Let's get metaphysical

I was exhausted and drained when Carol left. Intellectual conversation can be stimulating but it can also be very tiring. I have not mentioned this before, but Carol has a degree in sociology. What I did not know – until today that is – is that she has also completed a doctoral thesis: “The council estate syndrome: an ethnomethodological study into the relationship between domestic violence and low cost, high-rise development in an inner-city environment.”

Well I should say almost completed. She went to live on a council estate so as to immerse herself in the background, so to speak. It was there that she met Gary and ended up in immersing herself in him . She now identifies with the working class - she was from an upper class background and went to a posh girls' school - affecting a lower-class accent and adopting the idioms and slovenly syntax of the proletariat. (By the way, she now calls Sociology ‘intellectual masturbation’! Talk about biting the hand that feeds you…)

Carol also left me with mild post-coital depression. I don’t think I’ll do the coitals any more. Is it worth it? I ask myself. I’m going back to making model aeroplanes. Life was simpler then, before I found girls – or they found me.
But you can’t go back, can you? Not really. You have to go forward.

“Therefore go forth,
And when you find
No highway more, no path,
All being blind –
The way to go shall glimmer in the mind”

(That is from a poem called ‘No Highway’ – did you see the film? James Stewart and Marlene Dietrich. Brilliant.


I was thinking about what Carol said, about thinking. I think she may be right about my thinking too much. But that is the difficulty: you have to think about thinking to decide whether you think too much. And if so, how much thinking is just about right? Very tricky.

Actually, I am working class. Well I was born into a working class family. All my family were miners – except my mother. We lived in a ‘two up, two down’ with a lavatory at the end of the yard. As you know, Amanda wants me to talk more about my childhood and that is what I am going to do.