Mere Pseud . . . .

Monday January 2nd

1984-01-02T20:58:00.002Z

Nineteen eighty four begins well on the football field at least. I saw Athletic notch up another victory, against Astlow Town, a win they hardly deserved. There was a large crowd at Cardigan Park—958 we heard later—& quite a few had made the trip from Astlow & packed the Three Locks Rd stand. Conditions were foul, with continuous rain & a strong wind blowing towards the Easterby end of the ground. Athletic played with their faces to this wind in the first half & almost went a goal down early on. Nussey was playing very badly & the swirling high balls had him beat every time.

Robert & I stood next to two Astlow supporters throughout the game, bespectacled, in their forties, quiet blokes. As the second-half continued Robert kept up a constant conversation with them. Astlow looked the better side & adapted to the mud & wind quicker than Athletic. They’d always looked dangerous & it seemed almost inevitable that they should go ahead, which they did in the 61st minute, but a minute later, Highmore lunged at a corner & the ball sailed over the heads of the Astlow defenders & into the net. Two minutes after that Labbie scored direct from a corner & the ground exploded into cheers & shouts of joy. The same people who’d hurled seat cushions onto the pitch after Astlow had gone 1 up now threw seat cushions into the air in delight, & sang “We’re Proud of You” with hypocritical fervour. Easterby fans are more fickle than most. The atmosphere was tremendous in the last few minutes & I felt for the hunched defeated figures across the pitch as they shambled towards the exit & the looks of black resignation on the faces of our two friends tempered our jubilation at the victory somewhat.

Robert & Carol drove back to Dearnelow in the evening. Dad is back at work today (2 p.m. to 10 p.m.) & Andrew returned South this morning too . . .

Sunday January 1st

1984-01-01T21:43:00.003Z

Yesterday Barry, Guy, Lee & I went into Debdenshaw & bought some food & rented a video, “Friday the Thirteenth, Part Two.” We watched this tale of multiple murder & butchery with some enjoyment. I also received the cheering news that Athletic had beaten Purswell 2-0.

Barry’s ‘party,’ not billed as such but destined to become one, attracted a fair number of people, I would say about twenty. Pete & his London friend Tony arrived at teatime, & various other old faces & new made their entrance throughout the evening including Barry’s friend Phil (how I like him!), carrying his wisdom like an awkward & solemnly intense schoolboy. His loneliness & isolation seemed etched deep into his long, sombre face. Patrick carries his insights & wisdom in an altogether more arrogant way. There’s a lot to dislike about him.

I didn’t really talk to anyone & it seemed as if I was apart & unable to bridge the gulf separating me from everyone else. I couldn’t summon the necessary energy or commitment to actually talk, & I couldn’t escape a sense of futility & meaninglessness. I endured the conversation & the laughter & the dope & drink & didn’t really feel excited or sad or anything particularly . . . I was just there. Lee kept to himself.

The onset of the new year wasn’t acknowledged by anyone—it came & went & we were none the merrier (or sadder) for it. I dragged myself on until four a.m. & then I found a bed & tried to go to sleep, but Phil sat at my bedside & talked to me. Then Barry came up too & we all talked about our mutual realisation of the need for change in ’84. It should be a ‘make-or-break’ year for me. I’ll know by the end of this year if I really am incapable of any fruitful form of commitment & resolve or if I’ll be destined to follow this course to its mundane conclusion. I must know.

Today, in the afternoon, Barry gave Lee & I a lift out to the beginning of the motorway, & although we waited over an hour in the bitter wind & damp, we couldn't get a ride, so we caught the bus into town & a coach back to Easterby instead. As we sat on the coach in Debdenshaw waiting to set off, the urban sprawl no longer looked as ugly & depressing as it had done earlier, thus illustrating to me the simple but fundamental way we ‘intentionalise’ our surroundings. In themselves, these concrete forms & structures possess no quality apart from that which we invest them with in accordance with our current mood.

Now the New Year is here I feel empty & devoid of any acknowledgement of what it is I’ve Got to Do. The idea of the decisive Act is there alright, but it isn’t Alive. It’s an empty notion so far. The spark of inspiration needed to vivify this idea is missing at this moment. I also catch myself experiencing real doubt & even fear at the consequences of what I’m planning, fear of being caught with my pants down so to speak, of finding myself in the midst of something I haven’t fully thought through.

Friday December 30th

1983-12-31T03:29:00.005Z

In the afternoon Lee & I hitched across the Pennines. Dad gave both of us a lift up to the top of Debdenshaw Road to the beginning of the A64. We made sure we were standing in front of the sign & stuck our thumbs out. A car stopped almost immediately, the driver a thin faced balding man, puffing on a cigarette. I thought him a little stupid for stopping right in the slow lane of the slip-road & not pulling over, but climbed in happy to have a lift so quickly.

No sooner had we set off again than there was a police car, ordering us to pull over. I recognised the driver immediately as Mr. Harding, our next-door neighbour at Wintersett Crescent ten years ago. He didn’t seem to recognise me at first. The car driver was taken & given a long talking to in the police Range Rover before he was released, sullen & obviously annoyed, to tell us that it was our turn for the slapped wrist treatment. Mr. Harding told us that there could have been a fatal accident: he’d seen 5 cars come round the corner in the time it had taken us to climb in, & two of these had had to swerve to avoid a collision. He’d done the driver of the car on several counts—driving without due care & attention, stopping on a dual carriageway etc. I felt sorry that we’d caused this innocent bloke so much trouble.

When I gave Mr. Harding my name, slowly the realisation dawned in his face that he knew me & he turned around with an “Ohh Paul!” He said I’d made him feel bad, & although he toyed with the idea of letting us off with a caution he decided he couldn’t take the risk & so reported us. We might get away with it, but if we do get done then Lee, as a second-time offender, could be fined £50. Lee was quite pissed off by his bad luck & the possibility of such a large fine. Harding gave us a lift in the Range Rover to the next service station. I was quite blasé about the whole thing, apart from concern over Mum’s inevitable over-reaction & the ensuing worry she’ll suffer.

We got a lift into Debdenshaw after about ten minutes cold wait & were dropped about two miles outside the city centre and walked the rest of the way, through a predominantly Jewish area part of the way. Lee & I both felt quite despondent as we trailed around the busy streets.

Barry finally turned up in his Dad’s yellow Capri. Doug was with him. Barry’s parents are in Venice for a Christmas holiday & when we got back to the Duckworth household only his 17-year old sister Claudia was in. They live in an enormous house full of cherubs—incorporated into the lamp fittings, cherubs holding up glass coffee tables, cherubs swinging from the ceiling lights, masses of white sheepskin everywhere (rugs, chair covers . . .), acres of the stuff in every room, red & pink décor & Romanesque divans . . . The entire effect was one of kitsch decadence, a small-time recreation of Baroque splendour which didn’t quite hit-it-off.

Guy rang at around six & Barry picked him up in the Capri. Guy too had hitched up & had come primarily for the Hacienda in Manchester & a meeting with a few friends of his. I didn’t say much to him & he seemed to be very remote in a thorny, cynical kind of way. Barry’s RCP friend Patrick & a few other people rolled up. Free tickets for the Hacienda were produced & so that’s where we went for the evening.

The Hacienda was quite impressive, a large converted warehouse decked out in austere industrial grey with diagonal black & yellow stripes. We sat & watched the videos playing on the large screens at either end of the club, smoked the ready rolled joints Barry had brought along or played video games . . . nothing special.

Wednesday December 28th

1983-12-28T23:16:00.000Z

The weather has been mild again, & this morning it was quite sunny, Ainsley Hill a blaze of copper tints & shades of brown caught by the sun against a sky the colour of gun metal.

Rob & Carol stayed the night & left at dinnertime. I met Lee in Farnshaw market place at eleven &, as we had a few minutes before the bus came, we wandered on to the second-hand electrical shop opposite Top Shop to look for ciné equipment & came away with a Chinon Concord Standard 8 Reflex ciné camera with zoom & wide angle lens for £9. This will go towards the Grey Triangle venture next year. It really seems quite a bargain. We bought batteries for it & the motor works perfectly.

We travelled into Whincliffe on the bus & walked the half mile into Cartbeck to the army surplus shop. Lee bought himself a pair of black German para-boots identical to mine & a pair of baggy fatigues. I bought a pair of trousers too. I kept thinking about the unfortunate uniformity of Lee & I’s taste in clothing just lately. What with the boots, the fatigues & the greatcoats, we look virtually identical.

I hurried back for half-three & the planned visit to Janet’s. I wasn’t looking forward to it but it turned out better than I’d expected. All the Peale clan were present: Nanna P., Kenneth, Shirley, Nicola, Ian, Janet & her husband Trev, Michael & newly born Geoffrey, plus Mum, Dad & Andrew & I. Janet’s baby was born 2 months premature & only now has he reached an adequate weight. I held him awkwardly for a little while. He was very light & quite tiny, a small pinched face & perfectly formed hands, palms no bigger than my thumbnail. He slept most of the evening as he was passed around, only rousing himself to squall when he was hungry. Michael is 2½ now & rushed to & fro incessantly, a broad grin on his face, his sticking out ears making his face look more triangular than ever. He doesn’t say much apart from “Yes,” “No” & a few other monosyllabic words. He’s a likeable little kid.

I kept quiet & sat in the corner & ate the food & drank the booze provided. Janet’s husband kept referring to me as “the young ‘un” & asked Dad if it was OK for me to have Theakston’s as it was strong: if he only knew. I don’t have a lot in common with the Peale side of the family & we’re really quite isolated on our little branch of the tree–I think Andrew is Mum & Dad’s strongest hope for grandchildren (I shall certainly never have any). I think this question of heirs to perpetuate this branch of the family is one that bothers Dad on the quiet. He’d enjoy being a grandfather.

Tuesday December 27th

1983-12-27T19:32:00.001Z

The day was inevitably dominated by football. Rob & Carol came across in the morning & after dinner, Robert, Andrew, Dad & I went to Cardigan Park & saw Athletic trounce Holmeshaw Vale 3-0. Highmore got two goals. Homeshaw were a poor side & at times, especially early in the second half, Athletic ran amok & looked as if they were going to score with every attack. The crowd gave the team a standing ovation & the great outpourings of enjoyment & satisfaction were a pleasure to behold. Over seven hundred people saw the game, nearly double the average gate.

The mild weather continues. Every night two of the Fire Bellied Toads chirp in their glass tank, presumably serenading the single female. I’ve done nothing since Christmas Day except finish the last few pages of “The New Existentialism" & carry on with my reading of “The Magus.” I haven’t been anywhere since Christmas Eve. Barry rang. Lee & I are going to hitch across to Debdenshaw on Friday & hopefully, Guy, Pete, Stu & Gareth will be there. Del is in Milton Keynes, Trevor across in Holland. Lee & I are going to Whincliffe tomorrow to the Army Surplus shop.

It’s quite apparent the surface routine of home has made no great impression on my mental situation. As a record of my ‘mental life,’ this diary attests to the virtual standstill of that side of things at the moment. I need time to think. What can I say but that at this instant in time I very much hope that I’ll see Claire again & that I’ll sort out myself for the new year; a sort of new year’s resolution before which I have to get a lot of things straight in my mind.

Monday December 26th

1983-12-26T23:45:00.003Z

It was fine & sunny again today, yellowy smudges of cloud hanging almost stationary against the blue, fragile sunlight & the wintry chatter of starlings in the trees. Looking out into the garden, at the clear skies, it wasn’t Christmas at all.

Mum, Dad & Andrew went out for a walk around Knowlesbeck & I stayed in to listen to a historic Easterby Athletic victory at top-of-the-table Hollin End at Reedshaw Lane. With just three minutes to go Newlands put Athletic ahead & for the last few minutes the tension was unbearable: I hopped about with my fingers crossed, unable to believe we were winning. But win we did!

Dad invited Mr. Tillotson across for dinner & he told us of his days as an Athletic fan before the First World War, when he & his mates would climb over the wall into the Three Locks Rd. side of the ground. He remembers nothing of the matches, but can still recall the names of some of the players (Arthur Briggs, etc.).

Reading Wilson all evening: “Our lives consist of a clash between two visions: our vision of . . . inner freedom, & our vision of contingency; our intuition of freedom & power, & our everyday feeling of limitation & boredom. The ‘new existentialism’ . . . helps to reveal how the spirit of freedom is trapped & destroyed; it uncovers the complexities & safety devices in which freedom dissipates itself. It suggests mental disciplines through which this waste of freedom can be averted.”

Perhaps I see the planned ‘Grey Triangle’ project in a newer perspective, as a sort of fresh regime to focus my mind on the necessary job of ‘moving forward.’ I need to impose these limits on my self, to tighten things up. It’s the Act I need. The search may be fruitless & I may be going about it the wrong way completely but I have to try. Freedom through purpose . . .

Sunday December 25th

1983-12-25T21:24:00.004Z

A typical Christmas day has slipped away as swiftly as it came, with presents, food & hours of turgid television. Mum & Dad got me a pair of Doc Marten shoes, a jumper & a ball-point pen, Rob & Carol an illustrated history of The Doors, Nanna P. £5 & Brut talc & Splash-on-Lotion, & Andrew bought me a Bunny Wailer record. Dad, as usual, got a heap of things, mainly books.

Nanna B. was brought round by Aunty Beverly at dinnertime & she graced us with her presence all afternoon. She came out with her miserable “I haven’t got you much . . . I’m only a poor old widow woman” routine–she got me a key fob plus £1 & Andrew a rubbishy plastic wallet–& in almost the next breath was telling us of the new stereo she’s just bought herself. My cousin Susan & four-month old daughter called round in the evening, the baby very fat-faced with huge cheeks & a bald pate.

Now all the visitors are gone, & so too is Christmas for another year. I've come to bed, stuffed with food & eyes glazed from watching too much TV. I watched a very entertaining Marx Bros. film (“Duck Soup”).

Nineteen eighty-four has got to be a year of real progress for me - "There are states of consciousness that are not 'everyday consciousness' & which are not 'transcendental' either. These produce a definite sense of values & purpose. If we investigate these properly, man may be able to replace his old dogmatic religious values with a scientifically objective set of external values" (Wilson, p.160).

Saturday December 24th

1983-12-25T02:02:00.004Z

I spent Christmas Eve with Lee, Jeremy, Gillian Wade, Tommy, & Richard Houlding. The latter is working in the tax office & hasn’t changed much except for a new, up-market soul-boy look. Tommy still walks the streets in dainty white shoes & baggy black trousers. He’s moved to Brynmor. Gillian seemed to feel the need to come out with ‘funny’ stories & the silly voices to go with them & she got a little over-bearing at times. She was, she herself admitted, “trying too hard.” Lee left us after we’d trailed round a few pubs, mingling with the joyous throng & feeling particularly un-festive. Going through the motions. I curbed the impulse to set off to Easterby for a night of depressing frivolity & we rounded the evening off with a curry in Farnshaw, which was crap.

Friday December 23rd

1983-12-24T01:50:00.003Z

In some respects I really have changed very little in the 3½ years I’ve been keeping this diary. In the afternoon I went into Easterby to finish off the rest of my ‘Christmas shopping’ & to buy a pair of Doc Marten shoes. Everywhere I went I had to battle with seething crowds & I hated every minute of it.

After I’d bought the shoes, & quite on impulse, I headed for a telephone box & rang Claire: I knew if I didn’t ring her then I never would. I confidently keyed the number, waited for her to be summoned to the ‘phone, & then asked her if she wanted to “go out for a drink sometime.” She wasn’t nearly as enthusiastic as I’d prepared myself for & this threw me off completely. I crumbled into embarrassed talk & fatuousness—I was awful, but she invited me round to her house at 8 p.m.

I came out of the phone box & felt sick inside. I just wanted to shrivel, to hide, wanted the earth to swallow me up. I cringed as I remembered a facetious aside & her misunderstanding it . . . I acted as if 3 years had never been, as if I was still the callow spotty faced kid of the sixth form years. Nothing learned. I think perhaps I was going there with the wrong intention, as though something vaguely underhand was driving me on & the night was something now to be endured as a testament to that blinkered part of me that refuses to let the past be past.

The journey back on the bus was passed in a rigid state of tension & nervous turmoil & I spent teatime & early evening in a state of agitation, as if I were 9 years old, not 19, but my night out ended up being more enjoyably than I’d expected. Minutes before I set off Lee rang & I lied & told him I was off to Grant’s (“I’ll come on there with you then”), so when I met him at the bottom of Egley Road I confessed. He was a welcome presence really, dissipating some of my inevitable nervousness.

Mrs. Pearson let us in, & Claire came out of the kitchen to greet us looking very pretty—I can’t help liking her. In other circumstances I suppose I’d be quite contemptuous of the lifestyle she leads, but I can’t be unkind. I just acknowledge my dissonance with that Young-Person–With-Car mentality & our inevitable distance from one another . . . But, when all is said & done, I like her.

Andrew Hudson & Christine Clough turned up, their relationship still going strong, but he is so uninteresting, so pedestrian & utterly unremarkable . . . Christine has redeeming features I suppose, but on the whole they’re well-suited. Claire is, as far as I know, not going out with Adam Hilty anymore. Why is it I always find myself interested in girls who are hard to get to know?

She told me she dislikes macho big-headed men, & she thought my call was from an RAF man who’s been plaguing her with persistent requests for dates. I was determined to be less of an oaf this time & I think I succeeded. I asked her if I could see her again over the holidays. She’s not free again until New Year but says she’ll ring me when she is.

We all climbed into two cars & drove to the Turf, out in the middle of the moors, & as we walked in, Lee & I were stared & smirked at by the young execs who pollute the place. It was a harmless evening’s entertainment & we got back to Claire’s house at 11.30. I sat dumbly in front of the TV with Mr & Mrs Pearson & the younger sister Linda. Brother Trevor & his girlfriend arrived back after us. We left at one o’clock & Andrew had arrived when I got back.

Thursday December 22nd

1983-12-22T23:55:00.001Z

I traveled over to Robert’s on the bus. It was again rainy & grey, although the weather did clear a little as we approached Dearnelow. It’s not a very pleasant place: the bus station was filled to overflowing with nightmarish people shouting at one another & clutching their bulging bags. This is the side of Christmas that nauseates me. (I’ve bought all my presents save for Mum’s, books mainly – I bought Dad a biography of Christina Rossetti & a copy of “The Easterby Remembrancer” & an 1891 edition of the “Life & Teachings of Gautama, Prince of India & Founder of Buddhism” for Rob & Carol. I bought myself a 1956 edition of Colin Wilson’s “The Outsider.” I couldn’t stand the crowds any longer so I caught the bus to Saxton.

When I got to Saxton Carol was ill in bed with an upset stomach & Rob sat on the sofa before the crackling flames of the fire reading “The History of Human Stupidity.” The evening slipped away pleasantly enough, with nothing to do but read Wilson’s “The New Existentialism,” which is fascinating. Carol rose from her sick bed looking white & obviously ill & spent the evening half asleep on the sofa. I listened to some ‘spiny classics’ on Radio 3: Connolly, from the sixties, a piece for brass quintet, another piece for male, female voices only, & an orchestral composition, limited in tonal range & interest, a seeming chaotic maelstrom of notes & lone noises in the emptiness: the music of vastation & despair, of inward turning, of blind frustration.

Robert told me he fears the age & the sickness we live in, recounting tales about an epidemic of glue sniffing at his school & an 11-year old girl with a painted face & in a mini-skirt & lipstick, asking him if he fancied her. This shocked him. His Buddhist faith doesn’t seem to help him find contentment. Perhaps he’s striving in that direction, but at the moment his mind seems only saddened & full of despair at the things he sees around him.

“It is true that reality exists apart from us; but what we mistake for the world is actually a world constituted by us, selected from an infinitely complex reality . . .” MY world is not THE world. Although I attach to it a tragic, despairing quality, in truth it possesses no qualities at all. It exists & I exist, & the world I make for myself from the one around me is filtered & distorted by my own consciousness. I intentionalise my perceptions of the world. The twentieth century has witnessed the “slow poisoning” of religion by science & the edifice of faith has crumbled away leaving a black void. The age of Nihilism is upon us & no one recognizes it. Is a part of us responding to this great tide of Nothing?

This morning Mum went on at me: “You let yourself & me down by dressing as you do. You don’t do yourself justice . . . you’re a good-looking lad . . . If you thought anything of me you’d accord with my feelings” . . . Why must I conform to their ideal of Perfect Youth? They don’t seem to respect my wishes in this . . .

Wednesday December 21st

1983-12-21T23:18:00.002Z

About my earlier comments about the Harrods bomb: I still don’t see any logical reason for doing what the IRA did. I can’t see how maiming & murder in London achieve anything. They need to win the support of the British masses, not to alienate them. Dad sees the Irish War as a crude “race war” & even said it had “nothing to do with the IRA.” Mum, Dad & Robert all have prejudiced views about the Irish question, but I suppose its understandable never having been exposed to opinions other than those peddled by the newspapers & on television.

Today Mum condemned the violence of the ‘peace women’ at Greenham Common, who perhaps are expressing their frustration at the blatant failure of their ‘Ghandian’ methods at preventing the deployment of Cruise missiles & realising—all too late—that if all you do is sing songs & hold hands & paint peace symbols on your face no-one listens & no-one cares.
MLK only succeeded when the police started beating his marchers with clubs & setting dogs on them. Confrontation got things moving. It seems naïve to fight ruthless regimes with toothless actions. If the police in Mississippi & Alabama had been able to control the racist mobs & curbed their own racist tempers, then the Freedom Marches & protests would have failed to budge things one inch. Kennedy only acted because he was afraid of adverse world opinion at police violence, not because he was responding imaginatively or emotionally to King’s “Dream.”

As long as the Greenham women sit tight & not do anything then they remain a topic of mild ridicule throughout Britain (sexism seems a typical reaction). But as soon as they respond by pulling down perimeter fences & injuring policemen then public sympathy instantly shifts behind the forces guarding the base. The only way for them to win is by an orchestrated, nationwide campaign of massive strike action & popular rebellion.

More rain today. It has drizzled non-stop since I got back to Easterby & this afternoon the skies began to darken by quarter-past three. I went with Mum & Dad to visit Nanna P. who was in muscular form, interspersing her monologues with heartfelt Christ Almightys.

Tuesday December 20th

1983-12-20T19:05:00.001Z

Jeremy slept here overnight. I was kept awake by the chiming of the Fire Bellied Toads that live now in my room along with their various amphibian brethren (newts, axolotyls), etc. He stayed until two thirty.

I met Lee at 3 in Easterby, outside the Durham Buildings, & we looked round the flea market. I bought a dozen Victorian & turn-of-the-century photos & L. acquired two choral 78s for his wind-up gramophone. He’s seemed subdued every time I’ve met him since we came back . . .

Monday December 19th

1983-12-20T02:14:00.005Z

I went out last evening with Grant. Steve Bates called round before I set off, so I felt obliged to invite him along although I really didn’t want to: he’s like a tailor’s dummy, & I can’t help recalling his “you’re the most negative & destructive person I know” comment from the summer. We walked to Farnshaw, to the Red Grouse, where I’d arranged to meet Grant. Steve mumbled on & I scarcely said a word. I sat in silence, save for the odd word or two, until Grant arrived, & I glimpsed a few ghosts of years back (Ben Barnes, Paul Hoyle . . .).

It was good to see Grant & good too to see him in a better mood than at Gloucester. He told me he can get very pissed off down there, & that my visit just happened to be one such time. We moved to the Malt Shovel up Easterby Road & we came across more ghosts – Halyna, Laura, Julie Walker & Louise Taylor. They haven’t changed at all save for a slight spikiness apparent in Louise Taylor’s hair. The same faces, the same laughter, as if, for a sudden moment, whole years haven’t been. Steve gravitated into their group leaving Grant & I sitting apart, & he told me that last night he ended up in bed with Jenny (Phases club, “I hate University students” Jenny), & that he felt oddly detached from what was happening, didn’t feel excited, felt nothing for what he was doing, a cold, preprogrammed routine.

Grant came back home with me & listened to records until the early hours.

Tonight Lee & I went to that yearly horror show, the Former Students disco at Chubby’s, which we were looking forward to as an opportunity for some anti-social fun but it was in fact pure misery. Lee & I arrived early & sat apart, grim-faced & deliberately not speaking. The disco was soon full of people, packed to overflowing with soul boys from school, tap-room lads & their girls. Steve, Tim Moyles, Sean Laxton . . . Ms. Hirst was there too, & Jeremy. The list as long as it was predictable. It was a noisy terrible affair & Lee & I slipped deeper & deeper into despondency huddled in our corner feeling totally apart & removed from the jollity around us, Lee long-faced & barely smiling. It was that depressing. It reminded me of being back at school again.

Lee had with him a set of Tarot cards—stolen, of course—& when a girl asked him to read her cards he refused point blank & she retreated with embarrassed laughter & confused looks. He did it with such a straight face too. Tim Moyles got off with Maxine Bates, & I sat & stared & was bored. I was glad to leave. Christmas used to be a time of excitement & magic but now all that is gone & I feel utterly cold & empty.

After Chubby’s ended I walked home with Jeremy, Peter Wood & Andrew Boyd.

Sunday December 18th

1983-12-18T23:53:00.004Z

It still feels unreal to be back, almost as if I’m playing out a role, going through the motions & emotions expected of me now I’m at home. I don’t have that much to say to Mum or Dad, because I must keep quiet about most of the things I remember from last term: the robberies & breaking open of crypts etc. They wouldn’t be interested in the other events, such as my visit to Manchester to see Psychic TV & Gloucester to see Grant & the Fall . . .

I sense that a gulf between Mum & Dad & I is making its obtrusive appearance. Today Mum asked me if I had any idea about what I intend doing after I leave University & I haven’t. Mum said it was “only fair” that I give them some idea of my direction, as Andrew & Robert have done before me, because they’ll “feel happier both for me & for ourselves if we know you know where you’re going.” I can’t lie – I want my freedom when I leave University. I voiced my naive desire to live life & sample experience – “for which you need a job,” added Mum. It’s hopeless expecting our minds to meet. We drift apart slowly but surely.

Yesterday Mum voiced her objections to me about my supposedly “weird” appearance (the army fatigues). As Mum went on I sat in silence, trying occasionally to voice my thoughts but for the most part not being able to. I can’t talk to them & tell them all this: it would lead to rancour, despairing sighs & fall-outs. It seems it must be an unspoken slide into misunderstanding & bewildered argument. Today I overheard their conversation: Dad fears a “confrontation” over my appearance—“It’s a shame he goes round looking ridiculous & dressing in such childish fashion . . . Three weeks with him looking like that is too much to ask.” Last night, come to think of it, I did detect an air of gloom & things left unsaid before I went to Lee’s. It was Mum who wore the longest face, & it transpires that it’s because of my “outlandish” appearance. Anyone would think I’d dyed my hair green or something. All over a pair of trousers! Evidently the misunderstanding reaches down farther than I think.

Yesterday Robert came & he & I went to see Athletic play Cross End. He hasn’t changed, & only asked me about my appearance, & whether it was the “urban vagrant” look, whatever that is. We got to the virtually deserted ground & stood shivering as the meager crowd trickled in.

Cross End looked much better in the first twenty minutes, but Athletic scored first, a Hubbard corner, dropped right in on the goal-line which the ‘keeper could only palm weakly away, giving Highmore an easy job to score. In the second half Athletic scored again & Tidemore got the third. Newlands scored a brilliant goal with 15 minutes left. Highmore sent Scarborough tearing up the field; he passed it to the wing where Wicks crossed it perfectly for Newlands, who ran in at full tilt to head it into the back of the net. As we leaped into the air a middle-aged man standing next to us shouted “Text book stuff!” amid the cheering. It really was a brilliant goal. With two minutes left Highmore scored again & Cross End had been run ragged. 5-0!

I went to Lee’s in the evening & played chess. He showed me the ciné film he took at school in autumn 1980 & we cringed at the way we were then: such a set of tasteless people! It was strange looking at those silent images passing on the screen, locked forever in that day, that Common Room that turgid afternoon three years ago. I was sixteen then & I hope I’ve changed since that day. It was also a little odd seeing a vision of Ian Tropp on Lee’s film, a glimpse from last term. He sat nonchalantly smoking a fag in Room 312 at the Art College, wearing his forage cap, silhouetted against the window, his face in darkness. He seemed utterly out of place there in Lee’s tiny room. How quickly you can forget the feel of certain things after only a few days absence. I walked home through the fog.

Saturday December 17th

1983-12-18T01:55:00.003Z

Today the IRA detonated a bomb outside Harrods in London, killing nine people & injuring seventy five others. Four policemen & one WPC were among the dead. A thirty six minute warning was given, but for some so far unexplained reason, Harrods was not evacuated. I felt a cold shock when I heard the news; Mum was upset & full of despair.

How can the RCP uncritically support the IRA when the latter detonate devices clearly aimed at civilian targets? Of what military use is the killing of Christmas shoppers? It seems fair enough to fight fire with fire & wage war on the Army & state apparatus in N. Ireland, but . . . Robert thought the bombers “sick” & could see no political excuses for the IRA’s operation. But people too readily dismiss the excesses of the Army, the RUC & Loyalist paramilitaries in the six counties as IRA lies & propaganda—example: the petty & spiteful seizure of an IRA man’s beret from his coffin as it was being taken for burial. The RCP will have a near impossible task mobilising working class support for the IRA in the light of such attacks; it can only do their cause harm. But there is a war going on in N. Ireland between a large section of the Irish people & the British Army.

Friday December 16th

1983-12-16T23:09:00.015Z

Lee & I spent the whole day traveling. We caught the No. 78 Shuttle into Attlee Square at nine, caught another bus out to Binston Park & within five minutes got a lift from a wealthy, name-dropping woman in her fifties. We shared the car with her two dogs & I was forced to maintain dull conversation about job prospects for Am. Lit. graduates, horse-jumping, etc. She dropped us on the A31, a few miles outside Farnborough.

Lift No 2 was from a silent Yosser Hughes look-alike who took us into Oxfordshire, & Sonningley near Reading—a miserable suburban area of large semis, detached mansions & wide, well-kept verges & gardens . . .We thought we were done for, so far were we from the main routes into London, but fortunately enough a car stopped & we were dropped off right outside Paddington tube station.

We caught the tube to Kings Cross St. Pancras, then Euston, & on from there to Colindale where we wasted an hour looking for the motorway. Back to Brent Cross & a tiring walk through a jungle of flyovers, intersections & dual-carriageways to the beginning of the M1. It was growing dusk & the sun had set in a pool of orange over the urban horizon. We stood, arms out, thumbs erect, and the river of traffic roared past.

At about 4 p.m. we got a lift; all the way to Knutsford service station, nearly in Manchester, on the M6, from an advertising salesman on his way to Blackpool. Lee had to do his office work for him part of the journey, & although he was a bit of a prat, he redeemed himself by buying us both a sandwich & a can of Coca-Cola. We reached Knutsford at 8 o’clock & for an hour & a half, had a cold despairing wait on the slip road to the motorway. We had our names taken by motorway police in a Range Rover—affected friendliness, calling me ‘Paul’ . . . There were half-a-dozen other people waiting for lifts to Carlisle & Scotland, but soon, even they were gone & we really did expect to have to wait at Knutsford all night. Finally, at 9.25 a car drew up & the driver said he was going to Haley Hill.

It was quite foggy on the M14 & our driver played The Pop Group’s “Y” & then Einsturzende Neubauten’s “Kollaps” on his cassette player. The latter’s pounding metallic urgency suited our headlong plunge through the orange gloom, a haunted journey racing along the near-deserted motorway with only rivers of road-lights above us for company. A Whitehouse tape greeted our arrival in Haley Hill & we were home. We were in such a jubilant, loud & enthusiastic mood as we boarded the Easterby bus that we almost got thrown off for putting our feet on the seats. After a 14-hour journey it was so good to the stout architecture & lights sprinkling the inky blackness as we crested the hills into Easterby. It cost us £3 to get back. Lee’s Mum gave me a lift home.

Thursday December 15th

1983-12-16T00:48:00.001Z

I left Lee’s at dinnertime & we spent most of the day packing all our stuff up into boxes. An early start tomorrow, on the road . . .

Dad sent me a letter. Andrew is now living in Dungod Fitzjohn, Hertfordshire & lunches regularly with the managing director of the Sackett Group. He seems well on the way to carving out his respectable niche. No doubt Mum is very proud. Nanna P.’s porcelain false teeth, in for repair, fascinated the dentist, who apparently hadn’t seen any like them for years.

Wednesday December 14th

1983-12-14T23:37:00.002Z

The confusion & complication over moving out is affecting us all, Barry in particular. All he wants to do is go home & forget about the shit hole at Jervis Terrace for a while. But he has no money even to do that. Barry, Pete & I are prepared to split up, & when I think about this possibility I think it might be a better option for me in the long run—I’ll have more chance to get things done. No houses or flats are available though, & there doesn’t seem a chance of there being so. When I see other peoples’ places our unfortunate position hits home & makes me feel angry & frustrated. Why did I ever move in there? I must’ve been totally mad, or stupid. It’s been a disaster from beginning to end, not helped by the freeloading of Trevor Turney, & the more I think about him the angrier I get—what a bastard! I haven’t seen him since he moved out. For the first time since we moved in there are just the 3 of us living there. It’s ironic that we should be moving out so soon too. I’ve packed away all my books & taken what few pictures I had from the walls. I’m looking forward to going home.

Today I got final confirmation of my exemption from the year abroad in a letter from the Dean & I couldn’t help a feeling of release—perhaps I’ll come to regret it in time, but at the moment I’m simply glad.

Barry & I also signed on for over the holiday period & tramped the miles to Lindsey & Susie’s but they were out, so we left a note & walked back along the promenade in freezing wind. The sea in turmoil. We stopped at Shelley’s. She was very surprised to see us & was in the process of preparing a Christmas dinner for her & her three flatmates, so we scavved a few crusts from her kitchen & left.

I drew out a fiver so we could go have a meal at a pizza place, but we ended up not having to pay anyway. We sat near the door, ate in a nervy silence &, while the waitresses were busy, dived for the door & ran like mad along Carpenter Street etc., collapsing with scorched lungs & dizzy heads in The Crown. We saved £3.00.

Colin from Crown Racing came round at teatime & told us the flat is now being advertised again by the University. We might even each get our £50 deposits back. We also had two blokes come round to look at the flat. In the evening, Lee left a note on our door giving details of a few places worth looking at, one for 4 people at a farm in Langridge Cliffs for £50 per week. I rang up a Mrs. Lincoln & she said that transport was essential. No, bicycles wouldn’t do, but it is a “very nice cottage.” I arranged to go see it at 4 p.m. tomorrow. It sounds quite promising but 8 miles out is a long way & would involve all sorts of hassles & complications.

Lindsey called at nine-thirty & she & I walked to the bus. I came to Lee’s, which is where I’m writing this script now. He’s just discovered that his camera is missing (presumed stolen) & is in a slough of despondency. This has cast a darker light on the housing problem for him. I tried to reassure him & instil some absent levity but he would have none of it. “Sometimes there seems so much to be doing yet also so little – as if it’s pointless . . .”

Tuesday December 13th

1983-12-13T21:12:00.000Z

A dismal, damp day. I stayed at Lee’s overnight & we went into University to try find copies of ‘The Ecclesiologist’ magazine for 1844, for Lee’s essay on Victorian graveyard iconography, but were unsuccessful. L. soon lapsed into yawns & bored fidgeting; his boredom threshold is very low as he himself admits.

I can’t wait to get away from Watermouth, for a change of routine mainly. I’m bored down here now, & once I realised how near the end of term is, I feel like I want it out of the way & settled. Lee & I are hitching back on Friday morning. Everyone else, apart from Mo as far as I know, is staying down in Watermouth. Lindsey called round today but I was out at Lee’s.

Trevor has finally moved out to his bedsit at White Deer Park & Del, who’s been trying to get fixed up with a place too, has gone back to Milton Keynes to read up for his forthcoming interview for a place at London University to do Philosophy. I like Del a lot; we’ve had some good laughs since he came down this last time.

Monday December 12th

1983-12-12T21:07:00.003Z

Del dropped Lee & I off at the Art College with the purloined drink in two holdalls, & within minutes we had our £20. We gave Ian a fiver & pooled the remainder in order to buy a decent 2nd hand ciné camera for the planned Grey Triangle venture, an idea we still talk about . . .

We left the booze in Room 312 & went off to look for somewhere to live, trailing round to two rental agencies & even scanning the window of a newsagent near Ian’s for flats. There was nothing. “We’ve not had any houses since the summer,” said the lady behind the desk, blithely, & we’re facing the prospect of spending a few weeks next term bedding down on various floors. We were very despondent until we whiled away an enjoyable hour in a games shop, admiring a Mayan style chess set. Lee pilfered a set of gaming dice & this cheered us up a bit.

We went back to the Art College & found the Combined Arts ‘party’ in full swing, a few people standing awkwardly in one room drinking & hardly talking, while the real mania was taking place down the corridor in the printing room—an impromptu disco, shaving foam everywhere, a set of screaming stumbling snogging laughing drunks covered in booze & sweat. I wasn’t drunk enough at all. Lee cleared the dance floor with a fire extinguisher & everyone reeled at the clouds of white powder.

George stayed quietly in the first room, talking softly, upright & tall like a spectre. George, Lee & I, plus a few other people I didn’t know, left for the Bellemoor. One of the girls was from Easterby, the other—called coincidently enough Alison Martindale—wore leopard-print tights & had her hair tied back with a band of the same. I talked with the girl from Easterby; something struck me as odd & neurotically intense about her wide eyed, faltering smiles. We moved on from the pub to a pizza restaurant before splitting up, Lee & I intending to go on to Ian’s & the crypts in Smith Square but we never got there.

Sunday December 11th

1983-12-11T23:43:00.003Z

Bitterly cold. It was the coldness which woke me up &, eventually, forced me out of bed. Everyone was scurrying about, cursing the freezing temperatures & trying to warm themselves on our electric fires. Quite an idle day; little doing.

In the afternoon, Del took Barry, Pete & I out to in his car for something to eat in Watermouth. He treated us each to a meal of mixed grill & prawn cocktail with ice cream & fruit salad to finish . . . He owes the bank £400 & has been told he must not, on any account, write out another cheque. So between the four of us we totted up a £13 bill & Del wrote another cheque . . . There was some hassle over the cheque, & the ageing Greek waitress’s servile smiles & service vanished suddenly when she realised she might lose money. So much for Christmas spirit. More & more I smell the stench of hypocrisy & greed at Christmas. It’s just one huge capitalist con trick.

We left feeling full, piled into Del’s Hillman Imp & he took us on a tour of Knoyldon & Woodside, where he spent the first 9 years of his life. Knoyldon’s narrow winding streets & picture book facades look worthy of exploration; there’s a squat ancient church that, says Del, is linked with witchcraft at certain times of the year. It was a journey back through time for him as he was seeing these streets & schools of childhood & infancy for the first time in fourteen years. He got very quiet & sober & we could tell that nostalgia of the moment had got to him. As we drove he pointed out features he particularly remembered. “It’s odd how the salient memories are those concerned with death & tragedy” . . . The turn-off where Cilla Black’s niece was knocked down & killed . . . the stretch of road where a hunchback Hell’s Angel & companion collided head on with a car while overtaking a bus . . . the Ryvita factory on the hill in which a man was beheaded on his very first morning of work as he scooped to clean out a machine . . . These incidents, like marks in a book, have mapped out & particularised Del’s memories of his childhood, just as similar such events mark all our lives out as unique & special & individual to us.

There was something magical about that drive, the deepening dusk, the blue & pale world “fluxed in declining light,” something about the succession of street corners & pavements streaming past the car window, unthought of places next to lampposts & shop windows, all terribly alone & separate somehow, fragments of lives forgotten & never mattering to anyone, anywhere. So much desolation & striving. Words are just marks on a page. These things dwarf me. I’m lost for descriptions & none of it can ever be fully conveyed or captured by these cold constructions in ink. I don’t think in words & find it difficult to make them yield their meaning. But whatever their inaccuracy & shortcomings: I have to try, & have tried. These pages bear witness to the effort.

The car journey with its sudden confluence of so much memory & experience left me feeling thoughtful, thinking that maybe Nietszche is right & that history is one long retreat into nihilism, into unbelief & into blind struggle, that maybe we have to save ourselves from these numbing conclusions & useless thinking, but not by becoming blind again but by some other step maybe, into acceptance. But for me right now these are just so many words, & I feel them in the abstract if I feel them at all. One day perhaps . . ? Pete wonders if when we’re old we’ll look back & hate ourselves because of how little we achieve. Maybe we’ll wake up in our late-‘40s, married with children & a home maybe, a lifetime of memories behind us . . . As soon as we got back Lee was walking up the road to greet us, in unrestrained & festive mood, & I plunged back into the present.

We played stud poker (for money) most of the evening & Barry & I ended the game heavily in debt, but were genially forgiven. Late we embarked on another reckless robbery attempt. We drove through steady rain to a boarded up house on Wickboure Road being used as a storehouse for Debenhams. While Del & I acted as look-outs, Lee & Barry whittled away at the putty around one of the windows with a penknife, getting most of the glass out but finding a wooden board beyond that was too much of a match, so we gave up.

Saturday December 10th

1983-12-10T20:06:00.001Z

I got up at mid-day & caught the shuttle into Watermouth, met Lee, & visited the open market looking (unsuccessfully) for a rumoured 2nd-hand camera stall. Lee was moody & silent much of the time: we stalked about contemplating shop-lifting something from Bennington’s but we didn’t do it in the end & succeeded only in looking very suspicious.

We called in on Mo & Pete & Mo’s flat mate Oscar at Castle Mount Court & admired the view of town & sky & sea from this height, noting how all the colours & lines of Nature seemed soft & gentle, in stark contrast to the bold angularity of the buildings. On the horizon we could see Jervis golf course & the red-brick barracks of Meadspike. I wouldn’t want to live at Castle Mount Court. I’d be worried about a fatal mentality of leisurely apathy that might result, leaving us slobbing about all day watching TV & never doing anything . . .

Friday December 9th

1983-12-09T23:28:00.006Z

I agree with the RCP's aims, if not always their methods, but this said, I need to find my own personal response to the questions they ask; I must suffer, & see all of these things; I have to do this before I could even consider joining. As an organisation, it seems to be composed of individuals who are seeking an answer to their own personal sense of alienation, lack of success, call it what you will, & who do so by immersing themselves in revolutionary brotherhood & sisterhood . . . They're all somewhat grey people who haven't managed to find happiness in the 'usual' forms & channels & have therefore opted into a new kind of society, made up of ideologues ("social misfits" as Del would call them). It's almost as if they've chosen the Party because of what they lack, not for reasons of affirmation, intellectual clarity or boldness (as surely it should be). I put my name down yesterday as a gesture of support, to make up the required 15 members to allow the RCS to get Union funding.

"Everyone of us is an island. If it were not so we should go mad at once. Between these islands are ships, aeroplanes, telephones, wireless - what you will. But they remain islands. Islands that can sink or disappear for ever . . ."

"It is important not to betray the self," says John Fowles through one of his characters in "The Magus." I feel like a commitment to the RCP would be just that: a self-betrayal. I must work it out, live it, & do it all for myself. And no one else can do this for me.

Late yesterday afternoon, Lee & Ian went back to plunder the cellars of the empty pub, bringing back another 48 cans of Carling Black Label which they are going to give to the Combined Arts party at the Art College on Monday in exchange for £20.00. They called round at about teatime & Ian spent the evening playing about with Barry’s synth. We got quite drunk & by the time Barry & Trevor showed up we were slumped drowsily in my room listening to records, all the lights off save that from the electric fire. Although Ian was fairly drunk he didn’t seem any different to his usual, quiet self. I fell asleep on my floor at 5 a.m. leaving Ian & Barry talking about something or other, & when I woke up I was cold & uncomfortable & it was 9 a.m.: Lee & Ian were sleeping on my bed.

I went back to bed after they’d left & finally got up at six to find Lindsey & Stu in Pete’s room, Lindsey in particular hardly speaking, a brief glance at me from under her hair, but not a word . . . I feel pissed off, very low & somehow overcome by the effort of having to communicate & talk with people, knowing that I never can or will be able to adequately do so. Lee saved me from myself by showing up: we are holed up in my room being very unsociable & waiting until everyone leaves.

Thursday December 8th

1983-12-08T23:27:00.001Z

Today has been a miserable struggle through wind & incessant downpour: snow has been predicted in the next few days. I slogged to & fro on the mundane errands I had set myself, huddled & bent against the sodden skies. I put my name down for the newly-formed Revolutionary Communist Society, which Lindsey & Liddy have organised. There are eleven people interested, mainly second, third & fourth years. I signed on the dotted line with mixed feelings; some would say ‘why sign at all?,’ if this is my attitude, but it can’t do any harm to participate in the promised reading groups . . . I don’t want to commit myself to marches, demos & paper sales I’m not prepared to give that sort of 100%.

The term is finished – things have been winding slowly down in the usual inexorable way for a week now . . . This is my problem: I’m trapped within circumstance & allow myself to just drift through life, without seizing hold of chances. Too often I’m dictated to by circumstances. This was the premise put forward to me when I went to see Don Carwardine to get my end of term report. I received a 2/3 for ‘Romanticism,’ & a 4 from Ted Coates for ‘Black Americans.’ The latter slated me for my lack of participation in the seminar, a failure to follow ideas through & persistent absenteeism & lateness. Mr. C’s report dwelt on my lack of drive in his tutorials; he said that too often I sit back & seem to let others do the work, & when I do make contributions I won’t (or can’t) elaborate on them further. He also said I was reserved, with an attitude that was “not quite laid-back, & not quite good old diffidence” . . . It was somewhere in between, & he used a particular word that I can’t now remember, but it struck me as odd that I couldn’t see these traits for myself. I thought I’d made quite a fair contribution in his tutorials, & so his comments were all the more surprising. He likened getting information from me to getting blood from a stone, & as he spoke I remembered Mr. Ingham’s 6th form report comment about my “lack of ambition.”

Afterwards, Lee & I expropriated more products from the cruel grip of the bosses (Ha); two torches from Sainsbury’s, & a book on ‘Modern Music’ from the University bookshop.

Today too I finally severed myself from all possibility of going to University in America. I went to see the Dean, Mr. Hibbard, & I told him briefly of my money situation. He listened silently, nodding his assent occasionally & opening his mouth only to ask the infrequent question in a trace of a Germanic accent. He said he'd write a letter to all the people that mattered & notify me of my release. I came away from that room knowing my future course for the next eighteen months at least. Yesterday I wrote & sent a letter to Mum & Dad reassuring them about the bloodied clothes & sending a photo' of Lee as evidence. When I got back from University a letter waited from Dad, which was much more cheerful & gay in tone than his last; it cheered me up to read it.

Wednesday December 7th

1983-12-07T22:54:00.002Z

Last night a few people were invited to Mo's at Castle Mount Court & we all sat about dumbly, watching TV. Trevor found it amusing that Liddy Rees was ignoring him & has, supposedly, recently tried to 'embarrass' him in front of others. He tried to chat up Lindsey & received a curt "You're rude, you are" in reply.

I bought an LP of C20th piano music (Webern, Schöenberg, Copland, McCabe etc.) . . . I can’t wait to listen to it. There’s a big new world out there—new to me at least—just waiting to be tapped, & now the stifling world of ‘pop’ music & NME conventional alternatives etc. seems insufferably narrow & unsatisfying if taken solely on its own. There seems a progression here; from my 16-year old salad-days of Santana & 'jazz-rock' I gained a love of jazz & through this I listened to more people like Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, '65-on era John Coltrane, Art Ensemble of Chicago, then via The Fall into the more traumatic experimentation of bands like Whitehouse, Nurse With Wound, Psychic TV. Now this. The barriers break down in all this music & right at its very extremes categorisation becomes impossible; it’s simply sound . . .

Tuesday December 6th

1983-12-06T16:46:00.000Z

“You're into the occult now, aren't you, Paul? Even you've got to have something to believe in . . .” This said to me in a half-mocking, taunting tone by Trevor (who returned last night), in response to tales of Lee, Ian & I & the crypt etc. . .

Being around Ian & co. has brought sunken paths of interest to the surface again, bright & fresh. I'm eager—so eager—to explore them. We left Ian & George discussing Cage & their performance & the directionless feel being in Watermouth has given them. They say that here there’s no context in which to act, unlike in London. Ian said he has friends up there who haven't even bothered to go to College & yet do a lot more than he does. “I seem to be drifting into nothing . . .” George agreed in his quiet, bird-like way—Lee likes him a good deal—and said he feels his last 2 years in Watermouth have been wasted in a way. I listened & was aware of how my horizons could open out immensely if I just look & travel in the right direction . . . I’d never even heard of Cage before. I've always had a (secret) regard for the modern compositions sometimes featured on Radio 3, & I often write down the titles & composers, with a view to looking them up . . .

Monday December 5th

1983-12-05T23:17:00.003Z

Yesterday a forgettable day. Today, at about teatime, Lee & I finally plucked up the courage to go back down the crypts of the demolished St. Catherine’s in Smith Sq. We decided to go to Ian’s first, to ask him if he wanted to come with us, so we three crept back down into that dank, black evil-smelling place. It was while we were poking about near Emily Newburgh’s coffin that both Ian & I heard a female voice call out Ian’s name – “Ian Troppy” (‘Troppy’ being his nickname); or was it, “Ian, drop it”? It sounded as if it’d come from outside & at first we thought it was one of his flatmates come to play a prank, but when we re-emerged, there was no-one to be seen. We both heard it quite distinctly, just once. Psycho-suggestion? Coincidence? The rational explanation must lie with one of the latter, but nevertheless, it was quite intriguing. I was more curious than scared, although if I’d thought of it a little thrill of fear would soon have set my heart thudding furiously. Was this my first ‘psychic’ experience?

To read of these simple facts sounds quite macabre, but I was able to distance myself sufficiently from proceedings not to be overcome by revulsion/horror etc. . . Lindsey asked me “why did you do it?” I was lost for an off-pat answer. I don’t really know why. Curiosity perhaps? Intellectual resolve apart, I still found it difficult to escape totally the conditioned reflexes, the feeling of fear & loathing where death and dead things are concerned. The spook-stories of ghosts & the dead rising laid a hand upon my mind & put me in a nervous, morbid mood. It’s probably unhealthy to immerse myself in the iconography & feeling of Death & dying to an obsessive degree. There’s much in this world that’s light & carefree, but much too that’s dark & troubling. Death hangs over all of us like a cloud all our lives, & the reality of it happening to us is inconceivable. The mind, even when it does manage those brief glimpses into the Reality of our own End, sends us into a state of blank fear. As a kid I used to experience the sheer, unimaginable horror of contemplating my own nullity, my own non-existence.

We went back to Ian's & eventually Lee's friend George turned up. He’s tall & quiet, his voice a humble, almost inaudible whisper. He’d come to discuss with Ian a performance they’ve planned for Tuesday 13th December at the Art College, something musical involving the use of drones & spare piano. John Cage played on a nearby cassette-recorder, beautiful, haunting, unsmiling . . . George talked about Morton Feldman. His favourite word seemed to be “interesting,” which he used to show his fascination with an idea & its possibilities . . . “Mmmm . . . . That’s very interesting . . ,” this breathed softly, bird-like, as he sat awkwardly on a chair in the middle of the room.

Ian is reading Alesteir Crowley & I looked up said author in the University library, but all the books were out, every one. Fashion . . .

We may have a couple of contacts with people who want to move in. We're going to invite them round on Wednesday evening & spruce the place up sufficiently to deceive them into thinking that this really is a decent place to live. This morning it was so cold I stayed in bed as long as possible.

Saturday December 3rd

1983-12-04T01:52:00.003Z

Last night saw most of us at a party on Marion Place, at the same house as befor e. This time the place was not so crowded & Lee was there too, doing his anti-social bit, falling into the packed crowds & tripping others up. “What is Lee on?” someone asked. “How much has he drunk?” I could quite honestly reply “Nothing,” to both questions. Lindsey was there too, in a shortish black dress. A glass pane in the front door was smashed by gatecrashers who were refused entry, & Barry & Pete were cut, so a few of us piled out & did our threatening machismo bit on the street corner, face-to-face with a gang of rockabillys.

We got home at 4 a.m., stopping by the derelict pub on Meadspike Road on the way. Amazingly, we found loads of booze in the cellars, so we made two trips, Lee & Barry descending into the darkness while Pete & I kept watch. The 3 or 4 bags we had with us were handed up full of clanking bottles & we struggled proudly up Windmill Ave. bearing 96 cans of Carling Black Label & Breaker’s Lager, 15 bottles of cider, & half a dozen bottles of Guinness & Tennent’s Export, plus 3 party cans of bitter. We whooped & jumped about like kids when we got it all inside, making a pile in Pete’s room to admire. Free booze until New Year. We are getting dangerously adept at this sort of thing.

I got up late today & this evening Lindsey & I went to see SPK at Watermouth College. There weren’t very many people there, perhaps 200, & SPK themselves didn’t come on until after ten o’clock. They only played for half-an-hour or so & had all the expected ‘industrial’ paraphernalia of blow-torches, circular saws, lengths of exhaust pipe, metal tubing & chains, plus two oil drums they used for percussion. The lead singer wore a slinky black dress unzipped right to the thigh at each side, & occasionally she would join in with the assorted beating & clatter of metal on metal, inexpertly wielding a length of exhaust & letting it fall onto one of the oil drums in an imperfect rhythm. Various black & white ‘20s & ‘30s films were projected as a backdrop & these were actually more interesting than the band at times, although I quite enjoyed the show, especially when the flames of the blow-torch were played into the audiences faces & a metal frame was thrown off stage.

After the concert had finished Lindsey tried to climb on stage and filch the heavy chain which the band had been using, but she was stopped by stage-crew. So she slipped backstage & got a piece of exhaust pipe instead which she gave to me as a souvenir. As I walked home I was punched in the face by a gang of drunks but couldn’t do anything as there were six or seven of them to just one of me . . . This has put me in a black mood.

Thursday December 1st

1983-12-01T20:15:00.001Z

2:30 a.m. I am at Lee’s now, sitting at the table in his tiny room, preparing to write an essay for Mr. Carwardine on Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound,” & this time I’m determined to see it through. Lee sleeps, his face expressionless, almost deathly it is so inanimate & unlike his waking, speaking self. All’s quiet save for an occasional car & the noise of late-night revelers returning home.

8:03 a.m. I’ve just now completed & copied up my essay—“Poet as Prometheus: Some Thoughts, with Reference to Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound.’” It took me 4 hours to write, 2 hours to copy up & is 5 sides in length. It isn’t very good. Words on a page. I could spend a lifetime studying the works of the Romantic writers. “We are on that verge where words abandon us, and what wonder if we grow dizzy to look down the dark abyss of how little we know” (Shelley, “On Life”). How little I know, how little I will ever know. A lifetime of bookishness wouldn’t suffice to fill in all those blank areas in my mind, & of course such a life would never do. How much time I waste on the unnecessary routines of life. As I toiled I was lucky enough to witness the brightening of the sky, the moon a thin crescent, its darkened portion glowing faintly with the reflected light of the gibbous earth . . . a bright, unfaltering star (Venus?) a few degrees above. Lee slept & will never see those things I saw. I’m as bright & fresh as if I’d just got up. Not tired at all. A new day awaits & I never fail to feel the promise & potential of such.

Evening: When Lee woke up I set out with him to the Art College. I dumped my things there & wandered round town, slipping slowly into a weary despondency. We had a look at the 2nd hand electrical shop near Maynard Park but the only ciné cameras for sale were two three lens types, one of which had two lenses missing. I bought a belt from New Lycroft Army Surplus shop near the train station & Lee pinched a canvas hold-all outside the door for me while I kept the assistants busy. It would’ve cost £6 to buy so I gave Lee my great-coat in exchange (he'd also pinched £6-worth of doll’s furniture for his photographic emulsion experiments from Bennington’s earlier).

After getting the bag I felt very jumpy & nervous so I made my way to the University & met everyone in the library café. I stole 2 books from the Bookshop, one on Cubist Cinema & one on “Performance Art." I just slipped them into my coat pocket while Lindsey talked to the woman behind the counter. A grim evening in the Cellar, watching "Aguirre, Wrath of God" & having a dismal drink in the Town & Gown. I came home to bed, leaving everyone else to travel into Watermouth to the pub.

Monday November 30th

1983-11-30T17:27:00.001Z

Out of bed & shivering at two-thirty this afternoon: I’ve got another essay to write for Mr. Carwardine & “Frankenstein” & “The Ancient Mariner” to read too.

There was a letter waiting for me from Dad. He spent half-a-dozen pages telling me of Mum’s Sunday morning discovery in the outhouse of the bundle of blood-stained clothing Lee wore for his trussed-up corpse imitation back in September. This turned Mum quite ashen-faced & they’ve been on “tenterhooks” ever since, waiting for a fateful knock on the door—the stabbing at “Chubby’s” last winter, plus the bundle of bloodied rags, seemed too much of a coincidence for Dad . . .”Your uncommunicative attitude, during parts of the summer, can be possibly seen with a damning clarity now, if I’m right. If I’m wrong, then the peculiarity of the situation becomes even more sinister . . .” As I reread the letter, I couldn’t quite believe the implications of what Dad was saying—it gives me an odd feeling to think this—but on reflection too it’s quite amusing, knowing of the real story behind those ripped & bloody trousers & shirt. Dad said he’d leave the next move to me in case a hasty action “brings down a hornet’s nest about our ears; & by ‘our,’ I mean you & I & your Mum & Rob & Andrew . . .” He obviously expects some kind of confession from me. I rang them & told them the truth. Dad sounded grim & I can’t help thinking he didn’t quite believe my garbled explanation, so next time I write I’ll enclose some of Lee’s photos as proof.

A cheque for £70 was in the envelope too, which will relieve my financial crisis a little. ‘Crisis’ is the only word to use; I got a note from Midland Bank today saying “we would not expect to see any increase to your overdraft” (of £178.10)—actually nearer £220 as I write this. I don’t know what I’m going to do, but I can’t complain as it is purely self-inflicted

It’s dusk once more – daylight goes so quickly – I’m sick of the dark. We’ve got to get out of here.

Tuesday November 29th

1983-11-30T00:10:00.002Z

I tried to stay up & work last night but succumbed to sleep at 4 a.m. The day taken up with tutorials & spending money. I went round to Maynard Gardens to meet Lee but he was out, so I wandered around the record shops, bought “Thee Psychick Sacrifice” by Throbbing Gristle & went to a housing agency with Guy. When I called back at Maynard Gardens Lee was there; he showed me a 4 minute film he’s made with his Yashica 8-E of the Moulin Rouge on TV & footage of the wobbling handlebars & pedals shot while riding his bike.

In the evening he & I met Juliet & Guy & had a drink with them & Barry in the Red Deer. Lindsey turned up later, & I must admit I couldn’t take my eyes off her. I wonder what Del told her?

I came back to Jervis Terrace & the damp air & cold chaos of the flat almost makes me regret it. Trevor & Del have gone, the former to London, D. to Milton Keynes.

Monday November 28th

1983-11-28T23:56:00.005Z

A brief resumé of my movements to date; I haven’t slept in my bed for two nights & I’m still at Lee’s. I spend the nights on his floor which is a little hard but not too bad. This is how much 44A Jervis Terrace has affected me . . .

Yesterday, at about seven, Lee & I went to Mo’s birthday party at Livingstone’s. We didn’t feel like going at all but turned up for Mo’s sake. Trevor & Del were in an exuberant, amusing mood, Trevor even more so as he said he’d scored the previous evening with Liddy, which surprised me as I didn’t think her susceptible to the Turney blitzkrieg tactics. “I’m a man, you’re a woman; let’s go to bed” was how he won her over, or at least that’s what he told me. Del tried it on with Lindsey but got nowhere & told me that they’d instead spent two hours talking about me. “I did a good job for you . . .” Of Trevor & Liddy, Lindsey said, “her side of the story is not the same as his,” but I was drunk by this time & can’t remember what else we talked about, though it wasn’t for long. I didn’t say much all evening & spent the longest time talking with Inga’s friend Ebbe about her impressions of England & the English. Ian was there, & Mick too, but we didn’t talk much. Ian exudes a superficial air of mystery & the bizarre that’s dispelled the more you get to know him. He said that when Barry, Lee & I interrupted he & Mick the other night they were on their way to set fires in the crypt, dressing this act of destruction in ritualistic talk.

The latter half of the evening turned into a fragmented whirl of half-remembered impressions; trying to stand & having the world spin crazily around me, retching among the bins & rubbish outside the club, Del & Lee pouring cold water over my head to sober me up . . . With drunkenness came silence, & I was quiet for the cab journey back to Lee’s Halls.

I slept until three, so ate breakfast as the sun was setting, although only the pink tinge of the clouds betrayed this fact. Lee has gone out on his bike for some more food. It’s nearly midnight; a German film plays to itself on the TV, the sound turned down so the images flicker silently across the grey screen.

Lee & I have come up with a symbol for our film project, a grey triangle, the mark given by the Nazis to ‘anti-social’ elements who were interned at Dachau—tramps, vagrants & the like. Lee even intends sewing the grey triangle on all his clothes to reinforce his stance of ‘new Puritanism’ that he plans on unleashing in all its ascetic glory at the new year . . . A thread of continuity uniting so many (possible) things, a banner under which to rally & to leave people guessing. I’ll be tolerably pleased if I even manage to commit one idea to celluloid, for I’m very lazy & let myself down so often . . . It’s important I get a really fine place to live.

Sunday November 27th

1983-11-27T11:13:00.001Z

Our plan to hand in our notice & move out has been met with a demand from Colin, Crown Racing’s minion, that we can leave only on the condition that we find someone else to move in. “You signed a contract until June 30th” etc., etc. I put a few notices up around campus advertising our hell-hole, but if that fails then we’ll simply leave &, if Crown Racing’s boys complain, we’ll get in the Health & Rent Assessment people. The icing on the cake, which we first noticed the other day, is the steady plip-plip of water dripping through the hallway ceiling on to the carpet. They must know that in the flat’s present state, they’ll have a hell of a job getting 3 other mugs to accept such squalour & deprivation. I can’t understand the apathy & stagnation that’s let us there for as long as we have, with scarcely a word of complaint.

Lee & I’s latest scheme is to buy another cinecamera, splicer, reel-to-reel tape machine etc, & make films. But like so many of my intentions, this one will probably never reach full fruition. Like a caterpillar with genetic defects, it will emerge as a butterfly without wings, a thing of potential worth disfigured by an inherent disease. Another year will no doubt find me sadly (& with real regret) adding this plan to the growing list of ‘might have beens.’ I’m the singer without a voice.

I’ve been reading a section in “From Blake to Byron” on the Romantic diarists & ‘men-of-letters’ that makes me reflect on the pedestrian banality of everything I write here . . . ‘I am here & it is Now’; this “must be central to any worthwhile diary, & it is not an effect achieved by accident, but by an unerring choice of the right words & a rigorous exclusion of unessentials.” I note this down to remind myself of everything this writing isn’t; there’s too much of “I was” & not enough of “I am.” My trouble is one of perspective: I fail to realise the larger whole because of an obsessive concentration on the unnecessary—&, in future years, boring—minutiae of who met whom, where & when, etc. Pepys wrote out rough drafts of his diary entries, but I’ve never done this because I approach writing this diary with a sloppy frame of mind, & as a result this ‘epic’ struggle is neither one thing nor another; it’s too poorly written & overrun with weary, hackneyed expressions to be anything other than a daily record of my daily movements & immaturities of mind, & it’s too formally composed & constrained by the page & an idea to be truly Spontaneous or the kind of experiential notebook I want it to be. Sometimes I think I have reached a certain spontaneity (last Easter’s “Outsider” kick, my ‘salad days’ of Kerouackian word-flow crap etc.), but I think I need to sort out in my mind where I aim to go (if anywhere) with this idea of keeping a diary. The first tiny but necessary step will be to opt for writing on unlined paper; this will help ‘loosen up’ the way I write & think too. I do this not to try craft this into some great Art-work (I won’t ever be great in this sense), but simply to advance into the habit of recording sights, sounds, smells, sensations & the merest flickers of thought that mark out one day from the next, perhaps with a view (god knows how) to using these at some future date. Is this too much to expect?

‘I am here & it is Now.’ It’s approaching eleven o’clock on a dry but bleak & cloudy autumn morning. I’ve set out all my books before me and I have to get a second & final essay for Mr. Carwardine over & done with by evening (on Keats’ “Hyperion” & Shelley’s “Prometheus Unbound”). Lee snoozes quietly on his bed, although he’s supposed to be writing an essay on the Victorians & death. We’ve talked about a trip to Highgate already, but we’ve yet to put pen to paper.

“Who alive can say,
'Thou art no Poet may'st not tell thy dreams?'
Since every man whose soul is not a clod
Hath visions, and would speak, if he had loved
And been well nurtured in his mother tongue.”

Saturday November 26th

1983-11-26T21:27:00.003Z

I finished the required work at about midnight last night; the essay mostly bullshit and empty hyperbole, but it didn’t turn out as poorly as I’d feared.

The heavens opened all day. Barry & I met Lee in Watermouth & we bought Mo a birthday present, a wicker shopping basket on pram wheels. We delivered it to her new address, 42A Castle Mount Court, a fourth floor flat in a new block ascending darkly into the mist, all lit with the glow from balconied windows. The flat that had inspired Barry to such enthusiastic praise disappointed me; although it’s undoubtedly comfortable & warm, it seems to lack the kind of personality that Ian’s place has—penthouse plasticity—although the view is impressive. Pete has stayed with Mo since she moved in . . . Barry is full of noisy enthusiasm for the idea of moving into the three bedroom flat which is on the floor below Mo’s . . .

We left to go deliver invites for Mo’s party to Ian & co., & encountered them striding purposefully along Stoneways Road carrying firewood, candles & a cassette player, destined for the catacombs in Smith Square. They hardly gave us a second glance, a disinterested aside to Lee as they swept past with a remote air. So while Ian & Mick descended into the bowels of the earth, we partook of the pleasures of the living across the road. Despondency, weary talk . . .

I couldn’t face the cold, dirty misery of our prison, so I’m sleeping on Lee’s floor again.

Friday November 25th

1983-11-25T21:57:00.000Z

Trevor, Del & Pete went with Mo last night to help her move her stuff into her new place, & when the time came for them to leave, Pete was upset because M. wasn’t coming home with him & their spell of living together had ended . . . so he stayed at her place last night . . . I didn’t stay up last night & I struggle now with the beginnings of an essay on Wordsworth, which I must hand in today.

A power failure at 12 & we were in darkness & silence for 20 minutes. Apparently a substation in New Lycroft had blown up & plunged the entire area as far as Brighton into a murky twilight.

The Fall were on The Tube tonight. It was so funny watching the audience of pseuds lost as to a reaction, some of them trying to dance & succeeding only in making total fools of themselves, others just standing about bored, trying to look interested. Their new album should be out soon.

Thursday November 24th

1983-11-24T20:27:00.000Z

I got up at 9.15 & finished off my reading of Keats’ “Odes,” hitching in to Uni in the drizzle & cold. My tutorial went quite well & I said quite a lot, but now I have two essays to write for next Thursday for Mr. Carwardine & one for Black Americans. I must hand in one essay for Mr. Carwardine tomorrow, & so I have to stay up most of the night to get it written.

I met Colin Pasmore again after the tutorial. I announced that I’d come to “deliver the death-blow to my year abroad” & I told him about Mum & Dad’s letter & my finances. He seemed quite concerned. I tried to explain my dilemma & the guilt I’d feel committing Mum & Dad to extra money when I’m really not that bothered about going anyway. Pasmore argued that it would be worth it, saying everyone who’d come back from the year abroad had had a good time. “It’s an opportunity not to be missed” says he, & ”you’ll never get the chance again to experience that environment & you’re only young.” I found myself slipping into a position of total uncertainty & indecision, even though I’d felt fairly certain of my options over the last few days. It’s so very hard to intellectualise about this whole situation, as apart from the financial aspect, my ambivalent feelings don’t stem from any rational part of my being.

Mo moved out today, into a flat that has a waste disposal system, free newspaper delivery every morning, large rooms & a balcony with a view of the sea . . . I’m so pissed off with this dump, with Trevor’s constant presence, with the tangled web which seems to haunt my every move.

I called Mum. Janet has had her baby 2 months premature, & after a few weeks in hospital, she has at last been allowed to take him home.

Wednesday November 23rd

1983-11-23T22:40:00.002Z

I couldn’t face a night in that shit-hole so Ade gave Lee & I a lift to Lee's residence halls where I spent last night. I’m sick of the squalour of my living conditions, the peeling wall-paper, the damp, the dirty walls & floors, the eternally filthy kitchen . . . I’m moving into a hotel next term if I can’t get anywhere else to live.

I didn’t get to sleep until four, but woke up today early & in a bright mood to match the day. The clatter & noise of engineers, industrial designers & mathematicians subsided at about 9.15 & we emerged to empty staircases & deserted kitchens; Lee tells me that this routine is followed by the residents each week with scarcely a variation in the pattern. Up at 8.30 a.m. every weekday, work at the Poly until five, watch TV, go up to the local pub & in bed by eleven-thirty. Saturdays is for getting pissed & wandering about being loud & obnoxious, & Sundays for cooking large meals & nursing a sore head. Their lives seem preordained.

I went into University at twelve-thirty, & at about twenty past 4 met Susie & Lindsey in the library coffee bar. Susie was in another one of her flutters of indecision, playing with her hair absent-mindedly & teasing great strands out with her fingers. I again felt myself dry up in front of Lindsey. I bought a book—Vol. 5 of the “New Penguin Encyclopedia of English Literature: From Blake to Byron.” Lee turned up around seven & he & I hitched home. It was bitterly cold by the time it got dark, the earth crusty & white from frost, my hands & ears in agony. I’m looking forward to hitching back to Easterby at Xmas; it will be a good laugh.

The long-overdue letter from Mum & Dad awaited when I got back; the first part from Mum, in her large rounded hand: “This is a difficult letter to write. I know you must be very anxious about everything . . I don’t see how we can fund you to the tune of £800 on top of your grant. We can manage £100-£200 extra, but not any more as we have to think about one of us falling ill. We don’t get any younger.” She also says that if I tried for a post-grad course in Journalism they would finance me if I sought exemption from the year abroad. Dad picks up on this theme, saying he thinks I could “walk it” going by the evidence he’s seeing in The Echo. I will think about it carefully as he asks, but I expect I’m going to disappoint them both severely. This isn’t my idea of how I want to spend the next 5 years. What is my vision of the next few years? I’d like to travel, but no doubt I shall end up in the UK: I love this country too much to desert its shores forever.

I need to do something drastic to change the recent state of my entries in this diary. I’m sick of my limp, colourless writing, hackneyed expressions, & inexpert, careless structures that don’t read well and abound with errors. The lines on the page enforce a rigid 200-220 words per page; this seems to have something to do with it. I want this to be less a series of chronological events, more an ideas book . . . Lee says that Ian wants to take his girlfriend down into the crypt to fuck her on top of one of the sarcophagi.

“Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget
What thou among the leaves hast never known,
The weariness, the fever, and the fret
Here, where men sit and hear each other groan;
Where palsy shakes a few, sad, last grey hairs,
Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies;
Where but to think is to be full of sorrow
And leaden-eyed despairs;
Where beauty cannot keep her lustrous eyes,
Or new Love pine at them beyond to-morrow.”

-Keats, from "Ode to a Nightingale."

Tuesday November 22nd

1983-11-22T23:39:00.000Z

Today is the twentieth anniversary of Kennedy’s assassination. Dad was on a police scooter this day in 1963 when a man came out of a house to shout the news . . .

We didn’t rise from our beds until two & the stark shadows were already beginning to lengthen outside. Del had stayed up all night on speed, borrowed Wordsworth, Plath & Eliot from me & driven off into Watermouth. He said he was feeling very emotional & later told us he sat all morning at a table in Green’s, a bundle of nervous energy . . . He was out when we got up but eventually turned up mid-afternoon, looking none the worse for wear.

Lee, Barry & I walked down to Wickbourne Rd & spent a couple of hours looking for a sturdy torch, wandering to and fro to the numerous second-hand & electrical shops that line the street. We got back at 4. It was dark when we all piled into Del’s Hillman Imp & set off for Smith Square . . . We parked the car outside Ian’s flat in Blenheim Place; the doors were open but no one was in, so we left a message in the typewriter standing on the table & walked to Smith Sq., Trevor & Del were in a very frivolous mood, jokes & repartee flying left, right & centre.

The entrance to the crypt was in the middle of a wasteland of rubble & broken bricks, a simple metal cover beneath which steps descended into impenetrable blackness. One by one we vanished into the earth; the blackness & silence was total. We bunched together & spoke in hoarse whispers, Trevor & Del nervously joking & laughing as materialists are apt to do in the face of unnecessary mystery. At the bottom of the steps was a passageway off which ran small side chambers, each with a compliment of brick boxes piled in twos & threes nearly to the ceiling. There were several similar rooms on either side of the passageway, each filled with identical brick boxes capped with stone lids, although some rooms were empty. Although each room had originally been blocked off with breeze blocks, these had recently been broken through, leaving the ends of each sarcophagus visible from the passageway. On these were carved the names of the occupant of each box & his or her date of death & age.

We climbed through the hole in the breeze block wall of the first room on the left; here lay the sarcophagus of Emily Newburgh, who was born in 1770 and died 15th April 1806. The heavy stone lid was split into three sections & the coffin had rotted away & lay in pieces. Lee shone the torch down on the fragments . . . the hair . . . it was the only human thing there, coiled in a plenteous brown river among the spars of broken wood & what was left of the rest of the body, a last pathetic reminder of this woman’s life & her brief flirtation in this world of vanities. In parts, the thick matted strands had come apart to release individual hairs, long & wispy, glittering in the torch-beam with the sheen of life. Poor Emily Newburgh, lying dead & scattered to the world, now in the thoughts of the living for perhaps the first time in decades; I wonder who she was, what she liked & disliked, what little personal eccentricities she had? The other sarcophagi all dated back to the late 1700s/early 1800s & seemed to be those of fairly wealthy people & their children; I presumed this was why they had been interred in the bowels of this crypt, not left in the (now-vanished) graveyard outside, at the mercy of future development. “No sound is dissonant / which tells of Life” – Coleridge.

After a half-an-hour or so we emerged thankful back into the cold night air. We went for a drink at a pub across the road & we all, everyone one of us, felt affected by what had gone before; Lee was silent & unresponsive & none of us felt very disposed to laughter or light-hearted talk. Del offered Trevor £20 if he’d go back down the crypt alone & without a torch—he almost did, but he bottled out at the last minute. I don’t blame him.

Ian & co. were still out so we drove home. It was Mo’s birthday & she & Pete were drunk, Pete whining because he didn’t want us in his room watching TV. Comments & slammed doors . . . Ade had come round too after spending a couple of nights alone in front of the TV in his new place; we’ve heard of a house for 5 which should be available around Christmastime.

Monday November 21st

1983-11-22T01:10:00.000Z

At around midnight last night, two half-expected visitors, Trevor Turney & Derek Caraway, descended on us whirlwind-like, the former fresh from a few days in Amsterdam, the latter just escaped from stagnation in Milton Keynes. “First thing he did when he got to Holland,” says Del of Trevor, “was go with a prostitute.” Replies a grinning Trevor, “I wanted a woman with a bit of experience . . .” Their live-wire energy/parody/piss-taking routines threaten the easy torpour we’ve existed in since they were here last. I hope they find a place soon; I can’t stand the constant hints, nudges, innuendo & references to sex & my lack of it. With playful malice, Trevor said I was conning he & Del about the date of Mo’s upcoming birthday party “because he doesn’t want us to talk to Her” (emphasis on this last word). He just doesn’t care . . . but how I do.

Stu went ‘home’ at midnight & at two-thirty am, he & Gareth turned up with bagfuls of work & we stayed up all night. I finished “Corregidora” at six; it’s a hard, uncomfortable book to read. I slept until eight-thirty while Gareth & Stu worked & when they left shortly after nine, Del gave me a lift into the University. I met Shawn Bennett & we had a couple of drinks up at The Town & Gown until I had to leave to go to my tutorial at 2.45. On the way I bumped into Lindsey & arranged to meet her & Susie in the cafeteria of the library after my tutorial ended.

In the library coffee bar afterwards Susie & I talked about the gradual but inexorable rift that develops between one-time friends who don’t spend time together anymore. Shelley is becoming a part of my past now, a figure from my history, & so it is with Penny, Rowan & Shawn too to a certain extent, Alex Margolis most of all . . .

As we waited in the Cellar for our food to be served, I looked across at Lindsey & for one brief instant, all the feeling & emotion I used to have for her came welling back to the surface. I could’ve kissed her, held her right there; I loved everything about her . . . but I can’t allow myself to be drawn back into another hopeless, helpless situation. I have to remember the past & how I behaved. I just want to be as good a friend to her as I can be.

Talking to her was like banging my head against a brick-wall so I left her & Susie drinking, went to the library, met up with Pete & Mo (Pete drained & pale from speed), & came home.

Lee came round mid-evening with a £5 typewriter (“Everest Model 90 – Made in Italy”) that he’d picked up from a charity shop & repaired. It’s a real bargain, & types perfectly. I typed a letter to my bank manager. I received a firm but polite letter today about my overdraft. Lee told me that he, Michael & Ian had gone back to the crypt of the demolished church in Smith Square & found an opened coffin. He stayed the night.

Sunday November 20th

1983-11-21T00:21:00.000Z

Later yesterday evening Mark went to Capone’s with Guy, so Lee, Michael & I went back into town & broke into a derelict house which stands in a block of three-storey buildings opposite the Art College. We climbed in through a partially boarded window in the basement, this a very conspicuous entrance & exit reached down steps choked with dead leaves, & next to a busy bus stop & main road. Earlier we’d filched two flashing road works hazard lamps & these were the only lights we had; each time the yellow lamps blinked on we could barely glimpse the floor of the darkened interior, a chaos of rubble, planks & discarded newspapers & tantalising shapes that were lost moments later as the lights switched off. Our progress was slow & ludicrous, clutching our yellow flashing lamps & whispering loudly. Upstairs there was more light from the street outside, but all we found were a few forlorn reminders that some people have been dossing down here recently—empty cider bottles, old broken shoes etc . . . We had a close shave on climbing out as the pavement above was full of noisy laughing drunks waiting for a bus, who scuffled & fooled inches from our hiding place. “I thrive on the excitement,” says Lee.

Peter & Lee stayed the night & we jammed two mattresses into my room. I got up at twelve thirty today—a grey dismal Sunday in November. Lee washed up & cleaned the kitchen, but it got very messy again when Mo cooked Pete a meal. I slammed out of the house in a real mood, leaving everyone else watching TV, & hitched in to University. I didn’t even tell them I was going. I went to the library & in a few hours my inexplicable anger had spent itself in the restful silence. It seems Pete & I are nearly constantly at odds these days over some trifling matter or other.

Bill moved into his new flat yesterday, taking the TV aerial with him, so we had to shift the TV back into Pete’s room. I haven’t seen Shelley, Gareth & Lindsey for days. Susie says Shelley is “settling down to a cosy domestic routine with her menagerie of doting males.”

I stayed at the library until seven & hitched back. It began to rain as I walked down the library steps. I have “Corregidora” by Gayl Jones to read for 2.45 p.m. tomorrow. Stu has just come round, & he & Pete have bought a gramme of speed between them. I have a lot of work to clear up in the next week, two essays to write by this time next Sunday, one for each course. The term is drawing in to a close already; in just three weeks I’ll be going home again. It seems so long since I was there last.

Saturday November 19th

1983-11-19T20:02:00.000Z

Last night Barry, Ade & I called round to the Art College to see Lee. We found him in room 312 hunched over a tidy grey & black Remington Rand typewriter newly acquired for £15 second-hand from a nearby shop. We left B. & A. battling on Phoenix & walked the few hundred yards to the shop where I bought an angle-poise lamp for £3. Lee’s Easterby Art College friend Michael Pugh was coming down at six-thirty, so I arranged to meet them both in The Quayside at 7.30. Much to my annoyance, they didn’t show up & so I sat for an hour alone in the crowded noisy pub listening to two girls arguing about the merits/demerits of some bloke they had both been going out with.

At half-eight I wandered down to The Anchor to meet Pete, Mo, Ade, Barry, Guy & Kamran & we went to two pretty crappy parties, the first one at no. 29 University Gardens, where we went over the top a bit & had a water fight on the back verandah, bombarding Guy & Barry who cowered down below in a doorway. I nearly crushed a little girl whose drunken tearful mum, for some reason alien to me, had brought her along to what must’ve been a very unpleasant, frightening place, full of loud, stupid people looming up out of the throbbing gloom. As a result, words were exchanged between our lot & a rugby-type who voiced the opinion that he thought we ought to “clear off.” Party no. 2 was equally crap, a laid-back affair near White Deer Park, the rooms thick with the smell of dope, everything very silly as parties usually are, everyone hugging & laughing & screeching.

Today has gone by innocuously enough; Lee atoned for the previous evening by rolling up at one & we went into Watermouth with Barry. An unpleasant Saturday afternoon near Christmas, the town awash with people. Around the Attlee Square clock tower a large group of students had gathered in the road & were singing in aid of peace. Crowds of people thronged around them—contempt & amusement from some—& the traffic tailed back in several directions. All the University SWSO crowd were there: ‘dog-faced’ Mickey with the mohican, Martin Hegarty, Guy’s friend Felicity . . . Lee & Barry & I were full of scorn for them—as if ANYONE will listen; it’s like preaching peace & morality to a psychopath with a machine gun. Sitting in the street is useless. When Heseltine had his face splashed with red paint on a recent visit to Manchester University, the CND bureaucracy predictably condemned the act as “intolerant.” CND will go on singing & linking hands until the fateful Day itself, all their undoubted commitment & sincerity smashed to pieces against the brick wall of the State. And I suppose on this point, I agree with the RCP.

I was spending money “like a man with no arms” as the saying goes, & somehow I’ve got through a little under £40 in two days. I’m now £150 overdrawn. I wrote to Mum & Dad about the year abroad, & in my letter I hope I made my position clear. I also wrote a typical sort of letter to Claire . . .

Michael P. had stayed at Lee’s halls watching a Jimmy Cagney film & was summoned by a telephone call. We met him in an amusement arcade near the seafront. I’ve only met him once before, a brief moment at Easterby Art College when I paid a visit with Grant last Easter. He had long hair down to his shoulders back then, but now wears it slicked back with a parting down the middle, ‘twenties fashion. He’s thin & small & looked quaint in a black tuxedo jacket, grey waistcoat & white shirt & bowtie. He doesn’t speak much, but when he does it’s with a heavy Easterby accent that’s music to my ears. We walked home.

Thursday November 17th

1983-11-17T21:14:00.002Z

I got up at eleven & had to rush for my 11.30 tutorial. I persuaded Ade to give me a lift in to campus & got there only a few minutes late. I couldn’t be bothered staying up all night to read “Hermsprong” & succumbed to sleep at three, with ninety pages read. So I let the other tutee, Phil Dickinson, ramble on from an essay he’d written comparing “Hermsprong” with William Godwin’s “Caleb Williams.”

At 2 p.m. I had to see the sub-Dean Ned Ammons so that he could give me a little slap of the wrist over missing two tutorials & handing in my vacation essay 6 weeks late. He was OK about it, & I spent the rest of the day in the library looking for books for next week’s work. I had beef burger & chips at Dee’s Diner & bought Robert a Christmas present, “The Meditator’s Diary: A Western Woman’s Unique Experience in Thailand Monasteries,” before coming home. Discord with Pete; in a huff he’d moved the TV from his room into the bleak back sitting room because he was sick of everyone going in there all the time, but there isn’t an aerial for it now. I was annoyed. I haven’t seen Lee in a few days, & the couple of times I’ve tried to ring him, the ‘phone has either been engaged or he’s been out.

I have a long list of letters to write: to Nanna P., to Duncan Verity, Claire, & Mum & Dad over the delicate matter of this $800. I’m still undecided. Guy is in a doubtful position over the year abroad too, but whenever I raise the subject with Pete he gets almost indignant & says I’m being stupid for even considering the alternatives, although how the fuck he’s going to afford it I don’t know . . .

Wednesday November 16th

1983-11-16T22:47:00.000Z

I handed in my essay yesterday, written up & altered & discovered that only one person had done the reading for Black Americans anyway. I bought Throbbing Gristle’s “Second Annual Report” at the mini-market (1st side played backwards) & afterwards I met Lindsey & Susie in the library coffee bar. We met up with Barry & Guy & went to the Cellar for something to eat, & then L., S. & I went into Watermouth; we had to make an effort. Lindsey & I ended up at ‘Dizzy’s,’ a disco at The Zone—½ price drinks until eleven thirty—& we met Alex who was acting as doorman. Ian & Mick were inside too. Ian came across to talk to us for a few minutes; he & Lee are holding a ‘performance’ in the crypt of a demolished church near Blenheim Place a fortnight today. I was supposed to go with aforementioned to said crypt at 1pm yesterday, but I didn’t get up until half-past one. After a couple of pretty uninspired hours at the disco L. & I left & I walked the mile or so home.

What have I done today? Very little. I got up at 2pm & sat about idly, winding Pete up most of the day . . . I’ve done no reading lately & I’ve quite let work & other things slip. I started off the term well but things have deteriorated. I’ve got to read the 200-odd pages of “Hermsprong” for tomorrow at 11 am, but it’s nearly half-ten already & I’m only on page 26 & so I may have to stay up all night. Barry has gone to Masquerades by himself. Earlier today he went round to see the girl he met at the Cellar & she & her friends are going to the club tonight too, so Barry once again sets out with raised hopes. Ade returned today to tell us his “love life is just about going again”; he’s in Barry’s room listening to records.

I keep pretending both to myself & to others that at the end of the year I’m going to shave my head & give up all drugs & drink, but I should realise that this would require more mental resolution & effort than I’m capable of . . . Why would I want to do this?. . . It’s not important.

I still can’t decide whether or not to go to America—I wish I could make up my mind. I can’t even answer this simple question, so what hope for me? Decisions! Current financial position: £104 overdrawn . . . I look at Grant’s poems & they make me think how hard it is to really Know anyone in this life . . .

This diary says so little. No doubt there are innumerable thoughts & passing shades of mood that have touched me & marked the last two days, but my words have such limited power against the great yawning gulfs of time they strive to combat. One day when I read these words again I’ll curse my lack of skill at fleshing out these transitory moments. What’s clear now won’t be when the surrounding chaff of living & peripheral thoughts have been swallowed up by the years. This narrative is dull & uninspired because I’m a bit drunk on the whisky Mo brought back from London as her payment towards rent.

Monday November 14th

1983-11-14T23:58:00.001Z

Over the past week I’ve let work, letters, everything slip, & as I write this I feel disgusted with myself. I missed my Black Americans seminar today too. I’ve only just this minute finished my ten ½ side essay for Ted Coates; Freddie Hubbard plays softly in my room.

It’s been bitterly cold today. We spent most of it huddled under blankets. Ade made an appearance in the afternoon and quite calmly announced he & his girlfriend have split up. She turned up on our doorstep agitated & tearful in the evening to sort things out but Ade had left, leaving a note saying he never wanted to see her again. She came & sat awhile in Pete’s room with us watching TV, her long dark hair hanging over red, tearful eyes.

I haven’t heard from Mum & Dad or anyone for ages. I’m £80 overdrawn & I spent over seventy pounds this past week.

Sunday November 13th

1983-11-13T21:22:00.002Z

Barry came back from Tasha & Lucy’s soiree in a gloomy mood of resignation, as his great hope Elisa—the Clare Grogan girl—had “got off with some flash spade in a leather jacket” (as Barry put it), & more or less ignored Barry who’d invited her & her friend to the party in the first place. He felt she was obliged to at least talk to him, & I wondered if she’d been put off by his obvious intent . . . “You’ve got to set your stall up to sell your goods,” he says. I’m no good at flogging what ‘wares’ I have to offer; consequently I don’t bother & none get sold!

Today has been a forgettable & uninspired day of lounging about; Lee stayed to watch ‘The World At War’ at 7.15.

Saturday November 12th

1983-11-12T22:14:00.002Z

Pete got back Thursday afternoon & I wrote my essay in the evening while Inga was round again, but I didn’t copy it up, & last night we went out to the pub (The Quayside). Barry, Susie, Lindsey & I ended up at a depressing soul-boy disco near The Oasis.

Today I went round to Maynard Gardens to watch Lee make the last part of his video. Guy & Barry were already there. The 3-minute piece is a combination of the footage shot in Crookgreave, clips from The Prisoner & old Heinz Beans adverts, & it ends with a shot of a gravestone coming into gradual focus & an insistent male voice hypnotically repeating ‘Sleeplessness, sleeplessness, sleeplessness’ over and over. It was the most entertaining of the videos I saw. Afterwards Lee came round to our house & is staying over; most other people have gone to a party organised by Tasha & Lucy.

Wednesday November 9th

1983-11-09T23:31:00.004Z

Pete & I went to Gloucester yesterday to see The Fall and also to see Grant. Pete didn’t get up until late afternoon & I was getting very annoyed by the time he did, at about four. We bought a gramme of speed for £14 from Phil (of the grey Renault from last June), & got Alex M. to get us an eighth of dope; he’s off to Peru on Friday supposedly. As it was I regretted buying both & I’m going off drugs altogether. They’re just a waste of time & energy, & rarely make me feel good. It was growing dark as we got on the train.

Got to Gloucester at 8.30 & both Pete & I felt very excited about the prospect. We rushed from the station, caught a cab to the University and followed the crowds to the Refectory building where The Fall were playing. This was the fourth time I’d seen them since March 1982. The tickets were £3.00. The place was packed & I searched the sweaty crush of people for Grant’s dark brooding features, but eventually it was he who spotted me in the plush main bar as I made a bee-line for someone I thought was him. He seemed very surprised & pleased to see me; I explained that since I couldn’t be bothered answering his last letter I thought I’d make a personal appearance instead. He wore the same brown shabby jacket, & sported the usual unkempt, stringy locks. He smokes like a chimney, & there was scarcely a time when his fingers weren’t clutching some miserable stub of badly rolled cigarette; he has pretty huge nicotine stains on his hands. Nik & a silent blond friend of his were up from Camberwell Art College & I actually said more to him that than I had on the previous few occasions I’d met him. He seems OK.

Pete & I left after this to go for a high-spirited dance in a crowded disco nearby; we’d taken some speed & I felt very good here, very carefree, the future & the present glowing with promise & pleasure. We went back to the main hall which was fairly empty & so only a few people saw the performance of the support band, The Wasp Factory, who Grant said were really good. Pete & I didn’t like them very much, finding cause for amusement & scorn in the lead singer’s pelvic gyrations & passé extravagances.

The Fall came on next, almost taking me unawares. They were up & into “Mere Pseud Mag Ed” before I knew it. They played a fairly good (long) set & it was good to hear “Man Whose Head Expanded,” “Marquis Cha-Cha” etc., etc. Their new LP is called “Perverted By Language.” Grant, Nik & co. had vanished in the melee up front so Pete & I hung about where there was a bit more space & I leaped about with gay, speed-induced abandon & got very tired & hot . . . One encore, then the lights came on & the unwilling crowds were drifting out into the night.

Grant’s quiet & vaguely trendy Gloucester friend Gavin Spencer joined us & we walked back to the residence halls, finding everything quiet, dead & in darkness. We’d had a vague image of what to expect at Gloucester, based naively on Sussex lines, but we’d been warned & should’ve listened. No one was about & nothing stirred. The silence seemed oppressive; somewhere an air-conditioning or heating unit hummed quietly. We’d at least hoped for a few people to be up & having some midnight lunacies, but all we got was a friend of Gavin’s who had a girl in his room & hissed at us to go away. Grant kept pleading with us to keep the noise to a minimum as the Warden of the Halls lived on the end of the corridor, in the room next-door to his. We had a joint – Grant kept reminding us about the noise & warning us not to leave any evidence of our illicit smoke in case he “got in the shit.” Eventually he & the others went to bed, leaving Pete & I to bore Gavin with our facetious comments & our incredulity at Gloucester’s deadness. We retired to the Common Room & Gavin went to bed. Pete & I just sat there, mumbling to one another until the miserable light of morning filtered through the curtains & we tried half-heartedly to get some sleep.

Grant made a tangled, scowl-browed appearance at eight, exhorting us to rise before the cleaners came. Nik & his friend left to hitch back to Camberwell & Grant lapsed into a gloomy & intense frame of mind, rarely raising himself from it sufficiently to laugh or smile. We wandered around what is laughingly called the ‘campus,’ a loose aggregate of low-rise buildings reminiscent of some shabby council estate. The majority of the student population is apparently into PE & rugby etc. . . What a faceless, dreary, utterly uninspiring place. Staying there will break Grant; he seems to move in a permanent gloom. Pete & I began to feel very tired, & sat in the ‘bar’ (ha ha) most of the day. Grant’s mental misery rubbed off on me, & I felt a momentary pang of anger when he muttered “Why did you come here?” To see you, you oaf, why else!? I’ve known him since I was a kid, & yet at times he seemed very remote. The more the day dragged on the greater our collective stagnation & I slipped into a heavy, dull silence. I felt thoroughly drained.

Things livened up slightly in the evening, with smoking of dope & some traipsing about to & fro from various rooms with large groups of cheerful people, but I eventually had to leave at about 8 p.m. I took some speed & left Pete listening to records in someone’s room. I felt better after making the effort to move & in fact I quite enjoyed the lone journey back to Watermouth. The speed threw my mind into forward gear & I spent the hours on the train staring glassily ahead of me, my mind awhirl with thoughts & ideas. I’d got a copy of Grant & Nik’s joint collaboration “The Spike,” an A4-sized pamphlet featuring Nik’s pen & ink drawings & Grant’s sparse lines of verse, some of which I quite like (for the record – “Lighting Up,” “Hedonist (Socially Mobile),” “Night-Walk”). Most of them concern his usual themes of social isolation, full of images of street-lamps, dark decaying cities & repulsive social/sexual interactions . . . This inspired me to contrive verse of my own, & elaborate rambling word-structures that I developed into long letters on various themes, but I had no pen or paper & so the creations were lost. Speed is the best drug I’ve had—such glimpses of Potential—but I don’t know whether it’s worth it physically or financially. Perhaps if I took some one morning & allowed a day to run its natural course . . .

I arrived back in Watermouth eager for paper & pens to convert my speculations into hard actuality, but as usual, I allowed myself to be distracted by Barry, who was crowing triumphantly over some address he’d been given by a girl he had chatted up in the Cellar.

It’s now 11 p.m. & everyone has gone out to an invites-only party at ‘L.A.' thrown by the University trendies. Mo spent ages primping herself up for it, getting her looks in order for the night ahead. I didn’t get invited. Inga came round wet-eyed just as Mo was leaving, quietly wrought over some bad-feeling in her house. She’s asleep on Pete’s bed now.

Tuesday November 8th

1983-11-08T15:28:00.000Z

Poor prospects for the year abroad. I went to a meeting at twenty to four with Colin Pasmore, who’s in charge of year abroad arrangements, & was told that that mine, Guy’s & Pete’s first choice of Plotinus is very highly subscribed & it’s doubtful we’ll all be there together. Next on the list would be Camden College in Vermont. Students are coming back from America with £800+ debts to their names— I was asked about the money situation & I said I felt guilty asking Mum & Dad to fork out this sum on top of the £1000 they contribute towards my grant. Exemption would be “no problem” says Colin Pasmore: I would just slot straight in with the final years & take my finals in May 1985, a year earlier.

I also met Mr. Carwardine & apologised to him for missing last Thursday’s tutorial—some lie about illness & a note that wasn’t delivered. He was quite OK about it & told me what’s due for next week—Coleridge, Keats & Shelley. We have a reading break this week. I got away with it. I met Barry, Lindsey & Shelley in the library coffee bar. I hadn’t seen Lindsey since last Wednesday at Masquerades & Shelley for a week. Lindsey & Liddy were selling “Next Step”s today around the mini-market, & all the old twinges of self-contempt surfaced.

Anyway, Barry & I went to the Cellar & came home where I lay on my bed & wrestled with mixed feelings. I think at this point in time the chance of me not going have become more apparent. Either way, I will have to sort it out soon. I could miss so much & perhaps forsake a never-to-be-repeated opportunity.

Monday November 7th

1983-11-07T19:27:00.005Z

On Sunday I went to see Psychic TV; I caught the 11.27 train to Waterloo & after some panic as the train went unexpectedly to Wickbourne, got into London at one o’clock. I met Mick & Alex at Platform 9, King’s Cross, at a quarter to 2, fifteen minutes before the buses were due. Ian was expected to turn up but didn’t & the coaches were an hour late. The journey up to Manchester was quite unremarkable. Mick, Alex & I sat at the back with a group of Psychic TV fanatics —Psychic cross T-shirts, shaved heads, tattoos galore . . . We smoked dope & I felt like throwing up, so I willed myself to sleep, my face pressed hard against the cold window.

We got to Manchester at 7.45. The Ritz is a shabby looking club down a dingy road facing a railway viaduct. The growing collection of assorted posers & paramilitary pseuds were kept waiting ages outside; meanwhile, we could glimpse the band through the glass doors & hear them crashing away inside. Eventually we were allowed in. The club very plush inside, a downstairs bar with red velvet décor & subdued lights & a central raised dance-floor with a stage & video screen at one end.

We went upstairs to wait, & sat on the balcony eating food from a tiny fast-food counter in one corner. A film was playing on the video screen, a recording made as the members of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana drank poison & pledged their undying allegiance to Rev. J. Jones in November 1978 . . . “I am prepared to lay down my life for this socialist dream” . . . The film was very blurred, the colour balance all wrong, a preponderance of red. “THOSE WHO DO NOT REMEMBER THE PAST . . . ”

Finally the band came on, four (or was it five) members with shaved heads, the male drummer in leather skirt & tights. Genesis P. Orridge, small & ugly, raved up front & even clambered up the scaffolding surrounding the stage, hanging with one arm while singing. They used a lot of backing tapes—electronic screeches, animal growls & snarls, voices, radio chat cut-ups—& the drums & bass built up into long hypnotic walls of sound. No one danced or moved, & most people just sat or stood & stared. Psychic TV ended their set with “In The Nursery,” which I recognised from the album, & G.P.O. closed it out: “It’s hard work living in this nursery – Thank you, goodnight.”

The coach journey back was equally boring, & everyone slept most of the way. We were deposited outside King’s Cross railway station at around three o’clock in the morning, & Alex, Mick & I immediately went to a nearby Burger Delight place, packed even at this ungodly hour, & blew six pounds on burgers & banana longboats . . We were in a good mood. A. & M. good fun to be with; as soon as the tube was running & we could head for Waterloo they rushed around like children, chasing one another with rolled-up newspapers. I was overcome by weariness on the train back to Watermouth; the grey light of morning seems so tiring to the sleepless. Bid A. & M. goodbye & went home to bed.

I got up today at teatime, after just six hours of sleep. I haven’t done anything yet.

Saturday November 5th

1983-11-05T23:28:00.000Z

Lee turned up late last night. He’d been to see the wrestling at the Starlight with Ian & Mick & he’d been at Ian’s house earlier while Ian & his friend Gav snorted heroin, got sick, & generally behaved oddly, talking of travelling down staircases in their minds etc. . . Then they’d all watched “The Exorcist,” the only light coming from the single candle on Ian’s windowsill in the other room. Ian is strange. They offered Lee some H. but he refused, & he says he wants to become “totally puritan” & cut even alcohol out. I see what he’s getting at. I hate the crap that goes with the ‘drugs scene,’ but I suppose looked at in the right perspective they can be useful.

Lee stayed overnight & I failed to get my essay done; my head was too full of ideas to sit down & focus. I planned on getting up early this morning to make a start, but I slept for eleven hours & didn’t get up until after twelve.

Barry got back at 8 a.m. He, Guy, Gareth & Stu went to two parties, the one in New Lycroft & another one at Sutton Road. He found out that Alex Margolin has supposedly blown his grant on a ‘plane ticket to Peru & isn’t coming back. Goodbye Alex. I doubt we’ll ever see him again.

Friday November 4th

1983-11-04T23:47:00.002Z

The US Marines are withdrawing from Grenada & a provisional govt is to be set up & ‘free’ elections to be held. If the people elected another anti-American govt, who’s to say that Reagan wouldn’t send his boys back in? There’s an RCP demo about Grenada in Hyde Park tomorrow but I probably won’t go. Lindsey is travelling up there.

I got a letter from Mum & Dad & I felt so awful about not keeping in more regular contact, so I wrote a letter to them. Dad’s finding his new job easy but tiring, & getting back into the routine seems a bit of a trial: “We will have to see how it goes . . ,” says Mum. Dad needs the company I think. I got a card from Andrew too, & at the moment he’s spending £20 a week commuting from London to his job.

The mist closed in again today, leaving the sun a pale yellow disk glimpsed through banks of scudding fog, the two tower blocks near us rising up into the murk until lost from view. Kids roundabout keep letting off bangers.

Dennis Nilsen was sentenced to 25 years in prison for the murder of at least a dozen men in London. The jury decided he wasn’t mad & so condemned him to a life behind bars. He may as well be dead. “I have judged myself more harshly than a jury can ever do . . .”

Tonight I read some of the letters of George Jackson from Soledad & San Quentin prisons. Perhaps on reading these, some people might realise why America is as bad as the USSR & as rotten to the core & riddled with racism & prejudice. Barry & Guy have gone to a party in New Lycroft. Ade has left us again until Nov 19th & Pete & I may get some speed tonight, because I’ve an essay to do before I go away on Sunday.

Thursday November 3rd

1983-11-03T23:03:00.002Z

A nondescript day; my Psychic TV ticket came, & the venue has been changed from Prestwich mental hospital because the governor fears the inmates (or should it be patients?) may be adversely affected by thee Psychic event. I rang up to confirm this, & a dry voice at Some Bizarre explained that said governor had got “cold feet” after scores of calls from concerned relatives. So they are playing at The Ritz in Manchester on Sunday (not Friday) instead. “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it,” announces the ticket. I’d do well to have this tattooed onto my forehead, so that every time I look in the mirror . . .

Ade went to pay a deposit on a place, but it won’t be ready until November 19th. I went along to take my coat to the cleaner’s & go to the library to get books for a Black Americans essay. I didn’t go to my tutorial. I had a joint before coming to bed, & I feel ill.

Wednesday November 2nd

1983-11-03T03:41:00.004Z

Today Pete & I finally got around to helping Lee make his video. We didn’t turn up on Monday or Tuesday, so this time he came round to ensure we helped. Pete & I took the bus into Watermouth with him & collected the video equipment from his studio in 312 at Maynard Gardens. We had £2000 of equipment with us—a camera, VCR, mike, battery pack & leads . . . the VCR itself was worth £600. We struggled back onto the bus & got off at Crookgreave Cemetery.

I was nervous as we walked up the spacious tree-lined front drive, because Ian had told us that one of the Polaroids he’d dropped in the crypt was of me, pulling open the door. But we evaded detection & climbed up to the columbarium where we spent an hour or so filming. The mist closed in & gave everything a serene feel.

We went back to the Art College & watched the video on one of the machines in the library on Barnum Avenue, & I think Lee was surprised at the good quality. He caught me in the film twice; once standing under a tree, & reeling back embarrassedly from a full face shot with white gravestones, swirling mist & trees in the background. I was supposed to be reading "Hermsprong" by Robert Bage for tomorrow’s tutorial but I much preferred to push those shadows to the back of my mind & lose myself in the filming. Back in Room 312 we watched the starlings wheeling in great black clouds in the blue twilight, screeching & filling the air with their deafening cries. The trees were thick with them & they reminded me of Easterby on a dark wintry teatime.

Lee came back to Jervis Terrace with me & cut my hair. He, Barry, Inga & her friend Ebbe (who’d called round earlier) went to Masquerades while I stayed home to watch "Five Go Mad on Mescalin" which had been hyped up but proved to be crap. Mo & I went to Masquerades at eleven & missed ½ price drinks by 3 minutes. The club was nearly empty, Barry deep in conversation with a pretty girl who looked like Clare Grogan. Guy, Gareth & Stu rolled up late & livened things up a little, & I lost myself in ‘dancing’ (ha ha) along with Lindsey, Guy & Lee . . .

Tuesday November 1st

1983-11-01T22:37:00.000Z

I spent most of the day with Lindsey. I met her in the coffee shop in the library basement, went for a baked potato in the Cellar & ended up round at Gareth & Stu’s. They live next door to the pub up Treadwell Rd., near the cemetery & both dislike living where they do. Their landlady overpowers them with endless talk, & when we arrived they were sitting watching TV in her tasteless living room. She was out, but her ugly Pekinese Ming slobbered all over us & even tried mating with my arm. We had a drink at the Wickbourne Road Inn, & Lindsey came back with me to Jervis Terrace. Barry & Pete had gone out & rented a colour TV & threw bangers at us as we stood at the door. Ade gave Lindsey a lift home. We got on well I thought, but I’m wiser this time, & I won’t make the same mistake again.

PiL loomed in the evening, but I came to the conclusion that I didn’t really care whether I saw Public Image Ltd. or not, & on reflection I think it was a positive thing that I didn’t want to go. It turned out they only played 7 numbers anyway. What with Lydon’s unashamed exploitation of his audiences (same songs duplicated on each LP) & his recent feeble renditions of “Anarchy in the UK” (quote: “If I ever play a Sex Pistols song again it will be the end”) then I don’t believe I missed out. My recent comments as to his ‘historical importance’ were all just crap. Forget him. He’s lived too long & is an example of what happens to all true punks in the end; they either die or cop out, & it’s Lydon’s misfortune that he didn’t do the former.

So Barry, who’d come to the same decision as me, partly motivated by prospects for female company at the pub, went down in Ade’s car with Pete & Mo’s tickets as well, & got £5 each for them.

Monday October 31st

1983-11-01T02:46:00.001Z

My tutorial went OK, but I’ve got to hand in an essay by the end of the week. Tomorrow I’m helping Lee make a video in Crookgreave Cemetery for his course, & going to see Public Image Ltd & hopefully, Psychic TV on Friday. Barry & Pete are at Roxy’s tonight, & will no doubt roll back pissed very soon (it’s 2.40 a.m. Tuesday as I write). Mo has just gone to bed, & I’ve just played Dome 2 Side 1 for about the tenth time today. . . .

A scheme has gradually taken shape for squatting the empty & boarded up Barrel Inn at the bottom of Meadspike Road, & although Lee pursues it with enthusiasm we all hang back & I’m not sure I’d enjoy getting the place all straight & cleaned out only to be evicted within a few days. Lee, Pete, Mo, Barry & I broke in again through a boarded window at the back of the pub’ & explored the dark & dusty bars downstairs & the six or seven carpeted room upstairs. There are two kitchens (one on each floor) & half-a-dozen toilets. Lee is anxious to get things moving & Pete’s been to the Welfare Office on campus to get a booklet on Squatting. It all looks doubtful. Lee’s been round here quite a lot during the last week & he’s got on well with everyone.

How long ago that speed trip seems.

Sunday October 30th

1983-10-30T22:34:00.005Z

Yesterday started off as an idle day, listening to the sport on & off in Barry’s room. The TV broke down last week & Ade left on Friday to go see his girlfriend in Oxford, taking his TV & a quarter of ‘black’ with him too. Selfish bastard, thinks us. So we remain Boxless. Athletic lost 0-3 at Dardray, their seventh straight defeat, & they now languish at the bottom of the table. Goals galore in the First Division, Arsenal beating Aston Villa 6-2 at Villa Park & Liverpool thrashing Luton Town 6-0. Man Utd are at the top.

In the evening Lee came round & at ten, Pete, he & I went down to The Cat & Lizard & met Ian, a quiet & thoughtful acquaintance of Lee’s from College. He has a crew cut & a pinched but kindly face; his eyes seem to speak of good-natured smiles & I took an immediate liking to him. He’d brought along a Polaroid instant camera, & Lee had his Pentax ME Super with a borrowed flashgun; the plan was to break open a crypt in Crookgreave Cemetery & take pictures.

We had to scale a wall topped with broken shards of glass skirting busy Treadwell Road. The other three got over in no time but I hashed it up & eventually bundled myself over several yards higher up, cutting myself & tearing my overcoat in the process. We walked cautiously through the ivy-choked undergrowth, over graves & between trees, until we found a path that wound down towards the main Wickbourne Rd entrance near the Mortuary, a sinister, clinical-looking building with whitewashed windows & a high ventilated roof. In this area the path broadened out & skirted a dark & massive chapel; here & there were dotted several above ground crypts. We tried half-heartedly to get into two but the doors were of heavy bronze & wouldn’t yield, but eventually we stumbled across one with granite doors that looked to have been recently opened & re-sealed with a strip of crumbling slate. This was easily pried away with the claw hammer we’d brought & after much shoving & scraping & straining, & with a loud grating noise, the door came open. Our hearts raced—mine was going hammer & tongs, & we pulled the great sheet of stone down from the top like a drawbridge, but it gave under its own weight & with a loud crash broke into 3 pieces to the ground.

Blackness beckoned within. Torchlight flickered across stone. In a state of frenzied haste Lee & Ian got their cameras ready & as they clicked picture after picture, the jumbled ranks of headstones were lit with searing blue blinks of light. Ian leaned right into the crypt, photographing the wooden coffin that lay in funereal splendour on a stone ledge within, its lid scattered with plaster & coming apart at one corner. The fear of detection galvanised Pete & I into hoarse pleas to Ian & Lee to hurry up—grave robbing is still a capital offence supposedly—& eventually (thankfully!), after what seemed an age, Ian & Lee came away & we all scurried through the headstones & back into the trees. We had to lead Lee by the arm because the flash on his camera had blinded him & all he could see as we stumbled toward the wall & safety was the stark brick interior of the crypt & its coffin seared into his mind by the intense light.

We got back over the wall higher up Treadwell Rd, Ian, Pete & I vaulting over simultaneously, leaving Lee to wait for a safe moment to escape. Ian’s Polaroid pictures were unimpressive. Only two showed anything, the first an end-on view of the coffin in situ, the second showing it at a more perpendicular angle, centred on the gaping blackness where the seams were coming apart at one end. He’d accidently dropped two pictures actually inside the crypt. The dead won’t mind.

We’d all been invited to a party at Sutton Road, so with still-racing hearts we got a cab that deposited us at the party. It was crammed to overflowing inside, so Ian, Lee & I decided to go back to Ian’s flat in Blenheim Place & dump the evidence. His flat is in a superb Georgian house that sits in a large three-sided square with the open side facing the sea. The living room is a cavernous place, decorated in a lavish but faded manner, complete with chandelier & heavy curtains . . . There seemed to be acres of floor space, & in the far corner of the room, diagonally opposite the door, three people sprawled on chairs watching a tiny black & white TV—Mick, with shaved head (a Psychic TV fan), Alex, from Australia, & a bespectacled Computer Studies undergrad on a visit from Hatfield Poly. Ian sat in silence, playing with a bayonet. A strange atmosphere prevailed in the room, perhaps only because of the vastness of the place, but it was almost as if we were illegally squatting in a closed-up & rambling stately home. The shaved heads, the torn army fatigues & the careless attitude didn’t match the fading splendour of the room. Someone passed a joint around. Alex kept asking questions in a voice that seemed somehow dwarfed by the prevailing silence. So did everything else. And in one way the atmosphere there fitted perfectly with the visit to the cemetery & the glimpses of the crypt, a funereal mood, as if the room was a chapel, the living occupying something meant for the dead. Or dying.

The party at Sutton Road was OK. It was very crowded. I found the gang upstairs: Lindsey, Shelley & Susie were pissed, Lindsey in a talkative, loosened-up frame of mind, careless & drunk. Trevor was in wonderful form, & dominated the room with his humourous melodrama & Ian sat quietly on a chair in the corner, watching. Then he leaped up & was out of the room in a flash, saying in his low, soft voice that he had to go & “see you on Monday.”

Lee & I returned to Ian’s to sleep. Ian’s room abuts onto the large sitting room I described above & the earlier mood was pressed home more forcefully than ever. Ian’s bed was just a single mattress on the floor. An altar-like stand on which stood a large simple mirror was placed against one wall, draped with a long flowing white shroud that fell in pale & graceful folds to the floor. The floor was littered with records; Ian put on Psychic TVs latest LP, “Dreams Less Sweet." The windows were deep set & on the broad white sill the light from a white candle filled the recess, a pool of shadow playing around its base. The glow diminished & was lost in the vast gloom of the high room.

Lee & I kipped on mattresses on the sitting room floor & at 8 the next morning, Mick came in, got some things together & left again. At 10.30 we got up & said goodbye to Ian, who lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling. We didn’t think he’d heard us, but just as we were turning to leave we heard his quiet reply.

We made our hesitant way home, pausing to play on video games & waste £1.80 on a miserably sparse breakfast at a fast food place. The afternoon was grey & quiet. Lee & I each bought a Bavarian roll & ate it sitting on the steps right at the top of one of the blocks of flats down the road from Jervis Terrace.

Today—at the suggestion of Alex—I sent off £10.23 for my ticket to see Psychic TV next Friday which includes return travel by coach to Prestwich from London. Later, Lee, Barry, Pete & I scared ourselves shitless talking about ghosts & strange things that have happened to respective friends. The Silence seemed to hover in the room as we talked, in the corridor beyond the door & in the dark & quiet streets outside. I’m probably noticing the absence of the TV. I couldn’t shake off this odd sense of stillness all day. It was weird: “Dome 2” captures it, especially Track 1 Side 1 “The Red Tent I.” Everything is underpinned by this backdrop of stillness & of brooding . . . Perhaps it’s just my morbid fanciful mind, or perhaps the spirit of the dead in that crypt has possessed me!

The Americans have invaded Grenada following a bloody coup there by members of the self-acclaimed Marxist government who executed the Premier & say they will leave when peace, “democracy” & law & order are restored. In the Lebanon, 200 US Marines & several dozen French soldiers of the peacekeeping force were killed when suicide-squads detonated two trucks containing high-explosives alongside their bases. Cheery news.

Friday October 28th

1983-10-29T02:48:00.003Z

During the afternoon, Barry, Ade & a bassist Christian Kemp (who Mo knew) had a jam together in the common room of Toynbee Hall. It sounded very muddy, not as ‘clean’ a sound as on the tapes Barry had brought down at the start of term. Barry was fairly disappointed with the results & thought that Christian’s bass-playing was crap.

In the evening Pete & Mo & I left for Shelley’s flat on Prince’s Way & she cooked us a meal, a mash of potato & chicken with onion sauce, rice & peas. We were ushered in by Shelley's effusive flat-mate David & found her slaving away in the kitchen; her other flat-mate Jack was squatting in a chair, bearded, silent, & more intense than the blustering friendliness & chat of David. Jonathan, the fourth member of the household was away. Their house has a pretty impressive sitting room & thru bedroom, but the upstairs is comparable in size & condition to ours; they’re paying £25 per week. David left to buy some booze, Lindsey & Susie turned up, David returned, & we ate.

Afterwards we all caught either the bus or taxi up to the University for the much-publicized “Club Mix” in Blair Peach Hall (where Hendrix once played, according to popular legend). I forked out my £1 to get in & the very first person I saw was Del; since they left Watermouth, he & Trevor have spent time in Bristol, Newport & Reading, & returned to find a house, which they’ve done apparently. Trevor was already chatting up some blonde girl. Barry & Guy were there too. We had another good night out getting pissed & dancing along with a few hundred others. I felt rotten afterwards & so I made myself throw up by sticking my fingers down my throat. We got back & pissed about with fireworks before going to bed.

Thursday October 27th

1983-10-28T00:58:00.001Z

My tutorial went well & I enjoyed it. In the afternoon after this had finished, I went back to Spengler Hall (for the first time since I left) for the second meeting of the newly organised American Studies Society that has been put together to help lessen the culture shock for those going to the USA. There were several 4th years there, & the average amount each has come back owing is £800. The rest of the American Studies first years seem, on the whole, a pretty wanky lot. Pete & I took a look at the prospectus for Plotinus (Euphoria State University); it’s a vast campus housing tens of thousands of students & dominated by 25-storey accommodation blocks It’s the only University Guy, Pete & I can go to together, as American Studies History & Lit. people get different campus choices.

Afterwards I went into Watermouth & met Lee in Room 312 of the Art College, right on the top floor. We wandered around town & L. ended up climbing into a derelict house on Barker Street right in the centre of Watermouth; he found two bound volumes of Punch magazine for July-December 1925 & 1926, plus a couple of envelopes full of the most pornographic porn I’ve ever seen, advertisements for magazines with titles such as “Cum” & “Girls Who Take it Up The Ass,” “Girls Who Eat Cum” - incest mags, bestiality mags, gay mags, all featuring explicit (with a big E) cover photographs of girls sucking on enormous cocks, a Chinese girl (?) with breasts & a huge erection raping a bloke up the arse, etc. I couldn’t stop wondering what actually motivates people to be photographed doing such things . . . What goes through their minds?

Barry, Lindsey & Shelley & I went out for a drink on Wessex Road in the evening & I felt a great sadness creep over me about leaving England in nine months time, an echo of that quasi-sentimental & over-sensitive moodiness I experienced the last week of term last June.

Wednesday October 26th

1983-10-27T02:58:00.000Z

Masquerades beckoned again in the evening. Lee came round while I was on campus rushing off notes for tomorrow’s tutorial on Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads; we all had a great time & there were about 20 or so people there I knew – Lee, Barry, Pete, Guy, Shelley, Lindsey, Susie, Miles, Fabian, etc., etc., etc . . . . Lee came back & kipped on my floor overnight.

Tuesday October 25th

1983-10-26T01:35:00.002Z

I was up early & Ade & Pete & I drove into campus, to find the University in the grip of a hostage drama. Gunmen had raided the Barclay's Bank near the Mace & got away with £150,000, leaving a ‘bomb’ strapped to a security man’s chest. We went down to the Tuesday mini-market & I spent £9 on a couple of jazz albums & an LP by Dome, which I’ve been playing a lot since. Even Barry likes it. I also bought a pair of black fatigues for £4.

In the evening Lee, Lindsey, Liddy, Barry, Pete, Stu & I went to see The Fall at Livingstone’s on the seafront, near the Aquarium. Barry & I met Liddy & Lindsey at The Lord Raglan & Lee, Pete & Stu in the club. Livingstone’s is a small place, along the lines of The Wavezz Club in Easterby with a bar area that separates the building into one large & one small room. The bands played in the former, a low-ceilinged room with chairs & tables around its perimeter & no stage. The support band, The Insects, was a 3-piece all-female band from America & were crap & unoriginal in a monotonous, noisy, unskilful & boring way. Everyone sat down for their set, but as soon as The Fall appeared we all stood up & crushed forward, so that only Mark E.’s lank hair & gaunt face could be spied through the forest of heads. They played “English Scheme” off Grotesque, “Ludd Gang,” “Hexen Definitive,” & a whole lot of other things I’ve never heard before, & they played their new single “Kicker Conspiracy” for an encore. They were pretty good, although not as impressive as at Camden last May, & the people leaping about & pogo-ing right in front of me were annoying. I think Lee found it a bit tedious & towards the end of the set he disappeared & went & sat down. Liddy felt sick & left early.

Monday October 24th

1983-10-24T23:25:00.001Z

After a pretty unremarkable Black Americans tutorial, Susie & I met Lindsey & went down to the Cellar for some food. As usual, I had a baked potato with cheese, tuna & mushroom filling for £1.00. Susie left early & Lin. & I found ourselves alone together. I say it that way deliberately. I couldn’t think of anything to say beyond the utterly trivial & utterly pointless, & I felt at the time that she was in the same plight too. A jazz group played a few laboured, uninspired pieces, while L. & I got drunk. I cashed & spent the better part of two £5 cheques.

Sunday October 23rd

1983-10-23T21:14:00.000Z

The grey misery of coming down from the dexy’s has cast a shadow over the entire weekend. I’m just now starting to feel physically OK again, & mentally I’m sure I will suffer the reverberations for a few more days. The weekend has come & gone & was filled with mundane things which are lost forever now. Lee & I did break into the derelict pub down Meadspike Road.

Saturday October 22nd

1983-10-22T18:01:00.000+01:00

Lee and I spent the afternoon in Crookgreave Cemetery; we wandered around the graves in the wintry sun, padding on clipped & kempt grass amid the gleaming white & well-tended tombstones, marvelling at the idyllic tranquillity, the hard blue sky crossed by sharp white jet trails. We sat in the sun & couldn’t quite believe the Perfection of this Elysian place. It was beautiful.

Since Wednesday night I’ve been walking around in a cold, suppressed state of gloom.

Friday October 21st

1983-10-21T22:26:00.003+01:00

It’s 10 p.m. & I have just about recovered from the excesses of Wednesday night. Barry, Lindsey, Susie, Stu, Guy, Ade & Gareth & I—Gareth back after a couple of week’s seclusion through illness—went as usual to Masquerades. For once, Masquerades was crowded & I got drunk & took four small yellow pills—dexy’s—which Gareth got for six of us for 35p each from a couple of contacts of his.

We got back home at about 2.30 in the morning & one of those classic ‘peak’ experiences ensued. The effects of the pills had taken hold in a very subtle & undramatic way, but perhaps this was only because I was drunk when I took them. We settled in Barry’s room & the talking began. Conversations raged at blistering pace on all sides, or rather monologues, for we directed long streams of words at one another, only shutting them long enough to let the other person speak, waiting until they stopped so we could begin the stream again. Guy & I talked at each other for four or five hours in an inspired way about school & family—Guy said he was “ecstatically happy,” & I was going through a great ‘Yea-saying’ explosion of optimism & excitement & felt so full of potential that I could only be happy. A delusion, but a good delusion to have nonetheless. O to feel so full & intense every minute of every day. Maybe I was glimpsing a higher plane of existence? I kept going at a relentless pace all through the night. We carried on drinking too, constantly passing around a bottle of whisky Mo bought us as her contribution towards rent. Pete got up & joined us but eventually, after he’d slipped away back to bed, & as the grey unwelcome light of another day & Responsibility glared weakly through the curtains, the talking stuttered, & finally died all together.

And now we paid for our night of rare delights. Stu crept into my room to rest & the others slid into mumbling weariness. I wasn’t feeling too bad & neither was Guy, but Barry & Stu were suffering “utter hell.” Ade collapsed onto the sofa in the back room—Barry said he couldn’t move. We were almost delirious, cracking weak one-liners & saying ridiculous things, laughing weakly & stumbling into verbal dead ends & illogic. I had a tutorial at 11.30 too, so mid-morning, leaving the others lying down & spent, Guy & I emerged into sunlight like new men.

The world looked different, we were different, separate, removed from the people who had just got up & filled the quiet streets & shops. We were different by virtue of what we’d just gone through. Our secret knowledge set us apart. My stomach felt hollow, my eyes ached & my whole body felt weak. I felt a curious sensation of expectancy, almost like anticipation, as though ‘something’ was about to happen to me. Perhaps because I hadn’t slept the night before lent some significance to the new day, as if the Act of staying awake had been rewarded with a glimpse of a sense of PURPOSE. I walked slightly unsteadily down the road to the hitching spot opposite The Cat & Lizard willing something to happen & Be different, filled with that old yearning for more depth & meaning.

It was chaos getting into Uni. because of a strike by BR men over a sacking. A dozen people were trying to get lifts & the buses sailing past packed full. I got to the tutorial room just in time. There are just two people in my Romanticism tutorial & it seems aimless & without a point. I left thoroughly dissatisfied. Our ‘discussions’ take place in a listless atmosphere. The things we say & the things we do don’t seem to be getting us anywhere or even near to approaching the core of Wordworth’s experiences & feelings. There has to be more to the study of Wordsworth than this, I told myself—I know there must be. Still, I couldn’t shake off the hopeless insight that perhaps there wasn’t anything other than what I’d just gone through, just second-hand, abstract intellectualising. I suppose I want to FEEL the emotions & sensations as Wordworth felt them in the raw, but then I suppose too this is just the “idealism of a bourgeois escapist mind” at work & is a fruitless point to make.

I met Susie outside the library & sat in the coffee bar with her. My words spilled out in a haste of enthusiastic talk, & after she had gone I even wandered around the library looking for someone else to talk to. I came home & feel utterly washed out, and so to bed.

Today I think I’m getting tonsillitis again. When I swallow I feel pain & my neck is swollen. Full of gloomy prophecies & expectations. The dexy’s experience has left me in a morose, negative frame of mind & nothing seems to offer any solace or prospect for enjoyment. It’s the old thing of wanting to live from hour to hour, day to day at a high & intense level of experience that—for me—seems impossible.

In the afternoon I sat with Lindsey & Barry in the library coffee bar (quite a regular hang out for us all this term) as they aired their dissatisfactions with Sociology & I thought how superficial & intellectually lightweight an American Studies degree is. I really felt quite gloomy. Sociology seems to encourage analytical & thorough thought & speech. There isn’t a course anywhere in the country which would do Everything I want to do—which is, in itself, Everything. As I plough through a book taking notes, I find the word “everything" somehow dissatisfying and superficial. Occasionally I yearn for something with real bite to it, say English or Philosophy or Politics. That isn’t to say I’m pissed off with my course; I’ve come to terms with what I’m doing & really I quite enjoy it. There’s just the odd discordant note that sounds from time to time & I long for something else.

Wednesday October 19th

1983-10-19T18:39:00.001+01:00

Del & Trevor finally left for Bristol last night at half-past midnight. The collective chaos & disorganisation had become too much for them & they’re going to return in a fortnight. A mood of relief possessed us after they’d gone & now at last things can begin to settle into a routine & we can make a start on tidying this place up.

Yesterday was a bit of a failure work wise; after writing yesterday’s entry I went down to the cafeteria underneath the library & met Lindsey, Barry & Guy. Shelley turned up later too, but she now seems somehow distant & far-removed from our circle. I suddenly felt very hungry, & so I persuaded Mo to come down to the Cellar with me for a baked potato. We met Guy & Barry again in the Cellar; they’d just been looking for a drummer. They were again full of the band & how good it’s going to be: “I want to make it the biggest thing on the planet,” said Guy, half-seriously. Mo left after a little while but we decided to stay—Barry was in a bad mood & wanted to drink away his temper, so we did just that & got quite drunk. We found ourselves in the middle of a reggae disco; the DJ refused to play anything other than reggae or funk.

I bought a couple of LPs yesterday too, “Backlash” by Freddie Hubbard & an early Ornette Coleman trio LP, plus three singles—speaking of which, the last of the cheese went yesterday as well.

I didn’t get up until 12 this afternoon. The sun was streaming down from a clear & cold blue sky & Barry & Ade were already up & talking. We met Roy last night in the Cellar; he had a dour, dumpy-looking girl in tow & was obviously at there for this one & only reason. My contempt for him was reaffirmed. Lindsey really sold herself cheap when she went out with him.

Tuesday October 18th

1983-10-18T23:25:00.000+01:00

Days roll by & I’m at a loss as to whether or not I should chart them in all their mundane detail. Trevor & Del left this morning to again look for places & were at their lowest ebb yet. The housing situation in Watermouth is worse than ever & Trevor in particular seemed very down. Ade came back last night from his few days in Bournemouth with a “sore cock” (to use his own words); he & Del & Trevor don’t get along particularly well & after D. & T. left this morning, Ade was still lounging on his mattress in Barry’s room. Someone suggested that the three of them should share an £85 per week house advertised in the Herald, but this met with a poor response from him. I don’t see that he really has the right to refuse at this moment in time.

A feature in today’s Union News claimed that the compulsory year in the States has been scrapped for this year’s 1st yr American Studies intake. The Union is fighting it all the way, but it’s obvious that if it’s not scrapped this year, then it will be next year. I’ve got in just in time. Since last Wednesday at Masquerades, I’ve felt very satisfied with my prospects. It’s quite amazing how cold the Art History idea has become with me, & I think it’s just as well because it would be too late to change now anyway. Guy’s enthusiasm rubbed off on me I think.

Last night Barry, Guy, Lindsey & I went to the opening night of a new club (“Roxy’s”) held at the L.A., a well-known gay disco. I walked all the way to Shelley’s on Queen’s Road on the seafront but she was out so I trudged all the way back & found the others already there. Roxy’s was free to get in before eleven; I was ushered in to an elaborate glittering foyer, complete with fountain, & found myself surrounded by a couple of characters who looked as they’d auditioned for a part in ‘The Adams Family.’ It was quite impressive inside, with 2 bars, split level seating & spectacular lighting for the dance floor & was crawling with the trendy post-punk crowd, crowns of dyed, spiky hair jostling for the attention, black, black everywhere. I was in black too. The occasional transvestite drifted by, & across from us two seedy & forlorn looking gay men in tacky suits were deep in animated, intimate conversation. Someone called Guy a hippy, which annoyed him, & after this he was full of contempt for the place and the people. They are, after all, just a bunch of very conventional extroverts. “Experimental is conventional, conventional is experimental. And no way is noble.” This applies to the Sanctuary & Roxy’s gang who’ve substituted the predictable uniformity of a more sophisticated kind for the Farahs & wedge-cut anonymity of the Saturday-nite soul-boy crowd. And the sickening thing is they all believe they’re being so different. “Art is not dictated by what coat you wear.” I would do well to listen to this & practise what I preach.

The girls who lived at Jervis Terrace over the summer made an appearance, & Miles Beattie raced between us & the dance floor while Barry & one of the girls fell into a long conversation. When he wasn’t talking to her he was discussing the band with Guy. Their band dominates conversation at the moment, & it gets a little tedious listening to their prophecies. Ade was saying when we got back that he “cannot wait” to get up on the stage, & I can see both he & Barry really getting into the pop-star cult trip.

I’m in the throes of starting several books, among them Colin Wilson’s “The New Existentialism” & “The Magus.” I also want to read some more Nietzsche, & then look at the chapter on N. in Lukacs “The Destruction of Reason.” All this and course work too!? Probably not.

Monday October 17th

1983-10-17T19:26:00.000+01:00

I got a letter from Dad & things seem to be looking up. He has the chance of a job as commissionaire at the Easterby Echo & should’ve found out by now whether he’s got it or not. He sounded very hopeful, & if he’s successful, the three Martindale brothers will be reunited under the roof of the same employer. I hope he does get it, for it’ll mean that he & Mum will get on better & feel better for the extra cash that’s coming in, & also I’ll feel less selfish about burdening them with all the extra financial responsibility my year abroad will entail. Andrew has got a job at the Sackett Group in Epping, Essex, so soon the money will be rolling in & he’ll be well on the way towards reaching that well-off position he aspires to.

Sunday October 16th

1983-10-16T22:19:00.004+01:00

Another drunken night; a party at Lindsey’s friend Liddy’s last night, which everyone attended, including Inga, a friend of Pete’s from Sweden, who seemed a bit overwhelmed by the deluge of Turney-speak which hit her. While Barry & I went to meet Stu in The Cat & Lizard, everyone else set off in Del’s Hillman Imp.

Stu went to dump his washing & Barry & I had a game of darts, but we got sick of waiting so we hung about outside. It was wet yet again, & as we waited Barry spotted Lee who was wending his way down Meadspike Rd towards the derelict pub’ at the bottom. He saw us, waved, & came across. He had a hammer & screwdriver with him & was just about to break in to the pub when we’d seen him. He’d called round Jervis Terrace but we’d just gone. When Stu turned up he & Barry strode off into the rainy night leaving Lee & I to our own devices. We walked all the way to Stoneways Rd & there caught a bus into New Lycroft, found Lindsey & Susie out, but discovered them with everyone else in the Nelson Inn nearby. Trevor & Del were on acid & in loud jocular spirits; Lindsey said she found them “irritating.”

Liddy’s party, evidently quiet & cultured before we arrived, turned into a manic affair after we showed up. Trevor & Del immediately set to work chatting up “the talent,” Lee squirted twin streams of saliva from his glands at various people & spat lemonade all over one girl’s back, I stood on his head with my para boots & ground him into the sofa as he sat there leering at me (he then squirting lemonade in my face), & finally I poured the bottle over Trevor’s head as he sat talking to a girl. A jumble of images & vague memories of excess . . . I kicked a door at someone, glaring threateningly, but needless to say, I remember none of this (I was told later). Why I was in the mood I was in I don’t know . . . We all piled out & into a fast food place nearby, & I think we were on the verge of getting kicked out of the party anyway.

Today we drove up to the restaurant at Nick’s Hill for a meal but found it closed & ended up forking out £3 each for food at a King’s Road restaurant which we could only partly eat. I’ve spent all evening working on the history of the civil rights movement throughout the ‘50s & ‘60s for my Black Americans tutorial. Next week our collective scrutiny turns to SNCC.

Saturday October 15th

1983-10-15T21:41:00.003+01:00

Last night Lindsey, Guy, Barry, Stu & Mo & I met up at the Anchor & ended the evening in the dark pretentiousness of the Sanctuary beneath the Helios Hotel. Stu & I got absolutely drenched as we had opted to walk the few hundred yards from the pub while the others caught a cab. Mo rode home on the bus & we struggled on although the heavens had opened & the roads were awash.

Afterwards, we had a cup of tea at Guy’s place on Sutton Road & met one of his flat-mates, Felicity. She & Barry got embroiled in a political discussion; she supports Labour & CND etc., & she sounded no less committed than Barry, if the less realistic. Guy interspersed the debate with inane drunken comments, and Stu & I took up a position loosely aligned with Barry. Everything fragmented & took a pleasingly ridiculous turn & the room was soon filled with laughter. We went to bed at 4 & slept on the carpet in the large living room.

I woke up cold & uncomfortable late in the morning & we lay like slugs in our blankets & sleeping bags watching the TV, until the appearance of Felicity’s Mum & Dad roused us to action. We left, accompanied by Guy, & got something to eat at a fast food place near the sea front. The sea was brown & ferocious, great lines of breakers roaring in one after the other against the beach. The wind was so fierce that we had difficulty standing at times, & I can’t ever remember being in winds as strong.

After getting home we descended en masse on Holmes Avenue Laundrette & I slipped into one of my black paranoiac moods, getting irritated by everyone. We got back after dark: Trevor & Del sat watching TV. They’ve been looking for a place to live, but still haven’t found anywhere, & both Barry & I are getting a bit pissed off by their continued presence here, especially Trevor, who seems to take this place for granted simply because Barry lives here, forgetting that Pete & I do too. Neither Trevor nor Del ever contribute towards food or washing up, & leave their dirty pots & pans about until someone else (usually Mo) clears them away. Trevor’s constant talk of sex & how good he is with girls is a drag too, even though I suspect most of it is self-parody.

Friday October 14th

1983-10-14T19:29:00.000+01:00

I sometimes find myself liking Trevor, yet at others I dislike him for the way he pins me so thoroughly to the wall with his words. Last night, he & Del (who returned on Wednesday) slept on a mattress in my room & before they fell asleep he kept asking questions: “How often do you think of sex?”; “Do you wank?”; “You fancy Lindsey, don’t you? She knows you do, & she knows that you know she knows, but her conditioning as a woman prevents her from asking you to bed . . .” & so on. He was in a manic mood earlier, leaping about & constantly cracking one-liners. I don’t think Mo likes him very much. Today, he & Del have at last set out in search of somewhere to live.

After a talk with Guy on Wednesday evening at Masquerades, I’m now certain that switching to Art History would be a bad idea. As a result, I’ve been a lot more positive about my course & I’m actually enjoying doing the work. I spent the entire afternoon today making notes for Monday’s Black Americans tutorial. Pete was a bit pissed off at his lack of motivation, & at teatime walked out in a sulk to buy a bottle of whiskey. Barry is messing about with his synth at this moment & Del & Trevor are still out.

Cecil Parkinson finally resigned today over the ‘scandal’ of his pregnant secretary Sarah Keays, sanctimonious statements of support from Thatcher & colleagues still ringing in his ears. Thus the grey-faced guardian of Tory morality bites the dust. He’s finished, & I’m pleased he’s met the end that he has. If I were S. Keays, I’d have the baby in London & name it Cecil Jr. or Cecilia, lest he tries to sweep it under the carpet—but maybe that would be too cruel on the kid . . .

Thursday October 13th

1983-10-13T22:41:00.001+01:00

After rushing to finish my work on Blake, last night at nine I caught the bus to Masquerades & what turned into a repeat of the last time we were there, most people turning up save Gareth, who’s ill with food poisoning. We all got pissed on the ½ price drinks.

I presented my tutorial this afternoon on Blake’s Prophecy on America, in which America emerges as a symbol for the realisation of man. This is a theme which fascinates me, & it’s detectable through a lot of the literature I’ve looked at (Wolfe, Whitman, Thoreau, Kerouac etc.). Although our dreams are always shattered by reality, still we go on dreaming.

After my tutorial ended I went down to the library café & met Guy & we went home on the bus amid tremendous downpours; we got absolutely soaked as we sprinted for Dee’s Diner, where we had something to eat & played a few games of pinball & Pac-man.

Wednesday October 12th

1983-10-12T16:36:00.000+01:00

Last night Trevor cornered me in my room as I was trying to read “The Magus.” I saw his eyes flit across my desk towards this journal, lying unconcealed. “What’s in that book?,” he asked me bluntly, as if he meant to put me on the spot. He said he’d been in & read it the other day, & teased me (“you’ll never get off with her”), before trying to pass it off as a joke.

I was left feeling very unsure—for better or for worse all my weaknesses & emotional excesses are exorcised on these pages. This is how I am. But amazingly, it seems that he'd come into my room for advice, or rather to clear his mind by talking to someone, which he then did for several hours, a long monologue about his friend Martin who he’s fallen out with over the latter’s “sinister” attempts to undermine Trevor in other peoples’ eyes—they had a disastrous holiday together in Greece & things came to a head in Holland where they stayed for 6 weeks—all the usual intrigue, romance, ‘eternal triangles’ etc., etc. Trevor says he’s writing a play in order to purge himself of all his vindictiveness & anger.

He criticised the RCP too; he characterised its leading lights (people such as Pat Roberts & Zanib) as “narrow,” perhaps even dull people, even though they're well suited to the RCP’s current party-building needs. He described a quality in Zanib that I’ve noticed before too, namely the way he never divorces himself from Party business. He comes across as someone who (in Trevor’s words) “brings their office work home with them”; he’s cold & aloof around we students, alienating everyone with his impossible-to-escape RCP opinions. He judges on the basis of political commitment or the potential for such. Trevor said he’s praised Lindsey as the only person at Watermouth prepared to get herself involved in the mundane necessities of building a revolutionary Party. I must rank with the worms in his eyes. I’m sure he finds the world of students thoroughly contemptible, but mockery, sarcasm, condescension & belittling people isn’t the way to win support. Friendly conversation is.

Trevor sees himself as unsuited to this era of RCP history & firmly believes that the people involved now who are creating the “vanguard” who will become Party “heroes” when the Revolution eventually does triumph, as he’s certain it will. I’m sure if that day comes, there’ll be a lot of people who, having shunned the drudgery of 6 a.m. paper sales, will happily take up their unquestioning places behind the barricades. Stu is one of those people, & if The Revolution erupts in my lifetime, I know which side I’ll be on—& it won’t be that of the Government or the Police. Meanwhile, I don’t want to forsake the idle pleasures of capitalism just yet while they still have something to offer. Why can we still find refuge in capitalism? I wonder what Zanib’s answer to this would be?

I don’t like the RCP. Secrecy, utter commitment & a quasi-military organisation might be necessary at this time, but will that tendency be reversible when the RCP becomes a mass party with nationwide support? Will this country’s much vaunted ‘democratic tradition’ come to the rescue & stop the British revolution going the way of the Russian? I often wonder if one day, the Zanib Hussain’s of this world will have people such as I put up against a wall & shot.

I got a letter from Claire this morning. “Can you ever smell perfume on my letters?” she asks, which makes me wonder. . . I spent most of the day in an ill-temper. I tried to hitch in to campus but stood for ages with no luck, until finally a car put its indicator on as if to stop. I thought my patience had been rewarded, but the bastard drove off laughing. I gave up & stalked home moodily.

Tuesday October 11th

1983-10-11T21:44:00.001+01:00

I went into the library at mid-day to work, but it’s now 6 p.m. & so far I’ve done nothing. I met Barry & Pete in the library cafeteria at 4; that old sense of claustrophobia, dull irritation & boredom seized me. Shelley made a brief appearance; she’s moved out of Jubilee Street & is now sharing a flat with her three friends from K.F.C.: “My room faces the sea & in the evenings it’s filled with the glow of sunsets!” etc. She stayed about a quarter of an hour, that was all.

I’m reading “America, A Prophecy” by Blake, & at home I’ve begun to read “The Magus” by John Fowles. As I started it I was filled with a feeling of loss & self-recrimination about the wasted summer.

Barry & I paid our rent today. It was late & we’ve been speculating that perhaps we haven’t been hassled because the flat is in such a shit condition. We’ve been thinking of getting the Rent Assessment people in to force Crown Racing’s hand into doing repairs. We’ve now discovered damp in the back sitting room; the wallpaper in one corner of the ceiling is hanging off in great sheets, which are black underneath. Barry’s bedroom is damp too, & the staircase seems afflicted with the same. Everywhere is still a mess, the kitchen grotty & cluttered with dirty washing up.

Monday October 10th

1983-10-11T00:32:00.002+01:00

A foul wet day. I got a lift into Watermouth & bought tickets for myself & four others to see P.i.L. on Nov 1st. I don’t like their latest single, but J. Lydon is one of those people who’ll go down in the standard histories as “important,” so I suppose I want to see them purely for the historical spectacle. I trudged around the streets in the rain, fulfilling all my mundane objectives. The glimpses I caught of the sea made me want to go & look at the grey angry waves, but the drizzle deterred me.

Mo still hasn’t found a place to live; she keeps going to see places but is always put off either by their poor condition or the price. Trevor hasn’t so far as we know even rung anywhere up yet. He spent most of the day asleep in Barry’s room, & I think Barry is getting a bit pissed off with him.

In the afternoon I had a tutorial & as usual I hadn’t done any work for it but conned my way through. I got back at teatime to find Lindsey, Susie & Barry watching the TV. It was an uneventful evening; we went out for a drink at the Jervis Arms.

Derek, Kevin & Trevor stayed up all night in heated conversation & I think things got a little ‘heavy’ & politically pointed at times. Trevor claims that at this era in its history, the RCP is all about party-building, & so it needs the Zanibs of this world. Apparently last night Kevin criticised Trevor’s lack of RCP involvement; Trevor attacked Kevin in turn, which left the latter “shattered” according to T. “I acted as the Devil’s Advocate, putting doubts into his mind to see how he’d respond . . .”

I think my decision over the summer not to go to the RCP meetings was a decision motivated primarily by fear. Looking back it was such a feeble, negative response, & a transparently obvious one I’m sure. Instead of this feeling of helpless confusion, what I needed & still need is some sort of cogent response or concrete argument in support of my position. Stu has a good answer: Given the RCP’s demand for total commitment, if you’re not prepared to give that whole heartedly then it’s pointless giving any. Despite my hasty judgements, Barry’s friends do doubt the Party & are critical of its attitudes & the “Genghis Khan” elements within it such as Pat Roberts.

I still can’t make my mind up about changing courses. I’m sick of waiting for a Way to emerge from the tangle of confused options that clog my mind. What do I want to do? Only I can decide that, but even this act of self-will escapes me.

Sunday October 9th

1983-10-10T00:10:00.002+01:00

Last night, not long after we got back from the football, we set off to the pub for a few drinks, & there ensued a brief but intense discussion about the RCP. I stayed silent for much of the time. Doug feels alienated & find the Party’s inflexibility a little irritating at times; all questions or criticisms founder emptily against the brick-wall of the RCP’s ‘my Party right or wrong’ syndrome. The Party demands 100% commitment & nothing less; Doug took the line that living a life in the best (Marxist) way possible for yourself simply wasn’t enough & was, in fact, futile if you weren’t involved with wider party politics etc. He was quite forceful about this.

Eventually, after everyone else turned up, we stopped at the pub off-sales shop & walked to Marion Place. Katie greeted us at the door. She cultivates coarseness in herself, & was full of knowing smiles & ‘deep’ looks. Their clean, large house is magnificent compared to ours & it soon filled up, developing into a fairly good party. I got pleasantly pissed & found myself embroiled in one of those self-induced & hatefully enjoyable meetings with Rowan alone together in her room. Then I met one of the girls who lived in Jervis Terrace over the summer; she seemed very naïve & innocent. I met other people too, fleetingly in the crush of the corridor or in some dim room; Guy was pissed, & after asking me if he could, head butted me & knocked me over. I saw Lindsey & Susie & Gareth & Stu briefly on the stairs . . . lots of other faces . . . fragments of situations, too many & too complicated to recount in detail . . . I drifted up the stairs to find Barry, Guy & Miles Beattie plus assorted others watching a video of The Young Ones. Ade & Doug lay on the bed, the latter with his head in Lindsey’s lap, she with her arm draped across his chest. For an instant the old hurts sprang up like flames inside—it pricked me enough to draw blood. “Oh dear, Lindsey’s involved,” said Susie pathetically, sitting on the steps . . .

My evening ended down in the basement in a windowless room whose walls were papered with words such as “Lust” & “Bonk," scavving dope from a soldier home on leave from N. Ireland & his hippy friends while Katie & Rowan played their Staring Game, stared unblinkingly at one another. When I got back to Jervis Terrace everyone else was asleep & it was 5 a.m.; I had to wake Ade up to let me in.

Today Doug took Barry & I for a drive to see ‘Nick’s Hill,’ a mysterious mound a few miles north of Watermouth. We followed Hill Road through suburbia until we were out into the countryside, the fields rolling flintily away towards the chimneys of Langridge Cliffs power station & the grey blur of the sea. At the Hill itself there were a lot of Sunday trippers, Mums & Dads & kids who kindled memories of not too distant occasions with my own parents on similar outings. A restaurant & pub stand on a low plateau facing on one side the tremendous grey vista of the flat plain striding toward the horizon & London, & on the other the Hill itself, a perfectly conical mound rising from the bushy landscape, its even slopes dotted with shrubs & clad in a paler grass than everywhere else. The wind was bitter, cutting through us as it roared in from the sea, & although a few people had braved the ascent up the slopes, we weren’t feeling so strenuous so we braced ourselves against the wind & strode back to the car.

Doug left at teatime to go back to London, to be replaced by yet more of Barry’s RCP friends—Trevor again, & Derek Caraway (who they all call Del), a replica of Trevor with a gaping shark-like & down-turned mouth, & the quiet Kevin, who reminded me of a character from a 1930s Boys Own comic. They were all in fine form & I slunk into my customary position along with the rest of the fixtures in the room. When Trevor & Del got together the sparks flew. The three of them went out for a drink with Barry & came back at closing time in high spirits. Barry & Pete & Mo have gone to bed & the other three have taken acid & driven off into Watermouth in Del’s car.

Saturday October 8th

1983-10-08T18:55:00.001+01:00

I wrote to Mum & Dad, & a typically limp letter to Claire before Barry, Guy & I set off to the football and the local derby with Bedgrove. We met at Guy’s local, The Wessex Ram, near Sutton Road, & drove to the ground. We parked the car a discreet distance away & joined the scattered crowds all heading the same way. There was 45 minutes to go before kick off & the Bedgrove fans were already a massed bank of yellow & red on the South Terrace, diagonally to our left. At times the noise was terrific; “You’re gonna get your fucking heads kicked in . . .” etc., all the old favourites, all aimed at our side of the ground. I tried to separate their faces out as individuals, but they were small & blank with distance.

The game itself wan’t very distinguished & Bedgrove were two up after just twenty minutes; the South Terrace went berserk, while the figures around us muttered dumb acknowledgement. For too much of the match though, events off-field detracted from the events on, & our eyes were drawn irresistibly to the spectacle of dozens of Bedgrove fans kicking with their boots at the large double gates at the front of their cage. The police hurried quickly onto the cinder track between the pitch & the fence & stood with their arms & bodies braced against the gates as a section of the crowd threw itself repeatedly at them, the cops fending them off by prodding with truncheons through the mesh. At one point we all thought the gates would go & the mob come pouring onto the pitch.

Watermouth applied intense pressure for the last quarter of an hour & forced several corners & free kicks, but Bedgrove held on & at the final whistle our section of the crowd fled. The streets leading from the ground were full of hurrying figures, bent against the bitter wind, some even running & casting anxious glances behind from whence drifted the faint sound of triumphant voices.

We called in at Guy’s for a cup of coffee before driving home. Doug, yet another of Barry’s RCP clique of friends, was waiting when we got back. He hides the RCP hardness beneath a more amenable, less intimidating façade, but deep down it’s there all the same.

Friday October 7th

1983-10-07T17:40:00.000+01:00

Trevor Turney, who left early this week & made a brief appearance last night when we were all in The Westdorgan with Zanib (even the normally house-bound Ade had come along), went again this afternoon looking very smart with Brylcreem-d hair & a paisley cravat. Zanib left this morning too; he, Barry & Trevor slept 3 to a bed last night. When Trevor & Zanib get together I feel out of my depth; the political grasp & confidence of those two makes me despair for myself, & makes me feel like all my ideas & thoughts are like so much insubstantial chaff. While Trevor & Zanib were in the house our world here seemed to stand on shaky, crumbling foundations. Students. The word should be spat out.

Stu & Gareth have finally found a place to live, a bed & breakfast for £20 per week not far from us in Tremont Place, which is temporary until they find somewhere more suitable.

So, another week has gone in my life, & I’m no nearer working out the things I profess to seek answers to. Another week of blindness, another week of my malleable existence. Will I ever work it out? Do I stick with my American Lit course or change to History of Art? A recent survey in the Guardian said that these two courses were the “Mickey Mouse” courses at Watermouth, & the ones least likely to provide their students with a job, which of course is just a typical situation for me to be in. I’ve heard rumours that Watermouth’s History of Art course is poorly taught, & Mo knows 2 people who’ve dropped out for that reason.

Mo & I are alone in the house; everyone else is out. I’m saving myself for the excesses of tomorrow night’s party at Marion Place, & an afternoon visit to Empire Lane to watch Watermouth Trinity. I’ve reading to do & an essay to hand in on Monday for my Black Americans course, & I must write home too. I got a letter from Grant in Gloucester, written while sitting alone in his room, the weather pissing it down outside, & complaining of everyone being “stand-offish.”

Thursday October 6th

1983-10-06T20:44:00.003+01:00

It’s been a fairly uneventful week so far, taken up with the routine superficialities of student existence; booze, socialising, & no work. I attended my first tutorial of the term (on Romanticism) today at 11.30 a.m. I hitched there & back, which I quite enjoyed as it was a superb warm autumn day. The tutorial went OK, just a discussion about how the course is going to be run with two other ‘tutees’ & my Personal Tutor, Don Carwardine. I have to present next week’s tutorial on Blake’s “America, A Prophecy” to the group. As D.C. rambled on quietly, my indecision over what to do about my course raged within. I’m still very undecided about what to do & as a result I’m not particularly bothered which course I do. Mr. Ingham was right—I have no ambition. Still, I left the tutorial feeling optimistic. Mr Carwardine asked me to stay behind & asked how my summer was. I told him about Calverdale & my 3 months of inactivity & how this accorded well with my nature. He seems to be taking more notice than normal of my progress, & perhaps I’ve been identified as potential failure material?

As I wandered back towards Wickbourne Rd campus was in one of its bright, sparkling, lively moods & I kept seeing familiar faces. I bumped into Lindsey, her friend Liddy & Zanib Hussain, who aim to be the nucleus of a potential RCP movement at the University. I know Lindsey has her reservations about being increasingly enmeshed by the commitment but Zanib—who lives, breathes & sleeps RCP—no doubt dispels all her reservations when he’s with her. He & Lindsey came back to our house in the late afternoon after a day of selling Next Steps, & she sat quietly on my bed with usual downcast eyes. Zanib was critical of Barry’s band schemes: “I thought he’d grown out of that frame of mind when he was 15.” Once Barry’s paid our rent of £208 he’ll have exactly £1 left to last him all term, & he wants to borrow £50 from me, an idea Adam doesn’t think much of. “I wouldn’t lend it to him.”

Wednesday October 5th

1983-10-06T02:38:00.000+01:00

Tonight, Guy, Gareth, Stu, Barry & I went to the Masquerades nightclub in Cudmark Way. It only cost 75p to get in & until 11 p.m. the drinks were half-price. We went over the top & I spent in the region of £7 or £8 & ended the night buying a total of 14 whiskies, 4 Southern Comforts & 3 pints of bitter. I wasn’t as ill or as drunk as these figures would suggest, my greatest social faux pas being to fall asleep as everyone chatted. There were only a few people there, so it was a sedate evening by usual ‘club standards,’ being more like a glorified pub. Lindsey & her new friend Liddy rolled up shortly after us, & Graeme made a brief (& boring) appearance.

Barry, Stu & I were quite pissed driving back in the car; we’re bound to get done sooner or later.

Tuesday October 4th

1983-10-05T02:55:00.000+01:00

Vivid dreams about Claire; I woke up & realised that the cold grey light around me was the real world, not the warm glowing one I had just been in. The house this morning was in absolute chaos. Seven people slept here last night: me, Pete, Mo, Barry, Trevor, Ade & Stu.

I met Lee at the Art College in the early afternoon. It was bright & sunny & he showed me the work he’s been doing, which isn’t like ‘work’ at all. He’s painting Japanese soldier figures with photographic emulsion & exposing them, trying to get all the light & dark tones to reproduce themselves via the emulsion, but so far it hasn’t worked. He’s got a darkroom to himself, & works all day until evening.

We went for a walk round Watermouth & ended up at St. Joseph’s Catholic Church, on Seaview Crescent near Maynard Park. We were drawn to it because of it’s sheer size: vertical walls tower into the clear sky as high as the average church steeple, & if you stand right at the foot of them you have to lean backwards to see the top. Inside it was quiet & hushed, the vast chamber cowing us to low whispers, the traffic & city tumult dying to a distant, unimportant murmur. Everything about the church was massive, the altar a great marble edifice, framed by an archway & two giant candles, one at either side. The gaudy altar struck me somehow as crude & ‘idolatrous’ (if I can say this without sounding too Protestant—is this my ‘conditioning’ speaking I wonder?) High on one end wall, opposite a huge stained-glass window, was an enormous cross. Even the normally irreverent Lee was impressed enough to put a simple “amazing” in the visitor’s book.

Later on, we went to Shelley’s ‘party,’ held at 6 Jubilee Street. She’s moving out & Shawn is moving in: he’s living in Penny’s room at the moment with the Girl herself, & Shelley is moving in with her Kentucky Fried Chicken pals; she apparently wants to do more work for her course & thinks living with them will give her a settled routine. Shelley seemed quite touched that everyone had made the effort to show up, & I think she was surprised. Rowan was there too; I’d met Lindsey & Susie on my way to the off-licence & after going to the pub’ for half-an-hour we found Rowan sitting on the doorstep of No. 28, under the impression that everyone was out. She’d been given the wrong address.

The party was really just an evening sat round drinking & talking & listening to the meagre selection of tapes on hand. Rowan & I gravitated towards one another: I’m such a sucker for punishment, but I can’t resist the fascination of Rowan, & the usual tête-à-tête developed. We exorcised the strangenesses of last term & she apologized for her behaviour then. I told her that I felt I’d been taken for a ride & that she & Kate had been laughing at me behind my back. She apologized & apologized, begging me to forgive her & coming out with all the usual crap . . . I didn’t want to leave . . . everyone was there & I didn’t want to leave . . . but finally in the small hours of the morning, Barry, Ade, Stu & I dragged ourselves away & drove home.

Sunday October 2nd

1983-10-02T21:40:00.001+01:00

Nothing special. We were watching the Spurs v Forest match live on ITV when Lee rang the doorbell. Things quickly turned chaotic; Lee climbed up into the loft, Pete & Mo cavorted on their bed & Barry & Ade plugged in their guitars & demolished us with sound. Lee & I left, borrowing a screwdriver from the next-door neighbour (“Hope you’re not going to break in”), & proceeded to attempt to break into a boarded up & derelict pub on the Wickbourne Rd.

We spent the evening at The Westdorgan up on Holmes Avenue. Stu turned up mid-evening, hair dyed black; he’s the same as ever. We rounded things off with a Chinese take-away & watched Bilko.

Saturday October 1st

1983-10-02T03:00:00.001+01:00

I spent the night on Lee’s floor & I got up quite early by my standards. We watched a kid’s show on TV & then in the afternoon went for a walk up Old Priory Road to Gaunt’s Hill Road. The hills were shrouded in a mantle of cold & wet drizzle & mist, the distant sea hidden behind banks of grey fog. We went back to Varney Hall & had something to eat before I walked home. I got lost on Jervis Golf Course.

When I got back, I had to run the expected gauntlet of laughter, teasing & commiserations over my short hair (“baldy” etc.). Barry & friend Ade drove down last night bringing Trevor Turney with them, plus masses of stuff. The hallway was cluttered with Barry’s £460 synth, & he & Ade told me they are concentrating on getting a group together. The flat—not built for seven people & a tip anyway—was just ridiculous; we could barely move.

Our night out was already planned, a trip to Lindsey & Susie’s new flat across the other side of Watermouth. We took Ade’s car, but Ade himself didn’t come as he was tired & on the way we stopped at an off-licence. It took about an hour for us to negotiate our way through the maze of one-way streets.

Lindsey & Susie’s flat is small but very clean & very tidy & makes our place look filthy in comparison. There is just one main room, with cooker, fridge, shower etc., off which lead their two bedrooms. Lindsey looked as dark & pretty as ever, & I melted into the background. Shelley arrived & we all tucked into the food L. & Susie had made, & the room became a stage for Trevor Turney. . .

After the food, we all piled into Ade’s car (3 in front, 5 in the back), & risking Barry’s license, drove along the seafront to The Sanctuary (it was called Spellbound last term), a depressing night-club in the basement of one of the large Georgian hotels for which Watermouth is famous. It cost £2 to get in. The club was full of Siouxsie Su look-alikes, black the predominant colour, & sickened us all off. Scores of bored, boring people sat about pretending to be different but looking like so many predictable dummies. Clubs are pretty shit places anyway, but this one was shitter than most, & we left after half-an-hour, preferring to leap about on the beach, play on the rides & swings & throw pebbles at one another. We drove back to Lindsey & Susie’s & stayed until well past midnight. Ade’s car broke down in Watermouth so we walked the rest of the way back.

Friday September 30th

1983-09-30T23:02:00.001+01:00

Pete, Mo & I went for a lunchtime drink at The Jervis Arms, our old rambling local, & afterwards we went into Watermouth. I bought The Fall’s “Kicker Conspiracy” (I still say they should split up), & we had some tea in a tiny café near Attlee Square before Mo went off to try to find a flat. Pete & I remained there feeling very conspicuous; sometimes the conversation around us dropped, & it seemed as if all eyes were upon us. We met Shelley outside, who’d just come back from a Siouxsie & The Banshees concert in London. Her latest craze is to regard herself as some sort of outrageous punk, which is utter crap. Pete was in one of his ‘wacky’ moods & so I left him to go over to Lee’s on the train.

Lee seemed pleased to see me; he said he’d been pissed off that I hadn’t gone over yesterday like I said I might. He’s still keeping his distance so far as making friends with the other people in his residence hall is concerned. In the kitchen he treats them disdainfully & with a kind of arrogance, setting out to be as deliberately irritating & annoying as possible: “I suppose it’s stupid really. I should try to make friends with the people I’m living with.” Instead he stays holed up in his breeze-block, white-washed cell, watching his portable TV & talking to himself, & when he does venture out into the kitchen he kills the crane-flies which continually flutter in through the open window by squirting washing-up liquid at them & thereby annoying everyone else. Says he, laughing; “they daredn’t shout at me as it’s only the first week.” We didn’t do much, just messed about really. I let Lee cut my hair, which was a mistake as it’s now painfully short.

Thursday September 29th

1983-09-29T23:31:00.000+01:00

Since I arrived in Watermouth the days have drifted by, marked by lethargy & inaction; I haven’t seen Lee since Monday although I was planning on going over to Old Priory Road this afternoon, but we didn’t get up until dinnertime & the rest of the day passed quite quickly, with Pete, Mo & I sitting about & achieving very little. Mo is still looking for somewhere to live. Barry & Stu may well be here by tonight. We plan to decorate this place eventually & I’m not nearly so pissed off as I was about living here.

What a feeble maze of indecision I tread when away from Watermouth. I thought about Claire again today & it makes me angry at myself when I look back & realise how I let months go by without phoning her up. What is the source of this unnatural—almost neurotic—fear that has hampered me all my life? Will it ever be battered out of me? What is it I’m scared of? I can’t answer: something to do with that old inability to judge between ‘too little’ & ‘too far.’

Wednesday September 28th

1983-09-28T18:38:00.000+01:00

I woke up today with a headache. One of the girls who lived here over the summer called round for some of her stuff with the cheerful opinion that she wouldn’t want to live here during the winter as “the last couple of weeks, we were freezing.” Virtually none of the windows shut properly, & the only heating we have comes from electric bar fires, which are expensive to run. The last two gas & electric bills were £9 & £4.

It’s been an idle day. Pete has finally wrought some sort of order in his room. I rang Barry, & he’s coming down tomorrow with his friend Ade, who’ll be staying with us until he finds a place of his own. Their new band has worked out 7 songs which Barry says are “brilliant.” Stu should be down in the next couple of days too. No one seems to have changed.

The drunkenness last night gave me the tiniest glimpse of how things were last term & how, no doubt, they soon shall be again. In the last few transitional days between one world & another, I’ve tried to analyse the state of mind & being which allowed me to slide into such a totally obsessive condition. It seems hard to imagine at the moment: I keep thinking of Lee, who is a sort of link between my worlds, a stabilising figure who gives me a certain perspective on my life here & how it may develop.

Tuesday September 27th

1983-09-28T01:26:00.002+01:00

Shelley, Lindsey & Shawn called at eleven this morning, getting us up out of bed: Shawn as uncommunicative as ever, Shelley all smiles & giggles, Lindsey quiet & confident-seeming. Not much else for the rest of the day, Pete & Mo retreating into the chaos of the front bedroom & a great quiet descending on the house.

In the evening Pete & I caught the bus into Watermouth & met Mo, then Lindsey & Susie, in The Frigate. It was just like old times, as though 3 months had never been; the acrid tang of cigarette smoke hanging in blue wreaths above the table, the endless procession to the bar for scrumpy (80p a pint; green when held up to the light), the same mood . . . I could feel those months evaporate: what only a few days ago had been remote & almost unimaginable—a shadow of the past—was a familiar scene, again all around me. We got a bit drunk & went noisily home on the bus, Mo teasing me because I dribbled my drink in the pub.

More key problems when we got back, which Pete solved by scaling the fall pipe to the bathroom window, breaking the latter as he climbed in.

Monday September 26th

1983-09-26T23:30:00.001+01:00

I was up at eleven & I set off to walk into Watermouth to meet Lee. Pete & Mo were still in bed. It was just like summer, not a hint of autumn, the trees full & green & the air warm & it seems that here the season is a couple of weeks behind that in Yorkshire.

Lee waited outside the Art College on Maynard Gardens. We wandered around Watermouth & I paid off my overdraft with a £100 cheque from Mum & Dad. It was a little depressing to pay this in to the bank & still only be £40 in the clear. I bought a b/w TV licence & we went back down to Maynard Gardens & I sat outside while Lee was introduced to his course & the other six Combined Arts students, who he characterised as “bristle-heads who all look the same.” He still sounded very excited by the course. We did a bit of shopping at Sainsbury’s & collected my trunk before catching a taxi back to Jervis Terrace. We had a hassle as my key didn’t fit, so we borrowed a ladder from a neighbour & Lee climbed in through a back window.

Lee left at 9 p.m. just as Pete & Mo came back from wherever they’d been all evening. He said he couldn’t imagine anyone but students living here.

Sunday September 25th

1983-09-26T00:59:00.005+01:00

Here I am, in my ‘different world.’ I’m writing this in my room at 44A Jervis Terrace; it’s nearly one o’clock in the morning & all is quiet. Pete & Mo are in the front room but silence reigns.

Today’s day of travelling was a little farcical once we had reached Watermouth. Dad dropped me at the station & shook my hand before returning home to Mum & Nanna P. Lee rolled up as the coach was preparing to leave, his Mum wet-eyed & full of tearful goodbyes. When we left Easterby the weather was dull but it picked up the farther south we travelled, & soon I was sweating in the full blaze of a glorious day, magnified through the coach window.

We got into Watermouth at teatime, getting off the coach at Wessex Rd. It was chaos for a little while—indecision over what to do, where to go & how to cope with Lee’s huge amount of luggage. We eventually got a taxi from outside the aquarist’s shop near the bottom of Gaunt’s Hill View: I took my stuff to Jervis Terrace while Lee waited, but I discovered the flat locked & empty so I had to dump my stuff next door with a middle-aged neighbour & his doddering, ancient father. I walked back to meet Lee & we got another taxi to Old Priory Road & Lee’s new home, the Varney Halls of Residence belonging to Watermouth College. Lee’s room was in a nearby block of ‘student residences,' in front of which were several pathetic-looking new students being helped by parents to unload possessions into unfriendly, sterile little rooms. I could sympathise. We found room 444, a white-washed, miserably small room with stone walls, a bed, a sink & wardrobe which made the rooms in Spengler Hall look spacious in comparison, & we lugged all his stuff up the several flights of stairs.

Lee seemed taken aback at his fellow inmates, who seemed to be engineers mostly. “I came here to escape tap-room lads,” said Lee as a pair breezed past wafting clouds of aftershave in their wake. We went down to the kitchen to have something to eat & the enforced friendliness & false cheeriness as everyone tried to make friends was painful to watch—spike-haired student in ‘Killing Joke’ T-shirt setting out unwillingly to the local ‘student-pub’ with a couple of wanky engineers etc. Lee would have none of this, & with glassy eyes and monosyllabic answers rebuffed an attempt at conversation by a mechanical engineering Lee Cooper type. The rest of the meal was conducted in silence.

I left Lee packing his things away, & arranged to meet him in Watermouth at dinnertime tomorrow. Pete was in when I got ‘home,’ watching TV & supping duty-free French whisky. The house hadn’t been touched by Mr. Harrop, Crown Racing, Colin or anyone else—no repairs even attempted apparently, although the place looks a little cleaner & certainly smells fresher. We filled each other in on all the details of our summers & shortly after, Mo arrived & we all hit the sack.

Saturday September 24th

1983-09-24T23:44:00.002+01:00

2.15 p.m.: My last day in Easterby. A trip to Bethany had been planned but it never materialised. Nanna P. was brought from Cross Green Rd. at dinnertime & as I write this she sits beside me at the table knitting dolls clothes. Janet’s baby is due in 8 or 9 weeks & she’s been given conflicting reports by doctors which hint that all is not well, & that the kid could even have spina bifida. My day will cruise by unspectacularly, listening to the football on the radio & trying to pack while outside the wind blows & the sun shines . . .

10 p.m.: Athletic won 3-2 at Ryburn United. It was nailbiting stuff listening to it on Radio North. Athletic went a goal ahead after just 13 minutes, but Ryburn equalised not long after, then went ahead themselves before Athletic drew level again; I really didn’t dare hope that the Spinners would win. But win they did, & Dad & I had a whisky in celebration of the winning goal & prayed away the last twenty minutes.

I’ve mobilised myself to desultory packing most of the day, & I’m just now finishing off. Lee rang earlier in the evening to announce that he’s got hold of a “Third Reich” board game from John. He’s all set to leave too, & his Mum is tearful at his departure. I wonder how he’ll change? Claire reckoned in her letter that he’d alter a lot as he’s been “restrained” here.

The day has been one of those unavoidable & unpleasant pre-departure days, with no real motivation to do anything, & a feeling that I’m biding my time. In a sense, things have felt a bit unreal. To N.P., people must constantly come & go around her, & I know when I’m southward–bound on the M1 tomorrow she’ll be here talking & knitting & looking forward to a “run-out.” Eternal. Life will go on as usual after I’m gone, & in a way this thought is a little odd to think, although to others it’ll seem too stupid & obvious to mention. Mum, Dad & N.P. are watching “The Omen,” but I’ve no stomach for that so I’m bodging about until bed-time.

When I next write, I’ll be in a different world completely.

Friday September 23rd

1983-09-23T21:01:00.008+01:00

I got up this morning to find Dad in a bitter blank fury, railing against “immigrants” & the policies of the past for bespoiling ‘his’ Easterby. “There was a time when Easterbians were proud to be Easterbians,” he said angrily & with hot-eyed bitterness. It’s just been announced that cut-backs in education in Easterby will mean 400 job losses among teachers & nursery nurses & Mum is worried about her job. If she loses it then she & Dad are fucked & I don’t see how they’ll be able to afford to keep me at Uni. Dad worries more about Mum’s health than anything, because the greater the hardships the greater her levels of worry. Dad lashed out with blind, angry bewilderment & declared that Enoch Powell has been proved right. It was announced the other day that Easterby has the third highest birth rate in the country, which is about the only thing that’ll keep Mum in a job, because it’s the Asian women who have their kids the fastest. I’m not too worried about Uni.: the main problem if I did leave Uni. would be seeing direction & justification in my life.

I’m going to Watermouth on Sunday & so today was taken up in part with preparations for my departure. Dad & I drove down to the Parcel’s Office at the station with my trunk (& cheese), which cost me £7. Dad told me that Mr. Tillotson hasn’t used the trunk since 1937 & the early years of his marriage. It was a hot day, a last evocative glimpse of summer before we are swallowed up by the wintry weather, & as we drove up Gilthwaite Road the moors away beyond Keddon basked under pale blue skies & I wished I were miles away over the horizon, walking amid vastnesses.

After dropping my trunk at the station we called up to see Nanna B., but she was out, so Dad & I went for a walk around his old haunts when he was growing up, stooping by an old wall overlooking the last of Kerforth’s common land, now a weed-filled field sweeping down towards Iredale's Mill, in whose dam one of my relatives once committed suicide. Nearby, partly hidden by trees, Dad pointed out the dark squat shape of an ancient cottage where John Wesley once stayed & preached. New housing has encroached on the old, but the skyline beyond Flaxhall Top, punctuated by the silhouetted steeple of Flaxhall Church, can’t have changed much since the turn of the century when Dad’s Dad was a kid. There was a tinge of poignancy & hidden sadness in the way he showed me Charnwood’s dam, where another distant figure from the family’s past ended his life & old Kerforth abattoir, soon to be demolished & now derelict & boarded up. We skirted the fields & took a small snicket that ran alongside Iredale’s Mill. Dad showed me the spot where as a kid he would lift the large stone slab of a hidden well & gaze down into the cool dark depths. The mill, once empty, is now in use again & the clackety-clack of machinery was somehow reassuring. The path ran between red-brick sheds & yards full of building materials. Here when he was a lad, Dad told me, sheep grazed & over there, the farmer kept his horses, whose restless night-time snuffles unsettled Dad & Uncle George as they returned home from the pictures. No. 59 Pollard Road, where they grew up, looks empty & semi-derelict now.

We wandered back up through Kerforth & along the main street, passing the house where Dad’s Dad lived after the suicide of his father (to this day we own a sepia-brown photo of him looking like Al Capone, standing in the doorway, fag in mouth); the Wheatsheaf pub where one day in 1917 my Great Uncle Ernest slapped his newly awarded Military Medal down on the bar promising, “It’ll be the VC next time!” (he was killed in France a month later); no. 52, where Dad’s Auntie Florrie was found dead one morning, so thin & frail that George had sat on the bed for fully 10 minutes reading the ‘paper before realising she was lying there next to him, lifeless, while upstairs her sister Olive rooted about for the insurance papers. The whole of the Martindale & Watkin family histories—great chapters of them at least—have run their course within those few acres of old Kerforth.

N.B. was still out when we got back to her flat so we made a cup of tea & watched the Liberal Party Conference for a while before leaving (David Steel quoting Cromwell: “Know what you fight for, love what you know”). We made a trip to pick up Mum from school, but she’d gone, so we returned home feeling that somehow the day had slipped wastefully by when perhaps we could’ve gone somewhere.

When Mum came home from work deadbeat as usual, there were more niggles between her & Dad, as there often are nowadays. “I think we’re seeing too much of one another,” sighs Mum wearily, & then complains to me that she doesn’t think Dad is doing enough to relieve his isolation at home. A few weeks ago they’d both been full of enthusiasm about adult education classes & had even gone to the trouble of getting all the forms, but Dad backed out at the last minute, limply saying £17 per year was too expensive (& the creative writing classes were free!). It’s almost as if he’s scared of making any commitment & frightened to break the routine his life’s fallen into. He never meets anyone apart from Mr. Tillotson across the road & does nothing but write his diary & tend his newts & toads, although he’s often saying “I wouldn’t mind doing so-and-so,” & so on. “He’s just hot air,” says Mum, but I’m no one to harp on about lack of effort & motivation, and it’s obvious who I’ve inherited it from.

Stu, Pete & Shelley have all rung in the last day or so. Stu asked if he can kip on the floor at Jervis Terrace while he finds somewhere to live. The accommodation situation in Watermouth sounds pretty bad. Pete rang up just to talk & Shelley said she might be suffering from hepatitis; she doesn’t know yet. I’ll see her on Sunday evening.

I’ve casually started reading “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” in the last couple of days & I think Nietszche has a lot to offer.

Thursday September 22nd

1983-09-22T22:54:00.000+01:00

In the early afternoon I went into Easterby with Andrew & Jay & we showed Jay the sights of the city. He was quite amusing & insisted on taking film with his home-movie camera of Andrew & I walking down Hutton Steps. We had a curry at the Bahawal, the streets alive with students laughing & talking, wandering to & fro & posing. At 3.30, after a drink at The Four Pigeons I said goodbye & met Lee at the library. We bought our bus tickets for Sunday &, after seizing upon a copy of “Kollaps” by Einstürzende Neubauten, I came home. I rang Penny to tell her to remind Shelley not to bother getting me the LP.

Lee came round in the evening, supposedly to dye trousers black, but we spent the time playing darts in my bedroom. We’ve dreamed up a scheme to shower the Saturday-nite Jasper’s mating crowd with balloons filled with pig’s blood. Our vantage point will be opposite the club on the William St. multi-storey car park: visions of the white-clad dance floor shufflers spattered with the black, congealed blood proved too much for Lee, & he was full of noisy enthusiasm for the idea. “I’ll have to do it now,” he said laughing. We even thought of sending pretentious letters to the Echo in support, signed “The New Puritans.” The only thing putting us off is the lack of a fail-safe escape route. It would be horrendous if it went wrong; we’d end up getting beaten into the ground or arrested—probably both. “If only we had become perfect at least as animals! But to animals belongs innocence” . . .

Wednesday September 21st

1983-09-21T23:21:00.004+01:00

I took a morning trip with Dad to the bank in Lockley, to Crossley (the pet shop) & Farnshaw. As we drove, he regaled me with tales of 1960s Temperance Hotel stabbings & other Easterby murders. Yesterday’s feelings on encountering the poorer areas of Whincliffe were repeated today as we went through Woodhead Mills & Birkside Bank. Easterby has its own slummy areas too, their impact lessened no doubt through familiarity. We got back in the early afternoon.

It rained all afternoon & while Dad frantically hoovered & dusted in preparation for the descent of Andrew & friend I gave my boots another coat of dye. They rolled up at three or so; Andrew’s friend Jay is a Chicagoan, red-faced, acned & bearded & quite amusing to listen to as he drawled on, punctuating his conversation with “wow” & “I guess . . . “ etc. Everything was very correct for the guest, Dad pronouncing his words properly & with care as he talked to Andrew, whereas normally he doesn’t bother.

Andrew & Jay went for a walk along the canal bank before tea, & in the evening, after a lavish meal by usual standards, they went for a drink in Knowlesbeck. Dad & I watched England lose 1-0 at home to a much-vaunted Denmark team while Mum dozed wearily in the chair. It’s colder than of late tonight & the full moon has risen & now casts its icy brilliance across the sky. My departure for Watermouth looms ever nearer & I can feel my time here drawing slowly to a close. I’ve begun packing my trunk & I’ve hidden my £30-share of the cheese in a layer at the very bottom, concealed beneath records, books & clothes.

Shelley sent me another letter. She’s so self-confident, & rails against her fellow flat-mates for being “bossy” & “boring,” & Penny for complaining about being bored. P. has got a Mohican, done no doubt at the instigation of Shawn. Shelley has been trying to get the Einsturzende Neubauten album for me for a week now, but Virgin has sold out, so I’ll have to wait.

Tuesday September 20th

1983-09-21T00:59:00.000+01:00

I did write to Claire & posted my letter this morning, so she should get it tomorrow. I again made the trip to the ex-army store in Whincliffe with Lee. No black fatigues available until Friday so I bought a pair of khaki German ones for £4.50 & a pair of grey leather Luftwaffe gloves. I later regretted buying the trousers as they’re very baggy. We wandered slowly back into Whincliffe city centre; it was a grey drizzly day, gusty & cold, & we paused at the cemetery to look about & record a death-verse which particularly impressed us with its morbidity: “Oft have I stood as you stand now, / To view the graves as you view mine, / Think reader, thou must lay as low / As I, and others stand & stare at thine.” We also took the lift up to the very top of the nearest in a group of 16-storey high-rise flats & got out onto the roof to admire the view.

The walk back us took us through miserable areas of tacky flats, grimy, oil-stained red brick factories, derelict warehouse buildings &, alongside the road, dilapidated—but still occupied—Victorian tenement-blocks falling down around their inhabitants’ ears, a chaos of red-brick landings, filthy boarded-up windows, jutting walls & wrought-iron railings. I found these shit-holes incredible to see in 1983 & it was a picture more worthy of Dickens rather than late-twentieth century Whincliffe. The streets were awash with kids home from school & weary haggard women pushing prams in the grey light—a miserable, heartless scene all around. Whincliffe is an awful place, full of people whose lives seem utterly miserable, to me & Lee at least. We are expected to live out our lives in such circumstances & be happy? I have no taste for that kind of existence. There has to be more, & if Steve calls this negative talk then it’s a negativity I’m proud of. When we got to Whincliffe city centre I bought leather dye for my boots & fabric dye for my trousers in the dreadful plastic James Street Shopping Centre. I thought of Claire, somewhere in Whincliffe, as we walked, & in a way my letters & all the hopeful energies I put into ‘em seem very insignificant & futile in the face of the vast bustle of the world & the countless people she must meet.

Andrew rang in the evening. He had interview no. 2 today for a haulage & construction firm’s in-house graphics dept.; he feels fairly confident. He’s back in Easterby tomorrow & is bringing an American friend to stay the night. I dyed one boot after dark, & came to bed after midnight.

Monday September 19th

1983-09-20T00:30:00.001+01:00

I met Lee in Easterby at 10.45 a.m. & we took the bus into Whincliffe, because Lee had seen some black army fatigues for sale at a militaria & army surplus shop there for £6.50. On the bus, Lee told me that this morning his Mum had been crying as she remembered him as a “pink baby” . . . “Now you look grey . . . like a corpse,” she’d said, tearfully.

Once in Whincliffe we caught a No. 88 bus from the station to Cartbeck, passing street after street of ornate red brick Victorian terraces; we then walked the rest of the way, past countless shabby second-hand electrical & junk shops & the occasional late-Victorian church, whose spires soar everywhere above the chimney tops of Whincliffe. Eventually we reached the shop, but we were out of luck. “Come back tomorrow,” said the middle-aged mother of the owner, “he’s gone to get some new stuff in.” It was a treasure trove of post-WW2 military clothing & hardware & there was a Nazi flag (genuine I was assured) for sale for £25.00. Tacked to the ceiling was an enormous hammer & sickle flag alongside a stars & stripes.

We walked back via overgrown & neglected Ivywood Cemetery, which was full of black tombstones. We wandered through the long grass & sturdy trees reading the morbid Victorian verses on the stones. Lee found a glue sniffing hang-out—an empty can of lighter fuel & evidence of a fire between two gravestones. We were puzzled by four gravestones which were inscribed either side with a name, date of death & age, & contained 74 names altogether. The occupants of the graves had all died in February & March 1908. Was it an epidemic, or just poor people who couldn’t afford separate tombstones? When I asked Dad later he seemed to think perhaps it was a ‘flu’ epidemic. Soon we found dozens more, containing hundreds of names, the dates of death all ranging from 1914-18, 1920 & 1923-24, so perhaps they were all ‘flu victims who had had to be buried together, & apart from everyone else. As we walked to the exit, Lee found some mushrooms which he thought were psylocibin, & we saw two hippies obviously scouring the ground nearby for the same. We ate one each & picked a few more but threw them away because we couldn’t be sure, & we didn’t want to be poisoned. I got home at 5.45 p.m.

It’s now twenty-five minutes past midnight on the 20th & I’m sitting at the dinner room table. Mum & Dad are long since in bed & all is quiet save for the tick-tick-tick of the clock & the hum of the ‘fridge in the kitchen. It’s been an odd weekend. I’m planning on writing to Claire before I sleep, but tiredness might foil me. I now want to see her before I go away—but then I remember how wooden & awkward I am when I’m with her. I’m back at square one. “Perhaps we could go somewhere?” Perhaps we could, Claire . . .

Sunday September 18th

1983-09-19T01:15:00.004+01:00

Yesterday morning I was woken up by Mum, shouting that I had a letter. Claire had written back within two days. She begins, “I really like receiving your letters—you’ve been in fact my most consistent correspondent.” She’s depressed & discontented with her social life (“what’s new?”) & she says that “the only thing lacking is male company, but then I’m very wary of men; you meet so many who think that they’re marvelous.” My lack of letters has stopped her getting in touch because she’d heard I found my Farnshaw friends “boring.” She says she thinks about me often & that “perhaps we could go somewhere?” It was scented too.

I was transported into ecstasies of speculation as I poured over this—I really am stupid. Jeremy says he can’t believe there hasn’t actually been anything between us; Lee says it was “obvious” she fancied me, & even Deborah brought her up the other night. Do I misread the situation as badly as I did last May?

I spent most of the rest of Saturday in a bit of an odd, distant mood & I couldn’t stop thinking about her. God forbid that anyone should ever read this. I’m a fool, wrapped in my own rosy delusions . . .

Anyway, Dad & Mum went blackberry picking & then Robert rolled up at eleven & he & I went to see Athletic. It was a pretty dismal game of football, scrappily played out in front of less than 500 people. Croft Perseverance went ahead early in the second half & we all felt that that was it. Relegation is in the air, and although Athletic equalised a few minutes from time (which cheered us a bit), I still think we could go down. Gavin Bressler was superb. The reaction to Athletic’s goal was more befitting of a vital Cup match—the crowd roared (well, as mightily as 500 can roar) & everyone leaped into the air in jubilation. Athletic are second from bottom.

At 7.30, Dad gave me a lift on to Jeremy’s, & on the way we picked up Steve Bates. Nick Gaunt, Tommy Whelan & Lee were all there when we arrived, & we quickly trooped out to the pub. Earlier in the day Lee had rung me to tell me that he’d pulled off a “heist” of £60-worth of Kraft cheese slices (16 boxes) from Tesco & he wanted me to help him retrieve them from their hiding place in the warehouse yard; we decided to pull it off tonight, & we furtively discussed it in the pub while Jeremy entertained Steve & Nick. Nick is a friendless, tie-all-the-time workaholic who like Jeremy goes to Uni. at Bristol. He has a ‘nervous disorder’ that probably accounts for his isolation, but he’s also very conservative & I could see him casting looks in our direction. Steve was his usual wooden self, coming out with his quiet ‘one-of-the-lads’ routine, playing the part of the bitter-swilling student. While Jeremy & co. moved on, Lee & I hurried up to Tesco for the cheese.

I was nervous at first as we slipped round the back of the supermarket to the warehouse yard, flitting anxiously across each pool of orange light & hugging the safety of the black shadows. Lee quickly uncovered the loot & I helped him carry it to the hidden darknesses at the back of the building, where we split each case & jammed the packets of cheese slices into a bag, cramming our coat pockets full. We walked swiftly back to Jeremy’s house & met up with the others. If we’d been caught I’d have fallen apart completely. We all rounded the evening off in The George Inn—Nick had gone home)—& then Jeremy, Lee, Steve & Tommy & I went back to Jeremy’s.

Steve & Jeremy started discussing politics. Steve is a member of the SDP & Amnesty International. He told me he’s sent the odd letter off to the odd dictatorship telling them he thinks it unfair that they treat their political prisoners like scum. He does it, he says, “to placate his conscience.” He & I got into a huge argument that ranged from quiet debate to impassioned mudslinging. In usual hasty fashion I slagged him off for being “sanctimonious” & blind & he in turn brought down accusations on my head, calling me “negative, destructive & lazy” & telling me I was the “most negative person” he knows. It was a strange out of focus argument, much to his (& my) bewilderment. There was no structure to what I was saying.

I warmed to my theme & said that his frigging about with letters & M.O.R. politics was just an extension of his desire for power & desire to placate his greedy ego—he uses these torture victims to make himself feel good. He said that if he even fractionally aided in the release of just one person, then he’d have made two people happy, “& that can’t be a bad thing . . .” (“humanising capitalism”? Shit!). He infuriated me with his so-decent middle way, & his bland liberal conscience & I raged emptily at him, making Jeremy laugh with my wordy metaphors. Steve got very angry when I called torture an abstraction (he misinterpreted me – I meant it could only be an abstraction to him & me – I don’t know what point I was pushing). He snorted contemptuously when I said that ultimately I wanted to be “content & to know Everything”—“You’re all talk,” he said—& as he shoved his reddening face close to mine, I felt utterly contemptible for railing so futilely against everyone & everything. He even accused me of being completely nasty to him whenever I’ve been around him, which annoyed me because it’s utterly untrue. Is being a member of the SDP & Amnesty International & writing token protest letters to Pinochet so wonderfully constructive? I called him blind. “Name one constructive thing in your life” he whinged triumphantly, & I couldn’t (I am positive about things deep inside!). Do I really sound so negative & destructive?

Meanwhile, Billy had vanished unnoticed & Lee had fallen asleep in the other room. Steve left too, storming off into the rainy darkness with his mental image of me no doubt underlined. This annoyed me & I suppose my pride was hurt. Jeremy & I talked long into the night & I grew to feel hopelessly cheap & empty. Jeremy says he feels the same as me. Again I’m forced to pen those hated words; “I don’t know what to think.” My whole life is before me & all I can do is moan & despair to people who don’t understand what on earth I’m on about, while Time gallops on . . .

I slept on Jeremy’s bedroom floor feeling unhappy, thinking of Lee asleep so soundly on the sofa downstairs & wondering if he’s ever troubled like this?

In the early afternoon, Lee & I left Jeremy to pack for Bristol & we wheeled Lee’s bike (loaded up with the cheese) back to Lee’s house, calling in on John on the way. We all played ‘Diplomacy’ until five thirty, & then we finished walking home.

Tonight I went out for a drink with Lee & Grant to The Red Grouse & The Windmill. We ended the evening in perverse hilarity. “We must be damned,” says Grant, smiling.

Friday September 16th

1983-09-16T20:07:00.000+01:00

At dinnertime I went to Lee’s & he, Duncan Verity, John & I played yet another board game (“Diplomacy”) which went on all afternoon, until we were interrupted by the return of Mrs. Hoy. I walked home with Paul & it rained all the way; I got soaked. Duncan was irritating—petulant when losing but flapping his hands & rubbing his legs in excitement when he was on top.

Thursday September 15th

1983-09-15T21:21:00.000+01:00

I did go out last night; I met Deborah & Jeremy in the virtually empty Moon. Despite promises, Steve, Nick Gaunt & Lee didn’t turn up. It took me an hour or so & a few pints of cider to overcome shyness & self-consciousness; it’s quite depressing the regularity with which this occurs, & no doubt I’ll be similarly hampered for the first few days/hours of the new term.

Deborah looked very smart & respectable & hasn’t changed a bit; she’s working at a solicitor’s for a year & going on some law course at Brynmor next September. She seems very content with the way her world is going. She told me that when she first met me it was as if I was “someone to look up to”! I hide my true self behind a mask of pleasant superficialities, so that people often gain a totally inaccurate picture of me.

Both Jeremy & I told her of our dissatisfaction at what we’re doing at university, & she made me feel a bit guilty by telling us both how lucky we are; it was clear just from her demeanour & attitude that she’s happy with her lot & has unpretentious desires. She said it annoyed her when girls who want houses & husbands were condemned: “Why shouldn’t they want these things?” To which we could only vaguely counter that if they really looked about them then they would want more, but what that ‘more’ is we were totally unable to say. What right have we to condemn & shoot to pieces other people for wanting something from their lives which we don’t? At least they’re sure of themselves & don’t waste time with pointless frustrations & empty questions. I’m sure I came across to Deborah as unhappy, which really I’m not. I haven’t anything to be unhappy about. “What you need”, she said to me with final certainty, “is a love affair,” & she even suggested Claire (who I wrote an apologetic letter to the other day). It sounded so self-indulgent to admit to being “bored all the time,” but it’s the truth. Perhaps I don’t try hard enough?

Last orders were being called when Deborah finally gave us a lift home in her gold VW beetle. The previous evening’s talk must’ve affected me because when I went to bed I had really odd & disturbing dreams, akin to a nightmares; I was back at Wintersett Crescent & I kept on seeing the ghosts of brutally murdered children in the back garden. In a frenzy of fear I locked the doors trying to keep them out & even took a photograph of them running between the motionless standing figures of other (unidentified) family members. They stared out of the photo with frightening, intense eyes . . . A dimly recollected image of a body hanging in a cupboard . . .

I woke up in the grey light of early morning gripped by fear, the covers pulled tightly over my head lest the ghosts get me. Half asleep, I couldn’t imagine the daytime & being free of my fear. It was pretty bad & left me feeling quite odd.

I finally got to Farnshaw & the dry cleaner’s this afternoon, & Dad & I got caught in a terrific cloudburst which swept away the sun & sent workmen at the site of Farnshaw’s vast new supermarket complex sprinting for cover; we had to shelter in a ‘phonebox. I really enjoyed the mundane wandering about amid streets & shops: everything seemed vibrant & alive. Last night, Deborah asked me what excited me & I couldn’t really give her a specific answer. Today I would say that it’s Life which excites me, with all its myriad permutations, unexpected rewards, wonders . . . which is probably the most positive thing I’ve said all summer.

Wednesday September 14th

1983-09-14T19:09:00.006+01:00

This morning Dad gave me a lift up to Admiral Street & I signed on for the last time. I was anxious in case I met anyone from the RCP again (they’ve been harassing one of Lee’s friends), so I slipped into the office & out again very quickly, but the coast was clear. In the car back I was congratulating myself; it’s so stupid, this self-inflicted anxiety. I’ll be OK now until Barry or Zanib dredge the unpleasant sensations back to the surface & I have to face them again . . .

In the afternoon Dad went up to Nanna B.’s. She rang earlier to ask if Dad would take her to Gillrigg to visit a friend; he’d intended giving her a run out, but not on taking her all those miles, and so for half an hour or so before he set off I was treated to his aggrieved complaints about the selfishness of his mother: “If I ever get like you have my permission to get rid of me.” Yet he takes it all lying down. He says this is because there’ve been countless rows between her & us in the past, & he wants no more, but his desire for general calm has led him into a cul-de-sac of personal misery. Both him & Mum are burdened by their respective mothers, & generally our relatives seem such a drag. I dislike most of them.

So with a sigh, Dad set off for N.B.’s, dropping me in Farnshaw so I could go to the dry cleaner’s. It was very pleasant just wandering about in the mild air, everything seeming very leisurely & unhurried, but my journey was unsuccessful (half-day closing) & I had to walk home empty-handed.

After a bright start, the day has degenerated & it’s colder & rain threatens. There’s a big dispute going on in the pages of the Echo and on local news over the introduction of ‘halal’ meat into Easterby Schools. To pre-stun or not to pre-stun? There’s much debate over the morality of animal suffering & the “cheek” of minority groups “imposing their alien cultures on the majority,” & thereby (presumably) subverting white Protestant England. It’s a pretty immaterial question really. The smug millions whose consciences are eased because “at least my Sunday joint doesn’t cause anyone any suffering” should take the time to visit an abattoir & see the room where the animals die, watch the skilled killers at work & smell the stink of fear and crap & blood. But all this said, vegetarianism smacks of odd priorities to me. I wonder how many bask in muesli-ridden middle-class meat-less self-righteousness unmindful of the millions who die worse than animals in other, larger slaughter houses across the globe? But I’m no different & the fact that I eat meat doesn’t separate me out from the vegetarians because I’m as blind to the world’s problems as anyone—I dislike the naïve tone of this sermon-rant, & really it’s no big anger that seizes me, just the merest of thoughts . . .

I don’t mention any of this with a view to saying ‘stop’ in any real, practical sense, but merely to acknowledge that all ‘civilization’ is the flimsiest of foils, & that civilization's sustaining principles are those of crass ignorance & brutality. Billions of devotees take these to heart & uphold them with a savage loyalty. What hope is there for man as a whole? We’re all cut off from one another anyway, in real terms . . . And with this, I’ll climb down from my podium because I’m going out to meet Deborah, Steve & Jeremy at The Moon Inn.

Tuesday September 13th

1983-09-13T23:58:00.003+01:00

It was very cold this morning—I jumped out of bed shivering. There was a heavy dew on the lawn & condensation on the windows & outside it was icy cold, a smell of frost, frozen canals & cloudless, glittering days. We’re going to suffer this winter in Jervis Terrace.

Grant rolled up at one o’clock & after playing a few records we went out to the Windmill in Moxthorpe for a dinner-time drink. I bought four cans of Stella Artois lager at the off-licence & we drank these sitting at the top of Glenbank Lane overlooking the spread of Egley’s red-roofs & secluded gardens, our backs resting against a young oak tree. Keddon Hill loomed up across the valley & to our left lay Knowlesbeck. We got very fresh & loud, helpless with laughter at a bizarre comment one or the other of us made. We stumbled back towards my house—I felt like going to a party—but within half-an-hour of having tea, conversation & high spirits ceased, & I fell into a drowsy torpour. Grant felt the same. As we sobered up, our alcohol-fired enthusiasm died, & it wasn’t until 8 p.m. that I felt lively again.

It was damp & misty outside, so Grant & I stayed in & amused ourselves by listening to old ‘60s/early ‘70s records (which of my records will people be “amusing themselves” with in ten, fifteen years time? The Fall?). We came upon a classic, a 1972 effort called “Distortions” by Blue Phantom, which has the worst cover of nearly any LP I’ve ever seen—amateurish & clichéd. The music is a cross between ‘progressive’ (ie utterly bland & monotonous) rock that’s embellished with synthesizers & ‘special effects,’ & test-card muzak. The tracks all have names such as “Psycho-Nebulous,” “Violence” & “Equilibrium” etc. Grant & Nik have finally got their magazine together & had it printed; 30 copies at 50p each. In the pub, Grant suggested that I write something for it, & he hopes it’ll be a continuing concern that’s kept going with contributions from more people, perhaps some of Nik’s Camberwell Art College friends, & Grant’s friends-to-be at Gloucester. They’ve called it “The Spike” because “we couldn’t think of anything better . . .”

He left at eleven to walk home & goes to Gloucester on the 28th. Lee rang shortly before he left, full of a trip to Whincliffe he made with John & a hat he’s brought . . .

There’s quite a big contingent of people from Easterby at colleges & poly’s in the South: Tommy is at Camford Poly, Nik in London, Grant at Gloucester, Lee & I at Watermouth, & there are probably more. Grant still can’t believe that he’s actually going to escape the clutches of his home situation after so long & so much uncertainty. I often thought that he’d end up drifting into a crummy job in Easterby & a flat of his own (it’d have to be in Lockley). He’s currently feeling fed up with his group Eat People & told me that he’d been embarrassed listening to their latest tapes because they sounded “so contrived.” The guitarist has become the dominant influence on their ‘musical direction’ & Grant is glad that going to Gloucester will give him opportunity to quit, no doubt to get involved in something stranger there.

Monday September 12th

1983-09-12T23:50:00.001+01:00

I’ve done nothing again today; I got up at eleven after planning to go have my hair cut first thing in the morning. I’m so lazy. Dad went out in the morning & again mid-afternoon leaving me half-heartedly flicking through books & still obsessed with what to do when I go back to Watermouth. I alternate between periods of decision & good spirits, & uncertainty & gloom, often all within the space of a day. But I keep all of the latter feelings bottled up inside & don’t make any show of them to anyone else. I keep my own counsel & trundle on through my life scarcely revealing the inner traumas I go through every day. That’s why people are surprised to discover I’m not as calm & cheerful as I seem.

Tonight the Middle East is in the grip of crisis, with Syrian-backed Druze militiamen threatening to overrun the Lebanese army & sweep on to Beirut. All that stands between the rebel forces and Beirut are a few hundred UN troops & the possibility of massive American military involvement grows nearer. Off the coast, 2000 US Marines await the order to go ashore, and if they do, the Russians won’t be pleased, although Dad says they’ll not do anything. Mum said grimly that Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that the world will end following an escalating crisis in the Middle East. And to all this add the already bad East-West relations because of the Korean Airliner massacre— it was announced today that the Russians expelled a US diplomat from Moscow for spying—and things look bleak. Mum is worried, & she sat through the news looking very tense.

Against this darkening backdrop (& just for an instant), all my wrangling over my course & my life looked insignificant. But tomorrow, as always, the global perspectives will recede with the daylight & mundane bustle of another fatuous day.