Category: Damp

I am getting to know the moods of the damp. The kitchen walls, still bare, sometimes seem to glower with anger: they become darker, browner. And then, at other times, they seem to lighten: the damp is in a good mood, or it has been dreamily distracted from the work of dampening. Is it a god that needs to be appeased? – and if so, by what kind of sacrifice? But if it is a god, or part of a god, it is an inscrutable one; I follow its moods without being able to understand them, and it is as though I face the changing surface of the planet Solaris.

Sometimes it darkens, it becomes browner, as though gathering itself up. Particularly high up the wall, like a dark cloud spread all along – the damp becomes more intense. But it is not quite wet, not anymore. The surface is smooth, but not really moist; and it is not running with water as it used to be. For a dehumidifier works night and day in the kitchen. Night and day, and though pin pricks of damp appear where there was once white plaster, dried out by the heater, the wall never grows wetter. Has the damp been conquered, or only managed?

The damp and I are companions in the quiet flat. Little happens here; the damp does its work, the wetness of its surface drawn through the filters of the dehumidifier into its transparent collection box, and I try to do mine. I am away a lot, and when I am, I think the damp plunges forward like a dark wave; I can smell it, very thick in the air, when I open the door after the taxi drops me off. Damp, in a wave, welcoming me. Obscure welcome. Thick and brown and wet in the air.

Sometimes I sponge down the walls with a mixture of water and bleach. It needs to be done in the bathroom, too, where black spores of mould are forming. And the wallpaper in the bedroom, too. But these are only symptoms. I touch a cool sponge to the wall as to a fevered brow. Be calm, be still, do not toss and turn. And now I imagine the damp is a dream of the wall, that it is lost in itself somehow, that if the wall were only to open its eyes and see me, then all would be well. But the wall seems to fall into itself. Lost in damp, or damp is what rises up when the wall disappears into coma.

I like to imagine that I could pick the walls up like a Chinese screen and turn them to the sun to dry. To lift up the ceiling and the flat above and let the sun find the wall, and dry it. That would let it live. That would awaken it. As it is, the wall is hunched upon itself and from the sun. It weeps in a corner. Did I take my Visitor, who has damp experts in her family, to the back of the kitchen, to show her the bricks whose surface can be scraped away like paste? It needs rebuilding, she thinks, the whole wall. The mushrooms, which grew last year from the corner of the kitchen ceiling as from a sweating armpit were the giveaway: dry rot, she says, a sure sign.

Her relatives rebuilt wall after wall in London houses. I tell her I want to cover it over instead. A new wall of dark grey rendering, to extend the work I’ve already had done: perfect. A mesh, and then a layer of concrete above the bricks that are turning to paste … And now I imagine the wall is like a wounded horse that needs silence and care. The wall and I, and the damp a disease we will have to wait out.

But how long for? Warmer days are approaching, I think, though it was freezing today, and there were a few snowflakes in the air. Warmer days, and the simple honesty of the sun, which will break everything dry. And if I cannot pick up the wall to turn it around, inner to outer, so there are no secrets anymore, nothing hidden, there is still the slow penetration of the sun, slow, and over the whole outer wall, rendered and unrendered. And one day it will be summer, too, in my kitchen.

I’m allowed to bleach the kitchen walls at last, and the washing machine, and cupboards scattered around the flat; the surveyor who first diagnosed the damp came and saw and wrote things down, and said: ‘it’s condensation that’s causing it.’ – ‘Condensation’, I said, ‘behind all this?’ The kitchen all around us, brown walled with damp. ‘People underestimate condensation’, he said. ‘In a flat like this, double glazed, there’s nowhere for water to escape.’

I look around. No, there’s no escape, no extractor fans. How could there be, in a room this size, six feet by six. Later, I went out to look at the kitchen wall, outside, where the rendering hasn’t reached. Naked brick, exposed; I took a stick of bamboo and idly scraped out stuff between the bricks. And then – it was the brick itself that started to come off. The brick itself, rotting; I touched it. Wet – and runny. Brick that came off on my nails. Brick eroding and coming off to the touch.

I’d heard about this. The damp eats the brick out, said one expert. It devours brick from within. And now, beneath the stairs, the discovery of an eroding wall, a wall turning to paste … There are many causes of damp, I know that now. An infinite number of causes. Condensation within, and a wall that’s becoming paste. A wall of paste and water within as it reaches the dew point on a colder surface.

And isn’t that a beautiful expression, the dew point? The washing machine is clean and white, so too with the microwave and the cupboards. And the walls of the kitchen, seven feet high, but also as high as the stars are wet with bleach and water. Take a breath. Breathe. But the spores are already there. Spores in your lungs, spores in your heart. An adult human gives off moisture to the air – two litres a day. But how much sporey damp do I breathe out?

‘That wall behind you’s looking distinctly wet …’, said Blah-Feme in the bar the other night. ‘Damp follows you like a dog’, W. said that.

The dew point – where the wall comes forward to offer itself to the touch of condensation. When condensation spreads and gives itself across the wall. And from the other side? Penetrating damp, find its way through pasty brick and the gaps between bricks. Penetrating, coming through, a slow, ceaseless tsunami, brown wave after wave.

On two fronts, then, the damp. And there was a third front, too, the worst: the leak from upstairs, so bad that they thought the washing machine from upstairs might come through the ceiling. The leak, for years. Wet brick, saturated brick. And then it was fixed, at last, in the end. And was there a fourth front, from the concrete, from the river that used to run from the burst pipe along the wall?

Along the wall, the damp is moving. Dark armies of damp, moving towards the fresh, dry plaster of the living room. When will it breach the door frame and come through? When to meet with the damp that’s already coming from the other room?

I’m stranded in space between the condensating damp. Stranded, as between two high walls of the sea, parted as Moses parted them. On a strip as wide as this room, the living room, still dry, still an island in a sea of damp. And on two sides of the island, the waves are lapping. As soon they lap over this island too, and it will have sunk, beneath the ocean’s smooth surface.

Or is it the two lips of a mouth that have opened, and I am the word it is trying to say? I think I’m looking for it here, that word. I think it’s speaking through me, a word of damp from within, penetrating out, and condensing outside, along the white page of the blog.

‘Keep it warm’, said an expert on the kitchen damp. ‘And the damp in the bedroom?’ – ‘Keep that warm, too.’ So where do I point my heroic little fan heater? It does a shift in the kitchen, and then a shift in the bedroom. I carry it from one room the other, over the bits of kitchen furniture that are scattered everywhere.

In the living room, the washing machine, covered in black mildew. Then a cupboard, the back of which is greeny-black with damp. I have to keep everything dirty, the expert tells me, to show the original surveyor who approved the damp course, tomorrow. ‘Keep it mouldy. Then you can show him.’

But the whole flat is now full of mould spores. The warm air is soupy; it’s jungle hot, and damp, and smells of rot and spores. The oven, new in September, is stranded in the bathroom. The hallway’s full of mouldy bits of wood, and another sporey cupboard is pressed there up against the radiator. At night, going to the bathroom, I have to step over damp wood and pass between damp cupboards.

Sometimes the smell is overwhelming. ‘I feel faint’, I told W. on the phone. He’s getting ready for a visit, he says. I brace him. ‘It’s pretty bad up here,’ remembering his last visit, he did nothing but whine, and then sat up drinking all night, telling me what was wrong with my life at great length, holding court on the sofa while I sat on the floor.

How long will it be like this? Weeks. The Loss Adjuster no longer wants to pay out. The company she appointed have given up, having dismantled the kitchen. ‘Where does this leave me?’ At the very least, I will need another £500 worth of rendering, and perhaps I’ll have to repoint the wall next door, too. There’s something wrong, very wrong, we all know it. The Loss Adjuster knows and so does the man from the building maintenance company. Even the workman knows. ‘Have you ever seen anything like this?’, I ask him. ‘Never. This is the worst I’ve seen.’

Outside, as always the concrete is wet. The concrete stairs leading upstairs are wet, and the storage space beneath the stairs is the same. ‘Look at the floor in there’, says another expert on damp I’ve called out. ‘Soaking. It shouldn’t be, mind.’ And I look. It is soaking. It’s completely soaked. ‘You’ll have to clear it out and let it air’, he says of the storage space. Clear it out; very well. Open it to the air. And then what? Water’s seeping into the concrete. Water in concrete, the whole yard. Seeping down, and the concrete saturated. Down, but there’s nowhere for the water to go. And the whole surface of the yard is like a wall in my kitchen, only lying down. Damp lying down. Damp lying on concrete, and looking upward to the sky.

Inside, I study the kitchen walls, watching for where damp comes and goes. I take the fan heater in there, pointing it at this or that part of the wall. It will dry after an hour or so. Dry, but then – another hour, or one more – pinpricks of moisture appear on the whitened plaster. It’s returning. It’s coming back, the damp. And then pinprick joins to pinprick, and soon the whole wall’s the same sweat-sheened clammy brow it was before the drying.

But still I watch. Still, nightly, I wield the heater. Is it drying out? Has it begun to dry out?, I ask myself, like a madman. Or is it a mirage, a mirage of damp? Have the spores got to me? Has the mould coated every passageway of my lungs and sent me mad? True, I have a new and persistent cough. I cough all the time, and today I thought I’d lose my voice. One day I’ll wake up mute in this flat of damp. Mute in the damp, spore-filled, choking. And one day, as I lie my body on the walls, I’ll disappear into them, damp returning to damp.

I need to know my enemy. To know it – the damp, to watch and study it; to press my hands to it as to a fevered brow. Only this brow – the walls of the kitchen – are cold and clammy. For the last few days, I have had a fan heater turned at various parts of the wall. The plaster dries out quickly; it changes colour from dark brown to broken and then almost all the way to a healthy pink.

But it is a sick pink that results, with trails of black and mould in little clusters like liver spots. A sense of victory – the wall, completely bare, since all the furniture and appliances in the kitchen have been scattered elsewhere in the flat, changes colour like the sky. A dawn is coming from the brown night. A dirty pink dawn.

And yet, and yet. Turn the heater off for the night and the next morning, when I open the kitchen door, I see specks of darkness invading the dirty pink walls. Specks of brown darkness that grow and link up. What sadness. And soon the brown is omnipresent again, and growing darker. And within 24 hours, a film of water covers the wall. A film, which when I wipe with kitchen roll carries with it dark particles of plaster. Mop the fevered brow. Mop it, and the water comes off brown, dark brown.

The damp punishes me. On the first night with the fan heater I felt exalted. Could the damp really be clearing? Was it as simply at pointing a beam of heat at the wall? The next morning I woke early in my bedroom, which, unlike the other rooms of the flat, I’ve kept clean and free of kitchen detritus. The washing machine, covered in mould, stands in the living room; the rusting oven in the bathroom. Cupboards whose backs are thick with green and black spores are scattered everywhere. But the bedroom – pristine, I thought, with creamy light green walls.

What peace! And yet, and yet, what did I smell? What was that smell – damp? had it reached me from the kitchen? And then I see it: punishment for my hubris; the restoration of the cosmic balance between light and darkness: all along the bottom of the bedroom wall, rising damp, black. All along the wall beneath the window, and curling the wallpaper up: damp, black mould.

And the damp’s already returning to the bathroom, I can smell it. Already returning, even after the damp course last year. Another damp expert ran his meter over the bathroom wall. ‘There’s something there.’ He and I go outside and look at the wall. We look, we look, until all we are is looking. How to read the walls? Does it need repointing? Best to do it. Best to get it done, to make sure. And then we look at the £500 of rendering I’ve just had done. It needs to be extended, he says. It’s not enough, he says. Look at the darkness of the brick, he says. Feel it. It’s wet, he says. Yes, it is wet. It’s weeping. The whole flat is weeping.

More rendering then. I book the rendering company to return. They’re coming at lunchtime today. And meanwhile, the damp and I. Meanwhile – and I think for the whole of my life – I and the damp, one to one. I press my hand on its brow. My hand on a patch of kitchen wall. My hand on the curled up blackened wall paper in the bedroom. My hand on the wall in the bathroom from which I know the damp will come. And my hand on my own chest, for I know where it’s coming from, all this damp.

Like Jacob with his angel, I wrestle with my damp. The walls are bare now, a workman having spread the parts of my kitchen around the flat: the washine machine beside me here as I type, the oven in the bathroom, the cabinets in the hallway. The walls are bare, and absolute, and sweating – this is the word – damp.

For my part, I have a small heater which I aim at this part of the wall, and then that. Gradually, the plaster changes colour. From an angry dark brown, mottled with dark green and with black mold to a calmer, lighter pink: it seems a miracle; it seems I’m winning, but how can this be?

Periodically, I go out to the kitchen with some kitchen roll, and wipe down the great sweating surface. There’s always a layer of water – a sweat sheen. I marvel. Is the wall alive? Does it live in some strange way, like the planet Solaris, perhaps. That is the meaning of salt crystals which form on the wall. Is it conscious and groping towards me to communicate? Or is salt the way it expresses itself, or dreams? My flat is the satellite that turns around the damp, and I am the astronaut, fascinated only by its changing surface.

Whole religions have formed around less: around damp, and the source of damp. The kitchen could be a sacred grove, a spring. Only it seems a spring underground, a hidden place, a grotto to which our ancestors would descend. And what of the essay I’m trying to write? How can it compete against the great, bare walls?

Sometimes I want to press myself bodily against them, and to be absorbed. To disappear into the damp and to live a life there, on the other side of the wall. But I have my little heater, righteous weapon, and in patches the damp is changing colour, from angry brown to pink. Pray for me.

I press my nose to the pink plaster in the bathroom. Is it damp that I smell? Is it coming back? My hand on the surface. No, it’s not wet. But there’s wetness, I know, on the other side of the wall. Waiting, darkly. I can smell it.

The damp can get no wetter in the kitchen. The plaster comes off on my fingers. Brown paste. And the smell, the terrible smell. What’s rotting? What’s behind the kitchen units? Something has died, back there beyond the wall. And down the plaster the trace of a vertical river. When did it stream? When did it dry up? A track of browner plaster on plaster. And everywhere the smell of rotting. What’s died, there behind the cabinets?

It’s all to come off Monday. And then the plaster’s to come off, and it will be the final encounter. The brick and I. Exposed brick and a man, and great drying machines. Because the machines are to come to dry the place out. Night and day, they’ll suck the damp from the air. And the plaster will have been stripped away. Nothing between the damp and I. Nothing but damp brick and I, in the stripped away kitchen.

There’ll be no washing machine and no fridge. No oven, and no cabinets. That will all be moved to the living room. In the kitchen, the wrecked floor and the wet bricks, breathing. The damp and I: a final reckoning. If it doesn’t dry, say the insurance people, then they’ll pull out.

It’s beyond them, say the drying company appointed by the Loss Adjuster. No one understands the damp. It’s Talumdic. The damp is the enigma at the heart of everything. It draws into it the light of all explanations, all hope. The damp says: I exist, and that is all. I am that I am: so the damp. I will outlast you and outlast everything, says the damp.

Outside, half an inch of rendering now covers the back of the kitchen. Today I placed my palm on its grey surface. Wet. But that’s to be expected, what with the rain. But it was still wet. Everything’s wet, on both sides of the wall. Apparently there’s a gap between two layers of brick. A gap – that’s where the source of the damp is, I know it. That’s where it is, dark, wet matter without shape. Matter without light, as there are in the dwarf galaxies stripped of gas.

And the damp’s still spreading. There’s still more of the wall to conquer. ‘It’ll be in your living room soon’, says the damp expert. I nod. Yes, it will be everywhere. The flat’ll be made of damp, and spores will fill every part of the air. And I will breathe the spores inside and mold will flower inside me. I’ll live half in water like a frog.

It is my own catastrophe, very close to me. A secret catastrophe, spreading from the gap between the layers of brick. I take people out there, to the kitchen, and run their hands along the wall. ‘Feel it’, I say, ‘it’s alive.’ They’re always impressed, and disgusted.

My Visitor, in particular, is disturbed by the damp, and by the dirt that falls from the kitchen. She stands at the threshold of the kitchen, appalled. ‘Don’t worry’, I tell her. ‘It’s inside the cabinets’, she says, in horror. ‘I know’, I whisper.

The washing powder has contracted into great wet lumps. The salt is a single wet block. The sugar, the same. And where tins stand for an hour they leave a rusty mark. And dirt from the ceiling crumbled over everything. And it’s so cold out there, so cold – so wet, the air full of spores. And salt covers the plaster like a beard. Salt in large flakes that you can rub away.

Leave kitchen roll standing for an hour and it’s soaked. Leave a dry dishcloth on a worksurface and it’s sodden. How wet is the air? Water condenses along the walls. And there are great green splodges where the mold is growing. You can’t rub them away. They go deep: great, green splodges like nebulas.

Once, the plaster was a dry pink. Once, for just a few days. Then the damp spread from one corner of the kitchen. We found the source: a leak. A waste pipe. It was fixed, but the damp began to spread outwards, strange sun, strange radiance. Until every part of the kitchen was a wet brown. A brown that became mottled with green, and purple. And then that was covered with salt that somehow grew from the wall. Salt in large flakes I sometimes wipe away with my hand. Was the salt a good omen? A bad one?

Sometimes, it has seemed the damp was drying. Sometimes, I have dared to think: it’s in retreat. But in truth, the damp was only gathering itself in darkness to come again. Gathering itself, breathing in, so it could exhale back out and farther this time. Gathering in so it can bloom out, strange star, so its rays might reach the living room, and there begin new work. There’s a whole cosmogony at work here. A universe born, expanding. Dark matter and darker matter intertwined. Impersonal life – it’s here, I know it beneath my fingers.

Just now, I went out there again, to verify. Is it really that bad? It is that bad. Is it really that wet? Yes, it is wet. Does dirt still fall from the ceiling? It falls, and constantly. And I take a breath. Am I really breathing in spores? I’m breathing in spores. And I touch the wall above the sink – is something really running off on my hands? I look at them. There’s something brown. Something wrong. There’s a new process beginning in there, I decide. Something else is beginning. A darker brown within brown. A spore within the spore, but with sentience. The king of spores, with a dark intelligence, growing between the walls.

I think the insurance company are going to pull out. I think the Loss Adjuster will shake her head and leave. I think the drying machines are going to fail, and I’ll be left on my own in the kitchen, in the dark. The electricity failed there for six months because of the damp. It was dark, only dark, and the oven didn’t work; nothing worked there. For a long time, dark, and with nothing working.

Then I got the electricians out. Light! ‘Your flat needs rewiring’, they said, ‘the whole lot.’ I ignored them. There was light, and that was enough. And the light is still working. It doesn’t flicker; it’s steady. Which means you can gaze upon the damp. You can gaze, fascinated at the damp and the plaster mottled with damp. It doesn’t hide, the damp. It isn’t shy. It is there, obvious. It announces itself calmly. It says, here I am, with quiet plainness. And there it is. A fact. Absolute damp. Damp beyond all damp meters. ‘Off the scale’, said the drying expert, who’ll bring the machines.

I’m going back out there again. I’m supposed to be working. I’m writing something. But the damp is calling me. The damp wants a witness to itself. And who am I but its bard? Make an idiom for me, says the damp. Let me spread in words, too, it says. Let me spread through your blog and through all blogs. The damp seeks a new medium. And it will spread, medium to medium until the pages of the universe are written with damp.

I have to go out there again. The damp is calling, and I am an arm of my damp, I know it now. One night it grew me. One night a spore unfolded itself to make a man, a golem of damp. And the damp wrote its name on my forehead and placed its charm on my tongue. I spoke; I wrote; I was the bard of damp. Write, says the damp. Let me spread there, too, on the page. I write. The blog is wet.

And is it coming back in the bathroom? Is it coming back there, from the brick and from the gap between the bricks? Is something beginning there, too, a kind of Singularity of damp, damp become self-aware? Because a new step is being taken here, I know it. Life has reached another level. Damp will speak. Damp has begun to dream, there between the walls. And what will it say when it comes to itself? What will the damp say when it wakes up?

I don’t know which one of us wrote these lines, the damp or I.

Yesterday, I swept the yard clean after the builders, and rearranged the potted plants by height – hebes and heathers, ferns and splindly shrubs – so they spread out pleasantly in the twelve feet of concrete between eye and wall. The long scar along the kitchen wall, which the damp expert said was ‘letting the weather in’ has been healed up; the thin skin of rendering, turning green from moisture, has been replaced by a thicker one, and finally, you can see a strip of darker, rougher concrete where the burst water pipe was dug up and replaced.

Inside, in the kitchen, the damp continues to spread, but calmly, changing softly the colour of the wall. Along its spreading edges, thick salt, which falls to pile at the base of the wall and along the worksurfaces. And grit still falls from one corner of the ceiling. And the wet walls are marked with mildew like liver spots on an elderly hand. Along the window sill, the plaster has turned a motled green.

The bathroom is dry now; the damp expert passed his machine over the wall: yes, it is certain, the damp course is working. And no leak, either, from the shower upstairs, though I look up still from my shower to where water used to run – where it even poured once, raining inside a room as in one of Tarkovsky’s films. But the wooden floor is still ruined in places by plaster dust. And the replaced floorboards are the wrong colour: yellow wood, instead of brown. On wood, fallen leaves from the palm. On the floor of the bath, long hairs – not mine – reddish brown on white plastic.

‘Damp’s easy to fix!’, said Blah-Feme, months ago, and with his usual confidence. ‘And it’s pretty cheap, considering’. I suspected he was wrong, but his judgement buoyed me: perhaps he’s right, I thought, and I’ve just been unlucky with all the workmen and damp companies who’ve come out over the years. But I’ve learnt since what I already knew: damp calls for a Talmudic inquiry; I will go from one wise man to another, from one to another, but none of them is really certain of the Law. There is no big Other when it comes to diagnosing the causes of damp, and subjective destitution comes when you touch a wall that is more soaking than ever.

There it is, the sinthome, naked and unashamed. There it is, strange pleasure, that, if it could gaze would look at me now from the soaked, grey plaster. And won’t it look at me again when the plaster is hacked off and the brick stands naked and seemingly without secret. Brick, wet brick, in its simplicity, its nudity, just as it stood last September, before the damp course and then the new plaster until it began again, the damp, beginning in the top righthand corner even as I held a party to celebrate the new kitchen I’d had installed, and then radiating out, strange, wet sun, to reach every part of the kitchen.

Now, three months later, its victory is total; mould is growing in patches, the damp is blackening, and a fine layer of downy salt covers the plaster. I stroke it and it flakes down: salt from the wall. Salt leached from the wall: isn’t it rather beautiful? Above me, the new joists and the wooden boards fastened over them. Dry as a bone now; nothing comes from there, the corner where the leak ran. How excited we were, the plumber and I, when we found it! Water poured down, we discovered, when the sink was emptied upstairs or the washing machine ran! It was from upstairs, and not from a copper pipe embedded in the wall! We were both joyous.

But a few weeks later when I called him again, he said it couldn’t be just the leak that was causing it. There was something worse, something deeper. And what was that rushing sound? What was that sound of an underground river? He turned the stopcock off and listened hard. It’s coming from there, he knocked the wall, from the other side of that. That’s your problem! Howay, Lars man. And shook his head. You’ll need to get someone out, he said. It’s urgent. And left shaking his head and swearing, and without taking money for either of his visits, except for the twenty pound note I pressed into his hand.

I called the water company first thing – and I would call them again, first thing, when the lines opened in the morning, for thirty days in a row. I tried pleading and wailing and sternness. I lost my will and then was filled with new hope and then bored of it all, by turns. Every day, every morning! Every single morning! I began to phone more sporadically, hope drooping even as I continued to hear, as the plumber heard, something like an underground river behind the wall, streaming all dryness away.

And in the meantime, all the dramas of work and life; in the time between everything continued to happen in its complicated way. There was a Symposium; our guests who flew in from other parts of the world heard all about the damp, and they even drove here in a taxi, dropping me off before they continued to the airport. Three Lacan-inspired theorists in a cab, driving away.

And still the damp. Always there, the damp. I’d breathe it, and imagine I breathed spores in the air. Mould in my lungs like asbestos. Spores growing in my heart. Mildew over my skin: the air was wet. Eventually, I learned I had to call the industry regulator. I called, and got straight through, one man, I imagined, in a little office; by the next day, a subcontractor of the water company phoned back: they’d dig up the lane behind my flat.

Very well, I said, having been promised this before. The next day they came, without knocking on the door, or announcing themselves. But they were far away in the lane, and the leak was close, by the wall. I called a workman in. Listen, I said. Do you hear it? He hears it. It’s where copper meets lead, he said. The lead comes off the mains in the lane and then meets copper, he said. They’re always leaking, he said. But he wasn’t allowed to dig up the yard he said. I’d need to sign a permission slip for that.

A dozen phonecalls and two weeks later – it’s December now, and chilly – a man calls at the door for me to sign a permission slip. And then two more weeks pass, and I hear nothing. It’s just before Christmas. The industry regulator is on the case, the complaints department knows me; the subcontractors who work for the water company are familiar with my name, but still nothing is done. Until finally, delaying my trip away for the holidays, they come out again to dig up the lane, the same hole, and give the same verdict. The leak’s closer to the flat, they say, and they’ll need a permission slip to dig there.

And I can hear the water rushing. Every night I hear it, rushing in the dark as though on an unknown and urgent journey. Every night, when I going into the bathroom, I hear it rushing beneath the floorboards. And hearing it by day, faintly, determinedly, seeking what ever it sought as it ran by the wall in the kitchen. I’ve signed the slip, I told the water company’s contractors. And gave up.

No more phonecalls for a time, I thought. There was the damp, and the water rushing, the one and the other. Let it rest. Until the new year, and a few days ago, a phonecall from the complaints division. A reassuring voice. ‘It’s in my hands now’. But I’ve heard that before. ‘We’ll do what we can, Mr —-; I will personally see to it’; ‘I understand your frustration; I’d be just as annoyed if I were in your position. Don’t worry, you’ll hear from us soon’; ‘It’s no good telling that to me. It’s the subcontractors you should be talking to’ – and then, from the subcontractors, ‘it’s the water company you should be speaking to. Have a word with them.’

For a time, they had me confused with someone else. ‘We’ve already dug up your yard.’ – ‘No you haven’t!’ She reads out an address. ‘That’s not my address.’ – ‘Are you a Mr Traviss?’ – ‘No, that’s not my name.’ – ‘Oh I’m sorry, we must have you confused with someone else.’ From that time on – late October – it’s as if we began again. There was someone confused with me all along. The contractors had already been out, they thought. They’d dug up the yard, they thought. Earlier still – a month after I first complained – they were similarly sure the contractors had been out. ‘We’ve records of it.’ – ‘I haven’t seen them.’

So when the phonecall comes in January, I know what to do. I log the time of the call, and the name of the caller. I tell her I expect to hear from her by noon the next day, or I would call her back (but there are no direct lines; the same queues, the same dumb music every time – the same half hour wasted, and explaining to someone new, someone else, the whole history of the problem, and that I was not Mr Traviss and never was). And I put the phone down with no expectation she would ring back.

But later that day, on a windy street, she calls my mobile and I hear her voice again. ‘I’m sending someone out.’ – ‘Great, when?’ – ‘Anytime next week. When suits you?’ – ‘Monday.’ – ‘We can’t come Monday.’ – ‘Tuesday, then. A.M.’ And we are agreed. Tuesday A.M.: tomorrow. Tomorrow!

In the last few weeks, the drying company’s been out and agreed to install dehumidifiers once the plaster comes off. The drying expert walked round the back of the house with me and pressed the wet, green-tinged rendering on the other side of the kitchen wall. Nine inches thick, he said, they built them solid in those days. I ask him if he thinks the brick’s corroded (water, the plumber told me, can eat brick from inside like acid). Could be, he said. Either way, can’t tell ’til the plaster’s off.

The next day, the Loss Adjuster and the contractors met in my kitchen. It’s got worse, they agreed. But decided in the end the insurance would pay, although I would have to get the external walls re-rendered, just to make sure. ‘I’ll get onto it,’ I told them. And I did, phoning the builders about the quote they’d give me months ago. They sent out a permission slip to sign, which I signed and posted back by return of post. And all this with no faith, with all hope withered away, but stalwart, adjusted, knowing the abandonment of hope did not preclude something happening. Down to the brick – what would they discover? All the way down – what would they find?

It’s been going on for years. I called six damp proofing companies out in turn, one after another. The water’s getting in behind the rendering, said one. You’ll have to strip it off, repoint the brick, and render it again. Above all, don’t replace the rendering, said another, you’ll need to leave the wall unrendered to let the water get out somewhere. It’s the hole in your wall, said another, referring to the long scar left where the lead pipe had to come out. It’s letting in the weather.

And still another discounted that and the other explanations. It’s your hopper, he said, showing me a thick patch of green at the top of the pipe through which it drained. Ah, I said, impressed at his observational powers. All of them agreed a damp course would help things. All of them agreed to provide one. We’ll tank it right up to the ceiling.

The year pressed on. Summer still, and dry, but I was worried at the damage the weather would cause through winter. But the damp proofers I chose were sure: don’t bother with the back wall yet. The wall needs to breathe. To breathe! But so did I! My lungs were full of spores! My lungs were caked with mildew!

Then the old kitchen went, and the new kitchen came, and I lived at Blah-Feme’s while the kitchen and the bathroom were done. I came back to check the work every morning, early, photographing it as it proceeded. All kinds of dramas: misdelivered goods, goods I had to replace from remote showrooms, the floor scratched and damaged, but it was done, the kitchen ready, and everyone came round for the party.

But the damp had appeared again. The damp, unvanquished, had appeared in the corner. And Blah-Feme said, it’s nothing, it’ll dry out. But by the next day, it had spread. And the day after, it had spread further, fanning out. And in a fortnight, the kitchen was soaked and the new, white cupboards were mildewed and the new plaster was covered in a film of water, and the air in the flat was damp again, and as damp as before. What madness!

That was September, when I called out the plumber. September after six months of damp proofers and diagnoses. September and it was the rushing river of water behind the wall that seemed most ominous. September and the water rushing like fate, a little personal Egdon Heath there behind the wall.

‘Either it’s getting better or it’s not’, said Blah-Feme firmly before he visited a fortnight ago, ‘which is it?’ I said I didn’t know, but a fine layer of salt had appeared, and it was nearly as charming as the small snails that used to fall from the hole in the ceiling. When he was round he looked at the white powder and pronounced it to be lime. ‘You’re very certain,’ I said. And he decided it was getting better. The smell’s gone, he said, and I thought he was right. Perhaps the kitchen was drying.

Back in November, I’d told Mladen Dolar, Jodi and K-Punk about the damp. Mladen asked me what I wrote about. ‘Damp, just damp.’ And they were driven off, three Lacan-inspired theorists in the taxi, leaving me at my door. I opened it, and there was a wave of damp, the old familiar smell. I wrote a post on damp, then another. Blah-Feme with Hero Harvest in Liverpool texted to say they loved the posts on damp. Even W. was moved. ‘My God,’ he said.

Back in the summer, down at W.’s, I told a prominent Levinasian scholar and her partner all about my flat. W. joined in. ‘It’s disgusting! The yard used to be filled with sewage! All the windows were jammed shut! And the kitchen! My God, the kitchen!’ They decided to visit me, the scholar and her partner, to see the kitchen at first hand.

That was in the days of the slugs, when nightly, through some nook or another, great slugs would find their way into the kitchen and then, slithering under the door, find their way into the lounge and leave translucent trails across the bare wood. My guests were impressed, watching me pick them up and hurl them over the back wall.

‘Can’t you cook them?’ I said I wished I could, dropping them into a stirfry, or steaming them like Dim Sum. Still other slugs were shrivelled along the side of the sink, where I had poured a thick line of blue slug pellets. My morning’s harvest! My guests took photos, impressed.

Back at his house, W. and I had explained my flat in Levinasian terms: the kitchen gave unto the il y a, we said, and in a Blanchotian one: the kitchen was an image of itself, we said. We went as far as Heidegger: my kitchen, we decided, suspended relationality. It was a kind of reduction. All this to explain the true horror of the kitchen to our phenomenologically-inclined guests.

‘Being is horror’, said W., ‘and horror’s his kitchen.’ We compared the idea of nausea in Levinas and Sartre, and cosmologies that saw order emerging from chaos. The tohu-bohu, said W., a scholar of Biblical Hebrew, that’s his flat. Absolute horror. He tells them they’ll understand once they’ve watched Satantango. Cosmic shit, says W., that’s what Bela Tarr called it an interview. Ontological shit, I say.

It’s what will happen if you lay plaster on wet brick, says the loss adjuster, looking at the discoloured walls of the kitchen, deep brown and rich green. Who installed your kitchen? I tell her. She shakes her head. And what about your damp proofing? It was their fault she says. I’m amazed they put plaster on top of wet brick. It’s very porous, she says of the new plaster. That’s why the damp spread so quickly.

Your bathroom’s ok, she says, but we’ll have to dry out your wall. Everything’ll have to come out. We might have to replace the cupboards, too. And you’ll have to empty them. And we’ll need the washing machine out. Looking up at the ceiling she said, I’m surprised the washing machine from upstairs hasn’t come right through. The joists are completely rotten.

I am reassured, even if the loss adjuster was nothing like the one in Atom Egoyan’s film. When she leaves I lie in the other room on the bed in the morning sun, reading Henry Green, and thinking, all is well. Earlier this morning, I had to listen to Donny Hathaway’s eponymous album to steady my nerves. And then My Name Is … by Albert Ayler. And I reread a little more of Concluding.

But now I reward myself in relief a tidbit or two from Surviving. I read a little of what his son, the editor, wrote about his father. The old anecdote about the glass of water Henry Green’s colleagues remembered at his elbow in long meetings at work being full of gin in fact. And his visit to America, where he is feted as a writer, the doorman, at the end of the week bidding him goodbye by his pseudonym and not his real name. And his meeting his hero, Celine.

By these facts my world repairs myself. Thank goodness for Green and my hardback Surviving. I reread the essay on C. M. Doughty and underline some passages for future reflection. ‘A man’s style is like the clothes he wears, an expression of his personality’, I underline. ‘But what a man is, also makes the way he writes, as the choice of a shirt goes to make up his appearance which is, essentially, a side of his character.’

And then I remember how W. likes to criticise my old velvet jacket. ‘Who wears velvet jackets?’, he says. ‘You have to look at the kids, at what the kids are wearing.’ For his part, W. likes to dress up in a suit. ‘Your trousers are very scruffy’, says W., look at them.’ And he’s right – they flap objectionably unironed around my legs. ‘Where did you get them? Primark?’

And then the phrase a friend of mine uses: ‘brown style’. ‘That’s what you were trying for in your book, wasn’t it?’, he said. Brown style – like Henry James, he said. And it’s true I was looking for something, for some kind of style, but in the end whatever style I have is scruffy and borrowed and bought at some cheap shop.

If I print anything out from the blog, which I do rarely, the first impression I have is light horror. An ape’s style, I think. But I expect little more, which is why the horror is light. And sometimes I even think that what is written here is worse than the books. I think: what a waste of time!, and curse blogging for the great detour that it is. And feel guilty that I should be thinking more, and writing more, or at the very least reading more, and pressing my reading through tougher books.

As it is, though, my reading is tough enough. Rise early, pages of Voicing the Popular open, and now to decipher that passage or that, having hunted down the books referred to and gone through those, and then, in a document in Word I add notes to my notes, wondering how I am to pull it all together.

And thank goodness for Sinthome who writes about Lacan and Zizek so lucidly, so I can fill out my very scanty knowledge of psychoanalysis that I need to read Richard Middleton’s book. Why don’t I stick always to what I know?, I ask myself as I read, and take notes. And of course I barely know what I’m supposed to know; I’m bad enough at that, and it is a cause of shame that I’ve published anything at all, what impertinence!

My god, what we’re doing to philosophy!, I always say to W. But then shouldn’t you at least once a year break into some new area? So many books. Middleton leads to Mowitt, who of course depends on Lacan, and Zizek. Dolar’s book, of course, in the pile by my bed. And what of Laclau on populism, and the book with Mouffe?

How much did these books cost me, all piled up? And why am I reading Green instead, if I’m reading at all? It’s at these times, I wish I had a realise excuse for not forcing my reading on, or writing. Write a paper, I tell myself. Submit something. W. wants me to begin another book, if only to listen to me moan. Then I’ve got to read Adorno on popular music, and then Taussig on mimesis, and shouldn’t I at least glimpse at Latour, since Middleton mentions him, and I really need to take some notes from Attali.

And then I think with my stupidity: how will another age look back on this one, and who will read what. And then I curse my stupidity and my thoughts drift to the damp, just as the spores of mildew drift, I imagine, into one’s throat and then into the lungs. To read Middleton, you have to you know your Zizek, or at least the first few books. And then of course Lacan, and Freud. And don’t I want to make some critical remarks or another on his take on this or that thinker?

I suppose the pleasure I take in Green is that I am not supposed to be reading him – or that I read on borrowed time. Here is Surviving beside me on my desk: don’t read it, I tell myself. Don’t open it. And you can write on damp if only to share your joy with the world that it has but one source after all, and that if it spread, it’s only because the plaster was new and porous in its newness. And that the brown and blue-green stained plaster will be hacked off again to the brick, and the bricks dried out with machines, and then the whole kitchen reassembled.

A room that is only six feet by six feet by six feet has caused a lot of trouble, I think to myself. A room – a cube that is as though tacked onto my flat, which is really one half of a divided house, which is why its rooms are so strangely sized. Built in 1895, above a mineshaft, I tell our guests as they drop me home on the way to their hotel.

This was once a coalfield, I tell them, looking about. But it was closed in the mid 1800s, and then they built houses for the workers in a factory brought it from the Borders to work here, I tell them. Hence the name: Ancrum Street – Ancrum is a town in the Borders, I tell them.

But all this is very well, I tell them, but the damp’s the problem, nothing else. And in all the ground floor flats, I tell them, up and down the street. Yes, that’s our real drama, I tell them. It’s our only concern: the damp. I’ve had mushrooms growing in my flat, I tell them. And for a time the slugs were omnipresent. And ants – though I think there’s too much damp for them now, and it’s winter. But there’s still these little snails, which fall through the hole above the sink. I don’t mind when I find them in a mug, I tell them. They’re decorative, like small stones.

But now, of course, the hole will be closed, and the kitchen stripped out and the plaster chipped off and they’ll begin again from the brick. They’ll bring in drying machines and dry the place out, and that’ll be it: down to the brick, all karmic debts repaid and perhaps damp will follow me about like a dog no longer.

Your damp’s world famous, Jodi tells me as she smokes and we stand outside the Playhouse. Squalor, she says, remembering the title of a post. At first she thought I’d look Norwegian, she says. But then she read Squalor and pictured me as living in squalor, drinking heavily.

I did go through a drinking phase, I tell her, and I do live in squalor. It’s quite disgusting, I tell her, and no joke. It’s no way to live: what W. said was right, and besides it will make me ill. Jodi says she liked to read out the posts on my yard to her partner and he would laugh. Ah yes, the yard, I say, I remember.

The shape of the flat is always changing, I tell her, and slowly it is disappearing into the mine shaft I know lies beneath it, on the right. It’s slowly tilting in that direction, I tell her, and the windows and doors are being pulled out of shape. For a long time, I couldn’t open the windows – the frames were distorted, and looked soon to make the glass break from the pressure. So I had the frames replaced with frames that tilt. The whole flat tilts, the windows, and now the door, which I also had to have replaced. But another disaster when the windows could open: the smell: the terrible smell.

The yard was filled with sewage. The plants, which had looked ill for a long time, were dying. The yard was rotting. Everything was disgusting, and my stomach turned when in hot summers the window had to be opened for air. Of course it was fixed eventually, I told her. But not before they had to tear the pipes from the wall, leaving a great scar, and through which slugs could find their way in, and ants.

Slugs and ants, I told her, are the bane of my existence. I wake up in the morning, and there used to be slugs in the mugs and in the sink. And ants – I didn’t mind them – crawling all over the walls. I think the damp keeps the ants away now, I told her, and the slugs left when I blocked up the holes in the walls. Which leaves just the snails, a new arrival, I tell her, and I don’t mind them, with their translucent shells. I wonder what kind of snails they are, I speculate as we stand in the cold air, outside the Playhouse.

Yes, it’s all true about the squalor, I tell her. I think I was cursed at some point and by someone. Not a terrible curse, you understand, but rather a flummoxing one. To be cursed with damp and a tilting flat, and, more generally, intellectual inability. It was all true, I say, everything I write, and I’m not a tall Norwegian, far from it.

The fame of my damp precedes me, that I learn over the weekend. It fascinates; people want to hear more; it’s much more interesting than I am. Or rather, if I am interesting, it is only because of the damp, of which I speak very freely: I have no choice, and in fact it’s a relief, for I actually think of little but damp, day and night.

Yes, I admit I am obsessed by damp, and I speak of very little but damp, and damp is constantly on my mind; that and the more general decay: the general tilting of the flat, its movement rightwards. If you look at my sideboards, I say, pointing to Blah-Feme’s sideboards, at whose house we are having dinner, you’d see they are very far above the floorboards, which are sinking, along the joists beneath them. Sinking, and leaving a great gap between themselves and the sideboard, like the stretch of gum you can see when some people smile.

It’s no good, I tell everyone at dinner, and of course I’ll never be able to sell it. The flat is a disaster, but it is my disaster, my shipwreck, and in the end, it’s no so bad, there’s far worse, I tell everyone. And I think in some way it’s the correlate of my life and that I deserve it, I tell them all. I think it’s fitting, or even karmic, and that damp is my burden but it is mine and if it follows me from flat to flat like a dog then so be it.

Slugs and ants will always be close to me, I tell them. And snails, I accept that. And the mushrooms that used to grow in the corners of the kitchen. And mildew, of course, mildew everywhere, spreading, its spores drifting through the air. Perhaps I’ll become tubecular, I tell them, and that will be the making of a true European intellectual.

But in truth, when I cough – and I do have a hacking cough that won’t leave me – it drives the few thoughts I have from my head. W., who is also ill, is likewise disappointed with his cough. He’s just ill, he says, and it doesn’t help with his thinking. Of course W.’s Sal will never repeat her visit to my flat, she’s adamant. It’s disgusting, she said. I don’t know how you can live like that. But don’t you think it’s improved?, I ask W. on his last visit. ‘My God! Is that what you think?’

‘Do you think I’m becoming a damp bore?’ I ask him. ‘I think you should only write about damp. It’s hilarious.’