I am still not in the UK where I am meant to be. I am trying to fit the pieces of my life together so when I finally leave I can feel safe things wont fall apart whilst I am away.
I am in the doldrums. I can’t wait to get home to see friendly faces, hear familiar accents, wash the last few months of indecision, lost love and tales of ordinary madness into the Swale.
No longer in love my cupboards fill with chocolate. I look at myself in the mirror and realize that I got what I wished for..the invisible man stares back at me. Yet, saying this, this morning I was full of hope. I sat in acceptance and said so out loud.
The little dog and I have not climbed Runyon for days and this is partly because my back twinges and I am scared that it will fail me again like it did earlier this year and I will have to sit in bed for a week unable to move without excruciating pain.
There isn’t much to report. I am not allowed to write about my trip home in case I say/write things that upset the man I am travelling with. Needless to say there are good times on the horizon though I am not sure if my companion will enjoy the whirlwind exploration of things past. My past. I am getting to show someone I care about the locations I love including the place where, in this now half over life, I experienced as a child a moment of total freedom that, strangely, I never really experienced again. It is this place that I want to visit most and ultimately end up under the elder, hawthorn and the sycamore of my youth.
I linger in depression when I am alone then, when people knock at my door, all at once I am happy and content. I know that I am going home to very friendly faces, to the great loves and the equally magnificent disappointments of the past half a century.
I am dreaming eager like a ghost through the Sunday drag shows of the Vauxhall Tavern, the streets of London, the parks and moribund locations of my youth.
There are people I must see who are essential to reconnect with if, as I plan, I am to remain at peace with myself. A smile on my face.
Dennis Hopper died this week. I spent a few afternoons/evenings with Hopper in Bucharest when I was directing the ill-fated Method..a truly ghastly film. We were staying in the Marriott and would sit in the marble bar with hookers, actors and gamblers. The entire cast of the film Modigliani including Andy Garcia, Udo Kier and Miriam Margolyes.
During one odd excursion we sat in a darkened screening room and watched the last few moments of the lives of Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena who were executed by firing squad in 1989. I remember her suburban coat and the way she fell. Bullets into their bodies. Hopper was unmoved. The next time we bumped into each other was at a pre Oscar do at Barry Diller‘s. He told me that rather than being unmoved he was shocked that the man who showed us the footage (the owner of Media Pro film studios) was so gleeful.
The Ceausescu were the last people to be executed in Romania before the abolition of capital punishment in 1990.
Louise Bourgeois died this week. Another colorful character from my past. The very same week I sold one of the two works I owned by her. The auction of some of my art collection went very well.
I had, it seems, invested wisely.