Diary of a Somebody Read online

  With nothing else to do, I returned to the Guardian Bumper Christmas Cryptic Crossword and surveyed my progress. There were sporadic outbreaks of lettering in the north-east and south-west quadrants but the grid was still mainly comprised of blank squares, unfilled in and unfulfilled, waiting for someone to come along and remove them of their emptiness.

  I redoubled my efforts and, by the end of the evening, I’d cracked 3 down:

  EVENT HORIZON (noun): the boundary of a black hole, from inside which no normal energy can escape.

  Which reminds me, it’s Poetry Club tomorrow.

  Tuesday March 6th

  I could sense the rest of the group eyeing me with interest. It was then that I realised I was still applauding when everyone else had stopped some time ago. A minute or so had passed since Liz had sat down from performing a new poem she’d written entitled ‘Mansplaining at the Ghostbusters Training Academy for Women’:

  Well, love, it looks like you’ve got a shape-shifter

  there, tricky buggers them, please excuse my French.

  You’ll need your photon gun and a monkey wrench,

  if you’ve got one to hand. Watch as you lift the

  neutrona wand, love, valuable that is. Good

  stuff. Now, there’s a cyclotron in that backpack,

  not that your pretty head should worry about that.

  It’s to concentrate the protons, see. That should

  create a positronic ionized stream

  to polarize with the negative charges

  of the ectoplasm. Still with me, darling?

  Lovely. Wait ’til you hear the shape-shifter scream . . .

  There. He’s not going anywhere! Now, love, just

  pop him right inside this Muon Trap. Double-

  check he’s secure. We don’t want any more trouble

  from the likes of him! There, you did it! You must

  be exhausted. I didn’t think you’d stick it,

  not at first. It’s tiring work – even for men.

  A lot of women wouldn’t have it in them.

  A cuppa’s what you need to sort you out. Biscuit?

  She’d recited it in a mock-cockney voice, delivered with all the condescension of a garage mechanic confident of fleecing a customer for an extra monkey through an assumed superior knowledge of camburettors or whatever it is they’re called. And yet, in spite of this, she made the poem seem sexy somehow – particularly the line ‘pop him right inside this Muon Trap’. It was a most intriguing performance and one that I was determined to ponder some more at length when I got home.

  As I got up to read a few poems, I could hear Toby Salt defining the term ‘mansplaining’ to Chandrima although I could tell by the look on her face that she knew this already. Liz appeared to like my poems, too. She laughed in all the right places (there were two) and then smiled at me as I sat down. I fear I may have blushed in response.

  What’s more, she demonstrated a healthy aloofness towards Toby Salt and his latest posturings. He gave us a preview of a terza rima he’d written for the Saffron Walden Poetry Festival entitled ‘Bucchero Redux’, about the socio-cultural history of an ancient Etruscan pot. This pantomime of pretentiousness was greeted by Liz with rolled eyes and arched eyebrows; although, admittedly, they may well have been directed at my wayward flicking of pistachio shells, a number of which had inadvertently landed in the folds of her dress.

  I think it wonderful how quickly Liz has settled into Poetry Club. Next month, I hope that I might even get to talk to her, given the opportunity.

  Or should that be problem?

  Wednesday March 7th

  Not Drowning but Waving

  They saw him, his arms up in the air

  And they rushed in to save him:

  But I was just happy with how far I’d swum

  And not drowning but waving.

  Poor chap, he must have had enough

  And decided to join the dead

  Lurking beneath must have been sad, hidden depths,

  They said.

  Oh no, no, no. I have none of those,

  (He spluttered as they reclaimed him)

  I was simply splashing around, having fun,

  And not drowning but waving.

  In an unusually good mood, I found myself whistling as I pedalled off to the bookshop in my lunch hour in pursuit of the first volume of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time for this month’s book group. It looks formidable. Or, formidable, as they say in France.

  To offset Proust’s yin with some complementary yang, I bought three P. G. Wodehouse novels. I popped these in my bag along with a few other books I picked up along the way: The Collected Poetry of Stevie Smith; Cryptic Crosswords and How to Solve Them; The Little Book of Mindfulness; Anthony Robbins’ Awaken the Giant Within; and Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. I also thought about buying Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking but it was £8.99 and I wasn’t convinced it would do me much good.

  I dangled the bags off my handlebars and slowly pushed my bike back up the hill, arriving back to work forty minutes late. Nobody seemed to notice.

  Thursday March 8th

  The good mood I’ve been in since Tuesday has shown no signs of abating and, for that, I have been rewarded by the noble and merciful Hephaestus, magnificent son of Hera and Zeus! Not only has he restored my Wi-Fi connection but he has also enabled me to Google who the Greek God of technology is.

  And just in time, too. The deadline for next month’s Well Versed poetry competition is approaching faster than information speeding down a fibre-optic broadband cable. I have decided to write about ‘smart technology’: it terrifies me. I stayed up late, tinkering with my poem’s components, twisting its copper strands together, hoping I’ve connected my wires correctly.

  Friday March 9th

  A Life Sentience

  They will be wondering by now where I am;

  it’s not like me to be home so late on a Friday,

  This will not be forgotten in a hurry.

  I can sense their censure, even from here;

  hear the hiss of the vegetables as they soften

  under the refrigerator’s cool stare

  and the dark scowl of the coffee machine.

  I should have called, not left them to their own devices.

  Perhaps they already know that I am in crisis,

  observed tiny shifts in my behaviour

  of which even I was unaware;

  the depth of my tread upon the carpet,

  or the slouching in my chair

  from which I shall not leap up to rescue a forgotten cake

  or slowly hoist myself to trudge to the corner shop:

  its milk cartons must serve another.

  And no more shall my day start

  with a blast of cold to snatch my breath

  as the shower wakes for morning

  or with a desperate stretch

  for a toilet roll that is not there.

  For everything is just so. Optimized.

  A thousand decisions and revisions

  outsourced to things far smarter than me.

  And, in its place, an absence

  and this stretching of the hours.

  There. It has gone. Into the unforgiving jaws of the post box. In the future, it will post itself.

  In celebration, I watched an old episode of Taggart with the cat and began to think about next month’s Poetry Club.

  Saturday March 10th

  Dylan’s team continues to defenestrate the formbook. They picked up their second victory in as many weeks under his guidance. He seems remarkably phlegmatic about it all. ‘It’s simple,’ he said with a shrug as we walked back, ‘winning is just about seeing the possible.’

  Sophie came to collect him later and, while standing on the doorstep, removed the pin from her hand grenade of news: Stuart is moving in with them from April. Interpreting my two-minute silence as uncomfortable, she asked me how I felt about it. �
��Fine. Absolutely fine. Yes, really fine. Totally fine,’ I responded, being completely fine about the situation, which I was, given that there was nothing not to be fine about.

  I spent the evening playing Scrabble by myself, being fine, and trying to see the possible.

  Sunday March 11th

  Scrabble Board, Abandoned Mid-Game,

  Author and Date Unknown

  Monday March 12th

  Since The Disastrous Affair of Leamington Spa, I have felt my corporate stock dwindle; ‘stock’ as in ‘reputation’ that is, not company shares, nor indeed my stock of aesthetically-pleasing yet utilitarian stationery, which remains as impressive as ever.

  Senior eyes are averted from me, inner sanctums are closed to me and frosted-glass meeting rooms keep their secrets from me, occupied as they are by huddled suits and dark whispers.

  The winds of change are blowing here. I hear the rattle of paper clips in the breeze.

  Tuesday March 13th

  All this change must have unsettled me. I have not written a poem since last Friday.

  In search of inspiration I went onto Twitter. In my absence, my follower count has mushroomed to twenty-seven. Toby Salt now has over four hundred. I suspect most of these are spam accounts. But there, amongst my new followers, was Liz. I followed her back and, for reasons unclear to me, I instantly felt a digital thumbprint of pressure in the small of my back.

  I suppose I should start tweeting again but that doesn’t usually end well for anyone.

  Wednesday March 14th

  Liz retweeted my poem! Twitter told me that today is Pi Day and to commemorate the event, I posted up a poem. I’d called it ‘π in the sky’:

  He’d think about her constantly

  – well, 22/7 –

  never completing.

  He even stopped eating.

  Then, one day – at 3.14 –

  a chance meeting.

  But, sadly,

  not repeating.

  It received 3.14159265358979323846264 retweets, or thereabouts, including one – did I mention this before? – from Liz!

  To show tacit acknowledgement and gratitude, I reciprocated by liking her retweet of an article which contained ‘8 Odd Facts about Pi’. One of those was that pi is both irrational and transcendental. Like love, I thought. Or a fondness for custard creams.

  Thursday March 15th

  Liz has liked another of my poems on Twitter! I posted up a poem about hurting my back on an item of children’s play equipment. It was titled ‘Beware the slides of March’. Within minutes the little Twitter heart symbol lit up – and it was her!

  Later, I thought about how she’d ‘retweeted’ my poem yesterday but had only ‘liked’ today’s one. Is this a sign that she’s going off me? Has my allure peaked already? I should try not to read too much into all this.

  To calm myself down, I went to bed early, determined to get stuck into some Proust. Having successfully got a couple of paragraphs under my belt, I found my eyes closing so quickly that I barely had time to tell myself that I was falling asleep.

  Friday March 16th

  I had a terrible dream last night. Janice and the rest of my work colleagues stepped forward one by one and stabbed me in the back with letter openers. Another figure emerged slowly from the shadows. ‘Et tu, Tomas?’ I whispered hoarsely before he squirted me in the eyes with his Windolene trigger spray and I woke up with a strangled cry.

  I looked it up in my Dream Dictionary but the book contained no references to Windolene specifically – only generic, non-branded window cleaning sprays – so I am none the wiser as to what it all means.

  Saturday March 17th

  Walking back from a hard-fought 5–3 victory (‘there is no elevator to success, sometimes you just have to take the stairs’), I asked Dylan how he felt about Stuart moving in with them.

  ‘OK, I suppose,’ he said. ‘He makes Mum happy. But he can be a bit of an idiot.’ I ordered in pizza for lunch to celebrate.

  After Dylan had left, I got down to some research. A quick review of social media and I was able to compile the following:

  Name: Stuart Mould.

  Digital footprint: Size Twelve (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn accounts).

  Number of followers: 124,516

  Number of accounts followed: 124,516

  Profile Description: Life Coach. Dream Architect. Mojo Motivator. Inner Peace Keyholder. Making a difference through one little act of kindness at a time.

  Follower Engagement: Medium to high. Conversations with followers contain high exclamation mark and emoji quotient.

  Typical post A: Photo of a soaring mountain / tranquil lake / breathtaking sunset accompanied by an inspirational saying, such as ‘Make the rest of your life, the best of your life!’ / ‘Dreams don’t work unless you do!’ / ‘Change the world with a smile. Don’t let the world change your smile!’.

  Typical post B: ‘This weekend I will be running a marathon / riding in a cyclathon / hosting a zumbathon / plummeting in a skydive-athon to raise money for Syrian refugees / Albanian orphans / Crofter Aid / The Society for the Preservation of Bees. To donate, visit my fundraising website . . .’

  The more I read, the more I worry about the deleterious and corrupting effect that this man may have on my son’s life.

  Sunday March 18th

  Please Take These Words For I Need Them Not

  Please take these words for I need them not,

  these semantic props from another age.

  Consider all that wasted time spent

  in their pursuit, that groping for a phrase

  that is never quite right. Five hours to get:

  You sweep the clouds behind the moon

  to let the stars dance upon the night

  and make the darkness spark itself to light.

  What rot. All that effort squandered

  when other things pile up: Facebook news,

  the laundry basket, the washing up.

  How better to have used:

  Damn these drab dictionary words,

  occupants of my ossified brain.

  They make me irascible and querulous.

  How much easier to be

  No longer shall I be in a brown study,

  all tenebrous and Stygian,

  not now I can express myself

  in fluent Emojian

  So take these words for I need them not,

  I shall replace them with little pics.

  Because now I can simply be

  not refulgent with lachrymary bliss.

  I called Sophie about Stuart. It didn’t go well.

  She seemed upset that I might dare to question his credentials. She hadn’t even bothered to look at the email I’d sent her last night with links to a selection of his social media posts and other crimes.

  ‘Just take a look at them,’ I implored. ‘One is a photo of an eagle flying over a mountain top.’

  ‘And what if it is?’ she responded, angrily. ‘He’s only trying to be positive and encourage people to make the most of themselves.’ I held the phone away from my ear. ‘What’s so bad about that?’

  ‘But it says “DARE TO SOAR!!!”,’ I told her, conclusively.

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you, Brian? It’s not about what Stuart says or what he writes. It’s about what he does. He’s out there – in the world. Trying to make a difference. Helping people. Mending lives. Bringing warmth. Compassion. He’s not sat at home, re-ordering his book collection, waiting for life to come to him.’

  ‘It contains three exclamation marks,’ I replied dully.

  Sophie sighed. ‘He makes me happy.’

  ‘Is that Smiling Face with Open Mouth and Smiling Eyes Happy, or Grinning Face Happy, or Smiling Face with Open Mouth and Closed Eyes . . .’

  Sophie hung up.

  Monday March 19th

  Something is definitely up at work: it’s been days since Janice has harangued me. People edge past me shiftily in corridors, half-smili
ng in sympathy.

  I think it may be affecting my motivation levels. Instead of doing any actual work, I idled away the day in writing a series of ‘uninspirational quotes’, using Stuart as a kind of anti-role model:

  1. No matter how big the problem, it is never too late to run away.

  2. Every morning’s another chance to have an equally awful day.

  3. Hard work may be optional but mediocrity is inevitable.

  4. Nothing is impenetrable, the word itself says “I’m penetrable”.

  5. Inside every opportunity is a disappointment waiting to happen.

  6. Don’t be overawed by your ordinariness. Make it your passion.

  7. It’s not about winning or losing, it’s the falling apart that counts.

  8. Unless a trampoline breaks your fall, you’re unlikely to bounce.

  9. Keep your head in a puddle long enough, and you’ll drown.

  10. Life is like a parachute; it gets you down.

  I have pinned it to my officle wall and taken another copy home to stick on the fridge door.

  Tuesday March 20th

  I’m a Celeriac Get Me Out of Here

  A knobbly root vegetable

  with a plan

  and bravado

  was able to escape

  from the van

  of Ocado.

  Toby Salt has had a poem go ‘virile’ on Twitter, a technical term employed by users of social media to indicate a strong tweet with lots of energy.

  It has been retweeted more than three thousand times and his follower count now nears four figures. It concerns the famine in East Africa and, according to one of his followers, reveals ‘a profound empathy that moves beyond political borders and teaches us what it is to be human’. As if. The closest Toby Salt has got to famine is when the Ocado van broke down and it was three hours late in delivering his rosemary and sea-salt focaccia.