Friday 12 December

And so I think this mechanical journal – all creaking puns and sprung confidences – is over a year old now and I take delight in the fact that its purpose is still far from clear. It has been cathartic, of course; it has secured me a small book deal while simultaneously allowing me to lie gently but shamelessly into the ether, it has let me settle some scores, in secret, coded and occasionally blatant ways. Less selfishly, it has saved countless friends from many volleys of verbal flourishment in the pub (the small likeness of me in the top left of your canvas allowing far greater right of reply than the fleshed out me, three pints in and ‘on one’). It has been responsible for six relationships (none of them mine), three children (paternity case pending) and the reunion of a poor old blind man with his beloved lost puppy, Maximillian Schnell the Younger (so how does he schnell? etc).

But I suppose its main function, if you’ll pardon the unforgivable French, is as an aide memoire. Who knows where some apparently insignificant anecdote, recorded here, will take me, or a superficially better writer in the future? How would our highlights remain so vivid without the context-heavy filler; the stodgy day-to-day from which we rise like butter pastry to taste life itself? Unless you save and iron your newspapers (like me) I find it hard to believe you have found greater access to the momentous and the trivial in so condensed and retentive a format. It has been a pleasure, and has certainly stoked my own pipe, to provide your stodge and mine in neat but irregular servings. We will be sure to look back with pleasure – or mad regret.


Cotton Exchange Christmas Party Committee, December 1863

Yet if there’s one thing I’ve needed no reminder of – not since Barton and mine old days on the saggy peninsula – it’s how to have a party in someone else’s manor. Tonight, with the help of a Christmas committee consisting of the good, the willing, the lonely and insane, I have more than my fair say on the running of the annual bash at our beloved Cotton Exchange. The poetry stall does mixed business. Thanks to our efforts in finding the finest, cheapest wine (half a bottle each, plus beer, is about right for ‘Oh go on then’ inclined workmates) a great deal of the entries are illegible. These I would have taken for the ‘protest vote’ had I not uncovered a number of others composed wholly of fruity language and lewd suggestion. I switch to helping another Batson on the bar (and before you ask, this is no confusing Folies Bergères reflection but a genuine namesake: I save my heavy drinking for Crow 2). Having sent the charmed circle spinning erratically into the night, there is just time for a quick tidy up before we workers follow them out. I spy the chocolate fountain, bunged up in mid-flow, and wonder if it’s not a little like me after ten years in the same workplace, sweet as it can be.