Wild Sovereign Development Site

Tag: advice

  • the wrong underpants

    Walking home we were following a guy who could not stop fiddling with his own underpants. They were clearly intensely uncomfortable and as he walked, he plucked at them, front and back. It was amusing because he was so beautifully dressed, with a calculated insouciance that, as it turns out, requires constant upkeep. He plucked at his undies from behind. He tried lifting his belt away from his lean belly in front to sort of tug from inside. With pinched fingertips he took another slurp at the back end. Finally in desperation he started shoving his hand down the front of his trousers to rearrange everything for comfort.

    We were in stitches. My companion kept up a running commentary, gravely observing in an undertone as though reporting a flock of seagulls on the pitch during a slow game of cricket. The guy was in an agony of discomfort and we were in an agony of suppressed gales of laughter. It was just too picturesque. The long-legged boy and his long-legged friend had identical sloping gaits. They were tall and stooped forward as they walked, curving their shoulders, wearing a uniform of sorts: black stovepipe jeans. Leather jackets. Wide belts. Greased hair and sunglasses propped up in the slew. All of this grooming and devil may care was undermined by the incessant twitching and plucking. They reached a bench facing the water and plonked themselves down. We drew level with them. I was carrying a metre-wide loop of rusted metal I had found in the street and when I picked it up, saying, Oh! isn’t this beautiful! my companion said: so long as it doesn’t end up in my apartment – it’s lovely.

    I said to the beautiful young man as he lounged there, “Du sollst diesen Slip wegwerfen, er ist offensichtlich total unbequem.” I saw him turn to his friend to say, “I have no idea what that…” So I turned back. “You should throw those underpants away. Clearly they’re just completely uncomfortable.”

    His face broadened to a smile. He said, with a lilting whinge, “I want to put them in my friend’s bag but my friend won’t let me.” Australian. The friend rolled his eyes. We were all grinning like maniacs. “You should put them in the bin,” I said, pointing to the scuffed receptacle standing by them, surrounded by its usual audience of open-mouthed beer bottles like a choir of baby penguins. He said, “Just they’re these really nice underpants…” “No,” I told him, “No. They’re not for you.” “Ahhh,” he said, lying back in his splendour in the sunshine by the sparkling water, the summer of his life he bought a leather and went to Berlin.

  • stitch grandeur

    In Berlin people do all kinds of things out loud in public. You can buy drugs, smoke pot in the street and drink beers, you can walk with your dog into restaurants and boutiques. You can dance on street corners. One of the blisses of living here is that everyone is stranger and no one’s a stranger: my lifelong habit of conversing with passersby as though we were resuming a discussion only briefly interrupted is welcomed and usual, it’s easier, fine.

    I had never seen anyone embroidering on the underground. Sleeping, yes, fighting, putting on make up; drunk men banging in unison their fists on the roof of the carriage on their way home victorious from some football game – those were English men, ‘educated hooligans’ – and people jump on and sing, for money, or make speeches, and sell things, or just beg: and the man on the U1 who shows mutely his malformed and tiny index finger that pokes the air like a children’s puppet, the more whole hand holding a grimy crumpled cup for coins. A week ago there was a can of green peas, with a spoon standing in it, empty and neatly tucked under the corner of the seat were someone, presumably, had been eating them from the tin. To say it took courage to pull out my embroidery seems ludicrous. But so it felt.

    It is an egg I drew freehand, a world egg, and have been filling with gradual slow stitches ever since. The egg shape is crossed with a bulging peace sign. I started it to sew for my suitcase, a new suitcase, khaki swirling, for my first trip to New York in 2011. The suitcase was a present, its army camouflage motif bothered me. “I want to sign that there can be peace, there can be love, that I am not part of the army,” I said, stitching next to the Brooklyn nightclub singer who at the request of our mutual friend was putting me up. We had bonded. We’d spent long hours sitting side by side on her bed, talking about our lives. “But,” she said, “you are also a warrior.” And hugging me, on her stoop opposite “the park” (an all-concrete basketball court) in the snow. She was smoking, and her voice was deep and compelling and rough.

    I made that trip, and another, longer trip, with the peace egg still missing from my luggage. Now in Berlin I have decided it is time to get it done. So on the underground I pull it out. With trepidation but not sure why. The first thing that happens is a good-looking, somewhat raddled man whose tangle of hair attracts me gets on and sits opposite. We are the only two people in the carriage. Noticing my stitching he says, terrifyingly, “This city belongs to us True Germans.” Nods many times. I try to smile, neutrally. His arm goes up in a blessedly hybrid but tyrannical salute. “We belong here. All of those foreigners need to just get out. They should go.” I say something, noncommittal and small, afraid of what violence I might bring on myself if my accent or choice of words gives me away. Then nodding also I get up and slide from the carriage, clutching the fold of canvas and my hidden needle.

    Real Germans sew in public. I felt I had identified myself with a certain kind of wholesomeness, or primness. The screaming mess at the back of my tapestry, with its gouts of wool and complex knotting clots of colour hardening the cloth, embarrassed me. It was so clear to anyone looking on – which they did – that I was a rank beginner. Perhaps that’s why the man in his seventies who had been strap-hanging nearby finally swung his upper body over me and confided, in a shy, sweet voice, We used to learn embroidery in primary school. We made cross-stitch. (Modestly, with a soft pride): I was really good at it.

    As she got off at Wittenbergplatz a lady clutching her hands before her chest paused to say, It’s hard, isn’t it, keeping the tension even. Yes, I said, relieved that she had articulated this issue I had only half-noticed myself noticing. You need an embroidery hoop, she said. Oh! I said. I really do. Thank you for mentioning it. Then I carried the feel of her all the way home. There is something innate, I think, in us – in me – which responds to the wisdom of an older woman, however pragmatic and small, however tentative, because it is what we are missing wherever else we look. Sneering at age, excluding the oldest cultures, enslaved to the young and the new; literary festivals falling over themselves to include schoolkids’ first raps at the expense of experienced writer elders; orchestras staging dismal photo shoots in which fiddle-clutching violinists leap uncomfortably. The trouble with hip is, it never lasts. I long for the inner knowing, the voice of experience, the hip replacement: the lasting.

  • personal draining

    To overcome a longterm injury I’ve taken on some personal training, in a stinky gym paved in black rubber. I can only afford two half hour sessions per week so we need to get us some work done. The trainer is strawberry blonde and perky, with perfect ankles and a somewhat staring pair of baby-blue eyes. On our third meeting she mentioned casually some news about her career: “I got a call-back from the someone-or-others!” I must have looked blank, though I said, “Good for you!” because she said innocently,

    “Don’t you know anything about me at all?”

    This so tickled my sense of humour that I instantly dropped into expressionless deadpan. My first thought was, Darling: I am so much older now than you will ever be. I said, levelly, “Why, no. I guess I don’t. The only stuff I know about you is what I have gleaned in these last two half hour training sessions.”

    She took this as an invitation to fill me in. Outside our window the sun was setting and a dozen people churning up and down sprinting earnestly put my grunting machinations to poor shame. Her degree was in something. With a major in something and pilates and something else. She worked on a cruise ship? as a dancer? only then her brother got married so she had to come home – for the wedding. “Oh,” I said. And then she got this job with Anthony (the gym owner) and now she has been here two months only she’s passed an audition with such and such cruises (“Wow!” I said) and so by August she plans to be airborne again. That is, she’ll be seaborne on the world’s largest single cause of waste pollution, but her dance routine is “aerial” and in costume – last time round she wore glitter on her eyelids and was dressed “as a wasp.” Right, then.

  • the plastic to drown us in

    Last week on the market I spoke to the girl queueing before me at the fruit stall. She had said to the cashier, Could I have a bag for that too please? which focused my attention from its dreamy perusal of the mountains of plump and glossy fruits. She had put her single lemon, her three apples, her two mandarins and her kiwi fruit each in separate plastic bags lest they contaminate one another. When the guy turned away to change her fifty dollar note I spoke.

    Excuse me. I’m just so distressed by the… amount of plastic you’re consuming. Could you, I mean.

    Her expression helped me. Goofy, caught out, unblaming, sprung. I gathered pace. Couldn’t you please think about bringing your own bags? I know, she said, looking down. I know I should. I said, pleadingly, They drift into the oceans. They sort of fly about. If you are a turtle or a fish they look like food, jellyfish.

    I know, she said again, I should. Please, I said, please do. It’s really really time. And we smiled at each other and she walked away carrying her kilo of petroleum byproducts and once I’d paid for my bouquet of greenery and come out from under the awning into the wintry sunshine, so pleasurable, my partner was standing there opening wordlessly his canvas shoulder bag and as I fed the spinach and fennel in feet-first I was aware of the plastic bags girls passing us, seeing this transaction, maybe taking it home and owning it: we can normalise what seems a chore. However tonight standing at the checkout of a grocery store I felt unable to address the woman standing in front of me in line who had put every morsel of fruit and every mortal vegetable each into its own noxious, off-gassing solitary confinement. Bad, naughty vegetables, you suffer in there until you learn how to behave. I looked her over from her wood-heeled boots up to the leopard scarf that was slung so perfectly casually across her sleeves. I thought how I might say, Couldn’t you consider, and how she might say, It is none of your business, and how I might say, But it is my business! I have to live on the planet you are desecrating.

    In between I visited the nut store in West End where everything is in tubs or big sacks, and you point and say, I’d like a half a kilo of those please, a wedge of that. The good-looking and ordinarily bearded man who came out from behind the counter cheerful and broad said to me, Would you like a bag for those? I said, No thanks. See I think I’ve already used up my lifetime’s…. quota of plastic bags. A laugh of surprise spurted from him. I think I probably have too, was all he said. After the grocery store lady with her terrifying scarf I walked home in a kind of fugue. The moon hung like a slim segment of moon high in the blackened and starless sky, a plastic bag drifting in a bottomless trench. How can we have come this far without catching on to ourselves, I thought. Is the water just too dark and warm? Are we asleep?

  • a novel filled with good advice

    a novel filled with good advice

    The place I’ve sublet has a shelf of Joanna Trollope novels and I’ve just reread two of them. It’s so interesting learning all the signs she uses to indicate class. In the gentry, rudeness indicates an unwillingness to pander to form, it is authenticity. In factory workers, rudeness betrays a lack of breeding. Horsey women have good-quality possessions which they do not value and treat casually. They do things carelessly, having nothing to prove, dropping tea bags on the floor, “sloshing” milk into mugs and speaking in clipped half-sentences: “Shut up! Bloody dogs. Sit over there, it’s the only comfortable chair. Chuck the cat off.”

    The landed class recognize one another by signs: tea is always “China”, never “India”, perhaps because China eluded colonization by these characters’ forbears and thus like a spirited horse showed independence. To have middling-quality possessions and to take care of them is unmistakeably a sign one is trapped in the worst of all worlds: bourgeois, unimaginative, burgerlich middle class. At least the poor have their realness and dignity. At least the gentry have their self-assurance and intricate codes: ‘”Daddy says,” one ten year old said cheerfully to our main character Liza, surveying a French pronoun exercise almost obliterated in red ink, “that there’s really no hope for me because I’m as utterly thick as him.”‘ Very often Trollope’s plots seem to unravel the marital miseries of a couple ill-suited as to class: in the case of A Passionate Man, a lordly doctor and his timid wife whose appearance is dismissed as “pretty.” She’s not of good enough stock to be either ugly or beautiful.

    In fact the approval of both aristocratic and poorly educated character types in these novels seems to revolve on their ‘realness’ – excusable bluntness in the gentry, forgiveable gaucheness in the “frightful woman” who runs the post office. The middle class, by aping their “superiors” but without access to the insider knowledge that would let them buy the right kind of tea, show themselves to be false.

    The other novel I read yesterday, The Best of Friends, was reviewed (on the cover) by The Observer as “above all a novel filled with good advice.” Like a recipe book.

    H2O HoL goldfish