August 2007 – Robert Wringham // Writer-Comedian

John Hegley : Letters to an earwig

Originally published at The Groggy Squirrel.

A slight melancholy hangs over the Royal Mile this morning: the last day of the Edinburgh festival. There are lots of hangovers from those whose last performance is done and dusted but a few eager drama students still hand you their flyers in a final act of financial desperation. Posters are being taken down. The Underbelly is closed. The various free stages have been packed away. The city is partied out.

Time to take in one last show though. Something gentle. Something that will definitely be funny. Something that will be a high note to end on but won’t make my delicate head hurt anymore than it does already. The answer is simple: John Hegley at the Pleasance.

Hegley’s style is probably best described in the titles to his various poetry books: ‘These were your father’s’; ‘My dog is a carrot’; ‘Can I come down now, Dad?’; and ‘Five Sugars Please’.

A guy has brought his dog into the venue. Hegley isn’t fazed by this at all. In fact he tries to engage with the man and his dog as much as possible. ‘Sit! Good dog’. Hegley’s engaging with the audience is second to none: always spontaneous yet always in character. Whether he has an onstage persona or whether this is his natural self is difficult to ascertain. As soon as he enters the room, singing with the accompaniment of his mandolin, he invites two children onto the stage for a drawing contest. “Draw me a flower” he sings, and later “Oh, that’s not very good”.

Each of the flowers are added to a mural, covered already with flowers from previous performances. He asks a man on the fifth row to draw him some grass. “What colour would you like?”

And so it goes: drawing, poetry, singing, banter, audience involvement. Nobody seems scared to be ‘picked on’. An hour of this sort of japery is quite lovely – a perfect, gentle way to spend the lunching hour.

Hegley’s style is to channel perfectly domestic incidents and childhood memories into his anecdotes and plinky-plunky poetry. “It was a highly upsetting incident,” he remarks about an occasion on which he was lambasted by a dance teacher for getting carried away, “but it’s nice to make a bit of money out of it later in life”.

The poetry is usually very short – often just between one and four lines – with an abrupt but hilarious end. The result is a highly talented joke-telling machine gun. In one verse he provides the context, his thoughts and a punchline. He also likes a challenge: today he orates a rhyming poem about an octopus “who gets a nasty shocktopus”. Some of his stuff could easily be sold to kids, but it’s impossible as a grown-up not to get caught up in his charmingly eccentric style.

At the end of the performance, there is a five-minute Q&A. Someone asks him what he’ll do with the mural now that the show has ended its run. This results in an impromptu charity auction: twenty-five quid is raised for Amnesty International.

At the end you’re left thinking, “Please come back next year, John. Pleeeease!” He will be though. He’s a total veteran.

The Book Club – All New Fighting Years

Originally published at The Groggy Squirrel

British comedy is often at the centre of a merciless tug o’war between the jocks and the nerds. It rope is tugged in each direction: owned by the ‘blue’ comedians in the early 1970s only to be taken by the satirists; divided oddly by alternative comedy in the 80s; taken by the lads again as ‘the new rock and roll’ in the 90s; reclaimed by geek power of Lee and Herring snatched away by Skinner and Baddiel’s Fantasy Football laddishess; back to the quiet boys in the corner by The League of Gentlemen and again to the popular kids again by Little Britain, Bo’ Selecta! and Catherine Tate.

Don’t worry though. Nerds and losers are back in vogue thanks to Daniel Kitson, Josie Long, The Mighty Boosh, Toby Hadoki and The Book Club. Josie Long’s “Drawing Moustaches in Magazines Monthly Magazine (Bi-Monthy)” is apparenty aimed at “Losers, Misfits and the Anxious”.

The Book Club has a short but interesting history. A group of comedians, most notably Robin Ince and the aforementioned Josie Long (now the proud holder of an if.comedy award), got together to launch a new showcase of friendly, non-confrontational comedy. It has been a refreshing alternative to the reign of laddish stuff in the eternal tug o’ war.

What is The Book Club? In a nutshell, our bookish comedians read passages from books aquired recently from local charity shops: all of them strange and rubbish. Popular lines of investigation include Mills and Boon pulpy romances; self help guides; astonishingly bad horror or sci-fi paperbacks; and memoirs of washed-up TV personalities. An ever-present tome during tonight’s show is “Yoga for Men”: a large hardback depicting a woman in a yogic squat, bearing a massive pair of hooters.

Tonight’s show was good. Robin Ince is a lovely puppydog-faced Alan Bennett-a-like whose orations from Catherine Cookson’s poetry and selection of “Medical Romances” is accompanied by an interpretive dancer and an opera singer. You never got that with Skinner and Baddiel.

Perhaps the jewel in the crown of tonight’s performance is camp Australian, Asher Treleaven. Announced as a reader of ‘self help books’, Asher reads from a selection of bad romances and a dangerous-looking thriller simply titled “WEAPON” in which our narrator tells us how to guess the nationality of a woman by gawping at her breasts through a pair of binoculars. Creepy. Apparently for want of a proper exit strategy, Asher treats/subjects us to a painfully geeky dance to a piece of classic Meatloaf.

There is slightly too much pantomime and childish CBBC-style interaction between the comics for comfort and Robin Ince’s frequent meandering between a stationary microphone and his book table is a bit hard on the ears. One can’t help thinking that the fostering of a more intimate atmosphere would be better for this sort of comedy. This aside though, The Book Club makes for a successful cabaret of amusing found-pieces and inexplicable humour which, like the acts and the audience, has trouble fitting in.

Staying In

I think I’d have an excellent career as an agoraphobic. I’ve been thinking about going into it for some time but as with any horizontal career move, I’m waiting for the appropriate moment. I don’t have any formal qualifications but with a history of general obsession/compulsion and of various complex fetishes and phobias, I’m sure I’d make an excellent candidate.

The fact of the matter is that agoraphobia is a growth industry. It’s in the interests of the government and the pharmaceutical giants to keep you off the streets and popping the ho-ho pills. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get some sort of subsidiary for it. Yes. “Benefits,” I think they’re called.

It’s the way forward. Whenever I imagine ‘happiness’ I see myself idly playing the trumpet in the bath, with a fruity-looking cocktail on the side. You couldn’t do that in the outside world, no matter how laizez-fair your office environment.

I bring up this subject because I enjoyed a few days away from work last week. The thought of waiting workload is unappealing but far more unappealing is the idea of ‘going outside’ to get there. Outside is for wasps and weather. Inside is for towels and tobacco.

It’s always amused me when people have said, “Well, at least it gets you out of the house”.

What on Earth are they talking about? They’ll usually say it in response to the declaration that you’ve been at work that day; or at the hairdressers/fishmonger/bottle bank/public library/brothel/hardware store; or some other uninspiring everyday place.

Me: “I’ve just been standing in the street, shaking my lad at the pretty lay-dees”.

The plain people of cyberspace*: “Well, at least it gets you out of the house”.

What’s wrong with these people’s houses?

Why is labouring in an office or a factory better than being at home with your books and your microwave pizzas? Why is shopping at Tesco a higher state of activity than watching television in the warmth of your pajamas?

Those people are weird.

I imagine that being an agoraphobic “in this day and age” is far easier and potentially lucrative than being an agoraphobic in the nineteenth century or even the modern world as it were fifteen years ago.

We have the Internet now after all so we can do our shopping and trading and monitoring of business from our home computers. This isn’t even seen as being eccentric anymore.

You don’t need college or school when you have true, reliable, seldom-biased Wikipedia.

You wouldn’t starve to death. All of your food could be bought via the net and and books or videos or other consumables could be acquired likewise. You could even adopt a circular metabolism by selling the stuff on eBay once done with it. Not your food, obviously, but your books et cetera – the gods of eBay froun upon poopoo being listed for international auction (yet they encourage the listing of Dan Brown novels – there is no consistency in this world).

Imagine if everyone was agorobobic. Our carbon footprint would be smaller for one thing. I imagine the fashion supplement of the newspaper would be less interested in designer duffle-coats and would give promience to the latest pyjama and dressing-gown combinations. The showbiz pages would feature the latest photographs of celebrity stay-at-homes with oversized beards and kleenex boxes upon their feet. The new sports would be origami, sex and chess. The new motoring supplement would focus exclusively upon model railways and Scalextrick.

There would have to be a brave few who would deliver the mail and keep the electricity flowing and the crops in production. In fact the more I think about it, the more I recognise the importance of “non-agros” to my vision – or “Norms” or “Mundies”, if you will. Heck, let’s not beat about the bush. We shall call them “Morlocks”. Only the bin men can take our smelly garbage to an appropriate resting place far, far away.

OK – the agorophobes would have to be a new social class. We would sit at the top of the class system, god-like monarchs who stay at home, pushing our money around electronically and nodding approvingly from afar. Noble, we at once the the consumer market, the royal family and the government.

Me (Calling down to the quiet street from a high window): You there! There’s been no mail delivery and my pants must be sent to the laundrette post-haste! What day is this?

Bin man: Why, its Christmas day, mistah.

Ah, so easily we lost track. Our pipes and slippers seemed the heith of it all but at what cost, dear reader, at what cost?

< size="1">*The plain people of cyberspace. This is a reference to the excellent Myles Na Gopaleen – a humourist whose works I am developing an obsession with, largely thanks to . In his newspaper columns he will frequently publish imagined conversations between himself and ‘The plain people of Ireland’. I might continue to rip him off… um… homage him in this way for a while.

Luke Wright, Poet & Man

The poet, Tim Turnbull, once opined that the difference between stand-up comedians and performance poets was that the poets try to make money by selling their books during the intervals while the comics “just want to be loved… like dogs”.

A good point well made, but there are other differences too. It’s a matter of punctuation: the stand-up comedian must annexe his sentences with a shrill exclamation mark if he’s to get the belly laughs he’s after. The performance poet or the humourist can get away with a humble full-stop and is happy with a few nods of agreement and the occasional isolated chuckle in the darkness.

A stand-up comedian would never orate someone else’s work either (unless he happens to be Joe Pasquale). Repetition of another’s material is comedian kryptonite. But Luke Wright, as performance poet, boldly goes there.

The set, as the audience enters the room, consists of a bookcase and an occasional table stocked to the gills with excellent books. From Kafka to Harry Potter and The Bible to Zadie Smith, it’s all there. Breaking up the flow of his own poetry, Luke reads selected paragraphs, humourous and profound, from his favourite books with energy and a passion.

I see in the bookcase that there is a copy of ‘The Idler’ magazine in which I published my first essay. “Go on!” I tell the poet telepathically, “Read it!” Alas, no dice. He decided to read Goethe or something instead. There’s no accounting for taste.

The theme of the evening is masculinity (which explains why my piece got overlooked) and the selected pieces from his library highlight ideas discussed in Luke’s own works. His poems apparently derive from real-life experiences concerned with symbols of masculinity: his car, his childhood friends, his working class origins in Colchester “where not a lot of culture stirs”, his less-than-manly role as a poet and his the problems associated with “big gay face”. What emerges is the portrait of a culture-thirsty, eager-to-entertain, slightly socially awkward young man. It’s good and one can tell that poetry is therapy to Mr. Wright.

As an entire it works rather well. What works less well is Luke’s ad-libbed attempts at stand-up connecting everything together. His hubris isn’t quite ironic enough to make you laugh and you’re left feeling a little awkward for it. But this aside, his show is a five-star performance.

Librarium Part Two

Originally published at The Idler

We’re all fairly familiar with the public library system and those vast depositories attached to universities, but there are other libraries that hide from public view: special collections, private subscription libraries, law libraries, remote stacks and libraries so unusual that they fail to be noticed due to their sheer implausibility. The Library Hotel in New York City, for instance is a sixty-room book-filled hotel with rooms arranged according to the Dewey Decimal Classification system. And then there is the Vaughn Williams Memorial Library, completely dedicated to folk music; the legendary deposits of pornography held by The British Library and The Oxford Bodleian; and the remarkable archive at BBC Scotland: a seemingly endless vault akin to one of those said to exist beneath the Pentagon, only filled with tapes of Balamory rather than bits of UFO and the lovely fluffy truth about Al Qaeda.

Perhaps one of the most notable libraries in terms of unusual content is the American Nudist Research Library. With over seven thousand magazines on the topics of naturism and the philosophy of nudity and a copy of almost every book printed on the subject, ANRL is a pretty exhaustive resource. It is based in the Cypress Cove Nudist Resort in Florida and has been around for an impressive twenty-six years. By email, I caught up with the library’s president and director, Helen Fisher:

How was the Nudist Library founded?

“Twenty six years ago a couple who lived in California (Jayne & Read Schuster) had a collection of nudist/naturist magazines and books which they needed to find space for. They were friends of [the couple] who owned Cypress Cove Nudist Resort. When offered room space, they shipped a huge number of boxes here. A group of Cove residents volunteered to help organize them. From that beginning the collection grew by donations and before long needed more space. A small building was set up for the library and it was staffed, and still is today, completely by volunteers. Eight or nine years ago, having outgrown the building, an addition was made which doubled the building size and which we are now rapidly filling.”

Do your librarians go naked while at work?

“Ordinarily, the librarians are dressed since we have visiting outsiders who are not members of Cypress Cove and they feel more at ease if we are mostly dressed. The librarians are free to dress as they please. The visiting outsiders make arrangements ahead of their visit so they are admitted through the front gate. They come directly to the library and cannot visit other parts of the park.”

How is the library perceived by the locals? There are some who might think your subject matter was a little controversial. Do you get along?

“Yes, we are welcomed by the locals. Dean Hadley and Ted Hadley, son and grandson of the resort’s owners are members of local town organizations, including the Chamber of Commerce. Once or twice a year, the Chamber visits the Cove for meetings and tours for new members.”

Who can access your stuff? Do you have to be a member to get in?

“Our materials are available to anyone visiting the library and this includes nudists who are visiting the Cove, although nothing can be taken out of the library. Since everything has been donated and much of the older material is getting fragile, we keep control of handling. Also, we now have about 450 nudist / naturist videos / DVD’s which can be watched in the library.”

It is how the librarians are described as “mostly dressed” that fascinates me. I wonder if that means you get the occasional naked librarian or that they’re all partially naked. Either way, the idea of a Nudist library is marvellous: it is a symbol of how libraries can be relaxed and leisurely places while working to combat censorship and to stand guard over the world’s knowledge, no matter how specialised or obscure.

Best Days of your life: Kim and Jason Kotecki

Originally published in New Escapologist

If you feel as though you’re taking yourself to seriously, have forgotten how to have fun or simply don’t have time for mucking about any more, you’re probably suffering from a bout of ‘Adultitis’. Help is at hand as Kim and Jason Kotecki – authors of a forty-step Escape Plan – show you how to flee the world of electricity bills and mediocrity, and return to the innocence of childhood.

New Escapologist: What are the main things we can learn from childhood?

Kim and Jason: There are eight “secrets” or qualities that all children posses. These are things that can get a little rusty as we grow older. Some of the biggest things we can learn from childhood are the ability to slow down and appreciate the little things in life, to dream big again and to renew our natural curiosity.

NE: You’ve interpreted maturity as an illness. What makes you see it as one?

K&J: Maturity is not necessarily an illness, but taking yourself too seriously can be a problem. We like to differentiate the differences between being childish and childlike. We don’t think people should start paying their bills with Monopoly money and mucking around with Play-Doh all day. But we think getting back to a more childlike attitude is important.

NE: So what’s the cure for Adultitis? How can we escape the shackles of being an adult?

K&J: There are many ways to counter the effects of Adultitis. Anything you can do to get yourself thinking and acting in a more childlike way will help. Our entire web site revolves around the idea of giving people tools to do just that. Our most ambitious project has been the Escape Plan.

NE: The Escape Plan is described as the first ever ‘experiential blog’. What does that mean?

K&J: Basically, an experiential blog (or xblog) is a blog that inspires active participation in events or activities, leading to the accumulation of knowledge or skill. You might think of it as a community self-help or how-to blog.

It’s different than other blogs because it invites active involvement from the reader in the experience, beyond just responding to what the author has written.

An experiential blog contains the following elements:

1. It has a finite number of posts, each of which constitute a specific step towards a stated goal.
2. Community is created by readers (voyagers) who share comments on their experiences.
3. It is written by an individual or team of sherpas, who lead the experience and guide voyagers in the journey.

NE: What has been the response? Have many people taken up your challenges?

K&J: The response has been quite good. Jason has had a chance to talk about it during his speaking presentations. People have loved hearing about some of the ways we’ve solved various challenges and are inspired to do the same. Quite a few people have been doing the challenges, and people from all over the world have taken the time to post their adventures online.

NE: You completed all of the challenges yourselves, of course. What do you think were your most notable escape plan adventures?

K&J: Well, we’ve done many of the challenges several times – it’s really something that can be done over and over again and you get different results. Some of our favorites have been when Kim celebrated the first “Hump Day” of the year by making camel shaped pancakes and getting her picture with a camel at the local zoo (Challenge #2 – Instaparty: Find a reason to celebrate and do something to celebrate it.) and Jason was pretty excited when he made green eggs for breakfast as a part of Challenge #24 – Outside the Lines: Figure out a way to add some color to your day in a new, unusual, or wacky way.

Lately, we’ve been filming some of our escapades as part of Escape Plan TV. It’s a new project we’ve started since we do so much travelling. In a soon to be released episode filmed in Colorado Springs, we had a chance to feed some giraffes with our mouths.

NE: A lot of people have trouble with taking the first step in an escape plan. The survival instinct makes it difficult to leave comfort behind in favour of adventure. What’s the best way of setting out?

K&J: Yes, the desire to stay firmly in our comfort zone is a powerful instinct, and a breeding ground for Adultitis. The good news is that the Escape Plan is unlike a diet or new workout routine; it’s actually fun! If someone is having trouble getting motivated, we recommend doing the Escape Plan with a friend. You can hold each other accountable and have fun sharing how you’ve each decided to solve each challenge.

NE: You have a book out called ‘Escape Adulthood’. Which came first, the website or the book?

K&J: The comic strip we do and its characters started everything. Then, Jason wrote Escape Adulthood as a way to really fine tune the idea of what it means to be more childlike. Then we cooked up the Escape Plan and the corresponding website in an effort to come up with a tangible system to help people deal with their Adultitis.

NE: There is something to be said for a guerilla approach to art and your website seems to have embraced this. You have developed an industry around yourselves by developing your own comic strip and your own videos. Is there a particular secret to getting noticed when you “do it yourself”?

K&J: We are both big fans of Seth Godin, author of Unleashing the Ideavirus and Purple Cow. His ideas have been a big source of inspiration. Basically, we’re just trying to be ourselves, have fun, and create a remarkable experience. We try and make it easy for other people to spread the idea of [the] Kim & Jason [canon]. We’ve tried many different things – some of which haven’t worked very well – and are not afraid to experiment with new technology. One cool thing about the Internet is that it gives you access to so many people. In many ways, it’s a great equalizer. However, it still takes a lot of effort to network with people and get the word out, but the Internet makes it much easier than it ever was before.

NE: We always seem to be running from something or to something. We want to quit our jobs; we want to quit this city. No one seems happy with where they are these days. Why do you think people are so bent on escape?

K&J: People look for meaning in life. They are disenchanted and fed up with the stuff we’ve all been fed through the media and the advertising of big corporations. There’s way more to life than chasing after the next big thing, “keeping up with the Joneses”, and buying “stuff” to make us happy. Children have a built-in purity, wisdom, and happiness that we often overlook and that is definitely worth tapping into.

NE: Finally: what one piece of advice would you give to the world on how to live a fulfilling life?

K&J: Don’t take yourself so seriously. Take some time to slow down and appreciate the little things. Don’t worry about what other people think of you. And finally, be yourself. Be the person you believe you’re supposed to be (and what that looks like is different for everybody). That’s really the only way you’ll be truly fulfilled in this life.

Kim and Jason Kotecki run the Kim and Jason website and comic archive from www.kimandjason.com. The escape plan can be found at http://www.escapeplanblog.com. Jason Kotecki’s book, Escaping Adulthood is available from Amazon.

Andy Zaltzman

Originally published at The Groggy Squirrel

ANDY ZALTZMAN, 32, ADMINISTERS HIS AFTERNOON DOSE OF UTOPIA, STEPS BACK, AND WAITS TO SEE WHAT HAPPENS

If your budget for this year’s festival is a little lower than usual and you want to stick to the ‘safe bets’ rather than squandering your money on something dubious, Andy Zaltzman should certainly be towards the top of your list. Hard to believe he’s only been performing since 2000, Zaltzman is a seasoned satirist and a real Fringe institute.

He’s one of those natural comedians who you can’t imagine being anything else (he even resembles a clown with his receding mop of curly red hair) and though he often gives the caveat that the new show might be a little ‘shambolic’, it never ever is. He just talks and gold comes out:

Zaltzman: Where in the world is better than the United Kingdom?

Audience member: Switzerland!

Zaltzman: Why Switzerland?

Audience member: They have the chocolate.

Zaltzman: Yes, but how do they pay for all that chocolate? Nazi gold.

This year’s complexly titled show explores the idea of utopia and how we, the plebs, could do a better job of running things than any government. Zaltzman develops, with suggestions from the audience, a microcosmic society in the form of a flea circus. The end result is presumably different with each show.

In addition to ‘utopia’, Zaltzman is comparing the late night ‘Political Animal’ show at the Underbelly and performing at various nocturnal cabarets such as the notorious ‘Late and Live’ and the brilliant ‘Spank’. ‘Utopia’ takes place at a staggeringly early 3pm, meaning that Andy has to deal with audiences of the remarkably drunk and the painfully sober. It takes a good improviser to deal with both ends of the alcoholic spectrum in the same day.

The demographic of Andy’s audience is telling. A man behind me laughs loudly into my ear at anything vaguely political, to demonstrate that he ‘gets it’ and is up on the political zeitgeist. When Zaltzman asks about good alternatives to democracy, the answers that come back are “Philosopher King” and “Benevolent Dictator”. One member of the audience makes a heckle about the economic advantages of terrorism before announcing that he is a student of international relations. Political animals, one and all.

And this is Zaltzman’s brand: intelligent political satire with an absurdist edge. You can’t go wrong really.

Johnson and Boswell – Late But Live

Originally published at The Groggy Squirrel.

Openly insulting Scotland to its face has become a recurring theme in the latest works of Stewart Lee. Thankfully, it is an imagined Scotland of haggis and shortbread and an arachnid Robert the Bruce that is the object of his comedy scorn and the result is very, very funny.

“To say that a Scot speaks English,” opines his devised version of Samuel Johnson, “is to say that a dog eats a bone when in fact he merely mauls it”.

Such is the meat of this piece of comedy theatre: Simon Munnery as Dr. Johnson, lambasting Scotland for what he perceives to be its incivilities and peculiarities. In a belated book launch for Johnson and Boswell’s ‘A Journal of a tour to the Hebrides’, ‘Late But Live’ is a combination of stand-up comedy and theatre successfully blurring the boundaries between the two.

Simon Munnery is brilliant as Johnson. Perfectly cast, Munnery even looks like the good doctor and the parallels between this new character and Munnery’s infamous ‘League Against Tedium’ creation are myriad. A robust and regal creature, turgid with Nietzche-like witticisms and angry judgements.

Miles Jupp, perhaps best known for his portrayal of Archie the Inventor in BBC Scotland’s ‘Balamory’, makes a first-rate Boswell. He starts out as a smug champion of Johnson’s work (if always operating in his shadow) and ends up as his victim and appologist.

It’s difficult to say exactly how much input Stewart Lee had into this cleverly shaped piece of comedy theatre but it has many of his hallmarks. There is even a cheeky mention of Lee’s erstwhile colleague Patrick Marber (“the Johnson to his Boswell; the Marber to his Coogan”).

The play falters a little in the fourth act but its important to remember that Edinburgh is designed to be a launch pad for new material and a Petri dish for bold experiments. ‘Jerry Springer – the Opera’ felt a little half-baked at the Assembly Rooms back in 2003 and is now a tight and worthy object of international recognition. It feels good to be present at the start of something excellent.

Whether ‘Late but Live’ becomes a phenomenon of Jerry Springer proportions remains to be seen (or whether that is the intent) but it certainly has the potential.

Unfinished Stories

Sauntering along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, seeing what might be what and who might be whom, I chanced across a strange scene.

The Royal Mile during the Festival is, of course, a metric kilometer of patently strange events but this one seemed a tad too domestic for performance purposes. Consequently, it became “strange” in this context by its very kitchen-sinkness. Several people had gathered to watch.

It seemed to me that a dispute had resulted in a young girl breaking the finger of an older man with a beard. She stood at the steps of her flat. He stood just outside of the door. The police had been called in. The bearded man was showing his finger to one of the officers who was trying to ascertain whether or not it was actually broken.

The young girl was very pretty. She had nice hair and a red dress. The older man was drunk and had food in his beard. What had happened?

Above the muttering ruminations of the crowd, my attention was snagged by the discourse of street sweepers.

One street sweeper, leaning casually on her broom, said to her colleague: “You see, I used to want to be in the police. But I couldn’t deal with that.”

That she had once abandoned the idea of being a police officer in favour of being a street sweeper was interesting. I wonder what made her change her mind?

Perhaps she took the phrase “clean up the streets” a trifle too literally and from there it was a downward spiral.

Not one for adding to the publicity of other people’s affairs, however, I continued on my way.

Librarium Part One

Originally published at The Idler

Along with cafes, pubs and narrow boats, libraries have always been a top-drawer refuge for idlers. Oscar Wilde used to immerse himself in the beautiful literature of the British Museum’s reading room, as did George Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. The idle life’s founding father, Samuel Johnson is also said to have been something of a bibliophile having once achieved the autodidactic feat of reading 35 000 volumes of the Harlean Library in way of constructing a catalogue for it.

A good library can be a comfortable oasis amid the hubbub of an otherwise busy city and the best sort is host to everything the urban flaneur holds dear: peace and quiet, dog-eared books, crackly old jazz records, fascinating characters lurking in every corner and haphazard furnishings liberated from innumerable closed-down gentleman’s clubs. Today’s library directors are forced to go the extra mile to make these oases all the more appealing: these days the daily papers are laid out ready for you; access is granted to the digital delights of the Internet; librarians are getting younger and more attractive and it’s all absolutely free. Many public libraries are even installing coffee and tea facilities for their punters. No wonder Ray Bradbury described these as “birthing places of the universe”. All we need now are on-site tobacconists and somewhere to get some shut-eye and we need not ever bother going home.

That’s precisely the idea taken into account by Saint Deiniol’s Library in the leafy town of Hawarden in Wales: the only library in the UK to have bedrooms. Not only is the library (of 230 thousand theology, philosophy and history books) housed in a beautiful and rambling nineteenth-century country house; you can also stay the night there – or even a month. That’s right: it’s a residential library. For a relatively low sum of money you have your own bibliographic retreat at which you can make full use of the collection; have dinner; sleep in a proper bed and wake up to enjoy a continental breakfast. Heaven on Earth, surely. They even have a copy of Johnson’s Idler in the annexe. To think that people pay so much money to go to health spas.

The library was initially put together by Victorian politician and dedicated polymath, William E. Gladstone (though the current building wasn’t erected until after his death, as a publicly-funded memorial). Gladstone was probably an enemy of idleness: he was the holder of three first-class university degrees, curator of this great library, self-stated utilitarian, staunchly religious, four-time prime minister of Britain and it seems that (for a spell during his early years) he opposed the abolition of slavery and factory legislation. Phew. He even personally delivered many of the books from his private residence to a publicly accessible building by wheelbarrow, shortly after his eightieth birthday. Nonetheless, you can’t help but admire the guy’s gung-ho spirit and his ability to stick in the craw of Queen Victoria who once remarked upon his insolent lack of formality in her presence.

Why exactly Gladstone chose to erect the only residential library in Britain rather than a regular non-residential one remains something of a mystery but James Cape Story (a regular Saint Deiniol’s patron circa 1905) was right in declaring the library, “a place for restful meditation, for research, for mental and spiritual refreshment”.

Health Spas? Pfft.

On happiness

Whenever I read celebrity interviews in the Guardian‘s saturday supplement, I always think about how I would answer the same questions if it were me being framed as an object of curiosity by the major national newspaper.

You do the same, dear reader. Do not try and deny it. We all think we are special. But we are not. It is only celebrities who are special. And possibly me.

Obviously I’d be very mysterious and interesting about it all because I’m a very mysterious and interesting person. Each answer would be an imparting of advise to the public, who are desperate to be shown how to live by the various figureheads of gliteratti, literatti and cliterati.

Today’s interview was with Regina Spektor, with whom I am in love. She’s the interesting Jewish New York jazz singer babe that Amy Winehouse never became. Do you hear that, Winehouse? You failed us all. I don’t want you anymore. You are nothing to me now. Regina and I have a beautiful thing going on and next summer we’re going to cycle around Oxford on a tandem and smoke exotic cigarettes on a Balkan midnight. In my mind.

When I read these interviews though I fall at the first hurdle. Perhaps reading too much into the questions, I hardly ever know what the interviewer is on about. To me, many of the questions are like the cryptic bit at the bottom of an email personality questionnaire which always asks “Who is the least likely to respond?”

To what?

A case in point:

The first thing asked of Ms. Spektor was, “When were you happiest?”

As much as I’d like to subvert the trite and saccharine question by adopting the role of some horrid character (“When I watched my mother dying. It’s a real pleasure to visualize her even now sinking into the abyss”) I feel that I aught to give a more truthful response. The public wants to know all about me after all and not some horrible character lurking in the corners of my mind or perched gargoyle-like at the tip of my tongue waiting silently like a bound-and-gagged Tourettes homunculus to leap out suddenly at a job interview or a funeral and irrevocably sabotage my life.

No. The problem is that I don’t understand a lot of these aparently popular human emotions that get bandied around as though there were no alternative. I don’t know what happiness is exactly. When I imagine happiness, I visualise myself reading novels in my pajamas upon some soft cushions. But is that happiness? Contentedness really. Or comfort or something.

A guy in the “Are you happy” column of the same magazine writes that he “can be dark, bleak, pessimistic but that doesn’t mean [he is] unhappy”.

I can understand pleasure. I enjoy eating, smoking, drinking coffee, chewing pens. I enjoy books, comics, Charlie Chaplin films, jazz music and those things made of pins which mould to the shape of your hand but while these are pleasure-giving commodities or sensations. They don’t make me conclude that I am “happy”.

Perhaps happiness was invented by Epicureans: the school of philosophy that saw life as absurd and aimless other than the aim to minimize pain and to maximize pleasure. Perhaps this maximization of pleasure is happiness.

When I have more jobs in my outbox than my inbox: the cat is combed, the kitchen sparkles and the notepad bursts with new ideas. I feel something alright. Happiness? I’d call it satisfaction.

And it goes on like this. I don’t understand what people mean by “Forgiveness” either. If one is wronged and asked to forgive, what does one have to do? Forget it happened? How can one consciously erase a memory? Even if you just ignore the fact, you’ll always know that your chum fed all of your favourite ice cream to the dog. I don’t really understand “anger”. I can feel frustrated or wronged but I get over it.

It’s a good job I don’t get interviewed in newspaper supplements. I’m far too neurotic. But I doubt anyone else has decent answers to the above either and that the celebrities just humour the magazine by saying things like “playing conkers, aged nine” or “eating a sandwich bigger than my head”. I don’t see myself as some cold non-human anthropologist like Spock or Mr Data from Star Trek because if challenged I don’t think anyone really knows what they are talking about when it comes to emotions or the mind. As psychotherapist Albert Ellis used to say (I learned this from today’s magazine too), “all human beings are out of their fucking minds”.

The Skeleton

Before I attended the Glastonbury music festival in 2005, I would always say “I go to Edinburgh every year” when other hairy people asked me if I’d ever been to a festival.

I’d know they wouldn’t be happy with this response of course: they meant music festival – and specifically in the one-weekend, sensory-overload, drug-fueled, covered in mud sort of way but my reply about Edinburgh was my punishment to them for being overly presumptive.

If you’re not going to include literature, comedy, theatre or film festivals under your schema of ‘festivals’ then don’t speak to me. You’re prejudiced against squares, you are. Why aren’t you at home listening to music by faux-squares like the Kaiser Chiefs or something?

I’d like to come up with a retort for the similarly presumptive “Who do you support?” question which doesn’t involve football or the supporting of one’s legs in return for their supporting of one.

The best I can come up with is: “Who? Who? I think you mean WHOM! Arsenal!”

The fans of footy don’t like this sort of banter though and pointing out grammatical inaccuracies to them is a good way of finding yourself reduced to your component molecules.

Last week resulted in multiple sojourns to Edinburgh to soak up the foamy suds of the now-in-full-swing Festival. Now that I’m there with plenty of real music festival experience to compare it too, I realize that the two sorts of festival are remarkably similar experiences. Both involve lots of slow walking about in orderly lines.

Saturday in particular involved a lot of this sort of shuffling but was otherwise great and summed up everything I love about festival Edinburgh. I spent most of the time hanging out in the marquee of Luke Wright’s Poetry Party, drinking cheap beer and listening to the UKs best poets (Tim Turnbull, Martin Newall, John Hegley among others) for free, surrounded by wonderful friends.

After that, a quick trip to see Simon Munnery doing Phone Book Live and then himself again with Miles Jupp in the brilliant Johnson and Boswell: Late But Live.

My strangest Fringe experience of the year (so far) took place while poking around the market at Grass Market. A man was selling peculiar and slightly grotesque objects – which might have appealed to Lord Whimsy in a particularly peculiar mood. The salesman beckoned theatrically at a large Aleister Crowley-looking goth who had come up to his table to browse and directed him to the boot of his car.

I overheard him saying to the bald, six-foot goth in floor-length leather jacket, “Come and have a look at this skeleton”.

From the boot of the car a box not much bigger than a shoe box (but not yet a shoe box!) was revealed and presented to the goth in a carefully balanced fashion. The way it was handled by the salesman suggested that the contents must have been highly fragile.

The goth looked at it carefully but unemotionally. I recall specifically that he held his head at a slanted angle akin to a curious emu investigating a hedgehog turd.

Apparently unimpressed, the goth floated away, leathers swishing behind him. I swear I heard a crack of thunder.

The salesman shrugged and put the box away.

I suppose I could have gone and investigated this peculiarity for myself but it was raining and I needed a wee.

But I wonder now what sort of skeleton could have been in the box. A human baby? A small animal? A single skull? I prefer to imagine that it was some sort of carnival grotesquery – a Fiji Mermaid or an Angel or an extra-terrestrial.

Due to my temporary lack of investigative spirit, the readers of this blog will have to remain unsatisfied. Sorry about that. No closure to this anecdote, fatty.

Back in my theatre days (oh yes), we used to play a warm-up game called “What’s in the box?”, devised by yours truly. An empty box was passed around the characters of the play (who had collectively decided beforehand on the imaginary contents); each of them would react in away according to their character and a single onlooker would have to hazard a guess. Of course, it was usually a severed cock.

I motion that we, the livejournal community, play a little game of “what’s in the box?” right now by utilising the limited data of the goth’s expression. We are cheating, I suppose, by having knowledge of the boney truth: the box contained a skeleton. But what kind, you schlub, What kind?

Funny Money

Most people reminisce about sexual encounters, holidays in Spain or the general ‘good old days’. Not me. I apparently reminisce about old cartoons. And if they happen to be really bad straight-to-video releases then so much the better.

Today, seemingly for no reason, I remembered an animated series called Sylvanian Families. Now, Sylvanian Families were primarily a range of crappy doll house-type toys for girls involving various ‘families’ of woodland animals (oddly including bears). I played with my sister’s toys endlessly as a kid and usually made them all have sex in a big pile in the living room of the deluxe cottage. They liked it, the animal slags.

I guess the manufacturers of these toys tried to emulate the successful toy/cartoon partnership done so well by He-Man and the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Sadly, their cartoon was a load of bollocks so it never really got shown on TV and no one ever gave a shit. The wikipedia page doesn’t seem to know whether Sylvanian Families were a line of toys or a cartoon. I guess I’m the only person who knows. Que sera sera.

The one episode of the Sylvanian Families cartoon I can distinctively remember is one in which the Families’ common enemy, ‘Pack Bat’, decides to pull a bank heist. Yeah, hardcore. The kids watching the cartoon must have suddenly felt out of their depth: their happy animated toy-spin-off series about tree-dwelling woodland families had turned into Oceans Eleven.

At some point in the episode it was revealed that the standard unit of currency in the Sylvanian Families world is that of the leaf. That’s right – they use leaves for money.

Not the leaves from some magic tree owned by the Sylvanian bank, mind you. Not the leaves from the only Oak Tree in the Sylvanian Forest. Just leaves. The urban equivalent of this madness is a Londoner giving up on cash and taking up a barter system with a currency of carbon monoxide or pigeons.

And this is what Pack Bat wants to steal from the Sylvanian Bank? I’m pretty sure that at the time of watching it (aged eight) I realized that Pack Bat was a moron and that leaves would never have any financial value in a woodland economy. The Sylvanian Families (and Pack Bat) live in what you might call a Forest Democracy, but I say that they’ve made such a mockery of the concept of money that they might as well just ‘fess up to being communists right now.

I’m reminded now of Star Trek‘s similar attitude to money. Our main Star Trek guys have no need for money: they have replicators so that all of their food and material objects are free and so going to work is either (a) a total waste of their time and symptomatic of an ingrained slave mentality or (b) the result of a desire to improve the world they live in through working hard. They’re communists! They might look like little Utopian Americans going around the vastness of space, policing the galaxy in spandex pants but when you think about it they’re actually communists made good.

When our main Star Trek guys are forced to trade with civilizations who still have money on their home planets, they INVENT money to trade with. It’s hilarious.

“Still working for the old kablingy, eh? Well, no matter. Here is some precious money for you (haha) in the form of Federation Credits. We printed it this morning just for you.”

Why would any business-minded alien accept that crap? Seems to me that Star Trek‘s ‘Federation Credits’ have about the same value as Sylvanian Families‘ ‘Leaves’.

The phrase ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees’ must have never developed in the Sylvanian Forest. Or maybe their insistence on using leaves as currency was originally a response to the old adage. Who knows?