A story written in indelible ink

FICTION

THE PERPETUITY OF MEMORY

“When you see what Dom Pablo has done, at first you may recoil. But Dom’s art is personal and subjective. Each work is unique and creates another life for the owner. A gift from an admirer.”

The invitation to be part of a rare commission by Dom Pablo Solanas was a work of art in itself: exquisitely crafted by the artist and a future priceless piece. This alone was a luxurious gift, even to someone of Christiana Kunsak’s means, yet it was merely an invitation to a private audience with Solanas himself. A box, carved from a single piece each of ebony and rare boxwood, interlocked to form a puzzle.

The piece is entitled La armonia. The accompanying notes state that the name only exists for as long as the puzzle is in its unsolved form: once the puzzle is solved and the two pieces separated, a mechanism inside the piece ensures that they cannot be re-joined. Once the puzzle is complete, La armonia ceases to exist and the work becomes La ansiedad.

La armonia was a rare and beautiful thing. It also held a secret: an invitation to meet with Dom Pablo Solanas. The nature of that meeting was unknown and therein lay a form of gamble; a wager with oneself: La armonia was unique and intricately crafted; its aesthetics were unquestionable in that initial state. Further value must be added for the simple fact that the piece contains a secret. If that secret is revealed, it may reduce the value of the work. The invitation will be spent.

La ansiedad may not be as pleasing to the eye as La armonia and it is the permanent replacement, with La armonia destroyed forever. Conversely, the construction of the work is so fine and detailed as to invite curiosity, more of what it might become than what it is: should that beauty be left as potential, or revealed? Is it something which may be left to a subsequent benefactor? What might they find inside La armonia?

Christiana could not deny herself a pleasure which someone else might yet have, and which she may never see.

As soon as the first link clicked audibly out of place somewhere inside the box, La armonia was no longer. There were no instructions on how to create La ansiedad: it was a work to be created by a new artist from the original. Only when the puzzle was complete would it reveal its secret and until then, it was nameless and fluid.

Held in both hands, the wooden box – around the size of a large cigar box – felt as heavy as it should, carved from solid wood and not hollowed out. It was slightly heavier at one end than the other. The seamless interlocking of the ebony and boxwood formed variously alternate, interlocking and enclosing patterns of dark and light. Aside from the initial click, no amount of tilting, pressing, pulling, twisting and pushing of the device produced any change. Christiana alone had been privy to that first movement, so to anyone other than her, La armonia still existed. But she wanted to create and to see La ansiedad.

The box remained unaffected by manipulation, until Christiana’s housemaid picked it up to clean around it. Snatching the box from the maid’s hand, Christiana heard another click from the device and almost immediately noticed a change: the box remained a cuboid but the dimensions and patterns had altered. Closer examination of the new patterns revealed some to have assumed shapes which suggested movement: swirls, series of dots and even directional arrows. The introduction of a third party had revealed a form of instruction.

Over a period of around four weeks, the wooden box became a collaborative project, with guests to Christiana’s apartment invited to examine the puzzle and attempt to solve it. During that time, the box took on many geometric forms: pyramid, cone, octahedron and latterly, a perfect cube, with opposite ebony and boxwood faces: it was more perfect in form that it had ever been but it still harboured something inside.

The geometrically perfect cube would let up no further information and remained static for a number of days, until the housemaid picked it up once more while she was cleaning. The top half separated from the bottom, the base now a half-cube on the table. The surfaces of the half cubes where they’d separated were a chequerboard design: a game of miniature chess could be played on each ebony and boxwood surface, the size of drinks coasters.

Christiana placed the two halves back together and a perfect cube once again sat upon the table, for a while. After around five seconds, the cube began to make a whirring sound, as though a clockwork mechanism had been invisibly wound inside. Slowly and with a smoothness suggesting the most intricate mechanical construction, the individual tiles on top of the cube folded back from the centre to the edges, eventually forming a five-sided cube with a checked interior.

It was seemingly the lack of any further outside intervention which allowed the wooden device to complete a long transformation by self-re-assembly and after a while, the device resembled a chequered wooden hand. A slot opened in the palm and a card was offered between the forefinger and thumb: a card roughly the size of a visiting card and folded with such accuracy as to disguise the fact that it was anything other. Yet unfurled, it was an octavo sheet: eight leaves. The reverse of the flat sheet was blank but the eight pages to view on the face were images of art.

Oil and watercolour paintings; portraits, landscapes, sill life and abstract; cubist, surrealist and classical. Wooden, metal and glass sculptures; pieces made using prefabricated materials, notably shop window mannequins, plastic dolls, action men and tin soldiers. Body art as well: tattoos drawn in such a way as to give them a third dimension: an arm with skin pulled back to reveal muscle and bone beneath by way of a zip; a human chest splayed open to reveal a metallic cyborg beneath: living art made from human flesh, these two suggesting something beneath the skin visible only with the benefit of intimacy with the bearer. Another tattoo made the wearer’s right leg appear as though the limb were an intricate sculpture made from wood: one organic material transformed into another, which can be transformed in a way that the material it’s made from cannot, to create the illusion of just such a thing.

All of these things had been made by the hands of Dom Pablo Solanas. All were arresting at first sight and invited closer inspection. Even as facsimiles and at such small sizes, the works of Solanas were breathtaking. At the bottom of the sheet was a phone number: apparently a direct line to Dom Pablo himself.

La ansiedad quietly whirred into motion again, the mechanical fingers retracting into the wooden flesh of the hand until the sculpture was briefly a chequered ovoid, before flipping open like a clam shell. It continued to change form, seemingly with perpetuity.

Dom Pablo arrived promptly and attired in a fashion exhibited in many public portraits of him: conflicting primary colours which somehow worked, on a man who also wore a fedora hat at all times, and who sported a perfectly manicured handlebar moustache.

“Ms. Kunsak. A pleasure to meet you.”

“Please sir: Christiana. Likewise, Mr Solanas.” Christiana offered her hand, which Solanas held firmly.

“As you wish. And please, call me Dom Pablo.” His voice was deep and relaxed. “Christiana: what is it that you’d like to do today?”

“I already have a great gift before me. This is a chance for me to turn your natural gift into something I can share. I have everything I could need around me, but this is an opportunity to own something which is so treasured, I may not wish to leave this apartment again.”

“Indeed. That is one of the rules I apply to my arts. Just as I turn my raw materials into others – like flesh into wood – so I wish to allow others to use me as a creative tool, so that what I create is their own. My subjects and prefabricated materials are artworks in themselves but together, we make unique pieces. By allowing a subject to commission me, I am subverting the art and holding a mirror to the process.

“You will of course have an idea of who the giver of this gift is. Association with such a person is to be in the membership of a society which respects certain things, like privacy. Therefore, I never discuss the details of a commission with the subject. It is highly unlikely that anyone should wish to attract attention to anyone outside of a certain group, that they have been a part of my work. All of my pieces are unique and personal.”

“It is those very people, those within my inner circles, that I have in mind as I enter into this: it was within my closest circles that I came to receive this, and only those of a certain standing will have access. Dom Pablo: I should like to carry your work with me in those circles; I would like you to use me as a canvas and make me a living work of art.”

“A truly beautiful idea. Although the canvas is living, I must render it inanimate so that I may work. As such, I shall administer a general anaesthetic, so that you feel no discomfort. I don’t like to talk when I work. When you awake, we will have new art and the Dom Pablo art changes lives. You will enter an even more exclusive, innermost circle of my very own. Excited? Sleep now…

***

“…When you see what Dom Pablo has done, at first you may recoil. But Dom’s art is personal and subjective; each work is unique and creates another life for the owner. My art remains with you, just as the motion of La ansiedad is perpetual. This latest work is entitledThe perpetuity of memory.”

Christiana stared into the mirror, and the illusion of wood carved from human flesh was real. It would take a level of intimacy permitted to very few, to see the original material beneath the artwork, made by Dom Pablo. The mannequin beneath the wooden skin.

© Steve Laker, 2015

Both The Perpetuity of Memory and The Unfinished Literary Agency, are available now in paperback.

A library of appetite disorders

FICTION

Most Schlock covers don’t objectify a fantasy female warrior (they do men, demons, ghosts, monsters and aliens too), but it’s always nice to see my name on the front of a webzine (and print quarterly) where I feel at home. I like to think it’s the kind of cult pulp fiction people might pick up in WH Smith at a spaceport in some alternative universe.

Other science fiction, fantasy and horror writers are available.

DIARY OF A SKINNY KID

What’s beneath the headline is the story of everything below the neck. Once a story breaks, trust is lost, like a cradle from a tree. I learned that as a journalist for a local newspaper, before taking a more sedentary and solitary path as a freelancer, writing mainly about the arts and humanities. Sometimes I cross over into fiction, but I try to blur the edges when stories have a basis in past experience.

The internet means I can write and do most of my research from home, and digital printing democratised publishing, helping me and thousands of other writers become published authors. Previously the only way was vanity publishing, where the writer took a leap of faith and paid for stacks of their own books from a traditional printer. With editors removed from the publishing machine, it’s pumped out a lot of shit. As a result, a niche industry has developed underground.

The rage among the entitled classes are bespoke, one-off printed editions of books, a market served by boutique publishers, who are always striving for something new and different. The most exclusive in this rarefied world is Mobius, who can somehow gather sought-after cult writers better than any little black book in the underworld of pulp fiction.

Few writers have one or more novels in them. Most have a collection of short stories which make up their own fictional autobiography. There’s still a big difference between publishing your own novel and having a publishing house, but there’s a far greater difference between self-publishing your own shorts (as simple as posting them on a blog), and having them accepted for outside publication, whether it be online or in print. Writing short stories is more difficult than writing a book, simply because the author has fewer words.

The editor of an anthology or periodical, online or in print, is like a conductor, a Master of Ceremony. The captains of those ships are curators and innkeepers, of works and writers who might not otherwise find themselves together.

I’ve had many stories published by third parties, online, in magazines, and in cult collections. I’ve published my own novels in paperback, but apart from the quarterlies, I’ve not had a short story published in an anthology (although I’ve published two of my own). Published periodically but not permanently, my stories are my own and those of others I never chose to be with. This is where the story starts, when I saw an ad for Mobius in a friend’s university rag mag.

My friend is a psychology student from UCL, on a placement with Lewisham Hospital, just up the road from me. 30 years my junior, we’d been friends since she was at school, through consequence and convenience when the weather was fair, and sometimes she’s stayed over when it rains, sharing stories only we could tell, beyond the birth dates of children and the expiry of parents in our tattoos. Now she spoon-feeds me, as we talk about our lives and she gives me ideas for new stories.

She didn’t like red horror, so this would be a psychological story, more black mirror. Nothing new there, but I was trying to branch out further with my writing, and wanted something I might make into a screenplay, a story within a story, which could turn in on itself and stand up to repeated reading. A story which might be suited to the stage. Mobius could be that.

The ad was brief, a few lines in amongst vacancies for student flat shares, campus clubs and guinea pigs:

Mobius is launching a student arts council project, and we’re looking for volunteers and contributors. We are inviting submissions from authors which tell the stories of the individuals we all are. Successful entries will be published in a unique anthology, which forms the centrepiece for a planned exhibition at The British Library, to raise awareness for our ongoing and future humanities work. Entitled ‘Fictional Reality’, we aim to present something which could only exist in fiction (or the mind) as real. We want the viewer to confront the realism of fiction.

Fictional realism is the theory that in an infinite universe, everything which can happen, has happened. All fiction – places and people – are created as they’re written, then exist as chance would predict they must, in a multiverse of infinite possibilities.

There was an email address, so I sent off a query letter (basically, I’d be interested in contributing, could you send me the editorial guidelines please?) My friend had returned to her student digs, so while I was waiting, I continued writing.

All stories are tales within others, when each contains a part of the writer. Whether it be a mannerism of a character, or a location in a familiar distant dream, the writers of short fiction tell their bigger story in parts, which don’t necessarily fit together, in the way some people don’t when they first meet.

It’s a lonely existence, being a writer, so to be curated into a fiction anthology would mean my story was part of a whole made of many other people. Being a writer suits me, because I can work on my own. I miss the human contact, not of any workplace, but in an outside life. All I have is my psychologist friend, and she’s rarely around now she’s of legal drinking age. Acceptance into this anthology would help the reclusive writer get out and meet new people.

Writers don’t all like to get together in real life (the one outside this writing life, the bigger story beyond), so the publisher has to think about a seating plan. Authors are unlikely to ever dine together, but the order of the stories in the anthology should reflect the kind of conversation which might be expected around an unlikely dining table.

Anyone reading that book in The British Library would be privy to a conversation between minds who wouldn’t normally meet, because they never met, only in the collaboration of a secret world spewing its guts into a bowl. With each story carrying its character, the whole volume should speak an interesting narrative, a whole of many parts, which individually have bigger stories to tell.

The chapters in this exclusive Mobius project would make up a unique life, a new one. So does any collected works anthology, where something can be one of a collection of unique things. I wondered what Mobius could do which would make this venture truly unique, unlike anything before.

Away from the modern democracy of digital, the traditional methods of printing still thrive, even the fine art of letterpress, where galleys of text are assembled by hand before impressing by mechanical platen into the paper. Before print became technology, it was a skilled craft which allowed the fast distribution of information through multiple copies. The only truly unique printed documents are antiquated texts and scrolls, hand-written by artisan scribes. That couldn’t be the truly unique centrepiece promised for The British Library, as it had been done before.

I’ve had many writing desks, many temporary, some in public libraries, others bolted to the floor, and all doubling as dining tables. The one I’m sitting at now is the horse for my typewriter, where many of the stories only me and the psychologist could tell are hidden in a dark web; and where I was invited to meet an agent for Mobius, who I assumed would be an arts student from UCL. An email arrived on my desktop, inviting me to meet a guy called Rupert Surname in the reading room of The British Library.

Rupert hadn’t described himself, leaving him to my imagination. I didn’t know his full name, so I couldn’t look him up on social media. Most people called Rupert at university would probably revert to Facebook’s roots, and use it as an in-campus social network. I didn’t know how tall he was, how old (although I assumed student-age), or what he’d be wearing. I’d ruled out a red jersey and yellow-checked trousers with matching scarf.

The reading room at The British Library is huge, a cathedral to reading and learning. There are hundreds of desks, some grouped socially, like wooden beasts of burden for books and computers. Other desks roam alone, seeking light beneath a window, or preferring the solitude offered by walls of bookshelves. There are nomadic chairs, ridden by students to feast around a beast, a camp fire, or left at a universe laid flat in MDF. Some were tethered to unattended laptops, while the riders smoked outside the realm of fictional realism.

Among the menagerie of mascots left to guard unattended windows on other worlds, there was a Rupert, naked and white: A stuffed bear, sans his usual modesty, sitting next to a laptop about the same height as him. Anyone at eye level could have read what I did on the screen:

Your story must clothe the bear. His jersey will need two sheets of material for the body and one sheet for each arm. The bear’s trousers require two sheets in total, and the length of his scarf is to be your own space, to weave as long as you wish. Please submit the first three sheets for preview.

Was this a student’s own project? A student of what? Fashion, knitting, philosophy? It gave me another idea for the story I was already writing. My journey to King’s Cross hadn’t been for nothing, as I had a plot device.

A sheet of A4 cartridge paper holds around 500 words from my typewriter, so I’d already knitted most of Rupert’s upper half, the first three pages I’d normally send to a prospective publisher. I sent it to Rupert Surname, and queried whether they’d like a synopsis of the whole story. As mine was to be one part of a curated volume, the final work would only be complete once all the contributors’ chapters had been chosen. The publisher retained license of freedom for the final work. If my own life outside this story was one they could influence, by placing it among the tales of others, then I was happy to be guided.

Although The British Library was outside my comfort zone (away from home), in the brief time I’d been there, I’d not felt alienated. There I was, surrounded by knowledge and almost silence, alone but not, part of many stories unfolding in one place as I wrote my own. If Rupert invited me there again, I’d be glad of the excuse to visit. If not, then perhaps to view the final exhibit at the end of this Mobius project. Even if I wasn’t a part of it, I’d still been on the stage where it was produced.

While I waited for a response, I worked on another story I’d been writing for the general market. It was about an understudy actor, stumbling home and ringing on the wrong doorbell. Fictional realism was the music of chance, when my doorbell rang.

It was my UCL psychology student from Lewisham. It was still rag week and there was a new edition of the student mag, with a pulp fiction supplement. And my story was in it.

The story I was writing for Mobius and the British Library, the one which was meant to be exclusive; tales of individuals making a unique whole life for visitors to gaze at; the book produced in some way which made it truly unique, which was meant to enclose my own story, safe from reproduction, was now in a photocopied pulp comic; and I was reading it just as you are now, and just like anyone so inclined, not to seek out something completely new and singular, but happy to read cheap, disposable fiction on the underground.

“What,” I wondered, “about The British Library?”

“Oh, that’s still going ahead,” she said. “I’m taking your story there.”

“What? But I never finished it.”

“And you never will. But you have already.”

“How?”

“The truly unique nature of the project is in the way the story will be presented, in a way which can’t be reproduced.”

Beneath the forest and savannah of the reading room at The British Library, is a network of tunnels lined with shelves. Everything which is published in Britain is held there: one copy of every book, magazine, newspaper, musical score, screenplay, script, and even university rag mags. Even the poorest writer, with no sales, can take comfort in knowing that a copy of their story is held in that subterranean cavern for reference, knowledge and learning. It’s a world off-limits to the reading room, but readers can request a copy of anything ever published, which is retrieved by a robot and delivered to the student’s desk. We are never truly dead until we’re forgotten, and published authors will live in that underground publishing world for as long as The British Library still stands.

“So,” I wondered, “what’s so unique about the curation?”

“Well,” she said, “words can be copied.” Of course, even if it’s an ancient scribe plagiarising the bible to make his own version. “And so can DNA.”

“What’s that got to do with it?”

“Would you donate your own skin to have your story told?”

“Why would I?”

“It would be a way of telling your story as very much your own, if it was printed on sheets of your own skin. Bound into a book, with 49 other shades of flesh, wouldn’t that make for quite the publishing sensation?”

“For starters, I wouldn’t do that. Donate my skin? Maybe to a burns victim, but for people to stare at in an exhibition, as I’m stretched over some sort of frame?”

“Your skin grafts would be bound with others in the book.”

“What, and people would just be able to flick through the pages, looking at my story, all stretched and laid bare?”

“Among others, and together you tell the whole story.”

“In a book which anyone at all can just finger? I thought this was exclusive. Surely such a unique thing should be encased in glass?”

“No-one could read the book in its entirety. It’s not the kind of book you’d borrow from any normal library.”

“Well, I wouldn’t donate my skin. That contains me and protects me.”

“As does mine, as a student. That’s how comes I’m part of the final story. Student financing, pulp fiction sales; those only cover accommodation and books, not the life I want to live.” She looked down at her white coat. “So I sold my skin. I want to pay you back for all the favours you’ve done me.”

“What the fuck are you talking about?”

“I’m far more comfortable if one story is told upon another, in a safe place where one can meet like-minded people. Like a glass cage at The British Library, where my body can entwine with others for public entertainment, but remain safe. You’ll be there. Your story will be there, writhing in and out of others, your words coming together like so many authors of others’ stories, trapped in a box and in their own skin, while people file past and gawk at an artistic representation of you and others at work. Reality stripped naked in fiction, Q.E.D. Mind if I take a shower?”

I pushed my chair out of her way. As she stood up, I noticed a new tattoo above her collar:

Diary of a skinny kid
What’s beneath the headline
is the story of everything below the neck…

© Steve Laker, 2019

Google lists all 60-odd stories I’ve had published in my favourite cult pulp fiction mag.

A horrid little newspaper

POLITICS | MEDIA

In another part of my life I’m a B3tan: a member of an online community of “Guardian-reading media types”, introvert activists who disrupt social order satirically, mess around with images in Photoshop, and make things. A fellow B3tan ‘spellingmistakescostlives‘ (AKA Darren Cullen) is making a satirical scale-model Daily Mail, which he originally distributed in Liverpool as part of a residency with RRU News.

A miniature, boiled-down version of the full paper, it’s like the Daily Mail, but distilled to its angry, horny core.

At time of writing, the project had raised over twice its original goal on Kickstarter.

THE PAPER

This compressed, hand-drawn paper draws attention to the glaring hypocrisies baked into a rag that claims to care about things like moral decency and the sexualisation of children, while also regularly publishing photographs of underage girls in bikinis or low-cut dresses. A paper who’s bread and butter is collecting the kind of ‘wardrobe malfunction’ upskirt and nip-slip photographs of strangers that would land anyone else in jail.

The Daily Mail is the pervert the Daily Mail warned us about.

DIANA PULL OUT

This 24 page version of the regular paper inevitably comes with a Princess Diana pull-out, ‘DIANA: THE ENEMY WITHIN’ which details the paper’s historic opposition to any of the issues Diana came to be lauded for. From her work against landmine arms sales to humanising the victims of HIV/AIDs, her relationship with a Muslim migrant to her meeting with the “terrorist” Nelson Mandela; the Mail had terrible things to say about all of it at the time, but now Diana is dead, the paper can safely exploit her memory for cash without having to deal her inconveniently liberal politics.

Containing all the misogynistic, racist, war-and-fear-mongering you’ve come to love and expect from the Daily Mail, this Kickstarter campaign is to raise funds to reprint this miniature fun/hate-sized paper so people outside of Liverpool can get their own copy.

Pledge and reserve your copy here.

All artwork (except masthead) © Darren Cullen.

Going forward (can’t find reverse)

THE WRITER’S LIFE

I’m somewhat in limbo at the moment, part way through the dehumanisation process which is the biannual re-application for Personal Independence Payment (Daily Living Component only) on the grounds of having crippling depression and anxiety. I’ve been called for an assessment, a one-to-one consultation with an out-sourced medical professional (my last one was a midwife) to determine if I’m mental enough to be paid to stay out of society’s way.

I’ve not been writing much because my mind is focussed on the short-term. It’s difficult to concentrate on anything else when you’re fighting to keep the money you need to have any quality of life. I decided to take a trip to find ideas.

My favourite time to be alive was when I was 14, in 1984. Apart from being 14, it was an era which introduced me to the emergence of home computing, Steve Barron’s Electric Dreams, and aspirations of having a room like David Lightman’s in John Badham’s WarGames. He had a lock on his door and could connect to the early internet via dial-up and an acoustic coupler. Aged 48, I’ve managed to acquire more or less the same, but with more internet.

When you don’t go out much and you’re stuck for something to do, you can do far worse than take a wander around the entire universe which is online, beyond your bookmarks. Anything and everything is there to be discovered, away from the well-trodden paths.

Here’s a few I’ve happened upon today, starting with some personal exploration by way of translating my words into pictures with AI art: Type in some text and it will interpret it as art. It’s pretty shit, but it can be quite inspired (and disturbing). For starters I just typed in what I was, then what I was doing and what I wanted:

      
Left to right: “A writer sitting at a desk”, “Writing science fiction”, “Dying to be heard”

As I staggered from that virtual gallery, I found someone who’d stumbled upon a hidden computer museum. This little-known place hosts exhibits which were fundamental to the evolution of the computer, from 4000-year-old Mesopotamian tablets to computers of yesteryear, and the kind David Lightman and Miles Harding found so much life in:

         

I finished my little trip by taking in some more art. With OCD among my many labels, there are some sights which disturb me (Alphabetti running out of letters I need to make words on toast), and antidotes to erase memories of such things. There are video compilations of these little CGI perpetual motion machines on YouTube, and the dude who makes them is one Andreas Wannerstedt. He has an Instagram page, filled with dozens of examples of things like this:

After that brief stumble up the internet corridor, I’d have liked someone to hug when I got home. I once lived on the streets, where love and fear are never far apart. I was ready to laugh at this guy, because I’ve become (in some ways) reconditioned to life with a roof. How quickly we forget not to be too quick to judge, as Catfish Cooley tells us so eloquently:

If I’m judged unfit for work in the upcoming PIP assessment, I’ll be able to get on with life again. I just wonder who’s fit to judge. The process is designed to reduce one’s will to live, but I won’t be a statistic in a government’s social cleansing exercise. While I can’t go out, I still have a virtual universe to traverse.

 

Slugs, snails and all things nice

THE WRITER’S LIFE

One of the many functions of depression is to kill your emotions. I and many other depressives have written about how we don’t feel down all the time, in most people’s understanding of the word, but that we have no emotion at all. Depression is not feeling sad, it’s a feeling of complete emptiness.

The unexpressed emotions build up, and sometimes they all bubble over at once. When they do, we might suddenly become overwhelmed by (in my case) a feeling of guilt over past actions, and become inconsolable in our grief. Other times, we might realise – just for a fleeting moment – that all things considered, everything is okay. We’ll suddenly feel happy, and grateful of the life surrounding us, expressing ourselves by letting people know we love them, and that we appreciate what they do. It’s ‘the manics’, but when you’re also an alcoholic, people can assume you’re on something. It seems I can’t win, I’m not allowed to be happy, so I stop being it.

Social anxiety and paranoia are best mates with depression, imprisoning the afflicted, so they have plenty of time to think about life, the universe and everything, and everything just gets worse. It’s a self-perpetuating and degenerative condition. Apart from visits to the local Tesco every other day, my outings are limited to well-rehearsed known quantities, the monthly trip to Milton Keynes for a day with my children being one. This month was different, as we had a day out in London.

I’m fine with London. Even though it’s a mega-city, I feel more comfortable in the capital than I might in some remote village. It’s because I know London, I lived and worked there, and it’s where I’m from. I sometimes think that if I had the means to move back to the capital, my mental health might improve. On Saturday, I was okay, and the emotions which London evokes for me carried me through the day. It’s quite surreal when you’re not used to having feelings, like being carried around in someone else’s body, a haunting of the living, a possession.

I met the kids at 11 and we went for an early lunch, our thinking being that few others would be lunching at that time, and we were right. Our further thinking was that when we got to our first attraction at about 1 pm, most normal people would be having lunch. And we were right, as the London Transport Museum was sparsely populated when we arrived.

There’s only so much you can do with stationary vintage vehicles, and with the youngest in tow, we were bound to end up in the gift shop, which is rudely expensive: £60 for a sofa cushion (albeit one in Victoria Line seating material), and £40 for a magazine rack (ditto, Northern Line) being two examples. The littlest filled a bag with stationery in London Transport livery (and paid for it), then we set off for our next destination – The National Portrait Gallery – on foot.

The Portrait Gallery is hosting the BP Portrait Award, but before we troubled that, I took the kids on a whistle stop tour of the main National Gallery. Although they’ve been to London before, and to some of the paid attractions and national institutions, it was when they were very young. Neither could recall seeing a Leonardo da Vinci or a Vincent van Gogh, so that’s where we headed.

 
National Gallery, London

Carried along by my emotions, I was a little overcome standing in the presence of Leonardo’s Virgin of the Rocks. To be just inches from a painting, able to see the brush strokes made by da Vinci over 600 years ago, is a humbling position to find oneself in. There I was, standing only as far away from a priceless treasure as Leonardo did to paint it. Vincent van Gogh’s Sunflowers was a similarly belittling experience, and when we left I was grateful of some dust in the wind blowing through Trafalgar Square as I wiped my eyes.

I have a condition called Stendhal Syndrome, on top of all my others. It’s a psychosomatic disorder, manifesting in me as an emotional mental weakness or vulnerability. When I see or hear something beautiful, it evokes the same outpouring of various emotions as the manics or the guilt. I feel sad, but they’re tears of joy. It takes quite a lot to set me off, and it happened again pretty much as soon as we walked into the Portrait Award exhibition, when I saw this:

Bertha (c) Jesus Maria Saez de Vicuña Ochoa

I did a double-take when I read the cue card next to it, which said it was oil on canvas. Up close and personal, it’s the kind of thing which stops you in your tracks and glues you to the floor.

My young companions were as into all of this as I was, if not quite so visibly moved by it all. Eventually it was time to feed their curious minds with Chinese food. They’d never been to Chinatown before, more used to eating oriental cuisine from take-away cartons, so dinner was a multi-sensory experience. Frankly, the food was mediocre at best, the service arrogant, and the prices bloated. Eating in Chinatown is more Russian roulette than I remember, but the kids enjoyed it, so I kept my mouth shut.

Of course, all good things must end, and so it was yesterday. As soon as the kids had headed off on their train, I got the most almighty emotional comedown. If I hadn’t been in London, with all that atmosphere keeping me going, I might have been tempted to play with the trains instead of riding one home.

In a few days I’ll be back to just feeling dead inside, but until then separation anxiety feels like I’ve had my chest ripped open and my heart pulled out. For a while last night, I perked up as I remembered all I’d done in the day. I texted someone and told them how happy and grateful I was to have had that day. They replied that I seemed to be acting oddly, and was I on something?

I wasn’t. I wasn’t under the influence of anything, just a brief feeling that life was okay, quickly popped like a balloon at the end of a party.