Distraction Number Five by Gerry King
On Mondays I attend a reading group at Second Home just off Brick Lane. It’s one of those Uber trendy start-up gaffs, hot desking shared spaces, entrepreneurs and the like. A fair percentage of the guys are bearded, wear shoes with pop socks and sport tortoise shell spectacles of Harvard academics. Always spectacles, never glasses. The partition walls are Perspex, the chairs are mix and match shabby functional and the bases of the tables are fashioned from industrial concrete- reinforcing steel. There is free tea but compared to Nude – substandard coffee – and a selection of milks, mindful of the lactose intolerant. All this is dispensed from kidney shaped beverage islands fitted with instant boiling water taps. Second Home also runs a bookshop across the road. I tried to get my book Smoke and Other Tales in there but they wouldn’t have it – they were more interested in getting Will Self who wrote the foreword. Times like that I felt like an old fashioned boy – an out of date boy. The guy I spoke to wore high-end spectacles.
Our group takes turns in reading and discussing short stories and poems, our entrance fee paid for by the Royal Literary Fund. A prize-winning female novelist of mostly historical romantic fiction runs the group. She reminds me of a Joanna Hogg character, and I take cues from the films Archipelago and Souvenir on how to respond. I revert to a type of Peter Sellers character, specifically Chance the gardener in the movie Being There. I imitate a behaviour that I think is required and my reference is usually from a film. I find myself witness to quiet considerations before she asks someone’s opinion on say a brutal Betjeman war poem.
All the time there is an oscillating hum of activity around the borders of our see-through room. People talking into black spidery conference call devices that squat on the tables like little spaceships. The constant chatter. I’d listen for clues regarding political affiliations in what was for me a passionate and sensitive time. I heard references with more than a little affection to ‘Boris’, by women of a certain age. I realised I’d have to change my tone.
I did read one of the prize-winning novelist’s books set in the art world of 1990s London. I ordered it through Abe books, and had it sent to the Welsh address. I noticed there was a great deal of fucking by numbers in this particular book but specifically no oral sex. I did mean to ask her why this was the case. I had read somewhere – I think it was Charles Bukowski – who said he considered oral sex to be cheating, but not in a Bill Clinton get out clause sort of way. I think he was alluding to the friction of penetration, that self-control, working at the edging. Jonathon Meades said he always thought of Princess Anne when he wanted to delay orgasm.
When I called into Nude coffee in Hanbury Street for my double macchiato on my way to the group, I’d often see Damian Lewis sitting at a window seat with a woman. He always looked slightly quizzical, as if he was about to say something. I think perhaps it was to do with his overbite. I’d seen him around Spitalfields a few times. I found him extremely convincing in Homeland and particularly good in the spy film Our Kind of Traitor. He is a man naturally suited to spectacles. Over the years he has grown on me and I’m tempted to give him a copy of my book ‘Lubin Tales,’ stressing he’d have to pay for ‘Smoke and Other Tales’ though.
Louise and I stayed in a Hussmann designed apartment near St Denis, Paris some years back. It belonged to a friend of mine who worked in the City of London. Chris and his wife plus two daughters holidayed at my apartment in London, while we stayed in their magnificent Parisian pad with parquet floors and full-length windows opening out onto the boulevard. He had thoughtfully left a bottle of champagne in the fridge with various cheeses. His wife was the manageress of a beauty spa whose clients included the late Olivia De Havilland. During our stay we noticed an unusually large number of different styles of spectacles scattered throughout the apartment. We photographed these in situ and presented Chris with a small booklet of our ocular documentation.
I never did change my tone to accommodate the Johnson groupies and as a New Year resolution I stopped attending the class. I did miss seeing Damian Lewis in Nude, but that was all really.
Text and Image by Gerry King
