AM I BORING?
We can’t keep the future away – it attacks us at every moment.
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Thank you for reading The Kureishi Chronicles. I am still unable to use my hands and am writing, via dictation, with the help of my family.
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If you are in Shepherd’s Bush this afternoon, and fancy something to eat, you couldn’t do better than Pizza Express, just off the Green.
My son Kier and I are heading there now. We haven’t, in fact, visited this Pizza Express for more than twelve years. We would go every Saturday, me with the Guardian, Kier with his Gameboy, for margheritas and doughballs.
Kier holds the door for me and, as we cross the threshold, we are surprised, if not stunned, to be met by the charming Francesco, a camp Brazilian waiter who would serve us all those years ago. The restaurant itself hasn’t changed – the same photographs of BBC DJs and comedians from the fifties and sixties still adorn the walls – and neither has Francesco. He tells us that he has been working at this branch of Pizza Express for twenty-seven years.
Later, as I talk to Carlo about this, he is reminded of the time when he revisited a luxury menswear shop he used to work in, and encountered a former colleague, who was in fact standing in the same spot as he had been when Carlo left, eleven years before.
What motivates a person to stay in the same job for so long? This isn’t a question of aspiration; not everyone chooses to ride the iron rod of ambition. But what does it mean to choose to remain in exactly the same place and to refuse the variety, novelty and excitement that life can offer?
Carlo and I imagine Francesco’s funeral, and whether his life-long devotion to Pizza Express would be seen as a virtue, or as a failure of imagination. Had he been working for Oxfam or Save the Children, his mourners might describe him as altruistic or good. But, having dedicated the best years of his life to pizzas - in service to a company that couldn’t love him back - how would he be judged? Or how would he judge himself? Has he led, in the formulation of the Greek philosophers, a good life?
Without religion, or the Day of Judgement, there is no ultimate arbiter of how we have lived, whether we are a priest or a murderer. The universe does not provide an answer. But what would we say if Francesco leaves Pizza Express tomorrow and, raising money for blind children, sails across the Atlantic in a canoe? Would he have led a better life?
There is safety in predictability; if nothing new can happen, you will always know where you are. That, at least, is the idea. But whether you like it or not, new things do keep happening. We can’t keep the future away – it attacks us at every moment.
A friend visited the other day, a well-off, intelligent woman I hadn’t seen for a year. I asked her why she hadn’t been to see me, and she gave the oddest reply, saying she had been worried that she would bore me.
What did she mean: that her presence wouldn’t give me any pleasure? Or worse, that she would burden me? Perhaps she was a burden to herself. Women seem to be more concerned about the negative effect they may have on others than men are.
One’s parents start, or don’t start, the engine of your so-called self-esteem. If your parents never saw you as someone of value and interest, it might be hard later to see yourself as enlivening.
We have noticed two types of bores: those we wish to flee from, who make us feel as if we are pinned to the spot by an invisible dagger as they drown us in verbiage. And there are those with personalities so tepid, you hardly know they’re there.
In Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre discusses the work of Francesco and his role at Pizza Express. Sartre - who spent a lot of time in cafés, particularly during the war when French apartments were not heated - uses the example of a waiter who is overly committed to his role. He performs his duties with movements that are "a little too precise, a little too rapid," and interacting with customers "a little too eagerly."
This exaggerated performance suggests that the waiter is not just doing his job but is defining himself solely by his role as a waiter, thereby suppressing other aspects of his identity. The waiter, in other words, refuses to accept that freedom is essential to the human condition.
If our sexuality or excitement inevitably persecutes and disturbs us, the boring person has made a life-long commitment to subduing their jouissance. Boring people don’t wish to harm others, they don’t want to change their lives or the lives of people they encounter. That is their problem. Enlivening people are dangerous, they jolt you, they make things happen.
Some people are boring but live fascinating lives; conversely, some people, like Francesco, are interesting but have reduced their lives to a series of deadening repetitions.
Perhaps boredom is a skill that must be learned. You can get better at it by practising. What a pleasure it must be to see others wither around you, to witness friends and family wishing to escape, or even die, in preference to experiencing the deadening state you’ve created with your presence.
Hmm.
The idea that someone working as people often used to work- at the same job, year after year- in any way diminishes them, is rather startling to me. I'm an artist, from a family of artists, but perhaps because of my roots in the working class, and my life spent in meditative practices, I don't see the way this waiter or that man in a shop the same way you do. Seeking new experiences wears thin when the experience of living in itself provides endless variety.
I knew a man named Sid, who owned a small workshop in town. It was a throwback to the early 20th century where there would be garages tucked away behind painted double-doors in residential areas, in what had probably once been stables. He used to employ a lot of rudderless young men and they would take on various mechanical and building projects. I would often see Sid at a bar that I was used to frequent, back in the days when I was an afternoon drinker. It was the kind of place where a regular could walk in and go behind the bar and make themselves a pint of tea and no-one would raise an eyebrow. The owner, who was absent from the business, was apparently a stockbroker who had taken a beating in the crash of 1987. The place had originally been a mortuary. I once took a wrong turn while coming back from the toilet and found myself in the kitchen where the chef was cooking a pan of mussels, stark bollock-naked.
Sid was profoundly dyslexic. Like many men his age this was not diagnosed while he was at school. He taught himself to read as an adult. He had a turbulent youth. There was a child – a boy who never knew him. He signed away his rights as a father. Towards the end of his life he was on the receiving end of a miscarriage of justice that saw him convicted of assault. His duty solicitor barely spoke to him and built a case around the police report that was biased against him. He got five years. I used to go and see him up at Blundeston, a stone's throw from Norwich. I would ride the mini-bus to the prison with all the women on their way to visit husbands and partners who had been locked-up for decades.
Sid was very angry. It was constantly simmering in the background but he never let it turn to bitterness or slow him down. He was a busy man in prison, building aviaries, working as a listener – a point of contact for other prisoners who were having a hard time. He traded packets of crisps for stolen art supplies and made me all these great birthday cards. In the prison workshop, he carved a small wooden box that has since passed into my ownership. Inside the box there are a small quantity of his ashes.
When he was released from prison, he moved to a first floor flat, above a launderette, in Ipswich. To access the property, you had to follow a narrow alleyway around three sides of the building, then go up a metal staircase. The only thing I really remember about the inside of the place was the glittery toilet seat. He ran a business selling engine parts on Ebay. He fixed-up old mopeds. He purchased a light aircraft to work on with his dad, who was in the early stages of Alzheimer's. The last time I visited him in Ipswich, I noticed he was in the middle of reading 'Across The River And Into The Trees' by Ernest Hemingway. The protagonist of the novel – a U.S. Colonel – dies at the end as a result of a heart condition. You might call it foreshadowing.
A couple of days before Sid died, he visited me out of the blue, in Southend. He told me he was having chest pains, which his doctor had attributed to stress. He had recently acquired a large boat. He was about to head off for France for a month where he had property that he was in the process of fixing up. A neighbour had taken advantage of his incarceration and stolen a piece of his land.
Sid's body was found on his doorstep by the postman. He had been about to leave for France. He must have stepped out the front door and into the afterlife. He was carrying so much money that the police initially suspected foul play.
When my mother told me he had died, my immediate thought was 'Who's going to fix everything?' Because that's all he ever did. Whenever I walk into town, I pass a wall around an amusement park that he helped to build. It's a good wall. At his funeral there were people from all walks of life with whom he'd formed working relationships. He was a very interesting man. I still think about him.
Unlike Sid, I am profoundly boring. I became aware that I was boring from a very early age. I will die boring, and it will not bother me in the slightest. There was a time in my life when you could argue that my life was interesting; when I either actively sought out interesting situations or allowed them to develop around me. Even then, I was never interesting. I was analogous to one of those prosaic dioramas that you find lodged in snow-globes, that only appear to take on a semblance of life when the flakes of an artificial blizzard are swirling around them.
My interests are idiosyncratic. I do not care to explain them in any depth. I lead a life of quiet routine and silent joy. I am awoken at a deathly hour of the morning by one of the rider mowers on the golf course, or by the machine they use to clean up fallen leaves, which has the noise profile of an idling 747. I get up and I exercise, in the semi-dark now that it is Autumn. As I drag a kettlebell around my head, in a warped elliptical orbit, I imagine that it is a comet passing through the black void of space. I sit down in front of a computer and work on a novel that will have a very limited appeal. Periodically, I will ask a chameleon, who has been dead now for over a year, his opinion on a sentence, as I did when he was alive:
“Frederic, what do you think of this?”
My pleasures are fleeting and insular: The other evening I walked to a nearby parade of shops to collect an Amazon package from the lockers at the Nisa. The sun was setting. There was a little faded pink in among the scudding grey clouds. As I rounded the corner of the Broadway, I could hear a hillbilly melody being picked out on a banjo by the owner of an empty barbers shop. On the other side of the street, a broken line of swallows were perched all along the tiled apex of the rooftops. These are the things that I want from the world; small simple things that I put away in my memory. I think that, to be interesting, you have to give something back. You have to engage. I give very little.