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Illusions of Alaska

 

 

“Do you know where the two one six leaves from?”

“You mean the two sixteen,” said the fat driver. Maybe I nodded or said Yes. “Just around the corner there, the first bus stop,” he said. Why did that fat bastard laugh at my “two one six”? When I got round the corner, a bus was at the bus stop - my first time on the 216. I showed my Daysaver and sat down. 192, 262, 314, 157. These were all buses I had travelled on many times and they were all spoken as three numbers by me, the other passengers and the drivers. One nine two, Two six two, three one four, one five seven. Anyway, the 216 would not leave because some man wouldn’t pay the fare and wouldn’t leave the bus, and the driver wouldn’t drive the bus until the would-be free-wanting passenger either alighted or paid,  so the driver phoned the police.  So the passenger got off the bus.  In front of me, I could see that a girl was reading “Relative Values”.  I thought it must be philosophy. Then I saw on the back cover that it was published by Mills and Boon.

 

I can see myself sat on a sofa of will and wish, kicking a ball towards a goal. Standing on a line between netted posts is a beautiful woman who I have never seen before, and a pot of gold is beside her and she is under a double rainbow. I don’t want to kick the ball too hard in case it hurts her but I don’t want her to save it either. Maybe I want the ball to hit the post and rebound back to me. I move aside and somebody else takes the penalty and I don’t know if he scores or if she saves it. What does it mean? Alaska? But I think she lives near Canada. One of my friends once told me that I suffer from illusions of grandeur.

 

“He said I’m off for a cock-a-leekie and she said you’re disgusting,” said one of the women sat in front of me. “Then he came back and slumped into his armchair. Then she said this place needs a clean and he said it needs a cleaner and farted. Then she looked at me and said Why do I bother? This is our stop. Look at those idiots!” The two women stood up and walked towards the front of the bus where two of the three boys were swinging on the bars.

 

            “Sorry, missus.”

           

            “I’ll give you missus in a minute.”

 

            “You’ll probably miss us.”

 

            “You’re not worth the bother.”

 

            “Get off the bus, now lads,” said the driver to the boys.

 

            “No way, it’s not our stop.”

 

            “I don’t care, get off the bus.”

 

            “We’ve paid our fucking fare.”

 

            “Get off the bus or I’ll call the police.”

 

            “What can they do, we’re just kids. What have we done?”

 

            “You’ve been causing trouble since you got on. I’m not going anywhere until you get off.”

 

            “Alright then, we’ll just wait.”

 

            “Fuck him, let’s go.”

 

I went into exile because my idle efforts to become a poet or pub philosopher were becoming intolerable to myself . . . You’re a hasty poetaster. A poxy liner of words. Listen to me, you crafty scop! We are the poetry cops! We are the catchers of cod . . . the rejections from poetry magazines were piling up. Perhaps I sometimes try to give meanings to words which are commonly used to mean something else because I want something that the words cannot give me unless I try to change their meaning. The problem is whether it is worthwhile communicating the meaning I have arrived at to other people. Barbarous wires divide me from who I am and who I tell myself I am. I imagine that I am who I am and it sounds like madness.

 

“If my dad jawed me, I’d lamp him,” said one of the boys. “He knows that. If he hit my mum, he knows I’d go for him no shit. He got a bit rough with her and I told him.”

“If my dad hit my mum, I’d put his head through a window,” said another boy.

 

“I respect my dad, though,” said boy number one

 

“I don’t, I respect my mum,” said a girl.

 

“I’m grounded because I didn’t go home when we were let out early,” said the second boy, as the bus overtakes ten joggers with Faster / Stronger / Fitter on the backs of their T-shirts. “He just said you’re fucking grounded.”

 

On one occasion I overhead a student in the pub say that he was an existentialist. “The existentialists were wrong,” I chipped in. The existentialist and his mates looked at me. “Existence,” I continued, “does not necessarily precede essence. There is more to life than the psychological drama of the subject and object, otherwise known as the case of the mental mirror.” I suddenly realised that I was not sure about what I was saying, so I shut up for maybe ten seconds. I think I was regurgitating stuff that I had read but not properly understood. Perhaps I was challenging JPS and other thinkers and smokers who have stated that existence precedes essence. “And the concept of the Übermensch,” I went on, changing direction slightly, “is useful for men and women – because its primary objective is the abolition of a slave mentality. But it is contradictory because it seeks to enslave others and ends up enslaving itself.”

            “That’s rubbish. How can a concept try to do anything and end up enslaving itself?” said one of the students. “The idea is absurd.”

            “Exactly,” I said, turning to the bar for a pint I decided not to order. As I exited the pub, one of the existentialist crowd said: “Give my love to your family.”

            “I cannot give somebody else’s love to somebody else, especially when I don’t know the former from an ad man.” I left the laughter behind me and stepped onto the pavement. I walked home with a decision that conceptual analysis probably wasn’t my thing. I banned myself from pubs and spent more time on the buses.

 

“Is that what he said?” said a third boy.

 

 “Yeah,” said boy two.

 

“What, your fucking grounded, just like that?” said boy three

 

“Yeah,” said Two

 

“What, swore at you?” said Three

 

“Yeah, just said you’re fucking grounded,” said Two

 

 “No way would my dad swear at me, he knows better,” said Three.

 

 “I’d never swear at my mum,” said One

 

 “Neither would I,” said the girl.

 

 “I’ve said things like dickhead in front of them but I’d never say fuck you to my mum,” said One. “No way could I be grounded. You should do what I did, give them a choice. I just said I want my freedom or I’m leaving.”

 

“My dad would just smack me,” said Two.

 

“Does he smack your bottom?” said Girl.

 

“Still smack your botty?” said One.

 

“No, he digs his fist into my arm,” said Two. “This is my stop.”

 

That night I read the foreword of John Braine’s Writing a Novel. It was sat on one my bookshelves. I think he said something along the lines that I should stop writing about writing. I should just write a story that I want to write, based on what I know and what I think other people want to read. Something like that. It’s a good foreword. I must be a bit backward.

 

“There he goes,” said One, “watch him when he gets round the corner, watch him run so his dad doesn’t smack his bottom. Grounded, ha, ha, no way. I’d just say I want my freedom or I’m leaving. My mum and dad are alright.”

 

“Mine are alright,” said Two. I can do what I like, go on motorbikes when I feel like it. Fancy being seventeen and grounded. Old enough to drive but can’t go out because you’re grounded.”

 

“Dad’s don’t give a fuck what you do,” said Girl.

 

“I go missing for a month and don’t bother phoning,” said One. “They don’t mind. My mum worries, my dad doesn’t care though.”

 

“Yeah, my mum worries but my dad’s alright about it,” said Three.    

 

 

The next morning was one of those when all the words of all the songs on the radio seemed to mean something to me. There was a knock at the door. “Does Charlie live here?” said the man in a baseball cap, side-to-side eyes oddly evasive.

 

“Charlie? No. There’s no Charlie here.”

 

“Does he live in any of the others.” He looks along the walkway at the flats either side of mine. Black hair. He’s in a band.”

 

            “No, I don’t think so. It’s not him next door that way, and I don’t think it’s the fellah who lives next door that way from what I’ve heard. Most of the people along there are quite old and they don’t look like band people.”

 

“Okay, mate.”

 

“Okay.”

 

         I’m sure that I remember the same man asking me the same question maybe six months ago. Apart from thinking that he had knocked on my door before and asked me the same question, I can’t remember seeing him at any other time. He probably lives somewhere in this block of about 100 flats, or knows someone other than Charlie who lives here, otherwise he shouldn’t be able to get into the flats unless some person who doesn’t know him let him in. If it was him at the door maybe six months ago, I’d have thought that he might have found out where Charlie lives by now. I don’t know. Sometimes it is necessary and inevitable to live without knowing the truth, because there is no other choice. I could ask some neighbours about Charlie and the man in the baseball cap but it doesn’t seem important.

The Dipper

 

The grey top quarters are east or west. The bottom left corner has trees without names, and houses with pebble walls. Traffic lights race the sea between the row of distant trees. The far edge of the sea could be fiction but there is a turbine and a farm. The shoreline train to Manchester is on time. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow.Three or four tree tops higher than him, some birds without names in the twilight of notes, and three amber streetlights. In the bottom right quarter is another streetlight and three silhouetted trees, and a folly with two white lights on the external walls. 

             

Colin walked towards the bridge over the river and saw a woman with a Golden Retriever. He offered the back of his right hand for the dog to smell and then stroked the dog’s back with his right palm. The woman looked out from between a wooly hat and a scarf covering her mouth and nose.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “I couldn’t hold him”. The big dog barked again and Colin’s Toy Poodle and Patterdale looked at the big dog with something like indifference or fear. “He’s not vicious. It’s because he’s been attacked so many times.”

“They won’t attack him,” said Colin.

“No, they’re lovely,” she said. Colin held the Retriever by the collar until the woman clipped the lead on.

“Watch you don’t step in that,” said Colin, as her Wellington boots moved.

“It’s awful when they don’t pick it up,” she said.

“Okay then?”

“Yes thanks. See you again.”

 

“Have you seen the dipper today?” said a man on the bridge with his dog.

“Don’t you know what a dipper is?”

“No.”

“It’s a tiny bird that flies up and down the river like it’s on a big dipper.”

I said that I would keep a look out for it and then the rain fell and the dogs and I climbed the hill towards a tree near the castle, where a blanket was draped over the flagpole. While we were stood under the tree, a policeman appeared. Had I seen a rucksack anywhere nearby?

“Why?”

“There’s a fellah been sleeping rough here. I think he thinks he’s Sir Lancelot. Says he threw his rucksack down somewhere here.”

“Where is he now? Is he in the castle?”

“No. I think he’s gone back to his mum’s house.”

           On the Buses

 

[[[[[Someone in the pub told me that the Romans gave the name Mamookian to the lilting village that Manchester was, because the Pennine hills look like women’s breasts. Roman? Ro-man. Row-man. They must have come by sea. Man + Chester = Manchester, like a man from Chester who named a place Manchester. Carlisle could be an island found by a man called Carl.]]]]]

            Hunching ideas to lunch through spring blues, away from the shouting idiot, the knees fading on my jeans with frayed hems. My green shirt is slightly creased. I’m on my way to the café, thinking that it has been a while since a woman has been in my bed – I can’t remember how many months. Words can be a problem as well. Money is a problem, so bills are a problem and food is a problem. Other people can be a problem. I can be a problem. The food I amble towards is more like what some call brunch. It is about 1pm and I only got out of my bed about twenty minutes ago.

The poplars sway along the park path. A stream of shopping trolleys divide the council estate from the supermarket. Two herons watch the lake like detectives in trenchcoats. The car horns on the island are Canada Geese. The shops are ahead of me. The woman troubling my thoughts at the moment could be part of my future in some way. I just don’t know. She is impossible for me to read with any certainty. One day she puns for fun in abundance. Then she writes angry and abrupt eruptions when I refuse her occasional invitations to go out to places where she will be with her boyfriend. She sometimes confuses me, sometimes charms me, sometimes irritates me, sometimes intrigues me, and she probably knows it. One minute she is with me with words, talking me up and down, and then she seems to disappear and leaves me wondering where she has gone. Maybe I am too old for the sperm wars she seems to be promoting. I’ve never met whoever she says she is fucking and I’ve never done it with her. It’s been a few years since I’ve even seen her. She sometimes writes me suggestive letters that seem threatening, sometimes when her boyfriend is away from home and I don’t really understand. I sometimes think that she could be just having a laugh, a bit of punny lingus. But there is something curiously intense about the way she writes. I think she likes to be wanted. She sometimes seems to feel very strongly for my words and it’s as if we are lost in translation between desire and reality. She is sometimes chatty and friendly about her family and friends and sometimes she exhibits examples of what I’ve read is the dark side of emotional intelligence. Sometimes I think she’s not much more than an attention seeking wind-up merchant. I’ve read that infidelity can be good for a woman in evolutionary terms, even dabbling with it, so maybe I am some part of her finding out what she wants . The other day I dreamt about a woman who I hadn’t thought about for years: she used to go out with a friend of mine and once told me that I was her second favourite man.

My writing correspondent is not in the café. Why would she be? She lives two hundred miles away. A girl with a belly button on baby hill talks roofs on the money slide to the teenage father. I sit down and look at the menu.

“Can I take your order, please?”

I look up. “A pot of tea and two toast with jam please.” The waitress turns away with her thong visible above the arse of her jeans. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty? I must be about double her age. Maybe I am getting old. On the way to the café, I was thinking that today could be the day that I realise some ambition. It’s about time I did something more constructive with all my spare time, now that I am no longer claiming sick benefit and have become a Jobseeker.

A man about my age with egg on his shirt sits on a stool by the window – that could sound a bit gross. I’ll change it so that he is sitting on a chair with no arms. That’s no good either, because of the fact that he has got two arms. Language can be a problem. I’ll just call it a chair. So, a man with egg on his shirt sits on a chair by the window. That will do. He looks about the same age as me. I’ve already written that. Or I could even forget about the chair. A man with egg on his chin sits by the window. I mean a man with egg on his shirt – not his chin – sits by the window. But that could mean that he is sat on the floor. A very small woman, about thirty years old, skips to the counter without regard for the queue: “Full breakfast, love, I’m going to Southport, they’re picking me up at nine.”

            “I’ll crack on then and bring it over,” says the man.

            “Yes yes yes yes,” she says, and runs towards a seat by the window.”

               I have spent the last ten years spouting words on paper and then reading my notes, descriptions, ideas, starting poems, character sketches, wondering what to make of them, beginning stories, changing “I” to “he” and back to “I” and so on. Thinking of names for characters takes up more of my time than I think it should. I don’t like to use names that are the same as people I know and not because I write about people I know and want to disguise fact into fiction. Maybe I don’t want anyone to know that I am a writer or that I have written anything about them. I could use a pseudonym. If my reading of John Braine’s foreword is right, all of this writing about writing instead of just writing a story that people will want to read isn’t doing me any favours, in terms of getting published. Sometimes I think of a name and then I get introduced to someone, say a friend of a friend, with the same name as one of my characters and then I change the name of the character. I can’t keep doing that. It’s ridiculous. Some of my stories read to me like diaries, perhaps because I don’t keep a diary. I try to write characters onto paper but I don’t find it easy. I sometimes have trouble thinking that I am them. I don’t even know if I should try to imagine what they might be like in their heads, or try to describe how they behave in particular situations. I think I should be trying to do both, but sometimes I am not sure about what I am doing. Maybe I should try to get out of my head in some way, without going off my head. I could try to think the ways of other people while still knowing that I am myself and am not becoming  the characters I am trying to write. Maybe later.

            “I think I’ll have fried bread today,” says the woman at the table to the left of mine.

            “I’ll see you down the cholesterol clinic,” says the man.

            “That’s one good thing about being ill, you can lose weight.”

            “Why? Yes please, no sugar in either thanks.”

“You don’t feel like eating. Just imagine that you’re ill when you’re not and you’ll get so thin that it will make you ill.”

“Lovely. You’re going balder by the day.”

“I’ve been bald for years.”

“Max Bygraves has got a full head of hair. I read somewhere that he uses lavender water and olive oil”

“Let me go bald in peace.”

“I wonder if you’re supposed to drink it or put it on your scalp.”

            The waitress brings my breakfast over and I thank her. I take a swig of tea and start eating my toast and jam. Strawberry. Not my favourite. I prefer raspberry but I am happy enough just to eat. Maybe I should have asked about the flavour of jam when I ordered. Maybe I was right to take a chance on the jam and put up with whatever flavour. I didn’t even think I was taking a chance though. I just thought of jam but I was not expecting strawberry. The strawberries are growing on me.

Two men face each other across one of the chequered tables – a cop out to lunch with scales and a snout baited with tales. What are those two up to I wonder?

The fulfillment of an ambition could be seen as a success, depending on what the ambition is and who decides whether it is a success or not. There is also the trying. The trying itself could be an achievement. So failure could be a sort of success. I try, fail and try again. I am a trier. I am trying. Most of my achievements, possibly all of them, have come about because I tried. What have I not tried to achieve? Lots of things. What have I achieved without trying? That’s a question that I would need to think about. There are of course degrees of trying. No one ever got a degree by not trying. I failed my degree but I tried – sometimes, occasionally, seldom. I tried and I failed. Maybe I should have tried a bit more. All my efforts are achievements – I’m not so sure about that. I think I’m getting a bit carried away with all this trying business, but there is surely a strain of truth to it. A quiet face drinking tea or coffee by the window, looking as if she might be imagining somewhere else, riding a horse across Spain with me, her Don Juan Quixote. She corners a triangle of pizza, her face moving like words I can’t think of. She must be about thirty, dark brown shoulder length hair, large brown distant eyes, possibly Spanish – looks a bit like that woman who writes to me as she travels around the world, and gives me occasional bouts of stomach-ache. I’m not very good at describing what people look like. Maybe I am lazy. Maybe I need to observe people more, even watch what people on television look like and how they behave. My last girlfriend left me for a sober man about five years ago. I have since dried up and started drinking again, moderately, reasonably. I have also started taking more of an amorous interest in possible bedmates. I don’t know if there’s much mileage with the woman I’ve been writing with. Maybe we could just be friends. Maybe that won’t be possible.Victor? No offence to other Victors. I could have been called anything and may still have been the same person that I am. I don’t know. It might be interesting to do a survey of how many Victors are successful as a percentage in relation to other men not called Victor. The results could be interesting. I can think of Vic(tor) Reeves, Vic(tor) Damone, Vic(tor) Marks. All of these Victor men (they seem to be called Vic but I assume it is shortened from Victor) have been successful in their chosen careers. And there is of course Victor Mature, sounding proud about growing up. I know that he is, or was, a film star, and that boys at school sometimes called each other Victor because of somebody famous called Victor Mature. Some lads who called me Victor sometimes gave me the impression that they were calling me Victor Mature, by the sly pronounciaton or the wry smile that went with the greeting: “Alright Victor.”I finish my second cup of tea, and walk home with thoughts of possible stories.

      

 

 

 

“Some people are addicted to drugs, I’m addicted to broad beans.” I look up from the drink, towards  the gangly man at the bar. “A friend of mine in America lived on turnips – raw turnips. Try one of these.” I can’t see anyone else in the pub, recently refurbished and  re-named The Community Pub.

“No thanks,” says the woman behind the bar, refusing a broad bean.

“They’re raw. Don’t know what you’re missing. Pint of best, please love.”

“I prefer them cooked thanks,” says the barmaid or landlady as I leave the pub. 

At the bus stop two lads approach. “Have you got a ciggie?”

I reach into my coat pocket and the one who had asked the question says “You should have said no, I don’t carry spares.”

“I’m feeling kind today.”

“Cheers. See you later.”

 

 

Someone in the pub told me that the Romans gave the name Mamookian to the lilting village that Manchester was, because the Pennine hills look like women’s breasts. Roman? Ro-man. Row-man. They must have come by sea. Man + Chester = Manchester, like a man from Chester who named a place Manchester. Carlisle could be an island found by a man called Carl.

            Hunching ideas to lunch through spring blues, away from the shouting idiot, the knees fading on my jeans with frayed hems. My green shirt is slightly creased. I’m on my way to the café, thinking that it has been a while since a woman has been in my bed – I can’t remember how many months. Words can be a problem as well. Money is a problem, so bills are a problem and food is a problem. Other people can be a problem. I can be a problem. The food I amble towards is more like what some call brunch. It is about 1pm and I only got out of my bed about twenty minutes ago.

The poplars sway along the park path. A stream of shopping trolleys divide the council estate from the supermarket. Two herons watch the lake like detectives in trenchcoats. The car horns on the island are Canada Geese. The shops are ahead of me. The woman troubling my thoughts at the moment could be part of my future in some way. I just don’t know. She is impossible for me to read with any certainty. One day she puns for fun in abundance. Then she writes angry and abrupt eruptions when I refuse her occasional invitations to go out to places where she will be with her boyfriend. She sometimes confuses me, sometimes charms me, sometimes irritates me, sometimes intrigues me, and she probably knows it. One minute she is with me with words, talking me up and down, and then she seems to disappear and leaves me wondering where she has gone. Maybe I am too old for the sperm wars she seems to be promoting. I’ve never met whoever she says she is fucking and I’ve never done it with her. It’s been a few years since I’ve even seen her. She sometimes writes me suggestive letters that seem threatening, sometimes when her boyfriend is away from home and I don’t really understand. I sometimes think that she could be just having a laugh, a bit of punny lingus. But there is something curiously intense about the way she writes. I think she likes to be wanted. She sometimes seems to feel very strongly for my words and it’s as if we are lost in translation between desire and reality. She is sometimes chatty and friendly about her family and friends and sometimes she exhibits examples of what I’ve read is the dark side of emotional intelligence. Sometimes I think she’s not much more than an attention seeking wind-up merchant. I’ve read that infidelity can be good for a woman in evolutionary terms, even dabbling with it, so maybe I am some part of her finding out what she wants . The other day I dreamt about a woman who I hadn’t thought about for years: she used to go out with a friend of mine and once told me that I was her second favourite man.

My writing correspondent is not in the café. Why would she be? She lives two hundred miles away. A girl with a belly button on baby hill talks roofs on the money slide to the teenage father. I sit down and look at the menu.

“Can I take your order, please?”

I look up. “A pot of tea and two toast with jam please.” The waitress turns away with her thong visible above the arse of her jeans. Eighteen, nineteen, twenty? I must be about double her age. Maybe I am getting old. On the way to the café, I was thinking that today could be the day that I realise some ambition. It’s about time I did something more constructive with all my spare time, now that I am no longer claiming sick benefit and have become a Jobseeker.

A man about my age with egg on his shirt sits on a stool by the window – that could sound a bit gross. I’ll change it so that he is sitting on a chair with no arms. That’s no good either, because of the fact that he has got two arms. Language can be a problem. I’ll just call it a chair. So, a man with egg on his shirt sits on a chair by the window. That will do. He looks about the same age as me. I’ve already written that. Or I could even forget about the chair. A man with egg on his chin sits by the window. I mean a man with egg on his shirt – not his chin – sits by the window. But that could mean that he is sat on the floor. A very small woman, about thirty years old, skips to the counter without regard for the queue: “Full breakfast, love, I’m going to Southport, they’re picking me up at nine.”

            “I’ll crack on then and bring it over,” says the man.

            “Yes yes yes yes,” she says, and runs towards a seat by the window.”

               I have spent the last ten years spouting words on paper and then reading my notes, descriptions, ideas, starting poems, character sketches, wondering what to make of them, beginning stories, changing “I” to “he” and back to “I” and so on. Thinking of names for characters takes up more of my time than I think it should. I don’t like to use names that are the same as people I know and not because I write about people I know and want to disguise fact into fiction. Maybe I don’t want anyone to know that I am a writer or that I have written anything about them. I could use a pseudonym. If my reading of John Braine’s foreword is right, all of this writing about writing instead of just writing a story that people will want to read isn’t doing me any favours, in terms of getting published. Sometimes I think of a name and then I get introduced to someone, say a friend of a friend, with the same name as one of my characters and then I change the name of the character. I can’t keep doing that. It’s ridiculous. Some of my stories read to me like diaries, perhaps because I don’t keep a diary. I try to write characters onto paper but I don’t find it easy. I sometimes have trouble thinking that I am them. I don’t even know if I should try to imagine what they might be like in their heads, or try to describe how they behave in particular situations. I think I should be trying to do both, but sometimes I am not sure about what I am doing. Maybe I should try to get out of my head in some way, without going off my head. I could try to think the ways of other people while still knowing that I am myself and am not becoming  the characters I am trying to write. Maybe later.

            “I think I’ll have fried bread today,” says the woman at the table to the left of mine.

            “I’ll see you down the cholesterol clinic,” says the man.

            “That’s one good thing about being ill, you can lose weight.”

            “Why? Yes please, no sugar in either thanks.”

“You don’t feel like eating. Just imagine that you’re ill when you’re not and you’ll get so thin that it will make you ill.”

“Lovely. You’re going balder by the day.”

“I’ve been bald for years.”

“Max Bygraves has got a full head of hair. I read somewhere that he uses lavender water and olive oil”

“Let me go bald in peace.”

“I wonder if you’re supposed to drink it or put it on your scalp.”

            The waitress brings my breakfast over and I thank her. I take a swig of tea and start eating my toast and jam. Strawberry. Not my favourite. I prefer raspberry but I am happy enough just to eat. Maybe I should have asked about the flavour of jam when I ordered. Maybe I was right to take a chance on the jam and put up with whatever flavour. I didn’t even think I was taking a chance though. I just thought of jam but I was not expecting strawberry. The strawberries are growing on me.

Two men face each other across one of the chequered tables – a cop out to lunch with scales and a snout baited with tales. What are those two up to I wonder?

The fulfillment of an ambition could be seen as a success, depending on what the ambition is and who decides whether it is a success or not. There is also the trying. The trying itself could be an achievement. So failure could be a sort of success. I try, fail and try again. I am a trier. I am trying. Most of my achievements, possibly all of them, have come about because I tried. What have I not tried to achieve? Lots of things. What have I achieved without trying? That’s a question that I would need to think about. There are of course degrees of trying. No one ever got a degree by not trying. I failed my degree but I tried – sometimes, occasionally, seldom. I tried and I failed. Maybe I should have tried a bit more. All my efforts are achievements – I’m not so sure about that. I think I’m getting a bit carried away with all this trying business, but there is surely a strain of truth to it.

            A quiet face drinking tea or coffee by the window, looking as if she might be imagining somewhere else, riding a horse across Spain with me, her Don Juan Quixote. She corners a triangle of pizza, her face moving like words I can’t think of. She must be about thirty, dark brown shoulder length hair, large brown distant eyes, possibly Spanish – looks a bit like that woman who writes to me as she travels around the world, and gives me occasional bouts of stomach-ache. I’m not very good at describing what people look like. Maybe I am lazy. Maybe I need to observe people more, even watch what people on television look like and how they behave.

            My last girlfriend left me for a sober man about five years ago. I have since dried up and started drinking again, moderately, reasonably. I have also started taking more of an amorous interest in possible bedmates. I don’t know if there’s much mileage with the woman I’ve been writing with. Maybe we could just be friends. Maybe that won’t be possible.

Victor? No offence to other Victors. I could have been called anything and may still have been the same person that I am. I don’t know. It might be interesting to do a survey of how many Victors are successful as a percentage in relation to other men not called Victor. The results could be interesting. I can think of Vic(tor) Reeves, Vic(tor) Damone, Vic(tor) Marks. All of these Victor men (they seem to be called Vic but I assume it is shortened from Victor) have been successful in their chosen careers. And there is of course Victor Mature, sounding proud about growing up. I know that he is, or was, a film star, and that boys at school sometimes called each other Victor because of somebody famous called Victor Mature. Some lads who called me Victor sometimes gave me the impression that they were calling me Victor Mature, by the sly pronounciaton or the wry smile that went with the greeting: “Alright Victor.”

I finish my second cup of tea, and walk home with thoughts of possible stories.

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