The Apple Cemetery

I’ve had to take a break from book culling. 

Having spent yesterday being ruthless in my decisions to keep some books and not others, I started unculling them today. 

What if I woke up one morning desperate for Seamus Heaney and I’d already chucked him? Hmmm. But then I met him once in a Soho pub and he wasn’t very pleasant (he actually slapped my face – not hard, but it was a shock), so he can stay culled. And, having decided to dispense with all poetry (apart from my mate Tony Curtis) on the grounds that I can Google it anytime, suddenly I find myself slowly adding poets back to the “Keep” pile. 

Even though I’m the only person in the house, I’m doing it very furtively, like an alcoholic smuggling a bottle of gin under the sofa in the hope that nobody will notice. I’ve had to uncull Tony Harrison, because I met him once, too, and he was lovely . . . oh, dear – after all that, I’ve just unculled Heaney, on the grounds that the books might be worth something. So I have to stop before I decide that I can’t live without Proust.

   

I’ve now moved on to the Apple Cemetery that is my attic. Almost every Apple computer since the company started is there. Black, turquoise, purple; desktops the size of houses, laptops like handbags, laptops heavier than suitcases – Steve Jobs must be smiling in his grave.

   

It’s made me think how much technology has changed my life. When I began my career as TV Critic on the London Evening Standard in the late Eighties, I had to watch TV live, write my copy longhand and then phone it in to a copytaker at the paper at 7am. Today, I spend most of my time in the States, where I am able to watch TV on anything with a screen just like anyone in the UK, and I’m able to e-mail it straight to the editor.

   

I remember the first time somebody asked me “What’s your e-mail address?” and I berated them for being ridiculous, insisting that such a silly idea would never catch on. Today, when I get on  a plane, at 30,000 feet, I am the voice screaming “Whadderyermean, yer don’t have WiFi?”

   

The uphill task that awaits me in the Apple cemetery is taking the information off the hard drive before I sell the computers. Some of the hard drives are broken (you know who you are, Big Purple Mac), but others store some of my earliest writing. Maybe it’s time to let go of that (like so much else), too.

   

It’s not only the computers in the cemetery. Every piece of software known to Apple mankind seems to there, too. And then are the Dummies guides to those software programmes. Did I ever open one of them? Of course not. Mac OS X Leopard was dead almost as soon as it could run.

   

My electronic life has shrunk in the technical wash. These days, I download more books than I buy, and when I’m travelling (which is a lot), I watch TV and movies on my iPad. Paramedics have to be called when I go into panic mode if I can’t find my iPhone (it’s invariably right next to me, as the bartenders keep pointing out. Thank you, Justin Sigda at Mr Biggs in New York, for being my full-time Apple minder).

   

Bizarrely, while the products have shrunk, the packaging has grown. I could build a church alongside the cemetery with the empty boxes for iPhones, iPads and laptops that still lurk like Mrs Rochester in my attic, ever a fire risk even though their presence has been forgotten long ago. Why did I hold on to them all?

   

Easy. Because they, like Apple products themselves, are works of art: the stiffness of the cardboard, the exquisite print, the slightly bitten Apple logo – every box a tiny eco coffin, a new sculpture to keep safe the perfection within. Alas, my bank manager doesn’t quite see it that way.

   

I’ve been putting the boxes into green recycling bags, from where they look back at me through the transparency with a silent cry of “Why? Why me?” begging for release. When I sealed their fate with a double knot and took them outside ready for refuse collection, it was like saying goodbye to my family, emigrating to the other side of the world.

   

If I’m like that with the boxes, what am I going to be like when it comes to the computers? Maybe I could re-cull Heaney and keep just one small iPhone box? Would that be so very indulgent?

   

No, no, they have to go. But I can’t pretend that this is easy. Everything I touch is a slice of life, good or bad, and already I’m emotionally exhausted. Still, at least I have a computer on which I can play in order to avoid the real business of packing. 

By the day of completion, I suspect I will have a book. Which I can then download to my new iPhone. Oh, come on. You didn’t really think I wouldn’t start making plans for another cemetery, did you? 

Steve Jobs may be dead, but my Apple body count lives on.

   

Pining for Love

Men and pine furniture: the two things responsible for my habitual moving. 

It was the purchase of this small forest that set the ball rolling, and I was doomed never to recover. If I hadn’t bought that damned pine furniture, I wouldn’t have had the quandary of where to put it when I broke up with Carl, wouldn’t have moved it to Soho and had my heart broken by Phil, wouldn’t have moved it to Cardiff and started up with Steve, and wouldn’t still be stuck with it by myself in Cardiff over 25 years on at the age of 57, hoping that pine, like avocado-coloured bathroom suites, might make a comeback.

   

I was living in Belsize Park, in my first mortgaged home, and Carl was a fellow critic on a national newspaper and had been living with his girlfriend of seven years, Jane, who was trying to get pregnant. Carl didn’t like the fact that she was so fat and said that he would like to have a child with me. We were talking about a seriously unavailable man here.

   

I was still hung up on Alan, a manic-depressive who went into hibernation for six months at a time. I knew it was over when, adopting the Florence Nightingale approach during one of these dark periods, I sent him, by taxi, a spinach, rice and cheese bake (Delia Smith recipe) I had baked for him, a bottle of Burgundy, a cone of Swiss chocolates I had bought for him during the Montreux Comedy Festival and, for reasons I have yet to understand, a 12 foot inflatable skeleton. I paid the driver an extra £20 for his trouble, although he had to leave everything on the doorstep (including the fully inflated skeleton) because, he informed me by phone later, there was no reply at the door. The day after, I received a message on my answer machine, in painfully flat tones: “Hello, this is Alan. Thank you for my present. Goodbye.” 

This really isn’t going anywhere, I thought.

   

I thought I was in love with Carl and the intensity was extraordinary: endless phone-calls, incessant declarations of love, the strange comfort of late afternoon fog, hand in hand, walking his dog on Primrose Hill; fingers clasped across dining tables, resentful of the cutlery that separated them even for an instant. And I remember the seeming timelessness of passion.

    

There were only two down sides for me (apart from the obvious one of him living with someone else). One was the hideous green and yellow jug in the shape of a duck that Carl gave me for my 30^th birthday. A china duck is not romantic. 

   

The other was that I had to keep hearing different versions of his columns. I would receive a phone-call in which he gave me version one, then he would arrive at my apartment with version two, then I would get a phone-call with version three before he filed it to his newspaper. He once dragged me out of bed when I was sick with tonsillitis to have me sit on his lap while he read me his column straight off the computer. On the one occasion I went to his house, I had to hear not only his columns, but every piece of music he had ever written; I was even required to admire the enormous Heal’s table on which said his music was composed. Then he started to bring me tapes of said music, too.

   

He also became ill, still claiming that he wanted to leave Jane, but never knowing the right time to tell her. We met almost every day, in restaurants and bars all over London. Carl acquired a facial rash as a result of the stress and, sympathetic as I was, dermatology wasn’t an aphrodisiac as far as I was concerned, and neither were the flakes of skin he used to leave on my pillow. So after just five months, we decided that we wanted to put an end to the trauma and be together. Before he told Jane, we went apartment hunting, Carl expressing a need to have his own study and also a garden for his dog. 

Quite why I put down the entire deposit myself and also one month’s advance rental on the place we chose, is anybody’s guess. Carl also said he liked pine furniture, and off I went to buy up half of Camden Pine (again, without him contributing a penny towards the woodpile money). Having rented out my own apartment and moved into the three-bedroom maisonette we found in Hampstead’s Steele’s Road, I waited for Carl to inform Jane that he was leaving her. I predicted that she would ask him to stay for three months to try to work things out.

   

She did. Bells started to ring when he told me that he still intended to leave, but he thought it decent to hang on to give her time to lose enough weight so that she would be attractive enough to meet someone else. This was the Notre Dame of bell-rings.

    

It ended for good on 3^rd March 1989. Carl told me that there was a lot more low-fat yoghurt in the fridge and that he had started to feel closer to Jane again. I was upset but relieved. I didn’t want to hang around for three months in some kind of diet reality show. I put down the phone in the middle of the conversation after telling him so.

   

I could no longer afford the new rent and so when the tenant in my own apartment did a runner, I returned there. One problem: there just wasn’t room for the pine. So, having always harboured a desire to live in Soho, I rented an apartment in Brewer Street: not for me to live in full-time (Belsize Park was still my main residence) but to house the pine furniture. Having bought it for such a ridiculous price and also feeling it held a certain sentimental value, I could not bear to part with it. Renting a second little home for us both seemed, strangely, like the more cost-effective option. 

It would prove to be just one of many bizarre twists of logic I would apply throughout my life in relation to moving.

   

As it happened, the pine - or, rather, the location of the pine - proved to be a sexual magnet for my next conquest, Phil, a TV presenter. And so began another romance in the brown shadows which, by now, had cost me around ten grand. 

As I look around the Cardiff house I am selling, I know that it’s finally time to chop down the pine forest, along with the the grain of every man in it, and send it to the great wood chipper in the sky.