‘I don’t believe in argument,’ he said, looking out into the darkness.
‘You don’t?’ Erens said, genuinely surprised. ‘Shit, and I thought I was the cynical one.’
‘It’s not cynicism,’ he said flatly. ‘I just think people over­value argument because they like to hear themselves talk.’
‘Oh well, thank you.’
‘It’s comforting, I suppose.’ He watched the stars wheel, like absurdly slow shells seen at night; rising, peaking, falling… (And reminded himself that the stars too would explode, perhaps, one day.) ‘Most people are not prepared to have their minds changed, and I think they know in their hearts that other people are just the same, and one of the reasons people become angry when they argue is that they realise just that, as they trot out their excuses.’
‘Excuses, eh? Well, if this ain’t cynicism, what is?’
‘Yes, excuses. I strongly suspect the things people believe in are usually just what they instinctively feel is right; the excuses, the justifications, the things you’re supposed to argue about, come later. They’re the least important part of the belief. That’s why you can destroy them, win an argument, prove the other person wrong, and still they believe what they did in the first place. You’ve attacked the wrong thing.’
‘So what do you suggest one does, Professor, if one is not to indulge in this futile… arguing stuff?’
‘Agree to disagree,’ he said. ‘Or fight.’
‘Fight?’
He shrugged. ‘What else is left?’

– Iain M Banks, Use of Weapons.

*

In order to maintain a semblance of contact over the damn-near-six-thousand-miles currently between us, my girlfriend and I have weekly Skype chats (Friday night for me, Saturday morning for her.) It’s generally hit and miss as to whether the connection is good enough for video, but it’s usually good enough for voice, which we often supplement with links to relevant things, or text when the distorted spoken word isn’t quite good enough. For example, yesterday’s log:

[23:06:01] Brosencrantz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Babylon
[23:33:57] Cantrix: http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JaUlmdlubuQ/TrJEPagqvrI/AAAAAAAAA4Q/ve-vb_nMbH0/s1600/KabochaSweetMama.JPG
[00:02:45] Brosencrantz: http://www.beaverandsteve.com/comics/BnS_135.png
[00:06:38] Brosencrantz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:DavyCrockettBomb.jpg
[00:15:48] Brosencrantz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Peshawar_Lancers
[00:24:54] Brosencrantz: Petronel
[00:24:55] Brosencrantz: Jingal
[00:24:56] Brosencrantz: 88
[00:24:58] Brosencrantz: Mannlicher-Carcano
[00:25:04] Brosencrantz: Bofors
[00:44:14] Brosencrantz: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b6/Zonaro_GatesofConst.jpg
[00:49:49] Cantrix: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LF3bM0X_xDY
[00:50:41] Brosencrantz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LqETVk3Oq7g
[00:52:48] Brosencrantz: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wa3eoMnMC80
[01:00:21] Brosencrantz: <3
[01:00:21] Cantrix: <3

I hope this gives an enlightening glimpse into the nature of our relationship.

*

i.
Mrs Shepherd, queen of the Bristol Grammar School library, has an unbelievable rogues’ gallery of authors in her acquaintance (she once taught J.K. Rowling, and scuttlebutt suggests she had some part in inspiring Prof. McGonagall), and through her deftly organised events I had the pleasure of meeting various grand old children’s literature personalities back when I was at BGS – among them Malorie Blackman, Eoin Colfer, Garth Nix, Morris Gleitzman and, best of all, Philip Reeve. Some months ago, one of my old English teachers pinged me on Facebook (yes, I have teachers on Facebook, shut up) to ask if I would be up for helping do an assembly with another author, a chap named Charlie Higson, in June. Mr Higson is one of those blokes who seems to have been everywhere and done everything: singer, comedian, decorator, actor, novelist, writer of various TV comedy things (he was part of the writing team that invented Lods Emone.) But, most recently, coming off the success of his Young Bond books (which I only ever really knew about through my mentor in my old Runescape clan, who went by the handle Young_Bond_4) he’s written a series of stories about a zombie apocalypse where the virus kills or zombifies everyone over the age of 14. And that was the hook upon which he was coming to BGS.

So I said yes, and emailed Mrs Shepherd back and forth about times and details, and not too long later three books about zombies appeared on my doorstep. (Verdict: perfectly tailored to the intended audience of teenage boys who like violence – good pacing, good sense of place, technically competent, in touch with what the yoof o’today like, unsentimental and pull absolutely no punches – but are all basically a series of gruesome bone-crunchin’ pus-squirtin’ murder-themed money-shots, and past the stock zombie-movie moral dilemmas avoid really challenging the reader in any way except the strength of their stomach. Mr Higson explained that he avoids putting in words that children wouldn’t understand. I would have loved them unreservedly if I were ten years younger.)

My active role was on Thursday morning, but I went up on Wednesday afternoon for the public event, with zombie-themed cakes and snacks, including biscuit decorations which actually looked like dried blood, and decorative bowls of jelly full of fingers, eyeballs and maggots (as represented by frankfurters, shallots, and grains of rice) and sat next to a bunch of amusingly enthusiastic boys from Cotham High while Mr Higson did his thing. The next morning, having prepared a couple of questions, I put them to him in front of a sea of young faces. Being very conscious of how much I’d loathed past “In conversation with…” people cracking jokes and pretending the show was about them rather than the author, all I did was ask questions, and it was slightly bizarre feeling like a flunkey who could have been replaced by a piece of paper, but I hope I did a good job. Mr H seemed a bit tense and standoffish beforehand – I got the strong impression that he hated waiting around for things to happen – but once he was on stage, spoke engagingly with total confidence and aplomb. Then he handed out prizes to the winners of a short story competition, and we went down to hobnob with the winners (the grandfather of one of which, having heard me introduced as a War Studies grad, cornered me to tell a round of war stories about the Berlin occupation and about knowing Sir Michael Howard; it was great). In the wait between that and another assembly, Mr H and I chatted briefly about writing, and the wish-fulfillment nature of zombie apocalypses, and so on. He struck me as a thoroughly good egg.

Going back to school is weird. It definitely hasn’t been long enough for me to have any fuzzy nostalgia for an institution which I was mostly indifferent to and a place where I was mostly unhappy, but it’s been long enough for it to change a lot. I don’t know anyone there any more except the staff, and many of those I knew have left or, as in the case of Mr Selwyn (my old year 10 form tutor and a generally brilliant and inspirational man), died. And it still feels terribly strange hearing teachers referred to by their first names. (“How’re you doing, sir?” “Please, it’s Roger now!” “What? No! You’ll always be Mr Cox. Sir.”) But I got to hang out with my wonderful old A-level English teachers, Mrs Maddock and Mrs Yemenakis, and while I won’t pretend that I didn’t find my time there (and my childhood in general) a ceaseless sequence of gagging misery, I also won’t pretend that it’s not a good school with great teachers.

And – holy of holies – I got to actually enter the staffroom and sit there like an adult. All I can say is, there was a lot more cereal than I was expecting.

ii.
About a year ago, back in Birmingham, I was sat at my computer chomping some rather truculent pork scratchings, when I felt a particularly large and painful crunch and found that part of one of my teeth had broken off. There’s a filling in the tooth (right-hand maxillary first molar), and while the filling remained, one side of the now-hollowed-out actual tooth had been levered off. Fortunately there were no exposed nerves, but it’s not fun having a yawning (ha) sharp-edged hole in your tooth, so I found an emergency dentist in Birmingham, rode a bus out to the far side of town, sat in a waiting room for half an hour, and they moulded a new bit of tooth into the hole with cement and I rode home texting godawful tooth puns to Fran. So when, while walking back from Asda chomping some crisps, I felt a particularly large and painful crunch and a yawning (haha) sharp-edged hole in my right-hand maxillary first molar, you could say I knew the drill.

The new NHS 111 line is terribly sensible – you ring it and a human appears to give you advice – but unfortunately the advice the cheerful, helpful chap at the other end gave me wasn’t very good. The first number he gave me wasn’t an NHS place; the second didn’t take emergency patients; the third had a five week waiting list. The fourth came good. Dad kindly drove me to the far side of town, and I sat in a waiting room for three quarters of an hour before a brisk, efficient Teutonic-sounding doctor moulded a new bit of tooth into the hole with cement, and I rode the bus home (no puns though.) It feels much stronger than the Brum one (and was much cheaper!) – hopefully it’ll last more than a year this time…

Among the various fun British things that Mikhail wanted to do before his visa expires and he has to go back to Petrograd (foremost among them going to Edinburgh, which we’re doing tomorrow) was the Bristol-Bath cyclepath, which follows a picturesque branch line decommissioned in the sixties by a swing of Beeching’s axe. Rebuilt as a cyclepath by the first generation of Sustrans, which included my parents, it links the two cities with fifteen miles of well-paved track winding through beautiful countryside and suburban decay.

The weather couldn’t have been better – bright, but breezy enough not to be oppressive. The first leg of the track, leaving Bristol through a long, straight cut shadowed by bridges and lined with the weed-riven ghosts of old stations, was bustling with people: walking dogs or children, commuting into town, or just going for a stroll. But just as we got to the edge of anything that could be considered “Bristol”, Misha’s front tyre went very quickly and dramatically flat; a rather worried phone call home revealed that there was a bike shop in nearby Warmley, and fifteen minutes of walking had us there and getting repaired.

The stations at Bitton and Warmley both used to be inhabited by greasy spoons – proper, solid bacon-bap outlets – but a few years back Bitton went all bijou and upmarket, and Warmley has lately and lamentably decided to copy it. Even worse, at the point we arrived the metamorphosis from cheap, workmanlike catering caterpillar to overpriced affected yuppie butterfly was only halfway complete, so the station was inhabited by a formless goo of an establishment which hadn’t even got its shit sufficiently together to rustle up a gourmet organic panini or some other limp-wristed unfood – just a fridgeful of cans and a freezerful of lollies. So we refilled our water bottles and went on our merry way.

Further on, near Bitton, there’s a great collection of wrecked locomotive guts and gently rusting rolling stock, but while that sort of thing holds a romantic mystique to the average effete young Briton (speaking), you can barely move for wrecked infrastructure and derelict vehicles in Russia, so it probably wasn’t doing much for Misha. (I put this to him: he agreed.)

The last leg into Bath is absurdly beautiful, as the embankment cuts a high, straight, tree-lined path across the flat Avon valley, the river meandering to and fro around and underneath it, and on a sunny day – as this was – the fields on either side fall away in shimmering seas of yellow and green. And then, quite unexpectedly, you happen upon Bath.

Architecturally, Bath is a wonderful oddity: a Regency resort town frozen in time. For two thousand years it’s never served much purpose other than being a spa, for pleasure and relaxation (there’s little clumps of solvent-smelling light industry on the outskirts of the town, mostly out of sight and out of mind), and its height was in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, around the same time the better part of Clifton was built. So everything is built of creamy limestone in grandiose neoclassical Georgian stylin’, with great sweeping terraces and crescents and gratuitous pediments as far as the eye can see; it’s a little monotonous, yes, but it’s also nice to have that uniform baseline attractiveness, rather than the ugly mongrel mess of most British cities, brutalised by Brutalism and defiled by plate-glass (I maintain that while the Luftwaffe were quite often complicit, most of the great post-1939 crimes committed against British cities were done so by architects).

I can’t imagine the level of planning-permission-themed nonsense the city council has had to impose to keep it that way, or how subsequently horrible it must be to actually do anything or run any business that isn’t based on ripping off Anglophiles – the city road network is a nightmarish tangle of one-way bullshit – and I know I wouldn’t want to live there (because I know what living in a Georgian house in the winter is like…) but I’m very glad it exists.

Going on a walk after lunch, in between Equitable Tracing and Equitable Remedies, I saw two cars on my street whose number plates combined to form a controversial and subversive message about musical taste.