Thursday 6 February

The trip to Switzerland last weekend already seems a distant memory. It was an almost exact rerun of the weekend that I spent there last April. We were again staying at the Seehotel Kronenhof, an excellent hotel in the little village of Berlingen on the shores of Lake Constance. The meals there were spectacularly good, often including freshly caught fish from the lake. Berlingen in January/February was of course a good deal colder than in April, with a dusting of snow on the ground and patches of ice at the edges of the lake. But the weather was bright and sunny, and we had a bit of free time on the Saturday afternoon for a walk in the hills above the lake.

The meeting itself I found disappointing. The topic was the same as last April's: the grandiose plan to digitise the entire research literature of mathematics. Since last year, this project has lost some of its momentum, partly because of major difficulties in getting it funded. Also, there were some librarians at the meeting, who have expertise in digitising other areas of literature and who were critical of the methodology of the groups of mathematicians working on the project. Personally, I would have thought that librarians would have been consulted at an earlier stage than this. It has made me a bit sceptical about the way the whole thing is being organised.

I got back home on Sunday evening, and on Monday my old friends Alan and Nan from Alabama arrived to stay for a few days. It was good to see them again, seven years after their previous visit, but I was a bit apprehensive about looking after them without Mary here.

In fact, their visit passed off pretty successfully. They are both big talkers, so there is never any danger of running out of topics of conversation. In fact, Nan talks so much that I sometimes wished she was equipped with an Off switch (or at least a Mute button).

I don't want to be critical about them, because they are good friends and I was very pleased to see them again. But there was one thing I noticed about them that I don't remember from their previous visits: they are both very stingy about spending money. For instance, they decided to take a train to York yesterday to do some sightseeing, and it was a central feature of their plans for the day that they did not want to start too early in the morning because the train fares are fractionally cheaper after 9:30.

It's not as though they are hard up, and I certainly wouldn't say that they are mean. I think it's probably just that they had to be very careful with their money when they were young, and they have never grown out of the habit of saving the pennies whenever they can.

When they arrived on Monday they presented me with a box of chocolates. That evening I cooked dinner for them (a rather good turkey risotto, though I say so myself). After the meal, as we were having coffee, Nan said that she would really like to try some of the chocolates. That really surprised me, and I thought it was another example of her penny-pinching ways. I mean, you don't give someone a present and then promptly ask for some of it back again. But then it struck me that if I had better social skills I would have offered the chocs round after dinner in any case.

I was kind of hoping that they would offer to take me out to dinner yesterday when they got back from York. But they didn't show any sign of doing so, so I decided to drop a heavy hint. On Tuesday evening they were discussing how to get back to my house on their return from York. For various reasons I couldn't pick them up at the station, and the idea of taking a taxi was far too extravagant for them. So I explained how they could get a bus. They then wanted to know when I would get home from work, so as to be sure that they did not arrive before I did. I told them that I usually get home around 5:30. "But I may be a bit later tomorrow," I added, "because I have to stop at the supermarket to buy some food for our dinner." [Short pause. No response, so I continued.] "In fact, I'm not altogether sure what I'll buy. I don't have that many recipes that I'm good at cooking."

That was enough to do the trick. Nan said "Well, why don't we take you out to dinner somewhere?" I responded with a tone of innocent surprise, "Oh, that's very kind of you. Are you sure?"

So we had a very good meal at the local Chinese restaurant yesterday evening. Afterwards, we sat there chatting for a while, until Nan suggested to Alan that the time had come to pay. I had trouble keeping a straight face when Alan replied "No, I hate paying for food. Why don't you pay?" So poor Nan was left to foot the bill. At that stage, I started to feel guilty and tried to insist that I should pay my share. I argued that if Mary had been at home then we would have been entertaining them, and it was unfair that they should have to pay for me. But they insisted. When we got home, I made partial amends for my unscrupulous behaviour by getting dessert for them (Mackie's ice cream with maple syrup—delicious).

They left this morning to go back to Lancaster, where they are spending a sabbatical semester. I hope we'll see them again before they go back to Alabama.

Monday 10 February

Following a recommendation from a regular reader of this journal (thanks, Bob!), I have been reading the novel At Swim, Two Boys by Jamie O'Neill.

This book received glowing reviews when it was published a couple of years ago, but at nearly 650 pages it's long, and its historical setting, in a run-down suburb of Dublin in 1915-16, didn't altogether appeal to me. Also, the title, echoing that of Flann O'Brien's classic novel At Swim-Two-Birds (which I have never read), made me think that I would be missing all sorts of literary allusions if I read Boys before Birds. So without Bob's enthusiastic recommendation I might not have bought this book. That would have been my loss, because this is a stunningly well written and moving story.

I bought the book some time last summer, and as usually happens it had to take its turn in a stack of other books waiting to be read. I started it towards the end of last year, and finished it just before we went away to the Canary Isles in January. I haven't had time to write about it until now, and this short review would have been a lot better if the story was still fresh in my mind. But maybe late is better than never.

The two boys of the title are Jim and Doyler, whose childhood friendship is renewed when they meet again at the age of 16 after four years apart, and gradually deepens into something stronger than just friendship. Jim is a shy, scholarly boy dominated by his shopkeeper father and also deeply under the influence of the Catholic church, very different from Doyler who is a streetwise hustler from the very poorest part of town. Together they form an ambition to swim across the bay to a distant island. But most of the time swimming has to take second place to other concerns.

Most gay coming of age stories seem to me to be no more than wish fulfilment fantasies. But O'Brien makes the relationship between Jim and Doyler seem totally realistic and believable. He has a wonderful ear for dialogue, and you can hear the Irish lilt of the cadences in this extract, in which the boys are lying in a field, making up after a brief quarrel.

Jim looked at him. He was lying on his front with a meadow grass sticking out from his mouth. How did Doyler do this? He could make Jim so angry with himself, so ashamed. The next minute, he was all alive, like a spark was inside, like the full of him was electric. How did Doyler do this to him? He really didn't know.

He stretched out in the grass too, leaning on his elbow, facing his friend, the pal of his heart, happy to watch him, fondly, his face. The grass was wonderfully cool in the shadows. It gave a fringy brush to his legs. Doyler grinned. He took the grass-stem from his mouth and tickled its ear under Jim's chin. 'You can tell does a fellow like you with a spear of grass, did you know that?'

'How do you tell?'

'You wave it under his chin, and if his face goes red at all, then you know.'

Jim laughed. The blush had risen, as of course it must, but for once he could be glad of it. He thought how lovely it would be to touch at this moment. The notion hadn't formed before Doyler's leg came to rest against his own. It pressed ever so lightly, and Jim pressed lightly back. He smiled with his bottom lip caught in his teeth, for it was wonderful to lie in the long grass, with just this tiny pressure of touch between.

Then Doyler said, 'I think I'm going to ask for a kiss.'

And Jim said, 'I think I hoped if you would.'

They neither of them moved. Until they heard voices approaching, and Jim pulled quickly away.

It is a long time before they get to kiss, because other things are happening in the Dublin of 1916. Irish liberation is more important than gay liberation, and Doyler goes off to join the Citizens' Army as the story moves inexorably towards the bloody massacre of the Easter Rising.

I won't even attempt to sketch the many other themes of this complex novel, in which the love between the two boys is just one strand. If you want a more thoughtful and literary critique you can find it here, in a review written by Michael Pye for the New York Times.

It's very seldom that I feel like re-reading a book. But this novel is so rich and rewarding that I'm sure I'll be coming back to it over and over again.

Sunday 16 February

I had to go to a meeting in London on Friday, and I toyed with the idea of staying there overnight so that I could join in the anti-war rally the next day. In fact, if it hadn't been for Rosie I would probably have done so, but domestic considerations prevailed and I came back home to feed the cat. Thus I missed taking part in what was by far the biggest political demonstration ever to have taken place in Britain.

Why do so many people feel passionately that the plans of Bush and Blair to go to war against Iraq are misguided and wrong? I think the answer is that they know instinctively when they are being lied to, and they don't like it. As preparations for war gather pace, people can see that the reasons given for it by the politicians get ever more transparently false.

First, they tried to tell us that the campaign against Saddam was part of the "war against terror". They seemed to think that if they mentioned Iraq and Al-Qaeda in the same breath sufficiently often, people would assume that there was a connection. When this didn't happen, the attempts to link Saddam with terror became increasingly desperate, culminating in Britain with the farcical recent incident when the government's so-called "intelligence-led dossier" of evidence of such links turned out to have been cobbled together from some out of date pages downloaded from the internet.

Next, they wanted us to believe that Iraq has an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction that threaten our security. How anyone can claim with a straight face that Iraq has weapons that could reach the USA or Britain is beyond my comprehension. The only countries that could possibly be attacked by Iraq are its immediate neighbours, and none of them seem to favour this war. On the contrary, they see only too clearly that a war might destabilise the whole of the Arab world and breed a whole new generation of militant extremists. In any case, the search for these weapons of mass destruction has not yet yielded much evidence of their existence. Even if he has them, it seems highly unlikely that Saddam would use them unless grievously provoked.

With over a million people gathering for the march in London yesterday, Tony Blair came up with a third reason for war: the moral case for removing an evil dictator responsible for the torture and death of hundreds of thousands of innocent people. This argument would be more convincing if our leaders had shown a bit more concern 15 and 20 years ago when these atrocities were taking place. But western governments were conspicuously silent in 1988 when Saddam was gassing the Kurdish people. Before then, they were actively supporting Saddam in his war against Iran, supplying him with the very weapons that they now want him to give up.

If the reasons given by our leaders for going to war are not believable, what are the real reasons? In the case of George W Bush, is it a sort of Oedipus complex, a desire to do better than Daddy by sending the troops into Baghdad, as George Bush Sr failed to do at the end of the first Gulf war? Or is the war really all about oil, with a cabal of Texan oilmen wanting to get their hands on Iraq's oilfields? More cynically still, is the whole thing part of the President's re-election strategy? These are all disreputable motives, unworthy of the leader of a great nation. But since the stated motives for war are so blatantly false, you can't really blame people for believing in the conspiracy theories and shady motives.

The motives of Tony Blair are harder to fathom. Here is a man whose political career has been totally pragmatic and opportunistic. He has never seemed to have any deep beliefs or firm principles. Yet on this issue he is completely unwavering in his support for his buddy George W. Nobody seems to have any convincing explanation for this. My theory is that his pro-American line has been forced on him by the secret services. Britain's military and security services are completely dependent on their close intelligence links with the CIA. Without these links, Britain's whole defence strategy would fall apart. Blair obviously knows this, and I think he dare not risk the threat of America withdrawing from this cooperation. Whatever his motives, on this issue he seems to be out of touch with most members of his own party, and also with British public opinion, which for once seems to be backing Europe rather than America.

Yesterday evening I was invited to dinner by my colleague Charles, to meet some visiting relatives of his. Charles, unusually for an academic, is a born again christian with very right wing political views, and I was apprehensive that his relatives would be similar. But Charles's cousin and his wife turned out to be an interesting young couple with even more liberal political views than me. So we all ganged up on Charles and had a lively evening of discussion, with Charles doing his best to defend Bush and Blair and their warlords against the attacks from us peaceniks. The only person who didn't seem to enjoy the evening was Charles's poor mother, a retired missionary who had served in Lebanon and had seen too much of the misery that conflict in the middle east can bring. She retired to bed quite early, leaving the rest of us to argue until past midnight.

Monday 24 February

Today was supposed to be the day that Mary came home. But she is still in the Canaries. She was unable to get a flight back this week because it is half term and all the flights are fully booked. That's her story anyway. In fact, she is enjoying life there and doesn't seem at all bothered by the idea of staying on for an extra week or two. As for me, I don't really mind another week of the bachelor life. Time seems to have passed very quickly for the past five weeks, though I haven't enjoyed it much as I did last year, when there was more of an element of novelty about it.

The thing I dislike most about living on my own is the grocery shopping. I did the weekly shopping trip after work today, and felt very self-conscious at the checkout, imagining that the checkout clerk and other customers would all be looking at the small portions and single servings, and feeling sorry for this sad old guy living on his own. That's one reason to look forward to Mary's return.

[Pause for a telephone call.] I have just been speaking to Mary, who has booked a flight for next Monday. So I only have one more week on my own, and no more grocery shopping trips for one. Suddenly I feel that time is running out, and that I could really do with a few more weeks of solitude. There's no pleasing some people.

One reason why Mary originally planned to come home today was that our season tickets for Opera North include two performances this week, on Thursday and Friday. Since she won't be able to use her tickets for these, I have invited our young friend Stephanie to come with me. I imagine that will cause a few tongues to wag among the regular opera-goers. "That Chris is a dark horse, isn't he. Who'd have thought he'd be carrying on like that with a pretty young girl while his wife's away?" Dark horse maybe, but not in the way they think. I would like to invite Stephanie's dishy boyfriend, but I only have the one ticket, and Fran doesn't care much for opera in any case.

Actually, I'd better be a bit careful what I write about them. I have a suspicion that Steph and Fran may possibly have stumbled across this web site. I know that I have acquired a couple of regular new readers from this area, who both use the same ISP as they do.

Memo to new readers, whether local or distant, known or unknown to me in real life: why don't you and let me know who you are.

Among the many bizarre Google searches that lead people to this site, I noticed yesterday that someone had come to my poetry page after a search for "Auden face deserve". Repeating this search for myself (as one does), I found that Auden once remarked, "We get the face we deserve." Further research reveals that it was Coco Chanel who came up with the saying "Nature gives you the face you have at twenty. Life shapes the face you have at thirty. But at fifty you get the face you deserve." (Though looking at my passport photos, I'd have to say that it took me until 60 to find a face that I'm comfortable with.)

The reason for mentioning this is that it reminded me of a nice little anecdote I once heard about two of the most distinguished gay British figures in the world of the arts in the 20th Century, the poet W H Auden and the painter David Hockney. I can't remember where I came across this story, but I believe it to be true.

Apparently when Hockney was a young man and had not yet met Auden, someone showed him the famous photo of the poet with his deeply lined face. (Auden himself once commented "My face looks like a wedding-cake left out in the rain.") Hockney examined the picture carefully, with his artist's eye, then looked up and said "If that's his face, what must his scrotum look like?"

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