For Hoff exclusively I would make coffee by the filter method, using Kenya Peaberry beans that had been ground before my eyes at the King Street coffee shop. Luckily in those glory days all my other visitors stuck to their preference, turning up their noses at the suspect brew I made in a glass vessel by a laborious technical process, boiling the kettle (filled with fresh-drawn water, of course) and then waiting two minutes for the temperature to be right. For this diehard group the filter method perverted the true taste of coffee, the powdered or granular joys of Nescafé. As far as these purists were concerned, unless it had been prepared for the jar using high-pressure industrial sprays, properly dehydrated or freeze-dried at the very moment that the flavour reached its peak, it hardly counted as coffee at all. My small-scale operation, with its plastic funnel and paper filter struck them as insultingly amateurish. Who was I to set myself up against Messrs Nestlé?
Considering the expense of Kenya Peaberry, this was handy. Of course it’s when life seems to be collaborating merrily with you, supporting all your little schemes, that you have to watch out. Luckily the sensation is very fleeting.
Once, very disconcertingly, Hoff said he wished I was a girl. Or rather he wished he had met a girl he got on with as easily as he did with me. My mind in a body he fancied — but then why would we be discussing his several protocols? ‘Girls are fantastic, girls are wonderful,’ he told me, ‘they shoot their stars across the sky and then they fizzle out. I’d never get tired of you, John.’
A mad thing to say, but touching too. And to a limited extent I could agree. My chats with Hoff were the closest I got in my Cambridge years to the university experience as promised and advertised. There was a nice Socratic feel to our conversations, an underlying crackle of dialectic, even if the subject was the sexual availability of young women. Getting into their knickers, to be perfectly frank.
Things might have worked less well if I had found Hoff the slightest bit attractive, but I didn’t. I wasn’t put off by the name-tapes on his socks or even the way he called ten thousand unborn cod, compressed into a tin, by the name of ‘lunch’. That wave-length simply wasn’t there.
On his last visit, at the very end of term, he brought me a present. It was an extremely thoughtful gift, positively disorienting in its attunement to my needs. I’m not used to people reading my mind, but if they can do it on special occasions, why not on a regular basis?
It was a simple enough piece of electrical equipment, an array of plug sockets, five of them side by side, on a short extension lead. It meant I could have all my devices on at the same time — record player, Anglepoise, electric typewriter, even my prematurely senile lava lamp — without the labour of juggling with an adaptor (itself a luxury) which would only accommodate two plugs at a time.
I don’t frequent electrical stores any more than I do shoe shops, but I was pretty sure that this wasn’t an item on sale to the public. It was a rather fancy piece of technology in those days. I went into raptures of entirely sincere appreciation, and managed not to mention two little details.
One was the timing. Hoff was passing on this highly desirable gadget only when he himself had no further use for it. He was leaving it with me rather than take it with him when he went down.
The other was the provenance. There was a strip of Dymotape stuck on the white plastic of the array’s body.
Dymotape, sublime Dymotape! Dymotape was a lettering system which printed raised characters on a long roll of self-adhesive tape. It came as a sort of ray-gun (or so it seemed to minds formed in the ’50s), with a wheel mounted on the top with which you selected the next letter, rather than ANNIHILATE or ANTI-GRAVITY, before squeezing the trigger to advance your message by a single space. The clever thing about it was that the plastic tape turned white under pressure, so that the raised letters stood out blanched and clear against the coloured ground. A final extra-strength squeeze on the trigger caused a blade to clip off the strip, while also nicking the underside so that it was easy to peel off the protective layer and expose the adhesive. I knew the pleasures of the machine only by watching, since it was no better suited to my handling than any other ray-gun (a ray-gun made to fit my grip would actually look alien), but even at second hand they were considerable.
The strip of Dymotape said PROPERTY OF THE CAVENDISH LABORATORY. By this time I knew Hoff well enough to be sure this name-tape was no joke, though Mrs Beddoes would never have suspected that this was stolen property, now that the riddle of the dictator’s socks had been cleared up. There’s no one so gullible as someone who’s been fooled once already, as long as you don’t pull the same trick twice.
University security was rudimentary in those days, and libraries suffered a steady leakage of their treasures. I imagine Hoff had crossed paths at some stage with a shopping-trolley filled with oscilloscopes, and had spotted and snaffled this humble device so well adapted to his needs (and in due course to mine).
Metaphysical oilskins
Stealing things was always described in those days as ‘liberating’ them, as long as the thieves were young and subscribed to a revolutionary agenda of some sort, but for once the word applied. Not having to struggle with plugs was indeed a little liberation.
It was entirely in character that Hoff should offer me a present only after getting plenty of use out of it himself, and also that he shouldn’t remove the incriminating tape in order to convince me that money had been laid out on my behalf. Yet even when any generosity had been so scrupulously scrubbed from the gesture, a residue remained. By Hoff’s sacred code of miserliness, passing on the socket-array at all was a sort of mad spending-spree, a morbid splurge of emotional extravagance all the more unsettling because its economic basis couldn’t be mathematically established. Consequently my thanks were heartfelt.
Hoff and I ‘exchanged addresses’, which is a more satisfactory exercise when you have one to give out. Hoff’s was ‘c/o The Dean of International Students’ at Harvard. He had won something called a Harkness Award to study there — a place where British plugs wouldn’t go in the wall.
It seems clear that my various inadequacies in friendship were no more than the social aspect of a spiritual crisis. As Maharshi often pointed out, and had first ventriloquised for my benefit through the pages of the guru Paul Gallico’s Snow Flake, the drop merges with the ocean, but the ocean also merges with the drop. I had tried to play my part in this merging, but my grasp on the fluid dynamics of the invisible was fatally faulty. The ocean of other people seemed to take the form of a vast waxed mackintosh, a set of metaphysical oilskins even, from whose slick sleeves this yearning drop was doomed to drip.
There was one fact I failed to consider in my pig-headed misery — that disappointment is a form of grace. What is disappointed is always the ego, cheated of its applause. Every breakthrough for the Self is greeted by the ego’s tears. When Self-realisation makes its entrance, then the jig is up with the ego, as the ego knows only too well. The ego looks forward to enlightenment the way turkeys look forward to December 25th (in Christian countries, and putting the question of nut roast to one side). And yet there is yearning underneath the dread, since despite all its fears the ego longs to be dissolved.
In those days of Cambridge summertime the grace of disappointment was poured down on me unstintingly, grace ubiquitous and grace abounding. If I wasn’t at my wits’ end, I was close to it. I phoned Graëme Beamish at his home, hoping he would somehow arrange for me to stay in mine — in A6 Kenny, where my Cambridge roots were if I had any. I needed just those few more days in residence, to bridge the gap until Mayflower House was ready to receive me. Otherwise I was afraid it was a gap which I would fall into, never to be seen or heard from again.