How do you sell your soul...?

I updated my Twitter profile yesterday. Partly this was to rid myself of a hyperlink which didn’t work; partly it was to include something which someone who seems to understand me fairly well suggested I should have as my personal catchphrase. Either way: a brief deliberation and some technical difficulties and voila. Behold. Self-marketing in under 140 characters…


It’s a funny thing, though – what TS Eliot called in ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’, ‘prepar(ing) a face to meet the faces that you meet.’ I’m more and more conscious of it, the older I get… though the thing is, as this consciousness increases, I worry about it less.


I’ve lost a few friends recently. A literal loss in one case, one too raw to write about just now; a few other losses too, though – that thing where a friendship just ends as though the person has just got up and walked off, but it hasn’t really registered with you because it was a sort of metaphorical walk off, not a physical or visible one. You only notice when it’s all over, as if you were the person who fell asleep on the last train and woke up at the terminus, your station long past. It’s made me far too conscious about what people think of me: what exactly am I doing that’s so wrong that some of these people just don’t want to know me any more? Is it my sense of humour? My obsessive love of words and language and books? Am I listening to the wrong music – is a lifetime’s obsession with the sort of songs you listen to on low volume, late at night, just that off-putting? Maybe it’s my sense of humour. Yes… bound to be that, the fondness for bad puns, the sense of the ridiculous, the turn of mind that tells impressionable teenagers that the word gullible is written on the ceiling because we had to take it out of the dictionary and so just we had to put it somewhere… Or maybe it’s not that at all. Maybe it’s how I dress. What I look like. I’ve never been the decorative sort. No-one is going to seek out my company based on how I look: in fact, based on how I look, I’m pretty much invisible. A few days ago, in the middle of a late-May heatwave, a colleague was admiring the ‘lovely bright summer colours and flowery patterns’ that everyone was wearing. She went around the breaktime table, itemising people’s florals: ‘your yellow top is gorgeous, and ooh I love those pink and purple florals and… goodness that little cream dress is just so cute and…’ And then she reached me. There was a pause. ‘And … yes. Your black and … um… turquoise. It’s … well it’s interesting. It’s different. It’s… well I suppose it’s very… you.’ The subject changed. The discourse marker crashed across the coffee-mug laden table like a falling roof-beam…


We all do it, though. We all think about how we present ourselves and how we present the things we do. In my workplace, the canteen restyled itself as a Café a dozen years ago or more. Needing a further update, it has now introduced healthier menus and livelier music. That’s to say: salads which are basically composed of potatoes, pasta and rice with a generous dollop of dressing thrown on top, with a few ‘added extra’ brightly coloured things like peppers and sweetcorn flung unceremoniously into the mix. Just to make it look healthy. Every lunchtime, people are chomping dutifully through these ‘healthy salad lunches’ and wondering why they’re falling asleep at their desks in the afternoons… And they’re chomping along to the sound of One Direction and Westlife and Bruno Mars, as well, because there’s a sort of Pied Piper of Hamelin effect offensive going on to lure unsuspecting customers in. Not really hungry? Come in anyway. Have something. The boys from One Direction are here! Well… no they’re not, not really, but you’re here now, here, have a sandwich! Have a salad, actually – because that’s what makes you beautiful…


It’s getting to that time of night again. It’s around 11pm. I haven’t done the things I meant to do: I haven’t done the ironing yet, and I haven’t emptied the dishwasher. I haven’t watched much TV and I haven’t read another chapter or two of the current novel open on my Kindle. If I want to get some sleep, I should not be blogging and should not be tweeting and should not even be sitting in front of a backlit computer screen at this time of the evening. But it’s just been that kind of day. A day when I realised that the reason I’m not very much like the people I see every day is because I never have been: the lunchtime discussion drifted into the territory of childhood memories, today, and as I listened I realised that those memories that my workplace friends had in common simply did not factor in my life at all. That the things they were talking about as current news, current opinions, current matters of interest, simply didn’t register in my life and that my free time was really rather differently spent. I’m not sure whether this is evident – it’s not something I view as some kind of token of superiority. It’s just… fact. Just how things are. And it always has been, because, thinking about it, when I was a teenager or younger, and much more worried about peer-pressure than I am these days, I was wearing the wrong clothes and listening to the wrong music and spending my weekend on the wrong pursuits and either with the wrong people or on my own. I remember the day a boy from the year above said to me, in the breaktime crowds, that no boy would ever love me but that Jesus did. Years later, just finished university, his words echoed in my memory as a well-intentioned friend suggested that I dye my hair blonde and pretend to be stupid if I wanted to find myself a man…


… far too many years later, and I’m still not blonde. I don’t think I need to make any pretences: if being stupid is appealing, then my occasional idiocy and strong tendency to walk into inanimate objects and immediately apologise to them must make me absolutely irresistible. I’m packaging my thoughts in anything from 140 characters to 10,000 words, in a selection of iPod playlists, categorised by occasion or by state of mind, in a black car covered in a fine layer of sand from the local beach near where I live, and in a distinct unwillingness to dress just exactly like everybody else. I’m writing this in a room full of books and memories from too many years of trying to figure out a meaning or a point of reference… and maybe that’s the meaning, right there. Now. At 23 minutes past 11 on a sultry summer night.


Maybe the meaning is in the very search for meaning. The destination is the journey time itself. The terminus is every staging point along the way, and the crucial thing is staying awake to see the landscapes shift. It’s that thing George Eliot said in ‘Middlemarch’.


‘Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.’


What’s that you said, there, reading this?


‘Pretentious, moi…?’