Going, Going ...

I’ve got Pure, by Andrew Miller lined up to read next. I read his first novel, Ingenious Pain, about ten years ago. Here’s what I remember about that – it was a period novel about, I’m pretty sure, a man who couldn’t feel pain. And I enjoyed it. That’s it, that’s all I can tell you about that highly thought-of, prize-winning book. I might as well not have read it. The same goes for pretty much every novel I read these days, and every film I see for that matter, good or bad, they fade, they disappear like a photo left in the sunlight. So what’s the point? Is it just about the pleasure in the moment?

It would be good if reading a book was more like listening to music, more of a sensory experience. It’s easy to remember a loved piece of music, even easier to remember a gig. Listening to The Pretenders play Brass in Pocket at the Marquee, The Specials at the Lyceum, The Clash at Lewisham Odeon. I saw some good gigs. Hearing Beethoven’s Violin Concerto on a friend’s car cassette player as he drove me away from the hospital on a sunny day in 1982. I remember the sounds, sights, textures of those experiences, I associate layers of feelings with them.

But books? Films? Slipping away. Going, going, gone. Shards and tatters of memory, twisting and turning as they vanish, dwindling, out of reach. I used to review books. For the TLS, The Spectator, Kaleidoscope on Radio 4. Couldn’t tell you much about those same books now. In an ideal world, memory would be a resource, something you could turn to, file through, like your own personal Wikipedia. You consult a memory, examine it, and find it in some way helpful. Maybe I should work harder at it, make lists of books I’ve read, even a few notes about each one. Is that a bit weird though, a bit anal? It makes life sound like an exam for which you’re being continuously assessed. Our tastes may create us, but that doesn’t mean we have to remember every step along the way. Maybe it’s enough that a book retains a resonance, an emotional weight. Something lingers. 

That title, Going, Going - it's from a Philip Larkin poem, right? One that's actually got nothing to do with memory. I haven't checked, but I'm pretty sure ...

The Dark

My second novel, The Alchemist, explores the strange evolution that makes children into adults, and suggests that what we accept as normal life is subject to radical change, beyond our control. I could trace in it aspects of my own life, which have been creatively processed, but I don’t really want to try. There’s probably nothing to be gained, and possibly something to be lost, in too thorough an examination. I wrote a short story a few years ago, in which a man walks out of his job, finds his relationships with people beginning to fracture, and spends his nights out in the garden digging holes. I liked it without quite knowing what it was all about, until someone, well Ian McEwan actually, suggested it was a writer, leaving his structured, ordered life and, for no obvious reason, digging in the dark. That rang true. I like the dark aspect, the delving and exploring and fumbling and tripping over but picking yourself up and carrying on, not always knowing what you’re up to or where you’re going, till you step back and think ‘Ah, got it, that’s what this is about.’ Sometimes it's much more planned and self-conscious, but it’s that dark aspect, that makes it fun and mysterious and frustrating occasionally but exciting too. 

A Chinese Summer

So along came, in 1988 when I was 25, my first novel, A Chinese Summer. It was about the aftermath of a relationship, about a young man who gets cancer, and about a movement from depression and isolation towards a sense of community and belonging in the personal and in the wider world. Like many first novels it was a short, first-person piece in which the narrator was the same sex and the same sort of age as the writer. And lived in the same place as the writer, and travelled on the same trains, and shared some of the same experiences. But he wasn’t the writer. No, honestly. He was like the writer, but he reacted to things differently, he was a bit over the top about things, and he saw things differently, in a more heightened way.

I was just reading Lindsay Clarke on this. He suggested we use story to convert experience into something with meaning and value. It's the way we pass from feeling into meaning. Makes sense to me. Anyway, I don’t think it’s possible to choose not to use your experience. It tends to be what you care about, what’s central to you. It’s not just what has happened to you, it’s also what has helped to make you who you are. Throw in a vast mixture of events, and the emotions they give rise to, add nature, as well as nurture, and personality, which perhaps has some sort of core content, irreducible, put all those together and some weird alchemy makes an adult out of a child. And in my case, because I’d always wanted to be a writer, as long as I could remember, part of that process was writing a novel. That sounds like it got coughed up - whoops, there it is. No, it was crafted, lovingly, sentence by sentence, beat by beat, and also it was consciously, ambitiously, a step on the way to becoming a writer. Experience, craft, ambition, heart. Those are good ingredients. 

1988. It’s history now, isn’t it?

Big Snakes

My mate asked last night, (over sloe gin and Scrabble), if he could have my kids' hamster, after it died, to feed to his kids' snake. Blimey. Wasn't sure they'd be up for that, especially six year old Son. (Him of the forks and scorpions, below.) I could see him being unsettled and confused by it. Is this what happens to all dead creatures? What about aged relatives? Are they fed to a big snake when they die? No, not too sure about that. If we did it, we'd have to have a ceremonial burial, then follow it with a moonlit, Burke and Hare style exhumation. Take the corpse to the reptile. Midnight feast. Of course, worms, snakes, what's the difference in the end? Circle of life, etc. I told him I'd think about it. Drank some more gin.

Jerusalem

So Jerusalem was wonderful, not disappointing at all. Maybe a tiny bit overlong, in that final third, but basically I loved it. Traffic wardens, giants and Rooster Byron as a sort of ruined reincarnation of St George or King Arthur, funny and surprising and shot through with a deep thrum of melancholy, which is something I always respond well to, because life is shot through with a deep thrum of melancholy too, isn’t it? Along with joy, you’d hope, and surprises, and a forward-looking drive towards, you know, something. And a good sprinkling of contentment. But Jerusalem, yes, it wasn’t all about that central performance, but still, Mark Rylance was brilliant. I wasn’t sitting there admiring him, admiring the craft, I just believed it. Lovely stuff. Plus the Courtauld Gallery, and catching up with family and friends … all good. And I’m looking forward to Hugo in 3D. And Dr Who this year, from the look of the trailer, it looks pretty good, doesn’t it?
And, as a nice bonus, got home to find a review of The Last Word in The Guardian.  

http://bit.ly/uYc3za

'A lobster quadrille of tentativeness' ... exactly what I was shooting for, obviously.

Slippage

Feeling better now. Been grappling with an episode, not getting it right (apparently), feeling frustrated and worried ... but now it's done, and satisfaction seems to be in the air, and look, it's December, Christmas has moved from a vague shape on the horizon right into view, a jaunty boat with colourful sails and a crew full of elves drunk on Baileys ... I'm going to give up that metaphor. What am I most looking forward to between now and Christmas? Going to London to see family and friends, and, especially, to see Jerusalem. It’s had fantastic reviews, Mark Rylance is supposed to be stunning, have I imagined it or did I see the phrase ‘once in a generation’ somewhere? So obviously, it’s likely to be disappointing. Maybe Rylance will be like Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York, over the top, mannered and frankly a bit panto. Maybe he’ll be bravura, like Anthony Sher swinging around on his crutches in Richard III, so you admire and enjoy it, but you aren’t fully engaged, don’t quite believe it. Maybe. Either way, I’m expecting slippage between anticipation and the event. Because I’m a bit of a gloomy git. I’m Paul Giamatti in Sideways (which I saw again a couple of days ago - fantastic), not Thomas Haden Church. But, but, but … still capable of taking pleasure from anticipation, from actual experience, and from memory, because it’s London, family and friends and a play, what’s not to like? And then it’s Christmas, more family, and food and drink and presents and Dr Who. Although Dr Who last year, that giant, floating shark, it was rubbish, wasn’t it?

I Hope It's Forks

My son’s thinking of an animal. So far I’ve managed to establish it has less than four legs.

‘Two?’

‘No.’

OK, maybe he’s thinking of a snail. ‘Just one leg?’

‘No.’

‘It has three legs?’

‘Yes.’

‘No animal has three legs.’

‘This one does.’

We go back on forth on this for a while, but he’s insisting all the time that he's right. Finally, like he’s getting really frustrated with how dim I am, he’s shouting -

‘It has three legs! Three on each side!’

‘OK, we’re getting somewhere. So is it very small, like an ant?’

‘No, it’s very big.’

‘A very big animal with six legs?’

Turns out, eventually, it’s a scorpion. Which has eight legs. My son’s not too bothered about whether it’s an insect, an arachnid or indeed a mammal. He has a thoughtful look in his eyes now.

‘Which d’you think there’s more of in the world,’ he says. ‘Scorpions, or forks?’

Lumb Bank

It’s an eighteenth century mill owner’s house on a long grassy terrace halfway down a valley outside Heptonstall, West Yorkshire. Across the valley you’ve got the hillside, covered with trees and heather, and then down in the valley it’s just seething with trees in every shade of green. Mill chimneys poking up out of the foliage, looking like they’ve always been there.

My Dad was there first, as a student, in the 80’s. I turned up in 1990, tutoring a Starting to Write course. 16 students, two tutors, living together from Monday to Saturday, workshops and one to one tutorials. I was there again the following year, tutoring a school, and then I lived there for three years, with my then girlfriend now wife, we were running the place as Centre Directors. The job wore us down in the end - being nice to people every week, it wears you out - but we never got tired of the place. I’ve been back many times over the years as a tutor and a guest reader, most recently last week, tutoring a lovely Starting to Write a Novel course with Patrick Neate. It’s one of my favourite places in the world.

Every room has memories, every corner of every room, layers of memories. When I’m there, I feel like trailing my hands along the walls, picking them up through touch, through smell, through the sound of pens on paper or dishes clattering in the kitchen or people talking somewhere. A reading silencing everyone; a room full of people laughing during a workshop; the party we had the night we got married, the room full of our closest friends; crossing the garden, heading back to the cottage after a reading, beneath a big sky, seeing shooting stars, a hedgehog, hearing the low white noise of the river. And standing there, by the low wall, looking out at the view, in every season, at every time of day and most times of night, just looking.

Twenty Questions

I’ve just done an interview on Steve May’s always intriguing blog.

http://thesecondbesttime.blogspot.com/

20 questions about this and that. Zombies, The Last Word, Emmerdale, Angela Carter - the usual sorts of things I guess. Which makes me think I could do a whole blog entry on meeting famous people, because I have run into a few over the years. It would be about how rubbish I am at it. Angela was an exception, because it wasn’t a social meeting, it had a context, she was reading my stuff and criticising it. And then if I did meet her socially after that I felt like I knew her, and it was fine. It was very nice, in fact. Others though … just awkward. Embarrassed smiles, sidelong glances, blushes, tongue-tied responses. It sounds like a shy boy meeting a girl, doesn’t it? You have to pity famous people I guess, if they get that reaction very much. What are you supposed to do when faced by it? Still. I’m older now. I might be better at it if it happens again. Although I didn't do very well with William Boyd (July 09.) Maybe I'd be better just to avoid them ...

If ...

If I hadn't been ill I'd have gone to Manchester University instead of UCL. I wouldn't have met my future wife. I might not have entered the Time Out/Whitbread competition I stumbled on in my second year, so my first story wouldn't have been published. I wouldn't have had the editor of the LRB as a tutor, so my second story might not have been published there, nor my third which got into Fiction magazine because an agent saw my second in the LRB. I went to UEA partly because a mate who had a cricket match there picked up an application form for me, because of those three stories on my CV, and because of a good reference from another tutor, Dan Jacobson. Perhaps without all those factors I wouldn't have got there either. I wouldn't have written my first novel. Illness gave me a subject, a structure and a style for A CHINESE SUMMER. It gave me a bank of memories, impressions and sensations to draw on, and it gave me a mood-flavoured point of view which gave the novel it's voice.

It's like one of those episodes of Star Trek where they encounter a temporal anomaly, and find out how things might have been. I wonder about this life I didn't lead, those gaping holes it would have left. Would they have been filled by something I'd be equally sorry to lose? I doubt it, but then I would, wouldn't I?

The 1000 Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

Finished it. The last third is as good as anything he’s done, which is to say very good indeed. He habitually writes in short stories, linked short stories presented as novels, like my last book, TENDER. 1000 Autumns is essentially three novellas, the first weak, the second an improvement, and the third excellent. So, a qualified recommendation. But there’s a humanity underpinning his writing, a belief that honesty and kindness are the best options in human relationships, that I find very attractive. He's not interested in cheap, attention-grabbing tricks, melodrama introduced to make the plot work, or as an excuse for some purple prose, his stories are inventive and surprising, the ideas bubbling beneath them are always at least interesting, his language is beautiful and distinctive, his characters engaging and his research – which I was a bit snippy about below – unsurpassed. And they're about to start filming his masterpiece, CLOUD ATLAS, I believe. Films of books, that's a whole different discussion ...

Edinburgh

Up on stage. Dragged up on stage by an unusual comedian at the Edinburgh Festival, in front of maybe 300 people, squinting into the dazzle, trying to smile, wondering what’s happening to my lips. It was embarrassing of course, but fun too, even while I was up there I was enjoying it, it was memorable. That was The Boy With The Tape on His Mouth, a man doing an hour’s show with his mouth taped up, using mime and physical comedy and the audience; child-like, playful, sophisticated, bit of Tati, one of my highlights. The other would be A Slow Air by David Harrower, lovely play at the Traverse, about family, a brother and a sister, estrangement, something I always seem to be looking at in my fiction, beguiling. And the wonderful story-telling of The Man Who Planted Trees, with the very funny dog puppet, the surprising and engaging kids’ show, Boxes and Bubblewrap, Michael Morpurgo doing his gentle, moving thing in Private Peaceful, and Neil Gaiman at the Book Festival, being pleasant and interesting, though I’d have liked to hear him read.

So that was a success. Daughter desperate to return next year. Son a little more luke-warm, a little less surprised by it all. Walking down the Royal Mile among tightrope walking jugglers, fire-eaters, strangely dressed performers accosting us to hand out fliers, he’s earnestly asking me, Who would win in a fight between Caligula and Blackbeard?

In other news, The 1000 Autumns of Jacob de Z … a bit disappointing. I love David Mitchell, but I’m not enjoying this very much. Jacob de Z’s a bit dull, the thriller story of the second part’s an improvement but not very thrilling and with a predictable (inevitable?) twist. Just beginning the third part. When you admire the visuals on a Pixar film, you know there’s something wrong with the story. Here, I’m admiring the research.

Riots

It’s poverty, it’s bad parenting, it’s police harassment, it’s failed education, it’s lack of aspiration, it’s lack of discipline, it’s the glamorisation of criminals, it’s adults spending too much time trying to be like cool kids instead of showing kids how to be like adults, it’s defining people by consumerism then denying them consumer goods, it’s straightforward greed, it’s gangs of criminals, it’s the cult of self-esteem, it’s lack of role models, it’s the closure of youth clubs, it’s all a bit depressing. Hard to imagine a way back from this. It would take enlightened, longterm work by politicians who weren't going to be influenced by unpopularity, looming elections or the Daily Mail, who were dedicated to perceptive, compassionate, hard-headed policies aimed at improving all the above. Like I say, hard to imagine.

A Different Life

So, after February 1982 (see below) there were about two years where my life was arranged by illness. Chemotherapy, knee replacement, physiotherapy, radical surgery. What does it mean, to be ill? It means being a step back, being passive while other people do things to you, and for you. Doctors and nurses clustered round me, prodding me, examining me, made me feel important. Or they left me alone, walked past, checked a chart without a word, made me feel neglected, ignored. Powerless, either way. I lay in my hospital bed and watched somebody die in the bed opposite, and I was sad and scared while watching it, but grateful to be there, to witness it. I lay there while friends and family visited. I lay there and craned my neck so that I could look out of a window at what was going on in the street outside. I sat in other people’s cars as they drove me to and from the hospital, and looked out at what was happening in the ordinary, breathing world. You’re behind a window a lot, or feel like you are, looking out at life going on elsewhere.

Once a friend called Robin drove me away on a morning when I couldn’t have chemo because my blood count wasn’t right. We drove up the hill out of the hospital, on a beautiful sunny morning, and he put Beethoven’s violin concerto on, and it felt like the world couldn’t be more perfect than this: being driven away from hospital by a friend, in sunlight, with the music playing, and not having chemo. Your values are rearranged when you’re ill. You’ve entered a different world with different rules and when you leave it – if you leave it – you’re changed.

That period has influenced everything since, has made me a different person. I’m more or less with Nietzche on this:

As far as concerns my own sickness, am I not infinitely more indebted to it than to my health? It is to my sickness that I owe a higher health.

OR: What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.

(I haven't read Nietzche, I heard the first quote in a lecture, and saw the second at the beginning of Conan the Barbarian. It seemed clever to me at the time, and apt, since I was in the midst of illness, but it’s become a cliché, and lost it’s power. Thanks, John Milius.)

I try not to be romantic about it. If I could keep the change but lose the experience, then I’d do it. But if I could only lose both the experience and the change in myself, then I’d most likely do that. And then I'd be an altogether different person, living a different life.

Snapshot

READING – Just started Game of Thrones. Because I loved the TV series. Got 1000 Autumns of Jacob Wotsit lined up next. Because I think David Mitchell may be the most exciting and interesting living English novelist. I’m trying to remember what I finished before GofT. I can’t. I’m racking my brains (or am I wracking them?) and I genuinely can’t remember. Which is a bit scary.

WATCHING – The Killing box-set. The Danish one of course, not the American remake. Dour, slow and utterly absorbing. The Hour. Yes, it’s miscast, the two leads are at least ten years too young. And apparently it’s nothing like a newsroom, but I’m enjoying the story, the characters. I want to see where it takes me. Torchwood. Which is silly, which you expect but maybe it’s a bit too silly, so I may not stick with it. And Emmerdale, naturally, which is in a good moment, Aaron on trial, teetering on the brink of an abyss of guilt.

WRITING – New novel, The Last Word comes out August 17th. Yay! Available for pre-order on Amazon. Working on Victorian novel. Working on kids’ TV series idea. It’s at an early stage but there’s been a little bit of interest. Might it be possible to get some development money? We’ll see. Working on a stage play idea, a collaboration, possibly for Edinburgh next year. But that’s not going to happen is it? Surely not. But you never know, and working on it is fun. Playing with a film idea, a Gothicky, ghosty thing. And working on Emmerdale. (Of course.)

And meanwhile, lining up readings for The Last Word, at a library, a bookshop, also in Manchester. Maybe a launch. And the zombie film’s coming out next year.

And meanwhile, everything else continues, family, friends, texture, the getting from one place to another, the sleeping and not sleeping, the hopes and worries, the appalling news stories.

And meanwhile, this morning, Son was disappointed over spending his little savings on something he didn’t much like. His mood, his sad face, have affected my day more than any of the above.

A Lake of Tears

Leavers’ Assembly. Last day of Year 6. Girls weeping, mums weeping, dad’s sniffling, boys looking a bit puzzled. You have to go with the cliché here, it’s irresistible - seems like last week, literally last week, Daughter was entering her big new Primary school with a crowd of other kids, gait awkward, legs stiff, because they were so very nervous. That was four years ago. Seems like only the week before I watched her toddling off holding her mum’s hand, and her little lunch-box, to infants’ school. That was seven years, maybe eight years ago. She didn’t even much enjoy school these past few months, got too big for it, wasn’t learning much, marking time before moving on. Makes no difference. A chunk of childhood is over, four years, more than a third of her life, and you can’t help it, nostalgia gets you, and maybe the worry about whether you enjoyed it enough, wrung enough out of it, appreciated it enough, valued it enough.

Time works its slippery business. You’ve got a pretty good grip on it as it plods along, hour by hour, day by day, then suddenly … woah, what was that? You’ve dropped it, spilt it on the floor, and there’s four years round your feet, finished, irreplaceable. So that’s it, it’s becoming a memory now. You remember that trip, that teacher, that time when we … It’s gone.

February 1982 (Part 2)

I was wearing a shirt with cufflinks. God knows why. I think it may very well be the one time in my life I’ve worn cuff-links. Maybe someone gave them to me. I was 18, probably thought they were sophisticated. Westminster Hospital. The doctor was a woman, and by now she had the results of the X-ray at Greenwich and the biopsy, so she had the definitive word, a sketch of the likely treatment, prognosis, all that. She was very firm that it was curable. Which made me think – for the first time? Surely not, but perhaps this was the first time it became articulated – it made me think it might not be curable. But my memory as usual skips around the dialogue, all the dramatic stuff, fixes on the embarrassing detail. She needed to take some blood. Just roll your sleeve up, she said. Then she sat and watched me as I fiddled with the unfamiliar cuff-links, with fingers that may have been shaking, wanting to tell her it’s not that I’m upset, although I am obviously, it’s just that I’m not used to these things, these cufflinks, these impossibly fiddly, utterly pointless bits of metal. How long? Probably only 30 seconds or so, but it felt like minutes. Is it even possible that she helped me? Perhaps I asked her, or perhaps she couldn’t bear to sit there any longer, watching. Anyway, the sleeve went up eventually. I imagine we both felt like cheering. Big events are written in capitals, they’re loud, they have exclamation marks. But it’s the small stuff, very often awkwardness, clumsiness, a mis-step, it's the ordinary texture of life that snags the emotions and hints at everything that lies beneath.

Zombies

Saw a trailer for Before Dawn last night, the relationship drama with zombies I wrote, from a story by Dominic Brunt and Jo Mitchell. It’s looking good. Strange hybrid, first half a serious, hopefully emotional unpeeling of a troubled relationship; second half zombie holocaust. High production values, (top actors and crew, make-up by veterans of Harry Potter and Dr Who), tiny budget. It’s out next year. Made with a new camera, I’ve forgotten what it’s called, but it basically seems to mean anyone can make a film that looks like Hollywood product for bobbins. Sounds a bit like e-books, potentially revolutionising publishing by allowing anyone to get their books on Kindle, via Amazon. In both cases of course, publicity is still the key. It’s all very well having your film or book out there, but people have to know about it before they buy it.

And this morning, in the playground, I signed a tea-towel. I got Dom to sign it last night, and was asked to add my own signature. I’ve signed a few books in my time, but this was a first. It was an Emmerdale tea-towel, I should clarify, a raffle prize. Has my felt-tip scrawl really made it more desirable? I honestly doubt it.

Inside and Outside

I remember a line in The Great Gatsby – actually, I don’t remember the line, I remember a version of it, without any of Fitzgerald’s swooning poetry and elegance – Nick Carraway’s at a party, and he says something about feeling that he’s ‘inside and outside simultaneously’. It doesn’t sound like much, but it struck me as a deliberate allusion to the writer’s position, experiencing something while at the same time observing that experience, storing it up, filing it away, for future reference, like the actor who checks the mirror when his mum’s died, to see what bereavement looks like. Which means that you’re busy observing it, but you’re also diluting it, making it less worthwhile, and less enjoyable, by standing with one foot outside it, as if you’re really not entirely sure you want to get involved, thank you very much.

Of course I was an awkward teenager when I first read GG, and it’s no coincidence that inside and outside simultaneously is also the position of the awkward teenager, trying to be confident, trying to be unselfconsciously in the moment, but a bit too uncomfortable in his skin, too shy and, well, too awkward, to wholly carry it off.

So what does that mean? All writers retain some element of the awkward teenager inside them? No, that’s clearly nonsense. Any sentence that begins ‘All writers …’ is probably pointless. Just bring it back to Fitzgerald, ‘inside and outside simultaneously’, which suggests that dilution I mentioned, an incompleteness, a less satisfying life, if you’re doing the ‘outside’ part properly, conscientiously. But does it have to be simultaneous? Maybe the secret is to have the full experience at the time, then remember it later, in tranquillity. Back to memory then, which more and more seems like a polite word for making things up …

University

I made a mess of my Cambridge entrance exam. I seem to remember in the practical criticism writing a lot about the punctuation in a poem. I felt I was in a hyper-perceptive state, and I spent a page or so writing about the placing of a particular full-stop. In retrospect, it was not a very charismatic full-stop, and I was probably hyper-nervous rather than hyper-perceptive. And then I made a mess of the interview as well. There were two interviews in fact, and I was waiting outside the first room with a boy from Radley who, it turned out, seemed to think his interview was at the same time as mine. I felt pretty smug about this. Radley had just had a TV series devoted to it, something that my school unaccountably had never quite managed. He was going to be very embarrassed when he found he’d made such an elementary mistake. He hadn’t. I ran out of the building, and around the quadrangle several times, like that sprinter in that scene from Chariots of Fire, opening doors and peering in more or less at random, and eventually I found the right building and the right room and I was only about ten minutes late. Unfortunately, I was breathless. He asked me about King Lear, something I was quite knowledgeable about at the time, but I couldn’t speak, all I could do was pant: ‘Justice ... flies to wanton ... any cause in nature ...?’

In retrospect of course, everything (except that full-stop) has its own shape and meaning, which you entirely miss at the time. My efforts, once I’d got decent A levels, were largely irrelevant. I applied for Cambridge, didn’t go there, had a place at Manchester, didn’t go there either. I finished up at University College London instead, which was a great place to be, but which I hadn’t even applied to.