DIARY
Emlyn Williams once said that only virgins, generals and professional writers keep diaries. I would like to think of myself as belonging to that last category but I've never managed the trick of keeping up a proper journal. When you are writing a book, as I am at the moment, you do almost nothing apart from stare at a word processor and stare out of the window. Between nine and six my only human contact is the milkman, and I think he is growing wary of my attempts to engage him in doorstep conversations. The only social engagement of the week was the daughter's school play, postponed by Christmas flu. It was a musical version of the story of Noah in which the daughter took the role of second monkey. 'Who's playing Noah, then?' we asked her. 'Oh he's being done by Alice,' she told us with no apparent sense of incongruity. This is a very non-racist, non-sexist primary school we send her to. The daughter showed great natural talent for swinging on wall bars, gibbering etc, and she only picked her nose during the dull bits. They all sang beauti- fully and there was scarcely an adult eye that failed to brim. Little children are so nice. It is hard to believe they can grow up into horrible pubescents. A few rows in front of us sat the 12- and 13-year-olds in greasy quilted nylon jackets, with hog- bristle haircuts, open pores and pig eyes. They scratched and smirked and farted and didn't even clap at the end. They didn't seem like a different generation of chil- dren, they seemed like a different species of mammal. The mother of my children thinks it is something to do with the gentrification of the school: poorer chil- dren in the upper forms and richer ones in the lower ones, but I think this is an illusion, and that our children will be like that too.
My home is in the London borough of Haringey which is distinguished for having the highest rates in Britain and soon the highest poll tax. On the council's own admission the road outside my house is swept only once every eight weeks. To judge by the Coke cans and styrofoam sarcophagi of Kentucky Fried Chicken which are familiar fixtures on my walk to the post office, I doubt if it has actually been done since last summer. I could go on about the teacher shortage in my children's school, the swimming-bath which shuts Itself down at every opportunity, the ex- pensive new playgrounds which are vandal- tsed before the paint can dry, the pointless little traffic islands which are demolished by drunks every Saturday night, but we don't want to start sounding like the Daily Mail. One service the council provides with great efficiency are the thousands of smart, MARTYN HARRIS
metal notices on every second lamp-post which publicise its good deeds. Driving to work this week I note that last month's advertisement for a new 'Leisure Pass' has been replaced by one proclaiming the 25th anniversary of the borough. Put me in an arm-lock and I will still call myself a socialist. So it is probably very naughty of me, but I can't seem to banish these troubling dreams I have from time to time, where I see myself with a Haringey coun- cillor cringing at my feet while I hit him across the throat with a sawn-off billiard cue.
he French au pair has been gloomy this week: a mixture of homesickness and boyfriend trouble, we guess. How can she find a nice `purb' to go to with her au pair friends? she wants to know. The problem is that pubs are becoming harder to analyse from their appearance and for foreigners they are difficult to spot at all. None of them say 'pub' on the outside, and most of the ones around us have mystifying names, like the World's End or the Slug and Lettuce. We natives use a dozen clues, from the pool of sick on the pavement to the glossy vinyl blinds, to the volume of breaking glass, to work out if we are going to get picked up, beaten up, or enjoy a quiet evening of shove-ha'penny, but it's tough for the foreigners. I've always had this problem in France of telling the
'I warned him about listening to personal hi-fl.' chemist from the bookshop from the epi- cier, an anxiety which is far more disorient- ing than my meagre grasp of the language. But now the disorientation is coming home. My eyes can't seem to locate the post office with its new Postman Pat lettering. I can't differentiate the clothes shops with their gnomic, prole-smart names like Options and Principles, and their window displays of saddlery and onions. The language of signs is breaking down. Is it middle age or the sheer expansion of choice? I went deaf to pop music ten years ago when it atomised into a dozen genres, and I lost my memory for television schedules when Channel 4 ar- rived.
Funerals tend to accumulate in middle age. When I was eight or nine my father seemed to be getting out his black tie every week. My mother seldom attended, since it was a South Wales custom that funerals were too dreadful for womenfolk. They stayed at home preparing an enormous tea, it being another tradition that the thing had not been done properly unless you were 'buried with ham'. I told the anecdote at a funeral this week and was greeted with a rather baffled silence. I had forgotten it was a Jewish ceremony, and! forgot also to bring a hat, and had to borrow a tiny skullcap which swung about on a hairpin at the nape of my neck. The deceased — there seems to be no less squeamish word — was a friend of 38 who had died from an overdose, more or less accidentally, we think. He was a very nice, very funny man — his niceness established by the fact that no less than four of his previous girlfriends had chosen to turn up. I can't imagine any of my exes coming to mine. At the end of the oration his father flung himself on the coffin, sobbing uncontrollably, which seemed to embarrass nobody. We then followed the casket, on a kind of wheelbar- row, to a muddy field beside the M25. There was none of the Anglican nonsense where the undertaker produces a tin of John Innes from his pocket to scatter daintily on the grave. The whole family, up to their ankles in raw clay, pitched in with shovels to bury him, most of them in floods of tears. It is a cliché that we avoid death too much these days. But it is true that even in the saddest funerals there is, as Sean O'Casey said of his son's, 'a sense of trespassing joy'. Sucking down a blessed lungful of cigar smoke in the car park afterwards, you have looked over the edge and been absolved for a while from your own anxieties by the sound of sods thump- ing down on somebody else's coffin.
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