Diary of a Somebody Read online

  Liz was amongst the retweeters. How noble of her, to put to one side the poem’s obvious flaws and failings, in order to raise awareness of this terrible situation.

  Wednesday March 21st

  I was liberating a Twix from the snack machine this afternoon, when I noticed the copy of Toby Salt’s poem pinned up next to it, underneath which was a bucket collecting money for the East African Famine Appeal. It is incredible to think about the power of poetry and how it can make a real difference to world events and people’s lives.

  Thursday March 22nd

  In a dramatic turn of events, both the collection bucket and Toby Salt’s poem have disappeared. An email circulated from HR. It stated that ‘following a staff complaint that the collection did not conform to one of the company’s annually approved charities, the decision has been taken to remove the collection from public display. However, should staff wish to make a donation to this very worthy cause, then they should follow the link below’.

  I got my head down for the rest of the day before heading home to a quiet evening of kale and quinoa salad, with a side serving of Proust. Before climbing into bed, I made an online donation of £100 to the East Africa Famine Appeal.

  Friday March 23rd

  There was no sign of movement at Number 29 this morning so I put his bin bags out for him, using up his five-bag allowance and then adding three more of his to my own pile to help clear the backlog. I spotted Mrs McNulty peering out warily at me through her net curtains and making the sign of the cross.

  I went into work to face the horror of ‘Dress-Down Friday’. In protest at such a ridiculous gesture of enforced corporate jollity, I taped a poem (unsigned) to the water cooler machine:

  Vive La Revolution!

  Let others march to another drum.

  Take tyrants down by sword or gun.

  Or guillotine them one by one.

  A button I shall leave undone.

  Manifestos some may construct.

  Their forceful words inspire, instruct.

  Or heads of state they may abduct.

  I shall leave my shirt untucked.

  Let others preach from their soapbox.

  Call walkouts, strikes, erect roadblocks.

  Launch missile strikes from behind rocks.

  I shall wear unmatching socks.

  From the vantage point of my officle, I watched Richard Potts, the HR Director, reading it as he helped himself to a cup of water. I could see his lips moving. He shook his head and then removed it, ripped it up and threw it in the bin. The poem that is, not his head. He eyed me suspiciously as he strode past my desk in his Ramones T-shirt.

  Saturday March 24th

  The Day We Argued About Roman Numerals

  Even now in my mind

  that row remains VIVID.

  We tried to stay CIVIL

  but ended up LIVID.

  With the cessation of footballing hostilities for the Easter holidays, I’d drawn up plans for some quality father–son time with Dylan. I’d be the first to admit that he hasn’t seen me at my best recently and what any teenage boy needs is a strong and positive male role model in his life. Particularly one with plans largely centred around the sofa, the television and home-delivered pizza.

  To my horror, Dylan had barely got through the door when he reached into his bag and produced a giant Latin grammar and vocab book. He started rambling on about something to do with GCSEs and revision and suchlike, and how it would be really helpful if we could go through some Latin together. Five long, torturous hours of Latin ensued. Two hours in, I suggested we go to the park or play a board game but he was having none of it.

  I tested him ad nauseam on nominatives, accusatives, vocatives et cetera; I was barely compos mentis by the end of it. I suggested that maybe next time he might find someone else to help him, in loco parentis, as it were, but as soon as I started saying it, I could tell I’d become persona non grata. But don’t blame me – actus me invito factus non est meus actus!

  Sunday March 25th

  I don’t know where the time goes. Barely had I finished checking on the contributions to the Poets on the Western Front trip (nearly £1,800 now!) and clearing my garden of all the abandoned pairs of deely boppers and fluorescent leg warmers from Dave, Martin and Marvin’s 80s Party last night, and it was time for bed.

  I had hoped to make more progress with In Search of Lost Time but the changing of the clocks and the consequent loss of an hour has really impinged upon my Proust. I am doing my best to finish it but if Time itself has other ideas and conspires against me in such a cruel way then, really, what chance do I have?

  I had planned to reward myself at the end of every page with a madeleine but not having any in the house, I made do with custard creams.

  Today, I have eaten twenty-six custard creams.

  As I bit into one of them – it may have been the nineteenth – a sudden, sharp memory came back to me of a student flat in Sheffield in the early nineties, the Cocteau Twins and a bottle of vodka, and Sophie and I gnawing at either end of a custard cream, until our crumb-coated lips met in the middle.

  Monday March 26th

  A near-perfect storm of boredom, procrastination and ‘papeteriephilia’ (a word I have just made up to mean a love of stationery) induced me to spend most of my working day reorganising my desk munitions. Five separate trips were made to the cupboard: new pens purloined, staples and paper clips pillaged, files and folders filched, then arranged in rainbow order upon my shelves. My desk drawer was tidied. My desktop stationery holder was replenished, its contents having first been rigorously tested and vigorously deplenished. I scribbled haiku on Post-it notes and stuck them to items in the stationery cupboard:

  Crisp linen bedsheets

  awaiting your impression.

  Papery heaven.

  Magical hole punch.

  Snapping jaws swallow holes whole.

  And look – confetti!

  How to best highlight

  your writing’s inner essence:

  sticks of fluorescence.

  Humble paper clips

  with such noble endeavour

  hold things together.

  I fear that this may be another indication that my job is failing to fulfil me. It may also be an indication that I am failing to fulfil my job.

  Tuesday March 27th

  Beer Mat’s Last Theorem

  On the back of a beer mat,

  he finally proved the theorem

  that

  It is fair to say that, until this evening, the musical genre of Math Punk had passed me by. The gates to those halcyon days of blissful ignorance have now sadly closed to me. The eight-piece Fibonazi Sequence played a set of snarling anarcho-algorhythmic rock as they promoted their latest album The Lowest Common Denominator.

  They opened with their new single, ‘My Sex is Hard (like a Diophantine Equation)’. Darren declared that he could actually hear integer coefficients within the song but given that he only just managed to scrape a C in his GCSE Maths, this struck me as unlikely. Fearing the onset of a migraine as I tried to keep pace with all the complex rhythms, counterpoint tunes and angular melodies I persuaded Darren to move to the back of the crowd so I might concentrate on my Proust.

  No such luck, though. It was as the band launched into a long, sprawling instrumental piece called ‘Trigonometry’ that Darren went off on a tangent:

  ‘Sophie tells me that she and Dylan are going to Barcelona for the weekend – with Stuart,’ he said.

  ‘That’s nice,’ I said. Page 29 of In Search of Lost Time really was a terrific one.

  ‘Dylan’s very excited, by all accounts. He’s always wanted to go,’ continued Darren. ‘They’re watching a game at the Nou Camp on Saturday night.’

  ‘Splendid,’ I said. Yes, page 29 was definitely one of the best pages I’d come across so far.

  ‘Sophie said that you had often talked about going there with Dylan. But you’d never quite got around to organising a
nything.’

  ‘Fantastic,’ I said. I wondered how this page 29 stacked up against all the other page 29s I’d read. Early indications were favourable.

  ‘It’s really generous of Stuart, isn’t it? Dylan’s sixteen today, isn’t he?’

  Dylan’s birthday! Darren was still talking but I was out the door before you could state that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. If I ran, I might just have time to buy a card from the shop on the corner, get some money from the cashpoint across the way, bung it inside and post it through Sophie and Dylan’s letter box before midnight.

  Wednesday March 28th

  In Search of Lost Tomes

  I had forgotten that –

  for a long time – I went to bed early,

  seduced by Proust,

  who so often had le mot juste

  about affairs of the heart

  and the nature of art,

  and all that stuff.

  But life and things passed,

  gave way to armchaired collapse

  in front of a screen,

  scrolling through memes,

  watching videos of cats.

  Until one evening,

  when retrieving the remote,

  I found you again, on the shelf,

  as if stumbling upon a swan’s nest

  amongst the reeds, hidden,

  the smell of your pages,

  like fresh bed linen.

  Feeling rather pleased with myself for this month’s effort (although I never did get beyond page 29), I turned up to book group only to learn that nearly everyone else had finished it. They presumably have less hectic lives than mine. I did manage to sneak a quick look at the Wikipedia entry on Proust, having excused myself to go to the toilets, and so I was able to hold my own for a short while.

  But when the conversation moved to the novel’s embodiment of the principle of intermittence and a debate began on whether life was simply a series of different perceptions and often conflicting aspects of reality, I zoned out and focused my attentions on my cashews.

  Thursday March 29th

  I have been filling the gaps in my workday by scrolling through Twitter. The number of tweets to read is staggering! There are a lot of people in the world without much to do.

  Liz, it would seem, is an occasional tweeter. She sends a tweet out – on average – every two days, and typically retweets those of others, two or three times a day. She is most active on Twitter between the hours of 11 to 12 a.m., and 7 to 8 p.m. Statistically, she is more likely to tweet during that early evening period, whereas most of her retweets are usually sent out in the morning, particularly around 11.35 a.m. The tweet sample for this analysis was taken only over a nine-month period and a longer-term study may yield different results.

  This chance investigation of Liz’s online behaviour reminds me that it’s Poetry Club next week. It’s about time I took it more seriously: spend more time on my poems so that they’re in tip-top condition for when I have to get up and perform them. It is a mistake, I think, for a poem to be written in isolation from its audience.

  Friday March 30th

  These are post-Proustian times that we are living in; I have never felt so alive! Mrs McNulty appears to have other ideas, though. I caught her this morning stuffing a flyer on will-writing services through my letter box. I unlocked the door quickly but she vaulted back over the fence before I had the chance to confront her.

  Today is Good Friday and the long weekend gives me a chance to work on my poems for Poetry Club. I got my head down with ferocious abandon.

  Saturday March 31st

  I focused on my poems to blot out unwelcome thoughts, searching out words and stroking them, releasing some back into the wild, taming others. And in that way, the picture in my head that I’d created of the three of them gazing up in awe at the Sagrada Família only surfaced every twenty minutes or so, and I was able to bat it away.

  And now I have finished my poems for the day, I look for other distractions, like there, through the window, where a blue moon shines out, and lights up the sky.

  It is big and bright and oblivious of how utterly extraordinary it is.

  April

  Sunday April 1st

  Brian Ch.16 vv.1–6

  And very early on the first day of the week,

  when the sun had risen, he went to the cupboard.

  And he said to himself,

  ‘Who will open the door to this cupboard?’

  And looking up, he saw that the door was already open.

  And peering inside, he saw a young man sitting inside,

  dressed in a white robe, and he was alarmed.

  And the man said to him,

  ‘Do not be alarmed. You seek the chocolate egg.

  The one that was here yesterday.

  But it is not here.’

  And he trembled and was much afraid.

  But the man said, ‘Do not be afraid.

  For he who seeks the chocolate egg,

  Must first seek inside himself.’

  Is it wrong to buy yourself three Easter eggs and eat them all in one sitting? I am unsure of the ethics surrounding the whole issue, unschooled as I am in Christian scripture. But, in the absence of a prevailing opinion, that’s what I did, and I shall wait for the theologians to correct me.

  Monday April 2nd

  I sifted through my poems to figure out which ones to read at this month’s Poetry Club. I considered ‘Emphatic Love’:

  You’re outstanding,

  Just my type.

  I’m filled with admiration.

  LET’S CAPITALISE,

  if I may be so bold

  and you have the inclination.

  I read it out loud. It didn’t quite work. Vocally, I was struggling to convey each typeface style as it looked on the page. I tried shouting ‘LET’S CAPITALISE’, using a deeper voice for ‘if I may be so bold’ and then leaning to one side for ‘and you have the inclination’ but I was concerned that the combined effect might simply be to make it look as if I was having a stroke.

  I looked for another one. A strong, powerful rhyming poem to put Toby Salt in his place, perhaps. I gave ‘Po-em’ a go:

  If your rhyme is stuck and you can’t get by

  then you may need the use of a hy-

  phen implanted at the end of a line

  and soon your poem will sound like a Stein-

  way piano in a grand concert hall,

  its notes floating in the air like a ball-

  oon. So what if the words happen to spill

  into two lines? Do not pity these syll-

  ables, orphaned, adrift, left there to hang;

  their beauty is in the way that they dang-

  le.

  That wasn’t working either. It rhymed well on paper but when I read it aloud, it sounded as if I had a speech impediment.

  In the end I settled on some standard fare (poems about Jeremy Clarkson, University Challenge and semi-colons) and a new poem about watching television and recognising a familiar face from the past. The latter piece, at least, might give me an air of mystery and imply that I was someone who possessed an interesting and troubled history.

  Tuesday April 3rd

  Artist’s Impression

  Channel-flicking on the television,

  a sudden flicker of recognition,

  and there you are, lighting up the screen.

  You’ve not changed much, it seems.

  The selfsame eyes of grey flint,

  those touchpaper lips,

  that shocking blaze

  of hair. It’s as if the days

  lit by time’s slow-burnt passage

  are reduced to ashes.

  An old flame, charcoaled

  back to life by the controlled

  hand of a police sketch artist.

  I see you’re still up to your old tricks,

  wanted, as you are, for questioning

  in con
nection with

  a spate of arson attacks

  in the vicinity of Matlock Bath.

  I must confess to having developed something of a crush on Liz. Purely in a literary sense, of course, not in any kind of crass sexual way. She has such delightful couplets. And lovely, languorous iambs. Terrific dimples, too.

  Her poems were the highlight of the evening. She has a way of reading them that makes my insides feel like they’re in a tumble dryer. Her observations are funny and clever and razor-sharp. Against their light, those of Toby Salt were exposed as the pretentious nonsense they are – and my own poems as nothing more than schoolboy doggerel.

  Courageously, I complimented Liz on her performance and offered her a pistachio nut when she sat down. She’d just opened her mouth to reply when Kaylee launched into a powerful lyrical diatribe about prostitution, sex slavery and venereal disease and further conversation became impossible.

  By the time there was an opportunity to talk, Toby Salt had already smarmed in and was regaling Liz about his upcoming festival appearance at Saffron Walden and the special linocut edition of his forthcoming book, This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleave. I found myself powerless to intervene, cornered as I was by Douglas, who proceeded to tell me about the major military engagements of the Second Boer War for what remained of the night.