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Stood on Brighton Pier, watching sunset. Having spent so long in Cambridge, to see the sea, the undulating waves; each undulation so unique, flecked with gold. Just before, I'd visited the arcades, spend a pound on the penny falls, blew my winnings on the same machine. I visited here with my brother and father as a child, a teenager, go on the rides. Once they - brother, father - went on the big dipper, I wanted to go to the fun house. I was mocked for this: not a manly ride. She said - she - that her favourite too was the fun house. The intellectual's fairground attraction, she said; an obstacle course for grown-ups. I suppose this explains a lot. Just how well-synched we are.
So much of my life was by conflicting goals, of the vision of the good life. Of my mother: the pathetic conformist ideas of church (chapel, in fact), family. Of my father: the grand hippy ideals of liberation, of perpetual pleasure. Of the LSE: of worldly success, the meritocracy, the rootless cosmopolitan, bestriding the world, jetting from Tokyo to Sao Paolo. Of Cambridge: of the quiet academic, the college man, a bachelor, buried, not in the parish, but in college. Thinking back, my mother had it right, and I wish to God I could have lived that ideal. The Cambridge ideal a second-best, the ersatz community of the exile: but perhaps that would, should have been me. The LSE ideal, a third, but a third by a distinct distance. My father's ideals (which he never lived, he was a nurse, an administrator, a decent man) a distant fourth: squalor and failure.
So much of my life was by conflicting goals, of the vision of the good life. Of my mother: the pathetic conformist ideas of church (chapel, in fact), family. Of my father: the grand hippy ideals of liberation, of perpetual pleasure. Of the LSE: of worldly success, the meritocracy, the rootless cosmopolitan, bestriding the world, jetting from Tokyo to Sao Paolo. Of Cambridge: of the quiet academic, the college man, a bachelor, buried, not in the parish, but in college. Thinking back, my mother had it right, and I wish to God I could have lived that ideal. The Cambridge ideal a second-best, the ersatz community of the exile: but perhaps that would, should have been me. The LSE ideal, a third, but a third by a distinct distance. My father's ideals (which he never lived, he was a nurse, an administrator, a decent man) a distant fourth: squalor and failure.
