“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”
Eliot, The Waste Land
“In every object there is inexhaustible meaning; the eye sees in it what the eye brings means of seeing.”
Thomas Carlyle
In Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia all the action happens in the same house, in the same room, with the same props. Except, it isn’t and they aren’t. Two hundred years separate the room in which Septimus teaches algebra to Thomasina from the room in which Hannah sketches out the proposal for her book on romanticism to Bernard. So, so, so close but impossibly far. I don’t understand how anyone can think about the past without being morbidly nostalgic.
The other week I was back at my parents’ house in Manchester for a few days, and I found myself going through the cupboards in my old bedroom. I’ve never been much of a hoarder, and over the years I’ve performed several ‘shitectomies’, as my dad calls a clearout, but there are still things there to find, mental inventories to draw up. I’ve lived in London for most of the last six years but never stayed in one place for more than nine months, and in all that time I’ve spread my stuff around, and never quite shifted it all out of home. I’ve spread my life around really in a way, subbing cash to my flatmate for Council Tax in Homerton, carrying a drivers licence that still puts me in a flat in Stroud Green, letting my bank statements arrive in Manchester. I’m starting a PhD in September and I’m planning to move to a much nicer flat in Brixton in July. I’m 25 and I need some permanency, and I need to take my things with me. I think my mum feels the same; family stuff has begun to drift into my room and jostle for space with my CDs and the t shirts I don’t wear anymore. Under my bed there are about four sleeping bags and a tent, next to my bookshelves is a collapseable cot that my parents keep for when my neice visits, in my wardrobe hangs my mum’s beekeeping outfit. My room is like a town by the sea slowly being covered by sand dunes.
I’d been spending a lot of time indoors lately and I needed some air to clear the dust out of my lungs. I walked down to Primark in Hackney to look for a pair of jogging bottoms. If I’m going to spend so much time around the flat I quite like the idea of having a pair of trousers that lets me get out of my pyjamas without really getting dressed. More than any other shop, Primark encapsulates cheap low quality disposable possessions. (There’s already a hole in the pocket of the joggers which I’ve had to shore up with masking tape, but on the plus side they only cost me a fiver.) Queueing for the tills you are led in a snaking line past a last selection of crap you look at out of boredom, and just might buy on impulse. On my right is a ‘wash mitt’, that looks like a small oven glove made out of a Winnie the Pooh towel. Behind me an American girl carrying two pillows and a duvet is talking to her friend. “I’ve bought so many pillows in my life. You know, every time you’re moving your things at college you throw stuff out. The bedding’s the first thing you get rid of.”
Sitting in Steve’s lounge, a rained off barbecue. Heavy rain and wind tugging at the gazebo in the back garden. It wants to get away. A small bureau in dark wood, from a workshop in Manchester where they take old furniture and get it restored by homeless people. They take an object and put extra symbolism and a story into it. There are trinkets on the shelves; two cigarette lighters, a tobacco tin, a cigarette case, hip flask, some kind of incense holder, pewter tea set with milk jug, a framed print of the Alfred Wallis painting the blue ship. Prints and photos on the walls. Flowers. A copy of ‘Lamb’s last essays’ on the bookshelf.
My sister Anna and her husband and daughter Nina will soon be moving to a new house in Manchester. She’s been in London for nearly ten years but she’s going back. Me, I just can’t leave yet. I’m taking over the lease on her flat in Brixton, and every time I visit at the moment I feel like I’m sizing it up, making my plans. I wonder if it annoys her. I’ll put my this there, I need to buy a that for the bedroom, I’ll probably get some of these.
Anna’s new house in Manchester isn’t ready to live in, and currently has builders hard at work on it. The other day, chipping old plaster off a wall one of them found an old page torn out of the Manchester Evening News from 1993 tucked into a cavity. There was a little piece on an event held by the Hallé orchestra, in which local schoolkids had visited for the day and had help composing their own piece of music. Pictured, and quoted, was my friend Ed’s mother Janet, the Hallé’s pianist. By coincidence, Ed came over for dinner the night Anna told me about this. I made bobotie, a South African dish my dad makes, and we watched the Apprentice, pissed ourselves laughing, and made stupid comments on the Guardian liveblog about the show. The candidates were making fools of themselves selling mostly shit British-designed products in Paris, so we opted for “un, deux, TWAT.”
I took Nina for a few hours this morning to get her out of her parents’ hair. We went up to the ‘play zone’ at the Brixton Rec. It’s much bigger than I expected, and loads more fun too. There were lots of plastic balls to flop around in, a kind of rope bridge, tunnels to crawl through, slopes to climb up, slides to woosh down. I wish we’d had one near me when I was a kid. “Look at me!” Nina shouts, “uncle Harry, look at me!”, and she jumps off a slide into a pool of balls. Eventually she hurt herself and insisted on going home, but she calmed down after a few minutes and we went for a drink at a café in Brixton Village instead. She sucked her ginger beer through a curly straw (“like a snake”) and offered me sugar for my coffee. We talked about their imminent move: “You can come and visit me if you like,” she said. And then, “Are you going to miss me?” she asked. I nodded, somehow I couldn’t speak.
I stayed at Anna’s for lunch. My brother in law had just heard that he’d passed his final exams. We cracked out the Cava and clinked glasses. “Here’s to Dr Cormack.”
I looked around and wondered what I’d leave behind in the walls when I finally make it out of here.
