inspo/self-deprecation

The weekend her father left – left the house, the town, the country, everything, packing so lightly I believed he would come back – he had said, ‘You can raise Nickie by yourself. You’ll be good at it.’

And I had said, ‘Are you on crack?’

And he had replied, continuing to fold a blue twill jacket, ‘Yes, a little.’

The referee blew his whistle. ‘We can do this, England,’ I found myself yelling, despite my Welshness, despite my half-German mother. I was not the only player transformed by regressive instincts. Our captain, Andrew Keatley – a soft-voiced writer of brilliant, searing plays about injustice and humanity, about guilt and inheritance, an outspoken voice for the voiceless – spent the ninety minutes shouting at the Germans, shouting at the referees and linesmen, and generally sending the message that their voices were irrelevant. I had never really given much thought to the fact that Andrew had no hair until I saw him screaming in an England shirt. He was suddenly Plato’s eternal skinhead: the ideal form of the worst in our culture. Even our critically acclaimed poet, Nathan Hamilton, headed the ball with such commitment you could almost smell the poems evaporating. It became clear we all badly wanted to destroy Germany. We wanted to do it for England. I recalled the incident when the writing hand of Marcus du Sautoy, The Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford, had been ruthlessly crushed, bones and all, in collision with a German writer of plays for children. I vowed to avenge his months of lost productivity. The idea that football might provide an opportunity to overcome our dumber instincts seemed ridiculous now: football was a chance to set our idiocy free.

We won three-nil. We beat Germany three-nil. In the World Cup. We tonked them. We mullered them. We shellacked them. All the made-up words. We did not care that the only audience for our victory was a handful of Cypriot weightlifters, dead-lifting dumb-bells at the side of the pitch. We refused to acknowledge that the Germany B team was any worse than Germany A.

‘Germany’s Germany,’ we said.

Back at the hotel, we drank, swam, watched traditional local dancing, and told stories of our heroism, our darting runs and crisply pinged through-balls. We mythologised our best goal, how the ball had seemed to hang a moment in the sky – spinning on its axis like the earth itself – before novelist Matt Greene – never forget his name – had slammed it home, bringing to a righteous end one of the great feuds in world history.

I have since rewatched a video of this game. It is amazing how slowly we move. It looks like we’re on the moon. In order to make the game on the screen accurately reflect my self-image, I played it at three times real speed.

The last time I performed in their theatre—the Jo Ro, opposite the factory—I played Abdullah, a street urchin in Tennessee Williams strange, static play, Camino Real. I was thirteen years old. As Abdullah, I was photographed by the Yorkshire Evening Press, and the accompanying caption came very near to praising my brief performance. I would read this caption over and over in the hope that unequivocal praise for my acting talent might somehow emerge from it.

Edmund’s going to have to make some choices. Five hundred academic sinologists can sign off on a letter, tell Taiwan what for and so on about how to run its business, but in the end, what does it mean? You can’t stir up a pot with five hundred sinologists. Honey, you need five million sinologists.

I chewed my toast, considering this, and between glances at Brigid looked all around the room with equal attentiveness, just so it wouldn’t seem like I was particularly fixated on her face (so sharp-boned and precise, but with a pleasant suggestion of former plumpness everywhere smudging it faintly with voluptuous life) and happily analogous body. Certainly she would make a welcome addition to any threesome.

“Is there a mosquito?” she asked. “Or what are you looking at everywhere?”

[...] I want to believe I'm at home with these composed individuals. They're liberal in their politics, after all. From where I sit on the low settee wedged among needlepoint pillows, I can see a whole shelf devoted to the egalitarian writings of Thomas Jefferson. Surely they recognize my native intellect. [...]

It was a fine voyage, in first-class berths. A destroyer escorted our steamer, and now and then took long shots at floating mines. A dark gush would rise from the waves and the child hostages applauded. From mist and sea there emerged the massive outline of Elsinore’s gray stone castle, with its roofs of dull emerald. Weak Prince Hamlet, you faltered in that fog of crimes, but you put the question well. “To be or not to be,” for the men of our age, means free will or servitude, and they have only to choose. We are leaving the void, and entering the kingdom of the w ill. This, perhaps, is the imaginary frontier. A land awaits us where life is beginning anew, where conscious will, intelligence and an inexorable love of mankind are in action. Behind us, all Europe is ablaze, having choked almost to death in the fog of its own massacres. Barcelona’s flame smolders on. Germany is in the thick of revolution, Austro-Hungary is splitting into free nations. Italy is spread with red flags. .. this is only the beginning. We are being born into violence: not only you and I, who are fairly unimportant, but all those to whom, unknown to themselves, we belong, down to this tin-hatted Senegalese freezing under his fur on his dismal watch at the foot of the officers’ gangway. Outbursts of idealism like this, if truth be known, kept getting mixed up with our heated discussions on points of doctrine. [...]