On the Treadmill

For the first time in a decade, my dreams have become more vivid than they ever were. They are full of improbable characters like 60 year old crack addicts accosting me at train stations. Sometimes I'm directing a dead actor, other times I become the animal I'm watching and the perspective is incredible and for every dream I remember a thousand get away and isn't that the way it's always been. The old body is beginning to scream gym gym gym at me and there's time to knock it into shape before the summer makes me a bad advert for t-shirts. Dreams and movies. I think it's all because I've been overdosing on the Wire and being wired on David Simon's excellent TV series has been the best in-house entertainment for ages. A friend's boyfriend down in Clapham found a way of downloading the series as it went out a couple of years ago and religiously kept his copies of a drama so far removed from anything we had ever seen and which spoke volumes about the human condition never mind the black one that it made sense to follow it if only for the great raw writing and obvious superior acting.

Then the week is rudely interrupted by the whingeing calls from a producer who wants to meet and meet and chase this project and that and arrange for a bank meeting and talk to the funders and ask for a page to show the book people why we need to take out an option and by now I'm sufficiently schooled in the dark arts of freelancing to know that deep down he's right to crack the whip like he does but know also that deeper down I need to be lazy to do anything of worth in the long run and that it's like a fermenting process and it's needed to give body to ideas. Bollocks, you don't have time to be precious about stuff at our age we could die just like that. Nice. And so we meet after changing the meeting place only because there's enough city to change our point of view and the Tinderbox has good coffee and makes good soup. I work as much as I can and deliver stuff because it’s easier to write the stuff while it’s there in buckets who knows when the creative drought will come.

The great city is beginning to exude the air of a lack of confidence – what with the daily redundancies the plummeting pound the high divorce rates the feeling that London is no longer the capital of cool but of scrambling financial houses and bankrupt councils is all over the headlines and everywhere I go strangers stop me to talk God and to ask me to do a direct debit into some charity and I say I’m already a member and they go thank you sir like they believe me and it must be the face I have which lets total randomers as my daughter likes to call strangers tell me their life stories. But I don’t mind them as much as I mind the God squad who hang around Oxford Circus these days saying Jesus is coming and have you been saved repent repent and how the fuck do they know I haven’t repented already and churches in South London and North London with their Nigerian or Kenyan preachers are posting millions in profits and since when did God become profitable? Over at a library I like to work in some mullah type is doing the same for the other great religion of our times and I can’t stand them all with their pushy search for other peoples’ souls and maybe some people like their lives to be just so, a silent pact between them and their maker so who needs other peoples' churches and their mosques?

The city is also excited by the imminent arrival of the Orator for the G20 summit and the papers and commentators are abuzz with expectation and ofcourse it’s a great moment in history but if one more person says ‘yes we can’ to me I really am going to AK47 their unoriginal passé butts - why can’t people move on? But then again the man has the talent for saying the most obvious things and the people lap them up as if they’ve never been said before and that's good because conviction is back. I pop into the broadcasters over near Carnaby Street and the boss takes me out for a quick drink and yes times are rough in the broadcasting world lay offs everywhere and every independent is scrounging to keep afloat including great huge companies but don’t worry we’ll get you on air. We are joined by the lovely anchor and knock down some Mexican poison as a way of saying hello and someone asks if I twitter and no I haven’t got round to that. You know you should, it’s more than a fad now it’s about being first with the news wherever you find it. Maybe that's the problem. Everything is fucking news these days from women being mauled by polar bears in a zoo to another suicide bomb in Lahore to pets and priests and paedophiles to celebrities and their armpits to who's shagging who it's all one big compost heap of news fertilizing nothing. I’ve just thought of something, says someone. What’s that. What if you don’t twitter but you twatter? The gutter humour of the day job no doubt.

A call comes through to say I’ve been neglecting my duties as a board member for Africa At The Pictures – the annual film festival showcasing African films here in London and last year it changed its name to the London African Film Festival – and I haven’t attended a meeting since the summer of 2006. Some tiff with the Royal African Society is on the agenda and I sit there bored out of my head and wondering why this unholy union was ever made in the first place and we leave all other business to the next meeting and wander down to the Fitzrovia for some welcome spring ales and it’s rare to be gathered here like this the old and the older and the married and the chronically single and we swap war stories about the city the Congo Burkina Zim and Spain. Dinner at the pasta place off Charlotte street which has a 1970's gringhy charm and I'm sure they only wash the 70's lace curtains but they've never changed them. At another dive old faces appear out of the warm spring breeze and I wonder how we shed friends and then bump into them again and the faces look a little older and no is it really two years this month since I saw you last and it is incredible how time goes but isn't that the buzz of the ride unless you have things to do which are very time sensitive and if only the clock would stop so you can have that baby and finish that novel and do that trip and marry that person tick tock tick the clock don't stop. The old timers who yesterday lost a home in the Africa Centre are still congregating here where the watered down beer is for students and the other perpetual students still doing their Phd's are still there discussing impracticle politics as learned from the media and stubbornly holding on to the theories of Nyerere's 1970's revolution and I find I can stand anybody's company as long as it's in small doses. The marxists says to me he's been here a long time and I say why don't you go home and he says no he doesn't want to he just wants to drink his family can come here and see him. And the more I dig the more I learn he was there at the right hand of some dictator a servant to some ruthless man and now a slave to history sacrificing his liver. Small doses.