Month: March 2014

School assembly, circa 1991. Age 9. We all sat on the floor in rows.

Our headmaster, Mr Noakes, addressed his audience, doubtless amazing us with a wildly apocryphal Biblical story for children, probably involving some normally-adversarial animals learning to cooperate on Noah’s Ark.

Suddenly, Mr Noakes singled me out of the crowd.

“You there,” he said, “Don’t be so silly.”

He must be talking to someone else, I thought. I hadn’t done anything silly. I looked down at my pumps.

“Don’t ignore me,” he said, “you there, in the blue tee-shirt.”

I was wearing a blue tee-shirt. Did he mean me? I hadn’t done anything silly. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“That’s it,” he said, “Get out and wait for me in my office.”

Being sent to the headmaster’s office was the most-feared disciplinary action in our little school. It was usually a last-resort threat from an exasperated teacher. I’d never seen the headmaster himself send anyone to his own office. This was serious. Someone was in trouble. Not me though, because I’d not done anything silly.

“YOU!” he shouted, “OUT!”

I chanced a glance at Mr Noakes. We made eye-contact. His were blazing with headmasterly rage.

It felt like he was talking to me. But he couldn’t have been. I hadn’t done anything silly.

“Am I talking to myself?” he asked the room, and I was beginning to think quite desperately that maybe he wasn’t. He was almost certainly talking to me.

I felt sick. Children in the front rows were starting to look around behind them to get a look at the idiot or rebel who was disrupting everything. I was keeping them from knowing whether Noah would be able to teach the spider and the fly to be friends.

I pointed at my chest and silently mouthed the word, “Me?”

“Yes! You!” said Mr Noakes, “If you can’t act appropriately in an assembly, you’ll have to leave.”

Blimey, he really was talking to me. But I’d not done anything silly at all. I hadn’t even been aware of anything silly happening in my vacinity.

I looked around for signs that maybe someone else was being silly and I’d been caught in the crossfire.

“Don’t look around!” he commanded, “You know who I’m talking to. You. You!”

“Me?” I said again, pointing at my solar plexus, “Me-Me?”

“Yes!”

Nah, I thought, he can’t be talking to me. I hadn’t done anything silly at all. I wasn’t even sitting with my friends, vital accessories in the pursuit of silliness. Who on Earth could he be talking to?

“I’m not going to say it again. You. You! In the blue tee-shirt. Leave!”

Cujo spume frothed in the corners of his mouth.

My refusal to believe he was talking to me was reinforced by the fact that Mr Noakes knew my name but wasn’t using it. I was famous at school. Everyone knew me, especially Mr Noakes. He’d personally approved my second and third entries into the school talent show. He’d spent hours in his office talking to Mum and Dad about my allergies and my persistent refusal to do a forward roll.

Why didn’t he say “Robert Wringham” instead of “You there, you in the blue tee-shirt”? He knew who I was. And he knew I wasn’t a trouble-maker.

Not a deliberate one anyway. Maybe he was picking on me as some kind of revenge because I was too afraid of heights to climb the gym rope or because I’d caused him extra work by suggesting our school participate in the Blue Peter can drive.

By now, the other children were getting restless. They were all looking around and asking each other “who is it, who is it?” They were desperate to know whether Noah could unite the lion and the antelope in a rare example of predatory-prey harmony.

“Who, me?” I asked again.

“YOOUU!” he whined childishly. I thought he was going to tear some of his hair out. It was getting really bizarre.

There was no way I was making the walk of shame and leaving the assembly hall when I’d done nothing wrong, especially as I’d held fast for so long. One of us would come out of this looking like a complete idiot and it wasn’t going to be me. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I tucked my head between my knees and acted like a balled-up hedgehog.

Eventually, he lost interest. Wise birds, hedgehogs. He must have sensed that he’d completely derailed his own assembly and that the other children were dying to know whether Noah would be successful in getting red and grey squirrels to put aside years of bitter sectarianism and sign a mutually-beneficial non-aggression pact.

“Who do you suppose he was talking to?” I asked a friend once the assembly was over. I still wasn’t convinced it had been me. It couldn’t have been. I wasn’t being silly.

“Dunno,” he shrugged, “wanna trade some Pogs?”

I did! I did want to trade some Pogs. And in doing so I forgot all about the strange assembly episode until today. Seriously, what the fuck was that about? Had he really been talking to me? I’ve a good mind fly back to England right this minute, drag him out of retirement and straighten this all out.

“Be careful when you open the fridge,” I said, “there’s a loose egg rolling around in the door.”

My girlfriend laughed. “You should start one of your blogs with that,” she said.

“With what?”

“With that. That there’s a loose egg rolling around in the fridge door.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s funny,” she said, “a loose egg.”

“Is it?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Why?”

“A loose egg,” she said, “it’s just an aesthetically-pleasing combination of words. The two ohs. The two gees. The gloopiness of ‘loose’ and the suddenness of ‘egg’. And the word ‘egg’ doesn’t often follow the word ‘loose’ so it’s unpredictable too.”

I was impressed by this level of comic analysis. Good value, my girlfriend.

“Loose,” I wrote in my notebook, “Egg.” And then because it didn’t seem like enough, “Unpredictable.”

“Honey,” she said, this time less sure of herself.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why is there a loose egg rolling around in the fridge door?”

I explained.

“Because,” I said, “we have new eggs.”

We’d done the groceries that morning and I’d done the unpacking.

“Why do new eggs mean a booby-trapped fridge?” she asked, reasonable.

I’d gone to put the new eggs in the fridge to find the old box still there, still containing a single egg.

I couldn’t bear to leave it there, the old guard occupying an otherwise empty box, surrounded by eleven empty spaces once occupied by now-eaten fellow eggs.

To put the fresh box containing twelve new eggs–twelve promises–next to last week’s lone survivor felt cruel.

I binned the old box and nested the lone egg carefully in the top compartment of the fridge door, vowing to have it for breakfast tomorrow. It would be safe in there for one night and it would never have to meet the newbies.

Our fridge, for reasons best known to the good people at Benelux Electronics, does not have one of those molded plastic compartments for eggs. Don’t go thinking it’s got one of those. The egg just rolled about loose in the door.

I gently wedged the egg in place with two bars of fancy chocolate, but wasn’t convinced it would stay put. This is why I mentioned it to my girlfriend. To be on the lookout for it.

“A loose egg,” she said, “in the door.”

“Yes,” I said, “because of the new eggs.”

There was a pause.

“New eggs,” I said, “Is that funny too?”

“No,” she said, “Because it’s plural.”

“Correct,” I said, “Just testing.”

I looked down at my notebook. It said, “Loose Egg. Unpredictable.” It was exactly the kind of note that would haunt me in a few weeks’ time when I tried to work out what on Earth it meant.

To help its meaning stay in my memory, I showed the note to Samara.

“Are you going to remember what that’s about?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said decisively, “I will”.

“What do those other notes mean?”

Further up the page, my handwriting showed that I’d once been excited about “False Tales” and “Stoat:Hospital”.

Intriguing colon, that. Possible ratio.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, “But I’ll definitely remember this time. The loose egg, I mean.”

“A loose egg,” she corrected me.

“Yes,” I said.

It had been a productive morning.

A little later on, I went to the fridge for some orange juice. I opened the door gently and looked for the egg. Samara had cut a single cardboard eggcup out of the old box and, in it, the egg now sat like a little ovoid king.

“The egg,” I said.

“I made it a little holster,” she said, “you know, because of the new eggs.”

We closed the door slowly and watched the fridge light blink out.

*

If you’ve been enjoying this strange weekly blog, perhaps you’d consider backing my book at Unbound.co.uk.

As a repulsive hipster with an exaggerated sense of self importance, I sometimes place convenience over safety when crossing the road.

Even though I’ve committed to various fitness regimes with an eye to living a long and healthy life, I’m perfectly happy to launch myself into oncoming traffic given the slightest opportunity of saving a few seconds.

Reckless, I know, but the real problem is when other pedestrians follow my lead. They must mistake my impulsiveness and impatience for some kind of magic knowledge. Perhaps they think I’ve noticed that the oncoming truck is actually just a trick of the light, incapable of reducing them to a mound of twisted gristle.

It’s the dangers of conformity. Follow and be damned.

This being said, I’m a terrible conformist myself. I even conform when I sneeze.

By nature, my sneezes don’t sound like sneezes at all. They’re like something between a cough and a cry for help. They go BLASH!

I find myself deliberately altering them to more closely resemble the normal human sneeze. I put a vocal spin on them. My manufactured sneezes go Choo!

It’s not so ill-founded. Do you think Beethoven had such pathetic sneezes as mine? Was Moses’ flight from Egypt punctuated with such ill-defined nasal expulsions? Not on your nelly. By conforming, I can sneeze like the greats.

And then there are accents. I’m especially suggestible when it comes to accents. If I’m in the company of someone with a particularly alluring accent–if they’re from New York, say, or Ireland–I gravitate unconsciously toward it. If I stand between two people with different but equally alluring accents I risk being mistaken for, say, a Brooklyn Leprechaun.

Mannerism reproduction is something I’m prone to as well. Sometimes, in the company of people I like, I find myself mirroring the way they sit, speak, laugh, and generally position themselves. I’ve always seen this as friendly rapport more than conformity but what’s chilling is how I sometimes use my friends’ mannerisms when the originator isn’t even present. “I’m inclined to agree” is something my friend Johnston says and I’ve inadvertently added it to my lexicon wholesale. I’ve got laughs borrowed from other people too, particularly a kind of dry wheeze lifted from my friend James.

That’s not normal is it? And if it is, to what extent are we ourselves? What if James took his dry wheeze laugh from someone else? A third-hand laugh. I want don’t want a laugh with that many miles on the clock.

And then there’s rucksack straps. At school, we’d use rucksacks to carry our books from class to class. For some reason, it was universally agreed that to carry a rucksack using both of its straps was a dorky way to carry a rucksack, even though they were clearly designed to be worn that way. Instead, we’d carry our rucksacks with a single strap over one shoulder. Casual. Nobody was strong enough to be the only one to wear a rucksack with both straps, so we all grew up wonky, spines distorted into nightmare treble clefs. The behaviour is so ingrained that, even as an adult, I think twice before strapping myself fully and symmetrically into a rucksack.

This could cause a problem if I ever go parachuting, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I’d rather plummet to my death than go around looking like a two-strap dork.

So there we go. A modest bestiary of minor conformities. I don’t think they matter in the grand scheme of things. Unless you think they do, of course, in which case I’ll probably modify my opinion to coincide with yours.

Thursday was laundry day and, as usual, I’d left it to the last minute.

In swimming shorts and a pair of knitted slippers, I rolled up the sleeves of my formal dress shirt and set to it.

A sou’wester hat would have completed the look, I know, but I don’t have one because I don’t live in an episode of Murder She Wrote. Yet.

We live on the fourteenth floor of a tall apartment building and the communal laundry room is in the basement. I generally enjoy doing laundry (the coins! the bounce sheets! the lint guard!) but all that up-and-down in the elevators is a bit of a bind.

You have to use the elevator six times when you do laundry. Six. You go down once to load the washing machine; a second time to switch the load into the drier; and a third time to collect the finished load.

You have further seventh and eighth trips to make if the bastarding dryer hasn’t done its job properly or if you’ve forgotten to bring your detergent like some sort of forgetful crane operator.

I can’t help but think all this would be easier (and more fun!) if the building only had a fireman’s pole.

Would that be too much trouble? Would it be too much to ask for? Would it be too extravagant in the current political climate?

Now, I’m not suggesting that a single fireman’s pole take us all the way down from the fourteenth floor to the basement. Even if you survived the plummet, think of the chapped thighs.

Especially on laundry day when you’re wearing swimming shorts. Yowza.

But you could have a staggered system of multiple fireman’s poles (firemen’s poles?), allowing you to descend two floors at a time.

Laundry is not the only reason we have to go downstairs, of course, and I can’t help thinking of the potentially horrific pile-ups that would certainly happen in a Towering Inferno-style evacuation scenario. Neighbours’ shoes upon neighbours’ shoulders, a teetering tower of impatient urbanites, fourteen storeys high.

Oh, the ironic indignity of being injured on a fireman’s pole during a fire.

But, madam, you’re overlooking an added benefit of the fireman’s pole system: the super-duper mood you’d be in after each slide.

This would translate to a social benefit when the purpose of your descent is to confront a UPS man who wants to charge you an unexpected customs tax, or if you’ve been pulled away from your lounge party to open the door for your stupid mate who can’t figure out the intercom.

And you know full well it would be life-affirming to begin your daily commute with the words “Geronimo!” or “Wheeeeeeeee!”

A word on attire. Additional fireman garb — helmets, galoshes, galoshes, helmets — would be forbidden when “riding the poles” (as it will become known). Like wearing a band tee-shirt to a show fronted by the same band, it’s just too much. You may still dress like a fireman on the street and when you’re at home, but never on the poles. You should also refrain from dressing as a Ghostbuster or a 1960’s television-era Batman, though all other eras of Batman (Batmen?) are fine.

Fast and fun, the fireman’s pole was originally invented by peppy Chicagoans to speed up firemen’s response time. But why limit this technique to emergencies? If we make the fireman’s pole a fairly standard way of getting about, it’ll put pressure on the emergency services to come up with even more efficient ways of averting crises. It’ll become an ongoing tug-o-war between the emergency services and regular society. Before we know it, we’ll all be zipping around the planet in lubricated tubes.

Naturally, the fireman’s pole is a one-way street. You couldn’t scale the pole to get back up to your apartment. For that, some kind of “lift” would be in order.

Oh, alright Hitler, we’ll just leave things as they are. If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. But if you ask me, the elevator-centric society we live in today is just another form of FASCISM.

★

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Collapsed on the chaise with a book, it slowly dawned on me that I was being watched.

I gingerly lifted the book and saw this:

A miniature llama. Sitting on my stomach.

He hadn’t been there a moment ago, but there was no disputing that he was there now. Sudden Llama.

What was he doing there? Smiling mainly.

My silly girlfriend must have come into the room, seen that I was absorbed by the book, and quietly put the llama there. She can be unpredictable in that way.

I, on the other hand, am a serious man–wholly predictable, thank you–and I was reading a serious book. I was not about to be undone by such silliness.

I did what any serious man would do and ignored the llama.

If I didn’t see him, he wasn’t there. I adjusted my glasses and returned to the book:

The trajectory of Freud’s and Lacan’s theory, said Žižek, goes from desire to drive…

But I knew the llama was there. Silent, with his friendly smile, on the other side of the book.

But what if he wasn’t. What if he’d llamaed off?

Maybe he was both there and not there. Schrodinger’s Llama.

Worse, maybe he’d never been there. I’ve been waiting for that to happen. I’m the ideal candidate for a pooka.

I peeked over the top of the book to check on the situation. I affected nonchalance, so that the llama wouldn’t know he was getting to me.

I saw this:

Yes, he was still there. Obviously. Piercing gaze. Vacant smile. Elderly Welshman’s haircut for some reason.

Nonsense, I thought and returned to the book.

The trajectory of Freud’s and Llama’s theory goes from desire to drive.

What?

The trajectory of Freud’s and Lacan’s theory goes from desire to drive.

Samara came in. “I see you two are getting along!”

“Yes,” I said, “like a house on fire. I’m trying to read and he’s distracting me.”

“How,” said Samara utterly reasonably, “is a toy miniature llama distracting you?”

“It’s the look on his face,” I said, “it’s mesmerizing.”

“Don’t let him get to you,” she said, “you’re more sophisticated than he is.”

I wondered for a moment whether she was talking to me or the llama.

“I won’t let him get to me,” I said, “My mind is a fortress”.

She sat beside me and began to toy with the llama. “Read something out loud to me,” she said.

“The trajectory,” I said, “of Freud’s and Lacan’s theory goes from desire to…”

I could feel his llama gaze burning a hole through the cover. Like this:

“Oh, it’s no use!”

Needless to say, Samara found this hilarious.

I snatched the llama up in my hands. I was surprised by how soft he was, hand-made possibly from alpaca fleece. I brushed him softly against my cheek. He was actually rather lovely.

“What is this anyway?” I asked “Who’s out there turning out miniature llamas?”

“He’s so silly,” she said dreamily, “and I have no idea where he came from.”

I thought it had come from the box of Samara’s childhood things her parents had recently pulled out of storage.

“Nope,” she said, “We’ve had him for longer than that.”

We thought about this for a while. The mysterious origin of the llama, how it arrived in our home.

It didn’t seem to trouble Samara, so I steadfastly decided not to let it trouble me either. I would not be tormented by this:

Seriously now. Where did this thing come from? An egg?