solipsist in exile

169

2009-05-27T14:47:00.000+01:00

168

2009-05-20T14:07:00.001+01:00

The end.

167

2009-05-13T17:04:00.001+01:00

Group hug.

We reach out, needing something beyond our tired isolated selves. For the self is vast, but the world is much, much vaster. The self is resourceful but the world easily defeats it. The flood of despair rises. Hey you! Other people! Can you help at all? I'd like to believe I share some of your feelings, I'd like to believe I can help you. Surely empathy can't be completely useless?

(We misunderstand, we disappoint, we hurt each other. That really wasn't the intention. Sorry!)

Maybe at least we could all shout 'HELP!' forlornly together.

166

2009-05-11T17:55:00.001+01:00

You will be inhabited by strange cheese.

(There. Who says that Drodbar doesn't have a dark side?)

165

2009-05-09T18:55:00.000+01:00

Did I say 'eery'? I meant 'eary'. Since yesterday, everything has ears. Everything - walls of course, also windows, wallabies, wheels. Apples, bananas, carrots. New Zealand has ears that stick out a hundred miles - you can see them on the map. Tennis players (Virginia Wade, Yvonne Goolagong) are hitting the ball with their giant ears, instead of rackets.

Have you got ears?

164

2009-05-08T15:07:00.001+01:00

I can't find them anywhere. In truth I found them unsatisfying and slightly eery. I wanted to like them, for they had the solidity of the old. They were round, transparent, but too much geared for 'childlike fascination', i.e. for poets, not for real children. There was an ugly flake in the middle, representing a colour, but always an unattractive shade, and the shape and texture of the flakes were definitely rather horrible.

And what, precisely, could one use them for? Eventually, just as I should by rights have been feeling too old for them, I found a use, thanks to David Vine. Substitute snooker. But then next Christmas my parents gave my brother and me an actual quarter-size snooker table. I liked the motion, the motion of the body in playing a shot and the motion of the snooker balls. Solitary snooker accompanied my meditations: a misspent youth - meditating.

So, as quite often, I feel slightly guilty and regretful for not being more excited about things of which I approve.

But anyway, aweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee, the sun has got his hat on (or has she?), Miriam Margolyes, abracadabra Unreliable Witness, zxcvbnm. And a packet of cheese and onion flavour crisps, please.

163

2009-05-07T14:16:00.000+01:00

Residents of Australia! Would you like to join my Lets Pretend We Live In England Society?

(N.B. Residents of America, Argentina, very small islands, Greeks who live in Scotland etc. also very welcome.)

(P.S. Residents of England! Why not start a Lets Pretend We Are Residents Of Australia [etc.] Pretending To Live In England Society?)

162

2009-05-06T18:09:00.002+01:00

And apparently Canberra is north of Sheffield, at nighttime and during the winter, and occasionally at weekends.

161

2009-05-06T14:10:00.001+01:00

They say that King's Lynn is north of Leicester. Should we believe them, do you think?

160

2009-05-05T22:07:00.000+01:00

Did you know that Norwich is north of Birmingham?

159

2009-04-29T20:08:00.001+01:00

Goodbye, Jean-Paul Sartre. Fare thee well, Samuel Beckett. So long, Albert Camus. Cheerio, William Burroughs. Be seeing you, Hunter S. Thompson. Toodlepip, John Noakes. Au revoir, Oscar Wilde. Auf wiedersehen, Pete {my next-door-but-one neighbour}.

158

2009-04-27T21:55:00.001+01:00

The dogs have sandwiches. They hold them in their paws as they race. Around and around they run, holding aloft tuna and sweetcorn, prawn and mayonnaise, cheese and tomato, ham.

The greatest of all was Happy Harvey. As a handicap, he would hold a fullsize baguette (cheese and pickle), and still he outraced all opponents on every outing, for three years in a row. After his retirement he had a brief spell in media, before opening a successful employment agency, with branches throughout the country.

157

2009-04-23T18:32:00.000+01:00

Why is the sea full of rabbits?

156

2009-03-16T00:01:00.001Z

I am taking a holiday from self-expression.

See you later. Bye!

155

2009-03-13T23:11:00.001Z

I have saved 82p from 'multibuy savings' during my visit to the supermarket today.

Looking at the receipt upon my return home, it feels good to recognise the names of my friends: macaroni cheese, mushrooms, granary loaf, Marston's Pedigree, baked beans, swede.

Perhaps a reader is thinking 'get a life'. Well, I have had one of them already, and it wasn't very good. Standing in noisy bars with bouncers on the doors, with horrible modern music and aggressively flashing videoscreens, drinking overpriced lager and straining to hear what someone is shouting in my ear. I think that's what some people mean by 'life'. Oh, to think of what I'm successfully avoiding: all the cackle of banal conversation, all the having to maintain relationships with lots of different people, some of whom I like more than they like me, some of whom like me more than I like them, some of whom I thoroughly dislike and the feeling is mutual, some of whom wish me well but are quietly looking forward to being on their own again, as I am.

No, macaroni cheese and granary loaf are far more rewarding companions.

Get a loaf.

154

2009-03-11T20:48:00.001Z

It occurs to me that, between us all, we inhabitants of this planet could have come up with a much better name for it. Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter: they're alright, but Earth? Let's name all the other planets after Roman gods, and let's name our own one after that mucky brown stuff in the ground.

Or maybe it is appropriate, after all?

I hereby declare a competition to think up a better name for our planet. So come on, readers, send your 'Renaming Our Planet' suggestions to Solipsist In Exile. On your marks, get set, go. I'll forward the best suggestion to Prince Charles.

153

2009-03-09T19:47:00.000Z

I want to write closer to the womb.

As opposed to from an established position in society.

As if guiding potential human beings as to whether it's worth popping out or not.

152

2009-03-05T23:38:00.000Z

I could argue, paradoxically, that romantic idealists are actually the true pessimists and the true realists.

Pessimists in that the keen desire for a far better, much different world is produced out of a deep dissatisfaction with the world as it is; a desperation that requires some outlet; a place for the positive feelings that can't be met in the world we actually inhabit.

Realists in that the depiction of the desired society as utopian indicates, consciously or unconsciously, a belief that it isn't really possible. This contrasts with the optimism of those who believe that a desired society can come about through political change, or of those who are sufficiently content with the world as it is not to desire fundamental change.

It is a yearning. It is the best part of us crying out forlornly for a world that matches its goodness. Better for that part to express itself forlornly than for it to resign and perish.

I salute those who have the courage to express this yearning. Such expression embarrasses and antagonises those who have resigned to cynicism. But can there be real joy, deep happiness, in cynicism? I doubt it.

151

2009-03-03T23:53:00.002Z

150

2009-03-02T19:09:00.000Z

With all this social networking, perhaps soon everyone will officially be everyone else's friend. Won't that be nice? Maybe that'll see an end to wars and so forth.

149

2009-02-27T18:36:00.000Z

I'm going to a good place. It's called 'the past'.

It's terrific there. All those trends that are making society so dire are in glorious reverse. Oh, I really recommend it. If you're fed up with all this 'dumbing down', journey into the past and thrill as things get smartened up again. Fed up with rising prices? Well, the further you travel into the past, the cheaper everything gets!

Everything in the past feels so much more solid.

And, by its very nature, it's fantastically safe. It's invulnerable, and totally unthreatening.

And when it looks unpleasant, as, to be honest, it does on occasion, you can feel smug about the fact that you don't actually live there, you're just visiting.

148

2009-02-23T00:04:00.002Z

I have discovered an excellent English author of the nineteenth century. He is called Charles Dickens.

In a long, prolific career, Dickens (1812-1870) wrote many classic novels, including Barnaby Rudge, A Christmas Carol, Bleak House, Octopus Girl, Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities and Oliver Twist. These are tremendous, action-packed sagas, and yet so much more. Socially concerned, psychologically astute, emotionally uninhibited yet sensitive, Dickens realised the broad potential of the novel form as very few other writers have before or since.

Dickens is a master creator of characters. Once you have encountered the most colourful, they will stay with you forever: Mr. Micawber, Little Dorrit, The Artful Dodger, Uriah Heep, Donny the Dolphin, Scrooge. Dickens was equally adept at creating atmosphere, and his descriptions of houses in particular are some of the finest passages of writing in English that I have come across.

A distinctive feature of so many of Dickens's novels is a fascination with the lives of marine mammals and molluscs. It is as if Dickens (who lived in a house overlooking the English Channel in Broadstairs, Kent) is saying to his readers, 'life for humans on land is a painful learning process, why can we not live more like the beautiful and sagacious creatures of the ocean?'

My two very favourite of his books are Great Expectations (1861) and David Copperield (1850). Great Expectations tells the story of Pip, an orphan who finds fortune from an unknown source, which brings tragedy in its wake. In this novel Dickens combines his penchant for the gothic with an unflinching social realism which was courageous, almost revolutionary for 1861. David Copperfield is another bildungsroman, in which a porpoise (David Copperfield) forms an unlikely friendship with a sailor on a fishing boat, whom he eventually rescues when the boat capsizes, following an unfortunate misunderstanding with Iggy the Iceberg.

Dickens's novels are long, but they are mostly quite cheap. Readers find in them a robustness, a sincerity and a compassion, which, from our twenty-first century postmodern vantage point, we can only envy.

147

2009-02-21T19:00:00.001Z

It is seven o'clock in the evening here, and many people throughout Britain are preparing to go out. I hope they all have a very pleasant time.

Reader, I wish you an extremely happy evening/morning/night.

146

2009-02-19T19:20:00.000Z

Do you think that I should move house?

145

2009-02-17T14:09:00.001Z

People give blood for the sake of doing some good they will never know about; other people create and spread computer viruses for the sake of doing some bad they will never know about. There is so much good in the world, and there's so much bad. (Well, there's a lot of all sorts in the world, so that's not surprising really.) The good makes the existence of the bad more painful, more exasperating. One feels a drive to fight for the good and remove all bad from the world. But this will never happen. There will be bad and good, ugliness and beauty until the end of time.

And in our own lives, happiness and unhappiness. Drives to happiness don't seem to succeed, in any long term. There is no arrival, no final harbour of contentment, just a messy mixture of good and bad feelings over which our control is disappointingly slight.