I have added a section to this blog I have called Dracula Dissected. There, you will find a website I have designed which breaks down the novel ‘Dracula’ into dozens of tiny pieces, and then strings them together again over a map, connected with the story’s internal timeline.

Dracula was written as a epistolary novel, so I have not had to change a word of the book to do this.    But by taking the book at it’s word, we get to see another perspective on the story. Narratives, by their nature, tend to stick to one viewpoint at a time. But if you introduce a moving map, you can watch Dracula gradually move towards England, just as Mina is wondering what has happened to her husband-to-be. Which is fun.

Even more interesting would be a retelling of history using the same methods. Imagine a similar site which showed a period of art history – the post-impressionists, for example – or one that showed the events of D-Day minute by minute.

Rereading the posts I make on this blog, after a week or so, is an odd experience. It’s almost as if someone else has taken something I thought and put it into words, and often bad ones.

It is increasingly obvious that it is hard to have a style of one’s own. It is impossible to strike the right balance between seriousness and humour, formality and accessibility until the words have sat unread for a week. It is also always important to avoid using words like ‘seriousness’. Yuck.

Part of reason for a more formal writing style is fear: fear of opening oneself up too much, but also the fear of making grammatical errors. I am not a great believer in grammar for its own sake. I would take euphony over some nineteenth-century syntax fetishist’s idea of correctness every time. ‘To boldly go’ just sounds a million times better than ‘to go boldly’, for example.

For me, blog posts are like a the father of the bride speech. I am sure we have all seen the sort of thing. We know a guy to be a confident teller of a joke, and declaimer of colourful opinions, who, when given the responsibility of making a ‘proper’ speech before a diverse audience, suddenly sounds as stiff as a board.

In this context, ‘I’ or ‘me’ are not posh enough, and no-one can ever remember which to use anyway. So ‘myself’ is used instead, as is ‘ourselves’ for ‘us’, and ‘yourselves’ for ‘you’.

In blog post writing, this also seems to manifest itself in an urge to mimic the style of broadsheet journalists. At one time, I read more newspaper inches than anyone I knew, and even cut out the columns of favourite journos for future re-reading. Now, when trying to write a short essay, I find myself reaching for that style, even cribbing the ‘winding up’ paragraph at the end from newspaper columns, which brings everything together. Which is euphony again – it just doesn’t sound finished until that bit is done.

It is also much easier, I am finding, to write about an opinion than to write anything factual. Factual pieces are much more useful, and much more widely read, I am sure, but terrifying to write. But I feel hypocritical: I have criticised journalists for years for spouting acres of opinion from a tiny scrap of fact.

What I will think when I re-read this in a week’s time, I do not know. At least I remembered to again split an infinitive.

I wonder if a period of plenty and ease was ever correctly identified, except in retrospect.

We always think that times are tough, but are hopeful that they will improve. If they do not, and, instead, deteriorate, we are appalled, and declare the now-passed time a Golden Age. We thought we were working too hard for too little reward, and discover that we must now work even harder for even less.

What I find amazing in myself, and in other people, is our ability to forget selectively. Our minds are always looking for stories, neat arcs with heroes and villains, such that we forget all aspects of the past that do not suit the plot we currently hold to be the truth.

We do not really forget that much, of course, because as soon as we want to change the plot – when one of our heroes ‘betrays’ us, for example, and becomes a villain, we are very quick to rewrite history, recast and reshaped, where the betrayal is foreshadowed by signs and portents. ‘You may remember, my dear’, my grandmother would say, ‘I always said there was something suspicious about him.’ I never could remember her saying anything of the sort, but there is always a pressure to join with the groupthink in these matters, and go with the flow.

The only solution, I suspect, is to proactively declare every moment that we are alive to be a Golden Age. I think that is a pretty good summary of ‘Walden’ by Thoreau, which, as I concluded elsewhere, is not really a book about getting back to nature, but instead about savouring every day of life, whichever path one chooses.

I once had a dream, which I remember very fondly. I dreamed that I was sitting at our kitchen table, in the early morning, and suddenly became aware that I was dead, and that I would be doomed to sit at that table for eternity. Then, I saw my young son’s face look around the corner, and he came in to join me. It became obvious to me, in a second, that I was in heaven. That I had been in heaven all along. That I was living in paradise, and had never realised it. That the real horror of the moment – I realised on waking – was that these moments of sitting in a kitchen with my lovely boy would not last forever, but would soon slip away into the past, would one day be a Golden Age of precious memory.

The task of understanding this needs to be performed anew every day. Otherwise, all the days just run away, unmarked, unnoticed, into oblivion, to be yearned after, far too late.

After a late night conversation about the huge number of characters in Shakespeare’s history plays, a friend sent me a tube in the post, which ended up containing what you see in the attached video.

What we found interesting was how many characters remain through several plays, even though their titles change over the course of the plays.

It is arguable how much Shakespeare intended the continuity to be part of the meaning of the plays, but the ‘traitor’ scene in Henry V is certainly more meaningful when you have seen the ‘Edmund Mortimer’ story developing.

My friend, the creator of this chart, is one of those people who seem incapable of making an ugly thing. But I think the spirit behind this was a desire to read literature in a more literal way: that perhaps time should be spent just trying to read the words that Shakespeare wrote. We had grown up being told by our English teachers to always be on the lookout for ‘themes’ and meanings.

Another example: I remember having read a lot of discussion about the porter scene in Macbeth, which immediately follows the murder of Malcolm. Thousands of words about how this humorous scene breaks up the tension of the play etc etc. I certainly got marks for repeating this in an essay. When I mentioned it to an actor I knew, who had played Macbeth, he laughingly pointed out that he considered it a very handy scene, as it gave him just enough time to get out of his armour, and appear in his nightshirt.

When I was 18, I had the very good fortune to find a job in a theatre in Manchester. The job was basic, but at that time, the late eighties, Manchester was the most glamourous and exciting city in the world.

Far away, on another continent, I had spent hours reading about the exploits of my favourite bands, like The Smiths or New Order, whose stories mentioned the streets and places that I now passed every day. It was electrifying. Madchester, with Happy Mondays and The Stone Roses, was at it’s height.

The greatest Manchester band of them all, however, was Joy Division. The tragic early death of the lead singer, just at the point when they seemed destined for mainstream success, had frozen them into a never changing amber of coolness. All young men of my age imagined themselves in an urban setting, gazing – trenchcoated – into the middle distance, while Atmosphere played in the background.

The Haçienda club – owned by the former members of the band, now New Order – was a short walk from my home, and the legend of older clubs, The Electric Ballroom, and The Factory itself loomed large in the folk memories of the local youth.

I worked with a woman who was – perhaps – five years older then me, but I had no idea how close she was to the epicentre of this legendary time, until I overheard a stray remark concerning the closure of The Electric Ballroom.

‘Did you ever see Joy Division play?’ I asked excitedly.

She said she had, but without pride, or with any affected ease. Did she not know how cool this was?

What was Ian Curtis like, I asked, breathlessly.

‘Him,’ she said, her lip curling with contempt, ‘He was a compete twat.’

I was crushed. She had been there when all this had been going on, and that was her assessment?

I asked for more details, but never got them. Heaven alone knows what sins the rock god committed to earn her eternal contempt. But I learned something. The Manchester residents who had the most respect for the legends were the ones – like me – who had missed the formative years. The people who had seen it all happen had no great illusions. A prophet has no honour in his own country, even now.

Sometime, I catch myself thinking something, and wondering what I am basing my thinking on. This happens quite rarely, given that so little of what we think we know can actually be proven. We are all guilty of holding opinions, often unconsciously, with no basis in reality, but it’s always easier to spot other people doing it.

An example I often notice in other people is the idea that children are born innocent, and gradually – tragically – become corrupted by exposure to the world, until they are sad, flawed adults like us. I think that this idea has its foundation in Judeo/Christian thought, but Plato seems to say something similar as well, so perhaps it is a widespread idea. My experience is that children are born wild, and become civilised, which is something else altogether – the opposite of the accepted truth. Perhaps my kids are different.

Another very common idea is the one that natural things are benign and good for us, while synthetic things are bad for us. There are people who profess to have no faith in God, but seem to have transferred a belief in a Godlike benevolence to nature. There is a deep seated belief that nature somehow ‘means’ us to live a long healthy life, whilst, in reality, death is the most natural thing in the world. And a few moments thought must surely reveal that our personal existence is of no more significance to the natural world than than that of any random microbe.

We feel we are special somehow, that the universe cares about our existence. It might work circumstances to help us avoid something bad – a traffic jam that means we miss a doomed flight – or ‘meaning’ us to meet out soulmate. On another level, we feel that nature  must ‘mean’ us to live a life free of illness, forgetting that bacteria are part of nature too. Even a cruel universe, one that bring us continual bad luck, seems preferable than one that does not care, or even have the mechanism to care. What we cannot seem to bear is the idea that the universe is chaotic and profoundly unaware of anything, especially our existence.

Whereas, if we come to terms with that idea – that the universe is empty of love and meaning – we are forced to conclude that we must provide the love and meaning. That it is down to us how meaningless we feel our existence to be. And if we despair of being able to do that, then we need to remember that we were providing that meaning all the time when we saw love and meaning all around us. Which must be a comfort: we were always the source of all meaning and love in our perceived world. The natural world acts like mirror, showing back to us what is in ourselves.

…your brother and my sister no sooner
met but they looked, no sooner looked but they
loved, no sooner loved but they sighed, no sooner
sighed but they asked one another the reason, no
sooner knew the reason but they sought the remedy;
and in these degrees have they made a pair of stairs
to marriage…
(As You Like It, Shakespeare)

There is a little trend I have noticed in newspaper and magazine writing recently, which I find rather off-putting. It’s where the author invites me to be a member of their little gang, and I instinctively reject the invitation. The word used to achieve this effect, is ‘that’, or its plural, ‘those’.

An example. Someone writing about white bread, concludes ‘in the end, I would always go for that eight grain loaf, or that dark pumpernickel.’

Why not just ‘a dark pumpernickel’? I think that the ‘that’ serves two functions in this context. Firstly, it flatters me by making the assumption that I am so familiar with artisan bread that I casually use terms like ‘dark pumpernickel’ in place of ‘a loaf of dark pumpernickel bread’. Secondly, by making that assumption, it invites me to share in the lifestyle and aspirations of the author.

Another example: ‘Are those stubborn stains getting you down?’

I have always hated been put in a box, or included in any group. Or, put another way, I am a member of a group that likes to imagine that I do not belong to a group. So I dislike the matey tone this little trick creates. It’s rather like having somebody talking to you while standing just a little bit too close.

A while ago, while on my way to work, I saw a woman pulling out of her enormous, palatial home in a large SUV. She was stationary in the driveway, repeatedly clicking a remote control which was meant to automatically close her wrought-iron gates. But she couldn’t seem to get the angle right, because she was half leaning out of the window of the car, angrily jamming her thumb on the button, her face contorted with rage.

I realised that from the vantage point of the majority of the world, I would look just like that woman. I own a car, live in a house, have surplus food, and good health. I have a happy family, living in a safe country, with a great education and health system. But there are days when the slightest inconvenience contorts my face with rage too.

I am trying to make it an expression in my family, that if any one of us is frustrated by any trivial thing, that we all have to ask if their gates are stuck.