Therapy

Sally is the ethical type, whereas I’m the aesthetic type — except that I believe in marriage, so the cap doesn’t quite fit. And where does Kierkegaard himself stand? Is he A or B, or both, or neither? Is he saying that you must choose between A’s philosophy and B’s, or that whichever you choose you will regret it?
    Reading Kierkegaard is like flying through heavy cloud. Every now and again there’s a break and you get a brief, brilliantly lit view of the ground, and then you’re back in the swirling grey mist again, with not a fucking clue where you are.
     
    Monday evening. According to an encylopaedia I’ve just looked up, Kierkegaard came to think that the aesthetic and the ethical are only stages on the way to full enlightenment, which is “religious”. The ethical seems to be superior to the aesthetic, but in the end proves to be founded on nothing more substantial. Then you have to throw yourself on God’s mercy. I don’t much like the sound of that. But in making that “leap”, man “finally chooses himself’. A haunting, tantalizing phrase: how can you choose yourself when you already are yourself? It sounds like nonsense, yet I have an inkling of what it might mean.
     
    Sally signalled that she is still pissed off with me by declining to watch The People Next Door tonight, claiming she was too busy. It’s a Monday night ritual, when the show is on the box, that we sit down at nine o’clock and watch it together. It’s a funny thing, but however familiar you are with a TV programme before it’s transmitted, having written the script, attended rehearsals, watched the recording and seen a VHS tape of the final edited version, it’s always different when you watch it being actually transmitted. Knowing that millions of other people are watching it at the same time, and for the first time , changes it somehow. It’s too late to alter it or stop it, and that imparts an edge to the experience. It’s a faint replica of what happens in the theatre when you do your show in front of an audience for the first time. Every Monday evening as the last commercial before the programme freezes and fades on the screen, and the familiar theme tune strikes up over the tide sequence, I feel my pulse quickening. And absurdly I find myself willing the cast on as if they were performing live, mentally urging them to get the most out of their lines and sight gags, though rationally I know that everything, every syllable and pause, every nuance of voice and gesture, and the responses of the studio audience, are already fixed and unalterable.
    Sally gave up reading my scripts in draft years ago — or perhaps I gave up showing them to her: it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. She never much liked the basic concept of The People Next Door, and didn’t think it would catch on. When it was a runaway success she was pleased of course, for my sake, and for the sake of the lolly that started gushing through the letterbox as if we’d struck oil in the back garden. But, typically, it didn’t shake her faith in her judgement in the least. Then she started to work so hard at her own job that she really had no time or energy to spare for reading scripts, so I stopped bothering her with them. In fact it’s more useful to me to have her watch the programmes not knowing what’s coming next. It gives me an idea of how the other 12,999,999 viewers are reacting, if I multiply her appreciation by a factor of about eight. When Sally gives a chuckle, you can bet they’re falling off their chairs and wetting themselves all over the country. But tonight I had to sit through the show in glum silence, on my own.
     
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    Tuesday afternoon, 2nd March. To Alexandra today. She had a cold, and a stuffed-up nose which she kept blowing ineffectually like somebody learning to play the cornet. “Excuse me for mentioning it,” I said, “but you’ll give yourself sinus trouble if you blow your nose like that. I had a yoga teacher once who showed me how to clear my nose, one nostril at a time.” I demonstrated, by pressing a finger against one side of my schnozzle, then against the other. Alexandra smiled weakly and thanked me for the advice. It’s the one thing about yoga that’s really stayed with me. How to blow your nose.
    Alexandra asked me how I’d been in the last week. I told her about the kerfuffle over the future of The People Next Door. She asked me what I was going to