14 May 2025

The cruelty of politics is clouding my vocabulary

There’s always some new and revolting story coming from America under Trump – sometimes several in a day.

Photo by Lee Martin/Millenium

I have often mined the film 2001 for metaphors, and the one that has been springing to my thoughts lately is where the astronaut is unplugging the computer’s memory chips and HAL says, rather poignantly, indeed selfishly, considering he’s murdered most of the crew, “I can feel my mind going, Dave”, or something like that. Words keep disappearing. I forgot the name “Archimedes” for almost a week. I could remember the displacement theory and “Eureka” and all that, but the guy who shouted it? Not a Scooby-Doo. It only came back when I read it in an article. The word “edifying” slipped out of the door without leaving a note the other day, and that was really annoying, because I wanted to use it sarcastically in an argument I was having with a former friend on a social media platform. The word slunk back in on tiptoe later that night, holding its breath and its shoes in its hand, but by then it was too late. “Where the hell have you been?” I shouted at it, but it didn’t have an answer.

I begin to wonder: is dementia catching? Did I get it from my mother when I looked after her cat for a fortnight? I certainly seemed to have caught her wobbliness while I was there. We’ve been trying to advise her not to use the stairs any more, even to the point of installing something like a kiddie gate at their foot in order to discourage her, but that would have gone down like a cup of cold sick, for she is headstrong. However, when carrying my laptop and a set of external speakers down from my bedroom to the kitchen, I felt myself nearly coming a cropper on the stairs. Oh, the irony, if I had been the one found on the floor with a broken leg or worse. My esteemed colleague Hunter Davies is nearly 30 years older than I am and I bet he doesn’t have to grope for words, or panic when he goes down the stairs.

I write these very words through a kind of mist. I have been tempted for hours to write to my editor and beg for a day’s grace, but I have been doing that too often lately; he is a good and deserving soul and I do not wish to add to his woes. I thought a little walk would clear the fog, so I went off to the chemist to pick up my prescription, but they had closed for lunch. I always forget they do that. People talk about how great the old days were, but do they remember when the shops closed for lunch? And half-day closing on Thursdays? (Or was it Wednesdays?) Who else closes for lunch these days? They might as well go the whole hog and sell Wright’s Coal Tar Lamps for Whooping Cough and charge for them in the old money.

So instead I went down to a WHSmith in the shopping centre to buy the latest Viz and read it with a bratwurst bun in the sunshine. A seagull flew to my feet and picked up the fried onions that spilled to the ground. I was also beset by pigeons and was struck by how manky they were compared with the flawless whiteness of the gull’s feathers and the brightness of its eyes, which to my own bespeak a focused and malignant intelligence. How do seagulls look so good when they eat all that crap? Why aren’t they covered in spots and scabs, and why isn’t their plumage falling out? The pigeons have the same diet and they’re wrecks. Or at least the ones in Churchill Square, BN1, are.

I found myself with no answer to these questions and, as I walked home, I felt disoriented, almost stoned, and went to have a nap from which I have risen as confused as a newborn. I wonder if this is long Covid. I have been rather wheezy lately and I haven’t even been smoking that much, and on some days not at all, without even making an effort.

I also wonder if it is good for the brain to be consumed by hatred on a daily basis. Semper aliquid novi Africam adferre -– always something new out of Africa – they used to say when someone brought back a cameleopard to Ancient Rome; and today there’s always something revolting coming from America, sometimes several times in a day. The other day I saw the footage of the social worker being carried out of a town hall meeting by police for asking Representative. Mike Lawler (Rep, NY) at what point he’d start upholding the constitution he and his president had made an oath to defend. I have spent more than three months now wishing the 47th president ill, on a loop, and that can’t be good for one’s health. (If by some miracle he pops his clogs in the eight-day gap between my filing these words and their appearance in print, then Hallefrigginglujah. And if you think this puts me in the same moral postcode as those idiot rappers Kneecap then take a hike.)

I am off to bed after this. I do hope I get better. A friend is having a birthday party on the beach this Saturday and someone is threatening to bring a guitar along, and I will need all my strength to take it from his hands and hurl it into the sea. Unless I can train the seagulls to do it for me. Where’s Daphne du Maurier when you need her?