for a day or a week, so he is a no-name, so he is oblivion. Stories cannot save him. When human memory runs out, there is the memory of animals; behind that, the memory of the plants, and behind that the memory of the rocks. But the wind and the sea wear the rocks away; and the cell-line runs to its limit, where meaning falls away from it, and it loses knowledge of its own nature. Unless we plead on our knees with history, we are done for, we are lost. We must step sideways, into that country where space plaits and knots, where time folds and twists: where the years pass in a day.’

– Hilary Mantel, ‘The Giant, O’Brien’ (1998)

You can go and see the bones of Charles Byrne, if you want. They are on display in the museum of the Royal College of Surgeons at Lincoln’s Inn Fields in London. Known also as Charles O’Brien, he was the the Irish giant who became the subject of the novel quoted above. He stood almost eight feet high and not much is known about him. We have his bones still because when he died, a renowned surgeon named John Hunter bribed a man £500 for his corpse to be taken against O’Brien’s own wishes. In Mantel’s novel, when Hunter makes his offer to the still-living Charles, the giant’s response is curt: ‘Get out. Cromwellian.’

It’s a clever authorial flourish, but it’s also a wholly contrived, implausible reply. This giant is (as Mantel freely admits) an invention, and one who most likely bears little resemblance to the original of Charles Byrne. In this fiction he is a thoughtful poet, a learned man fond of telling beautiful tales in the most ornate language conceivable; the essential pity of his condition is that when he arrives in London, only his body is of public interest. Nobody wants to hear his stories except as a distraction.

The passage quoted above comes near the end of the book as a kind of dying fall. It reminded me instantly of George Eliot’s final, unforgettable tribute to Dorothea in ‘Middlemarch’:

‘Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it…’

‘Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’

It is impossible to envisage how we will live on in posterity. Charles Byrne might perhaps have guessed that he would not really be buried at sea, but he could never have imagined his skeleton would be on display to this day, nor could he have thought himself as the subject of a novel, or see himself referenced in an obscure bit of prose on the internet by some scribbler soon to be forgotten in his own right. But in the end there is no such thing as posterity. Every memory must fail in the end. Visited or not, every tomb caves in upon itself, is swallowed in the dark earth.

***

I’ve just finished reading ‘Up in the Old Hotel’ by Joseph Mitchell, which I bought after I stumbled upon one of his previously unpublished essays in the New Yorker. One of the most memorable characters from his work is Joe Gould; a bum and bohemian of legendary status who claimed to have dedicated his life to writing an enormous and impossibly long book called the ‘Oral History of the Contemporary World’. Gould was penniless, and subsisted largely on the kindness of more successful artists who found his antics amusing; today I’m sure he would not be tolerated quite so much, and would either be declared mentally ill or simply thrown in jail.

His name survives largely because of Joseph Mitchell’s brilliant original profile of him, and because of the short book he wrote after Gould’s death on what might have become of the ‘Oral History’ itself. Since then they’ve made a movie about him, and the two men have even appeared in a video game. In some ways the relationship between Mitchell and Gould was the same as that of James Hunter and Charles O’Brien – one was ultimately after the bones of the other. Yet while Hunter was probably destined to be an important figure in medicine regardless of his interest in the giant, it seems to me that the fates of Joseph Mitchell and Joe Gould have become inextricably intertwined.

It isn’t only that Mitchell’s own reputation rests partly on that of his subject. You only need to read the descriptions of Gould’s unfinished (and largely unwritten) masterpiece to see that Mitchell saw much of himself in the poor man. At first it is described as a thing only made up of ‘conversations taken down verbatim or summarized’, which sounds simple enough until you actually try to read the thing. According to Mitchell:

‘The Oral History is a great hodgepodge and kitchen midden of hearsay, a repository of jabber, an omnium-gatherum of bushwa, gab, palaver, hogwash, flapdoodle, and malarkey, the fruit, according to Gould’s estimate, of more than twenty thousand conversations. In it are the hopelessly incoherent biographies of hundreds of bums, accounts of the wanderings of seamen encountered in South Street barrooms, grisly depictions of hospital and clinic experiences…summaries of innumerable Union Square and Columbus Circle harangues, testimonies given by converts at Salvation Army street meetings, and the added opinions of scores of park-bench oracles and gin-mill savants.’

This makes Gould’s work sound remarkably similar to ‘Finnegans Wake’ by James Joyce (of whom Mitchell was a devoted fan). Yet Mitchell can’t have been unaware that the above also serves well as a pretty fair description of his own style as a writer. In all of his essays, he is interested in people because he finds them genuinely interesting, and because he met them by accident, not because they have declared themselves to anyone in particular – and he ends up as a kind of collector of much the same kinds of malarkey, palaver, flapdoodle. (In this regard his work looks rather old-fashioned compared to the current incarnation of that venerable magazine, where the profiles are now written under the assumption that because someone is wealthy or powerful they must be worth writing about.)

Yes, Mitchell’s work is frequently incoherent, sometimes dull, pedantic, and gossipy in style: certainly the facts of any given matter are not always left clear by the time the reader is done. But his essential mission is pretty much identical to that of Joe Gould. And it is in his last work, ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’, that Mitchell comes to admire the commitment of a man who chose to make his life into literature rather than commit it to paper:

‘When I thought of the cataracts of books, the Niagaras of books, the rushing rivers of books, the oceans of books, the tons and truckloads and trainloads of books that were pouring off the presses of the world at that moment, only a very few of those which would be worth picking up and looking at, let alone reading, I began to feel that it was admirable that he hadn’t written it. One less book to clutter up the world, one less book to take up space and catch dust and go unread from bookstores to homes to secondhand bookstores and junk stores and thrift shops to still other homes to still other second-hand bookstores and junk stores and thrift shops to still other homes ad infinitum…’

It is perhaps worth noting at this point that Joseph Mitchell never published another book after ‘Joe Gould’s Secret’.

***

I have no particular moral to express here. I realise it would be somewhat absurd to draw a conclusion about the importance of unhistoric acts and unvisited tombs from examples of people with a more of a legacy than most.

At some point in their lives, everyone believes themselves to be significant enough to worth remembering, and at other times everyone wonders if the world would be better off without them. Joe Gould and Charles O’Brien are emblematic of this dilemma. But in the end, how they wanted to be remembered wasn’t worth a thing. Both would likely have been impressed and disappointed in equal measure by the way things turned out.

burglarizing

Mon, 13 May 2013 22:09:00 +0100

For all that is written about the violent content of video games, it seems to me that most games contain almost nothing which is genuinely controversial. This is not to say they cannot be crude or offensive or misogynistic or any number of unpleasant things. But very few games are disturbing in a political or emotional context. Perhaps if a game even began to approximate actual violence it would become so troubling as to be unplayable.

For example, nobody has made a video game about being a burglar. It wouldn’t have to be an open-world simulator with a range of career choices, nor would it need spectacular visuals or an extensive cast of characters. It would just be a game about doing something consistently terrible with unpleasant consequences every time.

You would come to a home – one of many houses, apartments, condos, mansions, etc – and you would have to find a way in. You could choose to stake it out for a while or take a more opportunistic approach. The usual stealth game mechanics would be in place.

Once inside, your only mission would be to steal valuable items without disturbing the inhabitants. There would be no particular goal other than to take stuff you consider valuable. There would be no incentives other than your own perverse sense of curiosity. You can take anything you want away with you to your own little room, which becomes a trophy chamber of sorts.

There is no plot. No equipment to be bought or upgraded. No guns or weapons. No open world to be traversed. Only a series of rooms more or less large or small.

There are people in the game, and all the people in all the homes are different. They have different faces and voices, and will say and do different things while they are being watched. They will be afraid of you. If they see you, they might scream and run away and try to get to the telephone, or they might pick up the nearest heavy object and pitch it at your head. If you are caught or killed it is game over.

When you are discovered, you will be unable to control the reactions of your avatar. You will do things you aren’t anticipating. Your character will act along the lines of a concealed archetype determined at the beginning of the game. They might be reasonable and cautious or they might be prone to sudden outbreaks of unpredictable violence.

If someone finds you in their house, they will be afraid of what you will do. You will also be afraid of what you will do.

on giving blood

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 16:01:47 +0100

(I originally wrote this on Medium and cross-post it here for posterity.)

Once or twice a year, I take the bus to my local town hall to give blood. I bring the appointment letter and my donor card and I sit and wait and drink the mandatory big cup of water while pretending to read the health notes I’ve seen many times before. Then I go to a booth and answer a few questions about when I last travelled and whether I’m taking any medication, and they take a finger-prick blood sample to check my Iron levels (which is probably the most painful part of the whole procedure). Then I go and sit in another chair and wait to be put up on a folding bed where a nurse will put a big needle in my arm and drain out a great armful of person-liquor into a plastic bag.

I don’t have to do any of this, of course. I am not an especially charitable person in other aspects of my daily life, and here in the UK, there’s no fiscal incentive to donate blood — though once you’re done, there’s all the free orange squash, crisps and biscuits you can scoff. So why do I bother?

I’m sure sociologists have produced countless theories as to what motivates individuals towards selfless acts. It’s a fun question to pose, yet I’m not convinced there’s any great mystery here. It may seem like an inscrutable puzzle from a certain point of view, but on the level of the individual, I think most people understand quite well why they give blood.

Here are some of my own reasons:

My dad began donating about seven or eight years ago. I went with him at Christmas one year, when it was especially busy. He always used to insist that in the old days, you could get a free bottle of Guinness after making a donation to replenish your lost Iron — a rather tall story which was perhaps just an excuse to go to the pub afterwards. Still, I probably wouldn’t have gone at all if I didn’t have someone else to go with, and I suspect the same is true of many first-time donors. It wasn’t something we talked about, nor was it an opportunity for father-son bonding. It was just a thing we did. It was nice.

I like the NHS. This is another way of saying: I like the idea of the NHS. Free healthcare is one of the best things about living in the UK. I believe in a system of universal benefit which increasingly seems rather old-fashioned in the current political climate; one where individuals pay in according to their ability and take out according to their need. Blood donation is this in its purest form: I give because I can, and because I hope the same system will be there to look after me one day should I need it.

There is — dare I say it? — a certain masochistic pleasure in the act of donation itself. The needle going into me and the stuff going out. You feel something for sure, but it isn’t painful as such. It’s more like: oh, there is a thing coming out of my arm here that wasn’t there before. The first few times I went, the bleeding brought on an oddly pleasant sensation akin to gentle fatigue. A bit like having a couple of pints of beer at lunchtime. And I like to watch the blood bags rocking slowly back and forth on the electronic scales that hang below the beds. The latest models emit a cute little chirp when almost full that reminds me of Mario.

In the end, I suppose it is the personal aspect that brings me back every time. My dad passed away very suddenly in October last year. We hadn’t been to a session together for a while, but it’s still something that in my mind remains associated with him. And it’s this that makes me wonder, while I wait to go up on that folding bed, how many other donors do it because of something that happened to someone else they know; not a thing they might want to talk about, but something which quietly pushes them to be a better person in some small way when given the opportunity.

These days, my girlfriend and I go to give blood together. I hope he would still think it worthwhile.

the troll and I

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 21:10:00 +0100

I think I have lived long enough now that I say this with confidence: I am not a particularly ambitious person.

I have a pretty good job, but I’m not sure you’d call it a career. I’m not lonely. I’m often quite lazy, but I’m basically an active and conscientious person. I am shy, but not so much that it makes me unhappy. My interests are modest enough that I can fulfill them without any great risk to my wallet. I don’t want a new car or a house or to go on holiday right now, but I’m thinking about getting a new TV. My foresight is limited to a cloudy awareness of the next few weeks and I am no good at thinking about what I would like to do with my life.

The internet makes it quite easy to keep a peripheral awareness of people I used to know at school and university. Some of them are now reasonably successful. I look at them with a mixture of wonder, envy and confusion. It’s not that I am particularly jealous: it’s that I actually don’t understand how they managed it.

I try to make sense of these feelings with my own somewhat deterministic view of life. I’m inclined to believe that people turn out the way they are through the sum of all their experiences combined with the limits of their culture, the possibilities inherent in their society, and sheer good or bad luck.

In other words, most of the really important things that shape who we are in the broadest sense are defined by forces beyond our control. That people are afforded a modicum of success is only partly down to their own decisions; for the most part, they just happened to be in the right/wrong place at the right/wrong time at various stages in their lives.

Naturally I include myself in this theory: I consider myself extremely fortunate to live the kind of privileged life I do. I don’t really deserve any of it. I don’t believe that things happen for a reason; it’s just that being in a certain place at a certain time makes some kinds of things more likely to happen to you than others. There is no great plan.

(I feel like I have explained all this solipsistic pseudo-philosophical crap before on this blog, so apologies if I am repeating myself. I also find myself intensely aware that all my paragraphs are beginning with an ‘I’, which just tears me up inside, but it’s too late to do anything about that now.)

***

The direction of this entry might suggest a conclusion that it’s okay to lack ambition. After all, if the cards have been dealt in advance, then you might as well play your hand when the only alternative is to fold.

But I can’t reconcile what I think in my head with the troll in my heart. The voice that says some people have got to where they are in life because (to paraphrase Walter White) they applied themselves. Their lives might have been shaped in advance by factors beyond their control, but the fact remains that they took the right/wrong actions at the right/wrong moments that brought them to where they are today. They chose to work when I did not.

I want to write, and I want the things I write to be read and enjoyed by other people. That is an ambition that I have. It has no specific targets or goals, but it is a thing I want to do with my life because I’ve had reason to believe that it is achievable.

It’s not that I am averse to the work involved, though it is rendered more difficult by already having a job related to writing. It’s that my own lack of specific ambition means that I am easily satisfied by something like a well-received post on tumblr. Sending something of mine (what?) to a publisher or a magazine seems to me like a cursory, anachronistic gesture; not because I believe such media are outdated, but because I don’t really believe that it’s the kind of thing I ought to be doing.

(I don’t know what that means either.)

***

The troll in my heart hates writing. I don’t mean that he hates my writing – I mean that he hates all writing.

We are impatient with writing and writers, the troll and I. We’ve grown bored of the trappings of fiction, the desperate lies authors tells themselves to convince others of their own importance. I don’t only mean those self-evidently untrue platitudes that say that in a Great Novel, Every Word Must Count; we’ve come to find whole concepts like dialogue and character and motivation thoroughly tedious in most writing.

You’re just disaffected, you might say. You’re bored. You play too many video games. It’s the internet. Twitter is to blame. Perhaps you are right. On a good day, I can still believe that writing – any writing – is its own justification. But every day I watch row upon row of beautiful little byline photographs struggling to be recognised by someone in amongst the biggest slush pile ever known. Some of what I see is extraordinary and some of it is dross; after a while, the ratio doesn’t matter much. Somehow it still saddens the heart.

On gaming as escapism

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 23:30:00 +0100

On gaming as escapism:

I wrote a thing for Medium about video games and why I am suspicious of my own motivations.

(I’ve not forsaken you, tumblr; I just felt like a fling. It’s all very new and confusing. Do you like the style? Is there such a thing as cross-posting etiquette? Should I just put all my video game stuff over there instead? Who can say?)

there's always a lighthouse

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 20:15:00 +0100

I thought BioShock Infinite was marvelous. It’s a game which understands perfectly how to compose and curate the experience of playing a first-person shooter better than anything else I’ve played in a very long time. This is another way of saying that it doesn’t attempt to impersonate a cinematic or literary style in its storytelling; it builds upon a format established in the first System Shock and BioShock games, and takes that to a refined conclusion. It’s not a particularly inventive gaming experience, and so most of the problems I did have with it are really more like things that are weird about immersive FPS games: an oddly unresponsive world populated by automaton-like NPCs, the constant scrabbling about in odd little corners for health and ammo, the occasional pleasant moment of tranquility punctuated by sudden extreme violence.

It’s kind of crazy how they’ve got away with giving this game such a remarkable setting. By that I mean that there seems to have been relatively little discussion in the mainstream media about its political content. We’ve heard nothing from right-wing pundits (at least not in the UK) about how it’s a wishy-washy left-wing conspiracy to teach a revisionist version of imperial history to our children – and I kind of wish they would pick up on this stuff just so we could have a debate about it. (It also makes me extremely excited about what a BioShock game in a British context would look like.)

Perhaps they’ve ignored the politics because it’s only been promoted as an action game in a crazy city in the clouds. I caught a glimpse of the TV advert the other night while with my family; I mentioned I’d been playing it, and they were all surprised to hear that the game has anything to do with aspects of American history and racism. On the other hand, that stuff has been trailed for so long in the gaming press that we all knew what to expect when we saw an eight-foot cyborg with the face of George Washington wielding a minigun.

The plot is…odd. I’m surprised that its sheer oddness has not been mentioned more often. I mean, I like it, but it’s highly contrived and based around so many twists and turns that a big part of what kept me playing was a simple drive to find out what was going to happen next. (Which is a good thing.) It feels to me like the kind of thing that only a developer with a proven track record could get away with because it is pretentious. And I mean that in a good way because I don’t believe in using that word as a put-down.

The most important way in which it breaks from its predecessors was that the first two and a half BioShock games (including Minerva’s Den) had stories that were outlandish, but were at least both were founded on a pretty solid ground of sci-fi realism. There was no magic in those worlds, and the weirdest things that happened in them were science experiments gone wrong. BioShock Infinite changes all that. For a large part of the game, you feel like you can’t always trust the objectivity of what the player-character is seeing. You aren’t just steering a silent invisible camera through a world of stuff with your gun as your only means of interaction. And that’s a really interesting thing for a big game like this to be doing.

(A minor spoiler to follow.)

I also want to mention one way in which the plot disappointed me. As in the first game, there’s a dictatorial corporate presence in this world, and there’s also a union of rebels who set themselves up as a kind of resistance. At first you think the rebels might be friendly, but with a wearying inevitability, the game turns them against you, with the underlying implication being that if they were given power they would turn out just as badly (or worse) as their corporate rulers. As Alec Meer put it in his excellent review: ‘It continues BioShock’s tradition of trying (not always successfully, of course) to avoid moral black and white, but at the same time there is something odd about making people with an overwhelmingly correct grievance as monstrous as those they oppose’.

‘Odd’ is a probably the gentlest way of putting it. Yet on the other hand, I find it difficult to conceive of a BioShock game in which the player became the forefront of a revolution which was successful and largely bloodless; such a thing wouldn’t quite fit what these games are about. So what are they about? It’s not like the player ends up as an avatar of political centrism. Racism is self-evidently awful and unionised labour is not to be trusted – but there’s precious little to hold on to that’s good in the world.

Except I suppose that the game does place a remarkable degree of faith in the actions and decisions of the individual. Booker DeWitt isn’t always a pleasant person to be in control of, but he never does anything that places him beyond redemption. It feels like the only people these games have faith in is those who act as individuals, not as part of any group or movement, and in that regard it seems to have a purer and more patriotic faith in the American Dream than one might at first think. I always thought that Andrew Ryan emerged from the original game as a rather sympathetic character; like one of those beautiful and faintly stupid men from a Joseph Conrad novel, there was something redeeming about the good-hearted nobility of his dream, even if it was always doomed as a political concept.

you're pretty good

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 23:26:40 +0000

Over the last year or so I’ve been playing through all the main games in the Metal Gear Solid series. I thought the new HD collection would be a good place to start, but I couldn’t bring myself to start on that before playing the first instalment in the modern series which first came out way back in 1998. This turned out to be a pretty good decision, even though it was arguably much harder to finish than pretty much all the others.

The most common criticism of every game in this series is that the high seriousness of their plot is undermined by the total absurdity of their content. You could not possibly have a game with serious political and ideological themes which also features:

an antagonist possessed by the transplanted arm of our hero’s genetic twin,
a pack of indestructible wolves who will fall in love with you if you let them pee on the cardboard box in which you are hiding,
a boss made of bees,
the greatest soldier in history as a total babe in 1964 (who also beat Yuri Gagarin into space),
a boss whose initial distinguishing feature is her armpit hair,
strategic deployment of porno mags as a key weapon against elite super-soldiers,
a boss who can be defeated by turning off your console and not playing the game for a week,
a cyborg ninja chopping up giant robots with a sword clamped within his built-in cuban heels.

And so on. All this stuff (it could be said) dilutes the key themes of the game: the interplay between technology, security and privacy; the notion of personal autonomy within closed systems; the necessity of violence and the trauma of war; above all, the question of loyalty and what it means to be a soldier in the twentieth and twenty-first century.

The actual plot is far too complex to be satisfactorily summarised here. It’s a story which is endlessly convoluted through repeatedly doubling-back on its own conclusions; in each game, one reveal follows another until the ultimate shadow of a global, all-encompassing conspiracy is revealed. It’s a series whose preoccupations rival Thomas Pynchon in their paranoid obsession with secret agencies: instead of drugs, the explanation usually involves ‘nanomachines’, which become the most frequently deployed deus ex machina in the whole series.

Yet it has always seemed to me that the most ridiculous, overwrought aspects of the series only make its grandest themes more serious by contrast. After all, it never really made any serious claim to emulating realism. MGS has always revelled in its existence as a game before anything else, and it’s famous for frequently breaking the fourth wall in ways big and small. Characters throughout the series make frequent references to game mechanics and controls in their dialogue, the most notorious example being the Psycho Mantis boss battle in MGS1. But my favourite examples are the subtlest details, like the fact that in MGS4, the camera actually parts and swishes through long grass despite its having no real existence as an object in the game world.

Sometimes the games do try to be realistic. A remarkable attention to detail is devoted to Snake’s gun discipline during cutscenes, for example. But when it wants to be realistic, it does so deliberately and consciously because it is trying to tell us something about the character; it isn’t simply replicating an assumption inherited from the movies. Ultimately, realism is always subordinate to gameplay in this world so that when it comes to the actual business of shooting people, we are very much in a video game.

Despite the preponderance of gunplay, it’s hard for me to think of this series as a distinctively violent one. (This isn’t just because it’s possible to complete every game made since MGS2 without actually killing anyone.) Practically every aspect of these games is intensely stylised in a way that brings to mind Susan Sontag’s notes on ‘Camp’:

‘The whole point of Camp is to dethrone the serious. Camp is playful, anti-serious. More precisely, Camp involves a new, more complex relation to “the serious.” One can be serious about the frivolous, frivolous about the serious.’

This is exactly right. The po-faced seriousness with which the game delivers its silliest textural touches – what Steven Poole described as ‘the peculiarly satisfying way in which Metal Gear Solid’s iconic cardboard box flops down around Snake’ – pulls the game in two apparently contradictory directions, both of which are satisfying for different reasons. It is fun because it is serious because it is funny because it isn’t serious. As long as you don’t expect your entertainment to attain perfect consistency of tone, it is possible to enjoy the games both as entertainment and as a thoughtful reflection on modern times.

MGS is also camp in the superficial sense: the games are full of men who act like women and women who act like men, echoing Sontag’s notion of ‘going against the grain of one’s sex’. Another violent contrast in the game’s tone occurs in the characterisation of the female characters, who are both admired for their strengths while also being perved over for their looks at various times. Yet the pervy stuff is always tucked away under some kind of fold in the game so that it takes a deliberate choice on behalf of the player to take it in: holding a button to zoom in on a particularly alluring snippet of cleavage or butt seems to me like a wilfully camp gesture. None of the game’s women are meek or submissive, and one could even argue that virtually all of them emerge as expert manipulators of the men in the game’s world.

If we stick with Sontag’s definition of perceiving camp as understanding ‘Being-as-Playing-a-Role’ then everything seems to fall into place. Virtually every character in the series is built around some kind of predestined role; the story is simply a means by which we see this role either fulfilled or destroyed. Snake is not a soldier but a notional ‘soldier’ – he is a warrior abstracted, perfected. Or rather, he’s something like a small boy’s idea of a perfect soldier: you can even see it in his silly little punch-punch-kick combat routine which has been a hallmark of the series since the first game.

One could argue that where the Metal Gear games depart from Sontag’s definition is in their occasional reliance on sentimentality. There are moments throughout which are meant to be upsetting or moving that too frequently fall flat. For example, Emma’s death in MGS2 is somewhat derailed by Otacon’s sudden and rather weird confession that he once slept with his stepmother. Otacon is also the only character who succumbs to a fit of blubbing in virtually every game in the series, and this might seem to conflict with Sontag’s quoted camp assertion that: “One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing.”

But just because Otacon is crying, that doesn’t mean the player has to as well. Clearly it was the designer’s intention to affect the player at this point. But if we laugh at Otacon instead, it doesn’t necessarily reduce the totality of his experience, or of ours. Both occur as separate, valid reactions to the same scene. It’s in this regard that the series approaches the level of what Sontag calls Pure Camp: something made with genuinely serious intent which is both totally absurd and absolutely true in its own peculiar, good-hearted way.

the runway gods

Mon, 18 Mar 2013 23:14:36 +0000

It must be three or four times a week now that I see the little boy on my way to work. I leave the house between seven thirty and seven forty five in the morning, and I see a council minibus pull up and two men or women get out of the bus to help. I see a woman in a headscarf on her doorstep, and sometimes I will actually see them helping the boy (in his wheelchair) into the back of the minibus. But I’m walking, and I don’t ever stay long enough to watch them depart.

They take him to school, I suppose. Do they pick up other children as well? If so, I don’t see them. I think it is very admirable that all this is occurring. It makes me feel like I am in a society that would do this for someone. I also wonder how much it must cost to do all this every morning. And from there it is easy to see how prejudice sets in the thoughts of others who might pass by and witness the same thing. Here is a woman who (one could assume) might not be a British citizen, who might not be going to work, with her son who is such a burden on the state that he requires a special service just to get him to school. There are various conclusions that various different people could draw from this.

This is the political territory over which the three main parties in British politics currently debate – if you could call a relentless squabble over the same ground a ‘debate’. All that is required is the hint of somebody who is getting out more than they are putting in. The reality is irrelevant when perception is everything; politicians constantly mention how they must always be seen to be doing the right thing to the extent that most will choose this over actually doing the right thing every time.

I believe that the state has a responsibility to look after people in such a way that is not always dependent on their personal contributions to society. I am content to know that if ever I were in this woman’s position – or her son’s – that it would do the same for me. But I am not here trying to mount a defence of the welfare state. My opinion of the little situation I see every week is basically already pre-formed by my existing political views, which are in turn the product of my background and education. Perhaps this is another way of saying that I have never sought to rationalise my own opinions to myself.

This is not to say that someone with a different background or education might not share those views. All I am trying to point out is how easy it must be to come to a certain set of assumptions about a general situation based on anecdotal evidence which is not even actually an anecdote, not even a thing that happened to you; only the most fleeting, momentary of impressions. And perhaps it is the sum of these impressions above and beyond any facts or situations we might actually encounter that shape our notion of the society around us.

***

On the days when I choose to take the bus to the tube station, I sometimes see another passenger reading the Daily Mail. This is not such a common occurrence as you might think, even though the Daily Mail is very popular. Most people on public transport in London don’t choose to read a newspaper on their commute. They just pick up whatever is handed to them at the station, and so inevitably the two free papers dominate: in the mornings people read the Metro, which is fairly light stuff – like a summary of yesterday’s Twitter – while on the way home people read the Evening Standard, which is a little more serious in its intentions and has a rather warm relationship with the current mayor.

Paying for a morning paper is no longer something people do just to have something to read; it is a sign that you are discerning. You have chosen to pay for an alternative. A sign of what? Who can tell. This man wears a pinstripe suit and a rather spivvy slicked-back haircut. The parody of an investment banker. Maybe.

But what do I know. I have known people who read newspapers different from the ones I read and the one thing we had in common was a healthy distrust of the printed word. It is a common attitude in our liberal press to assume that tabloid readers share the prejudices of their reading material. I think this is mistaken, and perhaps the cause of more tension than might otherwise be the case. People pick up these things because they appeal to them for a variety of reasons. If they agreed with every word it would spoil the fun.

Of course the papers also print things that are wrong and actively pernicious and cruel, and often people do believe these things. Some people might behave in undesirable ways as a result of things that the media says and does. But it suits publishers to exaggerate the differences between publications, and to imply that the readers of their product (whatever it might be) are fundamentally different to the people around them. And this is more the case than ever when everyone else on the train is reading the same paper. Wouldn’t you like to be seen reading something different? Don’t you think it makes you special? How different are you feeling right now?

***

A new series of advertisements has been appearing on the tube recently. They’re for Heathrow airport, but not in the way that you might think. There’s always been ads for Heathrow on the tube promoting the airport as a better alternative to Gatwick and Stanstead. But these adverts are different because they are explicitly promoting something which has been regarded as a political minefield for quite some time.

‘Let’s build on strength’ is the tagline. This more literal than you might think. It means: let’s make the airport bigger. It is already one of the world’s busiest. The owners have been demanding a third runway for years, but the issue has always been complicated by the necessity of demolishing homes to make space, and by the multiplicity of flight paths which already criss-cross the densest, richest corner of England. Many Conservative politicians came to power on local promises not to support a third runway at the airport.

But the issue has not really gone away, and now the atmosphere is changing. It’s almost as though the exercise of democracy were a temporary inconvenience rather than a reality for the developers. Boris Johnson, the Mayor of London, has expressed support for a wholly new airport far east of London out in the Thames Estuary – pie in the sky stuff, perhaps, but a potent legacy project at a time when he is being seriously considered as a popular candidate for the next party leader if David Cameron is deposed at or before the next election. Despite the fact that London already has five airports that bear the city’s name, we are told repeatedly and insistently that Britain needs more airport capacity in the south-east – so if not here, where?

I find this poster egregious and objectionable for all kinds of reasons. There is the snappy corporate grammar of the the header; not wrong in a way that I can quite pin down, but weird regardless. It seems to imply that the place is some kind of sentient machine which ‘lands’ business much as a fisherman might trawl for fish.

I’m not sure who is meant to be impressed by the idea that ‘foreign business’ can be reduced to a parade of CEOs who have all presumably hired the worst car service in the world. There’s that glass-eyed, over-optimistic look in the faces of the drivers, and the whole thing only becomes all the more unsettling once you realise that everyone else in the picture is blurred out with their back turned to the camera. It’s almost as if they didn’t count.

‘Let’s build on strength.’ The most important thing to realise about this tagline is that it is not about us. The advertisement is not asking anything of you except admission of its superiority, its dominance. This is not an invitation to anything other than acceptance.

The airport is not one of us. The airport has its own desires. The runway gods keep their own dreams. They are strong, and they want to be stronger. They’ve got more, so they want more. This to them is only the natural order of things. They are not going away.

nsfw

Sun, 03 Mar 2013 21:50:12 +0000

My gf is trying to write an essay about how technology changes the way we write. She wants to mention tumblr. I suggested that what makes tumblr different from other blogging platforms is the ease with which you can post a variety of media without worrying about where it might be hosted, and the instantaneous nature of feedback. It has a higher information turnover than anywhere else, I said, even while I knew that probably wasn’t true and that ‘information turnover’ isn’t a real or meaningful thing. People don’t want to read long-form content, I said, feeling inwardly disgusted at myself for even using those words.

Later, we watched an episode of Portlandia. One sketch showed the editor of a newspaper taken over by a couple of hip young link aggregators; forced to turn away from journalism, he scores the most hits ever on their site with a three-word tweet. ‘Charlize Theron NSFW’, he wrote. It was not the funniest thing they’ve ever done on that show perhaps because it was so obvious. But it is a very good-hearted show, which is partly why I like it. The show makes it very clear that the editor is a good person, despite the things he has to to do for work. It is not a cruel show.

***

I had a thought the other day. I thought: I don’t really have a social life. I go out sometimes with my gf, but I don’t have any regular social engagements with friends. That is something I would like to do, I thought. So I thought I would set up a games club at my office. For board games, mainly – I don’t mean Monopoly and Risk and all that junk – I mean proper modern board games. Settlers of Catan? See, I know that one. That’s a board game.

The problem is that I don’t really know anything about these games. I don’t own any and would have no idea which ones to buy. The other problem is I don’t particularly want to do anything with my life and I hate the thought that I might be somehow interfering with other people and their right to not want to do anything with their lives.

(It was only after I’d had this thought that I suddenly remembered that this was something that I have already done in my life. Here was a thing that at the time had seemed like such a big and important thing, and I’d almost forgotten about it! Even now I can’t remember what it was like to be that person who did those things. It seems totally inexplicable but it is in fact quite banal. Like everyone, I have done many things in my life which were once incredibly important to me, but which now seem unthinkably strange. I’ve been a lot of people, and sadly it seems inevitable that I will become many more.)

When I was very young I ran a games club at school. Admittedly, we didn’t play a wide range of games, but we did play an awful lot of Space Hulk because it was simple and fun (and it was my kit so they needed me even if they didn’t like me) and even the most rebellious twelve year-old can be interested by the idea of space dudes battling an endless parade of horrible monsters. More appealing to me was the idea that you could play as the monsters.

I don’t play games of any kind with other people very much any more. Gaming is not a thing I am used to sharing with close friends, and playing with random people online tends to make me despair for the future of humanity. The rare exceptions when I enjoy multiplayer are in games like Dark Souls and Journey, which forbid players from hooking up with their friends and encourage them to forge relationships through unusual strategies implicit in the mechanics. I love co-op gaming, but so rare are the moments when everything comes together that for the most part it hardly seems worth the effort to get along with strangers.

Amusingly, this is more or less analogous to how I deal with real people. Most relationships are not worth the effort, I think. I am aware that this is an awful and stupid thing to write, but regardless it is a pretty good summary of how I feel and act. Not that I have to feel good about it.

***

It often occurs to me that I would be a a better person if I were more interested in everything. I recently read a brilliant piece of unpublished writing in the New Yorker (paywall) by Joseph Mitchell, a famous and long-running staff writer at that magazine:

‘What I really like to do is wander aimlessly in the city. I like to walk the streets by day and by night. It is more than a liking, a simple liking – it is an aberration. Every so often, for example, around nine in the morning, I climb out of the subway and head toward the office building in midtown Manhattan in which I work, but on the way a change takes place in me – in effect, I lose my sense of responsibility – and when I reach the entrance to the building I walk right on past it, as if I had never seen it before. I keep on walking, sometimes for only a couple of hours but sometimes until deep in the afternoon, and I often wind up a considerable distance away from midtown Manhattan – up in the Bronx Terminal Market maybe, or over on some tumbledown old sugar dock on the Brooklyn riverfront, or out in the weediest part of some old weedy old cemetery in Queens. It is never very hard for me to think up an excuse that justifies me in behaving this way (I have a great deal of experience in justifying myself to myself) – a headache that won’t let up is a good enough excuse, and an usually bleak and overcast day is as good an excuse as an unusually balmy and springlike day. Or it might be some horrifying or humiliating thought that came into my mind while I was lying awake in the middle of the night and that keeps coming back – some thought about the swiftness of time in its flight, for example, or about old age itself, or about death in general and death in particular, or about the possibility (which is far more horrifying to me than the possibility of a nuclear war) that after death many of us may find out (and quite rudely, too, as a friend of mine who was lying on his deathbed in a hospital at the time once remarked) that the eternal and everlasting flames of Hell actually exist’.

It is easy (for me at least) to read this and think that the author was a superior person to me in pretty much every respect. Look at him with his penetrating intelligence and his refusal to simply go to work like the rest of us, choosing instead to amble across town, absorbing whatever takes his fancy and rejecting what does not. The perfect flâneur; a discerning curator for our times? Well, perhaps it remains easier for a writer at the New Yorker to justify himself to his superiors in this way than it would be for you or I at our places of work.

But still: all Mitchell did was walk around and write about the things he saw and the things he was interested in. He went to mass in all kinds of different churches just to see what they were like and because they would have him. Whether or not he believed in what he was witnessing was presumably irrelevant. An atheist might say these things are not interesting because they are untrue; perhaps Mitchell would reply that they are interesting exactly because they are untrue, and because they are different, and because they describe different ways of fulfilling a variable and complex human need for community.

And yet what did he actually learn from his exploits? Here is an extract from the biography on his Wikipedia entry:

‘From 1964 until his death in 1996, Mitchell would go to work at his office on a daily basis, but he never published anything significant again. In a remembrance of Mitchell printed in the June 10, 1996, issue of The New Yorker, his colleague Roger Angell wrote: “Each morning, he stepped out of the elevator with a preoccupied air, nodded wordlessly if you were just coming down the hall, and closed himself in his office. He emerged at lunchtime, always wearing his natty brown fedora (in summer, a straw one) and a tan raincoat; an hour and a half later, he reversed the process, again closing the door. Not much typing was heard from within, and people who called on Joe reported that his desktop was empty of everything but paper and pencils. When the end of the day came, he went home. Sometimes, in the evening elevator, I heard him emit a small sigh, but he never complained, never explained.”

Did he know everything or nothing? Or did he learn everything but then became sad because he knew everything, and knew there was nothing more worth writing? It’s a mystery. To me, an idiot who knows nothing more about him than a snippet on some website, it seems a sad story. Yet I don’t know that it is. Maybe he was all right after all.

We might wish we had Mitchell’s apparent mental freedom. Certainly it is easy to point to individuals long gone and think that they had it all sussed out. But the thing I’ve quoted above is only a tiny window into the brain of one man who himself only had the narrowest perspective on one of the greatest cities in the world. Why him? What can he have to tell us about anything? And what a mistake it would be to think that either of the passages quoted would tell us about him.

‘Never complained, never explained,’ — words to live by.

Perhaps the most interesting room in Castlevania: Symphony of...

Sun, 17 Feb 2013 15:11:00 +0000

Perhaps the most interesting room in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night (a classic for the original Playstation) is the confessional booth. It contains nothing except the aforementioned furnishing; there is no dialogue, no hint as to what is required, no explicit puzzle to be sold. As soon as you enter the music switches to a short loop of a dull, haunting electronic pulse (as featured in the video above). It is a tune found nowhere else in the game.

There is only one thing to do in this room and that is to choose one of the chairs to sit in. A feature of the game is that if the player stops before almost any chair and presses the up button on the D-pad, Alucard (the player character) will sit in the chair, his posture either upright with his feet on the floor or reclining slightly with his legs crossed in a faintly louche fashion.

I couldn’t remember which side of a real confessional booth is for the confessor and which for the sinner, so I sat on the right. A ghost appeared – a woman in a red dress. She sat in the opposite side of the booth. The curtains closed. And then a spear thrust through the opposite side of the booth and stabbed me in the chest.

After a little more experimentation I found that there’s three or four different ghosts which can visit you in this room. At least two of them will attack you. But the purpose of the others is unclear. One of them is an old man who just sits down and, a moment later, shakes his head and crosses himself, then leaves. Sometimes nobody appears.

Symphony of the Night is interesting to me because it is a game full of secrets. Hidden rooms and precious, powerful relics abound. Most of these have now been extensively mapped and documented by veteran players. But the confessional room remains a mystery. Nobody seems to know what it is for. This seems to me to be directly contrary to so much of what passes for game design today.

I’ve tried several times to write about Dark Souls and what the...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 21:02:33 +0000

I’ve tried several times to write about Dark Souls and what the game means to me and every time I have failed. I end up veering into unnecessary detail about the myriad concealed systems in the game, how the key thing about it is that so much is hidden away from the player from the start, how you can only really discover everything through patient trial-and-error or by spending hours poring over the wiki or fan forums to try and establish once and for all whether Divine or Occult weapons are the more effective, or whether the Great Wolf Sif can really be spared his sad end.

What you see happening in the video above is an unintended consequence of the game’s unusual multiplayer mode. When you have attained your full human form in Dark Souls, you can summon other players to help you by touching a glowing summon sign left by them in the game world — however, you can also be invaded by other players who want to kill you and steal your humanity. What you see above is a player who has almost finished the game, but who hasn’t leveled up their character at all (a very difficult thing to do). This enables them to invade new players who are still at a very low level, but with the advantage of powerful spells and equipment that can only be gained later in the game.

I have no particular interest in fighting other players, but this video illustrates perfectly why I love the multiplayer component of Dark Souls. Whether you summon or are summoned, invade or are invaded, you never know exactly what is going to happen. Since players cannot communicate beyond a series of vague, predefined character animations, the intent of another player can only be measured through their behaviour. Most of the time this is fairly conventional, but occasionally something totally weird and apparently inexplicable will happen.

***

This month has not been so great. I wrote previously about how over Christmas we discovered leaks in the roof. We are still waiting for the roofers to come fix this. Not long after that we began to discover that the boiler wasn’t producing enough hot water; that was expensive to fix, but it was fixed. Since then we’ve had builders in the house: the floors are being replaced, and we’re having an old chimney opened so a log-burning stove can be put in. This has entailed moving every object we own into a giant heap which occupies almost all of the back bedroom. The work progresses well, but slowly. I have my doubts about the old chimney, whether it’ll need a liner, nightmares about smoke seeping through the walls. And then yesterday the boiler failed altogether.

It is snowing outside, the temperature lingering around freezing point. This morning we filled the bath with pans and kettles of hot water, and our living space is now limited to a half-floored living room, bathing in the small radius of a powerful electric halogen heater. I have spent a long time trying not to be the kind of blogger who writes about these things. I know from experience that most people have enough problems of their own that they can’t be bothered to hear about somebody else’s minutiae. It’s not like my problems are even particularly interesting or dramatic. But they are just enough of a recurring irritation to stop me thinking about anything else. I would just like to be in a place where nothing is broken for a while.

***

It’s become fashionable amongst a certain kind of gamer to speak mockingly of video games offering a ‘power fantasy’ for players. This is to say that they allow people who might otherwise be disenchanted with their everyday existence a chance to exert their will on an invented world, usually in a way that is terribly violent and destructive. Dark Souls was generally received as a game which works against this trend because of its incredible difficulty, unforgiving design and deliberate obscurity.

Certainly I never feel entirely at ease while playing it. And yet when I started my second playthrough recently, returning to it felt like sinking into a familiar old chair. I like the feeling of mastering something to the point where even though I know more or less what is coming next, I can still be surprised when something extraordinary happens. I don’t want total control over the game world. I just want to feel that from time to time I have achieved something, made things a little better, pushed back the darkness if only for a while.

What fascinates me about the video above is how much of the player’s power comes from theatrics. He moves slowly, wears an intimidating armour set, and at one point even waves the skull lantern, despite it having no use in combat at all. Actually, there is no reason why the newbies being invaded couldn’t fight back; indeed most of them only die because they are so startled by this apparition that they don’t even know where to begin.

I too must have died thousands of times in this game because I spent too long circling for a window of opportunity that never came; far better to close the distance quickly and give them the best you’ve got. It only remains for me now to apply this philosophy to the more difficult business of my actual life.

weaponized curiosity

Sun, 06 Jan 2013 23:32:00 +0000

At work on Friday, I stumbled on this article by Adrian Lamo and the accompanying interview on the Guardian website. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since then. In it, Lamo attempts to explain why he made the decision to turn in Bradley Manning after a now-infamous IM conversation. I was a little surprised to see this published now, but perhaps that’s only naivety on my part: I didn’t realise the extent to which Lamo is still regarded as a traitor in certain regions of the internet.

I have a lot of sympathy for Manning, and continue to follow his case with interest. I am not particularly interested in discussing whether or not what Lamo did was right. But I find his defence a fascinating piece of writing. It really does seem honest and heartfelt, yet it is intensely inflexible in its reasoning. It’s as though the author were trying to construct a totally impregnable fortress against his critics, without realising that in doing so he has created more gaps in his defences than he could ever hope to fill.

‘In 2003, when I was 22 years old, I spent a period of time wanted by the FBI, for crimes I felt to be well-intentioned, even warranted. Spending a good deal of time on the Internet exercising what might be best-defined as weaponized curiosity, I’d decided that, as long as I was engaging in unauthorized network intrusion – some call it “hacking”; I personally never did – I might as well go about it in what I believed to be a socially responsible manner.’

Most peculiar of all is the author’s tendency towards oblique linguistic constructs. Consider ‘weaponized curiosity’, a slick phrase which reminds me of the paranoid atmosphere of those post-9/11 days where words like securitization became increasingly prominent. To me it seems to contradict his earlier claim that his online activities were essentially well-intentioned because it suggests that his intrusions were no longer explorations for their own sake: any weapon must have a target of some kind, whether real or perceived.

Yet in another light, perhaps it isn’t such a contradiction. This idea of the ‘good-intentioned weapon’ is a deeply American construct, not only in pop culture (from the heroic high plains drifter to the noble captains of the USS Enterprise) but also in terms of international affairs. Though America is nothing if not ‘weaponized’ in every sense of the word, we are supposed to believe thishas no bearing on its moral status. One sees it reflected also in the attitude to gun control, and the deranged logic that says only ‘good guns’ can drive out ‘bad guns’. I guess we are meant to think of Lamo as one of the ‘good guns’.

‘The very reason I was reading these things is that they were beyond the ken of the public, and involved matters that I sometimes knew very little about. I tried to be socially conscious about what I was doing; throwing what I saw to the wind wholesale for public consumption was never an option – any more than going in for the sake of deleting it would have been.’

‘The public would never know how to use it safely, or be informed about its context. As a raw data dump, they literally would not have been able to handle the truth – if in fact I had any truth to give.’

Is it really true that the only reason information is kept secret is to protect people from themselves? I’m sure we can all agree that secrecy and security, as general principles, are important and necessary in civilised society. But to argue that they should be deployed consistently to protect an untrustworthy, incapable public seems to me a deeply paranoid, authoritarian logic. And who is this ‘public’, anyway?

Yet I can’t fully convince myself that this is entirely wrong, either. After all, when Manning’s files were released, there was a sense in which there was simply too much data for any one organisation to process. The Guardian had to crowdsource its readers into combing through and verifying the hundreds of thousands of documents available. And even when the stories emerged, there were too many for the average news cycle to cope with, leaving no way for the average consumer to latch on to any particular controversy. To many it seemed like an endless catalogue of horror about which nothing could possibly be done. Stories that might otherwise have run for weeks soon fell into obscurity.

If we accept that there’s no truth in facts without context (a big if) and that anyone approaching said facts would only be able to misunderstand them in the light of their own personal prejudice, then the only conceivable outcome is a giant mess where everyone is interpreting everything in a different way. And that’s basically what happened and what will go on happening. How could it be any other way? Would we even want it to be any other way?

Lamo describes his choice as ‘…between interdicting the freedom of the man in the IM window, or gambling that no part of literally hundreds of thousands of classified documents would intersect harmfully with the life of any person affected by their contents…’. This is one of those neat little philosophical situations to which the only reasonable response is to refuse the binary nature of the choice at hand. Things are never that simple.

Consider it another way. An alternate-reality Lamo – one who did not give up Manning – might have characterised his choice as follows: either interdicting one man’s freedom out of simple respect for authority and the force of law, or allowing the release of classified documents detailing the myriad ways in which the greatest arsenal in history had already ‘intersected harmfully’ with the lives of those both innocent and otherwise.

But this choice seems to me equally absurd. You cannot weigh the lives of those who have already suffered against those who might be put at risk. The more I think about it, the more impossible the choice seems.

What would you have done? What would I have done? It is so easy from our point of view, with all our ideals and opinions but none of the responsibility, none of the context. I think what Bradley Manning did was stupid, dangerous and incredibly brave. I think that what has been done to him is immoral even if it is legal. I think Wikileaks is, on balance, a good thing to have in the world. But how does this help me know what I would have done?

xmas

Sat, 29 Dec 2012 18:04:00 +0000

He kept asking when they were coming to fix his head. Can you see, he asked while parting his hair and pointing, scratching with a fingernail. Can you see them? Oh yes sir, they said. Then they retreated below stairs to talk.

He always insists that he must not be disturbed, she said, but whenever I come up with his afternoon cup he’s got nothing on the desk in front of him except the same old stacks. And since he won’t let me dust the dust is so thick you can tell he never touches it.

Did you call them? When are they coming to look at his head?

I left a message. They must be very busy at this time of year. But I’ve told him they’re coming Wednesday. So he has something to look forward to. The pain will be gone by then, no doubt.

Do you think he’s really got a hole in his head?

Holes. More than one hole.

I can never see what he’s pointing at.

***

Already it feels like my life can be neatly divided in two by what happened at the end of October. It’s like BC and AD: any recollection of anything done this year is immediately postscripted by a silent mental note that either (a) this happened when my dad was still alive or (b) it didn’t. Even things which have nothing at all to do with him. And it’s not even regretful. It’s just a thing.

It keeps raining. My roof is leaking. Not seriously, I think, but enough to make me anxious. It is to be expected. It’s an old roof, probably as old as the building itself. I keep looking at the one place in the wall where it gets damp and it feels like a weight on my chest. Not this again. Every day while it rains I go up into the loft and move around the tupperware boxes for a while where I think it might’ve been coming in. It is not consistent. We have tried to fix it before but it keeps coming back from somewhere else. I do not understand why we can’t just have a roof made of one huge single piece of plastic, a giant inverted-V under which we could all live. It keeps raining.

Certainly part of this is me thinking that my dad would know exactly what to do. But actually I know that he wouldn’t. He and I were both prone to procrastination, to missing things that we should have seen because they were right in front of us all the time. These days I am almost constantly uneasy with the thought that I ought to be doing something more productive, while simultaneously feeling totally unable or incapable of doing anything that would really help anyone, least of all myself.

***

We went to Boston in September. On the top floor of the MIT Museum in Cambridge is an exhibition dedicated to the work of the sculptor Arthur Ganson. I had never encountered his work before then. He makes these little machines that can only do one thing. I was utterly spellbound in that very particular way that only occurs when you come upon something without any expectations or indeed any knowledge of its prior existence.

A small wooden chair bounces irregularly back, forth and around a little plastic cat. A wishbone walks along a surface, dragging behind it a huge, strange and delicate piece of machinery. Scraps of paper are fashioned into a flock of birds which flap and soar in simple, harmonic rhythms. Perhaps my favourite is the machine which has no purpose other than to oil itself endlessly from the bath in which it sits. I don’t know why but I found all these things extremely moving.

When I was a kid I wanted to build machines like these but I didn’t know how. I like purposeful, purposeless machines because I can relate to them. I am a machine for being myself. I can do nothing else.

When I was a kid I remember sitting in the back seat of the car...

Thu, 20 Dec 2012 21:20:00 +0000

When I was a kid I remember sitting in the back seat of the car when we were going somewhere and finding something fixed to look at on the outside of the window – a speck of bird poop or some other stubborn mark – and then moving my head and eyes to ‘move’ that speck in, around, over and through aspects of the passing world outside. It would dart through a gap between buildings, duck below a roadside, bounce along a row of fence posts. There was no particular logic to this game beyond what I devised in the moment, and I never told anyone about it.

This is basically the principle of Super Hexagon, a game for iOS, PC and Mac. You pilot a thing through other things and try not to crash into any thing. But here the perspective is cleverly inverted; you are no longer travelling through the screen towards a visible vanishing point, but rather the little triangle you control seems to be travelling out of the middle of the screen ‘towards’ the player. Imagine the middle of your screen as the furthest tip of an infinitely long cone out of which the pointer is forever trying to escape, like a penny rolling in reverse from one of those black hole spinners in a science museum. (I’m aware that this doesn’t really make any sense since in this case the penny isn’t really ‘moving’ up along any side quicker than any other, but this is how it seems to me, at least, and the only way I can think about it without my brain hurting.)

***

A lot of people who are interested in video games as a serious subject are probably also interested in films and books. It’s easy to approach games with certain ideas of artistic meaning as it is expressed in these media: here is ‘good writing’, or a plot which moves and excites; there is a flat character, or an ‘implausible’ setting. Yet when games show ambition in these regards, we hold them up to the best books and movies and they inevitably seem unsatisfying.

It is harder to talk about pure abstraction in games and what it might mean. A lot of people would say that a game like Super Hexagon means nothing at all; not only that, but they would actively discourage any interpretation of the game beyond simply the pursuit of the highest score. They might call it an intensely pure form of gaming which can only be enjoyed through a considerable amount of painful and unsteady practice, much like a sport or a craft. But no sport or craft is treated as though it were only ever about itself.

Super Hexagon is not entirely abstract. It is a kind of maze. You have to find your way out, and though it seems endless, there is an end. Mazes are only hard when you cannot see the full extent of the maze, or when the walls keep changing around you; both of these factors are what make this game intensely difficult. In fact, the ending is so hard to get to that most players will probably never see it (which is itself a radical gesture in 2012).

We have ways of thinking about mazes that we have inherited from thousands of years of religious culture. Mazes are only one way we have of considering abstract patterns and how we might apply ourselves to them; you are here, now find your way to here. And beware of here. Gaming inherits all these old ways of thinking about shapes and symbols, but it also adds something new.

Jenn Frank wrote a beautiful and moving article about trying to explain her role in the game’s creation to her mother shortly before her death. It is about Super Hexagon and yet not at all about it. It’s as though the game were present but in the background, looming over proceedings like Kubrick’s black monolith. What is it doing there? What is it doing to us?

Games like this arrive alien and fully-formed. We do not have any tradition to tell us that Super Hexagon is about finding God, or life, or death. Nor do we need any tradition. Like any work of art, its meaning is not contained in the sum of its components, but in the aura of the work as a whole. Nobody can tell you what it means until you figure it out for yourself.

missmystery302: I don’t know if she is being serious or...

Sat, 15 Dec 2012 16:43:00 +0000

missmystery302:

I don’t know if she is being serious or sarcastic, but it definitely exposes the ignorance that people have these days

I’m not reblogging this in response to any comment anyone else has made, or because I think it is particularly funny (though it is quite amusing). I’m reblogging it because I know exactly where that place is and it’s extremely weird to see something so familiar appear quite randomly on your dashboard.

It was clearly filmed on Oak Road in the Ealing Broadway centre, which is just around the corner from where I used to live in Ealing. Here’s the closest I could get on Google Street View, though you can’t see much because it’s only a short little pedestrianised street down which the brave little camera-robot could not venture.

The shop visible immediately behind Stephen Fry is called Rumbles, and it’s the only one in that image which is still there today. It sells gift cards and jewellery and cushions and little stocking-filler books. I’ve been in there many times. The restaurant with the white plastic chairs is now a branch of the Costa coffee chain. I can’t recall what the other two businesses have become but I definitely recognise the pattern in those reddish paving stones.

One thing you cannot see is the large statue of a horse which dominates this little street. I’ve always assumed it was put up by the nearby branch of Lloyds TSB (with their somewhat apocalyptic black horse logo). I remember that when I was a child, a parent might lift me carefully up onto the back of that horse, though of course I had to be careful because the metal of the statue would get very hot in summer, and it was a very long way down.

There are two other shops on that street which I remember: a shoe repair and key cutting place, which cut the keys I still use in my house today; and a good chocolate shop called Leonidas, where I would often get chocolates in a little gold box as a gift for my parents. I’m reasonably sure that this street is also where the first branch of Starbucks opened in Ealing (though there are now at least two others).

It was weird to see this on my dashboard, but it’s not unusual for me to glimpse my locality on TV. If you watch carefully in the last episode of the most recent series of ‘The Thick of It’, you’ll catch glimpses of a nearby police station and an alleyway behind my local supermarket. I’ve always assumed that this is partly thanks to my proximity to Ealing Studios (which was once famous for movies like ‘The Ladykillers’) and because the BBC at White City is only a few more miles down the road in the other direction.

But what an unusual feeling it was for me to recognise somewhere so quickly, and not even from anything quite so concrete as a street sign: what caught my eye was not the details of the image, but a very particular arrangement of environmental textures. After having walked along that pavement and past those shops so many times, something about its mise en scène has become imprinted on my brain. I imagine that if I were now told that this was actually filmed elsewhere, I’d feel much like an android told that their earliest memories were simply a convenient fiction.

Malls never used to be a very British thing. For most of my...

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 15:04:00 +0000

Malls never used to be a very British thing. For most of my childhood they were generally referred to as ‘shopping centres’, and were quite small and unremarkable compared to the classic American Mall. They consisted of all the same shops you’d see on an average British high street clustered around a supermarket, and maybe a department store. They offered nothing much beyond that – you’d be lucky to find a food court, for example, though most would probably offer at least a Santa’s Grotto come December. Basically, with a few notable exceptions (the Bentall Centre in Kingston, or the massive Bluewater complex in Kent) they weren’t really considered a destination. They were just a place where you went to go get stuff you needed.

Things are changing. The arrival of Westfield London was something new. It wasn’t just that the floor space was huge – the largest in Europe upon opening – but it was a different experience to the old shopping centres. Everything is curated at Westfield. The old middle-class stalwarts are still there (Waitrose, M&S, Dorothy Perkins, Debenhams, etc) but there are also high-end shops you wouldn’t normally see anywhere (the Apple Store! Gucci! Prada! etc) and other exciting American brands infrequently seen on these shores. There’s a pretty good food court. They put on concerts and premieres with people who are actually famous (also the Kardashians). None of this was really a thing ten years ago.

You are far more likely to be hassled by sales people in Westfield. Previously I have to assume this was only an issue for women in somewhere like the make-up floor of a department store – you might call it a permissible zone for unwanted interference. Once you’re out of the shop, you’re safe. But that’s not the case in a place like Westfield because almost every scrap of available ground in between shops has been colonised by little semi-temporary stands. And because people don’t really tend to approach those places uninvited, the clerks find themselves with a lot of work to do. Here, as in the malls of the future, there is nowhere to hide from the mighty up-sell.

A lot of the stands offer beauty treatments and hair or nail services, or they try to offer you a free sample of food, being (in the words of Kevin Smith) an ‘autonomous unit for mid-mall snacking’. I recently witnessed a thing where you could go and sit on a little stool and stare at a video screen six inches away from your face which displays forcefully relaxing imagery (pups, kittens, etc) while you listen to something on headphones (nature sounds? Bach? the new Bieber album?) and a comely maiden or fellow massages your shoulders and you try to forget everything about yourself, I guess.

Other stands are purely promotional. Sometimes there are cars. The strangest thing I’ve seen lately was a little fake-restaurant counter which ‘sold’ only free bowls of Cheerios and other Nestle cereals. A lot of people were taking them up on this offer, and there they sat, row upon row, eating their cereal. I suppose you had to be there.

A lot of the old shopping centres are still around, but their target audience is changing. Most people can’t do their basic weekly shopping at a Westfield because it’s expensive, and you can’t buy anything useful there. If you ever happen to be in Shepherd’s Bush, you can easily compare the two styles by walking over the road from the West 12 centre (with its Morrisons and its Poundland, its Wetherspoons pub and its JD Sports) and across the street into Westfield, with its polished floors and its plasma screen advertisements, its ice rink and its 5D cinema, its Banana Republic and its Jamie Oliver restaurant. The difference is stark, and says a great deal about the future of Britain.

product review

Sat, 01 Dec 2012 16:39:00 +0000

The only premium skincare product I use regularly is this moisturising aftershave by L’Occitane. It’s almost £20 for a 150ml tube, which is more than I would pay for pretty much any other toiletry, but I use very little and can easily make one of these last a couple of months. Probably the only thing I ever learned from the brief appearance of ‘Queer Eye for the Straight Guy’ in the UK is the advantage conferred by moisturising immediately after shaving, rather than splashing some painful alcoholic solution about my visage afterwards. And it is actually not that easy to find a moisturising aftershave for men which both soothes and smells good in your average high street pharmacist.

I’ve read that the regular use of certain cosmetic products can make the user’s skin dependent upon them, which worries me a little. But I can relate. If I ever leave for work in the morning without having washed my face with a good quality bar soap, for example, my nose feels dreadfully sticky and oily all morning. Several times I have found myself locked in a bathroom stall at half past ten in the morning, scrubbing my face alternately with wet and dry paper towels in an attempt to be rid of what many so perversely insist on calling their ‘natural oils’. My body secretes a great many ‘natural’ substances and I would prefer not to be smeared in any of them.

The key thing is that the cream is still on your skin once you’ve rubbed it in. It doesn’t go anywhere. Look. Put your nose here. You can smell it, can’t you? It doesn’t go anywhere. Unless you wash it off. Most men, I suppose, aim to smell like nothing in particular: advertisements for our hygiene products don’t sell us the scent of lavender or cedar or hop flowers; they sell us attraction in the abstract sense. But why not smell good? The idea of smelling of nothing is a nonsense. Nobody smells of nothing.

One might as well try to be nothing. And yet the idea of being nothing has appealed to me more than once. An alternative marketing strategy for a new brand of aftershave or eau de toilette for men might even focus on its perceived ability to make the wearer effectively invisible in awkward social situations. Imagine a series of Larry David moments effortlessly defused by this charming, silent, helpful stranger in our midst: not particularly well dressed, not even all that attractive, maybe a little portly for his age; and yet so kind! Such a gentleman to the extent that nothing in his demeanour gives away even a hint of attraction or repulsion, nothing betrays even the faintest emotional crease.

It is not so much what I am trying to prove with my choice of moisturiser as what I am trying to hide. A few weeks ago we went away, my girlfriend and I, on a little trip to a little cottage on the south coast of England. We wanted nothing more than to spend a few days in one another’s company, away from the responsibilities of home and London’s noise and filth. But I forgot to bring my aftershave.

It’ll be all right, she said. What do you really need that stuff for anyway. Here, you can use some of my moisturiser if your face is sore. You don’t even really need to shave. When’d you do it last? Yesterday? You look fine. We’re just going to walk down to the beach and stop at the pub afterwards for lunch. There’s no need to get dressed up. Just put on whatever you have now.

What’s that? You’re going to shave anyway. Okay. Well, I doubt they care much about a bit of stubble around these parts.

What happened to your jaw? Look in the mirror. Your jaw has disappeared, dear. It’s just a great big hole filled with teeth. Oh. Here, don’t speak. Don’t make that moaning noise. You’re only making it weep. And that doesn’t look like saliva.

Do you want me to put something on it? It looks very sore. Come here.

Ow. Stop that. Ow. Ow.

humphrey

Fri, 30 Nov 2012 10:56:00 +0000

Sometimes it is hard sharing a house with two other people, but all the same, I’m glad not to be the third. My girlfriend was reluctant to move in when she first heard about Humphrey, but as time passed, she grew used to his near-constant presence in the back bedroom, and I like to think that one day she might even grow fond of him.

We barely even mention him any more. If he is in the kitchen we might put off dinner for another ten or twenty minutes, but even I know better than to venture in there when he’s preparing his intensely particular meals. If he needs me, I’ll go away for an hour or two, but she always knows I’ll be back eventually. Humphrey does not talk to her but that’s only to be expected.

I’ve known him all my life, of course. As far back as I can remember. It seems like he was always there; a companion of sorts, though he was never what you’d call companionable. We did not play together as I did with the other children. It was more that he would lead me to places where I might not have gone alone. And he has taken care of me, Humphrey. He gives me the courage to be myself because I know that I have his admiration.

Lately I have been trying to teach him to read. He can write a little, but only the first few letters of his name – he gets as far as ‘HUMFF’ before giving up. He can write his Fs for hours, but he cannot seem to master the P, and finds that part of his name incomprehensible when written down. He has never shown much interest in books, either. He likes pictures well enough, and he likes magazines (of a kind), and he has his computer. He will gladly spend whole days on the internet. I don’t know how he does it but he still manages to find things to look at online despite not knowing the names for them.

I’ve been through his internet history many times (we keep nothing from each other) and it is pretty appalling. Nothing strictly illegal. But I have often thought his life would be improved immeasurably if I would simply write down a few key phrases for him to copy letter-by-letter into a search engine. Meatfeast. Hairnet. Archimboldi. Blackhead. Ruftybags.

He won’t mind that I tell you this. Humphrey is not much concerned about how others see him. He’s not shy. In fact I’d say that his activities are constrained by myself more than they are his own wishes. He doesn’t go out much because I expect him to stay at home, in his place.

Not that this always works. I honestly have no idea what he gets up to when I’m at work, for example. I have asked but he will only say he was at home, in his room, on his computer. And yet I’m sure I’ve seen him sometimes, from the windows of the office across the road, or in the park, in my lunch break. He will never talk or acknowledge me at these times, but I’m sure I’ve caught him staring.

I suppose my girlfriend thought it strange the first time she ever came over that he was just standing like that at the top of the stairs. Of course I told her not to worry about it, that he does it all the time. He’s surveying, I said. Just walk right up to him and he’ll get out of your way. He knows his place.

He’s been unquiet the past few days. He keeps waking me in the night. We go to his room to talk. There’s someone else in the house, he tells me. A fourth person. She brought her with her, he says. I ask him to show me and he says he can’t. She hides behind the doors, he says. She won’t make herself seen. You’ve got to find her for yourself, he says. All right, I say. I go to wake her up.

the map

Sat, 24 Nov 2012 14:20:27 +0000

It was when I was leaving the funeral, patting down my jacket pockets in the porch of the pub to ensure I still had all my things, that I found the envelope in my pocket. It was too thin to be a card, this brown rectangle with no address or stamp, only my name on the front in red ball-point pen. I opened it at once and saw a flash of old, thick cream-colored paper neatly folded into three. But then somebody took my arm and asked if I was ready to go and I said yes and put it back into my pocket.

And then I got home and forgot all about it until the next day when I had to go get something else from the same pocket (the printout of the reading I’d given at the funeral) and found the envelope again. I sat down on the couch and unfolded the paper.

It was a map of my local area, hand-drawn in red biro, like my name on the envelope. There were no words, but such was the density and attention of detail of the drawing that I could at once distinguish what it was meant to be. It was the area around my home. The would-be cartographer had rendered the river as a sort of frantic rush of cross-hatched pen strokes along one side of the page; buildings were not generally marked apart from the local football ground and, oddly enough, the nearest supermarket. And at the centre of it all was my house.

The only point of interest on the map was a small cross, only distinguishable amongst the dense weave of lines for being in black ink rather than red. I knew – or at least I thought I knew – exactly where that X was: about a mile away, somewhere along the canal towpath, near where it passed beneath a broad stretch of busy roads. Why anybody would want me to go there was a mystery.

I put the map away in the backpack I take with me to work. I was still thinking about it when my girlfriend came home. She could tell I was preoccupied by something but didn’t press me about it. I’m sure she thought it was only the aftershock of the funeral. I was trying to picture who out of all the people we invited would have wanted me to have it. I couldn’t imagine any of my immediate relatives being so secretive, but there were so many attendees who I didn’t know and who didn’t ever speak to me. We had been in the pub for hours. It could have been any of them.

***

The next day, after work, I decided to follow the map to see where it led. It would be a simple matter to stop off there on the way home. There was no reason why she ought to know about it. It was just a thing I had to do.

In London it gets dark at around five o’clock at this time of year. It was around half past six by the time I stepped off the train and almost seven by the time I approached the bridge. It is mostly well-lit along the canal, and many commuters use the tow path as a shortcut home when walking or cycling. So though the shadows under the bridge were deep, I didn’t feel much of anything on my approach. Several times I checked the map to confirm that I was in the right place, though I didn’t really need to: how many hours had I spent over it already?

Under the road bridge over the canal, the sound of six lanes of traffic was a loud, steady rumble overhead. I took my phone from my pocket and shone the light from the screen about. At first I saw nothing in particular, and had to press my back against the wall and pretend to be texting when a cyclist whirled past. In the shadows cast by his powerful LED lamp I noticed that there was a ledge running along the top of the wall, with a gap of a couple of feet between it and the concrete supporting the cars overhead.

Once the cyclist had passed, I reached up and swept the light from my phone across the ledge. Junk: a old cans of beer, cracked and rusting; snack wrappers, foil packets from takeaways; somehow, a lone discarded sneaker. I looked at the map again. Was it possible that I was on the wrong side of the canal? No: the map was quite clear, and there was no path on the other side of the bridge.

Bracing one foot against a narrow ledge at the base of the wall, I found I could hoist my shoulders above the ledge to get a better look around. And it was then that I saw what I had been looking for. There was a narrow circular tunnel through the concrete, running directly below the road overhead. I focused the light from my phone on it. It was just about wide enough for me to crawl through. A small bundle of cables ran down the tunnel and disappeared into the darkness a few feet away.

***

This is the point in all my stories when it becomes difficult. I come upon the closed lock, the trap door, the mysterious hallway — and I have no idea what happens next. Is it that I’m not interested in finding out? Is what interests me only the possibility of something weird and fantastic and frightening rather than the thing itself?

There is a desperate quality to these stories. A craving for sensation. I long for mystery but I cannot bring myself to envisage anything beyond the world around me. I have this urge to write weird, impossible, strange, crazy things, but I worry that my imagination is not what it used to be. I’ve borrowed more from culture than I will ever be able to return. When I was young it was effortless, but now it seems like I’m forever pawing at a door I can no longer open.

I’m more self-conscious now, too. For example, I’ve just realised that the idea of me crawling through that tiny passage is borrowed from a sequence in Heavy Rain where the player is required to guide Ethan Mars through the narrow criss-crossing vents of a disused furnace. You have to move slowly because, rather implausibly, somebody has gone to great trouble to spread broken glass all along the floor of the shaft. It is very dark. The only way to find the way out is to light a match (of which you have an infinite number) and watch the flame; the direction in which it angles shows the flow of air out of the tunnel.

Tension soon becomes tedium. You venture painfully down one dead-end after another, and the match is no help; a bug in the graphics engine sometimes causes the flame to vanish altogether. And when you finally emerge there is no revelation to be found, no killer to catch, no solution to the mystery: this is simply a deliberate obstacle the murderer has inflicted on the player, just as the designer has inflicted it on the player.

***

What is it you expect to see when you turn to look into a darkened doorway?

I have been reading a lot of ghost stories recently. I like them at any time of year, but in particular around now, when the days grow shorter and the nights longer, when you can sense the dark outside the back door, when you hesitate before crossing the kitchen floor to draw the curtain because of what you might see behind the glass.

You might see a face. Or perhaps just a person. A sort of formless thing. But it is only in fiction that characters ever actually see any of these things. Most historical accounts of ghosts are only reports of strange sounds, knocking, scratching behind the walls, or at most something glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. Fewer contain actual violence upon the person; an interesting characteristic of even the many poltergeists is that thrown objects strike individuals with the weight of a feather.

The other place my writing comes from is my own paranoia. In many respects my life has been (and is still) defined by fear. Several times over the last few weeks I have suffered bouts of anxiety bought on by something that has happened or was about to happen to me. I don’t want to overstate this — most of the time I get along perfectly well. I think I would be happy writing these silly little weird stories forever, but that doesn’t make me less afraid of the things that happen in them. Perhaps they are best regarded as a place where I have to go to work out things in my head.

Just as it is always worth laughing at your own jokes before you put them on the page, so it might necessary to feel something in fear or awe before you can inspire fear or awe in someone else. I’m aware that autobiographical readings are now deeply unfashionable, but I cannot imagine Henry James writing ‘The Turn of the Screw’ or ‘The Jolly Corner’ without having experienced on some level the things which he describes in those deeply odd stories.

***

When we were in Boston recently we stayed in a very old hotel with something of an illustrious history. It is said to be haunted, but in truth it isn’t particularly creepy any more. But there was one odd thing which happened during our stay which is worth mentioning. We were unexpectedly woken late one night when one of the lamps in our room began to malfunction. The bulb was buzzing and flickering madly in the dark room. Being soundly asleep, it took me some time to realise that I was not dreaming; there is always something dreadfully unreal about those moments on the verge of the unconscious. I got up and turned it off – it was one of those odd ones with a little knob that you have to twist until it clicks – and I thought that would be the end of it. But I slept terribly in fits and starts, had strange dreams that were all but forgotten come the morning.

And that’s all there was to it. I’m sure almost everybody has a story like this. An explicable thing which we are content to leave unexplained. In fact, I know what was wrong: in the morning I tried to remove the light bulb and found the glass part had somehow sheared off the metal contacts on the bottom. The whole thing was lightly covered in some kind of sticky black stuff. I don’t know where that came from — something leaked, I suppose, or something melted. But I don’t remember that part so much as I do the night before, which only grows in the telling.

***

Here is what it comes down to: you waste hours of your life waiting for something extraordinary to happen to you. And then when it happens you spend the hours wishing it had never happened.

dad

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 22:02:12 +0000

What follows is not fiction. I try not to write about personal things here but it feels false to write about anything else until I do this.

***

Last Friday I was at work when I got a call from my mother asking me to come home immediately. My dad had been ill for the last couple of days with what we thought was the flu, but that morning he had suddenly taken an unexpected turn for the worse. An ambulance was called. He was conscious but weak by the time the paramedics arrived, but shortly afterwards his heart stopped. I was not aware of any of this until I arrived.

When I got there a second ambulance was pulling up the road to take him to hospital. I ran after it. When we got to the hospital they asked us if we wanted them to keep trying to revive him, and they did for a while. We waited in a small, quiet room. A doctor came to talk to us and we told her what had happened. They had done a blood test, she said, and it did not look good. One of the worst I’ve seen, she said. I didn’t know what she meant by this. Would you like to be there when we stop, she said. Of course we did, we were. Then they stopped. There was nothing anybody could do. It was by any measure the worst day of my life.

To say that his death was unexpected would be an understatement. He was a healthy, active man in his sixties; he retired early but kept busy through the years looking after myself and my two sisters and my mum, managing our finances, dealing with builders and craftsmen, driving us around in the big Volvo. That was his life, with occasional breaks for going fishing or weekends away with my mother. I think he was generally happy. He could have done anything he wanted to do when he stopped working but he chose to look after us.

It seems so unfair. Now I look at men his age in the street or on TV and think why do you get to be alive when my dad is not? This is ridiculous, I know, but it is what I think. And it’s especially ridiculous because I know exactly what my dad would say to me in these circumstances. As children, whenever myself or my sisters presented him with some pleading concern about something or other being unfair, he’d simply say: Life’s Not Fair. End of argument. Because it isn’t. Just get over it, he’d say to us now. Sorry I didn’t have time to give you the password to that really important spreadsheet with all the household accounts on it! But you’ll work it out between you.

I went back to work on Monday. It was odd. Work sent flowers. I still do not think I have fully accepted what it means for him to be gone. I know people always say that these things happen when you least expect, and that it doesn’t seem real when you lose a loved one, but really: it was so unexpected, and it does not seem real. Every cliche is true. I feel like he’s just gone away for a while.

My life can’t help but fall into its old patterns again. There is nothing else for me to do. I fall asleep on the tube in the mornings and I bury myself in video games, books, stupid things on the internet. The last few mornings I have woken up feeling sick to my stomach with grief, but by the time the evening comes around I feel almost all right again. And in one small miracle, my mum remembered the password to that spreadsheet.

I wear his watch now. It’s old, somewhat inconspicuous despite being more expensive than anything I would buy myself. To me it has become somewhat diminished over the years. I mean that it has always seemed larger in my imagination that it is in reality. I remember playing with it when I was a very small boy and it seemed huge. I was particularly fascinated with the satisfying click of the metal strap as it opened and closed, with running my fingers over little glass bubble in the fascia that magnifies the date. What I never thought it would do – and what it now does – is fit my wrist perfectly.