To get to know someone, really know them, takes a lot of work, and thought, and time. You'd have to concentrate, listen and be interested, stay close. You'd have to make bonds and keep them tight, you'd have to touch and hold, walk hand-in-hand, dance cheek-to-cheek, lie nose-to-nose.
You'd have to talk, and tell. Confide and open up. Tell your hopes and dreams, your secrets and shames, your fears and despair.
So I was wondering. If very few people really know me, is that because they didn't try? Or is it because they could already tell I wasn't worth the effort?
We sat in a coffee bar near Blackfriars. It's closed down now. He was telling me he had starting seeing someone else, fallen in love with her: it was the last time we met.
"The thing is" he said bitterly, "I never really felt I knew you. You never let me get close. We had some fun times but there was always a barrier that I couldn't seem to get through".
The truth can cut right to the bone, can't it.
But how well can you ever really know someone? How close can you get? Maybe there would be a series of tests a person could progress through, like levels on a video game. What newspapers do I read? Am I right or left-handed? What colour are my eyes? What would I order in a restaurant? Where did I grow up? What do I like to dance to? How do I like to be touched? Could you recognise me in the dark, just by the smell of my skin?
I knew she was upset about the fight with her friend, but she wouldn't say much about it.
After she'd gone to bed, I logged on to her Facebook, to try and work out what had happened. Seems weird to me, having an argument on-line, but I guess if you can fall in love on line and have sex on line, then having a cyber-row is relatively run-of-the-mill for Generation Tweenager.
"No one likes you", it said. "Everyone laughs at you because your mum is so ugly and so fat. She looks stupid and old and really boring. She wears mum clothes and she is just GROSS".
I stayed in an apartment opposite here last week. Britain is full of buildings like this: none of them cinemas any more but still thronged with the glamorous ghosts of the glory days of film. Redolent of the cigarettes from the time when everyone smoked, and wore hats, and went to the pictures.
These buildings are too big to demolish, so they sit in the midst of the old high streets - streets themselves that have been overtaken by retail parks and out of town stores and precincts. Mosques, bingo halls, gyms, or possibly nightclubs, they still serve as places where people go to have fun.
I've travelled widely in this country with my work, and most towns, even small, can muster a masterpiece like this - a Gaumont, a Roxy, a Ritzy. One day I would like to find the time to photograph these buildings. I'd like to capture them in a book, or perhaps a blog, with a photo and a piece of creative writing for each one.
I do not want to run out of time to do the things I promised myself I'd always do. And I need to reconcile myself to the fact that if I want to do these things, I must do them on my own otherwise I won't be doing them at all.
I am Ravenspurn: once of importance but now eroded away to nothingness. I am having so much of myself lasered away that soon I will be hollowed out, delicate as a blown robin's egg.
The looming sensation of dread at the resumption of healthcare indignities various is something I am trying to fend off - I imagine it like a shadow falling over life, a blocking of the sun. And I'm not the only one, of course not. All of us are beginning to crumble, one way and another. Our Achilles Heels are showing themselves.
Parts of the coast are falling away, but East Yorkshire will still be East Yorkshire even if Spurn Point becomes Spurn Island in the end. Ravenspurn that town of old is now reinvented as an oilfield. So I suppose even with parts of us cut out - cervixes, knees, gallstones, breast lumps, lengths of intestine, whatever - we're still who we are.
I try to live in the moment, honestly I do. I try to be still and present and mindful, to concentrate on the here and now.
Sometimes I do this so well I lose myself. There is no sense of time passing, just a feeling of now, and now, and now. And I wonder whether that is how to be happy: not to analyse, or reflect but simply to smile and say "now, I am happy", not wanting to be anywhere else.
It's the in-between times that are the trouble. When there is nothing happening. When mindful turns to mindless. When the worries start creeping in. What if that was the last happy moment? What if that was the last time?
Is it ageing, this fear of the last time? Or is it a different angst?
My happy moments seem afterwards unsubstantive. Are they the last rays of a sun setting to grey dullness and a slow fade to black? If I held those moments, turned them over in my hand, would they crush to nothing? If I laughed too hard, shouted with joy, sighed with regret, would they blow away entirely?
Was there anything there at all? How could I be sure?
I want to mark these moments when they come now, recognise them. I don't want to be too shy to speak the good things, while there are any good things to speak.
Can you imagine it? A situation where a wild, passionate, adventurous, free-spirited poet somehow becomes trapped in the life of a boring management consultant. It's like a sort of modern-day Grimm Brothers fairy-horror.
If it happened to me, I know just what I would do.
It would be important not to get found out otherwise disaster of an unspecified nature would strike. So I would button myself tightly into my business suit and play the role to perfection. Then every time something happened that seemed as if it might elicit an inappropriate response (anger, tears, falling in love, belly laughs, multiple orgasms, writing, getting drunk, dancing) I'd wrap it up quick and put it in a box. Lock it up, lock it down, file it away. Then get back to being Appropriate.
Boy oh boy there would be a lot of boxes stacked up there by now, if it were me. I'd bet some of those boxes would have stuff banging away, rattling about, trying to break out. Keeping them all nailed down, that would take some time and trouble: all that authenticity, that vibrant, messy, noisy lifeforce, wanting to escape and see the light of day. It would be some job, holding it all in. I'd get tired of it, I expect.
And then what would happen? I don't know the rest of the story.
So eventually, after much to-ing and fro-ing, the Brainchild returns. Sixteen and a half years I've been running this business now. Whoever would have thought I'd have the tenacity to stick at anything for that amount of time? Not me, that's for sure.
I was wondering how many people I've employed over that period. How many hours billed, how many pounds spent with suppliers. I feel I've done my bit to contribute to the economy (parlous state be it in these days).
As I am a smallbusinessperson, I won't be getting an MBE or a lucrative government advisory post - although I have played my part just as much as the next guy. Half the economy is made up of businesses like mine, although you don't read about us often in the press, or see us on tv or hear us on the radio. We sit uneasily, not coalminers yet not quite fat cats. Not worthy of the FT, yet subject to the same tax-regime as venture capitalists, for the relatively modest rewards.
I'm not complaining - I have a nice life. I've earned it all honestly myself, at no one else's expense and to no one else's detriment. I am quietly proud. Quietly too I've given away 10% of my time and 5% of my income every year.
And all my tedious training and work in the City, that I felt was the soul-destroying career-gulch of my early twenties, taught me enough after all to enable me to sell my business at the top of the market and buy it back at the bottom just like the text books said.
Now all I have to do is sell it again. The infernal roundabout keeps on turning.
She watched him from beneath her fringe with a steady gaze. He was cleaning his brushes on a white rag, and the bitter tang of turpentine caught in her throat as the reds of lip and hair, the green of eyes and the pale rose of skirt blurred together into a thick smear of dull brown on the cloth.
He never looked her in the eye, although he would stare intently at a wrist, or a nipple, or a wrinkle in the rough woollen stockings; then down to his work, the brushes delicately caressing the taut canvas.
He touched her from time to time in an impersonal, detached manner - to adjust a piece of fabric, or lift a section of her hair to fall across her cheek in a particular way. Once, he pushed his thumb between her lips to part them and show her teeth. He tasted of paint and salt.
He had rarely spoken to her, and only then with instructions on the pose. He had not asked her name, after all these weeks.
"I'm Anna," she said, quietly.
He frowned, came over and tilted her head downwards slightly, taking her chin between his finger and thumb.
"It doesn't matter, your name". He stared intently at the pot of brushes, stroked a flat-ended sable across the back of his hand. She knew his, of course. Everyone knew. She wondered who bought the paintings, where they would hang. She could not imagine what sort of house, what kind of room, would have on its walls a large image of a half-naked girl in rumpled wool stockings. No other man or boy had ever seen her naked, no hand apart from his had touched her skin beyond a handshake.
She watched the painter mix his colours with a scowl of concentration, care for his brushes with the tenderness of a lover. He painted with sure, confident strokes although he did not allow her to look at the work. She pictured him running his hand across the jut of her collarbone and into the shadow of her neck, and felt her cheeks suddenly blush.
(20 minute writing workshop exercise)
Typical girl - all foreplay and action? Answer my quiz of the week.
Make it stop Please don't stop Wake me up when it's over Oh you tease - where's the rest?
I skived off work this afternoon and went to a workshop: How To Write Erotic Fiction.
It's pretty much exactly two years since I went on a writing workshop - the first one I'd been to since university. I determined to start taking my writing seriously - and started this blog to exercise my writing muscle.
Now I've been published twice in anthologies, done a number of readings, and feel able to introduce myself (in certain circles anyway) as a writer. This is where I was going. This is where I am supposed to be.
Although I'm not entirely sure that erotic fiction is exactly the correct destination - it might be more of a fun diversion. The woman running the workshop was called Mitzi (my porn-starlet name, how funny....), an American who writes mixed-genre fiction, including the erotic (and with a call out right now for submissions to her new anthology).
She had some useful reflections on this kind of writing, and the differences between the horny (=good) and the porny (=bad). I remain to be convinced about this distinction, as sometimes real life scenarios can be very exciting precisely because they are porny. Nonetheless, I did agree with her that a writer should be clear at the outset whether she is aiming for a two-handed or a one-handed read. So to speak.
Personally, I feel there's a time and a place for everything.
We had to do a couple of writing exercises, then read them to the group. Writing something erotic is one thing. Reading it out to a group of strangers in a genteel county-town hotel in the middle of the afternoon is another thing entirely. However I did not find it as embarrassing as I still do to read my poetry in front of friends. Isn't that strange?
I realised with both the exercises (one inspired by a postcard of an Egon Schiele painting, on a write-up of someone else's fantasy picked out of a hat) that I was taking longer than everyone else to get to the money-shot. I am not sure whether that made it more exciting, with more of a sensual build-up, or whether that just made it rubbish. I might write up what I wrote, and seek e-verdicts, what do you think? Horny? Porny? Or just dull dull dull? I mean, obviously I've written about sexy stuff before, but is it sexy? And who gets to be the arbiter of that? (Now there's a job...)
I've got another workshop on Thursday, and a reading of my poems on Friday. Some of the poems are quite sexy, but I've not had the chance to read many of these in public - it gets complicated. A genteel tearooms in the middle of the afternoon is not the place to start, either.
I woke just before it was light on Saturday morning and decided to go for a run along the path around the golf course as the sun came up. This wonderful, unexpected Indian summer dawned with a perfect clear sky and a mist hugging the fields in the valley down by the river.
Even the golfers and dog-walkers were not out yet, as I jogged along crunching the leaves under my feet with squirrels, rabbits, a hare and two dancing foxes in the far field to keep me company. At the top of the climb the spires were caught by the first rays while the rest of the town was still grey and sleeping.
As I run this route, I can see the season's change in every vista, every tree. I began in the bright greens of early summer, and yesterday leaves were falling all around me as I passed. In one place, I thought a strip of sun had slit through the trees onto the path ahead, but when I came closer it was a vivid orange stripe of tiny fruits which had dropped in the night.
"Now and then it's good to pause in our pursuit of happiness and just be happy." (Apollinaire).
I have not seen the plays in town, Only the computer printouts. I have not read the latest books, Only the Wall Street Journal. I have not heard a bird sing this year, Only the ringing of the phones. I have not taken a walk anywhere, But from the parking lot to my office. I have not shared a feeling in years, But my thoughts are known to all. I have not listened to my own needs, But what I want I get. I have not shed a tear in ages. I have arrived. Is this where I was going?
I was much further out than you thought, and not waving but drowning. Complicated, intense,stressed, tired. Difficult to get to know and hard to love. Rarely admit vulnerability - never accept help. Standing note to self: "must try harder".