yammering

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, 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.

.

There were many suspected sightings of Flinty last weekend. By Monday morning a pattern had emerged to support a widespread belief that he had now settled on a consistent disguise: an Arab. The Arab is a man of about Flinty’s age and build. He wears a white dishdasha, a keffiya and Ray-Bans. He drives an old white Mercedes with a red leather interior.  He has been seen on the estate parked across the street from Mandy’s on at least two occasions, and in the neighbourhood many more times. He was also been seen in Amble on Sunday afternoon, eating chips from the Harbour Chippy with no other than Elephant Carmichael. Standing with Elephant and the Arab were the Fisher boys, infamous as purveyors of dodgy amphetamines and benzos.  By Monday morning the Arab had acquired a mythical identity around the estate: he was Flinty bin Laden.

While the evidence for a fixed identity seems compelling, it needs to be kept in mind that Batman was also spotted twice on the estate last weekend, on both occasions driving a pearly blue P-reg Peugeot 306.  There were also a couple of other curious single sightings of note: on Saturday a Rastafarian in a bronze Citroen BX Estate and on Sunday morning Michael Jackson in a white Fiesta with a black offside wing and a cracked headlight.  There was also an unconfirmed sighting of Robin Hood in a Honda Civic at around teatime on Sunday, although the source of this report is Cheryl Amstrong, a notoriously unreliable witness. It is generally agreed though that none of these individuals was Flinty, but that doesn’t explain the rash of exotic visitors to the estate. There are three plausible explanations for this:

1. Chance. Despite the statistical odds being long these simultaneous rare visitors are no more than an unlikely coincidence.
2. Copycat disguising. Flinty has started a craze. Already people are talking about ‘doing a Flinty’, but so far as anyone knows no-one actually has.
3. Decoys. Flinty has got his mates to dress up to confuse and mislead people. If they can’t all be him maybe none of them is.

The smart money is on the third option. The presence of Flinty bin Laden is now considered an established fact. And while dressing as an Arab doesn’t seem like the most obvious way to avoid drawing attention to himself, remarkably enough he’s never once been pulled over by the police.  Perhaps the decoys are doing their job. Or perhaps they’re mistaking him for Dekka Douglas.

On Wednesday morning Flinty rang Debs to ask about Mandy and the kids. He said he hadn’t heard from her since he came out and was a bit worried. He was just ringing to make sure everything was okay. He was Mr Charm himself, a nicer guy you couldn’t hope to meet. But Debs wasn’t going to let him go without a challenge.

‘People say you’ve been seen hanging around the estate near Mandy’s house.’ she said.

‘People? Which people? Tell me their names.’ Flinty replied.

‘Lots of people, Flinty. I don’t think they’d want me to tell you who they are.’

‘Because they know what would happen if I found out they’d been saying things about me.’

‘A couple of people have said you were across on Saturday afternoon. They say you were disguised as an Arab.’

‘It couldn’t have been me.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because I wasn’t there.’

‘Other people say you were there on Monday as well, around teatime.’

‘Do they? So what was I dressed as on that occasion - the Last of the Mohicans?!’

‘No, as an Arab again.’

‘Oh, come on, Debs, do I look like a bloody Arab to you? Tell me who’s saying these things and I’ll go and have a talk to them about it. I think you’ll find what we have here is a case of mistaken identity.’

‘How could you go and talk to them, Flinty? You’re not allowed to cross the Wansbeck.’

‘I’ll ring them, or maybe I’ll get the Elephant to drop in on them to clarify the matter.’

‘Mandy herself thinks you were there on Monday.’

‘Nah, Debs, it couldn’t have been me. I was somewhere else that day. And besides, if the person who was there was dressed as an Arab how would anyone know it was me in any case?!’

‘Because it was an Arab with your face, Flinty.’

‘Nah. It couldn’t have been me. I was with the Elephant in Seaton Delaval seeing a geezer about some DVD’s. Ask the Elephant.  Any way, what kind of car did this Arab have, Debs?’

‘The Arab drives a white Mercedes.’

Flinty laughed, almost theatrically. Then, suddenly, the line fell completely silent.

‘You know I love the lass, Debs,’ he said, ‘and you know she loves me. The kids love me as well, you know they do. I’ve always treated them like my own. So why won’t you lot let us be together? It’s a breach of human rights not to let us be together.’

Debs began to wonder if Flinty had somehow forgotten that he tried to lop off Mandy’s ears with a pair of secateurs. ‘Mandy doesn’t want to be with you, Flinty,’ she said, very deliberately. ‘You know that.  She’s moved on and you need to let her go.’

‘Who says she doesn’t want to be with me?  Does she say that? I bet she doesn’t. Nah, it’s just you and the other busy bodies who say that. If you tell her she can be with me she’ll be back in a shot. Tell you what, Debs, you set up a meeting between me and Mandy - you can be there if you like - and let’s see what she really says.  How about you do that?’

‘No, Flinty. Mandy has a right to get on with her life without having you scare the shit of her.’

‘You reckon?  Yeah, well, time will tell, won’t it?  Tell her I’m asking after her. You can also tell her I’ve seen my brief and my release conditions are going to be changed because they make it impossible for me to follow my usual employment.’

‘What’s your usual employment, Flinty?  You’ve been on the dole as long as I can remember - except when you were locked up, of course.’

‘Scrap. I’ve always dealt in scrap, everybody knows that.’

‘Well, you’ve been convicted of stealing cable, Flinty, but I don’t think that makes you a legitimate businessman.’

‘Look, the law says I’ve got as much right as anybody else to be given a fair chance. That’s all I’m asking for, Debs. Just tell Mandy and the kids I love them. Tell them I’ll see them soon. Okay?’

Debs didn’t reply.

‘Okay. Well, whatever,’ Flinty said. ‘Salaam, Debs.’

Flinty hung up.

‘Cocky bastard,’ Debs said, and logged on to her computer to read her emails.

On Wednesday night it rained heavily. The telephone rang at about six in the morning, and I stumbled to the hall all groggy and tousled and answered it.

‘Hello,’ a quaky, panicky voice said.

‘’Oh, hello, Mrs Middlemiss,’ I said. It was The Widow Middlemiss, as I call her. She lives next door, on the other side from Hugo.

‘Is your garden flooded?’ she said, as if she was stranded. ‘Mine’s under a foot of water. Is yours?’

‘’I don’t know,’ I said. I was a bit bewildered and wondered what I was going to do if it was - mop it up with kitchen roll? ‘Er, I’ll go and check.’

‘It’s terrible,’ she said. ‘It’s run in from the Citadel.’

‘I’ll go and look Mrs Middlemiss. Thanks for ringing,’ I said.

I went into the conservatory, De Kooning traipsing along behind me. The garden was wet but not flooded. I looked out of the side window. Mrs Middlemiss’s garden was indeed under a foot of murky yellow water. Spindly pink lavetera teetered above the flood, like blighted ballerinas.

‘Oh dear,’ I said to myself, and went back to bed.

I went back to sleep and had a vivid, highly anxious dream. We were on an island and a yellow flood was rising all around us. It was gloomy and steam was rising from the water, which was lapping beneath almost luminous double-glazed kitchen and bedroom windows and seeping under white plastic doors. Crocodiles and giant snakes were slithering through the muddy flood and green frogs and brown toads were erupting suddenly out of the depths, like ferocious little missiles. A swan glided eerily across the scene. I was watching all this from the conservatory window. I ran upstairs and threw open the bedroom door. Gordon was there in the centre of a shabby assortment of characters, some of whom I knew but couldn’t identify. On his knee Gordon was nursing a spherical time bomb and gently stroking its smooth surface. Gathered around him were ruddy faced men and women, all gazing in wonderment at the baby in Gordon’s arms. A pale horse was running around; the Widow Middlemiss was its rider. I tried to scream but no sound came out of me. It struck me later that this terrifying bedroom tableau roughly resembled David Wilkie’s painting The Blind Fiddler. The fiddler in my dream version was Tristan, and the man in the red waistcoat was George Bush. For some reason there were a number of traffic cones in the dream too.

As I was sitting in the conservatory on Thursday morning having a cappuccino before I went to work the telephone rang again. I assumed it would be Mrs Middlemiss again and let Margaret answer it. I listened to the news on Radio 4 and ignored the conversation.

‘That was Geraldine,’ Margaret said, when she came back. ‘Edna was flooded last night! She rang Geraldine in the middle of the night, though God knows why. Geraldine did nothing. Typical Geraldine!’ Edna is the first name of the Widow Middlemiss, although not one I ever use since I have never felt I have achieved a sufficient level of intimacy with the woman.

‘She rang us too,’ I said. I forgot to tell you.

Margaret was annoyed. Geraldine had already presumed to ring Griff about the flood.

‘Why didn’t you wake me up?’ Margaret asked.

‘I couldn’t see the point,’ I said. ‘What were you going to do, paddle across and rescue her? The water wasn’t in her house. She wasn’t sitting on the roof with a cow.’ I could see that images from Oh Brother Where Art Thou? were seeping into my brain. I stopped there.

Margaret stomped away to ring Mrs Middlemiss. No doubt she was going to offer her better advice than Geraldine’s. The Widow Middlemiss is about eighty years old, lives alone and has arthritis. She is the kind of accidental victim who has the makings of a cause celebre.

‘You can swim, can’t you?’ I said to De Kooning. He looked at me and then licked his paw and began cleaning his face. He can, but he’d prefer it if he didn’t have to.

On Friday Debs visited Mandy to see how things were going. Mandy told her that Flinty was dressing as an Arab and driving around in an old Mercedes.

‘They call him Flinty bin Laden,’ she said.

Debs said yes, she already knew. Mandy said she hadn’t seen him herself but Mr Zee thinks he saw the white Mercedes on Station Road one afternoon.  Mandy said they weren’t going out much and she felt like a prisoner in her own home.  She said that on Thursday morning there was a small pile of sand on the step in front of her door when she got up. It had appeared there during the night. She thought it was a message from Flinty.

‘Has he rung you any more?’ Debs asked.

Mandy shrugged.

‘We had Yvonne Fair a couple of times last night,’ Mr Zee said. He was sitting on the settee with Sparky, who had a pair of toy binoculars around his neck and a plastic rifle in his arms. As usual Mr Zee was in his full regalia and looking very well turned out.

‘Is that a new mask?’ Debs asked him.

‘Yes, it is,’ he said. ‘I got it over the internet from ZorrStore.com. My old one was getting worn at the edges.’

‘It’s nice,’ Debs said. ‘It’s really, really black.’

‘Thanks,’ Mr Zee said.

Debs was thinking how young and naïve he seemed. She didn’t know how long a young man like him would be able to cope with the situation like this. She didn’t like to think what might happen if Flinty ever got his hands on him.

‘You both need to be careful,’ Debs said. ‘The police say they’re going to keep a look-out for him. They’ll arrest him as soon as they see him.’

Mandy and Mr Zee looked blankly at her and nodded their heads.

‘Has he rung you, Debs?’ Mandy asked.

Debs nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, he has. He rang me to ask if I’d seen you. I told him I had.’

‘So is that all he said?’ Mandy said, frowning.

‘Yes, more or less. Yeah, it was. He said he was living with Elephant. Just chit chat really.’

Debs gave Mr Zee a lift up to the Job Centre. She asked him how he was coping. He said he was fine but he was worried about Mandy and the kids. Sometimes he thinks Mandy is cracking up. He said she was hardly sleeping and she’d been to the doctor’s to get something for her nerves.

‘Do you think he’ll eventually just go away?’ he asked.

Debs shook her head. ‘No, that’s not his style,’ she replied. ‘He won’t go away until they lock him up again. He’s a dangerous bloke, Mr Zee. You need to keep your eyes open.’

Mr Zee in his best brown cape and new black mask thanked Debs for the lift and told her not to worry. He promised her he’d make sure Mandy and the kids would come to no harm.

When Debs got back to the office Jen Larkin from the police rang her. She had some intelligence to share with her.

‘We think Flinty might be dressing up in disguises to cross the Wansbeck,’ Jen said.

‘Never?’ Debs said.

‘Yes, we think so. But we’re not a hundred percent on this one, Debs,’ Jen said. ‘Some lads on patrol thought they had him on Monday when they pulled up a punter dressed as Batman on the Pegswood road, but he turned out to be a bloke from Guidepost on his way to a fancy dress do.’

‘Was he driving a pearly blue Peugeot 306?’ Debs asked.

‘Yes, he was. Do you know him?’

‘No, not really,’ Debs replied. ‘Just a lucky guess.’

This morning Maureen and the Whelp passed our house. They didn’t knock, though. I was disappointed. I had wanted to ask her about the passage in the Book of Revelation which says that three unclean spirits like frogs come out of the mouth of the dragon, and out of the mouth of the beast, and out of the mouth of the false prophet.

I let De Kooning out into the garden and cut back a few unruly brambles and pulled up a few weeds. Margaret was going off to Brenda’s to pack some orders for despatch tomorrow. It was fine day and forecast to stay dry.

When I went out Mrs Middlemiss was in her front garden, pottering about with her petunias and French marigolds.

‘Hi, Miss Middlemiss,’ I said. ‘Is you back garden okay now?’

‘Oh, wasn’t that just terrible?’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what to do. You must thank Margaret for being so kind to me.’

I will,’ I said. Mrs Middlemiss looked as I imagined Mrs Noah must have looked sometimes. Oddly enough her husband was a stevedore, I believe.

I drove up to Amble and walked up through Warkworth. Amble was bustling with market goers, as usual on a Sunday, but it was quiet along the Coquet. Eider ducks paddled to and fro towing nurseries of little brown chicks. A flock of lapwings swirled overhead at one point, like locusts. Along the river bank the dog roses are becoming ragged, their pale petals falling. The blue vetch is beautiful when it’s in flower, as it is now. I love its weird curling tendrils. They remind me of lyres and millipedes. There were quite a few cars at the castle at Warkworth. I wandered down the hill behind the Sun Inn past the little housing estate they’ve jammed on to the river bank. I saw a heron roosting in a tree on the other side of the river and I sat on a riverside seat eating an apple and watching it for a while.

When I got back into Amble I walked through the path past the marina with a well-spoken man who was on his way to the Co-op. He told me that the big Co-op shop near the church square was closed now and that the building was going to be taken over by Tesco, who were also going to build a superstore with a big car park on another piece of land away from the town centre.

‘Bloody hell,’ I said. ‘What do people think about that?’

‘Most people support it,’ the man said. ‘It’s the car park, you see.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I see.’

I walked around the pier and back past the Harbour Chippy, which as usual had a queue right out the door and around the corner. I was on the lookout for an Arab in a white Mercedes. I didn’t find one, and I saw no sign of the Fisher boys either.

.

A few days ago I was reading somewhere that modernity is a runaway horse. Democracy was the only rein we ever had on it. Unfortunately a jockey can slow a horse down, and the owners don’t want that. Now there’s a ghost in the saddle.

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 4×4 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 Could 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.

.

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.

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.

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.

Yesterday I went to another meeting in Morpeth. Well, actually, it was the same meeting that I’d gone to the day before, but on that day I had the wrong day in my diary. One of the people at yesterday’s meeting was my old boss Gilmour. He and I have had some serious disagreements in the past, but generally we get on well with one another. Gilmour’s a very affable man, if on occasions a little fastidious or tetchy and at all times immensely vain. But handsome men are often cursed with such narcissisism. Maybe they think that if they aren’t loved for how they look they won’t be loved at all. Such men are never going to see themselves as ugly.

Gilmour sits well with senior management and looks every inch the part. He comes from a very different background to me. His father, Robert Gilmour, is a wealthy landowner and farmer in the south of England. He breeds Lincoln Red cattle. Gilmour is very sensitive to any perceived attack on his father, almost unnaturally so. For this reason if for no other whenever he’d been down to see his family I’d have to ask him about Slaughterhouse Bob, a moniker which instantaneously turned Gilmour Junior into a teeth grinding, fist clenching madman. This behaviour became a good deal more frequent when his father became involved in a TV programme, providing me with the pretext to unleash my childish abuse on a more or less daily basis. I regret such behaviour now, of course, but the habit of winding up Gilmour is a hard one to give up.

‘God, you’re lovely today!’ I said as I walked into the meeting.  His companions - Head of Department Harry Gillan, two men from personnel and Petra from legal - raised an eyebrow or two. Gilmour glowered at me and laughed.

‘You too,’ he said, adding ‘you lanky bastard’ under his breath as I took the seat next to him.

The meeting, rather ironically, concerned a disciplinary investigation I am undertaking into a worker suspended from work for allegedly gratuitously insulting colleagues and clients alike. The worker is Hermann Evans, who works in the north of the county. He’s been around for years and has a reputation as a maverick, a man who doesn’t give a hoot for the shallow niceties of organisational etiquette. He is suspended from work pending the outcome of my investigation, but has complicated matters by getting himself diagnosed with a work-induced stress-related psychological illness, and by taking out a grievance on the grounds of racial discrimination. Hermann is three parts Bavarian, one part Welsh, and is claiming that any offence he caused was accidental and arose from his failure to recognise the nuances of the English language. He claims this is because he still thinks in German.

Hermann has a long history of using apparently gratuitously insulting expressions and I discovered that he has been spoken to about this by managers many times over the years. One of the earliest examples occurred some years ago and involved Hermann habitually calling an unruly, unkempt group of siblings “the ferret children”. He did this, it seemed, not only because of their appearance and manners, but as a pun on their surname, which was Merritt. When talking to their mother Hermann would repeatedly refer to her children as “the lesser-spotted ferrets”. In his assessment report he twice referred to the boys’ absent father in writing as “the mysterious Mr Ferret”. Mrs Merritt complained about this behaviour and he was spoken to. He was unapologetic, and responded by saying that it is characteristic of the ferret to live in a state of denial. He was taken off the case.

More recently Hermann has persistently referred to a certain formidable broad-hipped female headteacher as Brunhilda, doing this both with parents and their children and in formal meetings involving school staff and other professionals. One person said to me that he had never heard Hermann refer to this headteacher by any other name and that he seemed unable to bring himself to use her real name. When referring to her as Brunhilda he spoke in a plain matter of fact tone, as if in fact this was her real name.

Other recent examples involve Hermann calling a child he was working with who suffers from enuresis the peapod, a local doctor whose eyebrows meet in the middle Freddie Faust, and two of his fellow team members Lardarse and Lulabelle.  It’s remarkable how tolerant the organisation has been with Hermann. My theory is that there are two main factors here: first, no-one wants to become the butt of his abuse, and second, everyone secretly enjoys his outrageousness and thus covertly encourages it. It livens up the day to see what he might come up with next.

Hermann finally came a cropper when he came up with a new label for the Director: The Gay Goldilocks. Hermann being Hermann, and riding on the back of his I don’t really know what I’m saying, I still think in German, you know excuse, he soon ceased to use the Director’s real name at all and simultaneously appeared to begin to go out of his way to find a reason to bring him into the conversation, something that would be a rarity in usual circumstances, given that the Director is little more than a mythical being to most people in the organisation. It was only a matter of time before he was suspended, and it happened in dramatic style at an Adoption Panel. The Gay Goldilocks was in the chair. Hermann grandstanded with a bravura performance of vintage Bavarian deadpan slapstick - porridge, the three bears, crumpled bedsheets, the lot. That was Hermann’s last morning at work.

From the interviews I’ve carried out I’ve come to believe that his colleagues also became increasingly inclined to mention the Director to Hermann, throwing up balls for him to whack over the fence. There were also a significant number of interviewees who smirked as they recounted Hermann’s exploits, and a number who said they sometimes couldn’t help laughing at his comments because he seemed to have a knack of spotting something true about his victims. No-one of course expressed the view that there was an ounce of truth in his characterisation of the Director.

Gilmour asked me what I made of Hermann’s excuse that he didn’t mean to offend and that the inappropriateness of his remarks arose from his poor English.

‘It’s a preposterous excuse,’ I said. ‘If he didn’t know what he was saying there’d be no truth in his characterisations. Sometimes his observations are frighteningly exact. No-one would hit the bull’s eye so often if he wasn’t a darts player’

Gilmour, Harry and the men from personnel looked at me quizzically.

‘Except in the case of the Director, of course,’ I added.  ‘Even Hermann sometimes throws a bad arrow.’ The personnel guys nodded sagely. I’m pretty sure Petra sniggered.

When the meeting ended I asked Gilmour how his wife and seven children were. He said they were all doing great. His eldest daughter has a dappled grey horse and his son drives the quad bike now.

‘And how’s your dad?’ I asked. ‘Still growing cows?’

‘Yep,’ Gilmour replied, now with the unflappable poise of a man with ambition. ‘How’s yours?’

‘Oh, he’s just the same, you know. Still working at the pit.’

When I got home I discovered Margaret on the phone talking to Brenda. Brenda and Tristan were back from Florence and had obviously had a wonderful time. I decided to go out on my bike before I had tea. It was a dull evening but dry. I rode out to Blagdon Hall and back through Annitsford and Shankhouse. When I got back Hugo was on his castle drive with a hammer in his hand. I cruised past his spiked railings and up the path.  I heard him beginning to beat the Alligator as I closed the front door.

Margaret had gone to see the snaps of Brenda and the Troskyist at the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore and to hear of the marvels of the Uffizi. The house smelled of onions. I fed De Kooning some fresh prawns and made myself a Quorn and cheese sandwich.  I put on the Decemberists again and looked at Haldane’s book on the drove roads of Scotland. 

Tomorrow I’m off to Galloway for a week. I go there every year at the beginning of June. The days are long and the world is green and I will walk from morning till night.

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.