No Direction Home
2 January 1990, Tuesday, Ampthill
The start of this year and decade finds young-Toby struggling to work out what next. He’s finished university (Worcester College, Oxford) — taking his Finals in June 1989.
He ended up with a 2.1 in English Language & Literature — a writer’s degree, he tells himself. If he’d got a 1st, he’d be more likely to become an academic.
After coming down from university, he has hung out for a while in a former lunatic asylum (as they were called then) in the South of France. It is being done up to become his parents’ holiday home. The builders, from Bristol and Devizes, led by a coquin called Harry, insist that young-Toby celebrates his 21st birthday by slicing the top off a champagne bottle with one of their machetes. That is the Viking way to open a bottle.
In the Autumn, Toby has travelled across America by Greyhound bus — San Francisco to New York via Denver, Austin, Oxford and New Orleans. (‘and the moon rose over an open field.’)1 In a YMCA in Washington DC, he watched footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall, not really understanding what was going on, or how it would change his life.
Since he got back in December 1990, he’s been dossing around at home, reading Proust and writing his first, still-unpublished novel, The Lost Notebook of Babel.
How would I describe him? Innocent, arrogant, bewildered, critical.
He’s five foot eleven. Good skin. Dark hair. Not skinny.
Phoned around for jobs in the morning. I am trying Dillons, Waterstones, Channel 4, BBC, Gabbitas and Thring, Ken Russell etc. So perhaps I could end up as a bookshop assistant, a tea-boy or a prep school teacher. Perhaps I am thinking it would be better to do a night job, like waiting tables, and work during the day. Dad is probably right about saying that I should get down to London to find work. In the afternoon I went to Bedford, got some music from the library – Paul Bunyan included. I also bought a few cheap tapes from a sale in Woolworths – Bessie Smith, Jelly Roll Morton. I shouldn’t have but I did. I got Dad his two pounds of muesli2 [from the wholefood shop near the bus station] and took the [142 bus] home. Listened to some of [Michael] Tippett’s MFP3. Wrote letters to Adam4, Luna and others. Watched ‘Round Midnight’ for a while and videoed the rest. Have moved the video-player under the new FST TV and tuned it in. Put on my still newish pyjamas and went to bed.
Whilst in Bedford I exchanged the diary Mum gave me for Christmas for this one [A4 size pages]. Having flicked through last year’s diary before putting it in the trunk, I realized that I could probably make do with the smaller kind for 90% of the time. But what of those crisis days when you need a whole page?
Simon & Garfunkel, ‘America’
Dad was famous in our family for pronouncing muesli as muhrzlee.
Any idea what this piece of music is? It’s not Music for Pleasure.
As noted yesterday, names have been changed.