A day off at last.

It’s pouring with rain, though, so the early morning dog walk is delayed. Instead I have a cup of coffee and take a gentle stroll around Twitter & Instagram, taking the air with my virtual boots and my virtual dogs and my tablet cocked on my arm, before I put the cup in the sink and turn myself reluctantly towards the stairs, ready to go up and write.

The rain has stopped, though. I can take Lola out after all.  Lola doesn’t seem that keen, but it’s good to get it over with. Maybe it’ll freshen me up and help get my thoughts in order.

Turns out, Lola was right. The break in the weather is actually the eye of the hurricane. It’s exhilarating, in an annihilating kind of way, but we both get thoroughly soaked. I stand at the kitchen sink wringing water out of my pants.

It takes a while to dry off. Whilst I’m doing that, I notice the extractor fan over the oven is really greasy and horrible. I think it needs cleaning right away. It takes a lot of scrubbing, but after an hour I have to say it looks pretty incredible. I did a good job there. And so finally, with nothing else to do or say about it, I drag my bare and sorry carcass upstairs to the bedroom, and the monk-like wooden chair and table where I write. Lola follows me, throwing herself down on the rug to steam while I flip the laptop lid, rest my hands on the keys, and prepare.

Facing me above the desk is a cork board I hung in a faraway and more innocent time when I was at grave risk of buying something like that. My plan was to cover it with things that might resonate with whatever project I was working on: photos, pictures, cuttings from magazines. I could pin up a sequence of cards to map out the structure of the book. Needless to say, the board is still bare, just the drawing Jess made of a little purple ghost I use for my avatar, a friendship band, a Sergeant Pepper pin, a Jack Skellington pin, a pen pin with the word ‘mightier’ down the middle, a business card with a typewriter motif (not mine), and the label that fell off the cat carrier (see fig 1.)

Sometimes I stare at the empty cork and try to see visions in the speckles of light and dark, but the truth is I don’t need cork for that. The bare wall’s just as good. I’ve had a lot of practice, being the sort to stare at nothing in particular quite happily for long periods of time. Maybe I should volunteer for a deep space trip. So long as there was a window, snacks, stationery, and a reading light for the sleeping shelf, I’d be more than happy. I wouldn’t mind a robot, too – who’d be bad-tempered but dry & hilarious. The misunderstandings we’d have, all the way to the Kuiper Belt. Oy Vey!

I take a breath to try to root myself in the moment, and in doing so realise  I haven’t done my morning meditation. I launch the app, do a ten minute session, followed by some exercises, press-ups, scrunchies (crunches?), stretches, etcetera, then a shower, then a cup of tea, then lunch, and when all that’s done and cleared away, drag myself back upstairs, flip the laptop, rest my fingers on the keys, wriggle them expectantly, and prepare.

The first thing I do is review how much progress I’ve made with the book. I play with the table of contents, trying to decide whether something I intend to write should be in bold and what I have written in italics. Make the change through all the documents. Then go back and undo it. Widen the margins. Enlarge the font. Then I take a breath, rest my fingers on the keys – and immediately realise that the single most important thing I have to do is Google Cubism.

The thing is, (and I admit, there is always a thing), I want to write up a little story I remember about Fred’s dad, Alf, something that happened to him in the war, and Cubism is a part of it.

One thing I do know about Picasso was that he had a Blue Period. To be honest, I’d rather he called it a Blue Phase. Blue Period just makes me think of those sanitary towel adverts where they demonstrate the absorbency of the pad by pouring windscreen wash all over it. The fact that Picasso also had a Pink Period doesn’t help, either. His Cubism Phase came immediately after and lasted a surprisingly long time – from 1907 to 25 – although I’d guess he was producing other, non-Cubic stuff at the same time, like ceramic hats and so on. The one thing I know about Picasso was that he was prolific as hell; the only thing that could distract him was a corked bottle of wine, or maybe a bull breaking free of the studio.

In this Cubist Phase, around 1910, Picasso painted the portrait of a guy called Ambroise Vollard. Ambroise was a French gallery owner who promoted a lot of artists early on in their career – Van Gogh, Gaugin, Renoir – so he ended up being one of the most painted men in the history of French art (although judging by the portraits, not the happiest).

It’s a brilliant study. Ambroise comes across as a brooding presence, simultaneously wide awake and profoundly asleep (a condition I sympathise with). It’s more than just the effect of looking at someone through a distorting prism; it’s as if Picasso’s taken a stack of angles and changes of light and perspective, and painted them into one dimension, so that you’re looking not just at a man sitting for his portrait, but at who he was, and thinks he is, and who he’d like to be.

So what does this have to do with Alf?

Alf was the hardest man I ever met. He was a pitiless, dessicated old Cockney, exiled to the Fens, bruised and bitter. He had his schemes and his dodges, his nice little earners, one of them being to work as a rose budder for six weeks every summer. He had a scarred face, flat and uncompromising, with a nose rolled so flat the nostrils were like two finger holes jabbed in a pie crust. His eyes were cut-in, ice blue. He smoked spitty little fags, talked out of the corner of his mouth – when he talked, that is. Mostly he just worked, trampling the roses down with an East End curse, brutally efficient, getting the work done, making progress.

I was terrified of him.

The story, then.

Alf was a despatch rider in Italy during the war. One day he was following a convoy of American trucks when they were ambushed. He ended up losing control of his bike and crashing face-first into a tailboard. Luckily, there was a young American surgeon travelling with the convoy. Ever since medical school, this surgeon had been reading up about maxillo-facial reconstruction, hoping to start his own exclusive practice after the war. He took Alf on as a project, using as his guide the photo of Alf from his military identity card.

‘Are you sure it weren’t a picture of one of them Picasso paintings instead?’ someone said.

And whether Alf smiled, or sneered, or did both at the same time, it was impossible to tell.