Street Sadness

    Yesterday I went to see the enormous Paul Nash survey show at Tate Britain. I have liked some of Nash's work when I've seen it occasionally over the years. But seeing all of his work together in such abundance did little to assure me of his major status. His  artistic shortcomings were all suddenly revealed - such as his over-reliance on certain colours and colour systems across his entire career, or his preference for outlining shapes in black - which obviously stemmed from his earlier training as an illustrator (some of his student illustrations were on display, and they reveal him to have been of average talent in this area).       His experiences during the war clearly gave him the subject which defines his work in British memory, and here there are plenty of crashed German fighter planes; soldiers caught in the horrible trenches of No Man's Land; and shell-blasted hell-scapes of shattered trees and bomb craters to satisfy the most sentimenta...

     A family shambles into the pub, all dressed in black. It comprises a set of obese twins, one of whom is the mother of a boy and a girl aged about eight and nine.       "My god", she says to the barman, "I need a fuckin' drink after the day I've 'ad." She orders for the entire entourage and they all sit around three tables, which they hastily drag together. The woman now spots me in the corner and she galumphs over on unsteady, knock-kneed legs, with a plaintive look across her pale, doughy face.     "'Scuse me luv, can I take summer dese chairs?" She gestures to the three empty seats around my table. I tell her she can. "Only, I cremated me muvver dis mornin'. " she says, apropos of nothing. I give her my condolences.       She seats her two children on tall stools at the bar. Another family member arrives with two bags of McDonald's food. He places these in front of the kids, who eagerly dig in. The adults sit ad...

     A large, middle-aged woman with a harried, drooping face and long hair which was once blonde sits with two of her friends in a Hackney cafe. She has just ordered a Sunday lamb roast, but she insisted on extra gravy, because "I need to have the extra juiciness to make the roast potatoes nice and gooey on the palate". She now holds court in a braying voice that rings around the cafe.       "My damned father will never answer my damned text messages and by the time he does damn well answer them I can't remember what I'd damn well said to him, the absolute pig... He sits in that damned house like Lord Muck and expects everyone to damn well run around after him, but will he lift a damn finger or make a damned effort? not on your bloody life."       Her friends nod in well-established silence. Finally, one of them dares to speak.      "I read the other day about a woman my age - 64 - who has just had a baby." ...

    Over the last few weeks our house has become the fashionable holiday resort of the fruit fly. They have decided that our kitchen is their Crimea and here they drift in slow motion: tiny hang-gliders held aloft on miasmic thermals of vegetable-gases, alighting wherever fancy takes them,     "Ooh! Stan! There's a lovely vile vapour emanating from that fruit bowl! Shall we settle there and luxuriate in the over-ripe ooze?"      At first, we didn't much notice them; they are small and silent. But within a week we had become the Fruit Fly Butlins: aunts and uncles, nieces and cousins, brothers and sisters soon all arrived, intent on enjoying their two-day lifecycle in the balmy Utopia of our kitchen.      Like cockroaches, the fruit fly seems to have an iron-constitution. Yesterday, as I took a bowl of steaming, home-made pumpkin soup from the microwave oven, I was shocked to see three of the little creatures drift out, too. They had b...

    I sit in a British Airways plane, 36,000 feet above Russia, heading for London. I am in a block of three seats. On my right is a demure, diminutive young Chinese woman. On my left is a morbidly obese Glaswegian man, about thirty-years old. He wears the most enormous shirt I've ever seen (although its voluminous tract of gingham material is, even so, straining to contain so much bloated, saturated, adipose tissue beneath it). I can almost hear the seams creak and groan at the mass trying to burst asunder. He also wears shorts.     I have been wedged between these two since Hong Kong. The man's belly is monstrous. I can sense the enormous weight of it as it pools around his torso, filling up all the space between him and the fold-down table and the video screen; it also flows over the arm rest and into my personal space, causing shudders of revulsion in me whenever I acknowledge its encroachment, as it wobbles silkily against my chest, or tenderly grazes my arm....