By the age of thirty-eight, Theodore Bell had become a curator of catastrophes that had not yet occurred. He could ruin a Tuesday with a Thursday that existed only in imagination. Breakfast frequently tasted of next month’s anxieties. He rehearsed conversations no one intended to have, mourned friendships that remained perfectly intact, and apologised for offences he had not committed. His life possessed all the drama of a great Victorian novel, except that every chapter unfolded completely within his own skull. Then, one peculiar Wednesday, something extraordinary happened. Nothing. The train arrived precisely on time. Rain fell with impeccable English manners. The cashier smirked. A pigeon inspected a croissant with the solemnity of a bishop. The world, Theodore noticed, had neglected to participate in the tragedy he had so carefully prepared. He wandered into a second-hand bookshop solely because he had never before entered one without first consulting reviews. On a dusty shelf lay a notebook bound in green leather. Across its first page someone had written:

“Suppose your life is merely the first draft of a novel. Would your protagonist truly spend six consecutive chapters wondering whether he had sounded foolish at lunch?”

Theodore laughed aloud. Not because it was funny. Because it was embarrassingly accurate. He purchased the notebook for three pounds and seventeen pence. That evening he conducted a peculiar experiment. Whenever indecision appeared, he refused to ask, “What is the safest thing to do?” Instead he questioned, “What would make this chapter worth reading?” The difference was astonishing. Rather than eating another lonely microwave supper, the protagonist wandered into an Italian restaurant despite having no companion. He ordered dessert first. He spoke with the elderly waiter about olives, opera, and why elderly gentlemen always seemed to know the location of excellent wine. 

The chapter improved immediately.

The following morning, in lieu of declining an invitation to join colleagues for coffee because he feared awkward silence, the protagonist accepted. The silence lasted approximately four seconds. Then somebody confessed they had once confused a funeral procession for a parade and accidentally applauded. Everyone tittered until tears arrived. Apparently awkwardness, Theodore discovered, often possessed an unexpectedly generous sense of humour. 

Soon the experiment expanded.

The protagonist bought flowers without requiring an anniversary. He wore the ridiculous emerald waistcoat hiding for years in the wardrobe awaiting an occasion sufficiently important to justify velvet buttons. He walked home through the rain rather than beneath umbrellas simply to discern whether novels exaggerated the romance of becoming soaked. They did not. It was marvellous. People began remarking that Theodore looked different. “What changed?” they quizzed. He never knew quite how to answer. Nothing had changed except the narrator. The voice inside his head had retired from its post as prosecutor and accepted employment as storyteller. Instead of declaring, “This is dreadful.” It now whispered, “Well... this should make for an interesting paragraph.”

Failures became plot twists. Embarrassments transformed into dialogue. Unexpected delays evolved into opportunities for side characters. Even grief acquired gentleness. When Theodore’s beloved aunt passed away, he uncovered that stories do not become beautiful by avoiding sorrow. They become beautiful because sorrow teaches every joyful page how precious it truly was.

One autumn afternoon he returned to the same second-hand bookshop hoping to ascertain who had written the mysterious sentence. The owner frowned. “What notebook?”

“The green one.”

“We’ve never sold green notebooks.”

Theodore insisted.

The proprietor searched every shelf. Nothing. Not even an empty space. He left puzzled. Perhaps memory had embroidered reality. Perhaps someone had misplaced the evidence. Or perhaps stories occasionally slipped helpful sentences into people’s lives without troubling themselves over authorship.

Years later, Theodore grew old. His hair surrendered with admirable dignity. His knees negotiated every staircase like diplomats concluding difficult treaties. Wrinkles arrived carrying maps of countless simpers. One evening, his granddaughter climbed upon his lap holding a blank notebook. “Grandad,” she asked, “I’m frightened I’ll make mistakes.” He smiled the sort of smile only accumulated years can produce. “My dear,” he replied, “mistakes are merely scenes before the editor arrives.” She frowned. “But what if people laugh at me?”

“Then you’ve accidentally written a comedy.”

“And what if everything goes wrong?”

“Ah,” Theodore expressed, “that depends totally.”

“On what?”

“Whether you’re reading your life as a police report...” He paused. “...or as a story.”

She thought about this for several silent moments before opening the notebook. “What shall I write first?”

Theodore glanced through the window. Outside, autumn leaves were dancing with absolutely no concern for symmetry. A dog had become convinced that chasing its own tail constituted a noble profession. Two strangers were chuckling over something the wind immediately carried away. The entire earth felt gloriously unconcerned with acting sensible. He beamed. “Begin,” he said, “with someone who finally stopped trying to be perfect and became intriguing instead.”

For that, after all, is the curious secret no anxious mind ever wishes to believe. Life is rarely asking us to perform flawlessly. It is utterly waiting for us to become a character worth following to the next page.

CLOTHE AS IF CULTIVATION NEVERTHELESS EARNS THE EFFORT

The foremost aspect one observes about a truly refined bloke is not his tailoring but his insolence. The garment is hardly the notarised affidavit of a deeper rebellion. One may purchase tweed from Savile Row and per contra resemble a petrified assistant manager at a Midlands insurance firm. Savoir-faire, in its purest incarnation, is not fabric but audacity pressed into cloth.

I attended a funeral in Belgravia where the departed—a financier of outrageous wealth and even lewder appetites—emplaced in a walnut casket below an avalanche of pearly lilies that smelt somewhat of hospitals and old money. The mourners appeared draped in hackneyed charcoal melancholia, seeming like a congregation of crestfallen ravens.

And then came Sebastian.

He wore a cream double-breasted suit.

Cream. To a funeral.

A chiffon carnation the colour of fresh arterial blood bloomed from his lapel. His shoon shone with the cold menace of lustrous mahogany. Worthy women gaped albeit they might faint directly into their canapés.

“Christ,” whispered a viscountess, clutching her pearls as if they were rosary beads against Satan himself, “the fella looms positively immoral.”

Sebastian heard her and smiled slightly. “That,” he murmured, “is because morality is so frequently clad by cowards.”

And there it was.

The unalloyed soddy thesis.

Spiff up not because the universe deserves allure, but because it so repeatedly deserves none and receives it anyway. Civility itself is smidgen extra than barbarism sporting cufflinks. The cutting-edge world wishes everybody to match accountants queuing for tax audits—grey geniuses in grey trousers carrying grey opinions underneath supermarket sconces.

To dress sensationally is hence an act of war.

A brocade blazer asserts: I refuse your drab diminutive fucking surrender.

A silk scarf states: Your ugliness has not conquered me yet.

And shiny shoes? Ah. Burnished shoes are the final courtesy extended to a collapsing courteousness.

DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN WITHOUT SOUNDING MAD

There are lads who spend their plenary presence pursuing to become palatable. They shave away every eccentricity until they are socially edible unimportant cubes of beige. They articulate in white-collar dialects. They titter precisely when expected. Their disposition duplicate airport carpeting.

Avoid these individuals with evangelical fervour.

The brightest brains I have everlastingly encountered rejoiced in a specific glorious deformity of temperament.

One Oxford mathematician I knew nixed to use umbrellas because he inferred rain was “merely weather attempting intimacy.” He would disembark drenched to black-tie repasts, water dripping from his cuffs, ordering Scotch with the serenity of a Byzantine emperor.

One more acquaintance—a painter flourishing in a mould-infested townhouse in Chelsea—kept a taxidermy fox at the dining table and referred to it exclusively as “the Minister.”

“Minister disagrees with your position on Wagner,” he would announce gravely before slurping claret.

Folks called him insane.

But insanity is often uniquely intelligence refusing to don itself in municipal bureaucracy.

The prominent animus alarms fraternity because cadre subsists athwart replication. The weird chap introduces treacherous variables. He reminds others that personality need not follow a manky PowerPoint presentation.

Stay strange.

Remain difficult to classify.

Permit population the discomfort of uncertainty.

For there is nothing further gruesome than witnessing a human being become comprehensible. The moment society altogether understands you, it has begun embalming you. Anecdote is the first layer of dirt thrown upon the coffin.

A woman once questioned me at a dinner party, “Why must you always say such unusual stuff?”

I surveyed around the console at thirty identical faces mooting property values with the passion of sedated cattle.

“Because,” I replied, “if I ranted like the rest of you, I should have to hang myself from the chandelier before dessert.”

CREATE SOMETHING CAPABLE OF LACERATING THE SOUL

Art is the last remarkable refuge for those who are unable to fully tolerate reality without adding gunpowder to it.

The artist is not a decorator of permanence but its saboteur.

I was conversant with a sculptor in Edinburgh who cohabited in catastrophic poverty. The sort of poverty possessing actual acoustics. One could hear the hunger in the floorboards. He rose at dawn with sacerdotal devotion and attacked marmoreal with hammer and chisel as if trying to liberate numen from stone.

“What if nobody recollects your work?” I asked him.

He lit a cigarette with hands coated in silvery dust.

“My dear boy,” he exclaimed, exhaling smoke toward the cracked ceiling, “most mortals aren’t remembered nowadays.”

Outside, sleet beat up the skylight like creditors.

Indoors, near the jaundiced lightbulb and the smell of wet plaster, stood a half-finished sculpture of a maiden screaming into eternity. It was grotesque. Splendidly grotesque. Her face looked like legacy discovering its own reflection and recoiling.

And swiftly I understood a mite dreadful.

Most crowds consume art the way cows consume grass—passively, mechanically, with all the ethereal urgency of damp laundry. But genuine art should bash a bit. It should pass down psychic bumps. One ought not emerge from a novel ordinarily intact. If a painting does not alter your veins and arteries, it is decoration for hotels.

Make art even if it bankrupts you.

Make art even if societies laugh.

Especially if societies laugh.

Because laughter is generally the earliest panicked noise emitted by mediocrity when confronted with transcendence.

The cosmos does not warrant additional content.

Good, God, no.

It hitherto drowns nether podcasts hosted by imbeciles and motivational literature written by grinning corporate necromancers.

What it clamours is hazardous handsomeness.

What it necessitates is someone inclined to carve obscenity into marble and call it orison.

BEQUEATH THE BASTARDS WONDERING WHAT THE HELL YOU MEANT

One of the numerous unheeded pleasures in life is bewilderment as performance art.

Not cruelty, mind you.

Style.

The English aristocracy understood this instinctively. Half their conversational method consisted of communicating as though everyone else had arrived midway during a dream.

One day I showed up at a country-house gathering in Sussex where a geriatric duke spent an entire evening insisting—in perfect seriousness—that swans were covertly governing Luxembourg.

None challenged him.

Not because they believed him, but because aristocratic etiquette requisites one never interrupt a lordly absurdity whilst it is mating.

By midnight, guests were debating waterfowl geopolitics barring a roaring inferno despite consuming Stilton with near-theological intensity.

And I thought: Yes. This is civilisation.

Confusion ruptures the monotony of expectation. Latest lifespan has become unbearably legible. Algorithms predict desires before one has properly felt them. Any arsehole with a smartphone now imagines himself a psychologist. We abide concealed by an empire of explanation.

Therefore become unexplainable.

Orate theories which require interpretation.

Slip on a signet ring even if your family boasts no estate.

Quote obscure Romanian philosophers in pubs.

Answer simple queries with spine-chilling sincerity.

When someone quizzes, “How have you been?” do not reply “Fine.”

Respond: “Profoundly suspicious of mirrors and mildly haunted by pears.”

Then sip your drink.

Let them suffer.

The modern macrocosm worships clarity because clarity is marketable. Ambiguity, however, maintains grandeur. It creates illusion. And illusion is infinitely too nourishing than privy branding—that ghastly contemporary disease whereby multitudes reduce themselves into digestible frivolous pamphlets.

Confuse race not because you are lost, but because they are.

The crowd forever seeks signage.

The unheard-of pith becomes fog.

EXIT THIS SPHERE LIKE A FRAGMENTARY GHOST

In the end, the great cataclysm of nouvelle existence is not ephemerality.

It is insignificance.

Death itself is almost elegant. There is ceremony in it. Velveteen curtains. Black automobiles gliding through torrent. The funereal perfume of flowers. Whisky trembling in crystal glasses exactly as exhausted males discuss the deceased in assuaged tongues, as withal volume itself might disturb the nature of grief.

No—the true obscenity is to vanish having contributed marginally except receipts, passwords, and a tolerantly impressive collection of kitchen appliances.

Most kin dispense behind administrative debris.

A very small number confer ghosts.

I recall lingering in the library of a crumbling estate in Yorkshire owned by an impossibly ancient baron whose veins, I suspect, contained equal quantities of bollocks and Bordeaux. The room reeked of extinguished fireplaces, mildew, antiquated parchment, and a touch palely ecclesiastical—as if jettisoned prayers had seeped permanently into the wallpaper.

Portraits stared downward with hereditary disappointment.

Alfresco, the deluge battered the manor windows like an unpaid creditor.

The elderly man sat near the embers arrayed in a burgundy smoking jacket, his skeletal fingers wrapped around a chalice of cognac.

“You know what’s tragic?” he quizzed quickly.

His voice sounded like downy dragged across broken glass.

I said nothing.

“The futuristic obsession with longevity,” he chuckled mellifluously, “as though duration were accomplishment. A cabbage may also persist.”

The sparks cracked between us.

“Humans speak interminably of wellness of late. Hydration. Protein. Blasted consciousness. But no one begs the one question that matters.”

“And what question is that?” I enquired.

He focused into the flames for so long that I assumed maybe he had forgotten me completely.

Then:

“Who shall stand spiritually injured by your absence?”

Christ.

There it was again.

That unbearable little truth.

For the purpose of a season cannot solely be survival. Rats survive. Bureaucrats survive. Men with Bluetooth headsets survive just as deliberating quarterly projections beneath fluorescent lighting that makes them mimic refrigerated poultry.

To live magnificently means to leave a lesion.

A beautiful gash, perchance.

But a wound nonetheless.

Submit a sentence somebody is not able to forget.

A painting that unsettles a marriage.

A perfume on bedsheets after parting.

A piece of music that returns at three in the bally morning like a revenant demanding entrance to the quintessence.

Relinquish stories which grow distorted with retelling.

Become myth before becoming memory.

And for heaven’s sake, do not die comprehended.

The by and large understood gent is already half-corpse.

Remain contradictory.

Remain excessive.

Sanction yourself sumptuous stupidity and frightening tenderness. Wear velour at inappropriate hours. Fall obscenely in love with impossible people. Read books which rearrange your nervous system. Enunciate with alarming honesty at supper soirees. Cultivate comeliness in an age devoted to efficiency.

Because one day—and the speed of it is frankly terrifying—the chamber might empty.

The champagne flutes shall remain abandoned apart from lipstick stains and cigar ash.

Your coats will hold up dangling in wardrobes carrying the nebulous scent of winter and tobacco.

Your cachinnation will outlast barely as a neurological bruise inside other head’s recollections.

And somewhere, plausibly very dead at night, someone will suddenly reminisce the peculiar way you presently glanced at the moon, or quoted poetry half-drunk beside a staircase, or spoke with regard to loneliness as though evaluating an aged hunting companion.

They will pause.

They will feel sort of fracture softly within them.

And then they will continue living.

Which is, imaginably, the closest thing any of us ever come to immortality.

Or perhaps that too is wholly another exquisite scrap of bullshit we tell ourselves while the candles gutter low and the darkness waits patiently beyond the fenestra.

At times, when vicissitudes turn out to be too orderly and my intellect finds itself clawing at the walls of routine like a drunk aristocrat locked out of his cozy Kensington manor, I amuse myself by walking with groups of middle-class women from Hounslow. Not companions, mind you—specimens. A travelling symposium on anxiety, gossip, cholesterol, and spiritual tourism.

We gather under rain trees admitting the air smells practically of petrol, jasmine, and disappointment. Then the performance begins.

“Oh, Meera,” one gasps, clutching her dupatta as though auditioning for sainthood, “he came home at eleven last night. Eleven! And then he asked for dinner.”

“Disgraceful, twat,” another mutters with the moral gravity of a Supreme Court judge sentencing a war criminal, “men these days have no sanskaar.”

Then comes the inevitable whisper:

“And Kavita’s husband… apparently there are rumours.”

Rumours. Christ. These dames circulate rumours with the efficiency of Swiss banking systems. They discuss temples, affairs, husbands, daughters-in-law, bowel movements, and God with precisely the same tone of exhausted catastrophe. Their mentalities swing endlessly between piety and prurience like a broken church bell in a storm.

And then—typically—they turn to me.

“But why do you work so hard?” one demands, sounding sincerely distressed. “You are not married. No offspring also.”

“No.”

“Then what is the need?”

The need.

There it is: the great middle-class philosophy of continuation. According to this clan, a dude may largely labour if he possesses a wife, three litters, a house loan, and chronic hypertension. Ambition sans domestic burden appears to them dubious, about pornographic. If you earn well without offspring, gentry ganders at you as withal you are hoarding gold bars in a bunker whilst laughing maniacally in silk pyjamas.

And this disease is not confined to the middle class. Oh, no. The rich simply wear better shoes while speaking the same guff.

Among my intimate circles—those palatial in bequeathed treasure and docile narcissism—the questions purely become more expensively phrased.

“Old boy,” someone utters over a ten-thousand-pound whisky, “you’re terribly committed to the gym lately. Who’s the lady?”

Another smirks. “Come now. No joe trains that consistently unless he’s trying to impress someone.”

Seemingly self-discipline is unattainable minus an erection attached to it.

Clearly a mister cannot deadlift saving some matron with excellent cheekbones has shattered his feelings first. The sheer wanker absurdity of it all is almost athletic in itself.

What saddens me is not merely the stupidity, but the confidence with which it is carried. These herds literally believe brio exists chiefly in approved formats. Matrimony. Broods. School admissions. Weekend brunches. Lipid medication. Death.

That is the script.

Anything outside it produces panic.

If a fella has no descendants, why does he require wealth? If a couple chooses not to procreate, why are they working so hard? Who comes into the money?

The entire ontology resembles a badly run relay race where wearied folks spend their lives passing batons to scions who at no time solicited to participate in the blooming event.

It is like quizzing a painter, “Why paint if no one buys the canvas?” Or besieging a pianist, “Why practise if Carnegie Hall never calls?” It reduces entity to utility. Everything must justify itself commercially, reproductively, socially.

Otherwise association becomes uncomfortable.

And community, let us be candid, is largely composed of petrified citizens desperately policing one another so they may avoid confronting the horrifying emptiness of their innermost esprit.

Most mortals do not think. They acquire thoughts in the manner like one acquires old furniture: dusty, ugly, impractical, but impossible to throw away inasmuch as grandmother would have wanted it.

Common sense, in myriad cases, has migrated completely out of the brain and settled somewhere near the ankles.

And nowhere is this idiocy more obvious than in the matter of infants.

Society talks of progeny not as anthropoidal beings, but as retirement schemes with birthdays.

“At least our successor will look after us.”

“There must be someone for old age.”

Presumably heirs are sentimentally spontaneous support Labradors with engineering degrees.

No one pronounces the placid part aloud: that innumerable plebeians have kiddies considering they are terrified of being lonely. Terrified of ageing. Terrified of confronting the fact that survival is intrinsically solitary.

So they create tiny creatures and silently hand them a debt they under no circumstances consented to paying.

Love becomes investment.

Parenthood becomes insurance.

Family becomes a pension policy with emotional blackmail indentured.

Absolute bellend bollocks.

A baby is not a sauntering life-protection document. Nor should one build an exclusive breath around the hope that someone else will eventually sit beside one’s hospital bed pretending not to check WhatsApp.

One must live for oneself.

Not selfishly. Not cruelly. But honestly.

And the same applies to the body.

The number of heads who assume my commitment to fitness ought to originate from romance is genuinely staggering.

“There must be a woman.”

Why?

Why the fuck must there always be a woman?

Can a man not humbly wish to preserve his own health? Must every disciplined act be fastened to seduction like some cheap cologne advertisement?

No, darling. I go to the health club owing to this protoplasm is the only permanent residence I possess, and unlike most landlords, biology is an unforgiving cunt when neglected.

If I fall ill tomorrow, a few may sympathise. They may send flowers. They may post tragic captions online. Sundry may even cry.

But none of them can suffer in my place.

Zip can bench-press your cancer for you.

Zero can cardio their way through your heart attack.

Zilch can squat your depression into submission as you sit there eating biscuits and romanticising self-destruction.

We are fundamentally alone in the maintenance of ourselves.

That is not pessimism.

That is sensibility stripped naked of decorative hogwash.

To remain fit, then, is not vanity. It is responsibility. It is basic self-respect. It is the acknowledgement that one owes oneself care before performing care theatrically for the approval of others.

But culture dislikes this idea enormously therefore civilisation depends upon collective delusion.

Idiots want you knackered. Espoused cause you “should be.” Parenting given “time is running out.” Extant according to templates written by deceased dimwits who themselves probably perished confused and constipated.

And the tragedy is that most seldom inquest any of it.

They circumnavigate from educational institution to marriage to rearing to funerals with the dull obedience of cattle strolling toward an abattoir howbeit deliberating interest rates.

Then they imply at someone living differently and become disconcerted.

Not because you are wrong.

But because your existence exposes the possibility that they on no account categorically chose theirs.

That is the real horror.

Not seclusion.

Not ageing.

Not even death.

But waking up one afternoon at sixty-three alongside someone equally bewildered and comprehending you have spent your whole specie performing a role in a play you barely blinkingly auditioned for.

And still—still—they persist.

These people mistake conformity for wisdom and repetition for meaning. They inherit fears from their parents, then lovingly hand them to their children like ancestral jewellery.

And when confronted with someone who refuses the script, they stare as peasants previously stared at astronomers: suspicious, irritated, faintly offended by the essence of alternative actualities.

I confess, beneath my irritation, there is pity.

Now that many of these imbeciles shall dwell and die beyond ever truly meeting themselves. They will know their spouse’s blood pressure, their neighbour’s scandal, their son’s exam scores, their daughter-in-law’s shortcomings, the opening hours of each shrine within a forty-mile radius—

—but not their private belfries.

Not their personal souls.

Not once.

And bloody hell, what a catastrophic waste of a human cycle that is.