“So, foraging through the headmaster’s desk one afternoon I had happened upon a list which called itself Eleven Plus results, listing Intelligence Quotient Results or some such guff. I noticed it because my name was at the top with an asterisk typed next to it and the words ‘Approaching genius’ added in brackets.
Gromie, the headmaster had underlined it in his blue-black ink and scrawled, ‘Well that bloody explains everything…’” — Moab is My Washpot

“Well I don’t know about you, but when I recall childhood pain, I don’t recall the pains of toothache, a trashed backside, broken bones, stubbed toes, gashed knees or twisted ankles - I recall the pains of loneliness, boredom, abandonment, humiliation, rejection, and fear. Those are the pains on which I might and, still sometimes do, dwell, and those pains, almost without exception, were inflicted on me by other children and by myself.” — Moab is my Washpot

“It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing—they are not all bad. Those devils have been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.” — Moab Is My Washpot

“Music is everything and nothing. It is useless and no limit can be set to its use. Music takes me to places of illimitable sensual and insensate joy, accessing points of ecstasy that no angelic lover could ever locate, or plunging me into gibbering weeping hells of pain that no torturer could ever devise. Music makes me write this sort of maundering adolescent nonsense without embarrassment. Music is in fact the dog’s bollocks. Nothing else comes close.” — Moab is my Washpot

“Come to think of it I don’t know that love has a point, which is what makes it so glorious. Sex has a point, in terms of relief and, sometimes, procreation, but love, like all art, as Oscar said, is quite useless. It is the useless things that make life worth living and that make life dangerous too: wine, love, art, beauty. Without them life is safe, but not worth bothering with.” — Moab is my Washpot

Playing chess with Hugh Laurie: my rooms at Cambridge, 1980

Moab is My Washpot

Moab Is My Washpot

Moab Is My Washpot

“   There is no proper way for me to express what music does to me without my sounding precious, pretentious, overemotional, sentimental, self-indulgent and absurd. No proper way therefore to express either what it has done to me over the years to know that I would never be able to make music of even the most basic kind.
   I would like to dance. Not professionally, just when everyone else does.
   I would like to sing. Not professionally, just when everyone else does.
   I’d like to join in, you see.
   Guilty feet, as George Michael tells us, have got no rhythm.
   I can play… I mean, as an effort of will I can sit down and learn a piece at the piano and reproduce it, so that those who hear will not necessarily move away with their hands clutched to their mouths, vomit leaking though fingers, blood dripping from ears. Then of course, a piano needs no real-time tuning. I strike middle C and I know that middle C will come out. Were I to try and learn a stringed or brass instrument that needed me to make the notes as I played, then I hate to think what might be the result. Playing the piano is not the same as making music.
   None of this is important in itself, but I feel somewhere that it has a lot to do with why I have always felt separate, why I have always felt unable to join in, to let go, to become part of the tribe, why I have always sniped or joked from the sidelines, why I have never, ever, lost my overwhelmingly self-conscious self-consciousness.
   It’s not all bad. Heightened self-consciousness, apartness, an inability to join in, physical shame and self-loathing — they are not all bad. Those devils have also been my angels. Without them I would never have disappeared into language, literature, the mind, laughter and all the mad intensities that made and unmade me.” — Moab Is My Washpot