to Catherine May 2003

May 2003
Thank you for the lovely card you sent to me around the time of my last birthday.  [It actually arrived two days late - on my father's birthday - I was due on his birthday, but arrived two days early, presumably to establish my individuality from the start.]
The card was a nice gesture, which meant a lot to me.  Some of the things you said in it were controversial enough to justify a reply.
You said that you have moved on [but haven't we all?!] and that you could not be my 'therapist, lover or true friend'.  In writing that, Catherine, I think that perhaps you were being somewhat presumptuous - and/or assuming presumptuousness on my part.
… 'therapist' … well … I have not seen your CV for a long-time, and so I am not sure that you are actually qualified to work with me - and, as you will well know, it takes some time for both parties to assess whether any therapist-client relationship can work …
… 'lover' … well … time passes, people change … and rates of time-travel vary … To be frank, I have little clear idea what the late-30-something [now early-40-something!] Catherine is like - nor can you have a clear idea what the [more or less] equivalent Philip is like …
… 'friend' … well … your ruling out of friendship was a great shame, I think, because I believe friendship of some sort is always possible between more or less any two people.  I note that you add 'true', which does resonate a bit.  You will have your own perspectives, but from my perspective, it does seem fair to say that there was a time, after we split as couple, when you were nominally my friend, but not perhaps an entirely 'true' one - I do feel that you empowered yourself at my expense, to some extent - though there were faults on both sides, of course, as there always are.
You said that what you really wanted to be in relation to me in future was a reader of my books - which I still haven't written, and possible never will.  Remember what I can be like, Catherine, when I say that I might not write those books just to spite you!  More seriously [?], there are just too many B-grade  [ and worse] books in circulation already, and I am not much inclined to add to the clutter of the second rate.  I would not attempt to publish until I was sure enough in my own mind that I had achieved something better than average - and that I was not just publishing for reasons of 'vanity' one way or another.  Matters of quality count for a lot in my idea of 'books' - and should, I believe, count more widely in this age of excess quantity [when humanity is being reduced in/by/to 'numbers games' - in many senses].
Anyway, all that said, if you do want to read a sort of 'work in progress', try popping into the web-site http://groups.yahoo.com/group/heraclitussociety/. 
It is a sort of open notebook where I have been dumping raw crap for the past year or so, and probably will continue to do so for a few more months - before moving on …
[Your suggestion 'Ravings of a Madman?' is perhaps not a bad title for the fragments I have put on that  website - I liked the question mark anyway.  Though my own working title is 'Fragments in Vulgar Script' - which is a paraphrase of Petrarch, by the way.]
To tell you the truth, Catherine, I am not really sure what a book is these days, anyway.  Our culture has become so spread-all-over-the-place, and the old  stable forms are breaking up, if you get what I mean.  [By the way, if you have become a pro-therapist, then my guess is that you aren't going to be short of clients in the coming years - there are growing numbers of 'scattered' and confused people about.]  And then I have the idea - picked up from Dante, Shakespeare, etc - that the entire world - universe even - is a sort of book, or mystery play [or maybe B-movie!] to which we all contribute a few significant actions and lines … here and there …
Among the 'books' on my shelves, one of my favourites is the collection of letters you sent me in the mid-80s. You were an excellent spontaneous letter writer, Catherine, and I still dip into those letters irregularly for illumination [rather than for reasons of nostalgia - to which I am not actually much given].  When I have written to you over the past couple of years, it was, in part, with a view to prising out more letters from you.   Although there are hordes of wordsters 'out there', very good correspondents are actually quite hard to find. 
As it happens I have recently found a few.  You might remember one, Mary Braid, a Scottish woman who sat beside me at the editorial training centre in Newcastle.  She remembers you.  Mary was one of several 'alternative possibilities' I met when I was seeing you.  I stayed loyal to you - and hence effectively rejected her - because I loved you and because I valued faithfulness very highly - and still do.  [While you seemed to dismiss my genuine, decent, faithfulness as 'mere dependency' - suggesting on more than one occasion that I was just 'dull and dutiful', and even putting it down to a 'low sex drive' {you did tend to speak your mind! - in ways that were both stimulating and hurtful - and I will speak mine now: maybe you had difficulty believing that someone loved you and wanted to remain faithful to you.}
Anyway, Mary went off to Aberdeen after Newcastle, and we continued to exchange the occasional letter - which on the terms of our relationship was almost an act of unfaithfulness by me, especially when you regularly complained that I did not write to you enough.  Mary grew up to be quite a big time international freelance journalist, who is a perceptive, complex and insightful worldly observer.  Actually she works for the Observer occasionally, and knows Lisa vaguely - both of us felt for her when we read her recent piece on her lost child.  I hope the recent expected birthing event went well.  Please pass on my regards and best wishes Lisa - if you would like to. [Emotions are never sweetly - or otherwise - clear-cut, though, are they? - both Mary and I are childless, and felt some jealousy when we looked at the picture of Lisa with her healthy first son.]
It is interesting to discover how others perceive you, even remotely and after a long time.  Mary tells me that she saw you as very 'possessive' of me and thought you did not like me mixing with other women - though she admits tinges of envy might have influenced her perceptions.  She suggests, quite perceptively, I think that this apparent 'possessiveness' might have suited me much of the time, because if freed me from having to get closely involved with other people.  As for you and me together, she saw us as a somewhat aloof, 'superior' and 'knowing' couple, rather more adult seeming than most contemporary couples she remembers from that time  And she told me that we seemed to regard her and contemporaries as 'juveniles' - that is how she felt anyway when in proximity to us.
This quite surprized me when I first heard it, but reflecting on it, I had to agree with her.  You and I were in many respects a pair of adolescent clowns, Catherine, but we actually did have quite highly mature levels of shared insights for people of our ages [then].  And - rightly or not - we did regard ourselves as more 'advanced' in some ways than others of our age.  I think it comes down to that last year in Durham, when we were more or less 24-hour-a-day constant companions, and did not mix much with others.  We had blended quite a lot mentally - if not physically [we never quite got that right, did we?!]- and had gotten to know each other's mental processes in ways that were quite unusual for early-20-somethings, I suspect.  At the time Mary knew us, we were almost in some ways more like a somewhat stale middle-aged couple rather than a young pairing, don't you think Catherine?
[Incidentally, when I have lacked a really top class therapist in recent years I have found that I can detach off from the rest of my consciousness a sort of combination of the best bits of you and me, and I have found this imaginary {I am not so schizoid as to think 'it' real!} combination an excellent 'therapist'.  Sometimes I imagine that a grander, more whole, version of this 'therapist' is what we might have become … {ah! … if only …} … had we not been, individually and together, such a pair of wreckers - but that his just a passing thought.  I have actually gained some quite good real-world therapeutic support over the last couple of years.  But there are always gaps in one's support networks, don't you think Catherine?]
Moving on …
Briefly, this is my recent history: I worked in London for a couple of news agencies until 1991, when I had the first of a series of breakdowns [during the first Gulf War, incidentally, which appalled me because it was so clinical and 'unreal' - the second seemed to me even more ghastly because of all the media spinning gimmicks, etc].  I retreated back to South Shields, and spent the 90s effectively as a student again - but without gaining much more in the way of formal qualifications.  I then had 3 or 4 massive breakdowns in some very distressing circumstances in 2000 ['millennium madness'?!], ending up in a mental hospital intensive care unit [no sharp objects, 24-hour observation] at the end of that year - which was almost literally 'the void'.  Since then I have made gradual but slow progress, helped by group therapy, a very good community psychiatric nurse, and the odd good psychiatrist [though most of the NHS shrinks I have encountered have not impressed me much.].  For the last year or so I have been working in a community centre - care in the community in the best sense of a mutual aid of supporting others while getting support oneself.  I have actually found informal community therapy has worked better for me than more formal professional kinds. [And I have been more or less left to devise my own care programme recently, since my nurse 'disappeared' due to work-related stress - so many examples of that in the public service, don't you find Catherine?  Even when the people are good, committed and well-motivated, the systems are shitty - and so many people end up stressed out or just going through the motions.]
Otherwise, I am [in my more grandiose moments!] helping to redefine socialism from the bottom up for the 21st century - well someone has to do it! … and making other small contributions to the 'book of love' that is - or might be - the grand scheme of things …
Finally, a few more words on friendship.  I remember you very fondly [mostly] and although I have some residual bitterness towards you [and many residual regrets and guilts as regards my own behaviour towards you] I will always regard you as an essentially very good and delightful person.  And while I might be a 'raving madman', I am a [mostly] harmless and considerate one.  I would be very interested to hear your news on a no complications basis.  [It does not seem to occur to some people that they can establish boundaries and / or push away unwanted attention simply by giving factual details - 'I am married with kids and don't want my family disturbed' … or whatever.]  Bits of you will always be part of me in some ways, and I will always regard you as a true enough friend, even if you no longer acknowledge my existence.  I do think it would be a shame if we never communicated again.
Anyway, Catherine, I hope have a happy 40th birthday, which is, I believe, on May 13th. Take care.


p.s. I long carried the crazy [?] notion that I 'owed' you a night in the police cells after an arrest in embarrassing circumstances for a minor public order offence.  Well … I now have two on my record to spoil my CV with …I won't bore you with the details … but .. Quits eh?!
[We were indeed a pair of adolescent clownish melodramatists in some respected, but in imagination, at least, I can transform the younger you and me into performance philosophers - philosophical clown prince and princess, if not quite king and queen.  And we sometimes set up interesting little real-world pseudo-parables.  One night we had a drunken row in Durham market place - over you dancing with some gay guy at Klute night club [My incredible shrinkers seemed to get lost in labyrinths of psychobabble when I tried to tell them this story!].  Things degenerated into a vaguely physical tussle, and you ended up on the ground at one point - did you fall? did you jump? did I push you? or did we get our combined timings 'right'? [or should that be 'wrong'?]  {Questions with more general resonance, perhaps}.  We separated, and you wandered off drunk, lonely, confused, and ended up at the Samaritans building.  The Samaritans [for whom your father worked, as I recall] turned you away on the grounds that they only gave a telephone-to-telephone services - so much for person to person human caring, eh?.  You lay down in the gutter outside the Samaritans building and stared up at the stars [so you later told me].  The Samaritans apparently phoned the police to 'take care' of  you, and -such unworldly preoccupations as star-gazing when drunk and depressed seemingly being a public order offence, according to Durham constabulary at that time - the cops turned up and arrested you.  Meanwhile, those same cops were failing to prevent me from committing a more serious seeming offence a hundred yards or so away - breaking and entry.  Missing you just a few minutes after we had parted, I had gone off in search of you, and failed to find you.  I went to your flat in Western Hill [or was it The Avenue at that time?  - I am not quite sure].  You weren't in, so I climbed over the wall and forced the window of your room.  I waited a long time [ who knows how long at this distance?], but you did not return  - and I went back to my own place in Gilesgate, assuming bitterly [and of course wrongly] that you'd gone off with the gay guy you had been dancing with [whose name I can't even remember]  Perhaps both of us spent sobering nights in cells one way or another that night.  {And matter of factly, I do seem to have spent a lot of my life in 'prisons' of one sort or another, and I don't think I am alone in that respect.  In my case, it has just turned out that way … no one is to blame really … but I don't recall making the decision to imprison myself …}]
p.p.s  Please find enclosed some bits and pieces for you birthday - it is mostly trivial juvenile chaff [well I am not 40 until July - and anyway I have papers to prove I am somewhat diminished in my adult responsibilities] so don't take it too seriously - though there is maybe the odd serious point in it.  Hope you have/had - depending on when you get this - a good birthday.  Take care - from one ageing, but still youngish, true enough friend. … to another …