IS IT DAY OR NIGHT?

A dispatch from the kitchen.

Brilliant, virtuosic and influential trumpeter/bandleader Miles Davis.Photo by Anton Corbijn

Dear Readers,

The Kureishi Chronicles is a year old this month. Time certainly hasn’t flown, but this blog has kept me alive. Thank you for your loyalty and continued support.

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“Are you religious? How religious are you? Do you know what time it is? Is it day or night? Where are we? We need to find out how responsive you are.”

Five strangers are sitting around my dining room table. I have been out of hospital for six weeks and these “providers” are here to ascertain whether I will have my care package extended, and in what form. At present, I have a live-in carer, and another one who arrives twice a day to help get me in and out of bed. As we know, this government is determined to make tax cuts before the next election, which will be paid for by reducing social care for the vulnerable. I could be one of those cuts. In order not to be, Isabella and I have to demonstrate how needy and sick I am. I need to dial up the distress, if possible, or there is a risk I may have to sell my house in order to get my arse wiped.

My house is in a busy district of west London, but by some kind of good luck, it is more or less completely silent. Lying in bed on the ground floor, I can’t hear a thing. But by necessity, I am still in the hands of the medical system. I wake up at seven when my carer, a pleasant African woman who lives at the top of the house, comes to wake me up, and my day begins with a suppository. Soon after, there is a loud banging at the front door when the local council sends another carer to assist with my washing and dressing. It is professional work, and each day a different young man comes to assist.

There is a complicated and obscure etiquette when it comes to being looked after. In some areas the carer’s duties are obvious: to deal with my bowel, bladder and catheter, to wash me, prepare my meds, get me in and out of bed and make my breakfast and coffee. But there are grey areas. Is it her work to mix me a Bloody Mary? To send texts to my friends, or make them a tea when they come round? She is a carer not a servant. Yet what choice do I have but to make demands, and discover whether they will be reciprocated?

The people who look after me, of which there are many, are almost entirely new immigrants. There is much political talk from all directions about immigration and how to limit the figures. But there is, at the heart of our culture, a conundrum: how will we survive without a continuous stream of low paid workers who enable our health system, as well as everything else, to function? Having lived and worked in a white world for the best part of forty years, most of my adult life, I am back where I began with my father, his family and friends, among people who have recently arrived and are not used to things here, as they strive to make lives for themselves and their children.

On the writing of my book, Shattered, which Carlo is helping me with, it has become clear how pleasurable it is to write with someone else. We work from ten until one every morning, and get about five pages of editing and rewriting done. We are cutting, reshaping and expanding the dispatches, keeping them in the present tense, and arguing over improvements. It reminds me of working on plays and movies with directors and dramaturgs, where there is plenty of amusing gossip about politics and sport, even as you work. It is consoling to work alone as a writer, but it is a blast to have companionship and banter.

Isabella’s grandmother, a screenwriter who wrote many films for Visconti – The Leopard, Rocco and His Brothers and Roman Holiday for William Wyler - said in an interview that the best way to write comedies was to work with others, since you can test the humour as you go. The internal critical voice, the one that tells you that you are no good, is muted when there are others to cheer you along. Writers can learn from musicians and movie people, and now are in writer’s rooms across the world. Music and cinema emerge out of creative alliances; from the Beatles to Miles Davis, Hitchcock to Robert Altman. Maybe the most important thing an artist can do is go to school with the right people, or have the ability to recognise a compatible talent. An artist can then do something they can’t do alone. Would we have heard of Lennon or McCartney if they had never met? It is a pleasurable and at times terrible dependency.

I read a great piece about Miles Davis and his many collaborators which I think you’ll enjoy. Here it is:

Hanif