Where They Are Now

 It's not prompted by the thought of Christmas cards, I was thinking it anyway, but I think Christmas cards to and from people one is only vaguely in touch with might be fading out. First class post is now 85p. In olden days many people had Christmas card lists of maybe 100. I don't mind if you think me frugal but spending £85 on sending festive greetings to people, many of who you have no other contact with, seems like an unnecessary burden on the postperson. I've already relieved the nice lady who delivers my post of many of the book orders by using the library, which is bad news for secondhand book dealers more than it is for authors, but the to and fro of Christmas post had never been much of an issue at this address.

No. I was thinking of all those people from the past that the internet brought back into view some years ago now. I can't have been the only one who looked and found what they could find about school contemporaries, those from the brief three years at university, previous work colleagues and anybody else one knew and lost touch with. I know I wasn't because I heard from some that found me. I didn't know whether to be flattered or terrified that they had gone to such trouble but it was mostly okay. They didn't mean any harm and I didn't owe any of them money.

As it was, in almost all cases, there was no point. Much of it was from 40 years ago when we probably did have something in common but 'having things in common' is dependent on sharing the same circumstances and experience. Once your paths have diverted it's not obvious that any such bond you had will remain intact. And that much is evidenced by some of the associates whose internet presence I've found. I don't think that's 'stalking', is it. It's only my own non-celebrity version of Where Are They Now? I have been told I was hard to find. David Green is a common enough name but googling 'David Green poetry' narrows it down.

I don't know if I'm more concerned about what it was that people became, and being able to see how that could have happened, or that they didn't change at all. I look aghast at what some of them are doing now when I see (with most if not all examples being fictional so as not to offend), that they play golf, poker or are fans of comedy clubs, that they write up their professional profiles with transparent sales talk that a child could see through (obviously that's not made up), that they like Top Gear, Coldplay, go to the gym, have been successful as consultants or are writing their memoirs.

It can look awful, just as awful as if they hadn't apparently evolved any further than when I'd known them in some other part of England some decades ago. But, then, what would they think if they'd been at such a loose end that they somehow found me here, regretting having decided that 'poet' was what I wanted to be and only now trying to shift towards 'writer', masquerading as a music 'critic', still clearly devoted to books and with the dubious sideline in the shifty, perceived glamour of horse racing.

Is that anything to be or anywhere to have arrived at?

I'm sure the books help. Sartre's Nausea not only provided the rare pleasure of meeting a very astute lady on the train between Bath and Salisbury on Monday but also seems to be as good if not better than when I read it forty years ago after we'd agreed not everyting looks as good as you thought it was when returned to. But it's us that change, not the books.

Nausea isn't just about how strange it is to find oneself to be a living thing. It seems to me to be about time, too, its maddening effect and how it feeds into that strangeness. Things move on. I'm happy enough with those that I associate with now and have no need to look them up. Of course, those from previous times should be allowed to go their own way without me despairing of them. 

Nausea is more of a treatise on phenomenology than a novel of the Jane Austen type in which the heroine,

gets married, or doesn't, or dies,

and thus concerns itself with what is 'real' or seems real. It is brilliant at times while being mystifying at others. It's not obvious what one should do about it beyond falsifying one's engagement by, for example, having a few quid on a horse, as below, or persuading oneself that the results of a chosen football team make a difference to your life, which looks to me like 'bad faith' in Sartre's terms.

When the lady on the train got off at Salisbury I said it had been 'a pleasure' and she said she was going to say 'enjoy the Sartre', 

'but that's not the point of it, is it.'

She knew.