My radiator knocks in code, my students nod in unison, and the Kremlin has discovered the cliffhanger.
HACKNEY, England (Bohiney) – I woke before dawn to the sound of my radiator, which has lately begun knocking in a pattern I can only describe as Morse code sent by someone with no message. I lay there composing today’s lecture on the serial novel of the 1800s, whose central lesson is that an instalment must end exactly where the reader would prefer it did not.
Early, kitchen table
Toast, tea, phone, in that order of importance, although the phone is where the trouble lives. Overnight, the Kremlin had said it hoped a meeting between Vladimir Putin and the American envoy Steve Witkoff could be arranged soon, in the Reuters report carried by The Star. The spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, explained that Mr Witkoff could brief Mr Putin on the positions of the Ukrainians and the Europeans, and on his contacts with both.
I admire the construction. A man is to be briefed on what other people think, by a man who has been talking to them, so that the first man may then think about it. In my department we call this a literature review and it takes eleven weeks.
The same report mentioned a recent Putin and Trump telephone call that produced an agreement on Russian diesel supplies. I put the toast down. Serial novelists understood that a good chapter plants an object in the first instalment, usually a locked box, and returns to it later. The box here is diesel.
Mid-morning, the Overground
The Weaver line to Liverpool Street was running, which I record because it is the sort of fact one now writes down. I stood beside a man holding a houseplant like a baby, and read further. LBC reported that Russia planned to send its first diesel tanker to the United States, carrying 40,000 tonnes, according to the deputy prime minister, Alexander Novak. The deal releases 300,000 tonnes into international markets. Mr Trump said 500,000 tonnes would follow in November, then a million, and Mr Putin said another three million tonnes would come shortly after.
Look at the shape of those numbers. Three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand, one million, three million. That is not a supply schedule, it is the subscription curve of a magazine that has discovered its readers will pay for the next number. Any Victorian editor of a weekly periodical would have recognised it at once and begun hiring illustrators.
The houseplant man got off at Hackney Downs. I would like to think he took the diesel news well.
Late morning, lecture hall
Thirty-one names on the register, nineteen faces in the room, and one young man in the back row who has taken to wearing sunglasses indoors as a form of attendance. I lectured on how serial publication shaped plot: the dangling thread, the sudden death in chapter nine, the readers who wrote to the author begging him to spare a character. I added that colonial-era memoirs did something similar in miniature, because every returning administrator ended each chapter on a cholera outbreak or a particularly obstinate servant, and then, regrettably, the next chapter.
A student asked whether this would be on the exam. I said that everything is on the exam, including the question of whether it is on the exam. She wrote that down. I was moved.
Then came the question I enjoy most, from a quiet girl near the radiator, who wanted to know why people kept reading the same story for months when they knew it would be padded. I said that the answer was the same reason people follow peace talks: the alternative is to stop, and stopping has no cliffhanger.
Afternoon, staff room
A colleague forwarded a headline from the farm pages, milking robots asking why the humans keep taking coffee breaks, with the single word “Us” in the subject line. I laughed more than the biscuit tin deserved. We then had the departmental argument about whether the kettle should be descaled by the person who last used it or the person who last noticed it. This is unresolved and has been unresolved since the autumn before last.
Over a second, tragic cup of tea I read the newest turn. Reuters reported that Mr Putin, at talks with Mr Witkoff in St Petersburg, suggested he and Mr Trump could meet in China, and the Kremlin had earlier floated a three-way conversation that would also include President Xi. Mr Putin also offered to discuss restoring economic cooperation between Moscow and Washington. Meanwhile, as LBC noted, President Zelenskyy had called the diesel arrangement an investment in a war that must be ended, which struck me as the sort of sentence a novelist saves for the final chapter and a politician is made to deliver in the middle.
I do not have a position on summits. I have a position on venues. In my experience the meeting that is proposed for next month in a third country is the one that will be postponed to a more convenient geography, usually a nicer one.
Evening, reading list
I drew up next week’s reading for the second years, and found I had set three hundred pages of a serial novel written for readers who had all of a weekly instalment to digest. They will manage it in a night, with a highlighter, and then complain the ending was predictable. It was, but it was predictable in instalments, which is a different kind of predictable and one that costs less.
Supper was beans on toast, taken standing, with the radiator knocking its message. At some point I realised it was not Morse at all. It was the boiler asking to be bled, which I have promised to do since the last time I wrote it down.
- Bleed the radiator, or at least stand near it looking capable.
- Reply to the student who has asked for an extension on an essay that is not yet due.
- Finish the lecture on the sudden death in chapter nine.
- Stop reading about tankers before bed.
The reading of news and the keeping of a diary have this in common: both are acts of faith that the next instalment will clarify the previous one. I find I read the first with scepticism and write the second with hope, and that on balance this is the right way round. If you enjoy a diary kept by someone who stops to count the radiators, there are more of my daily notes at Bohiney, and I am told that the people at the British Onion page on The London Prat keep a more reliable schedule than the Kremlin. For anyone struggling with the real and unreal on their phone before breakfast, a UK checklist for telling satire from real news is a good place to start, and the main Bohiney front page is where I leave the kettle on.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/