It turns midnight and I’m about halfway through watching Boy, a film I’d recorded off film four a week or so ago. It’s pretty good so far, about a boy growing up in New Zealand in the 80s.
It finishes at about 12:30. It was wonderful, funny, sweet, sad. I cried a bit towards the end.
I watch the credits, then delete it off the hard drive. I spend the next ten minutes or so going through the tv guide on the telly and setting it to record a few films – The Babadook (which I’ve seen before and quite enjoyed), Les Combattants (a French film that, from the description, I think I’ve seen before, although if I did it was under the abysmal anglicised name Love At First Fight), Marshland and Momentum (two crime films I’ve never heard of before but which sound like they might be okay) and Return Of The One Armed Swordsman (a 60s Shaw Brothers martial arts film that I think I’ve seen before but might not have done – I’ve seen a couple of One Armed Swordsman films before, at least).
I switch the tv off, and the lights in the living room, then walk upstairs in the dark. I use the toilet, brush my teeth, and take off my t-shirt and put it in the washing bin.
Before I go to bed, I look at the internet on my laptop for a bit. I post a comment somewhere about how much I enjoyed Boy; read a bit about Death Stranding; look at the guardian’s front page and gaze at the headlines for a while; read briefly about Donald Trump being charged with various corruption stuff; and then look at an article on wikipedia about Klaus Kinski being a paedophile.
I close the laptop, empty my pockets out onto the desk (wallet, keys, pedometer, four identical black gel pens, this pen, this notebook), and then remove my watch and put it next to them. I take my glasses off and place them on the shelf. I take my trousers off and leave them on the floor, then switch off the lights and walk over and sit on the edge of my bed. I take my socks off, throw them down the room, where they hit the cupboard door with a nice mild thud (I do this every night). Then I get into bed and try to get some sleep. It’s 8 minutes past one.
I don’t get to sleep until gone two, and even then I wake up again at quarter to three. I get up and go to the toilet quickly. I look at myself in the mirror and the whites of my eyes are bright red.
I go back to bed.
I wake up on and off all night – at about 4, about 6, about 7, at quarter past 8 – but don’t get up and fall back to sleep straight away each time. All my dreams seem to blend into one.
At 9:35 am I’m woken up by the front door slamming shut and I can hear my parents talking to each other as they leave the house and walk away up the town together.
I stay in bed for a while, finally getting up at 10 past 10. I go to the toilet, then go downstairs and have a shower.
The water’s nice and hot and I stay in there for about fifteen minutes. I wash my hair, and find myself thinking about gender in Star Trek, and their failure to ever really acknowledge or try to depict genderlessness (except for that one episode where Riker has sex with a genderless alien who’s not portrayed particularly genderlessly at all).
When I’ve finished showering I go back upstairs, put my boxer shorts in the washing bin in the bathroom, comb my beard in front of the mirror for a couple of minutes, then get my glasses from the shelf in my bedroom and sit at the desk and look at the internet while I dry.
I read a story about Boris Becker claiming diplomatic immunity from bankruptcy; read my emails (all commercial emails or spam); read the guardian and the bbc news headlines; look up Les Combattants to see if it was that film I’d seen before (it was).
My parents get back at about 10:45. I can hear them downstairs for a bit, and when my mother comes upstairs she expresses surprise that I’m up already. “Making the most of the last day of your 30s, are you?” she says. I say yes, then close my laptop, finish drying myself, and then get dressed.
I put on a black pair of boxer shorts, a dark blue cotton t-shirt, black socks, a pair of jeans. I fill the pockets with all the things I removed from them yesterday (wallet, keys, pens, notebook, pedometer), put my watch on, then open my window to let some air into my room.
I pick up yesterday’s socks from the floor and my towel from the bed, and go and hang the towel over the bannister to dry, and put my socks in the washing bin in the bathroom. Then I go downstairs. It’s 11 o’clock.
My parents are making lunch already, so I make myself a sandwich (cream cheese, lettuce, some slices of gherkins, in two slices of wholemeal bread) and put some cheese and onion crisps on the side of the plate. I pour myself a pint of milk, and then go and sit in the back garden to eat it (and drink it).
I ask my dad how it went at the funeral parlour this morning, and he said it went okay, although it’ll probably take another 3 months before the headstone is ready.
My mum asks me if I want a slice of cherry pie, which I do, and about five minutes later she comes back out with a punnet of raspberries and a punnet of strawberries, while my dad follows with a tray with two bowls of cherry pie on it (one for me, one for him) and two cups of coffee (one for him, one for mum) and we all sit and eat for a bit.
There’s the noise of drilling and sawing coming from somewhere up the street, and it’s irritatingly loud.
At about 11:30 I get up and go inside, putting my bowl and glass on the worktop by the dishwasher, then go upstairs and use the toilet again.
After that I check my emails and stuff again. I’ve got an email requesting children’s authors submit some stories for a live event next weekend, so I spend a little while sending them some stuff. While I do this I listen to Holly Herndon for a bit (her Platform album), while also occasionally flicking over to the news pages on the bbc and the guardian again, but never really look at anything or take anything in.
I send three stories to the event organisers, as I’m not sure what age audience they are aiming for. (The stories I send are Do Not Disturb The Dragon, Concerning Ogres, and The Wolves In The Woods). When I’ve finished I turn off the computer and go downstairs. It’s 12:35pm.
My mum’s in the garden doing her diary, and my dad’s watering the flowers and the vegetables.
I go for a walk on my own to the park. My mum’s bike is propped up upside down on our driveway, and the back wheel has been removed.
It’s sunny and quite warm. Whoever was drilling earlier has stopped (presumably to have lunch) and the street’s quite quiet.
There’s no one about at all on the way to the park, except for a couple of cars passing by on the main road, and a black and white cat that sees me and runs away into a garden to hide under a bush to wait until I’m gone.
It’s a little busier over the park, but not as busy as I’d expect considering how nice the weather is, and also as it’s a friday afternoon.
I buy an ice cream and a can of coke at one of the kiosks by the lake (it comes to £3) and go and sit at a picnic table to have them.
A starling comes down and watches me eat for a bit, but leaves me as soon as some other people start feeding the birds chips closer to the lake.
The tide is mostly in, and some of the barges are sailing slowly up the river and out towards the sea.
It is 5 past one.
I finish my can of coke and make a resolution that that’ll be the last can of coke I ever drink, then sit there and watch the boats and the birds for another ten minutes or so.
Eventually I get up, put my can and my ice cream stick in the bin, and then walk back home. When I get back the bike’s been put back in the garage, and my parents have gone out somewhere.
I go upstairs and use the toilet again (I’m not sure what’s up with my guts today). It’s 1:30.
I check my emails and other messages. Someone’s shown me a link to to a bbc story about a psychic pig predicting the world cup. I reply saying he’s no paul the octopus, then wonder how long my resolution to not watch any of the world cup lasts (I’ve managed to keep to it for 1.5 matches so far).
At 1:40 I go downstairs and get a drink of grape jice and then sit in the graden and read a book.
I’m reading Flights by Olga Tokarczuk. I got it last week and have read about half of it so far. Today, I read a chapter about Philip Verheyen, a Dutchman from the 1600s who dissected his own leg after it was amputated, to illustrate and study human anatomy.
At 2 o’clock my parents come back. They’d been to the supermarket, and bought pizzas and ice cream and a large bottle of coke for the party tomorrow. I help them unpack the shopping, then go back outside and continue reading my book.
On my way out of the house I glance at the thermometer on the outside wall. It’s 24 degrees C.
A sparrow lands on one of the bird boxes by the gutters on the roof of the house, looks into the entrance hole, and then flies away.
My parents come out into the garden with a cup of coffee each. My mum says my brother rang – he can come tomorrow but Jo and Ursula can’t, which is a shame. Julie, Florence and Patrick are still coming, too, she tells me (they should get here later tonight).
I mention that story I read earlier about Boris Becker and we talk about that for a bit. It’s about 2:30.
I read some more of my book. My parents go back indoors. Later I hear the sound of the vacuum cleaner coming from the kitchen.
A sudden gust of wind blows my bookmark (a postcard with a picture of a Japanese woodblock print on it – False Murasaki and a Rural Genji, by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, 1883 – that I remember buying from the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge several years ago) off the table and across the garden, so I get up and retrieve it, then put this notebook on top of it on the tabletop so it doesn’t blow away again.
I finish the section of the book about Philip Verheyen and start a bit about Peter I, Tsar of Russia.
The sky starts clouding up up a bit, and it looks like it might rain. It’s 3:05.
I go inside, have a piss in the downstairs toilet, then go to the front porch and take my shoes off.
I check the football score on the ipad in the kitchen (Uruguay won 1-0 against Egypt), have another look at my emails and messages (nothing new), quickly look at the news (I read a story about the BFI appointing Munroe Bergdorf as a speaker at its women’s filmmakers summit tomorrow), then go and play a Fire Emblem game I downloaded yesterday on the Wii U in the front room.
At about half 3, my mum comes in and does her hula-hooping for about five minutes and then leaves again.
I complete a couple of levels on Fire Emblem and then turn it off. The tv flicks itself over to ITV, where Morocco versus Iran is about to start. I turn that off too. It’s a couple of minutes past four.
It’s still quite cloudy outside but it hasn’t rained at all.
I get a chocolate bar out of the cupboard in the kitchen – my mother sees me looking in the cupboard and says she went to Iceland earlier and bought some Penguins, which I say sounds geographically unlikely – then pour myself a glass of milk and carry that and my book out into the garden again.
The thermometer on the wall says it’s 22 degrees C now, although it feels colder (presumably the bricks of the house the thermometer is hanging against cool down much slower than the air, compromising its accuracy).
A pigeon lands on the shed roof and looks at me for a minute, before flying up onto the roof of the house.
I read for close to half an hour, then get up and take my empty glass back inside, go quickly to the toilet again, and then come out and read some more of the book.
As I’m getting comfortable in my chair I tread on something sharp and wince in pain, but when I look for what I trod on I can’t see anything particular on which to lay blame.
At about five the sun comes out again. I put my bookmark back in the book and go inside and look out the front room window to see if my sister’s here yet (she’s not) while also checking to see that we’d moved the car off the driveway so she can park when she gets here (we had).
I check my emails in the kitchen, quickly check the news and sport again (Federer had won earlier, in whatever tournament is on at the moment). Then I pour myself a glass of grape juice and go back into the garden.
It’s cloudy again.
My mother tells me she managed to speak to my cousin, who we haven’t been able to contact since my uncle’s funeral in January, and she tells me he’s okay, or said he was okay, at least.
My parents go inside at about 5:20. I sit at the table for a bit longer, scribbling a picture of a boat out at sea on the back of the notebook I’m writing this in.
I can hear my next door neighbour putting some stuff in their bins on the other side of the fence.
A blackbird lands in the garden and roots through the mud at the end of the garden for a few minutes, before being scared away by the sound of my mum opening the back door.
She’s worried I’m sitting on the chair I’m not supposed to sit on (after I sat on it a couple of years ago and broke it), but I’m not sitting on that one but an almost identical one that’s not yet broken and has been reinforced to take my weight.
It still says 22 degrees C on the thermometer. My dad suggests hanging it elsewhere.
At 5:27 the doorbell rings. It’s Julie, Florence and Patrick. Patrick is really excited to be here, but Florence is feeling a bit sick. She gives me a slightly sad hug.
Patrick tells me he’s got a present for my birthday tomorrow, and then can’t resist telling me what it is (a triceratops). In the front room a few minutes later, Florence covers me with cushions while I’m sitting on the settee, which seems to cheer her up.
Mum gets some cars out for Patrick to play with, then takes Florence into the garden and shows her all the different herbs she’s growing. Florence wants to dig up the potatoes, but they won’t be ready for another couple of weeks.
I move the chairs to one side of the garden, so Florence can show me her handstands and cartwheels.
Julie gives me a present from Phil – the guardian and observer from last weekend, with the world cup booklets and wallcharts and everything in them.
Mum asks me to set the tv to record this evening’s match (Spain v Portugal), so they can watch it after they’ve put the children to bed.
I go in the front room but Patrick’s having his nappy changed, so I go back into the kitchen until Julie’s finished.
Patrick comes into the kitchen a few minutes later and asks me to play football in the garden with him. He’s wearing a new nappy and a t-shirt but no trousers. He hits his hand on a chair and cries until I kiss it better. I quickly go into the living room and set the tv to record the football and then go into the garden with Patrick. It’s 6:05.
About ten minutes later, mum and dad bring dinner out into the garden (garlic bread, quorn burgers and quorn nuggets, soya sausages, peas, pasta and cheese) and we all sit around the table and eat it, although Florence is still feeling a bit sick, so she doesn’t really eat much.
At half six I get up from the table and go inside to use the toilet. Through the window in there I an hear Patrick saying, “Mummy, where’s David?” a few times.
I finish using the toilet and come out and get drinks for people – cider for mum and Julie, apple and raspberry juice for Florence, Patrick and me.
I play football with Patrick again for a bit until he gets bored and wants to go inside to ride mum’s exercise bike.
I sit at the table in the garden with mum and Julie for a while, eating raspberries and blackberries, until about quarter past seven, when we clear the table and take everything back into the kitchen.
Patrick calls me into the living room because a bee’s in there. It turns out to be a fly, and we open the front door and let it fly outside. Then Patrick wants to play noughts and crosses in the conservatory, using dad’s wooden naughts and crosses board that’s out on the table. Florence plays too, and Patrick bursts into tears when Florence wins and he loses. We decide not to play another game.
I go and sit in the front room while Florence and Patrick play on mum’s exercise bike in the kitchen again.
There’s toy cars and trains all over the floor in the front room, all the old Fisher Price toys we had when we were children, testament to the indestructibility of 1970s plastic.
Julie comes and sits on the settee, typing into her phone, her face illuminated by the glow of the screen. It’s 7:30 or thereabouts, and strangely gloomy outside and in here.
Patrick and Florence come in and see the games console by the tv and want to play a fighting game. I put Tekken on first, but they don’t really like it, so I put on Smash Bros instead, and we end up playing it for over an hour. Both of them take great delight in beating me. Patrick demands to be the “red dragon” all the time (Charizard), while Florence prefers Zelda and Palutena. It’s 8:45 when we finally stop playing, and Julie takes them up to bed.
Mum tidies all the toy cars back into their box and I put the Wii controllers and games back on the shelf. I can hear dad reading the children some stories upstairs.
I go to the toilet again. When I’ve finished it’s 9 o’clock (or a minute or so to, at least).
I go into the kitchen and get a chocolate bar out of the cupboard and eat it with a glass of milk (although actually I don’t bother with the glass and just drink it straight out of the 4-pint bottle).
I read mum’s shopping list that she has pegged to the notice board in kitchen.
AA Batteries (crossed out)
bottle brush
bird food
Kathy’s BD gifts (crossed out)
belt (crossed out)
apricots
grapes (crossed out)
elastic
sunflower seeds
pumpkin seeds
filter fordyson
I puzzle over the last item for a bit, wondering what (or who) litter fordyson could be, before eventually realising it says Filter for Dyson (the vacuum cleaner).
Then I look at the sunset times that my mum has cut out of a diary (from 2013) and pinned up. On June 15th, the sun sets at 21:20 (about 13 minutes from now, assuming sun sets stay relatively stable as the years pass).
My dad’s still reading stories upstairs. My mum comes down and shuts the curtains in the porch, then all the other rooms.
I sit in the conservatory (which doesn’t have any curtains) and look out into the garden. I brush the tangles out of my beard with my fingers and contemplate existence, the purpose and meaning of things, the failure of my life, the failures yet to come, and how perhaps I might prevent them, and the more probably likelihood that I will drift into them aimlessly like I’ve done so during all of my life so far.
My pen runs out in the middle of the last sentence, so I switch to another.
Julie comes down from upstairs and asks me if I’d like to go for a walk after she’s put Florence to bed, and I say yes.
I clean my glasses with my t-shirt, then put the dead pen in the bin in the kitchen. I put my shoes and coat on and wait for my sister to come back downstairs.
My mum asks me to get the football I’d recorded for them earlier in the right place so they can watch it now, so I go into the living room and do that and then go back into the kitchen.
Patrick’s disembodied voice saying “mama, mama, mama” drifts out of the speakers of the baby monitor on the kitchen worktop. Then suddenly it starts playing a really loud tune, then it cuts out completely, then a minute later beeps urgently for a second, the stops again.
Two minutes later, Julie comes downstairs and we go for a walk over to the park together. It’s just after 9:30 when we leave.
We walk over to the par by the same route I took earlier in the day, then we walk the long way round the park, and up to the Byrhtnoth statue that looks down to the river. We talk about various things (cats, dogs, getting older, her children, tomorrow, today), then come back home via a slightly different route, past the school field, and talk briefly about the difference between school fetes now and how we remember them when we were children.
We see Venus (we think, but it might be Jupiter or Mars) glowing brightly in the sky to the west. It’s quite dark now, but not too dark so we can still see easily enough down the street.
It’s 10:25 when we get back home.
I take my shoes and coat off in the porch, then hurry to the toilet, for hopefully the last time today. I’m in there about for ten minutes, and take the opportunity to get out my notebook and write the last hour or so of stuff down.
In the front room, my parents are still watching the football. It’s 55 minutes in (they must have skipped halftime) and it’s 2-2. A minute or so later Nacho scores to put Spain 3-2 up.
At about 10:50, Julie comes down in her dressing gown, and all four of us watch the rest of the football together. Julie asks mum about when I was born. Mum says they thought I was going to be born a week earlier, but her contractions stopped when they got to the hospital.
In the end I was the only one of her children who was late, so really I should already be 40. In the last minute of the football, Ronaldo scores to make it 3-3. It’s 11:15pm now.
We watch about ten minutes of the post-match analysis (very little of interest is said), and then we switch it off.
Julie, Mum and Dad all go off to bed but I stay down in the front room. It’s 11:25.
I ponder going to bed early, as Patrick will no doubt wake me up early tomorrow morning, and eventually go upstairs to my room rather than watch a film.
I sit at my desk. The calendar on my notice board is still stuck on May, so I change that from May (Elephant Park Monument With Topiary, by Edward Gorey) to June (The Ampoo from The Utter Zoo, by Edward Gorey), then check my story notes/reminders pinned to the board, to see if there’s anything I’ve finished and can remove. I take down the Ikearotica note as I finished that this week, and also a generic “sort photos” note that’s been up there forever, and throw them both in the bin.
I look at the list of all my nieces and nephews birthdays, and think about whether to make a new list when Steven and Jo have their new child later this year, or just append the new birthday to the bottom, even though then the list will no longer be in correct date order. It’s not really worth thinking about now, to be honest.
My desk is a bit of a mess, but I can’t really be bothered to tidy it up.
I check my phone, which is plugged in on my desk, but I’ve not missed any calls or had any messages since whenever I last checked, a week or so ago.
I think about how desks are a perfect illustration of entropy, of the overwhelming disparity between the ease with which they accumulate disorder and the effort required to impose order upon them.
I notice on my calendar that yesterday was Flag Day. I don’t know what Flag Day is but it sounds faintly ominous.
I look at the things on my desk – an old one pint milkmans milk bottle; an empty Johnnie Walker whisky bottle that’s so old it lists the alcohol content as 70% proof rather than 40% or whatever by volume, and lists the volume of the bottle in fluid ounces rather than in millilitres; a white creature sitting cross legged in a jar, trapped for all eternity (a present from Holly, which I’ve had sat around in my room for 8 years almost now); a long beautiful feather from an unknown bird that I found a few years ago; a postcard from Sutton Hoo showing a burial mound covered in light snow; some notebooks, sketchpads, writing pad, etc, some full of words and pictures, some not.
My eye gets distracted from this by some movement in the corner, and I turn to look and see a spider climbing first up then down the door frame, where the frame meets the wall. The spider reaches the carpet, turns round, tries the climb again.
I open the window, pick the spider up in a tissue, and shake it out over the window sill, so that the spider falls down onto the driveway.
A gust of wind blows the tissue out of my hand and it flutters out and down the street.
I close the window, leaving it on the latch, then close the curtains. The top window is still open, and I can hear some cars passing on the road.
I go to the toilet, then brush my teeth, I get undressed and go to bed. It’s midnight.
It’s over.
It’s here.
__________
Notes:
1. Written on June 15th, 2018
2. And then unpublished until now
3. A spiritual sequel to the notebook I kept for The Museum Of Everyday Objects