A series of self-portraits by Cézanne

I actually planned this piece, in my head and on my dictaphone, upwards of a week ago but I've only got around to forcing it out and modifying it now...

Firstly, a confession, I have not so much written this post as declaimed it, deciding to experiment and taking my 'Notes' with me, out of the musty backroom in Surbiton and on to the Surrey Hills. Even so, I've not quite made the leap to radical Impressionist writer yet, as I'm finishing my sketches from life back in my dingy studio, with a mug of coffee and the Rolling Stones on loop.

Listening back to the recording's breathless murmur, I gather I am on the path through Denbies' vineyard in Dorking, attempting to disguise, so as not to alarm passing dogwalkers, what would otherwise look like a madman talking to himself as a particularly involved mobile-phone call. Looking back however, I was really just a madman muttering into a mobile out in the wilderness where there's probably not even any signal anyway. Still, one of the inadvertent benefits of modern technology, in this case phones with dictaphone functions, are that they provide wannabe-writers and other assorted crazies with the comfortable illusion that somebody is listening. A bit like the Internet, too, I guess- if a tree falls in the woods and a guy blogs about it later, is anybody really paying any attention? I'm sorry folks but probably not.

Back in the vineyard, I am looking at the sky and noting the mishmash of effects God is experimenting with today in Sistine Surrey. On the far left, as if in microcosm, a stormy, classical and dark grey scene- one of those which you easily imagine as a Romantic painting or positioned above suitably gothic subject-matter. To the right, a completely different view, tucked in between the general morass of light grey, a Turner in miniature: pale sunlight streaming into a patch of brightest blue and out over the hills. Lovely, I thought, I'm heading out that way so I should be able to avoid the...

...But, no, even I as mutter on at the dictaphone, the rain begins- only it isn't rain, it's really, really violent hail (in March?). Well, it explains the abnormalities in the skyscape at least and will, perhaps, dissuade any more dogwalkers from setting out to disturb me but it certainly doesn't do any good to my, already somewhat muffled, recorded observations. From here on in then, I am relying on a mixture of memory and damp, distorted murmuring.

Looking down through the faux-Mediterranean landscape and across to Box Hill, the recorded me is struck by how much it reminds him of the little caravan site he and his parents used to visit, with its view over the Ax Valley and the entrance to the Undercliff, down in Devon. It's true, actually, right down to little details, like the road and even the railway (although down in Axmouth it's a- far more picturesque- tramway) running beside the hills. I love this scenery. It turns out that my romanticism, which I once thought magnificent and all-encompassing, is of a very English and provincial sort. I am as happy with Devon and Dorset, as I am in San Diego or New Mexico or any of those other places I have visited. In many ways, my time on Box Hill or the Old Railway path at Ash Green are equal in my affections to my memories of stumbling up Macgillycuddy's reeks. I'm a walker, yes, but not a hiker or an adventurer, more a Sunday afternoon rambler. How despicable, I belong in that banal book of Home Counties poets that I derided on this blog just last month...

Oh no, it's all got incredibly self-indulgent and the levity's drained out of this previously quite charming set of observations; I'm not even listening to my nature walk impressions anymore. Still, I guess I should carry on regardless as I suppose I'm still covering the same broad, narcissistic turf. For example, the pompous reason I give on the recording for titling the post 'A Series Of Self-Portraits By Cézanne', is, ostensibly, because, in all the recent entries here and across most other aspects of my, extremely limited, creative endeavour, I seem to be working from the figure outward i.e. seeing the world through the prism of that same sickening self-indulgence. Determined to be a writer but in the absence of what I regard as a life befitting a writer (a childhood in the Lake District or in a tenement block in the inner-city), I have become obsessed with altering my own biography.

There's a Just William story where a violinist called, and you must forgive my phonetic spelling as I don't have the book in front of me, Zevreay turns up and ends up going off to a barn to play to William, altering it all later so it will fit as a picturesque episode in his memoirs, when, in actual fact, William wasn't ever that interested. Well, increasingly of late, as I consider the excesses of mundanity in South London, 'Zevreay' is me and anyone who has the misfortune to cast their eye over these musings is Just William. Even in the above, where I am giving details of picturesque holidays and walks in the Surrey Hills, I am being narcissistic, pure and simple.

The truth is, and as I have said before, I am a mundane, pseudo-intellectual also-ran who couldn't get it together and go to a good University at the correct time (hence all the LSE business now) and now pays the price every day by trying- and failing- to make something interesting out of the daily dirge so he can sell himself as some sort of idiosyncratic writer! The real reason I gave this post such a knobby title, for example, isn't to do with high-folluted theories about art but because I was reading my little paperback about the Impressionists on the way to Dorking on the bus. I'm a great big bullshitter.

There I said it, although I don't feel any better. Never study literature, or read books generally in the suburbs (unless, of course, they are about the suburbs). The incongruity between the characters' lives and your own is so stark that it is almost inevitable that it will make you depressed or give you cabin fever. Far better to set your sights on a mundane but realistic job and maybe go to a few galleries of a weekend (although, not for the culture but as a means to impress people at little parties).

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Well, the recording played itself out long before I finished my hour-walk to the top of Box Hill but I got there in the end; there's a lot of steps up and it was very slippery but it was hardly adventurous. Still, as I said, I like that... I am a provincial with silly limited opinions and perspective. I am a provincial who has gone to places and done things and read things and written things and has all sorts ambitions but remains a provincial all the same...

Look, here's the definition of the term, from the Oxford dictionary, and it's this blog all over:

Provincial: Of or concerning the regions outside the capital city of a country, especially when regarded as unsophisticated or narrow-minded.

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As I say, I got to the top of Box Hill and I looked out over lovely, green nowhere. I should, as Robin Williams suggests in Dead Poets' Society, sounded my barbaric yawp across the Home Counties... but my yawp gets less and less savage and primitive everyday...

... so down with enigmatic, creative sorts- I'm off to make another cup of coffee!