Flute / friction / fish / funeral

4 February
Something I remember about D. I only spent a week in his company, but I noticed he had the verbal tic of saying ‘This is true’ when he agreed with something you said. I thought it rather affected at the time, but he’d never have been conscious of it and it may have been a symptom of shyness.

***

16 February
Beautiful passage from Webster on brown-nosing: ‘from the implication that servility is tantamount to having one’s nose in the anus of the person from whom advancement is sought’.

***

23 February
You know those moments of lucidity immediately before sleep? Anyway, I went to a flute, viola and harp recital this lunchtime and I was just drifting off when I became conscious that the phrase ‘She comes from the town of the parrot people’ had entered my mind.

***

29 March
Memory coming to me yesterday of Mrs D, teaching French in Year 7 or 8, writing vocab on the board in French and English, and translating ‘le frigo’ into English as ‘frig’. Surely someone else noticed her mistake, but at 11 I may have been the only child in the room to associate the word with sexual friction.

***

29 April
Today P was destroying floppy disks from the ’90s.

P: Why does this disk say Nuclear Codes?
Me: I don’t know – does it?
P: No!

I could almost grow to like him.

***

22 May
My comedy crematorium worker Crem Pat could have a friend, Funerary Ern.

***

13 June
Joke I wrote ten years ago: If there’s one thing I regret, it’s that I dumped my girlfriend just because she told me she’d started producing an egg every second. It was a massive ovary action.

***

14 July
Duncan Thickett: ‘I don’t eat fish on medical grounds – but when I’m not at the doctor’s, I eat it all the time!!’

***

18 July
During the Cricket World Cup and Wimbledon Men’s Singles finals on Sunday I shouted ‘The roast gammon of old England!’ at the TV more than was strictly necessary, but it has become my new favourite pastime and I shall be doing it every summer from now on during middle-class sporting events.

***

11 September
Cleavage in Austen adaptations seems an anachronism to me. Am I right? Breasts presumably existed then. Perhaps censorship of them came later. This film of Mansfield Park lost me when someone cried out ‘This is 1806, for heaven’s sake!’ Also the scene where Fanny catches Henry rogering Maria Bertram wasn’t in the book.

***

13 October
On Trinity Street this morning there was a Japanese girl walking in front of me with a top that said in huge letters on the back: ‘MOIDER DA BUM! Unidentified spectator, Cliffords Field, 1926’

***

19 October
Had ‘The Farmer and the Cowman’ stuck in my head, but couldn’t remember the words. Is it ‘Cemetery folks should stick together’, I thought.

***

14 November
I think a student may have heard me say ‘fuck you’ to a book I hit my head on.

***

20 November
Mother played organ at funeral of a 56-year-old man today. A friend from school recalled his generosity. If you didn’t have enough money at the shop on the way home from school, he would buy two of everything. Two Lion Bars, two Walnut Whips, two packets of Quavers. Then they’d go home and eat them in his bedroom with Radio Luxembourg on.

Library / laxative / lemon / laird

23 January
Dream last night: I noticed a student in the library with a coffee cup, so I went and gave my standard polite lecture on food and drink. She was defensive and asked why, and I told her they attract vermin, and right on cue a mouse scuttled out from the radiator grate. I said I’d let maintenance know, and we peered below some bookcases and saw something even I hadn’t expected: a sheep, and to the left a donkey. Then a gorilla came out and started prancing around, and then out came about 20 or 30 squatters who had been living in some library annex unknown to me. Most of them left of their own accord, but it got so crowded that I couldn’t tell who was in the library legitimately and who wasn’t. I suppose it may all be related to my anxiety about challenging people with food and drink. This morning F opened a can not ten feet away from me, claiming ‘It’s water’, and I just sat there and took it, cursing myself.

***

23 February
H on form today as we walked to the UL. Noticing an area of the Backs that had been fenced off: ‘Maybe a cow was violated.’ In the staff car park: ‘Let’s find B’s car and key it.’ If B retired, would he attend the leaving party? ‘Yes, but only to poison his drink with laxative.’

***

7 March
Me: I see you’ve got Friends of Cathedral Music visiting on Friday.
P: Yes.
Me: FoCM, that’s what I say.
P: Thank you for that.

***

24 March
The Amish are supposed to shun modern technology, but surely there must be one Amish boy somewhere who uses the internet solely for rating documentaries about the Amish on IMDb.

***

3 June
Lemony painters:
1. Gustave Sourbet
2. John William Water-Ice
3. Limonado da Vinci
4. Citron Xsara Picasso
5. Rembrandt van Rind

***

25 July
D back from holiday, and showing off a photo of him in the sea, flecked with foam. Spume, I said. He’d never heard the word before, and googled SPEWM.

***

9 August
D: I don’t like the name Kevin.
Me: That’s very popular in France apparently.
D: [to R] It hasn’t reached Italy, has it?
Me: [exaggeratedly] KEVINO!
R: That means ‘what a wine’.

***

13 September
N’s wearing a mustard-coloured jumper like he’s a fucking laird or something.

***

8 October
A sweet Persian-looking boy of about 12 next to me was explaining the reconstruction of the Globe to his little brother in the interval of Twelfth Night. ‘Obviously the original one burnt down, but they rebuilt it and where you’re sitting now is approximately where they sat in those days.’

***

21 October
F: There was a big clang when I was on the train this morning.
J: A clown?!

***

21 November
The doctor asked about rectal bleeding. ‘The integrity of my anus has not been breached’ was the phrase I nearly used, but I think the word I had in my head was ‘bleached’ so it’s probably a good thing I didn’t say anything.

***

30 December
Reading Wodehouse last night, I became aware I was falling asleep when I read the phrase ‘financial position’ as ‘fictional poussin’.

Chipperfield / chapel / check / chocolate

26 February
Really quite angry at the weekend while contemplating the Mars bar. I think if I were given the opportunity to go back in time, I would return to 1990 and eat several Mars bars. It’s not just perspective that’s skewed my impression of how good they were back then, the familiar idea that things seem bigger to children, they really were more substantial. The vertices were squarer, the chocolate thicker, the lettering on the logo more stylish (it really does make my blood boil what happened to the logo), there was a sense of occasion to the eating of one; and there were individual occasions, just once or twice, when I bit into one and it tasted faintly of ginger, which might have been my imagination but I’m convinced wasn’t. And what made me angriest of all was the knowledge that time travel isn’t possible, that I will never have the experience of childhood Mars bars again. It’s been months since I ate a Mars bar, maybe over a year, more by apathy than design, and yet the next one I eat won’t have the effect of water on a man finding an oasis in the desert as it should, it’ll just be another Mars bar that isn’t as good as it used to be.

***

9 March
In the waiting room this morning, the receptionist turned on the radio and it was playing ‘The Locomotion’. I became instantly aware that my right leg, crossed over my left, was doing that involuntary tapping motion that one has no control over. Not in time with the music, though, which reassured me: it meant that if anyone saw me tapping my foot they would realise it was unrelated. Alternatively, they might think I loved the song but had no rhythm, which would be worse. Except that I do like ‘The Locomotion’.

***

9 April
I know I used the phrase ‘off his mash on mary jane’ last week, but I can’t remember the context.

***

20 April
A revisit of Simon and the Witch Series 1 Episode 5, in which Cuthbert is given one by Hopkins (as it were), demonstrates that the modern Mars bar is considerably smaller than the Mars bar of 1987, which confirms my testimonies of 26 February.

***

27 May
Next to me at chapel this morning: bald-shinned, safari-trousered old buffer with vespine hosiery.

***

30 May
Weird memory of making esoteric puns at school in 1999 on the name of circus trainer Mary Chipperfield, convicted at that time of animal cruelty, and the Merychippus, a proto-horse who presumably came up in a biology lesson.

***

31 May
Tonight I went to evensong at St John’s, which happened, unbeknownst to me, to be a special service attended by the St John’s College School Parents Association. It was basically a Dominic convention. I sat between two Dominics and had a chat with the one on my right (actually called Dominic), who was the father of a chorister. He had been a chorister at St George’s Chapel, Windsor and a choral scholar at Oxford, where he began studying music and ended up with a degree in philosophy and theology. He talked enthusiastically about Welsh rugby and told me I must go to the Millennium Stadium to see an international. Be still my beating trousers.

***

31 May
Evensong at Trinity was somehow consoling, though I found myself resenting Christians generally for all their concerns that aren’t mine. The phrase ‘Voices tell me I’m the shit’ occurred to me a lot during the introit.

***

8 June
Last Friday D, S and I all wore check shirts, and today we’re all wearing the same shirts. ‘Our cycles have synchronised!’ I said, to some amusement. S didn’t immediately get it. ‘I’m talking about menstruation.’ That set D off somewhat.

***

16 August
A nine-year-old Scottish girl on the train last night, talking to her grown-up brother or stepbrother and an older man who might have been an uncle. Polite conversation about how much she loved dogs, what she would call her own dog (Lexi or Dexter), 101 Dalmatians, the appetites of chihuahuas, what breeds of dogs are used for guide dogs. Then ‘Have either of you ever seen Adventure Time?’ Discussion of various characters, ‘I think you’d like it’ to the older man. For someone who spends a lot of time thinking about his own childhood, I don’t have a great deal of affection for children, but for a brief period I felt like one of those young men in Salinger.

***

21 October
‘Siblings are better than parents,’ says W, ‘because parents die.’

***

9 December
Felt a bit anxious. Went into the office and changed an illustration of a name badge on some packaging from ‘Schwartz’ to ‘Schwantz’, which cheered me up a bit.

Library life

20 January
Both our copies of John Hick’s Arguments for the Existence of God have disappeared. Q.E.D.

***

24 January
Catalogued today: a book by William J. Heitler, which amused me, Heitler sounding like the most half-hearted alias (cf. Mr Hilter, Beinrich Bimmler, and so on).

***

3 February
Thought: ‘Covering a book is very much like making love to a beautiful woman.’

***

4 February
Annoying reader, observing that the security for Ban Ki-moon’s visit was inadequate: ‘The cars were completely unattended. I mean, what if someone wanted to shove a potato up the windpipe…’ They could have done that at lunch if they wanted to bash him.

***

12 March
My competence and efficiency have been ruthless this afternoon. Any neutral observer would have been dazzled by the variety and speed of my librarianly skills.

***

29 March
I’ve got the hots for one of the models in the new edition of Abrahams’ and McMinn’s Clinical Atlas of Human Anatomy.

***

20 April
Old emails show I had a dream in 2010 about Ant and Dec coming in to cancel their joint borrowing account and to complain about my having charged them a replacement fee for a lost book.

***

20 May
Water cooler installed in library. Student already spotted wearing a conical cup as a sort of KKK yarmulke.

***

16 July
Flicking through a book on neuroanatomy, my eye alights on the phrase ‘General Melchett Council’. Check again. ‘General Medical Council’.

***

18 July
Today’s amusing author name: Rodney H. Grapes.

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25 July
One of our library copies of King Lear has appropriately become divided into three parts.

***

5 December
Reader, making conversation: ‘There has been no snow in Stockholm this winter.’ I think she may be a spy.