THE COMFORT OF THINGS

THE COMFORT OF THINGS

DANIEL MILLER

polity

The right of Daniel Miller to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2008 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK.

Polity Press

350 Main Street

Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-5536-9

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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To Rickie, Rachel and David

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Prologue

Portrait 1 Empty

Portrait 2 Full

Portrait 3 A Porous Vessel

Portrait 4 Starry Green Plastic Ducks

Portrait 5 Learning Love

Portrait 6 The Aboriginal Laptop

Portrait 7 Home and Homeland

Portrait 8 Tattoo

Portrait 9 Haunted

Portrait 10 Talk to the Dog

Portrait 11 Tales from the Publicans

Portrait 12 Making a Living

Portrait 13 McDonald’s Truly Happy Meals

Portrait 14 The Exhibitionist

Portrait 15 Re-Birth

Portrait 16 Strength of Character

Portrait 17 Heroin

Portrait 18 Shi

Portrait 19 Brazil 2 England 2

Portrait 20 A Thousand Places to See before You Die

Portrait 21 Rosebud

Portrait 22 The Orientalist

Portrait 23 Sepia

Portrait 24 An Unscripted Life

Portrait 25 Oh Sod It!

Portrait 26 José and José’s Wife

Portrait 27 Wrestling

Portrait 28 The Carpenter

Portrait 29 Things That Bright Up the Place

Portrait 30 Home Truths

Epilogue If This Is Modern Life – Then What Is That?

Appendix The Study

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My ﬁrst acknowledgement has to be to my co-researcher, Fiona Parrott. All the material on which this book is based derives from research carried out in direct collaboration with her. The success of the project came in large measure from the effective rapport we developed in our ﬁeldwork. We also discussed the interpretation of each household during our ﬁeldwork, which no doubt has informed my writing about them. This book would simply not have been possible, or would at least be a great deal poorer, without the quality of her contribution. But in turn I am sure we would both wish to thank the many, many people who gave to us the considerable gift of their time and patience in order to help with our research. We hope that, eventually, they have not regretted that they did not do the obvious London thing and slam the door on us, and that we were not too tiresome. I hope that through this and subsequent publications they will feel that their stories have contributed to something worthwhile. I also acknowledge the considerable amount of time and effort that my wife, Rickie Burman, gave towards helping me with the manuscript. I would like to thank the following for comments on an earlier draft: Mukulika Banerjee, Barbara Bender, Haidy Geismar, Martin Holbraad, Rachel Miller, Marjorie Murray, Anna Pertierra and Michael Rowlands. I am grateful to John Thompson and Polity for taking on this project. Finally my thanks go to Olga Neva for designing the book cover and for including our cat.

PROLOGUE

This book is the story of thirty people, almost all from a single street in South London. They are selected from one hundred individuals and households studied over seventeen months by myself and Fiona Parrott, a PhD student in my discipline of Anthropology. It is also a book about how people express themselves through their possessions, and what these tell us about their lives. It explores the role of objects in our relationships, both to each other and to ourselves. We live today in a world of ever more stuff – what sometimes seems a deluge of goods and shopping. We tend to assume that this has two results: that we are more superﬁcial, and that we are more materialistic, our relationships to things coming at the expense of our relationships to people. We make such assumptions, we speak in clichés, but we have rarely tried to put these assumptions to the test. By the time you ﬁnish this book you will discover that, in many ways, the opposite is true; that possessions often remain profound and usually the closer our relationships are with objects, the closer our relationships are with people. This is why the ﬁrst two portraits are called ‘Empty’ and ‘Full’.

The diversity of contemporary London is extraordinary, and begs to be better understood. But, increasingly, people’s lives take place behind the closed doors of private houses. How can we gain an insight into what those lives are like today: people’s feelings, frustrations, aspirations, tragedies and delights? Not television characters, not celebrities, but real people. How could one ever come to know such things about perfect strangers? We could try and knock on doors and ask to talk with them, to hear their stories. If you can persuade them you are not selling anything, not Jehovah’s Witnesses, they might let you in – they did let us in. But asking people about themselves is by no means straightforward. English people, in particular, often seem embarrassed by direct questions about their intimate lives and relationships. Sometimes people from other countries embarrass us in turn, by gushing forth these detailed accounts of their lives. Yet often you feel you are listening to a script; something readily prepared for such an encounter. They sound as much a justiﬁcation or self-therapy as an account. Language is often defensive, restricted and carefully constructed as narrative. You can ask people about themselves, but the results are often much less informative than one would like.

This book takes you on a different route towards this goal. The questions were not only put directly to the people who opened their doors. We also put our questions to the interior of the house. We asked what decorations hung on the walls, what the people who greeted us were wearing, what we were asked to sit on, what style of bathroom we peed in, whose photographs were on display, what collections were arrayed on mantelpieces. This might seem a rather absurd thing to do. How can one ask questions of things that cannot speak for themselves?

Objects surely don’t talk. Or do they? The person in that living-room gives an account of themselves by responding to questions. But every object in that room is equally a form by which they have chosen to express themselves. They put up ornaments; they laid down carpets. They selected furnishing and got dressed that morning. Some things may be gifts or objects retained from the past, but they have decided to live with them, to place them in lines or higgledy-piggledy; they made the room minimalist or crammed to the gills. These things are not a random collection. They have been gradually accumulated as an expression of that person or household. Surely if we can learn to listen to these things we have access to an authentic other voice. Yes, also contrived, but in a differ ent way from that of language. I don’t pretend to be Sherlock Holmes or Poirot, let alone CSI sleuthing for clues to solve a puzzle. The detectives and forensics tend to look at the inadvertent, while in this book I feel I am paying proper respect to that which some people have themselves crafted as patiently as any artist, as an outward expression of themselves. The original painters of these portraits are the people who appear in this book.

And what pictures they painted. Our only hypothesis in starting this work was that we had no idea what we would ﬁnd on this entirely ordinary-looking street. This proved correct. Could I have imagined that one morning we would meet a man who was responsible for the death of dozens of innocent people, and, on the very same afternoon, a woman who had fostered dozens of the most deprived children of the area? I didn’t expect to participate in the most charmed Christmas since Fanny and Alexander, or to hear how a CD collection helped someone overcome heroin. I didn’t know you could ﬁnd vintage Fisher Price toys on eBay or expect to hear such a convincing paean to the wonderful world of McDonald’s Happy Meals. I had no reason to see a logical connection between a laptop and the customs of Australian Aboriginals. I hadn’t thought of Estonia as an outer London suburb, or understood the potential of tattoos for controlling memory. I had no reason to expect this ordinary London street to include such sexual exhibitionism, or the tyranny of Feng Shui. I didn’t know one could care for a dog with quite such tenderness, or really ﬁnd life starting at sixty. I hadn’t registered quite how devastating divorce can be for children; I had underestimated the vast range of objects that people collect and why exactly they collect them. I wouldn’t have guessed that teaching sociology might ﬁt well with wrestling, or anticipated that image of goats looking amazed at basketball champions. I hadn’t predicted that I would get such an opportunity to share my affection for John Peel, or learn about prostitutes and custard. Above all, I sort of expected, but couldn’t really fully imagine, the sadness of lives and the comfort of things.

This is also a book about Londoners. The people of London deserve something better than the categories we generally use to describe them. London is unprecedented. Never before have so many people from such diverse backgrounds been free to mix, and not to mix, in close proximity to each other. At ﬁrst this was described in terms of Londoners and others: the multi-culturalism of the Greater London Council; the recognition of speciﬁc populations from the Caribbean or South Asia. But London today has moved well beyond ethnic minorities. Indeed, it was even then the case that the Londoner next door might have been from Greece or the United States. Yes, there is a huge increase in people from Eastern Europe, but the neighbour today might also be from South Korea, Brazil or South Africa as well as Irish, Pakistani or Jewish. Maybe it is better to start by seeing the typical London household as a Norwegian married to an Algerian. What, then, is typical? What can lead us beyond such categories?

Nor is this just a problem concerned with place of birth. Gender isn’t what it used to be. Being gay came to form another minority, but this labelling, too, fails to do justice to the range of people we meet. There are quite a few gay people present in this book, but it wasn’t clear by the end that they had a whole lot in common other than being gay. Similarly with class; one man seemed to convey the stereotype of a masculine worker propping up the bar at the pub; who would have little in common with an acupuncturist; and yet it was the latter who turned out to come from working-class Romford, while the former was doing summer work while at university. Categories create assumptions. But older people now want to keep on clubbing, middle classes have an affectation for cockney. Is that the au pair or your wife?

Nevertheless, London is most deﬁnitely not a free for all. People may still suffer from crushing constraints. Class can still be a creature of limited educational possibilities. People are still stereotyped by racism. Men and women still make derogatory remarks and have problematic expectations about each other. But still, London seems to be a place where people can confound and confuse expectations, and for me, observing London, perhaps the healthiest option is to acknowledge generalisations and categories when they emerge, but to at least try and not to start from these. Because it just may be that the generalisations emerge best, not from place of origin or gender, but around an orientation to science or celebrity, gardening or church.

This book is an experiment designed to ﬁnd people without recourse to such categories. Not to research them by picking them in the ﬁrst place as tokens of ‘man’, ‘Asian’, or ‘working class’. Instead, this book has acknowledged and exploited the unprecedented nature of modern London. That not just a few streets, but most streets today contain a mixture of homes – some, housing association; some, privately owned; big houses divided into maisonettes; and some smaller houses being gentriﬁed. That where migrants once settled in particular areas, they have now tended to disperse widely. And because most people can’t even tell you the names of their neighbours, there is little pressure to homogenise around a neighbourhood. So this book is about a random street that I had no reason to choose. It was undertaken in that liberal spirit of taking people as you ﬁnd them and letting them emerge as they would.

To do that, we had to pick one random street in the ﬁrst place, and then try to persuade the people to let you into their homes. This wasn’t easy, but, by dint of spending seventeen months on a single street, we reached our goal of one hundred individuals and households and had only eight ﬁnal refusals, providing what may be as close to a genuine slice of London as one is ever going to reach. In fact the street turned out to match well our lack of expectations. Only twenty-three per cent were actually born in London, and there were no minorities more signiﬁcant than any others. People came from everywhere and anywhere, and they were old, young, very gendered and sort of gendered, well off, badly off, and mainly sort of OK off. But this is what is special about London, and what this book is about: thirty portraits which pay respect to whoever these people happen to be and which, between them, paint a bigger portrait that starts to emerge as an image of the modern world. They are presented here not in sequence but juxtaposed, in the same manner that they live together on this street. One house gives no clue at all as to what you will ﬁnd in the next and there is rarely much orientation to the street itself.

I call these chapters portraits because I employ an approach that may have become somewhat passé in mainstream anthropology, a form of holism. A feeling that, in many cases, there is an overall logic to the pattern of these relationships to both persons and things, for which I use the word ‘aesthetic’. By choosing this term I don’t mean anything technical or artistic, and certainly I hope nothing pretentious. It simply helps convey something of the overall desire for harmony, order and balance that may be discerned in certain cases – and also dissonance, contradiction and irony in others. In learning anthropology, I had been taught to look for such an overarching sense of order in relation to the much wider study of society or culture. On this street it seemed useful to see individuals and individual households as somehow analogous to a society. So each of these portraits is sketched, and then ﬁlled in, according to what seemed to be the style of those sitting for their portrait: some comic, some tragic, some cubist, some impressionist, some bleak and some exuberant. You can read this book as you might move through a gallery. You should pay attention to the details, but then consider each composition as a whole, and ﬁnally ponder how each contributes to the pattern represented by the book as a whole. This is not Hogarth or Goya; there is no satire or parody, no horrors I set out to expose. I am an academic, trying to listen to and learn from the same materials that are here on exhibition.

In the conclusion I return to my more familiar academic style and consider the wider picture that emerges when you take the array of portraits as an entry into understanding modern life. I start by acknowledging that these contemporary London households bear little relation to the assumed objects of social science. This is not a society or culture, a neighbourhood or a community. Yet at the same time this is not a picture of the fragmentation, individualism and anomie that were assumed to follow from the absence of societies and neighbourhoods. Instead I focus on what seems to matter most to the people themselves: their ability to form relationships, and the nature of those relationships. Relationships which ﬂow constantly between persons and things. Using illustrations from these portraits, I discuss the way people create this aesthetic; that is an order, or style, which can be discerned across a range of quite different types of relationship. I conclude that there is a hitherto unsuspected way in which an anthropological, rather than psychological, approach can be found appropriate for such an analysis of individual households. This follows from seeing the street as a ﬁeldsite on a par with New Guinea: a diverse collection of societies, each to be respected as a cosmological order in its own right. Just as we have traditionally learnt from the study of the diversity of societies, so also we can learn from the diversity of these microcosms. But, to do this, we need to respect their authenticity and not to dismiss them as superﬁcial.

Anthropology is the discipline which tries to engage with the minutiae of everyday life while retaining a commitment to understanding humanity as a whole. This book tries to remain consistent with that ambition by bringing together these general questions as to the nature of modern life, with an ethnographic immersion in, and a wonder at, the world of small things and intimate relationships that ﬁll out our lives.

At this point you are invited to turn to the portraits themselves. Each is designed around two aims: an experiment in learning how to read people through their possessions; and to help us appreciate the diversity and creativity of contemporary Londoners. But if you would like to know more about how this study was done, and important issues of selection, ethics and anonymity, then please turn to the Appendix ﬁrst.

PORTRAIT 1

EMPTY

George’s ﬂat was disorienting not because of anything that was in it, but precisely because it contained nothing at all, beyond the most basic carpet and furniture. Absence of a degree doesn’t particularly disturb. A place can be minimalist, or there can be a single plant or poster that gathers presence precisely through contrast with the lack of any other resting place for the eye. But there is always something: a little china ornament, a postcard from a trip somewhere, an image of a friend or relative, even an old ticket stub or label. What I can barely ever remember encountering is a habitation entirely devoid of any form of decoration. There is a violence to such emptiness. Faced with nothing, one’s gaze is not returned, attention is not circumscribed. There is a loss of shape, discernment and integrity. There is no sense of the person as the other, who deﬁnes one’s own boundary and extent. I was trying to concentrate on what he was saying, but I was disturbed by the sheer completeness of this void. I began to feel we simply had to visit the other rooms in his house, his bedroom and his bathroom, in the hope that they would not replicate this chilling absence. But when, during a subsequent visit we did take opportunities to glance around these other rooms, they proved just as empty.

This emptiness in someone’s surroundings, that leaches away one’s own sense of being, was only enhanced by our experience of George himself. Even a space this empty wouldn’t have felt quite so disturbing if it had become ﬁlled with the presence of the man. His stories, his attachments and relationships could have re-populated the space, turned this room back into a living-room. But, from the time he started speaking, it was evident that there was no counterbalance between person and place, rather that the ﬂat was the man. It was the way he responded to each thing said to him. Usually when one speaks to another person there is an automatic moment of introspection, a sense that a person has looked inside themselves for the answer, interrogated themselves; so instantly and so obviously that we rarely think of that process. But with George there is the feeling that, at least in the ﬁrst instance, he seeks to answer each question by interrogating the shape and form of the question itself. He presumes that all questions are formulaic, derived from those bureaucratic situations which have made up the bulk of his encounters with the outside world. Such questions merely seek appropriate answers; they don’t want their time wasted with detailed and irrelevant information about an actual person. They demand an answer that instantly conﬁrms one of the three or six categories of answer that can be used as bureaucratic data.

So George ponders what it is that this question is formulated to obtain. If every animal trap has a highly speciﬁc shape designed to catch some particular animal, then what kind of trap is this question, what shape or form should George transform into to satisfy it? He never answers quickly, he ponders. With us there is an additional worry because our questions and conversation tend not to ﬁt his previous experiences. They don’t sound as straightforward as the usual questions of ofﬁcialdom, but they don’t have that comfortable emptiness of polite English questions designed merely to prevent the impoliteness of silence; questions about the weather or what’s on television. But often, after a while, George shifts from looking anxious to a broad deep smile, and it is clear that he has decided what category of question this is and what the appropriate response should be.

There is a mechanical, impersonal quality in his measured replies that makes one aware of the materiality of sound. He speaks always in complete sentences. He will talk about himself, but it is as though he is describing this external person to another. Two examples may help:

‘I do not have a motorcar. If I had a motorcar someone would vandalise it. In a way I don’t want a car because of this type of thing. I do not want to go outside, and ﬁnd something’s gone wrong. I don’t want anything of that nature.’

The other refers to the only picture we eventually found on display in the entire ﬂat.

‘No. I’ve not been, but that picture’s of the Scilly Isles, off the coast of Cornwall. This is an atlas of the world. I’ve always been interested in world-type geography. This is my best atlas, my book of world geography. If you don’t want to look, I understand, but to me geography was one of my favourite subjects when I was at school. This is what I used to look at. If the subject was geography this was one of the books I used to look at.’

Often, when he has ﬁnished speaking, he will ask: ‘Does this satisfy you?’ Or before saying anything else, he will ﬁrst ask: ‘Can I just say something?’ Often, instead of elaborating, he will think for a while and then simply say, ‘I think the answer to that is no’, or ‘I think I shall answer yes to that question’. He seems anxious that the answer given is complete, that no one is muddled, that any additional information could complicate things.

This way of speaking is matched by the deliberate precision in his appearance. A seventy-ﬁve-year-old for whom dressing has the aura of an obligatory routine. The black creased and ironed trousers, the clean knitted jersey, the striped socks matched to the slippers. One can imagine him dressing incredibly slowly and carefully, moving up his shirt from one button to the next, putting on his tie with great care, perhaps several times over, until it was just right. This is a man for whom putting on the second sock would be an entirely separate activity from putting on the ﬁrst sock.

The immediate temptation is to classify George as lacking something in himself. As being slow on the uptake, or whatever the appropriate medical term would have been. Actually that phrase, ‘slow on the uptake’, seems to ﬁt his manner perfectly. But, as we listen to him carefully, I increasingly feel that this would be wrong. As George’s story unfolds, something else emerges: that there is nothing innately slow about George, but rather he has become what we encounter as a result of all that has, or more importantly has not, happened to him. There is something else not going on here. Just putting a label on him would be to substitute effect for cause.

Notwithstanding the emptiness of his own surroundings, George remembers places that had their own decoration. His grandmother had ‘proper’ pictures on the wall, ones that, he reckons, were worth something. His father had pictures of birds – ‘English type birds, not foreign birds’. He remembers his grandmother’s house as a big house. He had no siblings. What he seems to have had from the beginning was a sense of tyranny, of being completely under the control of an authority. All later authority became a copy of the original and most total exempliﬁcation of authority, which was his parents. It appears that every time he might have been allowed to do something or go somewhere, or become somebody, his parents prevented it and he was powerless to do other than their will. When the war broke out he was supposed to be sent away from home, but his mother desperately tried to ﬁght this. When she failed and he had to leave, he became sick immediately, to the extent that the ofﬁcials relented and he returned to spend the war in London with his mother. Similarly, although he passed his examinations such that he could have stayed on at school, his parents took him out of school and refused to allow him to continue. He worked from 16 to 18 and then passed a test to go into the navy, but this was countermanded by his father, who sent him to the army. These references to his ability to pass examinations and tests don’t seem to suggest any intrinsic slowness of thought.

George describes such events without any evident rancour or bitterness, but in his typical slow descriptive monologue. But he seems entirely aware of the constant unfairness and constraints in his life, an example being the impact of his parents. At one time he was in the army. He never saw active service, something he attributed to his parents: ‘No I never left the British Isles. That’s another thing. My father and mother have always said “You are not to go outside the borders of the British Isles”.’ In fact when he was twenty-one he did eventually go on a trip organised by his evening class to Sweden, but that was the nearest point he ever seems to have come to an actual revolt against his parents’ wishes. He never again went abroad. At one point he noted ‘my father was even worse than my mother’.

School clearly made quite an impression on George as a social environment outside his home. He still thinks of much of life in terms of subjects that are taught at school, such as geography. He has clear memories of his time at school, wearing short trousers, serving in the church. Teachers seem to have captured something of his parents’ authoritarian role. In turn, this sense of authority was transferred to his encounters with employers, and now increasingly with bureaucrats. After the war he obtained work as a clerk in a large company. He worked there until he was ﬁfty-ﬁve, when he was retired under protest, since he wanted to continue at least to sixty. He continued to look for employment, turning up regularly at the employment exchange, but this was to be his last job. He has been in this enforced retirement for twenty-one years. The decades at work seem to occupy very little space in his life. Yet one could easily imagine him in one of those black and white newsreels which show an Edwardian vista of ofﬁces with rows and rows and rows of identical looking men ﬁlling in identical looking ledgers. In meeting George, it felt as though one was meeting the last of those clerks.

On our ﬁrst visit it was probably clear we were searching around for material things to talk about, and so when we returned he had carefully gone through his possessions and ﬁnally found in a drawer a postcard from a lady in Spain. There was a story attached. He had been asked:

‘Would I be willing to meet her at the airport and take her to the house where she was going to live. I’d never met her before. I said how can I recognise a lady at the airport like that? I was told I was to go to an address in Fulham where the lady was going to live. I’d never been to the road before. So when the day came I was told to go to London airport and sit on the chair outside the entrance to number 4. I had to ﬁnd number 4 and sit in the chair and wait for the lady to come up and speak to me. I wouldn’t recognise her. She was supposed to come up and speak to me. I sat there for hours. I was wondering if the whole thing had been cancelled when suddenly a young lady came up and spoke to me, told me what her name was and said now are you going to take me to the house in Fulham? So I took her.’

It seemed as though any request to take responsibility for an action was quite exceptional. That he had been singled out, taken from a row of desks and asked as an individual to do something. One could still feel his fear of that responsibility. Almost the only memories that stand out from that period are the deaths of his parents, and the responsibilities he had for the funerals. It sounded as though the terrifying prospect of having to deal with the funerals was as memorable as the deaths themselves. Maybe George had then, or has now, some form of mental retardation. But what I sensed was more a fear of having to act as an agent of his own fate. His account suggested that, for some reason, his parents used him, their only child, to give themselves a singular experience of total authority. An authority that sucked out his core, the basis for any expression of his own will, leaving him ever after dependent upon authority, teachers, employers and always also a dependency upon the ofﬁcialdom of the state. The ﬂat was empty, completely empty, because its occupant had no independent capacity to place something decorative or ornamental within it.

In order to be in range of his work, George went to live at a YMCA, which provided care for him in the way his own home had. He really couldn’t imagine staying anywhere else. But, ﬁnally, at the age of thirty-three, it was clear that he no longer counted as ‘young’, and he was told he would have to move out. The manager helped him ﬁnd another hostel, which lasted around ﬁve years, after which he was moved to the hostel he had stayed in right until the time he was moved to his present ﬂat. Just a year before we met him, this hostel was closed down. He simply assumed he would be moved to yet another hostel. He was told to apply for one. As he put it. ‘And I ﬁlled in four different forms, transfer forms, and they altered them. They were checked by members of staff. And I ended up nowhere.’ As often when George talks, there is that terrible sadness in his particular phrasing that makes it completely clear that George knows that on every such occasion he could only ever have been considered as an afterthought. He watched as each occupant left for a new place. He talks about them being taken away in a motor-car. The last one left in a minicab. No one thought to give him a forwarding address, so there would be no way he could keep in touch with any of them in the future. Finally there was no one left but him. Even then, no one seems to have been concerned with George. It was only the caretaker/support worker who was confronted with the fact that he had to be dealt with when she wanted to take a holiday. At that point she informed him that he would be moved to the ﬂat he now occupies. ‘But I did not want to live alone by myself. But these people, all these experts, said this was the only suitable and available place for me. So here I am.’

A van was supposed to pick him up at midday. It broke down. He waited. Eventually at 3.00 p.m. another van came for him. They packed up his things. Not even the support worker came with him to this new ﬂat – just the two removal men. They brought him and moved his possessions, ﬁrst to the pavement, then to the ﬂat itself. The sofa couldn’t go up the stairs. It had to be brought in by ladder through the window. It was George’s ﬁrst ever sofa. Even if he had no ornaments, he still needed basic carpet and furnishing. But no one had given thought to this. All the good furnishings went somewhere else. Finally there were a few seconds and leftovers remaining, and he was asked to select from these – which is exactly what he has in his ﬂat today. They came from the lounge of his hostel. His sofa matched another one there, and he requested both, but he was turned down.

So, for the ﬁrst time in his life at the age of seventy-ﬁve, George found himself alone in a ﬂat of his own, without any company at all. Even worse for George was that, for the very ﬁrst time, he was expected to learn to look after himself. That was excessively hard for him, as he puts it:

‘I don’t like shopping. I had to pull myself together and do it for myself otherwise I’d have no food to start with. So I pulled myself together and do all my own shopping. I do all my shopping myself. Nobody does cooking for me. That’s my worst subject. Whether I like it or not I’ve had to get on with it, I’ve had to learn how to do it.’

This phrase, that cooking is ‘my worst subject’, comes up many times in George’s conversation.

George was dumped into his new ﬂat ten days before Christmas. The date was signiﬁcant. There had been nine people in the hostel during the previous year; two of those went away before Christmas and the remainder stayed on for a Christmas dinner together, surrounded by Christmas decorations. That, at least, had been company. This year, at Christmas, George was alone, just as he had been for the rest of the year. So now we can see why George’s ﬂat remained empty. Because, even supposing that George had had the will, the sense of his own ability to take objects or images and use them to decorate this ﬂat; supposing that he felt the psychological strength to do such a thing – in fact, even if the whole bloody ﬂat was stuffed to the gills with inconsequential paraphernalia – it would still have been a completely empty ﬂat. An emptiness without that at one with the emptiness within himself. This was the other reason there were no decorations. There was just no point.

George has now settled into some sort of routine. He goes out about three times a month into central London. He refers to this as going there on business, for example to pay a tax. These expeditions have become major reference points in his life. He may also go out for a haircut. His one point of social contact is with a meeting of Old Age Pensioners at a church hall he attends from time to time. He simply observes that they are mainly female, that they are all poor, that they are all old, but above all that they are not at all happy. His only other outing has been to his one distant relative with whom he remains in touch, a market gardener. He has been to visit their farm a few times over his life. His description of his most recent visit is typically frustrating. It was clear that on some previous occasion he had been taken to see the breeding pigs on a nearby farm. This made a huge impression upon him and he was desperate to see them again. Throughout the visit he had been waiting and hoping that this experience would be repeated, but, being George, he had never actually asked his hosts or indicated his desire. As a result, although he had been taken to see the cows, he was not on this occasion given the opportunity to re-visit the pigs. The way he talks, in some awe, about the ‘lady pigs’ suggests that maybe an earlier visit was one of the very few occasions when he has directly witnessed any kind of sexual activity. This inability to act for himself in the world is especially evident when it comes to discussion of those things he would most wish to do. One of his prime ambitions is to visit Kew Gardens. He has been there three times, but the last visit was some thirty years before. When we ask where he would most like to live, he can only think of the YMCA.

By far the most important of the outings he does manage for himself is to view Royal pageantry, especially the Trooping of the Colour. He has gone to this ceremony annually for the last twenty-ﬁve years. He cannot usually go to the key ceremonies, because these days he ﬁnds them too crowded and noisy, and if there is a ticket required, he cannot afford it. So the highlight of his life is most likely to be a rehearsal of the Trooping of the Colour. George is more than simply a royalist. One could imagine the appeal for him of a movement such as fascism, itself an experiment in aesthetics. Fascism attempted to attach to itself individual identity through the participation of each person in its aesthetics. From the Nuremberg rallies to the charisma and oratory of its leaders, fascism spoke directly to every member of that society in a manner that entranced and made them feel like a pixel in a picture – a picture which was beautiful in its completeness and superior to anything that mere individuals could accomplish by themselves.

George had nothing to mediate this direct relationship between himself and the state. The state has become his mother and father, his teacher and his bureaucrat. The constant oppressor who determines his fate and his only resource – the one that feeds him, clothes him, accommodates him and otherwise ignores him in its own sheer unimaginable superiority to him. It would not even condescend to ﬁnd out about him anything in excess of what it needs to know in order to deal with him. No wonder, then, that, when the state appears in its full majesty, an unbearable but unrefusable beauty, it draws him like a moth to ﬁre. This exquisite, violent, regal glory that constitutes British history before him and will last forever after him, and which justiﬁes the sheer inconsequential lack of his mere being. Why should he matter in front of Her Majesty parading down the Mall? It was his greatest privilege merely to bear witness and be in thrall to this power, this majestic procession of red and gold and bayonets. He needed to be there to justify all that he was and all that he wasn’t.

Not surprisingly, over the years this pure form of authority has started to become an interiorised vision, often reducible to the expression ‘them’. One of the most common ways for George to ﬁnish his replies is with the expression ‘we will leave it at that’ with a wry smile. It seems as though on these occasions he knows there is more, he has located something about himself that could have formed part of the response, but sagely he has opted for discretion. Because, on occasion, when something does slip through and he starts to talk beyond the answer, it turns out that this was not the result of introspection but of paranoia. On those occasions he has decided to share with us something of what he knows about ‘them’: the force outside, that which would be displeased to know that we have come to visit him, that which is watching us and him, that which we should be alerted to and careful of. The particular things they don’t like, such as him going to visit some place or the presence of loud music, suggest that ‘they’ began in his head as admonishing statements by hostel staff. Being unanswerable and repressed, they hardened like gallstones into permanent and painful interior voices that can no longer be dislodged. Often his statements are not couched as opinions but as something that ‘everyone’ would say: a generic disapproval of loud noises, or of gossiping with neighbours, where his own voice has become merely an expression of ‘the voices’. Perhaps this is why he will watch television but doesn’t have a radio. Its disembodied voice is perhaps too close to his unrelenting experience of the voices within.

No doubt George will continue his encounter with the state, from its most lowly ofﬁcials to its most reﬁned and pure aesthetic. But from now on there is really only one more event that has yet to take place for George, and even that is simply a repetition of the same event that had occurred to his parents. He speaks of his one remaining distant cousin, the one with the farm:

‘She knows exactly where I’m to be buried. That’s where my mother and father are. When I die she’ll come to London, pick up the body and take it to F . . . Then they can decide what to do with it. There’s a church in F . . . It will most likely go straight to S . . . crematorium and everybody will go back to F . . . and that’ll be the end of it. I’ll be cremated.’ George has had a will made up. He was once told that people get very excited if they are mentioned in a will. His cousin is the only person George knows, so this is the person to whom George will leave . . . absolutely nothing.

During our time on this street we heard and encountered many tragedies, people who faced all manners of diseases and degradations, who nearly died, who actually died, whose children had been killed. There is no escaping the horror and tragedy in the interior of people’s lives. But it was particularly after meeting George that we found ourselves in tears after leaving his ﬂat. Because in every other instance there was a sense that, at least, that person had once lived. With George, by contrast, one simply couldn’t escape the conclusion that this was a man, more or less waiting for his time on earth to be over, but who at age of seventy-six had never yet seen his life actually begin. And, worse still, he knew it.

PORTRAIT 2

FULL

The curtain opens on a scene from the The Nutcracker; a lounge and drawing-room resplendent with Christmas decorations. In the bay window is the most perfect Christmas tree, topped by a fairy whose clear features and hand-made white net costume provides the apex to the array of silver and gold baubles and delicately crafted ornaments that adorn every branch and indent the tree offers for decoration. None is too large or gaudy, there is nothing plastic or vulgar. At the foot of the tree larger presents lie scattered. On a table in front of the tree is a nativity scene, unusual in that both crib and ﬁgures are of plain unpainted wood, tall austere kings looming over the cradle. They seem unimpressed by the glitter and sparkle of the myriad lights reﬂected in the silver tinsel which occupies any spare niche of wall and ceiling that lends itself to additional adornment.

From the centre of each ceiling there hangs an elaborate contrivance of circles and spokes from which are suspended a hundred tiny little parcels, wrapped up in green and red crepe. The diversity of shapes discernible through the wrapping promises an array of presents, each individually selected. Collected over the year, they might be a wooden ornament, a cigarette lighter, or, sometimes, just a lump of coal. The shapes have become only partly discernible in their careful wrapping, enhancing the sense of mystery and promise. Each one is designated by a small number stuck onto the surface. Green tinsel weaves its way along these lines and circles of parcels, punctuated by small lights. Tinsel and lights extend from the centre of each room to the corners and in additional arcs along the walls, from corner to corner. On closer inspection, the lights are found to be small antique glass in the shape of miniature Chinese lanterns, with hand-painted designs. Between the two rooms there must be close on a hundred of them. They are neither dull nor bright, but simply sufﬁcient to diffuse a generous sprinkling of light that seems to come from everywhere.

In one corner sits a portly and elderly gentleman, stooped over a desk. In one hand he holds pliers with which he deftly works many lines of gold cord, together with ornaments and lights; repairing, setting, arranging and lovingly creating additional pieces still to be set, though at ﬁrst there seems to be no place left that could yet bear them. The combination of patience and precision suggests a craftsman, who brings to this task years of experience garnered from professional work. One senses that this task is one he has given himself year after year, decade after decade. This tradition, so far from making the task seem dull or repetitive, has rather enshrined this particular time of the year as the climax, as a period of feverish excitement against which the rest of the year pales, creating a grey background to highlight the colour and splendour of the season. This seems to be his moment. Just as years of repetition and experimentation lie behind the integrity of the room decorations, which now appear as a natural and ideal ﬁt to the interior space; so his skills of concentration and ﬁngerwork have developed to ﬁt perfectly to this task – which more than any paid labour, so fully expresses the person.

For, in truth, this is not a scene from a Nutcracker; no dancers are waiting in the wings, no curtain has opened. It is just another ordinary terraced house in an ordinary terraced street. And yet no childhood memory of the Nutcracker, no lithograph of Cratchit and his family, no West End store window or specialist Christmas shop in Alsace or National Trust recreation has ever appealed as this lounge and dining-room setting of Christmas. Only Bergman’s ﬁlm Fanny and Alexander seems to capture its signiﬁcance. It is the product of a century of devotion to the cultivation of Christmas itself. There are no plastic baubles. The Chinese lights were ﬁrst collected by the father of the man now working the gold threads. The original collection grew until these Chinese lanterns were no longer for sale as a result of the Second World War. Each year since has added its own contributions of other ornaments. The hand-crafted wooden nativity scene is from the Philippines, bought on a visit ﬁfteen years ago. This year’s contributions include some blue glass discs with painted Christmas scenes, suspended as part of the ceiling decoration. They were purchased a few months earlier from a shop specialising in Christmas decorations in Prague. The only other innovation of the current year is a rearrangement of some of the lighting in the hall. That is sufﬁcient. Changes are slight and careful, tested for a year or two and then incorporated or rejected. The house has been adapted through this same gradual evolution, so that now the chandelier slides across to make way for the hanging of the numbered gifts, and there has been extensive re-wiring with many additional ﬁtments, such that no part of the room is excluded from its contribution to the season.

Behind this labour of love lies the labour which is love, something that becomes evident as soon as one is able to observe how this Christmas scene fulﬁls its ultimate purpose: when it shifts from foreground to background; and becomes merely the setting to celebration, to conviviality, chatter, drinking, feasting, gossiping and re-acquainting. During this season of family visiting there will be careful acknowledgement of all that has happened in the year past, celebrating what each individual who passes through this scene has in turn contributed. If young enough, they will take their presents from beneath the tree. But at the same time their own experiences and achievements of that year are brought and laid at the foot of the tree in the form of conversation, listening and appreciation.