Sept 9th – A man and a woman had a little baby. Yes, they did. They had three in the family, that’s a magic number.

Indoctrination and brainwashing by the Scientologists must be a pretty unpleasant process – the -lite version delivered by ordinary scientists is bad enough. Mine began one September many moons ago, pre-digitalisation. That first lesson and the homework that followed it, has always stayed with me. We were required to search out some standard household items once we got home, then subject them all to some ‘physics’. Oooh. Did flour/sugar/salt dissolve quicker if you stirred it? Or applied heat? Of course it did, who didn’t know that already?

I have never been able to let go of that lesson – the patronising idiocy of it, marking the first step on the road of science. My dad, the scientist, helped me with the assignment, not because I’d asked, but I suppose because he saw it as a rite of passage of parenthood – hand-holding through the first few faltering steps on the way to assuming the role of stable, achieving, genius. So there, in my memories he stands, alongside the cove, Halsom, as they watch and judge me through my daily conflicts with physics. For some reason there is a third person present too – a sort of amalgam of McSweeney-Sod and Mankey-Bones, sometimes one, sometimes the other, mostly McSweeney; occasionally a hybrid of the two odd fellows. Those other two are there for a variety of reasons. For one, both of them were social friends of Halsom and my father; golf club colleagues, and revolving participants in that strange ritual of a males-only weekly drink that was part of the structure of life back then.

Sod presented to me, at the age of fourteen, as a truly ignorant prick. Later, when it came to preparing for Oxford and Cambridge entrance exams, guess who I got to coach me? And guess what that coaching consisted of? A weekly essay, which, the following week, (all these sessions took place during a weekly fifteen-minute slot in ‘his’ lunch hour) was handed back with no other note than, ‘Yes, there were some quite interesting ideas in there.’ He also took us in our (scheduled, non-lunchtime) weekly ‘scholarship’ class, designed for the same purpose, where he would scare us to death with stories of the unbelievable intellect, of some of our opponents for places, and of the impossibility, for students like us, of being able to provide plausible answers to questions like, ‘Could God make a bowl of porridge that is too big for him to eat?’ without ‘special training’. That’s right, it wasn’t much like The History Boys would have you believe.

As fourteen-year-olds, he took us for maths. A doddle for him, since we all found maths easy, and each of us bagged two A’s, in two different disciplines of the subject, a year before anyone else in our year had sat a single exam. Nevertheless, he treated us like the same robotic dolts that he knew himself to be. Particularly me. He would single me out in lessons to answer routine questions, or he’d scrutinise my homework so closely that he’d be able to cross examine me on minute aspects of it in front of everyone, as he handed the marked copies back to us. Things like, ‘Why did the ink on your homework run feint towards the middle, then change?’ Honestly, he did. ‘Err, perhaps it was because I changed pens when one started running short of ink, you nasty prick?’

As is the way for the put upon, bullied and despised, rather than fight back, you come to accept accusations and implied assertions of dishonesty, as the right of the interrogator who has identified a weakness in a legitimate target. It’s only recently that I’ve worked out how it was that he came by these out of character insights into my bad attitude.

So, there’s him, mainly him, my father and Halsom, and get this, they always appear like a conclave of cardinals, or perhaps it’s an Oxford entrance interview panel, every time I start to cook. The moment I turn on the hob, one of them pipes up, ‘Watch him, he’ll put it to 9 without thinking, then turn it down to the right temperature, instead of doing it the proper way.’ Then another would say, ‘That’s not how you finely chop onions.’ And so they go, each egging on the other with their destructive criticism of my daily, physics-meets-food, science forum.

They no longer get to me in the way that they once did. But that they’re still here at all, I find a gross impertinence – much like they did when I turned up at school expecting to be taught; or at home, and just assumed I’d be nurtured because I lived there. I remind them that I know more about culinary matters than they collectively have ever known, then I tell them that they are dead and no longer cared about – if they ever were, and that I am living my life free from their malign indifference.

If I ever stop to have an extended chat with them, sometimes I tell them that they failed in the one thing that they devoted their lives to, that of mentoring the young souls in their care – unless of course, they saved all their bad work just for me, I say. I can’t count how many times they have been told that they have lost the right to be present in my life, but they still turn up the next time the hob is turned on, and the ring is switched to 9 – or 4 depending on how angry I am with them.

This has all come flooding back now since I began to earn my bed and board at Friend John’s uncle’s house, Chew-Chew, by serving as cook and housekeeper. When I say bed, it’s a straw stall in a barn, and when I say board, it’s what we can salvage from the cooking, for Chew-Chew, despite indications to the contrary, is no gastronome, and we live on meagre fayre. My cooking, as a consequence, has become more about taste than quantity. Today, for example, I melted down a cough sweet and two liquorice gums to their liquid essence, then dripped it onto a grilled fish which we’d found dead by the side of the river. As it happens, the licor-essence as I described it, saved the day, and we got a rare smile out of Chew as he sucked and grinded his way through his main – no sides.

We were still laughing about it as we set our beds for the night amongst the animals. It reminded me of that joke where there are two blokes in their local pub which has recently changed hands, and where, though a series of contrivances, end up snorting dry, powdered, white dog shit, in the belief that it’s cocaine, then, chiefly through a perceived improved sense of smell, start telling everyone how heightened their senses have become, and how good the cocaine is. It took about three hours between my poor Russian and his English, to get through it, but it was all the better for that.

Though when we finally bedded down for the night, I couldn’t get the Unholy Trinity out of my mind, and the story we’d just shared, took me back to that so damaging nadir of their reign. Unprepared, and incapable, I went into my Oxford entrance exam in a hopeless state of resignation, and on the wrong end of a massive spliff, which I’d used in the vain quest to retrieve lost inspiration – that something hidden in my unconscious would deliver novel ideas to an attendant intellect, dreadfully short on facts. As the clock ticked down to what would turn out to be my life’s pivotal moment, I became increasingly obsessed with those aphoristic, conundrum questions which I now knew to be deft mechanisms to reveal undisputed genius, and which, Sweeney-Sod had warned us off so vehemently; imagining that a single moment of inspiration about one of them, might still yet save the day.

So on that day, the one where, for the first time ever in my life I looked at an exam paper and had no clue how to answer any question on it, I decided that to tackle one of those oneiric questions, was my only hope of salvation. There’s an apocryphal anecdote, which had been many times repeated by Sod, which went, when confronted by the question, ‘What is courage?’ a fledgling genius, who had been given different training to us, answered simply, ‘This is.’ And wrote no more. I was incapable of writing a paragraph, let alone three essays, and needed to emulate.

I thought that the eternal shame of that moment had seen me dismiss from my mind, the question which provided the inspiration for my stab at immortality, but I recall it now, I think. It was, ‘What is the difference between James Joyce and Samuel Beckett?’ I think it was that. I, stoned, decided that I had to prove to the examiner the depth and intensity of my talents in the pithiest way possible, I toyed for a moment with writing, “Joyce is God, and Beckett is Jesus.” But in the semi-paranoid, out-of-it, state I was in, I couldn’t tell whether that was trite or not; or whether, if acceptable, it required further justifying analysis; or if it was just plain insulting to people of certain sensibilities – perhaps the type who’d eventually interview you, and who’d know far more about the whole notion you’d just implied, when everything you knew about the subject, was laid bare in that single sentence. Whether it was transparently unfunny and not clever? Eventually, I decided that it was no, ‘This is,’ moment, and began again.

These moments are where the blessed suddenly find hidden reserves to call upon but I knew in my heart of hearts, in between the waves of euphoria and cycles of self-doubt, that flashes of genius are always that – a single moment of inspiration that comes out of the ether and lands on your tongue, or pen. Whatever. Yet, despite this, I devoted the entire three hours of the exam to coming up with a succinct sentence that dispelled all possible notions that I could not be gifted.

In the end I wrote this. And, so shaming, so damaging, is it, as I keep saying, I find it hard, even now, to write the words on a page for everyone else to see. I wrote:

Whereas Beckett is this, Joyce is this.

I loved the symmetry of the statement, and the way it suggests that they were, in most senses, of one school. But what you can’t see here, and where I delivered the clue to the examiner that he was dealing with a genius, who needed just a little coaxing and mentoring to see him flower into that thing which so few other people could presently see, is the physical construction of the sentence.

Whereas Beckett got a mere, normal, ‘surface’ comma after his this, Joyce got a full stop. And not just a full stop, but one which, with my 2H pencil, I made go deep into the page, almost, but not quite, making a hole in it. The point being perfectly obvious to someone as wasted as I was, that Joyce re-wrote the rules of grammar and writing, so he should get his own, 3D full stop. A single piece of punctuation so intense, with such depth and resonance, so worthy of study in its own right – like a brand-new word that does just the job it’s designed to, that only another genius could see it for what it was.

I wish I hadn’t told you now. I’m going to have to think about it all night. Forever, maybe.

Except at meal times, when I’ll be preparing the next meal – (I pre got-to-love-you, if you will ;- that’s a phonetic joke for my Russian friends, please ignore if it doesn’t make sense)))).