Author: Robert Wringham

Practice

People are getting better at the “practice” versus “practise” rule. Have you noticed?

Bloggers get it right more often than not now. Submissions I receive for New Escapologist, even when they’re terrible, get “practice” and “practise” spot-on.

It’s like when supermarkets a few years ago started describing their express checkout lanes as being for “five items or fewer” instead of the incorrect but time-honoured “five items or less.”

You see, “practice” is a noun and “practise” is a verb. It’s “an artistic practice” but “practise makes perfect.”

I’m a bit of a grammar pedant with strong feelings about ugly words, but I’m sorry to say I’ve been left behind on this “practise” business. For me, it’s all “practice” and always has been, but apparently that’s the American way.

For once, I distance myself from the pedants. It can all, I think, be “practice.”

I still prefer “foetus” to “fetus” though.

Brilliant and Funny

This just in:

I finished Rub-A-Dub-Dub today. It has been a most treasured summer read for me. Brilliant and funny (I think I averaged one chortle per page). Hit me in the way the best Kurt Vonnegut books do: a humane portrait of the absurd, futile and grotesquely beautiful enterprise of being human.

So fuck this guy.

One chortle per page is good whack, by the way. The book is 281 pages, making it better for your abs than any kind of workout.

And this is the sort of thing I like to see:

Smells Nice

Not too many of these left on Planet Earth.

I gave these out at gigs in 2008. Made by Eric and Tommy.

Yentob

Alan Yentob died. I used to think I was the only person who liked him. And I did like him. I thought he was cool.

But Amol Rajan’s tribute to him is something else:

Engaging, witty and endlessly curious, he brought energy and warmth to every conversation. He was generous with his time, fierce in his convictions, and full of joy in the work of others.

To work with Alan was to be inspired and encouraged to think bigger. He had a rare gift for identifying talent and lifting others up – a mentor and champion to so many across the worlds of television, film and theatre.

Modern art never had a more loyal ally. His shows were always brilliant, often masterpieces, sometimes seminal. So much of Britain’s best TV over five decades came via his desk. That was public Alan. In private, he was magnetic, zealous and very funny, with a mesmerising voice and mischievous chuckle. He oozed fortitude until the very last.

He had his foibles and failures, but Alan Yentob was one of the most generous, influential, singular, passionate, supportive, creative and loved men of his generation. I commend his spirit to the living.

Now, that’s a loved man. Imagine a colleague saying that about you!

Some favourite Yentob things:

1. He is one of the “men” in Nigel William’s Two and a Half Men in a Boat.

2. BBC’s Arena arts documentaries – here’s my playlist of about 50 episodes scrounged up for rainy day viewing whenever they appear on YouTube. I wish the BBC would put all of them online in an archive – there were hundreds of these made, as well as Monitor, Ombnibus, and Imagine strands.

3. Dickon Edwards’ 2006 account of being on Imagine: “Mr. Yentob is nowhere to be seen.”

4. A 2016 Guardian profile of Yentob, “the last impresario.”

5. Cracked Actor

Fridged

You’ve seen a version of this pic before, but m’colleague Mark just sent me a signed version in the post.

Signed, that is, by S. Lee and R. Herring (who, despite that various other achievements in work and life will always be Pliny and Histor to me) at their separate gigs last week.

Normally I put this sort of thing in my Kubrik Box, but this one made the fridge. I want to see it every time I get milk. “There’ll always be milk!“

Zit

In an empty elevator this morning, I used the mirror to squeeze a zit.

It was a luxurious experience. The mirror was huge, wall-to-wall. The lighting was bright and even. What better opportunity for an act of minor surgery?

Just as I was getting to grips with it, a tiny voice said “hold the lift,” but it sounded distant and surely not for me (this was a bank of six elevators).

A woman slithered in sideways through the closing doors. “Oh sorry,” I said, “Did you just ask me to hold the lift?”

“Yes, but that’s alright.”

“I was just using the mirror to squeeze a zit,” I said.

“Ah.”

“So I wasn’t being an arsehole,” I said, “Just disgusting.”

Glad we got that cleared up.

Get an Umbrella

A neighbour is setting up some deckchairs and a picnic table on the back court.

This is what I call “the Glasgow rain dance.”

See also: “summoning a postman” (drawing a bath).

Demure

The view from our back window is fairly depressing. We live three floors above a busy commercial street, so our “back court” (the area where wheelie bins thrive) is actually the flat roof of a restaurant, all stainless steel extractor fans and outlet vents.

We can see various neighbours’ back courts at their vista of junk, including mountains of seldom-touched outdoor children’s toys, dropped bicycles with training wheels still attached, and hopeless lockdown purchases: mini trampolines, hooded barbeques, not used since we moved downmarket almost four years ago. There’s a fridge-freezer out there, and a never-again-to-be-collected wheelie bin with planks of wood burping out of it.

What frequently cheers me up though, when looking out of said window, is the sight of my downstairs neighbour walking his cat.

The cat is quite a fancy longhaired breed, but he seems to cooperate quite demurely with his master’s antics.

He’s not even on the lead today.

Sawdust and Shavings

Gah! Just as I’m trying to find some distraction in this world, here’s some very good eczema writing by Rebecca Gisler in About Uncle.

My brother and I have the same flaws, and the first of those flaws is that we have eczema, which is to say that, rather than protecting us from external aggressions, our skin itches endlessly, and it goes rough and dry like old crocodile leather, and it cracks and it fissures and it furrows, because over the years raking that defective skin has become as natural and unconscious as breathing, and some people say our skin is too fine for this world, that we’re allergic to it.

and

from the emptiness deep down inside us, from the stirring and throbbing of the emptiness inside us, and that’s what turns us into these louse-infested beasts, these fleabags, these bundles of nerves that no balm can soothe, but enough whining because it’s also true that scratching when you have an itch, even if it’s all the time, where you have an itch, even ifs everywhere, brings an intense pleasure and deep satisfaction, and we could easily devote our days and weeks to it, reducing ourselves to sawdust and shavings with fingernails and rasps and anything else we might find at hand, never thinking of the consequences, not thinking of anything, thinking of nothing, the very nothing than binds my brother and me, the reason we’re never at peace.

Aphid Todayphid

In an antihistamine-induced stupor, demi- and semi- idea fragments drift across the surface of my mind like floaters across an eye.

One such fragment, today, are the words “Aphid Todayphid,” which sounds like a topical news magazine for aphids.

Aphid Todayphid: all the news that fit to print, but really, really small.

I like the idea of being in a scrum of journalists at a press conference:

“Yes, Robert Wringham for Aphid Todayphid. Mister Prime Mininster, what is Number 11’s line regarding the impact of this latest u-turn on the cost of living crisis?”

“Thank you for your question, Robert. Um, sorry, Aphid Today?”

“Phid.”

At least we have an earthly use for font size 1 now.