Any Human Heart

All the ‘shock’ effects of a century of abstract art have been quietly replicated somewhere or other in nature since time began.

David Gascoyne1 once told me that the only point of keeping a journal was to concentrate on the personal, the diurnal minutiae, and forget the great and significant events in the world at large. The newspapers cover all that, anyway, he said. We don’t want to know that ‘Hitler invaded Poland’ – we’re more curious about what you had for breakfast. U

Last week I planted an acer in the furthest bed from the house, in honour of our new baby. The sapling is as tall as me and, by all accounts, it can grow forty feet tall. So, in thirty years’ time, if we’re still here I can come back and see this tree in its maturity. But the thought depresses me: in thirty years’ time I’ll be in my mid sixties and

(I must get to know the names of flowers – it annoys me, this ignorance. If I can name a dozen trees, flowers shouldn’t be beyond me).

I believe my generation was cursed by the war, that ‘great adventure’ (for those of us who survived unmaimed) right bang slap in the middle of our lives – our prime. It lasted so long and it split our lives in two – irrevocably ‘Before’ or ‘After’. When I think of myself in 1939 and then think of the man I had become in 1946, shattered by my awful

These final acts in a writer’s life usually go unrecorded because the reality is too shaming, too sad, too banal. But, on the contrary, it seems to me to be even more important now, after everything that has gone before, to set down the facts as I experience them.

A day of total solitude, of tranquil and perfect beauty by the river. A form of happiness I must try to recapture more often.

Maybe this is the answer – maybe this is how to find true contentment – to live your life within confined horizons. To set modest goals, achievable ambitions.

and for the first time in my life wished I had a television set. Perhaps I should have gone next door to Kwaku’s.2 But in the end I prefer my imagination.