A New/Old Year Begins
1 January 1990, Monday, Yorkshire
Happy New Year.
So, as I mentioned yesterday, this Diary is going to be different once again.
No need to be confused.
We join young-Toby in 1990, which is the year that he becomes a novelist. He also moves to a foreign country, twice, and falls in love, twice.
I’ve debated whether to refer to him/myself in the third person. I’ve decided to do so (we’re very different).
He’s 21 and finished university last June.
This is really my real diary, and — later on — real letters home.
Got up late and had breakfast with Martin’s parents. Martin1 joined us halfway through. We walked the dog, Zoe, whose teats are cancer-ridden and who is becoming stiffer all the time with rheumatism. We walked a bit further into the fields where Martin said he found his sheep’s skull. When I said there didn’t seem to be many skulls about he replied that there were but that sheep always choose to die by the edges of the field, in the shelter of a fence or a hedge, so that is where one had to look. We were in the middle of the field, following a muddy track, turning round and walking back again. It was raining dully. We were talking about religious art, drawing, Van Gogh (whose letters Martin is reading at the moment) and work. We have had some good discussions in the past few days. After the walk we sat around for a while and then had lunch. Tomato soup, bread that was warm on the outside but still frozen at the centre, biscuits, crumpets, Christmas cake and tea. I packed and then we were given a lift to the station. A train, which we had been uncertain was going to arrive, came and took us to Leeds. We went to the Chemists and I bought some shits-medicine for the journey. All that Sam Smith’s last night had done some damage. I got on the bus at 3.20 after a slightly awkward goodbye – a goodbye made awkward by Martin’s deliberate awkwardness – that way he has of… pausing twice before he… ends a sentence. And-then-gabbling-the-start-of-the-next-sentence. It was very rainy most of the way. I read about twenty pages of [Beckett’s] Molloy and finished Czeslaw Milosz’s Collected Poems. I very much like some of his latest poems. However he seems always to be writing about the Middle Ages, about a very clear, fruitful now dead world. It has all gone through his memory and then his imagination but it is all perhaps too pristine, too hygenic to convince. I wish it would. Perhaps he did grow up in those gardens, rode on the back of those carts, ate those delicious foods, but then he moved to Berkeley. These are really questions about myself. Milosz seems to translate fantastically well.
‘I have always found it easier to write from chord structure in buses and cars than from melody.’ Charles Mingus, sleeve notes to New Tijuana Moods.
3.20 – 8.30 Bus back home.
Martin was a university friend from Oxford, studying Art. He lived in a small town in Pembrokeshire, where I went to stay with him and his parents over this New Year. All names and identifying details have been changed, unless the originals gave their consent.