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I don’t know which I hate more, losing things or people quoting that Elizabeth Bishop line. Probably the latter. It’s one of those real pain-in-the-arse bits of poetry, not because of the line itself but by virtue of its being quoted the whole time. It would be okay if it could somehow lose itself for five years but it’s always bouncing back into view. Come to think of it, that whole Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Hardwick scene, the veneration it engenders, bugs the living shit out of me. I hate the way people refer to Lowell as Cal. Is this a kind of loss? The loss, that is, of my ability to respond positively to this stuff, this cult? The strange thing is that I experience it as the opposite of a loss, as a gain.

In terms of loss, my concern is overwhelmingly with things, little things. My most recent loss is E. M. Cioran’s A Short History of Decay, the Quartet edition. It’s not at our flat in London so I assumed it was here in LA, but it’s not here either, and I’m wondering if it was actually back there in London and I had somehow failed to find it when I spent days looking for it. Where can it have got to? Who took it?

I love my things. I look after them obsessively but they still go missing, in big ways and small. I’m leaving the house, I make sure I’ve got everything I need: glasses, glucose tablets for these funny turns I suffer from, a book to read on the Tube. And then when I get to the Tube, or wherever it is I’m heading, I find I haven’t got my glasses or have left the book behind. How does that happen? I must be losing my mind.

One form of loss I have managed to gain some control of is my temper. I’ve always had a terrible temper. Our flat in London is full of ruined things, things I’ve smashed up because they weren’t working properly and which, as a result of this provocation, no longer work at all. Years ago, when I lived in another flat, my parents gave me this shitty Hoover—my cousin’s husband’s work involved reconditioning Hoovers—which started blowing rather than sucking, so I swung it around my head like a broadsword and smashed it against the wall. The bag exploded, there was six months of compacted dust everywhere, and there was no Hoover to clean it up with. That was not sensible behavior, obviously, and I’m glad that, with age, I’ve managed to acquire a degree of self-control. In certain situations I can still go berserk, though. There was almost a major incident in the cinema a few nights ago because someone was checking their phone in the middle of the Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream.

But it’s mainly things that drive me mad—things and, when they were alive, my parents. Once my wife and I rented a car to visit them, one of those new cars without an ignition key or a manual handbrake, just buttons. We’d parked this car on the sloping drive facing their garage. I had to reverse out but couldn’t work out how to do it, and every time I tried, we advanced six inches nearer the garage door. I flew into a rage and then my dad, about eighty-five at the time, hobbled out and placed himself as a human shield between the car and the garage door, waving his walking stick like some aboriginal protester pledged to protect the Garage Door Dreaming. I was already in a blind rage but this tipped me into complete insanity. I was yelling that if he didn’t get out of the way I’d fucking crush him. I revved the car like it was a jet about to take off. It was a terrible scene. Neighbors came out, one of whom got in the car and calmly reversed it out of the drive. My parents were mortified and ashamed—“dis-gusted” was the word my dad used. “We’re very private people,” my mum said, and I’d been behaving like a highly educated lunatic and swearing in public (my parents never swore). They wouldn’t speak to me for several days after that, and I had a splitting headache or hangover from the rage that had not been fully expressed, though I also found the whole thing quite funny.

I miss my mum and dad. My wife and I keep them alive in the way we speak, rarely referring to an object as an it, always as “him.” We litter our speech with other quaint and lovely Gloucestershire-isms. My dad never lost anything, always knew where everything was. He even knew where my mum had stashed her secret supply of savings, the cash she’d earned as a cleaner: under the carpet of the bedroom. When she died, I lifted the carpet and the bulging envelope was gone. I thought it must have been discovered by one of the carers but, despite being blind with macular degeneration and barely able to walk, my dad had somehow got his mitts on it and had added it to his own stash, under his mattress. Good for him.

He was famously mean, one of the great penny-pinchers of all time. We visited my uncle recently, Uncle Daryl, ninety now, a retired bricklayer. He’s always had a great turn of phrase, and this time he said of my dad, “He was so mean if he had a mouth full of gum boils he still wouldn’t give you one.” That’s funnier than anything Cal ever came up with, though I suppose it was quite funny—in the sense of pathetic—that when Lowell came to England, he said he had to learn to get by without ice (or so he says in one of his poxy poems). Oh diddums! I think that was the moment I took against him. My dad had a friend who worked at Walls, the ice-cream factory over in Glouces-ter, and he used to get free choc-ices and gave some to my dad. It was a perk, he said, sitting in our garden, eating one of these choc-ices he hadn’t paid for. None of my relatives ever read poetry, or anything else for that matter. No loss, obviously. I think of what Tony Harrison said of his dad: “I’ve come round to your position on ‘the Arts’ / but put it down in poems, that’s the bind.” Well, I’ve never written poetry—no loss either—but I do love a choc-ice and I’d give anything to sit and eat one with my dad, one each, I mean, even if I had to buy them.


Geoff Dyer’s latest book is The Last Days of Roger Federer.