Diary of a Door Knob

Here is another cut-down extract from a ‘diary novella’ (every day of) which appears in each part of my upcoming collection of short stories. Part one, here.

God is our landlord. We’re all just tenants, paying rent. And just as landlords down here let you borrow a house which they are happy to see crumble around you, so God gives you a mind and a body and then spends seventy-odd years kicking the shit out of them.

A day in the life of a professional benefit cheat. Woke up, ignored Jobcentre text. Filled in Universal Credit journal; ‘Applied for 3 jobs’ (didn’t). Council tax bill came — shoved under takeaway menus. Checked burner phone: cash-in-hand tiling at 1pm with ‘Dave’s Kitchens’. Rang PIP to chase ‘chronic back pain’ claim, groaned a bit for effect. Universal Credit appointment. Wore ‘I’m skint’ Primark trackies, mumbled about anxiety. Tesco—paid cash for scratch cards (no luck), then met Dave for tiling job, four hours of scraping plaster from walls. Took £120 cash, no questions. Tea, fag, telly. Council letter about a ‘fraud probe’ — bin.

It’s hard work being unemployed, but the hours are good. I spend a lot of time sitting in the graveyard down the road thinking about the realm of death.

What would Doris Day do? She’d have a snack, that’s what she’d do. Or adopt a stray cat. Or she might dress up in a tattered but glamorous robe.

I wonder if God knows more about Himself than we do? It seems unlikely to me.

Had a thought about the old body, ‘old Sam’ as I call it, who comes along with me on all my adventures. My new idea is that he’s a kind of trojan horse, which the enemy have allowed into their city and, tee hee, here I am for a while, pulling the wires and levers of my face, uh huh, very interesting, until hahah! Out I’ll leap and seize the means of production!

I compare my life to a brimmed saucer of milk carried by a geriatric across a boat.

In the news today. Shoe manufacturer dies. Half a million Mexicans accidentally killed, CEO apologises. Flood causes a billion dollars of damage. New Madonna tour (speculation she died thirty years ago). Man spends five years trying to change the computer-generated name given to his daughter on her birth-certificate; Unakite Thirteen Hotel. The Prime Minister’s cat had kittens. The new James Bond will be a kitten.

I have a new ambition. I’m going to learn French, or learn better French, and then read Balzac’s Comédie Humaine and Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in the original. Now, you might think, what’s the point of doing that? Here we are at the end of the world; shouldn’t you be learning to fix bikes or fit sinks? My argument is this; at the end of all things, only French literature and idle drifting can save us.

Humanity will go on, reduced horrendously, but not back to our primal state, to something new, something unimaginably new, as strange and beautiful and troubling as a cathedral would appear to a man lifted from prehistory.

Mr Amos invited me to see a tribute band, The Smiffies. It’s tribute bands all the way down now. Even the original acts are paying tribute, to their own dead selves, playing their old hits in front of a crowd of overweight men in their fifties, jumping up and down like they did in the 1990s, loud and happy, but underneath, quiet and sad. And lonely. The loneliness of the tribute band.

Popped into the charity shop. Smelt of moths and old women’s armpits. And far too fucking hot. Bought Alan Bennett’s diaries. Thought I could pretend some of his ideas were mine.

I need ten heads to get through all my books, but that would probably be confusing. Umberto Eco says it’s stupid for people to say ‘you have too many books’ — like saying you have too much medicine. You never know what one you’ll need. True dat, but then it whiffs of self-justification. It’s a bit of a fetish, if you ask me, collecting books. What’s that? You didn’t ask me? Alright then!

Had a dream that Vladimir Putin had poisoned me, that my flesh was falling off in chunks, quite alarming, but then I thought, well, this is how it is now, might as well accept it, and then it was alright. In fact I started laughing as I fell apart.

This is an example of one of my many woh-woh-woh-Jesus dreams, in which something looks like it’s very wrong, but then I realise, oh, no, actually it’s fine. I have a lot of these kinds of dreams. I just need to lose the ‘woh-woh-woh’ part, so it’s all Jesus.

There’s a gentle black girl in my French class, Sibyl, who has a lovely face. It’s quite wide, I’m thinking as I write, and her eyes are quite far apart. My face being quite narrow from her view, if I were to kiss her, her my head would vanish.

Renard; ‘On a beau faire: jusqu’à un certain âge, et je ne sais pas lequel, on n’éprouve aucun plaisir à causer avec une femme qui ne pourrait pas être une maîtresse’—Say what you like: up to a certain age–although I have yet to discover quite when–there is no pleasure in talking to a woman you cannot imagine as a mistress.’

Mr Amos explained to me how his cousin trains horses, how he speaks to them, how he approaches them, a delicate business, very hush-hush-slightly-slightly. He, Mr Amos, finished his account by saying ‘And one more thing he does to establish rapport, at the end, he goes round to the back of the horse, lifts up its tail, and gives it one.’

Cliché is a defence against death. People who speak in clichés are trying to stop death getting in their brains. Christ serves the same purpose, as does porn.

Peter Greenaway looks evil from far away, but human up close; the opposite of everyone else.

What will happen? How awful it is not to know your fate. But how much worse it would be to know it.