June 7

Marcin went to Lucynka's birthday party on the weekend and gave me the following definition of the Polish middle class, based on first hand anthropological research: they have fast cars, designer babies, and they drink wine not spirits. Feeling out of place, he found the other solitary hooligan and proceeded to get obscenely drunk on vodka. I wonder middle class middle aged complacency is what lies in wait for us all, a four wheel drive on the north shore, tea parties on the terrace. Its completely incompatible with the way I think about myself and i torture myself imagining that in 10 years I will have become fat and mumsy, running around to collect the children from tap dance lessons and bullying them into trying out for shampoo commercials while shouting about their giftedness from the rooftops.

Being examined on the rise (and ultimate demise) of Mussolini: all that sticks in mind is that (after all that) he was eventually shot in 1945 and his body hung up on display in an esso service station in the middle of Rome. This is as it should be, since the only reason people are really interested in history is because they (we ) are bloodthirsty perverts who want tales of death and strangeness and are willing to trawl the archives of the past indefinitely in order to get it. No really serious historian minds negotiating referendums, pacts, elections, the writing of constitutions and the coronations of kings, as long as they are rewardedby the discovery of one good concentration camp or a little known horse-fucking Roman despot. Ohhh-rereading this, I don't like my chances of attaining middle class normality, now or ever.