I’m at an age where hospital tests figure in conversation with friends: breast, heart, tongue, liver, kidneys, brain – it’s all rather meaty for those of vegan tastes. Often, usually, pills and the proscribing of pleasures keep them on the road – down with butter, alcohol, nicotine, sloth, up with muesli and the treadmill. Thus they carry on, almost as whenever, though they now take the stairs one at a time and creak as they rise from their chairs.

Fathers of course are long gone, then mothers one by one, but can it be that friends the same age as I, Sylvia from school, Sheila from university, Douglas from my first job ever, have actually died.

Despite a bit of cancer ten years back I do not often think of myself as mortal in the transitory sense. I am here and that’s how it is. As that’s how it was with them and seemed to me it would for ever be.

Stretchered out in an ultrasound cubicle fully-clothed and with my boots on, just my jumper pulled up and the waist button of my jeans undone, smeared with some sort of KY jelly, a nice doctor slithering an elaborate mouse over what I might call my torso, I watched with confused detachment as my inner self googled to the screen. I didn’t at all understand what was where, in much the same way as I’ve never known where Mongolia ends and Kazakhstan begins, but there was a student sitting in, to whom the nice doctor addressed a commentary, so how could I help but overhear.

I took in very little. He was a conscientious tour operator, but it was an unfamiliar journey without recognisable landmarks. That’s her liver. No fat. That’s a bit of her spine. Did he mean that fuzzy little knobble. That’s her something or other. A landmass, or was it an ocean, lurched then disappeared. That’s her right kidney, and can you turn on your side, that’s right, that’s her left kidney, and oh, what’s that. A crater loomed. It’s very small. It might be a stone, it might be a cyst. He worried at it, went in on it from this angle and that. I said I’ve learned to be wary of little lumps that might be something else and he said Yes. He magnified it until it became planet earth from space, took pictures. Clearly this was the high spot of the tour. A little lump, a satellite, a coral reef, the Rubicon stream.

That was it. The film show over. I said, What now. He said Keep your appointment with Doctor Y. I worried the jelly stuff might stain my smart Armani jumper and rubbed myself with scrunchy blue paper but the student told me it wouldn’t - stain. I went to the ground floor café, had a double espresso and a piece of toast, then home on the circle line.

That was a week ago. What to make of it one way or the other. Nothing original. Only the time-honoured wisdom gleaned from books and music and loving friends and forest walks and conversation over one-to-one suppers in cheap Italian restaurants. I have my own book to write, a holiday in July – Greek Islands on a private yacht – very posh. And next week, or this weekend, or tomorrow, or rather today – a birthday dinner, my desk to tidy, email to answer and the tame blackbirds outside the window both waiting to be fed.

I was sitting in a vegetarian eatery the other night with a friend, eating a most peculiar sausage – since my passionate remorse toward the animal kingdom I’ve become bemused by food – and we were talking, the way one does, about class structure in nineteenth-century England and how it has evolved – this is a subject that interests me, now I’m immersed in research for my Edith Cavell book. I said we’re all tories now, and I listed my own capitalist transgressions and those of my once lefty friends. He said he thought it was more complicated than that and that now there’s a new class – the urban confident. I think he’s right. They’re everywhere and they’re so….. confident – about the sound of their own voices, and wines from the Garonne, and Alessi kettles and where to go on holiday, and whatever’s on their iPods, and their circle of friends, and the carelessness of their own opinions…

Then I worried that I was urban confident. He said I wasn’t, I was urban unconfident, so I worried about that too. Then we shared a piece of carrot cake and drank our fresh mint tea.

And more on why that screening of Macbeth Live from the Met was such a touchstone – such a faith-renewer. It’s just so marvellous, in the sense of marvelling, that there’s William Shakespeare in about 1600 writing this sort of Ang Lee psychodrama about the controlling force of sexual passion, and then Giuseppe Verdi 250 years later, follows on, takes the drama further, and shows how flawed, self-seeking leaders destroy the lives of ordinary people, and then about 160 years after that Peter Gelb at the Metropolitan Opera House thinks about how to bring opera to a wide audience, and Adrian Noble thinks about how to stage Verdi with resonance for now, and those technological physicist wizards, whoever they are, do what they do with digital sound and high resolution whatevers, and live satellite transmission… and then this Russian Goddess, this Maria Guleghina, comes via heaven, understands all of it and pours out this extraordinary music and for three magical hours transports us £15-a-go (with discount) punters. Truly a good night out.

One of life’s Saturday evening pleasures for me is – or was – to hear opera live from the Met on Radio 3 on my DAB radio. Now that’s old hat. Yesterday evening, screened at the Barbican, I saw the first of the high-resolution videos the Met is beaming to Europe. It was of Verdi’s Macbeth with Maria Guleghina as Lady Macbeth. The whole thing seemed like genius. Apparently there were about ten cameras in the opera house and what we heard came from Dolby Digital 5.1 surround sound.

We watched the Opera House audience taking their seats, saw the nervousness of the musicians, sneaked back stage and into the sound technician’s box, saw the sweat and dentistry of all the performers, understood what was going on because there were subtitles, and were musically, emotionally and artistically mesmerised. I’m ashamed to say I’d only ever half heard this great opera. Maria Guleghina was stunning. She’s from Odessa. She’s like some huge goddess who pours out divine sound. And Lado Ataneli was just as big as Macbeth. He’s from Georgia. John Relyea was brilliant as Banquo and Dimitri Pittas was brilliant as Macduff.

I felt a bit silly clapping in the cinema, but it was hard not to. It was like being a special visitor in the Opera House while a masterpiece was performed.

My roof garden is now a war zone. It’s not the work of amateur terrorists from some Ealing backroom: this is Ground Zero.

I don’t know if they’re the same blackbirds as nested in the yucca last year and caused panic and alarm every morning when gulls came to murder their babies. There’s a he and a she and they’re always together and they appear to be in love, or at least married, but without being ornothologicalist beyond blackness or brownness, all blackbirds look the same to my unfamiliar-with-them eye.

They’re a pair of scuffing blackbirds and they’ve taken over my terrace.

Last month I assiduously and laboriously replaced an inch or so of topsoil in all my plant containers, bedded everything down with bark chippings and anticipated a blooming spring. Then this pair turn up and scuff the whole lot out of the pots. They’re always at it. It’s an occupation in both senses. They never go away. They’re extravagantly unafraid of me no matter how I glower and insult them.

I wouldn’t mind so much if they scuffed just to the front of the pots so I could sweep up neatly – but they scuff to the side and the back and every which way, and as I’ve placed all the containers close together to create a sort of herbaceous border effect, the only way I can get to their scuffings is by backbreakingly moving the pots. And there’s no point in doing that anyway, because they’re back in ten minutes for more of it. Flaunting their ASBOs.

I’ve partly myself to blame. It is my habit to put a handful of nuts and raisins into my breakfast porridge, and seeing them both out there one morning in the tidy days before the occupation, I put a handful out for them too. I shouldn’t have. I started something. She in particular loves fat raisins. She gets a funny look in her eye about them, particularly the ones from Marks & Spencer. She gobbles them down, shits on the wall, then scuffs. It’s her way of communicating with me.

It puts me in a moral dilemma. Having started the nuts and raisins malarkey, is it right to stop. Also, I fear whatever the problems I’ll miss them if they go. I’ve found that to be painfully true and to my cost with other combative relationships. But it does strike me that the reason why, as a species, we kill or drive away everything that breathes and eats and does its own peculiar thing, is because everything and everyone else is different and inconvenient and messy, demanding and unreasonable. That’s why we cut ourselves off in tidy well-sealed rooms and buy anti-allergenic dustbags.

So I’ll go on with it I suppose for a while: sweeping up and muttering and putting out raisins.

smoking seriously damages your health
‘I never smoke seriously.’

‘”Is that a dead body in the road?”’
“It’s only a badger.”’

‘“He asked me to marry him.”
“What did you say?”
“Crumbs.”’

‘She ate seven chicken legs. I counted.’

‘A lot of people die in the lavatory.’

‘I’m going up to vacu pack the duvet.’

tbc

The worst thing about Christmas is that next year it’ll happen again: the same toxic mix of superstition, greed and dislocation. It might be tolerable – might be - if it was a one off event like death, but year in, year out, the same old stuffing and shopping and the swimming pool’s closed for a fortnight and the cinemas are closed and let us send Christmas cards to those who send Christmas cards to us.

Yah boo sucks and stuff it.

I like the memory flashbacks though. Is it really fifteen years since the Camillagate tapes: and if the Queen ever dies, which she won’t, because she’s not biodegradable and she’s stuffed with polystyrene, will the next monarch’s Christmas address to his subjects be by a king who fantasised about reincarnation as a tampax:

CHARLES: I need you several times a week.

CAMILLA: Mm so do I. I need you all the week. All the time.

CHARLES: O God, I’ll just live inside your trousers or something.

CAMILLA: What are you going to turn into, a pair of knickers? You’re going to come back as a pair of knickers.

CHARLES: Or God forbid a tampax.

CAMILLA: Oh, what a wonderful idea.

CHARLES: My luck to be chucked down the lavatory and go on and on forever swirling round on the top, never going down.

CAMILLA: O darling…. I just want you now.

CHARLES: Do you?

CAMILLA: Mmmm

CHARLES: So do I!

CAMILLA: Desperately, desperately. O, I thought of you so much at Yarraby.

CHARLES: Did you?

CAMILLA: Simply mean we couldn’t be there together

CHARLES: Desperate…’

Isn’t it sweet. I think Yarraby’s north of Melbourne and the golf’s very good. The lips should be almost closed and the teeth lightly clenched as the dialogue’s uttered.

The quality of high class stuffing doesn’t improve much year on year. Perhaps there was an uncertain truthfulness or at least understandable conceptual confusion in President Clinton’s deposition ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman Ms Lewinsky.’ Is it really ten years since the Lewinskygate tapes. Well yes there was frotting and blow jobs, and he did put his hand in her knickers and on Sunday 31 March 1996 – was it that long ago – he put a cigar where you wouldn’t want to light it, and there was semen on her blue dress, and she did orgasm and ten times over they weren’t having sexual relations under the table, in the hall, in the bathroom of the Oval Office – but stuff it. There’s a difference between snogging and heavy petting and ‘vaginal intercourse’ as the prosecution put it. It can all get confusing when you’re trying to run a country like the US of A. Ann Widdecombe says the president shouldn’t have lied but what does she know about sexual relations and anyway who’d want to flick her bean, and who should take the moral high ground when it comes to hacking and lying, and cheating and judging.

Then there was the conservative MP for Eastleigh Stephen Milligan – is it really fourteen years since his secretary found him dead in the kitchen with a bin liner on his head, naked except for ladies’ stockings and suspenders and with an orange in his mouth and an electric flex round his neck. His death apparently was consistent with autoerotic practices but what self-respecting girl wore suspenders in those days. He was parliamentary private secretary to the defence minister Jonathan Aitken – he of the ‘simple sword of truth and trusty shield of British fair play’ fame.

And was it really thirteen years ago in Sunset Boulevard when Divine Brown furthered Hugh Grant’s multi-million pound career by attempting oral sex for him in a hire car. And ten years since the Welsh Secretary Ron Davies got robbed at knifepoint by rough trade on Clapham Common. And ten years since George Michael was arrested for coming on to an undercover police officer in a Los Angeles public toilet. And two months since the lesbian tennis coach Claire Lyte was jailed for two years for having sex with a thirteen-year-old pupil who was infatuated with her.

I know lots of lesbians who think back, with great fondness, to their gym teachers.

I wonder about the conceptual distinction between sexual relations and love. I think of the letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West: ‘I have crushed down the vision of life with you, but always it has remained at the back of my mind, so wide, so open, a life so free and so full of music and beauty’ or of the painter Gluck to her lover Nesta Obermeyer ‘O God, O God – there had never been such a thing as Us. We’re quite perfect I think, don’t you?’ or Gertrude Stein about Alice B. Toklas: ‘I have so much to make me happy. I know all that I am to happiness, it is to be happy and I am happy. I am so completely happy that I mention it.’

So much for Christmas. I’m off to a Boxing Day party. Boxing Day – the day to open the Christmas box and share the contents with the poor.

‘You find you can’t do things any more and then you stop wanting to do them, and I think that’s very kind of life.’

‘”A customer was sick over my wife in Carluccio’s.”
“Did they pay the dry cleaning bill?”’

tbc

‘I like a cold roast potato.’

‘After he won the Pullitzer Prize he became unbearable and I had to leave him.’

‘I’ve never seen one like that before.’

“‘I fell in love with her.’
‘You might as well slit your throat’”

‘They don’t love mother and they don’t love you.’

‘So I says to him, I says, “Hmm”.’

‘I like my old boilers.’

‘She couldn’t stick the way he ate tomatoes.’

‘They keep their cooker on the balcony.’

“‘He got knocked down by a bus on a zebra crossing.’
‘What number was it?’”

‘She won’t die wondering.’

‘It’s not her own hair.’

‘What it needs is a bit of bling.’

‘I’m very sensitive.’

tbc

We London Library wallahs have been sent a four-page letter from our President Sir Tom Stoppard. This letter tells us our annual subscription’s to go up from £210 to £375. It’s oddly prolix in style ‘In common with thousands of institutions and societies of all kinds the London Library is not constituted as an Athenian democracy…’, unapologetic in its apologies ‘I wish I had been alert enough to write to you in advance and not in arrears. Perhaps then we might have lost fewer of the 34 members who have resigned’ (34, that’s a piddling number), and grandiose in its self-deprecation - ‘I’m sorry that I was not present at the AGM nor the run-up to it. (I had a play opening in New York, which entails the duty of attending the previews and finding fault with anything except the script.)’

But its essence is firm: like it or lump it, pay it or go away, there will be an 80 per cent rise in membership subscription this year. Back of the envelope accounting shows that’s over a pound a day or a full shelf, for keeps, of almost anything you want or need, if you buy from AbeBooks. Subscribing is a reminder of the remorselessness of time. Copies of the LRB, the Literary Review, The Rambler, and Birds, clack through my letterbox are skimmed and recycled. Nor have I got my monies worth from the Tate Modern, the NFT, the ICA.But I want to keep some semblance of belonging, and what I love best about the London Library is we don’t pay fines. I hate fines not because of the money, but because they make me feel dreary, in the wrong, punished. I never manage to get books back to public libraries on the assigned day. Never have. I don’t know why because I’m a punctual person. Three weeks, six weeks pass as in a haze and I’ve read/used none or two of the books but never all six. For decades and all over England I’ve posted back library books (why do they wrap them in those slimy covers) and rescinded membership rights rather than face the demand for the paltry fines.

At the London Library you can keep books out as long as you like, provided they’re not wanted by another reader. If they are, you must return them within a fortnight or forfeit borrowing rights. It’s a manageable rule and suits me fine.Another pleasure is burrowing for yourself among the stacks of books and weird periodicals. And another, in prospect only for me as yet, is falling asleep in the comfy leather chairs in the reading room by, in winter, the real fire. So I’ll renew my far from cost-effective subscription, and hope the money’s not spent on too much refurbishing of the peeling paint and dusty shelves and quaint old-fashioned air. Our President writes ominously about ‘keeping up’ not ‘falling back’, though keeping up’s a bewildering business when it comes to the world of books.