PART 2. Chapter 1: The end looms...losing specs - & marbles?... The Golden Notebook effect...First snog with a bloke...

you're invisible now, you've got no secrets to confuse..

Parkway ground floor bedsit Thursday 21st August, 2025. 22.46.

PART 2 Chapter 1:

[you’re right…there was no Part 1…I just made this up so I didn’t have to go and check what number chapter I was supposed to be on…and it feels like its time for a fresh part…]

End of pain

This is the text I sent last night to my dearest and closest friend R…

The pain free bit turned out to be a bit of an illusion. As soon as I stood up to go for a pee the oof of chronic* sciatica hit. But softer and I was able to walk rather than PD totter to the loo. I knocked back some more whisky and took one of the mushroom capsules my ex had sent me a couple of days before…they hadn’t seemed to work at all the first night…but maybe it was a slow build.

*As I’m editing this it clicks chronic ..chronos…your bleeding Greek god of time innit…no wonder it fucking grinds you down..

And by the time I went to bed….. by God… I WAS PAIN FREE…

This was amazing…to get into bed with ease and pleasure, to take off my shoes without shooting pains, to lay my head on the pillow without some awful fucking nag from my back or sciatic right hip…this was the best thing that had happened to me in months…I didn’t need to listen to a podcast or any other aid to sleep…

When I woke it wasn’t with the usual desperate need to get up because of aching legs, and when I turned over - though not easy - there was none of the horrible rasping lower back pain which I’d been living with it seemed for ever. And it was 4.30…another treat - I’d slept an hour longer and I didn’t need to have my first breakfast to cheer me up and get back to sleep..no way..I was normal…I could just crawl back into bed and go to sleep on my right side…the sciatic side but now it felt just like a nice side to sleep on…how wonderful life was…

I’m not sure when the pain came back - I think it might have started when I woke up at 7.30 (an hour later than usual). No - I just checked and discovered that I’d completely forgotten (more of which later….) that I’d had two major cultural adventures between waking at 7.30 and getting up at 9.00.

The first was that having still at 7.30 the luxury of a pain free bod I decided to go back to bed..I should explain that when bed=pain then getting up is the treat - especially getting up to eat is a big treat. So it was a novelty for me to chose bed over breakfast. That said I needed some entertainment so idly pressed Resume on a what I’d earlier dismissed as a rather pedesttrian convo at the LRB bookshop between Sue Tilley and Charlie Porter about a very vernacular biography of Leigh Bowery that Sue had written years ago.

Sue was totally unlike the uber brainy/hyper cultured Deborah Levy. Deborah was blue blood intellectual - who’s high flown conversation with Adam Thirlwell about her new book The Position of Spoons, had teased my intellectual curiosity so much last week. I’d already listened to it twice - and as a result was deep into Marguerite Duras’ The Lover.

Sue Tilley it turned out was a dedicated clubber from the early 80’s who’d become the only real friend of the

[OI MUSH..YES YOU - SPECKY FACE ON THE KEYBOARD..I SUBSCRIBED TO THIS END OF THE LINE WHATSIT SIX WEEKS AGO AND THERE’S BEEN NOTHINC CEPT SOME POXY NOTES ABOUT TRIP TO FUCKING MANCHESTER AND THEN YOU PUT UP SOME BOLLOCKS ABOUT PART 2 CHAPTER 1 AND STUFF ABOUT SNOGGIN A BLOKE AN THAT - BUT MATE - ALL YOU’VE FUCKIN WRIT SO FAR IS ABOUT YOUR BLEEDIN LA DEE DAH FUCKIN OL LADY AN FUCKN SHROOM AN N NOW YO\RE STARTIN ABOUT FUCKIN REVIEW BOOKSHOP AND SOME CUNTS WITH WEIRD NAMES

[have to stop writing now 1.30am my face is going into parkie spasm but brain ok so far…631 words in

OI! ARE YOU TRYING TO BLANK ME YOU LITTLE TOSSER…DON’T TRY THAT GOBSHITE ‘OH POOR WEE PARKIE ME’ - THAT’S ANOTHER FUCKIN LAME FUCKIN NUMBER YOU BORING BORING OLD GIT…I DON’T GIVE A MONKEY’S ABOUT YOUR SAD SAD OLD BODY…COME ON - WHAT’S ALL THIS END LOOMS THEN…ARE YOU GOIN TO SNUFF IT? BE A MERCIFUL RELIEF MATE FOR ALL OF US…IF YOU JUST FUCKIN LAY DOWN AND DIED THEN WE COULD ALL GET ON WITHOUT ALL THIS TERRIBLE WHINY LITTLE VOICE GOIN ON AND ON AND FUCKIN TAKIN UP TIME AND SPACE PRETENDING YOU’VE GOT SOMETHING WORTH YOUR TIME TO GET WRIT AND OUR TIME TO READ…oh what, ok ok calm down old man ok ok you don’t want to keel over with an aneurism mid sentence do …

The end looms…

Some of the new subscribers may not yet have caught up with the central feature of this particular person’s journey: that it is will not be the conductor or the inspector, or the engine driver (weird concepts in this case…) who decides when the end of the line has been reached but it will be I, the passenger¹, who decides when the trip ends. ie I will be in charge of when I die. My older sister at age 96 decided enough was enough a couple of years ago. 96 - the thought of living for another 16 years fills me with dread…but then maybe it is true that I have never fully been here but was always just passing through…²

[Alright you great thug - stop cracking your horible hairy knuckles…I’m coming to the lost spex and marbles…FFS who’s …Alright!..]

losing specs…losing marbles…

As I was saying the pain thing from the sciatica had become more and more of a drag that only mountains of codeine could touch - and we all know where that leads…

[Eh - big boy…we know where living on codeine leads don’t we…big boy…eh? …No for fuck’s sake don’t wake him..]

And then I can’t remember when but a month ago at least it felt like the meds stopped holding the Parkie at bay. Bit by bit the windows of ok time disappeared so that I felt unwell, out of it, brain fogged, body shambled, voice mangled all day long. This coincided with my living on my own in Camden.

R and I had realised that my age and health made a relationship unworkable for both of us. And I as my parkie symptoms seemed to be taking over I had to be in my own space being in someone else’s space, having to take account of how someone else lived became intolerable.

P’s lifestyle is so completely mucky and chaotic that my bedsit could never cause him to complain…But this messy down and dirty lifstylw was fine within the confines of my upstairs life. but became way problematic when when my flat was free for a couple days and I moved downstairs.

WHAT THE FUCK? HASN’T HE GOT TO THE FUCKIN SPEX YET…JESUZ H CHRIST YOU BAG OF OLD FART JUICE…HOW MUCH LONGER…FUCKIN HELL…

Losing spex…

Being so vain means I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to get the right specs…and then lose them rapidly…Last summer in the height of my relationship with R i lost both my computer and book reading specs…and made disasterous choices when I bought replacements in a rush. By May this year I’d lost both pairs. Because I’d had 4th nerve palsy (cool huh - bet you’re jealous) which means my close up spex have prisms to correct the double vision. So losing both pairs meant I had a sever visual handicap - texting even the shortest text became a nightmare and because my voice is fucked i couldn’t dictate. The really close up spex reappeared and so got by with these until this summer when I got two new pairs made. I liked both and thought looked ok - but within a month I’d lost both…

And…or…losing marbles…?

everyone loses spex but these were brand new and precious…and both disappeared in the panicy exhausted process of moving back from my flat to bedsit…too tired and boring to sat more… because it’s just turned midnight on the 27th August and I want to finish this fucker before I drop…

[PART 2 Chapter1.2?] The Golden Notebook effect…

I am Anna\Ella in The Golden Notebook, around chapter 50 Lessing aka Anna aka Ella embarks on a series of imaginary meetings, conversations, affairs in which she ask the question why am i like this, why do i have relationships wiht men that are so unsatisfactory, why do i do what i do/why am i like who i am. in one passage she descriibes her character Ella (who really is ]Anna, sitting in an arm chair for “hours and hour” her hands “lying in her lap”.

i’m amazed by the idea of sitting a chair for hours and hours just thinking…i don\t think i have ever done such a thing. And the questions she asks i (despite my much self promoted self absorbtion have never ever arisen in my mind. lying in bed after an a fitful late afternoon doze the lack of my self questioning starts to bug me so much i have to get up, go for a pee. What should i do? The laundry - so things are ready for next airbnb guests…No R and F say i should just be able to enjoy my home and i realise it is pleasantly liberating to think only of my pleasure in the moment. So what to do, more work on the railings outside…no that’s too much work…So there’s my will and the lasting power of attorney forms to be completed. My son had D said over lunch I did need to finish those…I’m walking back and forth between bedroom bathroom and sitting room while all this is going on..

Then i think i should just sit down and write about all these questions Lessing had thrown up and maybe even try to answer them. Anna\Ella was strikingly frank about sex, something i hadn’t remembered from my reading of it in the 1980’s. About how many men had been impotent or at least complicated in their sexual responses which of course I could say of myself currently (certainly I can’t remember ever being worried about sex with C or R so it was only later post J…But now I’m wondering if Lessing seems to assume a complete lack of complication on the female side, none of the women have concerns about their sexual responses.

All of this is going through my head as I’m feeling physically awful…weak wobbly, keep sicking into my mouth, head a total mush..combination of rushing about in a pd tizz combined with my messy habit of leaving stuff on the floor and my lack of balance means theres often a series of mini trip ups which add to the sense of alarm..

I must go upstairs and get my laptop so i can write this all down and at the same time get the resistance band i bought so i can continue my muscle building programme.

Upstairs i think why take the laptop downstairs when the whole place is set up for writing here?

So here i am upstairs in my bedsit…trying to think deeply about why my gorgeous great lunp of a son should tip up at lunchtime primed by this text to go first to talk to P my bedsit landlord

P started about a month ago to come
 and tell me whenever he went out 
where he was going and assuring me 
I could always get him on the mobile..,
so clearly he thinks I’m more vulnerable 
than i used toBe..anyway I thought you 
should meet him while you’re here ? 
Maybe go and chat to him about
 what he sees has changed..?

D turned up gave a big hug and said how sweet he thought P was and then said he’s only doing that because he thinks you’ve become more absent minded that’s all…

Then he gave me one of his lovely grins and said how do you feel now…and I who hate the fuss aspect involved in actually not being well and am so pleased to see him say “well I feel fine now and my voice is working and you’re here so yes i do feel ok…”

Of course as soon as he left I felt crap again and so went to bed and woke listening to the Anna/Ella stuff which seemed so full of big questions to be asked and answered but which now I can’t remember and….

First snog with a bloke...

A few weeks back in my bedsit, around 10.00 A man’s voice outside Nick! Nick!..It’s P a friend of R’s, musician. His gf lived round the corner and they’d come round a few weeks earlier to borrow my guitar and amp. I went to open the front door… he came in a jumble of skinny arms and legs and wrapped me in a huge hug saying how pleased he was to see me..I liked P, he was always dressed as if it was 1967, in gorgeous motley of crushed velvet and satin, he didn’t make a thing of it it was just how it was and he had the face and skinny body to make it work. He was clearly off his head on something but was so full of affection and enthusiasm that I was happy to let him ramble on. He sat on the edge of the bed facing me and started runnign his hands up and down my thighs saying all the time what a lovely lovely man i was and how much he loved me…I was laughing and enjoying being appreciated so much then he said you know i really want to fuck you…and laughed then he said have you ever had sex with a man? I said no he said i haven’t either but I feeling so horny now I really want to fuck you. I wasn’t against the idea of having sex with him but not now…so i said well you’re not going to. Then he sat up wrapped his arms around me and started snogging me furiously, it seemed entirely natural to stick my tongue in his mouth and so that was my first snog with a bloke. I didn’t get turned on …but then it takes way more than a bit of snog to get my loins to stir these days..and i found his very thick tongue a bit shocking and wasnt all that keen on the bristly mouth…But i was flattered and pleased to be found snogworthy by this much younger man…and so that’s the story of my first male on male encounter…

IS THAT IT THEN … YOU MEAN YOU JUST SNOGGED AND THEN HE WENT HOME….PULL THE OTHER ONE…YOU OLD POOF …YOU MUST HAVE DONE MORE THAN THAT…

He stayed a bit longer and talked about stuff he’d like to do …but the snog was as close as we got…

FUCKIN HELL WHAT A LET DOWN…ALL THIS OTHER SHITE YOU MADE SIT THROUGH FOR ONE FUCKIN KISS…END OF THE BLEEDIN LINE…MORE LIKE WASTE OF FUCKIN TIME…

Night everyone…

Random (not) lyric #7098

Didn't make it out to California
Where I thought I might clean the slate
Feels a little like I'm stuck in Seven Sisters
North London, oh, England
And maybe that's ok

The Sofa Wolf Alice 2025

s

1. The Passenger rang a bell from my past. An Antonioni film that i saw in 1981 at the wonderful Cinema City, the film has scenes set in Guadi\s gorgeous creations in Bacelona Parc Guell and the sacre famillia.

2. According to my ex some 30 years ago Nigel ? the then leader of the British Sufi movement, with whom we had been studying for some time, told her that he wondered if I had perhaps never fully incarnated into this world which might explain my aloofness and apparent lack of commitment…I’ve no idea if this is actually what he said but the idea had a certain appeal.