Narrative Self

For the last couple of days I’ve had my head down and my nose stuck in a book I just couldn’t put down: 350 pages of compelling stuff. Engleby by Sebastian Faulks: £2.99 in W H Smith if you were prepared to stoop low enough to buy The Times. I stooped. Then discovered I needn’t have bothered because the book was half-price in Waterstones anyway. Having been welded to the sofa for several days, I felt at a loss when I finished it: restless. I thought maybe a muddy stomp round the creek would help clear my head.

*

…I’m wondering when I might acquire my own patina.

Why is it that when I’m walking my thoughts flow with every stride, but as soon as I sit down they dissipate? When I was moving they were solid (as in ‘real’, tangible), coherent, had meaning. Now they’re just ether and have drifted off with the wood smoke from the grate. I’m sitting here in a congenial pub staring at the redwood grain of the old pine table boards (so much more stable than it’s cheaper, yellow counterpart). They have a richness that has developed with age and I’m wondering when I might acquire my own patina. I don’t mean on the surface, wrinkling skin and liver spots. I mean a kind of depth, a colour that is the sum of experience; something I thought I’d just naturally acquire as I grew older, compounding experience upon experience. It seems to be eluding me so far. I look into myself and I see no richness there. Then again, I think to myself, that table’s probably four times as old as I am.

In the part of the book where the protagonist Michael Engleby realises and accepts that he is actually “bonkers”, I have a similar realisation about myself: I am totally out of kilter with those around me, though, as yet, not criminally insane. There’s always this urge from others to fit in with them, the way ‘they’, society, does things. Well, I don’t want to; in fact I just can’t. For instance, I wonder if it’s ‘normal’ (perhaps I should say ‘usual’) to get indignant, into an internal rage, about recycling instructions from the County Council? A red recycling bag, with instructions in a black Helvetica style typeface writ large on the side, arrived on my doorstep one fine day: you will not put x, y, z in this red bag. You will put cleaned tin cans in here, etc, etc. Oh, I will, will I? CLEANED tin cans? Fuck off, will I. Don’t fucking tell me what to do with my own fucking tin cans that I’ve bought and paid for. It more than irks me every time I look at that recycling bag – some anonymous corporation telling me what to do and how to live my life. It’s like a job I once had at the County Council. (Could there be a theme here, I wonder?) In the contract I dutifully signed I was instructed to wear ‘smart, suitable clothing for office work’. Ha. You can guess what I thought about that: don’t fucking tell me what to wear. I’ll bloody well wear what I like and what I deem suitable for wearing whilst sitting bored witless in front of a computer all day. What I deemed suitable were comfy, ratty old jumpers full of holes and covered in paint. (I knew how to rebel.) Had I been there much longer I may even have turned up still in my pyjamas, which is what I’ve taken to wearing rather a lot lately. Alternatively, I wear the same clothes day in, day out, including sleeping in them. Sometimes it’s about three days before I even notice, today being one of them.

Mylor Creek

As I mentioned earlier, when I finished the book I felt restless and decided to go for a walk. It wasn’t until I was half way round the creek I realised that I’d just got up put my boots and coat on and walked out the door without thinking about clean clothes (let alone a clean body). But, the thing is, it doesn’t horrify me like it would most people. In fact I don’t give a stuff. There are far more important things to worry about. Like what am I going to read next? Where am I going to find another Michael whose internal monologue is as inane and out of kilter with the rest of the planet’s as mine? And, talking of inanity, at least I keep mine in my head (well excluding this of course – one of Engleby’s circular arguments perhaps?), unlike the load mouth Essex soundalike family that have just arrived to spoil the peace and quiet and disrupt the flow of thoughts I was beginning to feel I was getting a grip on once again…

“You’ve got kindling under that ‘ave you?” No, tossers, it’s a bunch of flowers. With that thought also going up the chimney with the smoke, I put on my not-waterproof waterproof coat and walked out into the pouring Cornish rain.

On my way up the steep hill, I wonder whether the rain that is soaking my thighs could actually be called Cornish? The rain clouds could after all have formed elsewhere and just blown in with the wind, rather than actually forming directly above Cornwall, entitling them to a proper name.

Engleby by Sebastian Faulks – I highly recommend it! (Link to Amazon)