‘Excuse me, mate, can you spare some change?' The balding middle-aged man in a winter coat had a Cockney accent. He was sitting against the whitewashed wall in the subway between the railway station and the High Street. It was the same guy who the day before sold me a copy of The Big Issue beside Lochaber House. I ignored him this time.

Fort William - An Gearasdan in Gaelic, as the road signs north and west of Crianlarich always remind us - wears its problems on its face. The biggest town in the Highlands - ten thousand people, a port and an industrial town (aluminium etc) - it has a fair number of manual workers. It also has deprivation of a kind the single linear shopping district of the High Street cannot conceal. Although you're sometimes hard pushed to be sure who is a tourist and who isn't, the lack of truly high order shops and the obvious presence of a number of distinctly low order ones tell you that the invisible poor are here somewhere. At first glance of course you'd wonder where they actually lived. Certainly not in the long line of pleasing residences (many of them B & B's or small hotels now) that line the main road into town. The poor in fact are tucked away in housing estates elsewhere - about a quarter of the population live in houses rented from the local authority - most notably in The Plantation, an estate which lurks out of sight above and behind the High Street. In Scottish government terms this area is identified as ‘severely deprived'.

Tourism is obviously crucial to Fort William's economy. And yet it seems to be struggling to transform itself into a modern tourist destination, its solitary ribbon of a high street and the nagging presence of its poor conspiring with its remoteness and relative smallness to make this transformation problematic. It isn't Edinburgh. It can't throw up the same kind of impermeable enchanting façade and it isn't big enough not to be dragged down by its blemishes.

One evening I ate in one of the pubs on the High Street, pub grub being hard to avoid in this town. I was browsing through the menu when the waitress came over and asked me if I was ready to order.

‘I'm a vegetarian,' I said. ‘I guess it'll be the mushroom stroganoff.'

She laughed. ‘Yes,' she said, ‘we do plough a rather narrow nutritional furrow in these parts, don't we?'

She was a striking woman of perhaps forty or forty five. She had red hair and her eyes were sparkling, playful and as blue as porcelain. Her name was Alice McTavish. She knew Newcastle and guessed that I came from around there. She told me she went to university in Edinburgh - to do biochemistry, she told me later - but had dropped out to work as a dancer for a while. Later she worked in hotels and restaurants in London and Liverpool before returning to Fort William to look after her disabled mother who suffered a stroke a few years ago. She works now as a waitress during the tourist season only, mostly just to keep in touch with the world, she says.

‘I used to work in McTavish's restaurant,' she said. ‘No relation!'

‘Where is it?' I asked.

‘It used to be in that space next to the Grand Hotel at the bottom of the street. It burnt down a couple of years back.'

‘Oh, I've noticed that space,' I said. ‘Aren't they going to put some new shops there?' The Grand Hotel is a bland concrete building. It's now boarded up. Like the hotel next door to it - which is larger and still a going concern - it seems to be a sort of relic of the bus tours of the Scottish Highlands, which I imagine must have been a really big thing in the 1960's and seventies and which you still sometimes see advertised in provincial newspapers. Although the bus tours are still going - nowadays they seem to bring in mostly the elderly or the less affluent from the industrial areas of northern England - they increasingly seem to be an anachronism, and ironically perhaps yet another albatross around the neck of a town that dreams of becoming a modern holiday attraction.

‘So what would you like to see them put in the space where the restaurant used to be?' I asked.

‘Oh, something up-market would be nice,' Alice said. ‘We could do with that. Maybe a nice clothes shop, maybe a Marks and Sparks. Maybe a jewellers and a nice wee art gallery. A Starbucks and a wee piazza. A good Italian restaurant? We could do with a bit culture around here.'

‘Whisky, shortbread and tartan is culture, Alice,' I said. ‘Isn't it?'

‘It is, and I love it, of course. But sometimes even up here we hanker after modern things too, you know.'

Alice's clothes were in fact very modern and fashionable - indigo, green and ivory, cotton and linen. She wouldn't have looked out of place in Edinburgh or London. I commented on this.

‘Aye, but I didn't get these at Mc&Co!' she said. Mc&Co is a somewhat old-fashioned and down market but reasonably respectable clothing shop which occupies part of the Lochaber House complex. There is a branch in Ashington too. Their demographic, as they say, appears to be broadly the rather less affluent social groups.

‘So where do you go to shop?' I asked. ‘Stirling? Glasgow? Inverness?'

‘Oh, no,' she said. 'I get my stuff over the internet. I got these things from Monsoon and Debenhams.'

‘So you don't really need an actual shop, do you? You can be thoroughly modern no matter where you live.'

‘Ah, but it's not the same, is it? A lassie likes to see what it is she's buying, you know, to try a few things on and all that.'

‘Hmmm. But why would Marks and Sparks put a shop here? Where would they get their customers from?'

‘Well, the tourists would buy stuff too. They'd get a lot of passing trade.'

This is oddly enough true. Even though most tourists would be able to get the same top or skirt in a branch of a chain shop close to home, it somehow becomes a different garment if it's bought on holiday, especially if it's in Scotland. On holiday we lose our spending inhibitions. We temporarily enter a different life-world, a parenthetical life-world of sorts. And things bought in Scotland are in any case mysteriously different. The spirit of Scotland inhabits them and gives them a special value, a magical aura. Place matters. It makes things what they are. It reconstructs everything, be it the book you read or a pop song you hear every day on the radio, an encounter with an otter or a brief love affair. Place makes transcendent souvenirs of certain memories. They become a part of the core of what we are.

‘Aye, but there'd be no customers in the winter,' I said. ‘There's the rub.'

Alice nodded. ‘I know,' she said. ‘I know. Thank God for the internet, eh?!'

Towards the end of the week I caught the steam train to Mallaig. As we chugged along the forty odd miles through some of the wildest and most beautiful landscape you could wish to see I found myself musing about modernity and the marketing of Scotland, the product, and the inescapability of me being a consumer of that product. Scotland is all rugged mountains, huge skies and vast stretches of water, Scotland is tradition and history, and it's easy to imagine that going to Scotland represents a radical escape from modernity and consumerism. But there is nothing accidental or unmediated about the experience. I go to Scotland to consume what I imagine is nature and a tradition of connection with nature.  I come to Scotland to confirm a construct I already have of what this place is. I come here to find what I know is here. It's a reassuring game and we all play it. The modernity is in the process, a process that transforms the substance of the world. The ancient is made new.

Modernity rests on layers of deception, none of them final. It is an onion without a core. It asserts as axiomatic that the new is better than the old. But it also says that nothing is ever good enough, that everything can be improved upon. It rests upon an induced endemic sense of dissatisfaction. We are persuaded to desire things we will very soon be persuaded to reject.  The layers get more pernicious and bitter as we peel them back. We are persuaded next that the products of the restless new world are more than mere things, that what we are is nothing less than the constellation of what we have or consume. We are what we consume and we are also therefore that which we desire to consume. We are what we want. This anguished sense of entitlement turns wants into needs. But despite this overwhelming urgency we will not want these things for long. Indeed this fuels the urgency, since we must have the thing we want while it is worth having and we know that this value won't last, that the shelf life of all things is limited. Modernity tells us we cannot and should not wait, because we are incomplete until we get the things we want. Soon we will be incomplete because of our association with these very same things. We live in a world where we love ourselves in the clear knowledge that tomorrow we are likely to despise ourselves. Soon our being will depend upon the next new thing. Modernity is a ruthless façade.

Modernity has no scruples and is endlessly flexible. The same thing can be sold twice. Modernity encompasses every deception. The traditional can be consumed as voraciously as the novel. The classic car, the country house, the work of art, the antique, the retro, the reproduction, the replica . . . There's a market for anything.  But there are things that can only decay. Modernity is cheap, because everything is made to be replaced.

When I got back I came through the subway again. On that day a girl was busking there. She had a good voice and played guitar with some grace. She wore maroon calf-length lace up boots with gaping holes in the toes. I threw a pound into her guitar case.

I walked down past Lochaber House and took a photograph of it. It lacks any discernible architectural grace; it resembles a giant breeze block, hollowed out so that termites can labour within its dank grey carcase. No-one could have designed this building with the idea that it might endure and be regarded as a in some way beautiful. It was surely constructed on the functional principal that it will never be loved and therefore no-one will cry a tear over its inevitable demolition in the relatively near future.

Over the road from Lochaber House stands the building that houses the Royal Bank of Scotland, a fine construction of grey and pink stone, built in 1911. It reminded me of a seashell in its deceptively delicate intricacy. Inside it I imagined bankers and cashiers and clerks would be going about their business like a scrupulous community of hermit crabs. Here we have modernity deploying the traditional to give a sense of something enduring and secure, the sort of place you'd think your money was safe and would be put to work in the pursuit of a decent, responsible society. Modernity occupies tradition in the way that some wasps occupy the living bodies of caterpillars by laying eggs in them; tradition is a paralysed, helpless host. I photographed the RBS building too, and then the Tesco Express building not far from it, another uninspiring concrete block.

As I was putting my camera back in my rucksack Alice came by. I told her about my day. We agreed that Glenfinnan station was very quaint and interesting. Alice was on her way to work. I told her I was leaving in the morning but I hoped to be back before too long. I asked her how her mother was and she told me she was fine. We walked together up the High Street. The cockney guy was near the tourist information centre. He was selling The Big Issue with another bloke who was also from the south of England.

Later that evening I walked alone down to the shore of Loch Linnhe and for a while watched the oyster catchers, herring gulls and hooded crows foraging on the shore.  A common seal occasionally popped its head up as it went about the business of finding fish to eat. The following morning I drove south, through Glen Coe, past Loch Lomond and Glasgow and down the motorway to Carlisle. I listened to the radio for a while. I followed the A69 east for a while and then took the military road along Hadrian's Wall. It was supposed to rain. It didn't though. I was looking forward to seeing De Kooning and hoped that he was well. And as it turned out he was.

.

However, the consequence of this is that we all work behind a facade. The facade sometimes is pulled down at Friday night drinks, when a huge crisis occurs or with an old friend. But these are the exceptions and the walls are rebuilt pretty quickly after any revelations of weakness.

Though, the reality is that we human beings are weak and frail and under pressure. Consider the following from Clive Hamilton in his book Affluezna:

The 2002 National Health Survey found that at any one time 13% of Aussies admitted to experiencing high or very high levels of psychological distress, while 23% reported moderate levels.

(That is not all that surprising; life is hard, work is not easy and juggling all the balls of existence keeps almost everyone on their toes.)

However, the survey also went on to report that in the 2 weeks before the survey 18% of Aussies used medication to improve their wellbeing. (About 4% using sleeping tablets, about 5% antidepressents, about 8% vitamins and supplements for stress, about 5% using natural remedies for stress.)

When you add in the alcohol consumption by Aussies, that falls in the high-risk alcohol use, then '27% of Australians aged more than eighteen years rely on mood altering substances to cope with daily life' (page 115).

In short, 1/3 of Aussies use some form of mood altering drug to cope with life. And this figure does not include illicit drug or illicit medication use to deal with mental distress.

At your work place while the facade may be up and everyone in their pods might seem in control of their little pod the reality is that many professionals are professional at keeping up a facade. We hide our stress. We hide our struggles.

As a Christian, at work, when did you last reveal to someone that you are finding life is hard? Not whinged, but just revealed the truth of the situation. When was the last time that you revealed that you turned to God in times of stress and duress? When was the last time you noticed that someone was struggling, life peeped through the facade, and you took the time to care and love them? Or, did you keep up a professional facade?

Deux architectures différentes mais deux mêmes couleurs de façades. Comme quoi les couleurs chaudes ne sont pas réservées uniquement aux habitations des pays du Sud !

It's been a relatively uneventful week at work, other than the two day strike, which wasn't that well supported. People live in relative affluence these days and are neck deep in lifestyle instalments. Globalisation is the only game in town. There's no longer a vital sustaining vision of an alternative society. The working class doesn't seem to know it exists. The masses have been unmassed. Work is fragmented. Nowadays most people work for firms rather than in industries; they have a different identity. The cultural context of unionism has radically changed, the political dimension is attenuated. Even the low paid explain that they don't believe in strikes and turn up for work. What they really mean is that striking is an expensive luxury that they don't see the point in buying.

There have continued to be regular sightings of the Arab in the white Mercedes, along with a smattering of Batmen, Rastafarians and Michael Jacksons. There was a further isolated sighting of Robin Hood, by Cheryl Armstrong again. But intriguingly a new, previously unseen visitor was spotted independently on a couple of occasions by two fairly reliable witnesses: The Man With No Name, complete with poncho, spurs and a stetson. On both occasions he was driving a yellow Fiat with steel wheels, and on both occasions he parked near Mandy's and got out to roll and smoke a spindly cigarette. As always, caution must be exercised when jumping to conclusions about these things, but it may be of significance here that Flinty's favourite film is The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

By the end of the week Lily and Debs had drawn up a book of the most likely new characters to be spotted during the next seven days. They've put it on flip chart paper and pinned it on the notice board in the team room.  Odds are currently being offered on the following:

Betting has been brisk. If Dr Who appears one of the admin workers, Jesse Upton, stands to win over £100. For that sum she might dress up like him herself. Lily says Debs has already ordered a gorilla suit, just in case. Shrewdly, Jesse has made an each way bet.

On Wednesday I went to Edinburgh for the Leonard Cohen concert at the castle. Edinburgh and I go back a long way and it holds many memories for me. I drove up during the day, stopping off a North Berwick for a coffee at the Westgate Gallery and a walk down to the seabird centre. It was very windy and the light over the choppy waters of the Forth and Bass Rock was dramatic and sublime.

In Edinburgh I left my things at the hotel and walked down through Princes Street Park and across to the National Gallery, where I mused over Raeburn's portraits for a while before making my way up into the crowds on the street. There was the usual rich mix of nationalities there, among them a lot of young Italians. As I was walking east near BHS a young guy in skinny black jeans, white training shoes and a black jerkin bounced up beside me and asked me a question I didn't catch. I looked at him over my sunglasses and asked him if he was street entertainer.

‘No,' he replied. ‘I'm a monk.' He had an English accent from somewhere south of Lincoln.

'Ah,' I said.

‘We have a monastery here in Scotland,' he said, with an enthusiasm that suggested the news had just come to him in a vision.

‘Okay,' I said. ‘So what's your pitch?'

He told me he was with the Hare Krishna movement. I wondered when they decided to give up the saffron robes, but I didn't ask. He asked me where I was from and I told him. He told me his group had a place in Newcastle and I said I knew and that I'd often bantered with his lot around there. He asked me if I was interested in meditation. I told him I'd tried it, yes. He acted a little surprised, but I felt he wasn't really that interested. He then appeared to veer off dramatically.

‘We've got a band,' he said, again as if he was channelling someone and this statement was as much news to him as it was to me. ‘We play monk rock!'

‘Monk rock?' I said, nodding and pulling a daft face. ‘That's very clever.'

‘No, no, we do,' the enthusiastic monk boy said, and putting his hand into his bag pulled out a CD. He gave it to me to inspect.  It had a rather amateurish looking deep blue and yellow cover. It was by The Gouranga Powered Band and appeared to have the title Mosher 6.

‘Do you know what a mantra is?' he said. I told him I did.

‘And do you know Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath?'

Again I answered in the affirmative.

‘Well, our band does mantras sort of in the style of those groups. Lots of people think meditation is about relaxation - and it is - but it's also about something else!'

‘So this is a hard rock meditation record?' I said. ‘Isn't that a paradoxical sort of thing?'

‘It is, yes!' he replied. I wondered why he was so excited. I was beginning to feel I must be selling him something and he liked my product. I looked down the track listing. The opening track is Gouranga Hey! The other five appear to have a common element:

            Dance & Mosh

            Sing & Mosh

            Hear & Mosh

            Krishna Mosh

            See Ya Mosh

‘They don't do Bangers & Mosh, do they?' I asked. He didn't hear me and I didn't repeat myself. I know Hare Krishnas are vegetarians in any case.

‘So what language do they sing in?' I asked. ‘English?'

‘Sanskrit,' he replied. ‘They're traditional mantras.'

‘Sanskrit, eh? These are hard rock Sanskrit mantras?' I nodded and read the song titles again. ‘Okay, so how much do you want for it?' I asked.

‘We are asking for nothing,' he said. ‘You can give whatever you wish to from the goodness of your heart.'

I put my hand in my pocket and found some change. I pulled it out and told him he could have it all. There was about £1.83. I poured in into his bag.

‘We usually get a little more than that,' he said. I wondered whether he'd lost his script for a moment or if his earpiece had fallen out.

‘Oh,' I said. I found two pound coins in another pocket and gave him them too. He must then have remembered his anti-materialist principles and offered to throw in a free book. I declined the offer. I said I'd read some of their stuff before.

I wove my way east through the tourists, passed the pipers and the Big Issue sellers and the occasional homeless person in a doorway with his sleeping bag, woolly hat and black and white mongrel dog on a piece of string. I crossed the street at some traffic lights and sat on a park bench under the trees near the Scott monument for a while. I was thinking it was going to rain. I made my way up Cockburn Street, stopping off at the Stills Gallery on the way to look at some photographs by Nicky Bird. I decided to eat and went into Bella Italia on the corner of the Royal Mile and North Bridge. I had garlic bread, a Caprese pizza and a cappuccino.

When she brought me the bill the waitress asked me where I was from and how long I was staying in Edinburgh. I said I was only here for one night, to see Leonard Cohen.

‘He was in here earlier in the week,' she said. ‘He was with his wife and daughter.'

'Really?' I said. ‘Leonard Cohen? Did you speak to him?'

‘Yeah,' she said. ‘I said "Hey, you're Leonard Cohen!"' She told me he was wearing a suit and hat and he looked kind of frail. She said he gave some free tickets to the guys who worked there.

‘What did he eat?' I asked.

‘I can't remember,' she replied. ‘But he kept asking for more cheese, I remember that!'

It was a nice enough evening as I strolled up the Royal Mile with the crowd, past the cafes and the bars and the shops of tartan and fluttering Saltires and shortbread packed along the sandstone ravine of blackened old buildings. I made my way to the castle and to my seat way up in the North Stand, high above the stage. I could see out beyond the castle and across city and out to the Lammermuirs. It was cool and breezy, but dry. Cohen came on stage to a great cheer. He was small and frail looking, wearing a well cut suit, a shirt and tie and a black trilby. From the moment he started singing the audience was in his thrall.

Cohen is a serious artist; he's no mere pop singer. It's claimed he's touring because he lost five million dollars to a dodgy business partner and needs to recoup some of this. I'm not convinced. How interested can a man be in money when he's spent much of the last ten years of his life in a Zen monastery?  Cohen is in his seventies now. He is gracious with his audience, genuinely solicitous in a sardonic sort of way. At some point he thanks us not only for turning up tonight but for showing "an interest" in his songs over the years. An artist's work is his bid to transcend mortality, and the coming silence for him (as for us all) is one of the dominant motifs tonight. Late on in the show he speaks the first verse of If It Be Thy Will, explaining before he does so that the Webb Twins (two of his backing singers) will then unfold the song for us. In other words the song will go on when the singer has gone. And the song itself is about ceasing to speak, and the context tonight makes the cause of that looming muteness all too clear: death itself. The set list was laced through with newly contextualised valedictions. Hey, this is one way to say goodbye. If this is a swan song, Cohen is singing for posterity. He wants his work to be remembered when he is gone.

Cohen's work - like his life, perhaps - is marked by the tension between retreat to the inner world of the self and activism, concern about and engagement with the outer world. Tonight's performance is heavily weighted with the late political songs from albums like "I'm Your Man" and "The Future". To my mind these songs have a maturity, depth and scope that history may value more highly than the narrower "love songs" he is perhaps still best known for - Suzanne, Bird on the Wire, Hey That's No Way to Say Goodbye, So Long Marianne, etc -  all of which he also sang in the show. The most powerful moments for me were tied up with those mature songs.

Cohen reminds his audience that in the "chaos and darkness" of most of the world it is a "privilege" to share these moments of "luxury".  Cohen is a social pessimist. I have seen the future/and it is murder, he says. Everybody knows the fight was fixed/The poor stay poor, the rich get rich . . . And everybody knows that the plague is coming/Everybody knows that its moving fast. However, he sees a space for joy and hope. Joy arises in a broken world where not that many bells now ring. Indeed joy can arise almost because things are broken, Anthem seems to suggest: There's a crack in everything/That's how the light gets in. He sings of "the holy or the broken hallelujah". The space for hope is an inner space, a solution which is private and individual, but there is a sense that for him this may not be really enough. One particular realm he compulsively explores is love. Love - like its sister, beauty - holds a crucial but difficult place in Cohen's cosmology. Every heart to love will come, he says, but like a refugee.  And, in another song, love's the only engine of survival. Chaos and darkness are the necessary conditions of Cohen's poetry; love is a necessary but somehow not quite adequate refuge. The heart for Cohen is prone to being a cold and lonely place. Cohen's universe is somewhat Manichean. The sacred arises amid the profane. Love is among the sacred things, but such things are less resilient than things profane, less solid. Sacred things are always fragile and fleeting.

Perhaps inevitably given that Cohen is a Jew born in the 1930's, the model for the catastrophe humanity faces is the holocaust. The failure is humankind is a failure of the heart, a failure to see humanity wherever it is and to always be fully human. Cohen sees the heart as a source of hope and survival, as a refuge from the world's darkness. He seems less confident about the heart's capacity to overcome or dispel that darkness. He sees real hope in social and political change - in Democracy. He sings that democracy is coming to the USA (implying that it isn't there yet) and says that the reason why it is most likely to succeed there (however it may truly look) is because America has the spiritual thirst. But change will require something enormous - the heart, he says, has got to open in a fundamental way. The failure of the human heart can perhaps only be guarded against by social and political change, but this will itself in turn require an inner change in individuals. Perhaps this will arise from culture rather than nature, although the dynamic here is obscure and seems to slide close to a hopeless circularity. But for Cohen hope is fragile. The very culture he sees as having the potential to achieve change is the same one whose moral bankruptcy he lays bare in songs like The Future and First We Take Manhattan.

His performance was spellbinding and absolutely focussed. Cohen is a modernist. He deals in hope and despair, in desire and the collapse of desire. He is looking to find order and value among the chaos and darkness of the world. And he is disciplined: there is not one thing about his performance that is ramshackle or casual. He is the model of composure and poise. He only very occasionally picks up the guitar. Most of the time he is clutching the microphone and delivering his songs with a word perfect intensity. His medium is language and he is exact: he places every word exactly where he wants it, exactly how he wants it. He is precise. The microphone sucks the poetry from his lungs as if it is an eternal ribbon of incontrovertible truth and wraps it around his audience, binds them to him and to one another and, by invoking the absent millions, to the whole of humanity. He conjures solidarity out of the darkness. Perhaps this is his paradigm for the heart opening in a fundamental way. His songs humanise us, at least for the time we spend in his company. We may care for one another a little more from here on in.  But solidarity is fickle and all too likely to melt into the air.

Cohen stalks the stage like a Godfather or a hoodlum. He has always been a poet of the city.  His persona encodes power, knowledge and urbanity. He crouches at times as if there is an invisible weight on his shoulders, like Christ's invisible cross. Sometimes he looks like an outcast or a plague victim or a figure from a Tarot card, thin and angular. Sometimes he resembles a refugee, sometimes a prisoner of war. Sometimes his body almost makes the shape of a swastika. Sometimes he falls on one knee and beseeches or pleads. He always sings with the hat on, but at the end of each song doffs it to the audience and makes a small bow.  He also occasionally takes it off and bows to a musician in his band after they have played a solo. He introduced his band members several times over during the show. As the waitress said, Leonard likes cheese.

The audience sat reverently. When I found myself singing along I realised I was usually doing so alone. Cohen has an authority and authenticity that seems almost anachronistic nowadays. But let us not be fooled: this is a performance, albeit a consummate one, and a persona is a persona, even if it is a persona he carries with him into his secret and ordinary life.

Towards the end of the show it began to rain. It was almost eleven o'clock and almost dark. The torches around the castle were burning wildly. Cohen ended with another valediction - the danse macabre of Closing Time. I walked back down the Royal Mile in the rain beneath a small umbrella. The lights from the shops of the Old Town glistened on the cobblestones. The crown spire of St Giles Cathedral glowed against the dark sky. I passed the new statue of Adam Smith gazing imperiously down Canongate towards the dark waters of the Forth. This statue was unveiled just a couple of weeks ago.  One newspaper commented that it was a sign of how far society had moved on that this monument to one of Scotland's greatest sons had been built in such a prominent site. A few years ago, they said, this would have been seen as a political act.  The project was proposed by the Adam Smith Institute. Margaret Thatcher gave it her support. Nothing at all political there, then.

As I returned to the hotel I sang The Future to myself:

On Thursday morning I opened the hotel window and leaned on the sill. It was a grey morning over Salisbury Crags and Arthur's Seat. One or two black-backed gulls sat on the tenement chimneys, which are often pretty much the same colour as their legs. The chimneys stand like rows of soldiers or tins stacked on a supermarket shelf, often ten or twelve in a line, on top of the great tenement stacks. Bare cactus-like shared TV aerials share the skyline with them. Buddleia has found a foothold on many of the high ledges and is blooming now in straggly lilac sprays. I drove south again, taking the old roads where I could and stopping off at Coldingham and St Abb's to look at some galleries and take in the views over the sea. It was raining most of the way home. When I got back Margaret was at work. The house was full of the smell of onions. The men were working on the Citadel. I walked through the house and opened a window in the conservatory and made myself a cappuccino.

‘So do you want to hear about Leonard Cohen?' I said to De Kooning. He jumped up beside me and rubbed his head against my shoulder. ‘Or do you want to listen to some monk rock?' I showed him the CD the Hare Krishna monk boy had sold me.

We sat watching the men on the scaffold and listening to the incessant rumble of their machines. The smell of diesel fumes floated in through the open window and on through the house.

On Friday I returned to work. I spent most of the day in my room, writing reports and replying to emails from those who'd been at work during the strike. At lunchtime I caught Lily and put a fiver on The Angel Gabriel. I was betting with my head. My heart would have gone with the Dalek.

.

Last week saw another big nasty nail driven into the coffin of democracy - and the protection of the environment - as Gordon slid the new planning laws past the sleeping electorate. It's true that most of the time all we can do is slow the bulldozers down rather than stop them. But when they're destroying irreplaceable and precious things, time matters. It's some consolation to be able to spend a little while longer with things we love before they're gone forever. Saying goodbye is so heartbreaking. It's a bit much to expect people to accept these things being whisked away from them overnight.

Speaking of night and things beyond our control, one day last week they were working on the Citadel site well after midnight. The Citizens were understandably incensed. The Council replied there were no restrictions on working at the site, contrary to the impression that both they and Griff had given previously. Just another glimpse of the horse that has no rein.

And of course the Citadel has continued to grow mercilessly. A vast labyrinth of girders and scaffolding has now consumed the skyline from our conservatory. It looms over our gardens and peers down into our bedrooms and kitchens. Its size is far greater than were ever led to expect. There is no doubt that the Council and their partners in this project - by which I mean the egregious Griff and the parcel of rogues he sups with - seriously and systematically misled the residents about this. The structure is now far closer to us than it was a fortnight ago and its shadow falls across our house even earlier in the evening than I thought it might. We are losing more than an hour's sun every evening. And because the Citadel has consumed the entire horizon we must now accept that every night the sun will be swallowed by it. This brutal, intrusive monument to ruthless privatisation will look down upon us for as long as we live here. We have lost so much more than we were ever told we would. We have lost peace and quiet, privacy, the sun in the evening, the darkness at night, the sky above the garden fence. I suspect we still don't know how much we will lose in the end. And just as they never warned us it would be like this, never once have Griff or his partners acknowledged the scale or depth of our loss. They probably never will. It's a disgrace they might have to pay out for if they did.

One evening this week Hugo in checked shirt and baggy jeans stood up on the boards around his pond, three ducks at his feet, elbows leaning on the top of his fence. He was gazing out at the Citadel. For the first time it seemed to me he was feeling the weight of its inescapable presence. He looked reflective, even despondent. I stood in the conservatory with De Kooning in my arms watching him. Margaret came in and I asked her how the Citizen's struggle was doing.

She shook her head. ‘It's like walking through treacle,' she said. ‘They just take all the fight out of you.'

She looked despondent too.

‘You're not giving up, are you?' I said.

She shrugged her shoulders. She said she wasn't but she was beginning to wonder what the point was now. Hugo was still leaning against his fence, his pond pump gurgling behind him.

‘At least the slippers are selling,' I said, trying to cheer her up.

She smiled half-heartedly and remembered she needed to ring Brenda about something.

Flinty was released from prison at the beginning of last week and has already wreaked havoc. One of his license conditions was that he must reside in Bedlington and is not allowed to enter the area north of the Wansbeck. However he is dressing up in various disguises and using various borrowed cars to enter the area and settle old scores, make drug deals and worry Mandy. Last Tuesday - the day after his release - he dressed up as Felix the Cat and drove north in a clapped out green Datsun to do a deal on some cowies with Black Peter from Newbiggin. Deal done it seems he made his way to Lynemouth and kicked seven bells out of Dekka Douglas for allegedly grassing him up to the police and getting him sent down. Dekka is undoubtedly a police informant and as a result appears to live a charmed life. It's said he's been involved in everything from armed robbery to GBH and money laundering but has never yet been charged with anything more serious than having a broken stop light. Dekka seems untouchable, although Flinty proved that this isn't literally true. Ironically Dekka seems blameless on this occasion. The grass was Elephant Carmichael, Flinty's best mate. Flinty is currently staying with Elephant until he can find somewhere else, and the word is that it was Elephant who pointed Flinty in Dekka's direction.  Dekka isn't likely to point out Flinty's mistake, of course: Flinty sees Elephant as his blood brother and besides Elephant is every bit as psychopathic as Flinty only three times his weight and twice as ugly. Dekka probably took the view that a hammering from Flinty was preferable to being mangled by the Elephant.

On Wednesday Flinty came over dressed as Bjorn Borg, wearing a blond wig, headband and tennis gear. He was probably inspired by Wimbledon. His vehicle that day was a red Toyota 4x4 pick-up, courtesy of Elephant's cousin. At some point during the afternoon he turned up outside Mandy's door.  Just before tea Mr Zee came out to go to the corner shop to get some milk.  Flinty seeing this jumped out of the Toyota and began to approach him. Mr Zee at first thought he was just any other man dressed for tennis, not a common site on the estate although not entirely implausible. However when this Bjorn Borg lookalike began to call him unsavoury names and to gallop towards him, Mr Zee realised who he was lurking behind the headband. He made off up the street, showing a surprising turn of speed for a man wearing knee length boots and a brown cape. It may be that Flinty is out of condition following his period of incarceration, because despite the obvious advantages of plimsolls and shorts he was unable to keep up with Mr Zee and quickly gave up the chase. He then swaggered back to the red pick-up and stood beside it in his white shorts, one hand resting on the bonnet, getting his breath back and glaring belligerently at Mandy's door.  For whatever reason he obviously thought that discretion was the better part of valour on this occasion, however, and quickly made his way back south to Elephant's. That evening Mandy received many strange phone calls, all from number withhelds. Some of these phone calls were completely silent, but on all the others Yvonne Fair's recording of It Should Have Been Me was playing in the background. It is Flinty's favourite song.

On Thursday Mandy, Mr Zee and the kids came into the office. They were requesting help with a house move to another area. Debs suggested they needed to inform the police about Flinty's behaviour as he was in breach of his release conditions.  Mandy had done so, but the police felt that the evidence - Mr Zee being chased by Bjorn Borg, and a dozen dodgy phone calls from an Yvonne Fair fan - wasn't enough to act on, even though they said they knew ‘with one hundred percent certainty' that Flinty was responsible. ‘Perhaps this was because Elephant Carmichael has told them so', Debs suggested.

The weekend was quiet, but on Monday Flinty went up to Amble to do a deal on some crack cocaine. He was dressed as a surfer - wet suit and Oakley's on his head - and driving an old VW camper van. On his way back he parked up opposite Mandy's for a couple of hours. Sparky spotted ‘the scary frogman' from the window.  He went away about teatime, abandoning the camper van on the spine road when it broke down. That night Mandy received five further unsolicited telephone renditions of Yvonne Fair's brash anthem.

On Tuesday morning Mandy came into the office to talk to Debs. She said she was thinking about going back to Flinty.

‘I thought you loved Mr Zee,' Debs said.

‘I do,' Mandy said. ‘But Flinty will murder him if he doesn't get me back.'

‘But Mandy the kids love Mr Zee, don't they? And they're shit scared of Flinty, aren't they?'

‘Yes, I know, I know.  But he won't let me go, Debs. He really will kill me too if I don't go back to him. You don't know him like I do.'

‘Does Mr Zee want you to go back to Flinty?'

‘No. He says I shouldn't do that. He says he'll stay with me no matter what. But he's scared, Debs, I can tell. He's terrified in fact, I know he is.'

Debs shook her head. ‘I'll ring the police again,' she said. ‘You need to see this through for the sake of kids. But you all need protection. I'll see what I can do.'

Debs rang the police who accepted that Flinty probably was ‘making a nuisance of himself', as they put it, but that without clear evidence that it was him and that he'd crossed north of the Wansbeck and that he was actually intimidating Mandy there wasn't a lot they could do. They said they'd alert the local Bobby and ask the patrol car to be aware of the address. Besides the odd musical phone call in the middle of the night things have been quiet since then. But Flinty won't go away, we all know that. It's only a matter of time.

I interviewed Hermann Evans last week. He was a great disappointment. Far from being the unapologetic absurdist anti-hero I was hoping he might be, he quickly turned out to be a blubbering Bavarian baby.  I was looking forward to the delights of a conversation with a Teutonic Dadaist. I got a man on his knees, a man who saw himself as a complete victim, and who, between the sobbing, while never admitting to saying anything whatsoever, said that whatever he did it was just in fun and he had been misunderstood. In short Hermann thought that senior managers must hate him for reasons not known to him or to me, and that my whole investigation was a shabby attempt to bring him down. 

I abandoned the interview because of his distress and suggested he needed to go and see his doctor. He didn't seem to me a well man. Interestingly enough it seems the distraught Hermann remembers the real names of people much better than his bold unsuspended counterpart. In this too he was an immense disappointment to me. I only hope that when we meet again he shows a little more spirit. I want to hear about Freddie Faust and the mysterious Mr Ferret, Brunhilda and Gay Goldilocks.

It rained again today. I went into the garden this evening with De Kooning while Margaret was cooking some onions and potatoes. A hedgehog wandered around the border for a while. The damp air was heady and thick with the swoony scent of stocks and pinks.  The yellow lily too is beginning to bloom in the grey evening. We went in and left the hedgehog to go about his business while he can.

.

I cannot explain why I am so fascinated by these walls which do look like a huge legoland scenario if you look at it as a whole but very different when you get close and just take a crop of the whole thing. This is what I have come up with now:

Somehow these crops are floating because a reference point is missing at least on those photos where you cannot see a keyhole nor the shape of a door.

The opposite impression is in the following photo where you clearly find a relation to what the reality is. I find the spell is lost here. But that of course is only MY opinion.

Don't forget to check out my photography website - I have uploaded a bunch of new photos about this theme.

The trespass went badly to all reports. Afterwards Margaret was particularly taciturn and disgruntled. ‘Just don't ask,' she replied when I asked her about how it had gone. It was obvious that the red girders of the Winter Palace had probably not been stormed.

As the week went on I gleaned a little more about the event. It seems there were probably a number of factors that contributed to its failure. Some were presumably more important than others, although the Citizens have not yet formally met to analyse it. Provisionally, the following elements appear to have been played some part:

Only seven people turned up for the mass trespass;

Geraldine ‘took over again' and dominated the confrontation with the site manager;

The site manager, Bob, was a nice guy and sympathised with them. Bob said he had a family to feed, he was only doing his job, and in any case there wasn't anything he personally could do to change things even if he wanted to;

The site workers either lined up along the girders ‘like bloody canaries' and waved at the trespassers, or they ignored them and got on with their work, thereby making a great deal of noise. Either way they distracted the Citizens and made rational argument difficult.

Geraldine was overdressed. She wore a long black coat, a black silk headscarf, and high heeled black boots. ‘All she lacked was a troika,' Margaret let slip at one point. Unfortunately Geraldine also broke a heel. This forced her to remove the broken boot and carry it around with her. She had to lean on Big Trevor's arm as they left the site;

Big Trevor ‘lacked discipline' and kept interrupting the exchanges, which consequently began to revolve around the issues of his glass chandelier and the poor television reception some people have been experiencing.

Vanguard putschism has apparently failed again. There appears to have been a clear failure to mobilise the masses to the extent originally hoped for and there are some signs of leadership issues.  The outcome of the formal post-mortem will be interesting. In the meantime I think we can anticipate little change of strategy from Czar Griffiths. The same water-off-a-duck's-back-ist approach as before will continue, marked by acts of mollification so insignificant and trivial that they will only further humiliate the Citizens and underline their impotence. Having your face rubbed in defeat is not a good place for any serious group of activists to be. No doubt strategy and leadership are issues that will vex them greatly in the coming weeks as they dissect the event forensically over many a pot of Earl Grey and many a fresh Jaffa cake.

Yesterday my dad asked me about the building of the Citadel. He'd heard it was massive and people were having problems with all the lorries coming and going. I confirmed that it wasn't a project that many people in its immediate vicinity regarded positively in any way. I told him about the attempted mass trespass and how it had turned out to be a somewhat ineffectual gesture. He shook his head and said this was always the way. ‘They just do what they want,' he said. ‘They always have as long as I can remember.'

We then got into a conversation about the failure of the Left to effectively empower people and achieve social justice. He repeated the tale I've heard many times about the General Strike in 1926 and my grandad being blacklisted because of his role in it. Heroic failure is an sustaining myth for the Left. Sometimes it seems to be the only thing that keeps us on our feet. My dad's conversation veered efortlessly from politics into ballroom dancing. He's always loved dancing. Before long he was telling me how many dance halls there were in the town from the nineteen thirties onwards. The Roxy was the main one, he  said, and The Tudor - where he'd seen Seaman Watson refereeing boxing matches - was just along from it, but there were dances in various church halls and other places on various nights of the week. ‘Everyone went', according to my dad, because it was the main source of entertainment in those days.  It was before the days of television and there were almost no cars around. Everyone walked everywhere, he said. That world is almost gone now, of course.

It rained quite heavily last night. By this morning it was drier but it had become very windy. The Slipper Shop Launch was scheduled to begin shortly after lunchtime and I spent the morning tidying away my books and paints in accordance with Margaret's order that the house must not look like a pig's sty when we have guests.  Margaret was laying out the slippers in their various places according to a vision that escaped me but appeared to perhaps be governed by the principal of diversity. She washed and dried the wine glasses and bottles of Sainsbury's Organic wines duly emerged. Pino Grigio and Cabernet Sauvignon, I suppose.

At about twelve thirty my rucksack was packed and I had my boots on. I was about to go when Brenda arrived. She'd been driven over by Tristan, who she brought in to meet me.  He obviously didn't always plumb on the Sabbath. Brenda gave me a kiss on the cheek, a new addition to her social repertoire, I guessed. Otherwise she hadn't changed much. Her hair is still as black as a guillemot, shiny and straight. Around her neck she wore a chunky black crucifix on a leather lanyard. A golden moon and silver stars hung from each of her ears. Her shirt was washed-out cotton, wrinkly and vaguely Indian. Brenda thinks of herself as eclectic, and would say this hotch-potch of pagan, Christian and exotic elements is evidence of this open-mindedness.

Tristan turns out to be a thick-set man of maybe forty five or so. He's not very tall, but has a boyish wide-eyed appeal about him. He has dark curly hair and a fashionably unshaven face. He reminded me of Diego Rivera, strangely enough, although not of Trotsky himself.

‘Nice to meet you, Tristan,' I said. ‘I've heard a lot about you.'

‘I've heard a lot about you too,' he replied. ‘From Bwenda and Margawet.'

Tristan, I now discovered, has a speech impediment. He cannot pronounce his r's. We had a brief chat during which I discovered that he does indeed see himself as a Marxist and has in fact been one for all of his adult life. His father was Rupert McLoud, who he told me was a notable left wing activist in the Manchester area thirty years ago. I smiled when Tristan told me this, not because I'd ever heard of his father but because calling a Marxist activist "Wupert" seemed so cute. I can see what Brenda sees in him, I thought. He's a likeable and accidentally quite amusing man.

Brenda interrupted our conversation by saying she'd brought some nibbles and they'd have to get everything ready. I put my rucksack on and went off on my walk. As I walked I passed the time in conversation with Mr Twistan Twotsky, my new imaginary walking companion.

'Is the game finally up for the Left, Twistan?' I asked.

'No, my fwiend, it is not. Histowical matewialism is alive and well. This is not the end of the woad. No, this is only the beginning'

'But the world is in terminal crisis, is it not?'

'The cwisis facing mankind, is a cwisis of leadership, my fwiend.'

'But does not Gordon nurse a ticking bomb as if it were a baby?  Time is against us, Twistan.  Barbarism is the best we can hope for, I fear.'

'The woad is long. We must make our own histowy. Think positively, comwade, and tell me, come the wevolution who will be first against the wall?' he said.

For a moment I hesitated. But an answer was waiting for us both.

'Gwiff!' we cried together. ‘Gwiff! Gwiff! Gwiff!'

And we walked on together, whistling The Wed Flag as we went.

My route today took me north through Bebside and down the hairpin bends into the Ha'penny Woods at the Furnace Bridge. I followed the river up to Attlee Park and then on to Humford Mill. I sat for a while at the weir listening to the wind rushing through the trees, watching the river and wondering if it was going to rain. I turned back soon after that because the path was increasingly muddy. Back at Humford I crossed the stepping stones and made my way up to the Horton Road. Out of the trees the wind was gusty and boisterous. I went back down to Bebside and then through Cowpen down to the river, before returning home at about six thirty.

When I got back the party was over but a few stragglers were still there - Geraldine, Brenda and Brenda's friend Jennifer, the one in financial services.

'Hi, Geraldine,' I said. ‘How's the boots?!'

She laughed. ‘Well, the boots might be gone but we certainly showed them we meant business, didn't we, Margaret?' she replied. 

Margaret laughed. ‘You remember Jennifer, don't you?' she said to me.  I didn't, but nodded as if I did. Jennifer was indeed a willowy blond, about fifty, tall with a long thin nose.

'I love your paintings,' Jennifer said to me. ‘Your work reminds me of Kandinsky.'

'Kandinsky?' I said. ‘Really. That's interesting.' I looked at the painting above the Napoleon clock. It was as much like Kandinsky as it was like El Greco. Jennifer proceeded to waffle on about a diverse and disparate assortment of painters as if she was a female Matthew Collings. And all the while she flirted with me blatantly, laughing merrily and repeatedly laying her hand on mine. She was tedious to talk to but I'll admit she did smell beautiful.

Later when everyone had left I asked Margaret how it had gone. It turns out that it was a tremendous success. No less than thirty three of the thirty five people invited had turned up, including fourteen Citizens - twice as many as turned up for the trespass - a local councillor and Mrs Fletcher, who ordered a pair of blue mules for herself and a traditional brown leather slipper for her husband. All in all orders for thirty seven pairs of slippers were taken.  Margaret was thrilled. Maybe Brenda was right after all and there is a right time for everything (in the case of a slipper shop launch party that time being quarter to three, of course).

'So what did you think of Tristan?' she asked me later.

'I liked him,' I replied. ‘He seems like a really nice guy.'

'Really?' Margaret said. ‘You really like him?'

'Of course,' I said. ‘Yes, I think he and I could become very good friends. Brenda's done well for herself for once.'

I tidied away the wine glasses and bottles from the conservatory and cooked myself a pizza. I sat for a while and read the Sunday papers. De Kooning came in and jumped up beside me. I stroked him and he began to purr.

'So what do you think, Twistan?' I said. ‘If they can give you thirty three good comrades can you give them the Citadel?'

'It's a mistake to believe in miwacles,' Twistan replied. ‘But when the time is wight tywants will twemble, walls will tumble, and the future will belong to an army of women in wed slippers!'

I nodded sagely. You can't say fairer than that, I thought.

NYCB dancers in the final pose from Robbins' Glass Pieces, photo by Paul Kolnik

Tuesday evening's program at New York City Ballet took the audience on a musical journey from Bach's solo piano and solo cello pieces, to an early twentieth century violin concerto by Alban Berg, to Philip Glass's minimalist music of the 1980s.  The performance was as choreographically diverse as it was musically, which speaks to the talent of choreographer Jerome Robbins.

2 & 3 Part Inventions, set to Bach's Inventions and Sinfonias for piano, was performed by eight advanced students from the School of American Ballet, as it was during its 1994 premiere.  The formal yet light-hearted mood of the piece was nicely conveyed by the dancers, and the clear formations and disciplined movement reflected the uncomplicated music.  I don't think this piece would look nearly as good if it were performed by older, more experienced dancers, because the choreography and simple piano music offer a youthful innocence that can best be captured by students. 

Nicolas Le Riche in A Suite of Dances, photo by Jacques Moatti

The formality of 2 & 3 Part Inventions gave way to a more casual atmosphere in A Suite of Dances, a solo that Mikhail Baryshnikov premiered with his White Oak Dance Project in 1994 (and which I was fortunate enough to see).  The piece has a fun, playful feel as the dancer interacts with the on-stage cellist, reflects on the music, and then seems to improvise a string of movement to complement it.  Nicolas Le Riche, appearing as a guest artist from Paris Opera Ballet, started sitting on the floor at the feet of cellist Ann Kim.  He rose to standing as she began to play selections from Bach's Suites for Solo Cello.  Le Riche was rather heavy on his feet and needed to be lighter and sprightlier in his jumps.  The piece is an opportunity for the male dancer to infuse the work with his own sense of playfulness, and I can recall how successful Baryshnikov was in this respect.  Le Riche, however, looked tired and lethargic, and lacked the finesse that is essential for this role.

The evening took a darker turn in In Memory of..., which is one of several Robbins pieces that addresses death and loss.  Alban Berg composed a violin concerto in 1935 that was dedicated to his friend's eighteen-year-old daughter, who had died of infantile paralysis.  In three distinct sections, Robbins' choreography illustrates the young girl when she was strong and healthy; then shows her illness and death; and finally, portrays her journey to heaven.  Wendy Whelan, in a pale pink dress, was delicate and vulnerable in the principal role.  She danced with youthfulness and joy in the opening duet with Jared Angle, who was an elegant and attentive partner.  Whelan wove through a corps of dancers who appeared on stage, suggesting that she was fully immersed in a community.  In the second section, Charles Askegard was a menacing, powerful death figure that seemed to envelop and nearly suffocate Whelan.  He manipulated her body and pushed and pulled her into different lifts and turns.  She grew more and more lifeless as their duet continued, and at one point, curled her body around his thigh and covered her face with her hands, nearly giving up and allowing death to take over.  The pace and violence with which death consumed her was alarming, but the final section, in which Whelan and the corps were dressed in white, illustrated her arrival in heaven and Robbins' acceptance of mortality as a part of life. 

NYCB dancers in the third section of Glass Pieces, photo by Paul Kolnik

Glass Pieces is one of my favorite Robbins ballets, which has a lot to do with my appreciation of Glass's music for this piece: Rubric and Facades from Glassworks, and excerpts from the opera Akhnaten.  The pedestrian movement in the first section reflected the repetitive structures and momentum of Rubric.  The large corps - with the women dressed in colorful leotards and skirts and the men in satiny tights and shirts - rushed about the stage in a repetitive pattern.  There is a distinct urban feel to the piece as the dancers walked quickly, avoiding one another and focusing on their destination.  Three couples in neon unitards appeared amidst the chaos, soaring with leaps and jumps and carefully maneuvering their way through the crowds.  Rebecca Krohn and Tyler Angle stood out for their precision and clarity.  Every so often, Angle made eye contact with his partner and the other dancers (while the others seemed to avoid any eye contact with their peers), adding a refreshingly human dimension to his performance. 

In the piece's second section, a line of women in silhouette traverse along the back of the stage, their simple pattern of movement reflecting the hypnotic, repetitive rhythm of Facades.  Maria Kowroski was mesmerizing and other-worldly in her pas de deux with Philip Neal.  She floated onto the stage in a lift and seemed to dance a few inches above everyone else.  The two dancers disappeared as seamlessly as they had emerged.  Percussive rhythms of Akhnaten were the focal point of the third section.  My eyes were continually drawn to Adrian Danchig-Waring, the clear leader of the cluster of men who moved as a pack, stomping and making distinct changes in direction.  The stage became more crowded and chaotic as the women entered, and the piece ended memorably with the dancers in silhouette, their arms thrown upward and backs arched.  As thrilling as this section of Glass Pieces is, it would be even more powerful if it included the female opera singing that one hears on recordings of this music.  The high-pitched voice adds an ecstatic energy that I think would only intensify the ballet's finale. 

Some of this exertion flows from my wish for the guests to be at ease in my home. (How awful it is to be grossed out in someone else's home!) The rest of the motivation flows from my desire to avoid embarrassment—I'd hate for the guests to encounter some of the build-up I've been too lazy to do anything about. Duplicity such as this is not all bad. Guests will likely be more comfortable when I am also comfortable, so the frenzy serves us both.

To be comfortable with who I am (and what my home is like) at any moment in time, though . . . that would be even better. That sort of comfort is steady and unchanging, unaffected by the external state of affairs. That's a peace-giving comfort. And I want to be that sort of comfortable to people around me.

In The Pursuit of God, A. W. Tozer said the cure for deliverance from the burden of pretense is found in the words of the Lord Jesus, "Become like children" (Matt. 18:3). Children are free from the burden of facades and shows, free to be comfortable to be with people no matter the external state of affairs.

I'd like to add that to my prep list.

"The most fatiguing activity in the world is the drive to seem other than you are; it is less exhausting to become what you want to be than to maintain a facade." —Sydney J. Harris

Some time today three part-worn car tyres on grubby black steel rims took up residence on the gravel beneath Hugo's railings. They do not look to me like Mercedes wheels, and I therefore assume they are not for the Alligator. I suspect it may be a long time before Hugo discovers their true purpose.

I rang Hermann Evans today and made an appointment to see him at his home next week. He was very upbeat and positive, I thought, and there were no signs at all that he is contrite or feels he has an apology to make. I am therefore anticipating that he will be thinking in German for most of our interview.

When I got home I had a pizza for tea and sat for a while in the conservatory watching De Kooning sitting on the hut roof surveying the Citadel site. I had a cappuccino and listened to the news on Radio 4. Gordon has been entertaining George today, although in reality the reverse process seems more likely to have occurred. Gordon is not a great entertainer. George on the other hand is little more than that, although he is of course famously self-deluding and dangerous, the kind of chump who makes anyone who stands next to him look just as big a chump. Today it was Gordon's turn, although like Tony this is not an area with which he has ever needed very much help.

There was some paw print evidence along the conservatory windowsill that it has been another dusty day.  I went out into the garden to see how the flowers were doing. Hugo was out. He had a bucket of steaming soap suds and a pale blue white-bristled brush in his hand. He was washing his moose. After he'd thoroughly lathered it down he took each of the three mallards and dipped them into the bucket too, giving them a quick once over with the pale blue brush too. He put them in a row at the moose's feet and then took the heron and dipped it head first into the foam and gave its flanks a brisk brush. He stood the heron on the lawn next to the ducks. Splodges of white foam slid off the whole menagerie and melted into the grass. Hugo emptied the bucket and then turned on his hose and rinsed them all. He put the wildfowl back in their places beside the pond, ensuring the heron struck almost exactly the same truculent attitude as before. He then took a chamois leather and wiped down the moose from antler to hoof, wringing out the leather from time to time to ensure the huge plastic ungulate was thoroughly dried and had no discernible streaks. I wondered if he would now wax and polish the creature. He didn't. He just stood back for a moment or two to check that it was once again free from all grime and pristine and then he went to find his hammer. A few minutes later I heard the thuds as he began to give the Alligator its usual evening pounding.

De Kooning had watched Hugo lathering his flock from his high perch on the hut roof. Once Hugo had finished he jumped down and ran across to me, tail in the air. He looked up at me and chirruped. He was hungry and had seen enough for one night.  I picked him up and took him in for a plate of fresh prawns. Later I had another cappuccino and read some chapters from a history of Scottish art. I've become quite an admirer of Henry Raeburn of late, for some odd reason. Earlier this year I was in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh and looking at his portraits again I was suddenly caught by their subtle magic for the very first time. It's strange isn't it how art, like many other things in life, can sometimes go straight over your head and you somehow just don't get it, but once you do it casts a spell on you that can never be broken.

Margaret's teeth are a little better today. She's taking tomorrow morning off work to join the Citizens on the mass trespass. Her Timberland boots have reappeared in the hall, I noticed, and wait dutifully between two pairs of Turkish mules, each made of iridescent silk, one pair green like the Mediterranean Sea, the other a shimmering fiery pink. I'm assuming that for the trespass it's the Timberlands she'll be wearing, although I'll be more than happy if I'm proven wrong.

We didn't do much yesterday (Sunday). We had a lie-in and then later went into town for a meal, followed by everyone's favourite Sunday activity: a trip to the supermarket!

While we were waiting for the bus back from town, my gaze was attracted by this sunlit facade and I took a quick photo. The dark area at the top is the roof of the bus shelter caught in my hurry: the bus was coming!

This view seems to me typical of the architectural salade that characterizes any big city and especially London, where you have buildings of different dates and styles crammed together, each doing its own thing without reference to any of the others.

I am often fascinated by buildings, especially the upper floors. It is not so much the architecture that draws me (though it does sometimes, especially if the building includes towers or turrets - I'd love a house with a turret!) as the mystery of who lives there or, better still, what it would be like to live there myself.

As I sit on a bench or wait at a bus stop, it is always the upper floors that catch my attention, and the details one glimpses such as a light fitting here, a grubby curtain there or a shelf of books further along.

The truth, were I to know it, would no doubt be banal but in the meantime, the glimpsed unknown evokes enchanting daydreams!

It's been a curious week.

Hugo has installed an elaborate Heath Robinson device above his pond, which presumably functions to keep the water pure. It is an arrangement of square black plastic tanks and gnarly white plastic pipes with a bewildering number of ninety degree bends in them. Any noise it makes is masked by the gurgle of the waterfall, but it does seem to be pump operated and has one particular pipe which drips perpetually into a reservoir of sorts. The installation was completed by Wednesday but the restocking of the pond was delayed because of a severe Citadel Dust Storm later that day.

Margaret, who has been having a few days off work in preparation for the Great Slipper Shop Launch, says that on Wednesday afternoon our street was like the dust bowl as a great swirling cloud of pale Citadel Dust descended among the houses. The effect was to make the whole neighbourhood a suburban mini-Pompeii: cars and lampposts, the leaves of hosta and fatsia japonica, chimneys and rooftops, conservatories, huts and gazebos, lawnmowers and wheely bins, sundials on plinths and bird tables, barbecues and reconstituted stone angels, gnomes, resin hedgehogs and wooden toadstools, green plastic chairs from Asda and Tesco's floral pattern loungers . . . . The foxgloves would have been choked. The birds would have fallen silent. De Kooning must have sat at the window in quiet stoical astonishment. Nothing was spared, Margaret says, everything was enveloped and disappeared beneath an eerie grey dust. Had lovers been lying kissing behind a wall they too would have been buried, suffocated in their last embrace.

Castle Hugo too must have been overlaid with a thick blanket of the noxious dirt that descended. The Alligator and the dwarf conifers. The henge, the platform, the shelters, the station clock. The moose must have worn a thick coat of the stuff and, I imagine, an undignified bird's nest-like wad must have accumulated on his brow between his suddenly somehow impotent antlers. The junkyard incongruities of Hugo's estate would probably for a while have been ironically unified by this catastrophe, in much the same way as a fall of snow can bring a miraculous harmony to absolute dereliction.

As it turned out, however, and as if by some strange act of grace, the catastrophe was short-lived and overturned by an apparently random act of nature: the wind got up. When I arrived home from work there was no more than a dusty grey film on the bonnet of Margaret's car to testify to the Vesuvian inundation that occurred earlier that afternoon.

As a result of her days off Margaret now has more direct knowledge of the consequences of the Citadel's construction. The noise is constant and cacophonous. Geraldine described it as like living next to the M1 motorway; Big Trevor says it's like living next to an iron foundry. And there is no escape from it from eight in the morning until teatime each day. Even if the dust clouds didn't occur and even if there wasn't a daily audience of workmen in yellow hard hats staring down into the gardens from the red girders above us, sitting out in the sun would no longer be a pleasure in any case because of the unbearable intrusion of the noise. The joy and relaxation of summer in the garden has been taken from us, certainly for this year and probably forever, since even when the construction is completed next year the school will open and all day children and teachers will come and go and peer down at us from the vast windows of the Citadel. And every evening the shadow of the Citadel will bring an early end to our day and cast us into a cold, inescapable gloom. This is the reality of the Citadel.  Griff and Gordon are taking from us the peace and privacy of our gardens, just as they are taking from us the pleasure and warmth of the evening sun.

And there are other consequences that have become apparent, such as the flooding of the gardens at the top of the street because the ground level has been raised in the Citadel field and in heavy rain the water pours into some residents' garages. And in some other streets the roads are permanently stained and greasy with mud, and on some corners the kerbs are crushed and crumpled and hazardous and unsightly. It also seems that many people are now experiencing difficulties with their television reception, presumably because the girders are interfering with their signal. Most astonishingly perhaps is the structural damage that has been caused to some houses by the quaking that has sometimes emanated from the activities on the site. Plaster has fallen of walls and coving has cracked. Big Trevor's bungalow has suffered particularly badly. A shelf fell off the wall in his utility room, scattering pegs and screws across the floor. But most alarming of all, a glass chandelier fell from his bedroom ceiling and shattered. Griff has offered generous compensation, of course, although, as most of us know, all the chandeliers in China can never replace the sun.

The Citizens are becoming more disgruntled by the day and have organised a mass trespass on the site next week to make the manager aware of their complaints. They are telephoning Griff and council officials relentlessly. They are writing letters to the press and to elected representatives at all levels. Their cause is a good one. But it is lost. Yes, it is a disgrace that we are all so powerless, but the duck's back of economic transformation demands our impotence. Democracy, like the environment or the truth or human and civil rights, must always play second fiddle to Gordon's toxic little time bomb, the economy.

This week our hapless leader. the Kirkcaldy Robot, his mechanical political virility wrapped in the usual shameless lies and clichés, rummaged deep into the pork barrel in his quest to forge yet more shackles for the population. I wonder what our MP was offered for his vote. Probably the name of the winner of the three thirty at Epsom, I imagine, some shares in Scottish & Newcastle, and the guarantee that the details of his expenses will never be made public.  And since this brave socialist certainly gave them his vote perhaps he got the price he demanded. They're not the things he should have asked for, of course, but then those things would have been paradoxical: freedom, honesty and a meaningful democracy. The Gulag and Gauntanamo Bay, the boot camp and privatised public services, the enterprise economy, the balance sheet and the like are all orderly little places and perfectly fine for robots, automatons and clockwork consumers. They have a narrow, seductive pseudo-rationality, and offer a reassuring Panglossian illusion of making sense of a confusing and arbitrary world. But humanity will always require a bigger, wilder space. 

Brick by brick, bar by bar, law by law, amendment by amendment, Tony and Gordon and those before them have built an invisible prison cell around each and every one of us. They watch us and they control us. They have insidiously but systematically disempowered us. They make laws on false pretences and then misuse them to curtail our every day liberties. They tell us it's to keep us safe from the bad guys, the guys we can't see but who they're sure are lurking around every CCTVed corner. But it's us they're watching. We are the suspects - you, me, Margaret, Brenda, Hugo, Mr Zee, possibly De Kooning too - each and every one of us.

On Friday I spoke to Hugo over the garden fence. He was wearing a soft black and white checked shirt and had the look of a lumberjack about him.

'I see Gordon's got his forty two days,' I said.

'Bloody good thing too,' Hugo said. 'He could have a hundred and forty two days for me. They should lock the bastards up forever.' 

'But these are people they haven't charged with anything. It could be you, Fletch. It could be me. Six weeks in the slammer for no reason?'

'It couldn't be me, mate,' Hugo protested. 'I haven't done anything wrong. These people are bloody criminals and terrorists!'

'If the police had much evidence that they were surely they'd charge them with something, wouldn't they?'

'Not necessarily,' Hugo replied. 'Things aren't always as simple as that, you know.'

'Aye, maybe you're right, Fletch,' I said. 'Maybe the police should be allowed to hold any one of us they like for as long as it takes for them to know if we're dodgy. Let's just hope they never have to release anyone without charge. It'd be sad to think they could have enough evidence to hold someone for six weeks in a cell without ever having enough evidence to charge them, wouldn't it?'

'I don't care how long they hold the scum, mate,' Hugo reiterated. 'It would be a good thing if they never let them out. If they do let them out they should send them back to their own countries. Bloody Moslems have no reason being in Britain, that's what I think.'

I looked up into Hugo's little cameras, glanced at his new shiny railings. He obviously doesn't imagine Gordon's iron shackles could ever fit him. He doesn't feel the weight of them on his ankles. I wondered if he thought bored Moslem kids had stolen his broken blue swing. I wondered if he thought the conditions for organised resistance have been taken from us, and I was about to ask him but didn't. I suspected I knew the answer already, and that in any case he wasn't a man who wanted to listen to me yammering on all day about politics.  He wouldn't want me to tell him that we might almost think that Gordon and his globalised gang already know hard times are coming, or that Parliament is even now fitting the deadlocks to each and every one of our cells. Or that democracy has an auto-immune disease and is progressively devouring the body of the electorate. A man like Hugo thinks he knows the nature of the world we live in and doesn't want to hear otherwise.

'I was sorry to hear about your fish,' I said.

'Yeah, it was a shame that. I'm not sure what happened to them'

'Oh, I'd heard it was the dust from the Citadel site,' I said, a little confused.

'Oh well, who knows,' Hugo replied. 'Fish are temperamental things sometimes. The truth is it could have been anything, we'll never know.'

'But the dust is a problem, isn't it? I mean, it could have been that. Maybe you should do a Big Trevor and get some compensation.'

'Nah,' Hugo replied, almost scornful. 'Hey, listen, I've worked on the buildings and you've got to expect some dust and noise otherwise nothing'd ever get built. Those lads are just doing their jobs, that's all. They're not committing any crime, they're just trying to earn an honest crust. They could do without any earache from us.'

'But what if they're killing your fish?'

'That'll not be what's killed them. Nah, it's probably algae or mites or something like that. You can't go accusing those lads of things like that when there's no proof that they did it. Hey, I'm surprised to hear you saying such things after the way you just went on about the Moslems!'

Hugo and I really do live in rather different worlds. I laughed and went in, telling him I could eat a horse.

All week boxes of slippers have been arriving and all around the house various constellations of the critters have taken their places, some lurid, some twee, some silly, some garish, some drab, some meretricious, some cloyingly sentimental. But it's an ill wind that blows no-one any good, and yesterday Margaret told me she'd persuaded Brenda that the launch party should be postponed for a week because our conservatory was a disgrace as it was still covered in an unsightly film of Citadel Dust following Wednesday's eruption. Furthermore De Kooning's comings and goings had left footprints of the toxic dirt in and out of the kitchen and along various windowsills and the last thing they wanted was a health and safety issue spoiling the day. They have agreed to hold the party a week today.

'But what about my walk?' I asked.

'Well you can still go and do it, can't you?' Margaret replied.

It has been quite cold today and threatening to rain between the sunny spells. I walked over to Lysdon Farm and down the Gloucester Lodge on the bridleway. From there I made my way back along to South Harbour, and thereafter to Bath Terrace and into the town centre. I went along Regent Street and Hodgsons Road and all the way up the Kitty Brewster. I made my way back across the fields, following the railway line to Newsham and out on to Pheonix Street.

When I got back Margaret told me her grumpy teeth were playing up again. She's back at work tomorrow and while it may be just a coincidence it does make you wonder, doesn't it?

'Do you think I look like a Moslem?' I asked her.

'I don't know,' she replied, looking me up and down. 'I mean, what does a Moslem look like?'

'Yes, that's what I thought,' I said.

I went out into the back garden with De Kooning. Hugo was at his pond. He'd bought some new fish and was slipping them from their plastic transportation bags into the newly purified water. I also noticed he's bought two more plastic mallards to go with the original. They are both drakes and both identical in every way to the other one. I noticed too that the sun was gleaming on the moose's back and head. It is obvious that whatever Hugo thinks of the dust he will always make sure his moose is kept looking spick and span.

The flag irises are past their best now and collapsing under their own weight. Their blue petals are turning thin, brown and papery. However, the lilies are growing well now, the honeysuckle will be in bloom very soon, I think, and the blue cornflowers are making a good show already. I ran my finger through the dust on the top of one of the solar lights, went to fill the watering can and told De Kooning I thought we could probably do with a bit rain.

Galloway was grand.

Things change so quickly at this time of the year. While I was away the climbing rose has become an unruly in your face splatter of ragged golden blossoms. The foxgloves are at least six inches taller than they were when I left, their spires all beginning to unbutton now in whites and pinky-purples with lovely speckled gapes. The catmint is a higgledy-piggledy drunken sprawl of blue stalks. And the flag irises have all flowered, a cluster of sirens in diaphanous hoods of watery blue, each one as pale as a jackdaw's eye. They remind me somehow of the Breton women in Gauguin's paintings. They have that same shy allure but without the blackness.

Hugo has painted silver the spear-like tip of each black railing along his garden wall. I couldn't see any new flotsam in his front garden. His security cameras stare resolutely at the street. The Alligator still lies where it has lain since time immemorial, and looks no different than it ever did. This is not to say no change has occurred, of course. Some changes are subtle and almost imperceptible in the absence of a running record to document the process, be it transformation or decay.

The Citadel is truly massive now, and is extending not only vertically but horizontally too. It must now be more than two hundred metres from one end to the other, expanding like a giant red crab in a series of huge extensions, each one mitred into the preceding one in an obtuse articulation, as if this monster will soon enclose us all in its dark embrace. It looks down on us anonymously, like the stadium at a race course, or perhaps like the vacant tiers of an amphitheatre. It dominates us already and already it is clear that it will literally blot out the sun for much of our street. The roofline of the Citadel will be our new horizon. Although our house will be less affected than some, I estimate that for the greater part of the year the sun will now set at least several minutes earlier than it did before because of the irresistible shadow falling across us. And in the summer months I estimate we will lose the sun from our conservatory perhaps forty-five minutes or an hour earlier than we have done in previous years. The Citadel will make our days shorter and take away our evening sunshine.  Griff obviously doesn't much care that we will now end our days in the dark shadow of this grotesque monument to his self-importance. And nor does Gordon. The so called modernisers care little for the sun, except as something else they can steal from us with one hand and sell back to us with the other.

I picked up De Kooning and together we surveyed the new landscape. Hugo was in his garden doing something to his pond.

‘What's Hugo doing to his pond?' I said to Margaret.

‘Who's Hugo?' she replied.

‘It's Fletch,' I replied.

‘Why did you call him Hugo,' Margaret said. ‘It's not his name.'

‘Yes, I know that,' I explained. ‘But from the way he looks I thought it ought to be.'

Margaret rolled her eyes.  She told me that the man known to some of us as Hugo but more correctly referred to as Fletch was cleaning his pond. While I was away it seems all his carp have died. He doesn't know why, but Margaret is fairly sure it's because of contamination of the pond water with dust from the Citadel.  She may well be right, of course, although Griff said the hypothesis was simply ridiculous when Geraldine rang him. The Citizens have a sample of the polluted pond, however, and are determined to get it analysed by an expert to prove that Citadel Dust is to blame. And as Margaret says, if Citadel Dust can kill perfectly healthy fish just imagine what it might do to us. The same thing, of course.  Obviously a brand new slogan is ready to be born: Citadel Dust Kills.

As the pond cleaning machine whirred away Hugo sat on an old kitchen chair, the moose standing at his right side. A scene from Ragnarok crossed my mind.

‘How was Galloway?' Margaret asked.

‘Oh,'  I replied. ‘ Galloway was grand.'

‘That's good,' she said. ‘By the way, we'll be having the Slipper Shop launch party next Sunday. People will be arriving at about two and we're expecting it to go on till about six or so. Perhaps you can arrange to go walking during those hours.'

‘I'm sure I can, yes,' I replied.

'Oh, and before you say anything, yes, I've changed the clocks. It's on Brenda's advice, in the light of the coming launch party. She feels that we need maximum equilibrium and has suggested the new time on the basis of Feng Shui principles. She feels that this will be the most propitious time we could possibly have.'

'That's fine with me,' I said. 'No problem.'

I hadn't actually noticed that the clocks had been changed. I glanced at the Cuckoo in the kitchen. We now have twenty three clocks all saying quarter to three. It will take me a little while to see if I prefer propitious equilibrium to the spiritual optimism of the previous time. But if it sells slippers I guess it would be churlish of me to care much either way.

It was a sunny afternoon, but Margaret told me that generally the week had been rather cool and that there'd been rain at times. I told her that the weather in Galloway had really been much better than that.

Thing is, I thought I was doing well in that area. I made a conscience decision to live life freely and openly... but I am starting understand that I was simply telling myself that. I am starting to see that in reality, I live within a realm of safety I constructed for myself... under cautious freedom. I find myself cautiously happy at times... waiting for the next disaster to hit... and it is inevitable that the disaster does hit. Usually that disaster involves a missed opportunity to love.

I am always pumping optimism from my tongue and I have gained the reputation of being the girl who is bothered by nothing. I always see the brighter side of things... and the truth is that I force myself to. I tend to stay in relationships long after they have soured because of my forced optimism... and in the end, I will have suffered greatly. This is an anomaly in that none of my relationships have lasted more than 2 years... and most of them no longer than a few months. Why?

I have never let anyone in completely. I recently opened myself to my husband in a way I have never done before... and I feel like I have lost a part of myself that I kept completely as mine. I am told I am emotionally selfish... and I am seeing more and more that this is true. I don’t want to love until I know love is mine.

So many facades! I have the one I put on when I get home during visits with my parents and siblings. I have the one I put on when I get to work. I have the one I put on when I get home... which is being threatened with exposure. Constantly trying to be perfect for everyone. Then I have no energy left to be the perfect parent to my children... and they seem to get the worst of me because when it comes time to be the perfect mom, I am tired... and they don’t get the energy and attention they deserve.

But this is my attempt at regaining me as I truly am. And I want to find peace.

]]> http://yammering.wordpress.com/?p=52 Wed, 28 May 2008 21:26:41 +0000 yammering http://yammering.wordpress.com/?p=52

It rained this morning for the first time in a while. The world was soft and grey.

Mandy, Mr Zee and the kids were in reception when I arrived. Mr Zee was in his full brown as peat regalia - mask too - and standing in his characteristic legs astride, taller than a tree posture. He was holding Sparky's hand. You have to admire any man who finds the time to take this much care over his appearance in the morning.

‘Debs is on holiday,' I said. They knew. The duty worker was seeing to them. They were still having benefits problems. Sparky was wafting a new plastic sword around and looked happier than he has for a while.

Michelle was on duty and she was on the telephone to the benefits agency when I went through. They were being their usual helpful selves. Michelle was getting nowhere fast and they weren't offering any suggestions as to how Apple and Sparky might be fed today. It wasn't their fault, they said. It's the system. They can't do anything about it. The tax credits needed sorting. Mandy was up to her limit on social fund loans. They couldn't give her a crisis loan. They'd try to get it sorted by the end of the week. The usual script.

‘So should we suggest they become beggars instead - or buskers maybe?!'  Michelle put the phone down and looked at me as if she was gobsmacked.  ‘Or should I say Mr Zee should just go and do a bit burglary - he's got the mask for it?!'

She shook her head in dismay. It's always like this, she was saying. I laughed.

‘Oh, it'd be beneath the dignity of a man of Mr Zee's standing to be involved in the felonious acquisition of someone else's property,' I said. ‘And besides, he'd stand out a mile at the identity parade.  Give them twenty quid and tell them to come back at the end of the week if their benefits still aren't sorted.'

Income support benefits are meagre and inadequate, and the whole system seems designed to be as difficult as it can be. The poor are still out there, even if they've have been rendered largely invisible by governments who want to pretend they don't exist and who turn the visible few into miscreants and fiends, the kind of people who mug old ladies, drag tiny toddlers into the bushes in the park, spray paint obscenities across the walls of public toilets, set pit bull terriers on meter readers. The kind of people who would steal a broken blue swing. Yobs, junkies, psychos, perverts, scroungers and paedophiles . . . The tabloids remind us of the cast every day. The fairy tale tells us that the poor are basically a bad lot because if they weren't they'd have money in the first place. Or possibly because Gordon has turned them that way. Which ever way you throw it though, the undeserving poor are now the only poor there can possibly be, and Mandy, Apple, Sparky and Mr Zee must therefore be numbered among them.

Michelle gave Mandy the cash and she, Mr Zee and the two children set off in the direction of Netto's. Shortly afterwards Lily came in chuckling, having just encountered Mr Zee for the first time as he was leaving the office.

'He's not for real, is he?' she asked, rhetorically.

'I'm afraid he is,' Michelle replied, 'which is more than you can say for the benefits agency. Put the kettle on, Lily.  Let me make you a brew.'

I had to go to Morpeth this afternoon. The rain had stopped and a warm haze floated among the hedgerows and trees as I drove back by Plessey Woods and over Hartford Bridge. When I got home Margaret was standing on the pavement outside of Geraldine's house. She and Geraldine were having an animated discussion about the Citadel. I pulled into the drive and looked up at the red girders glaring down at me through the mist. Hugo was in his castle bolting spiked black railings to the top of his garden wall.

'Here, you all right, mate?' he shouted over.

'Yeah, not so bad, Fletch. You've got yourself a few fortifications, I see.'

He laughed. 'Yeah, not bad, are they?'

For tea I had carrot and coriander soup and a few thick slices of olive bread. Margaret was still talking to Geraldine. I sat in the conservatory drinking a capuccino. I asked De Kooning if he'd like me to read something by Larkin to him. He jumped up and sat down beside me. We didn't bother with the Larkin. We just gazed together at the scaffold in the field beyond the house.

Yesterday was Whit Monday. Or at least it used to be. The Day of the Holy Spirit, the day after Whitsun, now best known to some of us because it reminds us of a poem by Philip Larkin. It's the spring holiday, a big day in the Retail Park calendar. I'm not sure that many people choose to marry at this time of the year now.

It was sunny and dry, although there was quite a strong north easterly wind. It felt cold. I went out walking, down along the harbour and up the river to Kitty Brewster and through Bebside. I made my way back by the Plessey wagonway track. The usual shirt-sleeved gaggle of chirpy locals was standing outside smoking at door of the Willow Tree.

When I got home I went out into the back garden and cut back the laurel. Big fat flower buds have suddenly appeared on the flag irises, one of my very favourite flowers. The French lavender is beginning to flower too and the lilies are stretching a little higher each day.  Golden yellow buds are swelling all over the climbing rose and the tight little reddened nodules of the honeysuckle tell me the garden will soon be full of its swooning scent.  Summer is all but here now.

I went back into the conservatory. Margaret was reading. A pair of fluffy maroon mules sat on the coffee table beside her. I should have bought the chicken wire when I had the chance.  I went through to the living room and put on the Decemberists and stared for a while at the painting of Rowhope I've been working on since I was sick a couple of months ago. I've slowly taken a lot of the yellow out of it, yellow being in my mind the most sickly colour. The painting is unusual for me in that it has no sky. My paintings depend upon their skies most of the time. The painting of Rowhope is an attempt to do without a sky. I also want it to look as much like a map as a representation of the scene, although not more so. That's tricky, I found. The painting has some good angles and pleasing lines and it's certainly a lot less nauseating than it was. Perhaps it's time I let it go.

In the early evening Hugo and Mrs Hugo came home. He unloaded some spiked railings from his van. A little while later I heard him drilling the walls outside. He was installing CCTV. The loss of the swing has obviously made him more insecure than I'd first imagined. Hugo's world is being fortified. Sometimes you can't help thinking that even a little affluence is dangerous in a world where needs are constructed by spending. When money is burning a hole in your pocket it's easy to imagine there are dragons in the world that only shopping will slay. Before too long I imagine Hugo will have battlements and a drawbridge - just as soon as Argos get their stocks in. And why not? He can afford them, the Daily Mail says he needs them, and they will make his property thoroughly modern and highly desirable even in a difficult housing market. This is the future. Electric fences, gun turrets, guard dogs, searchlights and sirens, laser trip wires, beartraps among the lupins, landmines among the gladioli. This will be the ordinary life of the ordinary aspirational man.

When I came in tonight I glanced up at Hugo's cameras. He has two and they seem to be positioned to ensure they cover not only his whole front garden but the footpath in the street too. In fact I would guess that he has wide angle lenses and that our garden path also appears on his monitors. I wanted to give him a nervous little wave. I wondered if under the Data Protection legislation I had the right to ask him for copies of any video recordings of me. It's a little disconcerting to think that Hugo will know all my comings and goings. He'll know if I'm on foot. He'll know if I'm carrying my old umbrella. He'll know if I'm wearing a red woolly hat. But I guess this is a price worth paying if it ensures that never again is a broken blue swing purloined by a kid in a polyester suitlet.

The Crane Wife is a fine album, at times quite overwhelming.

I was late in from work tonight. There was a beautiful clear blue sky and very little wind. The trees in their new leaves were luminous and green, fidgeting casually in the quiet of the spring evening. I had pasta and garlic bread for tea.

About seven thirty I heard Hugo beginning to saw. He sawed for about twenty minutes. I haven't looked to see what he's constructing - it might be an annex or extension to his henge, a new shelter, or perhaps a fine pavilion of some kind - but I did notice on my way in earlier that some old flagstones have already appeared in the newly tidied bare expanse of his front garden. Primal disorder is reasserting itself or, perhaps, the old order is simply returning.

As I waited for the Time Team special on Iron Age hillforts I watched a programme about the influence of Christian fundamentalists in British society. The programme included film taken in a so-called Faith School. The children there are taught that the moon is only six thousand years old, and that this is about the same age as the Earth itself.

The Time Team programme took us back to ways of life that must have come into existence long before the moon ever shone. It seems clear now that human beings were walking the Earth long before the Earth was even here to walk. There's no reason therefore why we shouldn't keep walking it long after it's gone. The  market for footwear appears to be futureproof, a prospect which should encourage Margaret and Brenda.

Gordon has posted himself on YouTube. He'll answer all our questions at the end of June. 

They're building a Citadel in the fields behind our house. Actually it isn't really a citadel, it's a new school. Margaret is part of a group known as Citizens Against the Citadel, CAC, or The Citizens, as they call themselves. They are loosely knit alliance of the disgruntled and discounted whose motivations are probably complex and varied but who are united in their feeling that the Citadel is an abomination and that building must stop now. They are right that the building will be gruesome and that it is already ruinous to the quality of life around here, and that it is an imposition and something about which ordinary people were never given any real say. It's true that the consultation was a sham. It's true that the Citadel Construction and Development Company - led by the Tyneside businessman Sir Toby Griffiths (‘Griff', to the Citizens) - misled local residents about the scale and impact of the project.  But the Citizens are almost certainly wrong in believing there's anything very much they can do about it now. They won't even get an apology from Griff on this one.

The phone rang about eight thirty. It was Geraldine. She lives across the road. She doesn't work now, but her husband, Mick, is a council officer of some sort. Geraldine, who has been a leading light in CAC and for whom Margaret really doesn't care very much, was ringing to tell her that Griff's men were working and they shouldn't be, because it was Saturday. Griff had said that Saturday working would not happen. This is the latest in a string of broken promises. Margaret's response was predictable and instantaneous.

'They're bloody kidding!' she said. ‘Let's get everyone together and get around there and stop it. Let's get Griff over here NOW!' And so on.

The general strategy of the Citizens is to rant among themselves by telephone or over coffee and chocolate digestives in one another's front rooms and then, one after another, by telephone, to bombard Griff, his minions, local politicians and council staff with unbridled disgust and indignation and, if the moment calls for it, a serving of personal abuse. Needless to say construction of the Citadel hasn't been delayed one rivet as a consequence of this strategy. Water and ducks' backs come to mind.  Nevertheless the fight must go on.

Margaret rang a couple more Citizens and began to make ready for the incursion into the Citadel building site. Her battle dress was a pair on Marks and Spencers jeans, her old but little worn Timberland boots, a grey sweater, her old red fleece and black gloves. It was a cool morning and it was drizzling; hypothermia on the Citadel battlefield was a real danger. I lay in bed, De Kooning at my side, pretending to take no notice of all this activity.

‘Have you heard that bloody racket?' she said.

‘Er, yes,' I mumbled, as if still slumbering. ‘I thought I'd heard something. Is it Fletch?'

‘No, it isn't bloody Fletch - it's the Citadel men. They're now working on a Saturday!  Can you believe that?! They've got a bloody nerve. Well, they're not bloody well getting away with it this time, I can tell you!' And so on, again.

I ignored her and pretended I might be unconscious again. She left to meet Geraldine and the other Citizens to go into battle. The Citizens, curiously enough, are more or less all women, an Amazon legion. With the exception of Big Trevor, of course, who doesn't work and likes to insinuate his booming and bellowing into any context where it might make what is essentially always only a textural contribution. But almost everyone agrees completely with the Citizens' complaints, even if they never join the battle. Hugo might be the exception here: so far as I can tell he hasn't even have noticed that the Citadel is being built. If he has he must regard it as just another extraneous object that's fallen from heaven. The right attitude will be to accept it with equanimity and to leave it exactly where it is. Haphazardist politics tend to be marked by a passive acceptance which at times can look very like complicity or collusion.

I didn't expect Griff's men to stop working before lunchtime. I did think however that it might be a good idea to get up and go out for a while. De Kooning looked at me: he agreed.

It's not that I too don't agree with the Citizens and think their cause isn't a good one. It's just that the battles are futile if the war is already lost. They are no more than quixotic gestures, and while I know this sort of comic-tragic futility is what makes us human, sometimes you can have just a little too much futility in your life. It's not always good to bang your head against every brick wall you find. Modernity is a steamroller and it will flatten us all. We will all become one dimensional people, as Marcuse said long ago. The future is a Citadel: massive, inhuman, noisy, computer generated, absurdly geometrical, obsessively orderly, built by robots to accommodate the robots we will all become.  It will be lifeless and it will not belong to us. Gordon, Griff and their like are at the wheel and the whole planet is their building site. Start saying goodbye to the things you love, Maureen, because this is the way the world really ends.

I left Margaret a note stuck to the top of her laptop.

Dear Margaret, modernity is a steamroller and it will flatten us all. The Citadel Men are unstoppable. I've gone shopping as there are some things I need. Please feed the cat when he comes in.

I went to see my dad this afternoon. He was watching an old film version of The Importance of Being Earnest on TV when I got there. I told him that they were knocking down bits of Park Farm in Newsham. He was born and grew up there so I thought he'd be interested.

‘Where is it?' he asked.

I described its whereabouts and he told me this place was always called Thompson's Farm when he was a kid. He used to play around there sometimes. I told him I'd taken some photographs of it just in case it was demolished. He went on to tell me about all the other buildings there used to be at South Newsham - the pit, the winding house, the rows of houses, the school and the Star Foundry. They're all gone now, of course.

I asked him what pubs there were near where the shipyard used to be. He said they included The Sun, The Ship, the Fox and Hounds, and the Blagdon. They're all demolished now too. He told me that a boxer called Seaman Tommy Watson had been the manager of the Blagdon for a long time. It seems Seaman was a good fighter and had fought Kid Chocolate for his world title at Madison Square Garden. He lost on points but some say he would have got the decision had the fight taken place over here.

When I got home I asked Margaret how the visit to the Citadel site this morning had gone.

‘I was a complete and utter waste of time,' she said. ‘Geraldine just took over.'

De Kooning was in the conservatory. He sat with me as I read the newspaper. In an interview Cherie Blair says Tony is a socialist. I laughed out loud and, for a moment, De Kooning stopped cleaning his jet black face.

Margaret had gone in the bath. She was going to a poetry evening at Brenda's house this evening. In two days time it will be exactly seventy five years since Seaman Tommy Watson lost to the little Cuban in New York.

When I left the house for work this morning I saw Hugo on his garden path, motionless as a plastic replica, arms at his side, legs set apart, gazing fiercely towards the gate.

‘Morning, Fletch,' I shouted.

This brought him back to reality.

‘Here, you,' he said, in his usual slightly rough-edged way, ‘someone's nicked the swing I had there.'  He pointed to the spot near the gate where since time began the blue child's swing with a broken rope had lingered.

‘Oh, yeah,' I said. ‘Who would do a thing like that?'

‘I don't know what this bloody country's coming to,' he said. ‘The sooner we get rid of this government the better, if you ask me.'

It sounded as if Hugo was blaming Gordon for the felony. Gordon has children, it's true, but stealing tatt from Hugo's landfill, while perhaps not beneath his dignity, is unlikely to be necessary on his salary.

‘So who do you think it was?' I asked.

 ‘It'll be bloody kids, that's who,' he replied. ‘Little bastards. They'd steal your granny if she wasn't screwed down.'  Hugo's ideas of normal family relations are clearly a little different to those of most other people.

‘Yeah,' I said. ‘Hey, but kids will be kids, eh?'

Hugo re