I am thinking of my son (G) and how he hovers awkwardly between immaturity and the occasional display of depth far beyond his years. One instance occurred in the wild days when I spun out of control and he had not long acquired a steady gait.
My lover had called to let me know he would be late again, as he had to allay his wife’s suspicions concerning his whereabouts. The drive was long and the night damp with foggy vapours. I left my curtains open as I usually did when staring down the street for him. I had lit the candles, opened the red wine, slipped into my black silk kimono. My son was in bed. Since I could not vent my frustration at JMCD for fear of dissuading him from undertaking the journey altogether, I hurtled into the kitchen, flinging the glass on to the cold tiled floor with all the vehemence I could muster before walking back to the living room and collapsing on the sofa in tears. During a lull in my sobbing fit an unexpected noise dragged me to my feet. Looking through the door I was confronted by G barefoot (and unharmed) in the middle of the destruction I had wrought, picking up the larger shards one by one and dropping them into the black bin bag, an alcohol-stained sink wipe abandoned nearby.
„That was very naughty, Mummy. Don’t do it again”.
Wisdom is clearly not proportionate to years.

Being a mistress is all about emotional excess: impotence, fury, martyrdom, passion, crushing the competition. Oh yes, and prolonged abstinence, soaked paper handkerchiefs. And cystisis.

I spent myself loving him. He knew of my quirk concerning electric pylons. Ray Bradbury understood it perfectly, as did the poet who described them as great naked girls striding over the landscape. Also aware of my love of tunnels he drove me one afternoon to an underground power station, open to the public, buried deep into the side of a cliff. The patch of daylight receded as we walked towards the heart of the complex, the only visitors. Up a few steps to the spectacular view of turbines, the machinery of generation in all its functional glory. You could feel the energy pulsing through the fingertips.

I bumped into the Welshman as I entered the building. The skin was flaking from his cheeks as usual and he grinned widely. With a hint of embarrassment he held out the black bin liner he was carrying: „You’ve caught me out. I am going to smother myself,” he announced.
„On such a beautiful morning? Go to your office and write out a list of five reasons to stay alive!”
It was for spring cleaning. My parting shot: „Take care in disposing of the evidence!”

Time is fickle. What I found hardest to adjust to was being in charge of my own time. Not politely visiting some eco-friendly model housing estate without so much as glimpsing the concrete cows, not touring a particle accelerator facility or a sardine-canning factory, not travelling up the gantry in a lift with a hard hat to stop my locks straying across my face, not constantly at someone else’s beck and call, barely tolerated, presence begrudged, but permitted my own voice and ideas, just for a brief few months. Not that my problem was being distracted by the luxuriant abundance of minutes, hours, days and weeks at my sole disposal. Instead I tried to force too much into the waking moments and have never suffered so many migraines in so few months. Even now not a day passes when I do not work, for it is a privilege beyond compare to be paid to think and write. I have already lost music (extraneous noise has become unbearable to me), soon I will dissolve, reproducing streams of consciousness pouring forth from others. Soon my livelihood will be considered a wasteful extravagance by those who have no inkling of the creativity of the process, which once was such a joy to me, a challenge. Soon I will melt back into the ranks of souless and despised bureaucrats. What was frightening was to wake up aware of the extent to which I had been conditioned by my occupation, by the need to fit around, to accommodate, to stifle myself in the interests of accurately conveying the original content.
I tried acting, but could never play a weak character, so it wasn’t for me.
My friend Rob, short, slender and sallow-skinned played Henry Higgins and I Mrs. Pierce when we toured with our production. His stage presence is fierce, liquid talent. With a doctorate in phonetics (he studied Norwegian dialects) and a natural streak of cruelty whetted by his razor wit the part could have been written for him. I used to watch his performances from the wings never tiring of them. When I moved to Waffleland he put me up for a few days whilst I looked for a flat. It took me two hours to reach his front door on arrival, a distance that can normally be covered in ten minutes. I had three suitcases holding my clutter of belongings and was eight months gone. There are no lifts or escalators in the station. Several hundred steps. Nobody offered to help, not even part of the way. This continues to be my abiding impression of that small country. Indifference, at best, towards outsiders, a dart of hostility and resentment, an inability to accept assimilation beyond boosting the statistics of one language community to the perceived detriment of the others.
I had to take a shower after my exertions. At my house-warming, Rob confided in me that he had contemplated walking into the bathroom (I had not locked the door) and embracing me. The wall separating us was thin and the idea of taking me in my ripe state strangely appealing. He did not, the awareness that he could sufficed for him. Rob is completely confident in a manner I have only ever encountered in men. He once told me I would make the perfect escort girl, attractive, fluent in several languages, pleasant company, able to converse on almost any subject. That I would retain the power of whether matters proceeded any further. He meant it as a compliment and as such it was apprehended. I suppose the thought was inspired by my chronic state of being unattached. He also (quite justifiably) criticized a piece I had written, based on an experience of my father’s. Whilst I agree entirely concerning the style (I never reread what I have once comitted to paper) his objection that the reaction to the events would have been rage rather than resignation is, sadly, not true. We are doomed to unprotesting surrender in the face of sullen greed and the scoop of the bulldozer.

Cigarettes killed my mother. I asked my father once whether she had any cravings when she was carrying me. Only for more of the wretched weeds. She would dispatch him into the night to seek out vending machines. They devoured her lungs, reducing her to an agonising hobble, then struck at her heart. It was eleven weeks ago to the day. My father hates Tuesdays now.

Cocooned in my office a smile spreads across my features. Aurora is not here for the second day running. The space is not too cramped for us both, but her duties mean that she constantly jabbers on the telephone. It clamours for her attention every ten minutes or so and she makes no effort to lower her voice. This is not conducive to serious production. Now the room is silent as I sit surrounded by my volumes of Hegel, Bourdieu, Zygmunt Bauman, Giddens, Locke, Hume, Elias, Lash, Megill, Berlin, Foucault, Collingwood, Oakeshott, Merleau-Ponty, Barthes, Parfit and Durkheim in no particular order on my shelves. The song of a blackbird pierces the glass of the door.

Have just returned from lunch. The pasta reminded me of dog chews (I obviously have canines on the brain today), the sauce long since having evaporated. The Welshman was on form. When he laughs I can see the gold crown on his tooth. As he cored his apple he inquired whether I owned a copy of The Anatomy of Melancholy. Apparently it contains two references to his compatriots, one concerning how the Welsh devour each other. Not literally, as in cannibalism, he offered, but in relationships. “I found this rather intruiging” he smiled. The subject drifted to ex patriots and how they loathe each other.
“Such talented people the Scots. They gave us the television. It’s amazing they don’t have a state of their own. They must lack the requisite political skills,” he teased.
“You can talk,” my reply.
“We are life’s losers and are reconciled to it. It allows us to look on with a certain cynical detachment”.
Back to ID cards. The biometric information includes fingerprints. Symbolically could the choice have been more apposite? We are all to be criminalized. Guilty until proven innocent. The retina can be damaged by diabetes and bungee jumping if you are that way inclined, so a scan of it proves little.

A scatter of pigeons in shabby congregation around a gutted orange half. Tourists sit, hunched, on the worn marble steps of the cathedral in their uniform plumage of comfortable shoes and superfluous cardigans tied around their waists. Early in the morning, on the way to the bus, the foam of the disinfectant that washed down their impromptu seats is still visible. Gypsy beggars turn their most piteous gazes upon them in the hope they might succumb to a twinge of piety. I dodge between dried rivulets of urine and noxious yellow powder sprinkled where dog deposits have been removed from the pavement. At the traffic lights, a row of mopeds is revving menacingly to chivvy the pedestrians across the black and white stripes. In the bus an elderly lady, self-styled guardian of virtue and protectress of the hapless warns against the menace of pickpockets. Indeed, the latter seem to constitute the sole topic of conversation on the Number Seven. Stickers on the windows warn against them, spoiling the view. The bus is always crowded no matter what time of day it is. We glide past the rubbish containers, blue lid for general waste, yellow for paper only (though these are rare indeed). All nationalities are repulsed by the driver without discrimination as tickets cannot be purchased on board, only in the small tobacconist’s shops or at the station. Curving round the hairpin bends, I peruse the „ridership rules and regulations” (or, more correctly, conditions of carriage), a marvellously alliterative abuse of my mother tongue explaining with the pedantic detail reserved for the terminally ignorant and the foreign that only pets small enough to fit into hand-held bags or cages may and guide dogs are permitted on the vehicle.
The courtyard cats were wailing again, like lost infants in a storm, a sound that makes me shudder. I could I suppose fling some projectile at them, but before long they would start again. One of them is called Mischa. I know this because their owner, Orsolya, calls the name every evening. In winter at four, now around seven.
I chatted to the Welshman about dogging. Not that I had heard of it, but he enlightened me with a mixture of disapproval, revulsion and relish. We often talk about how Britain is going to the dogs, how neither of us particularly wants to return. He is amazed and appalled by the practice, I am too jaded as to be surprised. Apparently teenagers are being given contraceptive implants without their parents’ knowledge or consent in an effort to reduce pregnancy rates. My favourite bugbear, however, has to be the identity card plans. On the pretext of combating terrorism. I have carried an ID card since leaving the UK, more years ago now than I care to remember. It does not curb illegal immigration. In Waffleland you cannot draw breath without one (you need it for having gas and electricity connected or for a fixed line telephone to be installed), yet the country’s economy would collapse without the armies of cleaning ladies, nannies, handymen and gardeners toiling undeclared. The native plumbers are prohibitively expensive as well as cunning. Let me illustrate by an example: a colleague, single female (for which read free game in the eyes of the unscrupulous and unredeemed sexist Waffleian tradesmen) needed emergency help as pipes were leaking. Her Polish godsend was on holiday and she had no option but to turn to the Yellow Pages. A plumber duly lifted the floorboards and removed the offending blockage. Within a month the problem returned. Thankfully her friendly Pole was available and unscrewed the pipe only to discover that half a pingpong ball had been inserted. The idea being that it would allow water to pass through unimpeded for a sufficient length of time to avert suspicion of shoddy workmanship and the limescale to accumulate necessitating further repairs. Or take the story of my hierarchical superior as his title goes (think Syncronicity by Sting and co) who placed an ad in the local newspaper for someone to weed and mow the lawn. When a caller asked him whether it was declared or undeclared he plumped for the latter. Only to be informed that his interlocutor was the local chief of police and that he could be fined severely for the offence of hiring untaxed labour. In order to avoid such unpleasantness, the upholder of law and order would take on the job himself. In the evenings, he would turn up on the doorstep, slough off his uniform jacket and dig away cheerfully, slipping the proceeds into his pocket unchallenged. The system is corrupt and inefficient. The police have powers to stop and search, but they rarely do. What I fear is that in Britain, where such hypocrisy is not in keeping with the self-image of the average bureaucrat, the rules will be enforced with a terrifying zeal and self-righteousness. We pride ourselves on living in a free country, yet the powers being arrogated by our government defy belief and still complacency reigns.
I recall the days when I felt vulnerable in Waffleland, pregnant and alone without a fixed income (I was a freelance). I had to queue up to register at the commune along with all the other law-abiding waifs and strays. A few days later I was visited by the police at my flat. This is routine procedure, compulsory for them before you can be issued with your card. The officer reeled off questions from a list. How much did I earn and so on. He inspected the rocking chair I had borrowed from my friend Rob, the miserable white desk I had bought cheaply and the bed on the floor (I was rather heavy during my pregnancy) and sighed. He told me that he would be forced to write that the appartment was very sparsely furnished and that this could have repercussions for me. I found this statement puzzling and sheepishly begged an explanation. Apparently there are many individuals in Waffleland who attempt to circumvent fiscal obligations by declaring second residences as primary domiciles. Eventually I persuaded him that having been a student until that stage of my life and not being blessed with the advantage of a highly privileged background I simply did not have the means to cram my living space with expensive sofas and the like. Luckily for me he accepted this argument. I found this scrutiny humiliating and intolerable. This kind of snooping, against which you as a citizen have no defence, is precisely what the introduction of an ID card means, no matter how many denials may fill the newspaper columns.

The sky has darkened and all I can hear is the scuff of trainers on the dusty football field where researchers knock about a ball in pursuit of another trophy punctuated by the occasional cheer. The angry orange tint of the firmament threatens a downpour, yet they are already soaked from their exertions. I, by contrast, am thirsty, having expended my mental energies gathering yet more material on a country for which I have no affinity.
At one stage of my life I put down a novel in the firm belief that I had finally read all that was worth reading, that nothing of beauty remained. Now the weight of human knowledge weighs upon me, as if I had been abandoned in an underground archive with a blindfold suddenly torn off and nothing but shelves stretching as far as my beleagured eyes can strain. All I can do is sit down on the cold floor and reach for the first volume.

In the distant days of my childhood I used to hate Sundays, the day when all the shops were closed and there was nothing on the telly. The days when I would be preened and dressed and sent to squirm on a hard wooden pew, the only consolation a Pan Drop to suck during the sermon. This morning, I was awakened by the screech of the swifts slicing through the calm air and the cathedral bells. During the night, a mosquito had bitten me in the tender flesh above the eye and it had swollen hideously. I remembered hearing it next to my ear with its high-pitched buzzing. The only respect in which Waffleland is preferable to my current place of sojourn is that there the life cycle of the pierce-tongued parasites comprises but a couple of autumn months, whilst here they tauntingly settle on the white-painted walls even in late winter. Once again the sky is cloudless blue outside the window pane smeared with concrete from the work done retiling the roof. I hope the scaffolding will be removed soon. It has obstructed my view since January. At first I could not sleep for fear that some prowler would climb up and stare in at me, although even if it were possible, it could only be one of the neighbours as the entrance to the coutryard is protected by a padlocked iron gate. Some weekends, the tenants below are so loud in their conversations that I could swear they are camped outside my bedroom.
When I first arrived here I expected the narrow streets to be crawling with rats, yet so far I have only spotted one, a rather bloated creature, thriving on pizza rinds no doubt and in no hurry to escape the approach of sandalled heels.
Ten a.m. When it does rain umbrella sellers throng around the bus stop huddles, their wares sheathed in plastic. Now, however, they line the roadsides in the city centre, dozens of pairs of sunglasses displayed on folding wooden tables in front of them. You can tell when a police car glides too close through the ambling crowds when they snap the tables shut and disappear faster than the fake rabbit on the greyhound track. Hurrying is an art form when processions of tourists congest the pavements, snaking around obstacles behind their guides. Above their heads the red parasols, the less imaginative numbers atop sticks, like lollipops. The guides always lose their patience with their undisciplined charges. The day before yesterday I heard one snap „Bitte kommen Sie mit, die Tour ist noch nicht beendet!” to the half of her group that had gathered around a woman swathed in white with spray-painted hair mimicking a statue.