U Diary 3

Diary - 18 August 03

My life in the last month has been like that poem by Paul Verlaine. You
know, that one that ends;

C'est bien la pire peine

De ne savoir porquoi

Sans amour et sans haine

Mon coeur a tant de peine

Roughly translated this means, 'There's nothing worse than having a
pain in your arse you can't put your finger on'.

By the way I'm still waiting for the green light from Faber &;
Faber for my collected translations of great French classics. I'm
marketing myself as a kind of literary Will Young. What he does for
music covers I'll do for poetic covers. It's going to be huge I'm
sure.

Dad would be proud of me, after all it was him who taught me all the
French I know sitting on the end of my bed with a cognac in his
hand.

Sometimes he would fall off. Usually in the middle of something by
Flaubert. God, he loved Flaubert the way other people love Camembert or
those other fancy French cheeses I've never been keen on. He got me
into all that Frenchness. But that is then and this is now.

I haven't read anything French in ages.

Nor am I writing.

I finished 'Rising Camp' a couple of months ago now and I've got three
more books that I want to write but I know that when I start one then
that's me out of circulation for the next six months.

I don't know if I want to do that.

Don't get me wrong, I love writing and I'm not happy when I'm not
writing but as Catullus wrote, 'Odi et amo'.

It means 'Jack Sprat he eats no fat'. Or something along those
lines.

I went to the hospital today to visit my brother. He had four
operations on his leg last week. He jumped from a fence to rescue a
fallen plant pot and then next thing he knew the firemen were cutting
him out. Of the fence, not the plant pot that is.

At one point it was touch and go. With his foot. The doctors weren't
sure that they would be able to save it.

'It seems to be ok now' said Nick quite spryly wiggling his toes on
Thursday.

'That's what they say' I said, 'but when the bandages come off. Clunk.
The whole thing will probably fall to the floor.'

I'm not sure that I would have wanted a one-footed brother. Sure, it
would have helped my socially, giving me something to talk about at
parties but on reflection having had a three legged cat for years
hasn't helped me at all. No one has ever been that interested. Perhaps
a one-legged brother would be different.

'Yes, that's my brother over there,' I would say. 'The one at an
angle.' And then when I was asked if he was standing on a slope I could
say, 'It was in August that he lost his right leg&;#8230;'

It would be the start of something.

It is now 2156 and my phone has just rung. I didn't answer it. I don't
answer the phone. I can't make phone calls either. Imagine the stress
I'm under working in a call centre. I've
been there 3 years. It's horrific. I'm serious.

It's not so bad these days as I mostly answer only emails. That I'm ok
with. Today however I needed to call South Central Trains to find out
whether a London Terminals season ticket would be valid to Farringdon.
I couldn't do it. Thankfully one of the team managers did it for
me.

I sent her an email.

"You are fab," I said.

I have a soft spot for her actually. She bought 5 copies of my book.
She is about 60 and I can't really imagine her reading the bit about
rimming.

'As long as there's no rape, I don't mind,' she said.

In case you're wondering, a London Terminals season ticket is not
valid to Farringdon.

I sometimes think I am not equipped for this modern life at all.

'You think things are bad now,' my father told me as a teenager, 'it's
only going to get worse.'

He was half right and half wrong.

The phone has stopped ringing but there was a message. It was from an
Egyptian guy I went out with a few years ago. He has a placement at a
hospital here in England and he has been trying to get in touch. He
still loves me. I know because he tells me. But he doesn't really love
me. I'm easy to love when you live in Egypt and you get persecuted for
loving anybody.

I'm a bad person.

He left a message saying goodbye.

I should have picked up but I didn't.

When I went to Gay Pride in London this year everyone around me had
banners saying, 'Stop the Persecution in Egypt'. I felt that it was all
my fault.

What can I do? He is young and in London. How can I be
responsible?

I shouldn't feel bad. I should concentrate on what I've got. When I
got back from the hospital this evening there was a message from my
current boyfriend on the answer-machine. He said, 'Boyfriend, I've got
two cats in my house. They are fighting and I don't know what to do.
Help!'

I love him.