I was surprised, as always, by the buzzer. It was a short, shrill sound, and whenever someone came to the door I jumped. I was in the kitchen preparing breakfast. I walked to the door, opened it and saw an outstretched hand. It was the postman. I took the package and he turned and walked out of the gate without saying a word. The package was tiny, though too big to fit through the letterbox. I went back inside and finished preparing breakfast. I’d gone back and forth in my mind over whether to make something special – the previous week I’d had black pudding and potato patties with eggs – or settle for something dull and efficient. I went for the latter, as I had a lot of work to do. It was Saturday. I had the whole day free and could write as much as I wanted. I never wrote for hours on end, though I’d made my peace. All the writers I liked seemed to have written ‘til their fingers bled. I was never going to be a writer, not now. I was too old and could never sit still long enough to do it, to concentrate hours without a break. I had a full time job and could only write, weekends aside, at night. I was no night owl. 10pm and I was tired, a habit that’d started not long after I left university and begun work. Instead of focusing on the merits and weaknesses of my writing, I had honed in on this, blaming it for my lack of output. One book in nearly four years, one unpublished, unpublishable book. Poor going.
But I didn’t think that way anymore. There were writers, I discovered, who did what I did, wrote in short bursts, letting it out without forcing the issue. Forcing the issue, that was a mistake I’d made before, when I wasn’t in the right mood or frame of mind, yet felt I had to write. Nowadays I didn’t feel guilty about not writing, unless it was because of drink. If I came home
stressed from work, which was common, I told myself it was important to rest. Someone had taught me that, a lifetime ago, it seemed.
Still, all that considered, I wanted to write on this particular weekend. I had a dull breakfast of eggs (boiled) and supermarket bought bread. I went up to my room and opened the package. I’d ordered it from eBay a week before, a miniature filing cabinet for tablets, with seven coloured trays, one for each day of the week. There were four compartments to each: Breakfast, Lunch, Dinner and Bedtime. I only needed one per day. I’d been having trouble of remembering to take my pills, or whether or not I had. I was getting forgetful. The trays would help.
I walked over to my dresser and picked up one of the packets that lay there, unorganised, chaotic. Everything about my room was chaos, an untidy vignette of the man renting it. The room was a shoebox, a metre and a half wide and not much more long. The shelves above the bed were full of items in no particular order, books, files, medicaments, old plugs, wristbands and cards, some flat, some still standing. The dresser was untidy. The clothes inside were folded, except for the socks, which were strewn hither and tither. The dresser top was a mix of cables from various appliances, a bottle of sake (unopened) and a stuffed toy I’d picked up on my travels. The floor was evidence of both my vices and ambitions.
Below my feet lay the yoga mat I’d bought a month or two earlier. I’d started yoga, purportedly to improve back problems which had plagued me since my early twenties, but mostly because I wanted some equanimity and a way of forcing myself not to drink on a Monday night. I’d bought it with the intention of doing yoga at home two or three times a week, in addition to the
class I was attending, but this rarely happened. I always made plans like this, far-flung, overly ambitious plans that spoke volumes of my manic tendencies, tendencies I’d got some hold over now but which had consumed me, for years.
I was always in a rush, always regretted the doing or not doing of something, be it due to the night before or just plain inertia. My mind fretted over action, and inaction. No, I wasn’t calm these days, but I was calmer about time. Sometimes at least. I didn’t worry about goals or self-imposed deadlines as I had before, when I was unhappy in my work, stuck in a cycle, revolving like a wheel desperate for the spokes it knows will break its motion, for better or worse. I had been a teacher, but felt more akin to a hamster on a wheel.
I looked beside the yoga mat, where I saw two empty beer bottles which I’d drunk the previous night. That in itself was fine. I’d been with a friend. We drank four beers, but those four beers made the two bottles both necessary and pointless. It was foolish to top up like that. It messed with my sleep and God knows what else. That was my problem. There wasn’t an off switch. Once I started, one more never could hurt. Sometimes it wasn’t even that. It was just, one more, or the next.
Alcohol was beautiful that way. I wasn’t desperate, or at least I didn’t feel desperate when doing it, or not doing it. But things were just simple when I was drinking, perhaps electric sometimes. Even depression was better, even watching a film alone with my sadness and defeat was okay.
I had reasons. I enjoyed it for one; the taste, the action, the sitting with a beer in hand, I enjoyed that, even when it was just me. I got drunk, that was another reason. It made everything feel different. Finally, and even thought it was bullshit, I liked the drunken writer thing, though I knew the best drank spirits with a bit of class, and not beer. Booze cast a pall over everything, but in the moment, that pall seemed like a veneer and felt like a warm cloak.
In typical, manic fashion, I put the pills and trays to one side and went to the bathroom, remembering that I had forgotten to put wax in my hair. I looked at my cheeks, which were slightly puffy, two days of stubble looking blonde in its shortness. My eyes were a little red, even though I’d slept well. I felt my hair. It was getting longer, wiry in a way I never liked. I hadn’t let it dry out completely, so the wax was easier to put in, though I knew that in four or five hours, it would be unkempt again. I took the pills and began to put them into the trays, from Sunday to Saturday. Once I was finished I took another from the pack and swallowed it with some water. I put my laptop in my bag, along with my phone charger, a book, my diary, and some materials for writing an article I needed to get done within the next few weeks, a write up of a trip I’d taken to the Middle East. • I’d already written a draft of the article, so now it was a case of cutting it down. I always wrote too much. It was the only way I knew how to write, in frenzied, discordant streams, words flowing freely though not necessarily with beauty or sense. They might be good or bad but they would be whatever came from me at the time. It was often bullshit, but it was never contrived, nor forced, and that in itself felt good, much better than before.
There was no feeling as bad as trying to write and not being able to. Whenever that happened I always felt like an idiot, a guy who’d kidded himself into thinking he could write. The feeling was awful. I had a lot to read over. Going through swathes of text meant I had a lot of rereading to do, rereading that ultimately left me appalled; not so much due to the quality of what was there, but for the qualities I had assigned it at the time of writing. But that was okay. That was all part of the process. I saw that now.
I’d not written a travel feature before, so I knew I was going to overwrite, and I did. I was left now with around five hundred words to cut, and even then I wasn’t sure if what I was writing was any good. It interested me how I could put so much information on the page, write so quickly, yet was comparatively incapable in real life, a man who was tight-lipped, of few words, stymied and often incapable of bringing to voice what was on my mind. I always had things to say, fucking speeches even, just couldn’t do it. Whether it was a joke, a come-on or a putdown, I had the words, but words aren’t nothing more than thoughts ‘til they leave your mouth; and thoughts they usually remained. It was all so much simpler on the page.
• The first café I went to was on the Camberwell Road. It was nine months since I’d left Prague, where I had been that teacher, and the naïve writer who sat in cafes wringing himself dry, trying to force out words that just weren’t there, words that weren’t even thoughts yet. I missed the city, missed the cafes where I wrote, though when I thought about it with clarity, I
remembered I had spent most of my time in the same one, over and over, a bustling little boho place at the bottom of my street, with faux-antique furniture and pretty barmaids —one of whom being the one who taught me how to rest. They had good beer. Spirits too, I heard, though I never drank the spirits. The coffee wasn’t bad.
I wrote there often, or read, or met my Czech teacher, a PhD student who couldn’t teach to save her life but who I amused with my attempts to transfer English humour into understandable Czech. Most importantly, it was where I used to hang out with my friend, The American. A tall man with round glasses and androgynous good looks, he possessed a healthy (perhaps too healthy) ego and yet was wracked by constant self-doubt. He overthought everything, even when I told him not to. Looking back, it was no wonder we were good friends.
We would sit there hours, drinking beers quickly, (we matched each other for pace) talking about everything, or nothing. Sometimes he’d talk about American politics (he didn’t know much of ours), other times it was women (I didn’t know a whole lot about them). On that we were at counterpoints. I’d recount my coy, draw-out, piss poor attempts to get with receptionists in the companies where I taught. That amused him highly. He on the other hand would detail – in depth – his sexual exploits, be they with his girlfriend (whichever one it was at the time) or the internecine women he needed so as not to be alone after relationships crashed and so readily burned. I would protest. I did not want to hear his stories. Yet, maybe I did. For one reason or another, the dynamic worked, and a part of me was always glad when he walked into the café and distracted me from my writing.
He was always short on money, or didn’t want to break a note, and I picked up more tabs than I can count. That infuriated me even though I never voiced it. Now, what felt like a lifetime away – it was only a couple of years – I missed all this; the lonely winter nights writing in the Boho place, the endless monologues from The American about philosophy or his sex life, or why Hilary Clinton was an opportunistic bitch (we agreed on that) much. I missed the beer, the cheap, clean, plentiful beer. When I think on it hard, I know these were not the sum of my time there, these pockets of hours in the evenings or the night, they were not what Prague was to me. But the mind retains what is fondest, forgets what is dull and suppresses what breaks the heart. Those nights with The American, so sadly gone now.
Here, in London, I had endless cafes to choose from. But none were the Boho place at the end of my street. None had The American. None had her. None were Prague, where I had lived when I was young, and felt young. What was it Hemingway said about Paris? These days I think everywhere is a moveable feast if you’re there young enough. Even that got me thinking of the city, for I had once known an American girl with Hemingway’s famous words tattooed beneath her left tit in French. I was probably lonelier than ever in then, but when I look back, it’s like I was having the time of my life.
After walking roughly thirty minutes, I found a café to write in; an old, converted tailors with a tiny bar and just two tables. There were a few more outside, but although it was mild, it was not warm, so I sat indoors, taking up a seat at the window and watching a young family outside with a baby in a pram. I ordered tea, rare for me, and got to work. I found it hard to decide what to cut from the article. Should I remove the allegory about my teenage years, where I made fun of my non-existent romantic life? I liked it. It
showed some character, an ability on the part of the writer to display weakness, bridging the gap between me, the unseen, and the reader. But maybe it didn’t fit. What about the visit to the cultural centre, to which I was indifferent? They had pressed us to include it in the copy, but I wasn’t so sure. I sipped my tea. It was a good morning. I was in a café in Camberwell trying to decide between two strands of the same tale. I was doing the thing I loved, doing the thing I often failed to do. I was writing. There was a semblance of calm in me. I chose to leave both parts in for now, decide later what needed to be cut. I wrote on for forty-five minutes, before deciding to leave. Although I liked the place, it was too small, and the door slammed with every entering or leaving customer.
I left and turned right. I had looked up another café online, but decided to try and find my way there without a map. I walked down an unfamiliar street and got slightly loss, but it was alright. Eventually I found the Peckham Road and, after a time, found the second café I had intended to visit. It was busy, but there was extra seating in the back, beside a gallery which was part of the building. I took a seat, and was asked to move because a group of four wanted to sit. That was fine. They apologised, but I didn’t mind. I took up a seat in the middle of the room, surrounded by other solitary readers, eaters, drinkers and writers. I sat down, and began to write. The story was finding shape. I was down to around 1500 words, but could see I’d be able to cut it further soon.
I ordered a latte – it was at least two and a half, maybe three hours since my last coffee — and got back to work. It went well at first, but there were a
number of large groups around me, including a couple of families and I got angry inside. I didn’t like that about me, the way I could feel indignant at people for conversing, enjoying life, fucking with my equanimity. Cafes were for work, I’d tell myself. It sounded vapid and self-righteous, even in my head. I told myself not to mind.
Still, I couldn’t concentrate for much longer, even with headphones on and music loud. After a short while, and some more editing, I paid, and left. I walked towards another café. It was raining now. When I got to the café, which was just off the Camberwell Road (but further down than the first place) I noticed, to my disappointment that it was completely packed. I started back up the street, hoping to find another place. I realised I was hungry, and that I was not far from my flat. I went home. It was grey and morbid inside, so I turned the light on. There was an unpleasant stillness and quiet in the room and although I had not been upstairs yet, I knew the house was empty. I made lunch — pasta, with tuna.
As the pasta boiled and the tomato sauce bubbled, I turned the telly on. It was the Rugby World Cup final. I didn’t much like rugby, but it was a cultural event of sorts. Moreover, it was noise. I looked towards the door. The shop was only ten yards away. I could get a beer, relax, watch the game and try to understand the rules. But no. It was drinking like that which led to the sort of drinking that stopped me getting up, putting together my rainbows, walking to the café. It was the kind of drinking that wasn’t pleasure but a vain and futile attack on loneliness. There’d been a time in Prague when I kept a lid on that, but in doing so had needed to shut myself
away, under lock and key, away from people. I wrote probably more than I ever did, but the routine was relentless, and it near destroyed my sanity as much as any liquid brutality could. I went months without seeing anyone I could call a friend except for maybe on a Sunday afternoon, when I’d watch football, have a few beers. Yes, a lot got written, but at what cost? Near madness.
Cooking lunch took longer than I expected, and after, I couldn’t decide between the café near my house, or somewhere further afield. In the end I decided further afield. If I were to go to the place near my place, which I liked, I’d have a coffee. I’d drink it quick, then maybe another, and then that would be enough for one day and, if I wanted to stay and work, I’d start drinking. I never bought juice in cafes, as it was string at silk prices.
So I made my way to Shoreditch. The rain was really heavy now. I jumped on the train to Old Street. It was only a fifteen-minute journey. It was easy. I read Knausgaard, who was my favourite author right now. He wrote matter-of-factly. He wasn’t purposefully witty, but he was witty, for he said things with candour, unafraid to look the fool, or base, or selfish. Human. When I reached Old Street I got lost. I hated the place: a big, awful roundabout. No matter how often I looked up where to go, I always seemed to leave the wrong exit, bringing me back to square one. I found a café beside the roundabout but didn’t like it. I walked up the road and found another place with bikes in the windows and a bike shop in the back. A hipster’s paradise. Nice enough, though. It was nearly four in the afternoon. I hadn’t written as much as I wanted, certainly not finished the article, but it was getting there. I got my coffee and set to work. I worked for another hour
before leaving. I was sitting on a high stool and it wasn’t a comfortable place to spend more than an hour. By the time I got back to Oval it was nearly quarter to six, so I went to my favourite café. There I had two bottles of beer, small ones, and wrote about fifteen hundred words of fiction. I knew you were never meant to drink and write, always had. Alcohol never made the words better. But when they talked about drinking and writing they meant heavy stuff, session drinking, Orwell in a stupor or Hemingway smashed on Listerine, that kind of drinking. A couple of beers wouldn’t cloud my thoughts, no more than the average day. The words came freely, until they didn’t come freely, at which point I decided to stop working.
On my way home the two-drink itch hit me. I’d done well this day, stayed calm, not given in ‘til the evening, and then that was just relaxing, normal. But while it was possible to write well on a couple of beers, there was always a danger of the switch, which always felt like one more wouldn’t do any harm. And it was often right. But it didn’t understand accumulation either, how two more tonight built into two more tomorrow and then gradually, one Saturday, to the flicking of the switch earlier and earlier, ‘til you found yourself drinking as if you were in fine company, for the very reason that you weren’t. I resisted it, and went home. I cooked a dinner and watched a film and went to bed.
I woke up in the morning and took out the pink tray from the filing cabinet, Sunday’s tray. I took the tablet. I went to my favourite café for coffee and cake and then went home, where I exercised a little. Around
lunchtime, I left the house and went to the cinema in Peckham, where I saw the new Bond film. On the way home I stopped in at a bar in Camberwell and wrote another fifteen hundred or so words, before heading to another pub, where I wrote another five hundred. I stopped in for one more on the way home. It was Sunday. After starting to write I gave up quickly, knowing that on a light lunch and early enough in the day I wasn’t going to be clear headed enough to write well. I read instead, which was fine. I was about a hundred pages from finishing the Knausgaard and I’d been with it a while. I went home and cooked a simple dinner of pasta with vegetables, watched television and went to bed.
In the morning I took out the green tray, Monday’s tray. I took the tablet and went to work. I worked well because I was fresh and I’d had a quiet enough weekend. In the evening I went to yoga. It still seemed ridiculous to me, going to yoga. I was a man who liked football and pints and music, not stretching and downward dog or whatever the hell it was called. But I had my reasons, and excuses.
The rest of that week was alright even though I went out Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. On Tuesday and Wednesday I met friends for drinks. We had only two or three, so it wasn’t so bad, but Thursday was stressful at work. On my way home I bought an eight pound bottle of wine and had it with a risotto I made. It was justified because of work, and because the wine was good and the risotto was good. On Friday I woke up feeling fine and went to the gym. I went to work afterwards and covertly took out Friday’s tray (blue), which I had put into my bag. I drank lots of water and coffee and the day was less stressful than Thursday, though
stressful enough still. At five thirty a colleague asked if I wanted a drink and so I went for a drink. I drank faster than the others, as per usual, but not so fast. I stayed for four or five beers, like everyone else, and left in a good mood because it was Friday night and I wasn’t going out and so wasn’t going to ruin my weekend.
On the way home I stopped in at a wine shop. I’d decided to have fish and chips. I wanted red wine and, even though the guy there said I should have white wine if I wanted fish, I went for red. When I got home I decided not to bother with fish and chips but to eat the leftover risotto (cold) instead. I began watching a film and had two glasses, before slowly drinking the rest of the bottle. It was good wine, it had cost me around ten pounds.
I woke up in the morning, dry-mouthed. But it was nine in the morning. It wasn’t like I’d ruined my weekend. I felt alright after some water. I took Saturday’s tray (red) and took my pill and made a breakfast before realising that I was a little groggy. A couple of hours later I texted a friend asking what he was up to and he said nothing and asked if I wanted a pint and I said yes. We met in London and chatted all day and drank till around six o’clock, at which point it was me who suggested we put an end to it because we ran the risk of getting blackout drunk.
The next day I felt alright and after exercising wrote about a thousand words. I went to watch football at a pub and had two beers. Then a friend of mine came and we had four more. He invited me round for dinner.
—How was your weekend? his wife asked. —It was good, pretty quiet, I said. —Got some writing done.
—Good, she said, and she poured me a glass and didn’t stop her. —Thank you.
On Monday I woke at six thirty and took the pill from Monday’s tray before picking up the bottle of beer I’d had after getting back from dinner. I went to the gym, a bit groggy but overall not so bad. When I left the gym I felt refreshed, then sweated a bit and felt tired. I went to work and drank coffee and lots of water and went back and forth in my mind all day as to whether or not to attend yoga in the evening. I was, after all, feeling kind of tired. I didn’t want to be the guy in that class who couldn’t keep up. At five thirty I started walking home in the dark autumn night, the Overground train rattling above my head as I went under the bridge on the Wandsworth Road. I took the park so as to get home more quickly, and as I neared my flat, I realised I would not be going. I went into my flat, said hello to my housemate, who was cooking chicken with vegetables, and climbed the stairs. I went into my room, changed into some jogging bottoms and I lay down.