happy anniversary

I limped into the town. Fifty minutes before, I had slipped on the stairs and smashed the edges of some of the lower steps into the small of my back, my right wrist and the little toe on my left foot. Some time spent with ice packs on the sofa had been helpful. The back and wrist were OK. The toe still hurt like buggery. Advancing into the city centre on my wife's arm, I was learning how to roll the foot onto the pavement without causing further discomfort to the swollen digit.

By the time we were passing the Blacksmith's Arms and the Cock Inn, I had it working OK. It was only on about every third or fourth footstep that I'd feel a  sudden lancing pain inside my Kurt Geiger desert boot. Those are good boots. Very soft.  When pulling the left boot onto the damaged foot, I'd felt almost nothing. Getting the sock on had actually been more of a trial, making me think of a very familiar Bukowski line:

"I don't know about other people, but when I bend over to put on my shoes in the morning, I think, Christ Almighty, now what?"

That's always just done it for me, that line. Human life is right there. For me, anyway, if not for other people.

I tried to make conversation. I spoke about the day I'd had at work:

"So we met Hammell again today."

"Who's that?"

"Hammell. This big professor. He used to advise the last government and now he advises the new one."

"Oh, right."

"These people interest me."

"That's good."

"It interests me that he could violently agree with the last Secretary of State and now he can violently agree with a new Secretary of State who has scrapped a lot of the last guy's measures and completely changed everything around. Hammell is adaptable. He's savvy."

"Yes."

"Words like that are interesting. We take them to mean something positive. It sounds good if someone is 'savvy', 'adaptable' or 'in tune with the times'. But there's another way of looking at it, isn't there?"

"Is there?"

"Yes. Those words just mean the person is a survivor who will do and say anything to maintain his position and remain influential and well-rewarded."

"I suppose so. In a way."

"You could choose to use words like 'hypocrite' or 'turncoat' instead."

She didn't say anything. She just looked a little bored. We were crossing the road. I wondered if the Cock was full of cocks.

"You'd think that intellectuals would shape the way the way we think about things. You'd think all that research and thought would enable them to take a lead, guiding mere politicians and businessmen as they set about deciding how things should be done. But it doesn't feel like that to me. It feels like the things the intellectuals say are the product of a reverse engineering process. The businessmen, and the politicians whom they own, first become attached to an idea because it serves their interests. It looks like a way of maximising shareholder value or of transferring wealth from the pockets of a dispreferred group to the pockets of a preferred group. Then intellectuals receive grants from government or from business to do their great work. They continue to receive the grants and to travel to conferences in San Francisco, Qatar and Mumbai so long as their output serves to support the conclusions at which their paymasters have already arrived. They do the work that attracts the funding. The funding supports the work which is not unhelpful."

I had to pause for a moment. The words and the footfalls both halted. My toe really fucking hurt.

"My guess is," I continued, "that adaptable, savvy people who 'understand the Zeitgeist' would be able to find their places in this system no matter who is at the top of it. Perhaps this is how we could gradually shift into the grip of dictators. The intellectuals, the media, the advertisers all combining to create a language that makes it impossible to point out that something might be cruel or absurd. To raise an objection to something completely commonplace and taken-for-granted is to sound shrill. To sound like a crank. A lunatic."

We stood at another pelican crossing, waiting for the lights to change so we could cross the main shopping street. Across the road, a very fat person in three-quarter length combat trousers kicked a crumpled beer can. He kicked it again. His forearms were tattooed quite extravagantly and the one earlobe I could see had a large tunnel stretched into it. My wife tutted. The fat person kicked the can again as he continued on his way. One paw was wrapped around an open box of chicken pieces.  With his other paw he lifted meat into his mouth. There was a bone between his teeth when I turned my gaze away from him.

"For example," I went on. "It might be acceptable to argue that one or other measure introduced by the new Secretary of state may or may not have the desired effect of improving the education of children in this country. Arguments can appear to be quite heated. But no one says what's really true - that this government doesn't want to improve education for most people's children. They want to ensure that the richest people continue to enjoy the advantages of an education which stabilises and improves their position towards the top of society. They want to divert resources and funds away from most people's children and towards the children of the people for whom these ministers really work. Put this together with the privatisation of the NHS and with the non-regulation of rapacious banks. In this context, every policy this government produces makes perfect sense. But don't expect Her Majesty's Opposition to say any of what I've just said, even though they know it to be true. They know that to speak in these terms would have them branded as 'extremists' or 'mad'. So they confine their arguments to narrow matters of technical detail."

My wife sighed. We were nearing the restaurant and I think she hoped that filling my mouth with wine and food would soon prevent it from emitting  more words.

"If you go back to even trying to give the children of cleaners and shop assistants the same quality of education as the children of ministers or financiers, what will happen? Well, some of those cleaners' kids might actually want to take over and a smaller number might even start making that happen. We've been down that road. Oiks running the country, or thinking that they do. But our masters are back in power now and they want to turn back the clock. Real people must be kept in their place. That means just enough education to operate machinery, read the tabloids and watch Britain's Got Talent. They must not care about or understand what's happening to them."

As we passed the Boot Inn, a family straggled along the other side of the street, moving towards us. Noises were coming out of their mouths. They got closer. I thought that the noises had to be words, given that there was some evidence of prosody. But it was not until they were behind us that I recognised little bits of what they were saying to be items of English vocabulary.

"Sometimes I have to listen really, really carefully to people to realise that they're actually speaking the same language as me," I said.

We got to the place and were shown to a table. We had kir royales to toast our wedding anniversary and once mine had been efficiently dispatched I got stuck into the bottle of Muscadet. My wife hadn't even drained half of the pinkish aperitif from her glass.

We ate: olives, bread, salads, cheeses, pâté. We talked about the kid. I tried not to allow any connection to exist between what I thought specifically about his schooling and the stuff I'd been saying as I limped into the restaurant. People don't want to think that things like that apply directly to them. My wife is no exception.

"Just so long as he's happy, that's the main thing," she said.
"Yes, that's the main thing."

To my left, men sat on one side of a long table. Women sat opposite them. Husbands and wives. I could hear they were speaking English but I didn't catch much of it. The men were competing to make the funniest remarks. As each utterance reached its conclusion, the whole table barked with furious laughter. It happened every few minutes for the duration of our meal.

I was feeling the wine by the time I found something metallic between my teeth. I extracted it and looked at it. It was a tinselly object, gold in colour. The words 'happy birthday' had been in my mouth, presumably cooked into the cod goujon I'd just eaten. A decoration.

We didn't make a fuss. The price of the goujons and of my wife's dessert were not added to the bill.

My foot felt a little better on the way home.

"Perhaps it's just the alcohol taking the edge off the pain," my wife said.
"I've had a drink. But I'm not drunk."

A car moved past us. Really dismal music thumped inside it and out of its windows. The bass was heavy and the vocalist sounded like a bloody fool trying to win a singing competition.

I danced around a bit, pumping the arms. The toe protested but I was having a good time. The front passenger's window rolled down further.

"Oi, cunt. Are you taking the piss?"
He looked like he was in his early twenties and not the brightest boy.
"I'm enjoying your music."
"You fucking what? Fuck off."
"You don't want me to enjoy it? I assumed that music played at that volume was meant to be enjoyed by everyone in the street."
"Do you want me to fill you in, cunt?"

My wife's grip tightened on my arm.

"Don't do this," she said.

"Smile," I told my young friend, gesturing towards the cameras mounted on posts all over our high street. "You're on CCTV. So is your licence plate."

They drove away, all of them in the car adding their comments into the mix.

"Don't do things like that. I don't like things like that," said my wife.
"I do. I think they're funny."
"Well, just don't do them when I'm with you."
"OK," I agreed.

We went home and began our eighth year of our marriage.