The Paradise I Always Dreamed Of

'The paradise I always dreamed of' was a phrase I heard several decades ago now that I liked and stored away for my own use to enrich my absolutely captivating conversational repertoire. One of the first times I used it was in the 1980's when pubs were suddenly open all day. 

The horrors that have been visited on us by our vengeful gods this year might have had compensatory upsides for some of us and for a long time, one of them looked like being me. Those now distant last days in the office had me saying things like 'suits me' or 'I can't see it making much difference to me'. A copper-bottomed excuse to stay in knocking out Times crosswords with the sort of off-hand panache that I did today with shelves of records to re-acquaint myself with and even more books, most of which I've forgotten. Nothing could possibly go wrong (which is another useful phrase I like, lifted shamelessly from Danny Baker).

And for a few months it didn't. I even opted out of working from home, the endless maths involved in wondering if the pension was yet sufficient being brought to a welcome end by deciding that it must be, a decision that was endorsed by last month's bank statement showing outgoings and incomings within a pound of each other in a satisfyingly Micawberish demonstration of equilibrium.

 

There's a book I can write. There's two, actually. There's as many as you can think of. For enjoyment rather than contractually, not for financial gain. I won't be bothering The Bodley Head with Memoirs of the Gloucester Sunday League 1975-77. The market for sardonic reflections on the pop music we used to think we liked has been crowded out even if it's odd to see Pete Paphides doing for a slightly later generation that which only my Bowie generation and the Beatles generation should surely be allowed to do. And I'm becoming even more convinced than Philip Larkin was right, and well served when his expressed wish that his diaries should be burnt was carried out by one of his more-than-you-might-have-thought girlfriends. So, not being sure why he wrote them in the first place, I'm not amenable to trying to reconstruct my under-achieving, vainglorious life from the brief notes of where I went, what I did, bike rides and horses that won from the pocket diaries upstairs.

I thought I might become more familiar with the operas of Mozart and Handel and possibly even remember their stories but music, like anything else worthwhile, is not a tool for self-improvement. It mainly sounds good but hurts when Donald Macleod plays something on This Week's Composer that can't be bought on CD. It happened the other week with something gorgeous and choral by Pachelbel and again this week with Desmarets.

And form is temporary but class is forever so my currently reduced rating for 30 minute games at Lichess is only like when Fulham struggled in the third and fourth tiers and I will be back. But sport is, for almost everybody, 'you win some, you lose some' so it's not really the result that matters. It probably is the taking part, after all.

But now that much of what I was looking forward to in my sensibly, modestly-downsized 'lifestyle' has been confiscated, the November of lunchtime concerts and meetings in the café society of Cosham High Street, which is as close as Portsmouth gets to Sartre's and Simone de Beauvoir's rive gauche, are unlikely to happen. I remain eternally grateful for the weekly big walk but we don't hear much piano music on them.

'Be careful what you wish for' was another maxim I always liked and most dreamt-of paradises prove not to be. 'People believe what they want to believe' was the reductive but unavoidable conclusion of my erudite letter to the editor of The Times in response to absurd claims in the Credo column that Jesus would have loved Mother's Day. And these clichés keep on coming because they are any good.

My last little book of poems didn't get reviewed anywhere. I didn't send any review copies out. But what any astute reviewer, I hope, might have said, was how it didn't try to avoid cliché and somehow make the age-old language 'new' or even try to 're-make cliché', to refresh it. It took cliché at its word and embraced it.

November is going to be rubbish but it's going to be worse for others than it is for me. There's always, as they say, somebody worse off than you.