Fog

All day a cursed fog covered the town and I resigned myself to staying put. I spent some time inert, then bought rice, chicken, an onion, a green pepper, a poblano, an orange habanero, garlic, ginger, coriander, soy sauce and mushrooms and made an exquisite stir-fry. The habanero was wonderfully smoky. Then the travel agent called and I had to get my ass – or rather the driver had to get my ass – to Monterrey, which is where I am now. Waiting for the cursed fog to catch up with me and ground me again.

Your brain

Tomorrow a day of reading and laundry and imaginary mariachi in the house. I head for Mexico City in the afternoon, and may attempt a late sortie into the city for dinner. Then Sunday to Honduras. I tried to rearrange my shit so that I left earlier for Mexico City and had time to walk around dumbfoundedly, but as so often it was nixed on grounds of cost.

I was raised to expect predictability, and now this!

We were all – all of us reasonable people – raised to expect rewards for helping and electric shocks for hindering, but when you deal with airlines you get neither; what you get is abandonment, denial, the industrial revolution shrink-wrapped, and your brain psycho-oprah-lised into a lurid paste, whether you help or hinder, for you can do neither.

I was raised to respect the dictionary, and now this.

Then Sunday to Honduras, where the potholes well with blood and dengue. Sinewy catrachos with machetes hacking at shrubs or crops and pausing to salute. Where nobody mentions the ****, the ******, the ******* ***********, though yes, there are many.

Everything good and everything Mexican

Like everything good, and everything Mexican, Juan Pablo’s new house was permanently under construction. In this case it had been under construction for five years and despite being, to the naked eye, only 50% complete, was due for completion in six months.

Juan Pablo swore as he realised the door was locked and he’d forgotten the key. He prised open a barricade elswhere in the property and I stepped in, treading cautiously on piles of tile and brickdust. The skeleton of the house was there in concrete blocks, with some rudimentary interior walls and a pit where the gas tank would be and a hole for the cupola. I was generally stupefied. This would be a luxurious house, with an enormous space devoted entirely to cooking meat outdoors, and JP’s young daughter would have a confounding view of the sierra marching like an epic army across the horizon (no doubt this is exactly how she’ll see it).

Thence to a bar, empty at first but soon fuller, where we met up with Ramón and I drank mezcal and beer inordinately and spoke Spanish, on a wide range of topics, but with a club foot. Then back to the company house, where I realized too late that Ramón’s mother would be meeting us with a corkscrew to open my wine. I greeted her exuberantly, with much physical contact, then hurried in to uncork the cheaper of the two bottles I had bought earlier tonight and scurried back out again to return the tool with very profuse thanks and in return the usual effusive embrace.

I write this in a large, empty house. In a way I feel more attached to Mexico, which I have visited only five or six times, and never to the beach, than to Canada or the UK, where I’ve lived. I’m sure if I’d lived in Mexico then I’d be saying the same about some other wholesome hole. Honduras for example, or America. The grass is always more impoverished. In any case, the glass is about to turn to some fluorescent shade for me, orange or apricot or molten glass. Best wishes to all my readers.

Being Homer

Clatter of stabilisers, whoosh of cars:
us returning from the shops,
North on Westview Rd.
The North shore mountains clothed in snow
to the ankles, chaste,
and now a lull,
and the chattering of chickadees and you,
saying “if I keep riding my bike,
I will have legs bigger than the whole universe”.
And the whole universe quakes.

In the pub

At my own instigation, I went out for a drink after work, but after a few formalities I found myself washed away by a frothing torrent of gossip and sedition. I zoned out, and my phone rang. It was Nancy, asking me to buy turmeric on the way home. Taking this as my excuse to leave, I stood up and said “I’m off” or something to that effect, and was met by a chorus of disapproval. They didn’t want me to leave, because the colloquy had reached a new pinnacle of infamy. Or nadir. In any case I muscled my way out of the bar, for I was thoroughly fed up with it. I was fed up with the imaginary ships bobbing across the pink imaginary reputational sea, and the imaginary u-boats with merciless kapitans holing them surgically… It’s a vile thing to talk about work in the pub.

Hawking

70. Well done. Two years to live, and so on. Black holes. Genius, loveable rogue, Simpsons, etc. Are we sure he isn’t faking it? Just think of the benefits he’s claimed! I think it’s about time he was means tested, and just saying a load of black hole equations in that voice of his isn’t going to cut it.

I say if he can weld, then he can damn well take a job as a welder. From an immigrant! Illegally.

Santorum

everywhere I look this morning. Some are calling it the santorum surge, but I would go further; I foresee a santorum tsunami. Luckily there was a dowpour of god’s honest rain to wash me clean on the way to work.

Health update and wishlist

Dull gripping intermittent pain in my left shoulder for a couple of days now. I think I slept on it awkwardly, or I’m about to die. Almost time to leave this desolate office.

Two things I hope for this Christmas:

• Chocolate orange
• Ham

Jenga

The ratings agencies strike me as ghostly, like money; pure feedback. But the problem is that because money is feedback, they really can bellyflop and smother it. Currently Belgium and France are being crushed. What a mad game of Jenga.

We’re sitting here like the last piece of chocolate on top of a quivering blancmange surrounded by rapacious office workers.

The New Life

Easter Sunday is the day I associate with you,
because that day I shambled through Battersea,
a man trapped fast between a fast-moving new
love and an old, and few men have a gait flat as he:
and that was me (the Albert Bridge frostily twinkling)
entering Chelsea, the previous unprofitable year
manacling me by the ankles. But an inkling
of better luck. And in a shadow the shop of a chocolatier

ablaze with light and luscious caramel and rose-
coloured wrapping and ribbon, and I walked in:
alone, as though on a vast steppe (plus I suppose
the artisan himself). And then I balked: in
a splendid cabinet rested an array of eggs,
dense and dark and sparkling, and muralled round
with incantations long and lovely as your legs,
and more intricately patterned and profound

than the river I’d just traversed.
I spent about a hundred quid, I think (it felt
like more at the time). As I left the shop a burst
of cold wind hit me and sunlight fell full-pelt
and I knew I was right to give up my old existence.
I walked back to your flat on Cambridge Rd.,
it was two, ten, a hundred miles, it was any distance,
it was SW11, it was Narnia, it was any postal code.