About a Girl published

Today - St Patrick's Day - sees the publication of About a Girl: A Reader's Guide to Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.

My book is a book about a book. Eimear McBride's debut novel was immediately hailed as a modern masterpiece when it was published in 2013 and About a Girl explores the background to the creation of the novel, the ten years of rejection that followed its completion and the extraordinary acclaim that followed its publication by the tiny independent Galley Beggar Press. There are interviews with friends and family, contributions from distinguished academics and critics and a long interview with the author herself.

Along the way we encounter Will Self, feminism, Theodor Adorno, Hélène Cixous, Caitlin Moran, Battlestar Galactica, James Joyce, Zooey Deschanel, The Tindersticks, Tolstoy, early modernism, critical theory and much more.

Also included are early drafts of the celebrated opening pages, a bibliography, some thoughts on the stage production and reflections of the cultural impact of a new way of writing.

You can order About a Girl direct from CB editions (250 pages, £12)
Here's an extract:
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          For you. You’ll soon. You’ll give her name. In the stitches of her skin she’ll wear your say.   
          Mummy me? Yes you.  Bounce the bed, I’d say. I’d say that’s what you did. Then lay you 
          down. They cut around. Wait and hour and day.

Forty-five short words, all but three of them ('stitches', 'Mummy' and 'around') monosyllables. The vocabulary could hardly be simpler, but simple isn't the same thing as easy. While all these words can be correctly read and spelled out by an average eight-year-old child, they appear here in combinations that actually unsettle or intimidate unwary readers, some of whom even get angry, can you believe?

Here's a representative disgruntled reader - let's call her Rebecca - on the Goodreads website:

so so so awful. i hated almost every minute. pretty sure all the awards are a result of the emperor's new clothes syndrome, as if you rewrote it in English you'd find neither the plot nor the characters interesting. as it is though it's written in pathetic fragments which, painful enough the first time, you are forced to reread far too often as (surprise surprise) the meaning is often lost when you dispense with grammar and half the words you need to say something. felt like marking a never ending self indulgent melodramatic and boring essay by an illiterate teenager with delusions of grandeur. thank god it's over and thank god (view spoiler) in the end. what a waste of money. stay far far far away.

Why is that? Why should such simple words arranged in a slightly unconventional way, in a way that avoids 'proper grammatical sentences', actually anger some readers, and make them want to express their anger online? Why, come to that, does Rebecca avoid using capital letters when criticising an author who uses them correctly? I don't want to mock Rebecca, who is fully entitled to her opinion (although that doesn't mean that we're entitled to it), but she can stand for all those readers who, presented with something new and original and unusual, react  with fear and derision and inexplicable rage, a contemporary variant of Aristophanes' 'Don't make your house in my mind' which might be expressed as 'Don't hog my Kindle', because most of the negative online comments are clearly based on the free sample pages available on an e-reader. It's remarkable, incidentally, how many bilious reviewers invoke Hans Christian Anderson's fable of the Emperor's New Clothes,assuming the role of the wise and outspoken child who sees through the  pretentious hypocrisy of the rest of us. 

Rebecca is right  in saying that if the novel were re-written 'in English' (that is, the type of English acceptable to her) the plot and characters would be of little interest. The author would be the first to agree - and we'll come back to this issue more than once. I don't expect I'd ever be able to persuade Rebecca that Eimear McBride's use of language is a dazzling quality and not a disabling flaw. She's made her choice - but there may be others who are open-minded enough to be curious, to want to know more about the book's genesis and the way the author achieves certain effects. About a Girl is for them.

The first-time reader isn't expected to know, straight away, on the first page, that these oddly-arranged but very simple words represent the thoughts, or unuttered speech, of an unborn child, still a foetus in the womb. Of course, this is not something you expect on the first page one any novel. Novels begin, traditionally, like this:

Hale knew, before he had been in Brighton three hours, that they meant to murder him.

That's Graham Greene's button-holing opener to Brighton Rock. Who wouldn't read on? Or how about this?

A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father . . .

On the face of it a similar first line, but something a bit trickier is going on, as the self-conscious and artificial reversal of Berg to Greb suggests. This is actually the opening sentence of Berg, a novel published in 1964 written by Ann Quin (1936 - 1973) and published in 1964. Quin, a superb and undervalued author of experimental fiction, wrote three more novels (Three (1966), Passages (1969) and Tripticks (1972) before walking into the sea off near her home town, Brighton. The first time I spoke to Eimear McBride I asked her whether she'd heard of Ann Quin. She hadn't, but then hardly anybody has. Yet Quin is among the vanishingly small cohort of experimental women writers , and one of the most original and compelling. She is not to be valued simply because she's rare, of course, but because she's a thrilling and original writer.

The opening lines of A Girl is a Half-formed Thing are nothing like the opening lines of Brighton Rock or Berg. Graham Greene is an A-writer, and we read on to find out who it is who wants to murder Hale, and why, and whether they succeed. The plot and characters allow the author to smuggle in lots of other material, much of it to do with Catholic guilt and redemption. Ann Quin's interest as a writer lies not so much in plot and character as in the mechanics of the novel, and different ways of telling stories - her prose isn't particularly radical or challenging but her use of the novel form is new and strange.This makes her an exemplary 'B-writer'.

That certainly doesn't mean second-rate, as in 'B-movie'. It was Anthony Burgess who first proposed that novelists could be  divided into two classes: A-writers and B-writers. The A-writer, he said, is a story-teller - concerned above all with plot and character and psychological motivation. Most novelists fall into this category - Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift and Jane Austen and George Eliot and Harper Lee. Think of Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch and To Kill a Mockingbird. Then think of Toni Morrison's Beloved and E. L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey (the categories have nothing to do with quality or longevity). A-writers are part of a long tradition and add to that tradition without much changing it. They are part of the literary mainstream and tend to work within popular forms, or genres - the crime novel, the horror story, romantic fiction, science fiction and so on. Not all A-writers are great writers, or even good ones, but some are.

B-writers, on the other hand, often employ plot and character and so on to a high degree of sophistication and accomplishment, but their real interest lies elsewhere. They are interested in language and form and structure, and the potential of the novel to say new things in a new way. They are explorers, and they are never popular in the way that some A-writers are popular. Burgess saw himself as a B-writer but often managed to be both. 

The greatest of all B-writers is James Joyce and his masterpiece is Ulysses, the greatest of all B-novels. Eimear McBride would insist that it's the greatest novel full stop, and to hell with categories. You may never have read Ulysses, or you may have tried and given up. It's not easy. Or rather, it's not simple. But it's certainly worth the effort and if you admire A Girl is a Half-formed Thing you might give Ulysses a go. If you're a reader who admires Ulysses then A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing is likely to knock your socks off.

In the category of B-writer novels we can include Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Samuel Beckett's How it Is. These may be novels you don't know, or novels you know but don't like. Or they may be novels you know and love and perhaps I should at this point give up addressing you, my reader, as a hypothetical sceptic. I assume you'v read this far because you admire A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing as much as I do. Perhaps you share my view that it's one of the greatest novels of our time. 

Joyce's Finnegans Wake is the most extreme example of B-writing, a book in which language is no longer about anything but is (as Beckett put it in Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress ) 'the thing itself'. Beckett's line seems to me to sum up the challenge of modernist writing and can be extended to include  all forms of modernism: films and books and theatre and art - everything. It's a line I tend to quote whenever I'm confronted with modern art I don't understand, which is often. 

B-writers tend to be highly original, experimental, 'difficult' and do not, as a rule, attract large popular audiences. Not all B-writers are great writers, or even good ones, but many are. Anyone aware of the Burgess categories who comes across A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing for the first time will immediately assume that the author is a B-writer. Her use of language is startlingly unique and her heavily punctuated 'ungrammatical' prose may alarm some readers. But, as readers have been quick to discover, the eye and mind soon adjust to the rhythmic syncopations of the words on the page and something quite extraordinary happens, something uncanny, practically alchemical. I can only put it like this: the book begins to read us. What happens to the anonymous Girl is never described to the reader but directly experienced by the reader. This is unsettling and often very distressing. It's also startlingly original - nobody has ever written like this. Caitlin Moran, one of the 2014 Bailey's Prize judges mixed her metaphors but spoke for many when she said: 'Ten pages in and all the bells start ringing. It explodes into your chest.' 

So we need a third category and might for the time being call Eimear McBride a C-writer, one who combines the linguistic virtuosity and experimental daring of her predecessor modernists with a page-turning appeal to a general reader who would not usually be willing to tackle challenging avant-garde fictions. She brought a fresh and powerful emotional force to an intellectual form and the critical and commercial success of an uncompromisingly harsh and volatile novel took the world by surprise. 

A close reading of D. H. Lawrence

The small locomotive engine, Number 4, came clanking, stumbling down from Selston with seven full wagons. It appeared round the corner with loud threats of speed, but the colt that it startled from among the gorse, which still flickered indistinctly in the raw afternoon, outdistanced it at a canter. A woman, walking up the railway line to Underwood, drew back into the hedge, held her basket aside, and watched the footplate of the engine advancing. The trucks thumped heavily past, one by one, with slow inevitable movement, as she stood insignificantly trapped between the jolting black wagons and the hedge; then they curved away towards the coppice where the withered oak leaves dropped noiselessly, while the birds, pulling at the scarlet hips beside the track, made off into the dusk that had already crept into the spinney. In the open, the smoke from the engine sank and cleaved to the rough grass. The fields were dreary and forsaken, and in the marshy strip that led to the whimsey, a reedy pit-pond, the fowls had already abandoned their run among the alders, to roost in the tarred fowl-house. The pit-bank loomed up beyond the pond, flames like red sores licking its ashy sides, in the afternoon’s stagnant light. Just beyond rose the tapering chimneys and the clumsy black head-stocks of Brinsley Colliery. The two wheels were spinning fast up against the sky, and the winding-engine rapped out its little spasms. The miners were being turned up.

This is the first paragraph of The Odour of Chrysanthemums. The author is D. H. Lawrence. The unsolicited manuscript had arrived on the desk of Ford Madox Ford, editor of The Transatlantic Review out of the blue and many years later Ford described the discovery of a new genius in the best piece of literary criticism I've ever read. Here's how he recalled the moment  (perhaps unreliably). We have plenty of Lawrences but we need more Fords. 

Alex Pheby's Playthings

I was delighted but not surprised to hear that Alex Pheby's fine novel Playthings has been shortlisted for the 2016 Wellcome Prize. Worth a punt, I'd say.

I wrote about the book when it was published by the independent Galley Beggar Press. Below, thriftily recycled, is part of that review (with thanks and acknowledgements to Tom Fleming at the Literary Review).

______________________________________________________________________________

'In my belly is an octopus and in it are God's children. Living children. These are things I must not speak of.'

These are the startling words of a German judge named Paul Daniel Schreber (1842-1911), an educated, cultivated and highly intelligent member of the legal establishment who went raving mad at the age of 40. Schreber's case is remembered today because of a remarkable memoir entitled Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (Memoirs of My Nervous Illness), written during a later period of lucidity and published in 1903. His book snagged the attention of Freud who tartly remarked that the author ought to be appointed director of a mental hospital. The memoir remains a key text in the history of psychoanalysis because of the clarity and candour of Schreber's account and because of the astonishing range and complexity of his disorder. The case and the memoir form the basis for Playthings, Alex Pheby's brilliant, compelling and profoundly disturbing novel.

Schreber's wide-ranging insanity had its origins in a single transgressive thought: waking one morning he wondered what it could be like to experience sexual intercourse as a woman, a speculation that marked the onset of an intense paranoid state diagnosed at the time as a form of dementia praecox. He believed that he was turning into a woman (hence the octopus/womb); that his corporal emasculation ('Verwandlung zum Weibe') was to prepare him for procreation with God; that he was controlled by 'divine rays' emanating from other souls; that the universe was a complex architecture of nerves. Another of his lunatic convictions - that his family had been replaced by imposter marionettes - is now known as the Caretas Delusion, a condition which, despite its rarity, has been the subject of at least two recent novels: Richard Powers's The Echomaker (2006) and Rivka Galchen's Atmospheric Disturbances (2008). An earlier fictionalised account of Schreber's childhood from a largely anti-Freudian perspective was Soul Murder (1973) by Morton Schatzman, 

These are examples of what Marco Roth (writing in the Brooklyn-based journal n+1) has usefully termed 'the neuronovel' - fictions that explore the experience of what he calls 'a cognitively anomalous or abnormal person'. What such novels share is an interest in the workings of the brain rather than of the mind, an interest that reflects, claims Roth, a post-Freudian, post-Lacanian movement away from traditional theories of personality. The neuronovel explores the loss of self, although to be sure selfhood is no longer the prerogative of novelists. It has become the property of specialists working within their own professional disciplines. 

Schreber is a lost soul with no fragments to shore against his ruin. If Playthings is a neuronovel then it's arguably the best neuronovel ever written, particularly in its depiction of memory and the instability of personality. But it transcends any such category and is simply a superb novel tout court, Kafkaesque in its nightmarish fluency and a powerful exposition of Kant's celebrated view that 'the madman is a waking dreamer'.

You can buy this novel direct from the publishers here.

Will Eaves and The New Serious

I'm reading - slowly, and with unalloyed pleasure - The Inevitable Gift Shop by Will Eaves. It's a beguiling mixture of poetry and prose, a sort of commonplace book of thoughts and reflections, but very uncommonplace as all the entries are by the one protean author. Eaves can pack into a short paragraph enough ideas to sustain three-day conference. 

Somebody called Professor Wu has written a terrific online review of The Inevitable Gift Shop which I commend to your attention. I'd like to quote the very first sentence of the Wu review here, because it links to my current thinking on contemporary culture, and writing in particular::

An artistic movement is forming. One that is open to spontaneity, artistic risk, emotional urgency and one which flies against traditional models.

Professor Wu sees Eaves as part of that movement, and so do I. In About a Girl - published on March 17th - I call it The New Serious (you read it here first), an emerging cohort of writers and artists who deplore the commodification of art as an alternative economy for the rich and have a high-minded (though not elitist) awareness of the modernist tradition on which they are building. They are daring, engaged, virtuosic,  emotionally intense and cerebral. Here's an extract:

Writing in the New Statesman (15 September 2014) the novelist Will Self described a showdown in an LA cafeteria in which he asked the proprietor to turn down the overwhelming music. The proprietor refused so Self had to eat his breakfast waffles to the sound of trip-hop. This annoyed him and when one of his sons shouted something sympathetic over the racket Self said: “Really, it’s OK. After all, it’s my generation that’s to blame for this bullshit culture.”

I feel for him, I really do - spoilt waffles in Los Angeles must be hell. But the incident, hardly serious in itself, prompted the author into choleric reflections on his generation, 'the pierced and tattooed, shorts-wearing, skunk-smoking, OxyContin-popping, neurotic dickheads' and their complicity in the commodification of counter culture. Getting into his stride he berated the 'twats' who insisted that there was nothing to choose between high and popular culture, who embraced a doctrine of relativism that placed advertising and fine art on the same level, and finally described cultural criticism of the kind he and his peers as - and I'm sorry for this - 'jetted slurry from our dickhead arseholes'.

Will Self's rant seems to me a watershed moment in recent literary discourse, marking the belated realisation by a leading writer of his (and my) infantilised fifty-something generation that the game is up, and that said game wasn't worth the candle. 

I'm no more a representative of my generation than he is, although I think I'm closer in thought and feeling to those who happen to lack the piercings, tattoos, neurotic addictions and clogged lexicon of Will Self. My tastes are resolutely unhip and tend more to V. S. Pritchett than Ballard and Burroughs. I am irredeemably square, by Self's standards.

Just as Self belatedly wakes up to the vain and hateful pointlessness of the crappy 'cultural criticism' perpetrated with sullen ferocity for decades by the likes of Will Self, just as he realises that 'the skunk-smoking, OxyContin-popping, neurotic dickheads' of which he is the Self-elected incarnation have produced nothing, absolutely nothing of value or permanence or even passing interest over the past three decades apart from trashing the thoughtful  hierarchies of taste and judgement that made literature navigable and worthwhile, just as he and his sneering coevals dwindle before our  gaze shrilly squealing like the liquidated Wicked Witch of Oz, just as he comes to realise that all the prolix redundancy of his threadbare psychobabble amounts to nothing more than a pretext for whining about his spoilt breakfast waffles in a weekly magazine . . . I punch the air with a loud whoop and say: YES!  Now where were we . . .?

Where were we? I remember reading Self's bilious New Statesman piece and thinking: this really is a watershed moment, the point at which a leading writer of my generation throws in the towel. But beneath the usual ostentatious verbiage (and Self, more than any big name writer I can think of, has never figured out the difference between eloquence and loquacity) there's a sense of - well what? Desperation? Exhaustion?

On redundancy

From my regular correspondent, a retired English publisher living in Vancouver: 

Some years ago I was living in Hong Kong and a private Indian magazine-publisher asked me if I would consent to be an "expert witness" on his behalf in the High Court there. He was being sued by a magazine in relation to the licence it had granted him.

The magazine had cancelled the licence, so that he could no longer publish a Hong Kong edition of their magazine. He had immediately started his own women's magazine, under his own choice of name.  

"Why did you do this?" he was asked.  "This was a improper act!"

"Not at all," he answered. "I had been employing wonderful editors, circulation and advertising people, to put out the magazine.  When you cancelled the licence, I had an obligation to these men and women!  I had to find some way to keep them employed, after they had done so much for me - and you!"

The magazine's lawyer found this unanswerable, as did the judge.

When was this last said in England, or the US (which sanctified "downsizing" as an economic and commercial virtue in about 1975, though up to that time it had been considered a failure of management)?  Around the same time, the US dropped resignation as the proper act of failed manager.  Now the bugger says "I'm going to tough it out!" (after losing a huge amount of the company's money and firing half the staff).  

I, along with 4,000 colleagues, am about to be made redundant. This is (for me at any rate) no particular cause for concern as I have alternative (and, I hope, more congenial and challenging) employment lined up. My Vancouver friend's memory of the Hong Kong publisher made me reflect that, yes indeed - things have changed over that past forty years. How could they not?

Circulating my CV to agencies I was struck (not for the first time) by the standard email response: Thank you for submission.

"Submission"?

Ezra Pound's Waste Land

A birthday gift from my fine son: something I've wanted to own for many years but never got around to buying. It's The Waste Land: A Facsimile and Transcript of the Original Drafts Including the Annotations of Ezra Pound, scrupulously edited by Valerie Eliot, the poet's widow.It's a beautiful large format Faber edition and here's the cover: 

From the opening of "A Game of Chess" (below) is the line "Filled all the desert with inviolable voice"

(c) Faber and Faber / The Estate of T. S. Eliot

"Too penty" was Ezra Pound's brisk annotation - too pentametric, in other words, too rhythmical. Earlier he  scribbled "Too tum-pum at a stretch" next to a similarly conventional line.

The thrill of the facsimile is to see two fine minds fizzing and popping and to see a record, in the many ink and pencil annotations to typescript and manuscript (some of it in Eliot's beautifully fluid and fluent 'best' handwriting). Pound is never wrong, not once - he cuts and shapes with a confident assurance and the result is the poem we know today.  It's surprising how much dud material was excised - the length culled to the  434 lines we know today. He has a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to equivocation, slashing every 'perhaps' (and adding variations on the phrase 'Damn perhaps', possibly a reference to the Blake aphorism 'Damn braces, bless relaxes'.)

Reading a TLS review today of the The Poems of T. S. Eliot: The Annotated Text edited by Christopher Ricks and Jum McCue, I was struck by the fact that the well-known opening lines from 'Gerontion' ('Here I am, an old man in a dry month, / Being read to by a boy, waiting for rain')  are a direct paraphrase (or lift, if you like) from A. C. Benson's biography of Edward Fitzgerald, published in 1905:

 Here he sits, in a dry month, old and blind, being read to by a country boy, longing for rain.

As the TLS reviewer points out

By changing this to the first person, Eliot stakes an imperial claim: any place in the continent of literature where he raises his flag as good as belongs to him. And his claim was effective - when people quote these lines, they are quoting Eliot, not Benson.

But do people quote these lines? I said in a review of a volume 3 of Eliot's letters that I had once met a bright young graduate with a recent degree in Eng. Lit. who had never even heard of T. S. Eliot. Not, you understand, that she had never read The Waste Land, or Four Quartets. She had never heard of the poems or the author. She was politely interested - is he any good? British? No? What did he write? 

She wasn't rdoubled by her ignorance and neither was I, because, well - you can't read everything and he wasn't on the syllabus. And she loved Virginia Woolf. I can't think of a better example of what's happened to the teaching of English Literature since the 1980s and, before you deride what you're quick to assume is my blustering old fartishness let me add that I'm all for it. Eliot's a costive, querulous and nasty piece of work. But he isn't negligible and you need to know all about Eliot before you write him off. To know about Virginia Woolf but not Tom Eliot is just plain wrong, although I was intrigued by the idea of a university offering degrees in English literature that omitted a man who is still widely (and correctly) regarded as the leading modernist poet of the previous century, as well as a leading critic and cultural arbiter. Because if Eliot isn't central to our understanding of cultural history, who is? But even asking that question shows how old hat I am. I mean - T. S. Eliot?

The young woman had what evolutionists call an adaptive advantage. She didn't need Eliot where she was going (and, come to that, neither do I. Neither do you). She was extremely bright and engaging and professionally ambitious, working as a trainee producer at the BBC. She didn't need Old Possum holding her back with his intellectual precision, his Tory monarchism and bloodless High Anglicanism. We none of us do, but ditching Eliot's values needn't involve abandoning his standards. That Eimear McBride's A Girl is a Half-formed Thing was rejected by publishers for a decade because they either couldn't see its value or, having seen it, didn't know how to proceed, is a terrible reflection on the state of our literary culture. If I, a  middle-aged hack critic, could immediately see that this book was the real thing, is it possible to assert (and I do so with absolute modesty) that a humanities education completed before the arrival of Critical Theory and all that entailed, enabled me to do so? 

What was disastrous about literary criticism in the 1980s is that none of it had even the slightest appeal to the non-academic, non-specialist reader. None of it reached beyond the hermetic world of university departments and conferences and academic publishing, or beyond the particular sub-canon in which it narrowly flourished. It was couched in the kind of language that can drive you nuts.

That so much academic writing about literature should be so aggressively unliterary (the prose equivalent of a musicologist being tone deaf) is enough to put you off reading, or at least reading academic writing. That a reader such as myself feels repelled and dismayed by academic writing about literature (and, come to that, about architecture, and theatre, and history, and photography - especially photography) is not something that troubles me much any longer. If academic writing has any content worth sharing it will appear, mediated into reasonably plain English on the internet, sooner or later. But - and this is a very bad thing - literary criticism no longer forms part of mainstream public discourse as it did (albeit within a small circle) back in the modernist heyday of the 1920s. 

Last memories

March 7th (last Monday) would have been the 80th birthday of Georges Perec, who was born in 1936 but left the party early in 1982, aged 45.

If my modest blog has two godfathers they would be Perec and the late Gilbert Adair (who as it happens translated Perec's novel la Disparition, in which vowel 'e' is never used and which Adair quite brilliantly - and with a hint of exasperation - re-titled A Void). They are both great losses.

Perec as a novelist an Oulipian theorist has been an inspiration for years, and when recording my own trivial memories I've shamelessly adopted his approach in Je me souviens (1978). Perec had in turn shamelessly adopted the method of the American writer Joe Brainard.

I've published two clutches of Perecian memories here and here, and what follows, by way of tribute to GP, is a third and final collection:

_________________________________________________________________________________

I remember the jaunty playground song from a television advertisement promoting Cadbury’s Finger of Fudge: "A Finger of Fudge is just enough / To give your kids a treat . . .'

I remember 'Put A Tiger in your Tank'.

I remember Uri Geller on the telly bending spoons and not believing for a moment that it was anything more than a party trick given a sort of spurious weight by his earnest description of what was happening. Jis performance (not without a certain gauche charm) was deemed newsworthy , the nation held in thrall.

I recall being completely speechless with wonder and surprise at a  magic trick performed by a casually elegant professional magician at a friend’s house one summer evening which involved a banknote, an egg and an orange. The banknote was mine, and signed by me, and at the end of the trick I peeled the orange to reveal an unbroken egg. I cracked open the egg and there, inside….

I remember “Knock Knock” jokes in general, but none in particular.

I remember Chinese burns and dead legs.

I remember dire predictions that British motorists crossing the Channel via the (then) soon-to-be-opened Channel Tunnel (or 'Chunnel' would be involved in endless crashes as they tried to adapt to driving on the “wrong” side of the road.

I remember growing pains.

I remember back in the 1990s marvelling at the way digital clocks would, just before eight o’clock, show the year of my birth (i.e. 19:59) and the frisson I’d get of watching this click over to the millennium year (20:00). I also wondered whether (say) German commuters felt downcast when their station clocks said 19:45.

I remember wondering why, outside the main entrance to the British Museum, there always is (or used to be) a vendor of greasy hot dogs who appears to be unlicensed and wholly unofficial and who must  make a substantial income from sales. I like to think that the site was awarded to the vendor’s forebears in perpeturiyu for conspicuous gallantry in some long-forgotten Imperial war.

I remember the very attractive 1950s “Neo Elizabethan” tourist information centre adjacent to St Paul’s Cathedral which was demolished and quickly replaced by a strikingly ugly razor-edged construction in 2007.

I remember my son inventing a joke: “Why is an artichoke called an artichoke when it isn’t art and doesn’t make you choke”.

I remember my son Edwin laughing almost continuously at Laurel & Hardy in Sons of the Desert and repeating, after a second viewing, substantial chunks of the dialogue and in particular Oliver Hardy’s pompous and ponderous statement that “Ev-ery man should be the KING in his oooown (pause) CASTLE!”.

I remember first hearing that Diana, Princess of Wales, had been killed in a traffic accident and recall my combined surprise, sadness and (as the days subsequently passed) indifference to the unfolding and ostentatious public grief..

I recall my intense (and well-founded) dislike for a person I worked with and subsequent shameful relief when he was killed in a car crash.

I remember buying some amber necklaces in a bitterly cold Russian street market and bearing them away wrapped in crumpled brown paper.

I remember my pleasure at reading Ford Madox Ford’s account of how, when editor of The Transatlantic Review, he “discovered” D H Lawrence and declared him a genius after reading in manuscript just the first paragraph of The Odour of Chrysanthemums.

I remember borrowing a bicycle very early one morning near Fleet Street and cycling back to my home in Fulham. I recall guiltily cycling back the following day, with a crippling hangover, to return the damn thing.

I remember my irritation at the mispronunciation of the word “research” (i.e. wrongly accented on the first syllable, a useage which became almost universal in the 1980s, a golden age for management consultants and their ilk) and my relief at the realisation that it was actually a useful and almost invariably accurate way of predicting foolishness in a speaker’s subsequent remarks.

I remember my first and only visit to Swaziland, and a terrific storm there which blew the beautiful and delicate weaver bird nests from the tall palms.

I remember Steve Martin in The Man with Two Brains, an enjoyable low-budget comedy film directed by Rob Reiner, the son of Carl, who was for many years a foil to Mel Brooks.

I remember my interest in the so-called Borscht Belt comedians like Henny Youngman (“Take my wife… please”) and the crisp “brrdmmm…tschhhh” of an onstage drummer which punctuated every snappy one-liner.

I remember Princess Diana’s divorce lawyer, Anthony Julius, who wrote a book about T S Eliot’s anti-Semitism, which met with mixed reviews. Julius seemed to suggest that Eliot’s anti-Semitism, however ghastly, was a quality and not a flaw, which of course is a view derived from Henry James’s note about favourite writers. I remember wondering whether 'antisemitism', 'anti-Semitism' or 'anti-semitism' would be the best way to express a hatred or intolerance of Jews. The idea that there is a 'semitism' (or 'Semitism') that can be opposed is itself troubling and contentious.

I remember reading that Stalin was born with webbed feet (or webbed toes, rather) and wondering how much or how little influence this had on his what I suppose we have to call his 'personality'.

I remember being tongue-tied in the presence of the radio presenter Robert Robinson and subsequently amusing friends with my description of our one-sided encounter.

I remember marbles, conkers, pick-up-sticks and blackjacks

I remember Chipmunk crisps

I remember my first watch – a Timex.

I remember electric blankets

I remember Jane Russell’s fabulously sexyburleaque dance routine in The French Line.

I remember a long and convivial lunch in the Whitstable Oyster Fisheries on a cold sunny March afternoon.

I remember my pleasure at first hearing the word “clusterfuck”.

I remember the only time I ever slept, having no alternative. on a park bench.

I remember watching Murnau’s Ordet for the first time at the cinema in the National Gallery and sobbing helplessly during the final scenes (along with the other dozen or so members of the audience).

I remember Barmouth biscuits.

I remember watching my son through binoculars pony-trekking across the sands of a remote estuary in West Wales.

I remember Whitbread Trophy Bitter, “the pint that thinks it’s a quart”.

I remember self-consciously developing a taste for Worthington White Shield bottled ale, a vile and powerful brew recommended by a CAMRA writer of my acquaintance.

I remember Charters and Caldicott.

I remember dominoes, skittles, shove ha’penny, cribbage and other pub games.

I remember first seeing the disused airship hangars at Cardington.

I remember Bootsy and Snudge.

I remember “Wayfinders” shoes for boys, which had a compass concealed in a secret compartment in the heel, and the rubber soles of which were embossed with animal paw prints.

I remember “Penny for the Guy”.

I remember All Gas and Gaiters.

I remember my bilingual son asking me :”What is a jew?” and mentally  mustering a careful reply when I suddenly realised he was asking, theologically, “What is a dieu?”

I remember Monty Modlyn.

I remember the Aberfan disaster, and the regular anniversaries of this haunting event which seemed to punctuate my childhood.

I remember visiting a coal mine in Yorkshire and being impressed by the Morphine Safe set into the wall by the winding shaft deep underground.

I remember whistling.

I remember Dennis Price seducing Joan Greenwood (Sibella) in Kind Hearts and Coronets, and also that this matchless British comedy was based on a novel by Roy Horniman entitled Israel Rank. This title was allegedly deleted from the film’s credits as it was thought likely that Rank Studios would object.

I remember toffee apples, and their square sticks.

I remember, from summers in childhood, pyramidal chunks of ice infused with fruit juice and called (I think) Jubblies.

I remember Tennessee Pancake Houses and The Golden Egg.

I remember the joke “I drink as I dress – Chablis”.

I remember seeing a photograph of a huge and mysterious mass of decomposing blubbery organic matter which had been washed up on a South American beach and which didn’t correspond to any known living creature.

I remember Auden describing his face as “a wedding cake left out in the rain”.

I remember Guerlain’s Vol de nuit.

I remember reading, admiring and subsequently re-reading Cyril Connolly’s only novel The Rock Pool. “Naylor was deaf again”.

I remember being close to a car bomb which exploded in New Oxford Street during an IRA campaign, and how the muffled blast set off alarms in nearby vehicles and buildings.

I remember the old Scala cinema in King’s Cross, and their wonderful folded A3 programmes.

I remember first reading that the act of remembering is subject to a continuing degradation as what we remember when we remember something is not the thing itself but the last time we remembered it.

I remember my son repeating, word-perfectly, a complete poem for the first time. But I can no longer remember what it was.

I remember first mixing a gimlet.

I remember visiting my friend Paul Neal in Bart’s Hospital when he was dying from throat cancer. Following an emergency tracheotomy he communicated for the most part by writing on slips of paper, (as did Franz Kafka in his last days). I asked him once if his condition was the result of smoking and he wrote: “Yes. And booze too. Just to be sure”.

I think I can remember the funeral of Winston Churchill, or at least a later television transmission which featured this event, and in particular how the cranes in the Pool of London lowered their jibs as a mark of respect when the lighter bearing his coffin from Westminster to Waterloo Pier sailed by.

I remember, with other children, making slides in icy weather.

I remember the joke about a certain Tory cabinet minister, popularly regarded as a lady-killer – “He’s not gay of course (pause) but his boyfriends are”.

I remember enjoying the sight of my son feeding swans on the Round Pond in Kensington Palace Gardens and how charmed I was when he gave some of his supply of bread to a much smaller and breadless boy who was watching him.

I remember laughing at the crumple-faced Northern comic Les Dawson – his oddly lyrical monologues and tuneless piano playing, and his version of Norman Evans’s “Over the Garden Wall” sketches.

I remember being angered by a noisy, crass and vulgar National Theatre production of the great Powell and Pressburger film A Matter of Life and Death, and composing a very long and nasty letter to the director which I would never send.

I remember meeting Jack Cardiff, the great cinematographer who had worked on several Powell & Pressburger films.

I remember rather pretentiously thinking it would be amusing to write a poem entitled On First Reading On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer. Also wondering whether any author has considered writing a serious literary sequel to Ulysses, perhaps set on 17th June 1906, and picking up where Joyce left off.

I remember reading a promotional brochure for Belfast’s refurbished and gentrified old docks, to be branded the “Titanic Quarter”, and that it would become “a spot where pleasure, profit and memorialisation meet”