Author: Robert Wringham

A few weeks ago, in downtown Montreal, we noticed a large truck emblazoned with the festive colours and corporate iconography of Planters Nuts.

I wouldn’t like to describe it here as “a truckload of peanuts” because I have no idea. For all I know, there was just one single, highly pampered, peanut inside or maybe Planters were transporting office supplies to their workers in a truck that looked like it might contain peanuts. Perhaps the truck wasn’t anything to do with Planters at all and the friendly “Mr Peanut” logo was being used to disguise a far-darker cargo. Pringles perhaps. I don’t know. It’s something of a Schrödinger’s Peanut situation, and I think we’re getting off the point.

Look. The side of the truck displayed a picture of smiling Mr Peanut, who looks more and more like Clive Anderson with every redesign. And next to his beaming portrait were the words: MR. PEANUT (MD).

MD? I was at once delighted by the idea that Mr Peanut might be a Medical Doctor and angry at myself for not realising it before. Of course Mr Peanut was a medical doctor. It made complete and total sense.

Clearly, a successful medical practice is how he affords such fine accouterments: the top hat, the monocle, the ebony cane, the spats.

How else? You didn’t think he made his fortune as a peanut magnate did you? For crying out loud, he is a peanut. He’s hardly likely to sell his brothers and sisters to be rolled in salt and casually scoffed in pubs and airplanes. That would be downright sick.

Also, there are a lot of people out there who are deathly allergic to Mr Peanut and his kind. It must be very difficult for Mr Peanut to walk down the street or go to the cinema without making a lot of people nervous. At least this way, should his very presence accidentally trigger an anaphylactic shock in a passing stranger, he’s able to be useful and to make repairs.

“Is there a doctor in the house!?”

“Yes!”

In such a situation, Mr. Peanut is at once curse and cure. That’s what he keeps beneath the top hat: an EpiPen. He never leaves home without one.

My wife pointed out that the “MD” after his name was the French equivalent of “TM” in English. The MD was simply pointing out that Mr. Peanut is a registered trademark.

Oh!

Of course he wasn’t a medical doctor. He’s known far and wide as Mr. Peanut, not Dr. Peanut. Someone who wears a top hat and a monocle would never choose the more humble of those honorifics. Frankly, I’m surprised he’s not going around calling himself Dr. Prof. Rev. Peanut (MD) even without the medical degree.

I had been a fool. And my wife was laughing at me.

The strangest thing about all this is that, weeks later, part of me still thinks that Mr. Peanut is a medical doctor.

I saw some Planters Nuts in the supermarket today and something in me said “Mr. Peanut can write prescriptions.”

Even though it never made sense to begin with, and even after Samara filled me in on what the MD really signified, I’m still slave to my first, wholly mistaken, impression.

When I’m old and senile, I will almost certainly tell the nurses that Mr. Peanut is one of the finest doctors in the land and that might want to consult him about my quinapril doses.

This really could end badly. I myself have a peanut allergy. If I should ever have the misfortune to sit next to Mr. Peanut in the cinema, I’ll incorrectly assume he’ll be the one to help reduce the swelling.

Worst of all, nobody will shout “Is there a doctor in the house?!” because nobody else on the planet sees Mr. Peanut and thinks “Medical Doctor”.

And in the cinema specifically, they’re far more likely to be shouting “Down in Front!” because of his fucking top hat.

From now on, to be safe, I will only go to IMAX cinemas. They don’t tend to screen the kind of medical dramas that would attract Mr. Peanut and the 3D doesn’t work if you have a monocle.

Montreal! Where albino squirrels run amok, Mr Peanut is an MD, the hockey team can be controlled with the mind; and (soon) my blimp will patrol the skies.

Down in the parks: topless men, bottomless drinks, bits of stadium, visible panty lines.

Out on the streets: beret-wearing women riding side-saddle with cigarettes, peg-legged pirates, cross-eyed babies, puking Torontonians unaccustomed to the fun.

At any one time, half of Montreal’s population is underground. I refer not to “the underground city” that the tourists are always looking for (any day now, they’ll find it), but to the perpetual state of digging the streets up. Either there’s a year-round treasure hunt that nobody’s told me about or the mayor has lost his keys.

The women and men of Montreal could all work as models if they wanted to. The women could model high fashion, the men could model anything from gravel to grit.

I don’t mean to patronize Montreal’s women by suggesting they’re all beautiful or to insult Montreal’s men by suggesting they’re all hideous (so very hideous), but nowhere else in the world have I so frequently been moved to say the words “I’m sorry Madam, but is this man upsetting you?” only to discover he’s the husband of twenty years.

Montrealers are generally prepared to get from A to B by any means necessary. Boulevard Saint-Laurent looks like the Wacky Races. In a single day last week I saw a home-made motor-trike; an ersatz batmobile; some sk8er bois old enough to know better; a procession of Hell’s Angels, the leader of which wore bunny ears; a hipster with Icarus wings; Leonard Cohen and PK Suban on a tandem Bixi; and a dwarf on a pogo stick.

At first I assumed they were after me, but it may have been chucking out time at Cirque du Soleil Anonymous.

Jerusalem was built on seven hills, as were Rome, Paris, Budapest, Byzantium and Edinburgh. Efficient Montreal did it in one. But it’s not a hill, dammit, it’s a mountain.

There are no truly high-rise buildings due to a bylaw about structures not exceeding the height of Mount Royal itself. Presumably the City Council are afraid of angering the Volcano Gods.

Further credence is lent to Volcano Gods theory when you consider “The Tams”. It’s supposed to take place on Sunday, but there’s always at least one drummer sitting in the shade of that statue thrubbing along on his own. Why? Because if the drumming were to stop, the Volcano God would awake. Those crusties are in the pay of the City Council and we should all be glad of it.

That Earthquake last year? A warning shot. The on-duty drummer must have been distracted by one of those model women or a pogo dwarf.

There’s a giant orange on the side of the Décarie Expressway. I’ve been there. There’s a hotdog stand in the bottom. I asked a lady working there what they keep in the rest of the orange. She said “Nothing”. Suss.

Montreal, as David Cronenberg knows, is the ideal place to hide from the supernatural. That towering cross on Mount Royal (though its main function is a massive key to wind up the town each morning) sends out a clear message to vampires: “you may be welcome in the rest of Canada, but Montreal’s not having it. We’ve got quite enough pale young men with top hats and pierced nipples, merci.”

Zombies meanwhile will never breach our city, thanks to a convenient flap on the Jacques Cartier bridge. At least I assume that’s what all the seemingly-functionless light switches in Plateau apartments are connected to. One flick of the wrist and Johnny Deadfellow is in the Saint Lawrence. We’ll lose the odd Boston rideshare that way, but it’s something to chat about in the lavatory at Expozine.

Speaking of Cartier, he and his posse must have must have arrived here in the summer. “Zut Alores!” they must have said, “Is zis not a paradise, yesno? We will settle down ‘ow-you-say tout-sweet.” And by the time winter came along, they’d already built a whole city and it was too late to move a few degrees south.

Dogs, cats, gerbils: all socially-acceptable fauna to share a home with.

There aren’t many people who have pet silverfish.

In fact, the only reason I’m able to pick out a silverfish in a lineup is that we used to get them in our outbuildings when I was little and Dad always insisted they be given the back of the shoe. Yes, snuffed out with the traditional method reserved for minibeasts: squishing.

Being a ridiculous greenie today and having far too much empathy for my own good, I’m reluctant to do anything about the silverfish currently occupying our bathroom.

It’s not like they’re using up all the hot water or leaving hairs on the soap.

Indeed, they don’t seem to be doing any harm at all. Silverfish, as I understand it, consume paper and while this would be an obvious threat to precious things like books or papier-mâché hats, the ones in our bathroom seem to be subsisting on the tissue-paper dust that snows down onto their home in the ventilator when somebody tears off a piece of toilet roll.

It’s a rather charming little ecosystem.

Not ones for venturing out during daylight hours (something I can very much relate to), the silverfish and I only cross paths in the event of a midnight pee.

Even then, they largely ignore the gigantic vertebrate in their midst (that’s me) and swim quite playfully around my bare feet (moving in a way evocative glistening little fish, hence their name).

If there are high-flying ladies out there paying good money for goldfish pedicures, I don’t see why I should be turning down silverfish pedicures for free.

Silverfish pedicures: the poor man’s indulgence.

Silver is only second prize, after all. I’m willing to accept that.

To tell you the truth, dear reader (and why wouldn’t I? I’ve already confessed to my shameful bathroom infestation), the silverfish are actually rather cute. The baby ones are the size of eraser rubbings. How can such a tiny form contain anything like a mind? It seems impossible, but there they are.

Yes, reader, there are baby ones. There were originally only two silverfish. We called them Silvia and Silvio on the rather heteronormative presumption that they were a male-female couple. Hasty, yes, but soon proven accurate, as their numbers began to increase.

You may be thinking: Kill them! Kill them now before it’s too late! and I agree it may be possible that the infestation is getting out of hand. But there’s the Montreal Agreement to consider.

You see, the silverfish and I have an unspoken agreement. If they stay in the bathroom, they can continue to live and to thrive.

After all, who am I so snuff our their tiny lives for no good reason? I’m no beastly Titan, you know.

But if I see one elsewhere in the apartment, I’ve given myself license to thwack it. Until that day, I’d allow them to live in peace rather than, as the case would be, pieces.

That day arrived today. I found a silverfish in the bedroom.

When I squashed the rogue animal with the spine of How to Be Idle (sorry Tom, it just happened to be to hand — it’s a testament to the book that it’s always so close by) it reduced to a barely-identifiable smudge, like a smattering of ash.

Needless to say, I felt terrible about this. A life smudged out. But them’s the rules, silverfish. You saw the agreement on the table. I must protect my books and any house guests who happen to wear papier-mâché hats.

I’m now thrown into a moral quandary. Do I make a preemptive strike by exterminating all of the silverfish–innocent babies and all–as they sleep? Or do you think they’ll get the message when none of their scouts ever seem to return from beyond the bathroom door?

Strike in advance to protect my books? Or punish only the offending parties? I don’t think it’s hyperbole to suggest that this must be exactly how President Obama feels about ISIS.

While I was idling in the hammock today, an airship passed overhead. Next door’s pug and I were equally delighted.

It was a lovely thing to see on a quiet autumn day, drifting proudly across a backdrop of cirrus clouds.

Oddly enough, we recently enjoyed a curious BBC documentary programme called Cloud Lab about a team of scientists flying around in a custom-made airship discovering things about clouds.

Not for the first time this week then, I was struck by how grand it would be to actually have an airship to ride around in.

What does it cost to have an airship, I wondered. Far too much, surely. About a hundred thousand dollars perhaps, or even more.

And then it struck me. That actually wasn’t very much. It’s more money than I have, obviously, because I’m an indolent wastrel, but it’s the kind of money that fairly ordinary people spend on things like houses and cars and all the rest of junk they think they need.

An airship was no more ridiculous that those things, dammit! I could have an airship if I wanted one.

My mind began to race. I loved the idea of an airship, perhaps permanently moored above the city, like how the HMS Belfast is moored in London.

I wouldn’t need an address any more. When people asked where I live or work, I could just proudly say “oh, I live in the blimp” and gesture up into the sky.

“You live in the blimp?!” they’d say.

And I’d say “Yes. Yes. I live in the blimp.”

The HMS Belfast is a tourist attraction in London, as is the permanently moored Tall Ship in Glasgow. I can only assume that the City of Montreal would be delighted by my plan. The blimp would attract people from far and wide–Ottawa even–and if they paid enough money I could take them for rides, maybe even drop them off at home.

I’d fulfill my ambition of being able to take a rope ladder to work. I’d be the only person higher than the crane operators. Their necks would creak as vertebrae groaned with the unfamiliar sensation of looking upwards. “Sweet Jesus,” they’ll say, “Someone found a way.”

It wouldn’t be very nice for the people who lived in the shadow of the blimp, I suppose. They’d never get any sunlight. The value of their property, now permanently eclipsed into a state of permanent night by my blimp, would plummet. The plants in their window boxes would shrivel and they’d all complain of a D-Vitamin deficiency. To them, I say: sorry.

This is the kind of revelry that comes to mind in a hammock, of course. There’s no practical application to any of this, of course. And even if there was, it would be highly unethical to plunge so many people into a state of permanent twilight. Of course.

But. Ah, but.

I got onto Google and searched “how much does it cost to buy a blimp?”

According to the first result on WikiAnswers, “A lot of money, but don’t worry. Keep smoking your crack pipe and I’m sure you’ll find one.”

Another answer: “It costs a quarter of a million dollars to rent the Budweiser Blimp for two hours.”

Yet another: “The Goodyear Blimp cost them three million dollars. And you’d need a special hangar to keep it in, which would also cost millions.”

Hangar. Pfft. Hadn’t they thought of a permanent mooring? Leaving it floating in the sky eternally would be free, the idiots. No one has thought this through except me.

And my blimp wouldn’t need to be as ostentatious as the Goodyear or Budweiser blimps. Mine wouldn’t be decked out in flashing lights to amuse the painted yobbos at Molson Stadium. The very thought.

I bet I could find someone willing to sell me a more humble blimp, perhaps one that I could deck out in the New Escapologist masthead colours or even a likeness of my own face like some kind of Batman villain might do.

And that’s when I found www.personalblimp.com

It costs “between $100,000 and $200,000”. That’s perfectly affordable and I’m sure my bank manager (who has been trying to get me into a mortgage for years) will be delighted to stump up the cash.

The personal blimp website also says something about FAA certification and needing permission to fly an airship around above a city, but I’m sure that’s all just legalese and nothing to worry about. I think I can confidently say that I’ll be flying (driving? piloting? plenty of time to learn the specifics) my own blimp pretty soon.

Look up, Montreal, and maybe you’ll see my new home office.

I awoke prematurely this morning from a nightmare inspired by the hit anime series Attack on Titan.

It was 10am. Early enough for me, but Samara had been long awake and was sitting right next to me, showered and coffeed, reading a book and generally firing on all cylinders.

Anyway. Attack on Titan is about hostile, skinless, eerily-grimacing giants who routinely break through the defenses of a walled city to eat the humans within.

It’s terrifying. It’s also horribly nihilistic since the Titans don’t actually need to eat. They don’t digest anything. They just chomp the humans up and swallow them down for no clear reason whatsoever. Well that’s just plain naughty.

“If I were a Titan,” I said sleepily to Samara, “I wouldn’t eat you.”

It was just my dreamy, morning way of saying “I love you”.

“That’s kind of you,” she said.

“I’d keep you safe from the other Titans,” I said, “in a little house inside my big Titan house and I’d just look in at you through the windows.”

“Would you be all skinless and grimacing?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m not at all certain that I’d enjoy that.”

“But I wouldn’t be able to help the skinlessness and the grimacing,” I said, “That’s just how I’d look.”

“Well, I suppose that’s okay then,” she said.

She saw me laughing and she knew what would be coming next. I always say the same thing when we’re talking about giants looking through windows, a surprisingly common occurrence.

“Would you be wanking?” she said in that tone of voice suggesting she’s heard all of this before.

“Yes,” I said.

“I thought so,” she said, “And crying at the same time, I suppose?”

“Yes,” I said.

There is nothing funny about mentally-ill giants, looking in windows and wanking and crying at the same time.

She was reading An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage, which I thought was a bit of a creepy coincidence.

“I’d make sure you were comfortable,” I said, “and that you’d be spared from the Titan rampage.”

Sensing that this somehow wasn’t enough of a proposal, I added, “and I’d make you a sandwich every day.”

“A nice tofu sandwich?”

“Yes. But it’d be difficult to make it with my massive Titan hands, so I’d have to keep a puny human chef around on retainer.”

“He’d live with me?”

“No,” I said, “he’d have his own tiny house.”

I thought about this a little more.

“And,” I said, “I’d have to keep some farmers around to grow the beans required to make the tofu.”

The ramifications of this sandwich promise began to dawn on me. I’d need to spare some human farmers to grow the wheat to make the bread for the sandwich. I’d need bakers to bake it, other farmers to grow any seeds to add to the bread, and further farmers to grow any salads or other vegetables my tiny human wife might want in her daily sandwich.

“Oh, the whole thing’s too complicated,” I said.

Before I knew it, I’d end up with a whole human village in my Titan house. Where I come from, that’s called an infestation.

“Why can’t you just eat Titan food like I do?”

“Titans don’t eat, remember.”

“Oh yeah.”

I didn’t have a solution to any of this. Before I knew it, the entire human race would be safe and uneaten in my house. That wouldn’t be any good at all. I’d be the laughing stock of the Titans.

“I wouldn’t eat you,” I said again, perhaps a little too defensively.

“Okay,” she said, “Thank you.”

“I probably would eat you, actually.”

“But you just said that you wouldn’t eat me.”

“Yes,” I said, “I feel that way now, but I’d be a Titan. It would be in my nature to eat you.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound very fair to me,” she said.

“You’re just saying that because you’re a puny human. If you were a Titan, you’d understand. I’d just have to eat you up. I’d pop your head right off. Om. Nom. Nom.”

I mimed what this would look like, in case it wasn’t clear.

I patted my stomach and pretended to burp.

“Quite tasty,” I said, “Not delicious. But quite tasty.”

I got up and stretched and went off to cook our breakfast of non-human vegetable matter.

An old Doctor Who today reminded me not only of a fondness for jelly babies but also the memory of the holy grail of mischief.

Pursued a masked assailant, Tom Baker was cornered against a bubbling swamp. For just a moment, it looked as if he was going to cross the swamp by submerging himself and using a corncob pipe as a snorkel.

He doesn’t do it.

Instead, he decides to take out the assailant with a hastily-fashioned blowpipe and dart. And I understand why. It’s easier.

When I was little, I believed it my life’s ambition to march unflinchingly into the local duck pond, to walk along the bottom–corncob pipe remaining above the surface like a tiny periscope–and emerge on the other side a few moments later. I’d be soaked through–algae hanging from my ears and a mallard under one arm–but with full composure as if there were nothing impractical or strange about marching through a duck pond like the T1000.

Ideally, it would be done in full view of some respectable onlookers–preferably the vicar, some gossipy mums, and the mayor.

It’s too difficult though. Perhaps even impossible. You can only really pull it off if you happen to be Popeye the Sailor Man.

I wanted to do this quite badly but got no further than caber-tossing my mother’s clothesline prop irretrievably into the duck pond, trying to gauge its depth.

I was perfectly serious about this and it occupied my mind for a long time. This is part of why I couldn’t be bothered with things like being kind to my sister or doing school work. There was the impossible stunt to solve.

There were diagrams. There were also diagrams, of course, of my robot, whose body would–quite simply–be made from off-brand Tupperware containers and whose mind would be made from a complex tangle of coat hangers. Diagrams do not guarantee execution.

The way I saw it, there were three major problems:

1. That the depth of the pond might by more than my 4.2-foot natural height plus two inches of corncob pipe.

2. That the corncob pipe wouldn’t allow for enough air.

3. That I didn’t actually have a corncob pipe.

But there were also three solutions: the finding of a pond with the perfect depth (deep enough for full submersion but shallow enough not to fill the pipe and condemn me to a premature watery grave); the acquisition of a corncob pipe; and that I traverse the duck pond quickly enough so as not to run out of air.

I found that I could hold it for 28 seconds. That would be enough time to cross the floor of a duck pond. Probably.

Of course, holding one’s breath instead of breathing through the pipe reduced the corncob to pure decoration. But essential decoration, so why dwell on it?

Getting a pipe would still be tricky though. I didn’t know anyone who smoked a pipe from whom I could borrow one and I suspected that Abdullah, our newsagent, would be reluctant to sell a pipe to a ten-year-old boy, even if he promised only to use it as a duck pond snorkel-cum-periscope.

I’d have to consult the one person intelligent enough and with enough time on his hands to help me solve these problems.

“Dad, can I ask your advice about something?”

Without looking up from the fiddly work he was doing with the cables on his scale model of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, he said, “Crossing a duck pond with a corncob pipe snorkel, I suppose?”

“Yes!” I said.

“Can’t be done,” he said, “You won’t be able to see.”

I hadn’t thought of that. A duck pond wasn’t like a public swimming baths, clear and limpid. It would be black with silt and duck droppings and the regal business of swans. I had to assume complete duck pond darkness.

I opened my mouth to speak but before I could offer my solution, Dad said:

“Forget it. It’ll spoil the illusion.”

He was right. Once you were into the realm of goggles, you might as well get hold of some proper snorkeling equipment and maybe even a wet suit. Such levels of preparation would completely ruin the effect. This had to be done sans sporting equipment, with only a corncob pipe for breathing through and (ideally) a three-piece suit and a bowler hat (for the later uncovering of a croaking frog).

It couldn’t be done. I was defeated, just as Tom Baker had been.

I told this story to my wife today, expecting bemusement. Without looking up from her embroidery she said:

“Pop a length of rubber tubing in the duck pond the night before. Use it to extend the range of the pipe. Rig the pipe in advance to facilitate maximum airflow.”

Samara Leibowitz. Smarter than a Time Lord. Smarter than my Dad. Smarter than me, certainly.

There’s really no reason not to do this now is there?

Pull up a pew, male readers. There’s a way to go À Rebours between three and eight times a day without even pausing to think about it. Yes, I’m talking about sitting to pee.

“But that’s what ladies do,” says a twat I know called Jeff.

But what’s wrong with that? I like ladies. And I’ve definitely had more lady friends than Jeff, possibly because my shoes aren’t spattered with wee.

“It’s lazy,” objects my friend Dan, who seems to think that a complete unbuckling and debagging is somehow less effort than opening the fly and unleashing the thunderprawn.

Sitting to pee is the superior and admirable act of an Übermensch.

For starters, it’s an opportunity to read. While you’re sprinkling urine all down your shins, I’m learning something. Sitting also means you don’t have to switch on the blinding bathroom light if you need to make a midnight dash.

When sitting, you no longer piss on the toilet seat or the floor or your shoes. Why would you want to piss everywhere? You know someone has to clean that up, don’t you? You may even have to clean it up yourself. Why are you pissing everywhere?

You can take your time if you sit. Life is busy. A bathroom break can be a nice retreat from a hectic world. The one in my old office was certainly a bastion to me. I’m not sure I could have survived a single working day without punctuating it with lengthy toilet breaks in which I could gather my thoughts in privacy. The lavatory is my Fortress of Solitude, and there I shall make my stand, or rather, my sit.

You can do a bonus poo. Yes, you might end up passing an unplanned solid. This bonus offloading can only be helpful to your body. To the minimalist, it’s a no-brainer.

It leads you to appreciate a fine piece of Victorian industrial heritage. I have mixed feelings about the Industrial Revolution, but one indisputable marvel of the nineteenth century is the porcelain throne. The cistern and the sewerage system are incredible feats of engineering. In terms of infrastructure, the labyrinth of sewers beneath our city streets is as mind-boggling a testament to human ingenuity as the Internet. Make the most of it. Sit on it.

You can reject the bestial. In Primo Levi’s Holocaust memoir he mentions his bunk mates urinating “bestially” while walking around the room. I know the free man doesn’t walk around while peeing, but there is certainly something animal-like (or at least ungallantly drive-thru) about standing to release the yellow cable.

It frees the hands. If you touch neither the seat nor your sweaty old kok with your hands, you’re unlikely to get germs on your fingers and pass them into your mouth. In public washrooms, other men have pissed on those seats you’re lifting. It also frees the hands for other masculine activities such as reading the business pages, smoking a pipe or knitting a manly tea cozy.

You don’t have to remember to return the seat afterwards. I live with a ladyperson. A lot of my male friends also live with ladypeople. Some of the cooler bars I go to have unisex bathrooms. A number of my friends are cohabiting female couples. I want to help usher in a world where women don’t have to worry about falling in. You may accuse me of Utopian thinking, sir, but it’s easily achieved. Since I never lift the seat, I don’t have to remember to replace it. And so this oft-cited source of frustration between men and women can be eliminated.

It’s bonus sitting time. Obey gravity and relax. What’s the point of fighting for a seat on a crowded bus or train if you’re going to voluntarily stand in this other situation?

You can be an Internationalist. American men are behind the curve when it comes to sitting to pee. In Germany, sitting to pee is actively encouraged. The German word for one who sits is a sitzspritzer. Probably. There has even been a mass installation of little gadgets into German public bathrooms, which make irritating noises for the duration of a seat being in the upright position. In Japan, 40% of men sit to pee. Some Muslim men sit to pee too because it’s seen as disrespectful to pray (which Muslims do every few hours) in unclean clothes or shoes.

Standing while pissing is so white-bread. Join the rest of the world and take a seat.

Never get a bus. That’s my policy.

Whenever I betray my policy, I live to regret it.

But every now and again–for reasons always elusive–I like to say “bugger the policy, let’s get the bus.”

I suppose I like to stick it to the man. Even if the man happens to be me: sober, reasonable me from the past who learned his lesson in being disappointed by buses and vowed to always stick to the policy in future. What does he know?

This is why, tonight, Samara and I found ourselves standing and waiting and swearing and waiting and hoping and waiting and waiting.

Do the drivers try to stick to the schedule any more? Do they even know there’s one?

(Somewhere in a bus terminus east of Montreal, a snoozing man thinks Maybe I should have told them about the schedule. Ah, they’ll work something out).

Walking is always better. You get home faster. I know this because it’s what I normally do. I almost always choose to walk precisely because of situations like this one teaching me (almost) a lesson.

Waiting tonight in the sticky heat, a skunk had blown off somewhere to make things more interesting.

I’ve never seen a skunk. Only smelled them. They are stinky phantoms of the night.

I should never have betrayed the policy.

I suppose we could have started walking once it became clear that the bus wasn’t coming any time soon, but it was always clear that the bus wouldn’t come any time soon. That’s why there’s a policy.

Sadly, when you’ve been waiting for twenty minutes, you’re invested: you have to carry on waiting until it comes, even if it takes until the Sun goes nova and swallows us all.

Never get a bus, I think, It’s so beautifully simple. Why didn’t I stick to the policy? The policy! The policy!

A raccoon trundled across the street. I wondered how he would interpret the skunk smell, but didn’t have time to witness it because the bus arrived just as things were getting interesting.

The bus finally ambled into our lives. It was acting all normal and reasonable as if it weren’t half an hour late in the middle of the night. Perhaps predictably, it was crammed with frustrated sleepy people.

It was one of those long buses with a concertina middle, so it looked like a bendy straw packed with meat.

We found ourselves crammed in between a twelve-foot-tall Rastafarian man and a tiny old woman with an eye patch.

The driver was playing opera on the radio.

“That reminds me,” said Samara, “I saw the opera singer on the bus this morning.”

I imagined the opera singer muscling in among the commuters in his tuxedo, rumbling a libretto. The passengers would throw flowers.

“Was he singing?”

“No,” she said, “He was wearing shorts.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I don’t like that at all,” said the eye patch woman, “it’s hard to picture an opera singer on a bus wearing shorts.”

“Very disconcerting,” said the Rastafarian.

I agreed. Why would an opera singer be wearing shorts on a bus? We will never know.

The night bus rumbled ever onward.

For all I know, I nodded off and we’re still on the night bus. Or worse, we’re still waiting for it and I slept through the raccoon/skunk reaction.

Maybe we’re all still waiting for the night bus and we’ve all nodded off.

Night bus. Night bus.

Night bus.

It came to me (as all good things do) while lolling in the hammock and watching the clouds go by:

Why, I wondered, (why?) is there no Sausage Fest?

There are plenty of sausage fests, obviously. Just pop into an online sexy chat room or a real-life Laser Quest and you’ll probably see one. But I’ve never heard of an actual Sausage Fest.

It’s so obvious.

Sausage Fest 2014 would be a massive village fate or food festival completely dedicated to sausages.

As well as various sausage-tasting marquees and meat grinder demonstrations and Noble History of Everyone’s Favourite Offal Format displays, you could have sausage-related fun and games like Sausage Wanging, Guess the Weight of the Sausage, Chipolata Bobbing, and (of course) Hide The Sausage.

“Name That Meat” could be a fun carnival game in which you pay a pound to studiously nibble a diskette of sausage and shout “pork!” only for a carny dressed as a butcher to pull surprising words like “stoat” and “chickpeas” from golden envelopes.

You could spend many a fine hour playing Find the Sausage In the Haystack, impress your date with Sausage Test Your Strength, take in a Highland Games-style Sausage Toss and (for the kids) Pin the Sausage on the Donkey.

Good clean fun.

I’d draw the line at running a Punch and Judy Show. You wouldn’t want to stir the attendees up too much with the idea of sausage theft. Festival Security are going to have a hard enough time as it is.

Over in the live entertainment quarter, you could have sausage-related bands like Grinderman, Longpigs, The Jazz Butcher, and of course Sausage. £35 entry, SJs (Sausage Jockeys) after midnight.

Absolutely no Richard Bacon.

If budget permits (and why wouldn’t it? This’ll be a smash) you could have other stages like middle-brow sausage poetry, sausages of the world, sausage burlesque, and a stand-up comedy tent for sausage-based jokes (though I for one can’t come up with any).

Given the name “Sausage Fest”, I wouldn’t want people getting the wrong idea about it. To make sure there’s no confusion, we’ll have hunks in lederhosen giving out knockwursts at the door.

After a few years, you’d start getting well-seasoned sausage crusties who remember how Sausage Fest was better in the old days, before the new fence was put up. The new fence is not in the spirit of Sausage Fest (even if, as an electrified fence, it happens to be useful for cooking sausages on) and neither are those new corporate big-brand bacon marquees you get now. Sausage Fest used to be about the sausages. Now it’s just about American-style weenie roasts and feeding the capitalist sausage machine.

But for now, it’s such a good idea. Who wouldn’t come to Sausage Fest? The advertising campaign is a no-brainer. Unlike some of the sausages.

We should immediately open an Olympics-style bidding process for the city or county best equipped to host it. This will be little more than a formality, obviously. I think we all know who’s going to host it. Cumberland.

Hamburg, Worcestershire and Brussels already have things going on with Burgerstock, Camp Saucy, and Sprout Fest.

As a vegetarian of course, I will be protesting Sausage Fest. And as a writer I must object to any sausage-based puns and innuendo. No, Sausage Fest is not something this writer could get behind.

I went into hospital today for a CT Scan.

A CT Scan is the one where you’re slid backwards like a car mechanic until you head rests inside a giant freestanding doughnut. The doughnut is made from the exact same shiny white plastic they use for stormtrooper helmets on the Death Star.

Even though I knew the procedure was simply a bit of follow-up to the minor operation I had on my nose recently, CT scanners are used so often on TV as visual shorthand for “scary cancer-related medical procedure”, I don’t mind admitting that the machine made me feel a little nervous.

As I lay on the flatbed (it’s a scanner remember), wondering what would happen next and whether it was possible for something to go wrong and for me to emerge from the machine with a head like a baked potato, the technician came in.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi,” he said.

He looked more like an IT support guy than any kind of medical professional. He wasn’t wearing scrubs like everyone else I’d seen around the department but a red tee-shirt and baggy bluejeans. He was young and stubbly and had that eternally dreamy look that you get on people like Edward Snowden.

A total stoner.

“What can I expect?” I asked by way of confessing to nervousness, “Any flashing lights or sounds?”

“Nope!” he said cheerfully, “You’ll see absolutely nothing!”

“Nothing?”

“Nah, you’ll be completely blind.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Because I’m going to give you this blindfold to wear.”

“Oh, okay.”

I got the impression that the blindfold was a kind of pacifier given to people they suspect of being nervous nellies who might panic in mid-scan and fuck everything up. People like me.

He put the blindfold over my eyes. It was just a thin piece of gauzy cloth, about the size of a bookmark, and almost entirely see-through. It was the worst blindfold I’d ever seen. I thought about the other people it had comforted though, people with cancer, and how they were braver than me. Definitely a pacifier.

“It takes about two minutes,” he said.

Two minutes my foot. He was placating me again. I’d be dunked in and out of the machine in about twenty seconds.

“It’s terribly painful,” he said.

“What?”

“Just kidding,” he said.

“Fuck you very much,” I didn’t say.

He left the room (I could still see through the blindfold) and looked at me through the window of the control booth.

“Okay, the machine is going to start now,” he said through a wall-mounted radio, “You don’t have to do anything. Just stay very very still. Or you’ll be immediately killed.”

“Har-Har,” I said, but I’m not sure he could hear me through the glass.

As the conveyor belt thing maneuvered me into the giant free-standing doughnut I closed my eyes just in case I really was supposed not to see anything, and decided to scare myself by pretending I was Walter White in for a scan.

This is something I do a lot of. Whenever I’m waiting on a subway platform and I hear the train approaching, I think to myself You’re definitely on the platform and not on the tracks, right?

I don’t know why I do this.

It scared me too much, so I changed my fantasy. I now decided I was having my head dunked into the Guardian of Forever and that, if I were lucky, I might get a look up Joan Collins’ skirt.

I don’t know why I did that either.

“Okay, that’s it,” said the technician’s voice on the radio. “Come on out.”

I was surprised to find I was no longer in the doughnut, that I’d been maneuvered out of it again.

I stood and walked out of the room. It felt rude to just leave without saying goodbye face to face. After all, this guy had seen inside my skull. So I went into the technician’s booth.

On his computer screen was a high-resolution image of a cross-section of the top of my head. I was slightly irritated by how huge my nose looked from that angle. A real Concord.

If anything, I’d expected a kind of grey and general image like when people photocopy their arse at the office Christmas party or what I assume the airport security people see when they’re operating the nudielator.

“Hey look,” I said to the technician, “That’s my brain.”

And it was. I’d never seen my brain before.

My brain. My home. Was this how my grandparents felt when they looked down at their house in that helicopter ride on their fiftieth wedding anniversary?

My brain. The source of my ideas and hopes and fetishes and phobias. My whole universe.

“I know, right?” said the technician, “and it’s so small.”

Well obviously.

Is is possible to be timesick, in a similar way to being homesick?

When I awoke this morning it was still dark. This is strange, I thought. I normally wake around 10 or 11 and only then because the needle on my internal caffeine-o-meter has dipped into the red.

I looked at the glowing red digits of the alarm clock and saw that it was 4:35. Very strange indeed. I’d only gone to bed an hour and a half ago.

It did not take very long to find why I’d been woken in the middle of the Canadian night. “Mother”, the computer who looks after our ship the Nostromo had detected an alien presence on a nearby asteroid and thought it might be fun to defrost the crew so that we could go lumbering around in the alien’s egg sacks, getting yawn-raped by facehuggers.

Wait, not that.

No, I’d woken early because…

because…

I was going to be sick.

I dashed to the bathroom and evacuated a mysteriously undigested veggie burger I’d eaten (or at least chewed) seven hours ago.

Now obviously, this was the cause of my illness. Something had gone wrong and my supper had proved indigestible. But the strange thing was that the only image present in my mind at the time of the puking was a public transit turnstile covered in ancient dust.

Let me explain.

Earlier in the day, I’d stumbled upon a YouTube video in which a high school history student had been granted access to an abandoned monorail station at the Merry Hill Shopping Centre in Dudley where I grew up.

Some of my first tastes of freedom (being allowed, at the age of 10, to go out without parental accompaniment) took place in that shopping mall. Riding around on the monorail with friends was no small part of that. (I remember being on it once with Snot Rag and a boy called DT whose flat head and acne made him look as if he’d been set on fire and beaten out with a shovel).

At the time, the monorail–a neat electric train gliding soundlessly over the stinking, motor-centric Midlands–seemed like something from an impossibly exciting future. Specifically (and this may have been the reason it closed down) it was from a rather obsolete idea of the future, a healthy Jetsons future characterized by clean and elegant ways to travel between pleasure gardens and geodesic domes.

They closed the monorail system in 1996 and eventually dismantled it. I have a strong visual memory of sections of the track being lifted out by cranes.

For one reason or another, one of the four monorail stations was never dismantled and simply left attached to the mall as a curious and inaccessible little vestige. To this day, you can see it if you walk or drive by. I’ve always been curious about it, assuming it had been converted into a storage unit or a base for mall cops.

Anyway, the YouTube kid was granted access to the station and, joy of joys, it looks exactly as I remember it. The signage, the schedule, a schematic of the New York-inspired station names (Central Station, Time Square, Boulevard), the red digital “train arriving” displays, the eerily-still-functioning wall clock, and some monorail-inspired drawings done by children of a nearby primary school who will now all be adults.

After a while, this little tour of the monorail station began to give me the willies. A piece of my adolescence almost perfectly preserved, it seemed to split my brain quite jarringly into two separate eras. After a couple of minutes, I began to think it might still be possible to hop onto the monorail and go hang out in long-extinct Jolly Giant toy shop.

In a way, I’m overjoyed because almost everything from that period of my life is now all but completely changed, but there was something impossibly dizzying about knowing that this was still there. In theory, I could be there myself in a couple of days.

It was the image of the dust-covered turnstiles I couldn’t shake from my mind this morning as I puked up my veggie burgers in a Montreal toilet, 3000 miles and 18 years (or so I thought) away from that Monorail station.

And that, my friends, is timesickness. Obviously, my actual sickness was just because I’d eaten something which hadn’t agreed with my stomach, but it felt exacerbated by some kind of night terror about this unexpectedly survived remnant of my childhood. I’m perfectly happy with my adult life but this unexpected leak from the past reminded me too jarringly that what’s gone is gone. Except, you know, for the bits that aren’t.

*

Hungry Hippo scams? Fly resuscitation? Geiger counters for Christmas? If you’ve been enjoying this strange weekly weblog (41 weeks now, chain unbroken, universe undestroyed) perhaps you’d consider backing my forthcoming book at Unbound.co.uk.

“My wife has a beard of bees.”

“My wife no longer requires this bowling trophy.”

“My wife’s incisor is stuck in your dreadful peanut brittle.”

These are just some of the phrases which, as of this week, I have the right to use. In fact, I could now use any one of an arsenal of wife-based phrases.

Yes, Samara and I were married on Monday the 28th.

Tax dodge.

Also love.

Neither of us could quite face the shame of a full synagogue wedding, so we hired a rogue Rabbi and a portable chuppah for a home ceremony with just six guests. It was lovely. Other relatives joined us for a little cocktail party afterwards, with music and merriment and fancy cakes. It was a good day, and it left us both very happy.

I also got a coconut out of it. Dear Diary!

My new mother-in-law (an entire untapped genre of jokes open to me there, incidentally) had read in this very diary that an item on my bucket list was “to drink from a real coconut”.

“You remember that bucket list item you mentioned on your blog?”

“To eat the first-prize giant vegetable from a county fair?!”

“No, the coconut one.”

“I’m listening.”

Some of the guests remarked on how easy it would be to drink from a coconut and that it wasn’t really worth putting on a bucket list. But where are those people now? Toronto mostly. And let that be a lesson to them.

The idea of drinking from a coconut has appealed to me since January this year when I’d anticipated getting the chance to do so in Hawaii. Sadly, the bars there only seem to serve the world-famous Hawaiian piña colada in plastic coconuts. What kind of crap is that? A plastic coconut? Get some class. Real sophisticates drink from real coconuts.

And today was the day. Monday 28th will always stand out in my memory as The Day of the Coconut. And for some other stuff too.

We soon found out that opening a coconut with even the best kitchen meat cleaver is like trying to get into Princeton armed with an Applied Learning Certificate from Dudley College.

It’s not like peeling a banana or shelling a cashew. (Not that I was there, of course. I was busy playing Boggle with the Rabbi.)

After failing to trepan the cursed drupe with all manner of kitchen utensil and a few screwdrivers and chisels, my mother-in-law resorted to an electric saw.

Digging through the basement for a power tool capable of opening a coconut is probably not something most women imagine doing on their daughter’s wedding day.

My mother-in-law is fucking metal.

The electric saw worked like a charm and, a miniature paper parasol later, I was a married man slurping whisky and coconut water from the shell of a real coconut.

If only my childhood self could see me now. He’d probably say “What the fuck? What are you doing in Canada? And what’s that, a coconut? We were supposed to be an astronaut. Jesus Christ.”

The wedding, needless to say, was lovely.

“My husband never seems to have any change.”

“My husband dances in supermarkets, libraries and lifts.”

“Apparently, my husband runs a blog about our life together.”

Just some of the cool phrases I imagine Samara’s looking forward to using.

I had a minor operation on my nose a couple of weeks ago. Not a full Joan Rivers you understand, but a no-less-exciting (and long overdue) procedure to help me breathe properly.

Somehow, I’ve been alive for over thirty years without actually taking a proper breath. Needless to say, this lack of oxygen is entirely to blame for every failure, mistake and error of judgement in my life so far. It is good to have a clean slate now. At last, with air running freely through my hollowed-out conk, I can get on with finding success™!

The day of the operation was quite an exciting one. The only moderately traumatic part was the anesthetic injection, which had to go right up my nose, into secret far-north nasal catacombs I never knew existed. I thought I was an expert in nasal excavation, but apparently there are schnoztic depths to which even I had never ventured.

It may have been my imagination, but I’m fairly certain I could feel the tip of the needle scraping the top of my skull from the inside.

Next, a nurse had to “ground” me. I’d assumed that the surgeon would be using a scalpel to conduct the operation itself, but he actually used a futuristic Star Trek-style laser device for which I had to be “grounded” by some kind of earth wire attached to my [rippling] stomach [muscles]. It was pretty amazing.

The smell of burning proboscis flesh, incidentally, smells exactly like barbecued beef.

Delicious.

All of this means, of course, that I’m no longer a member of that most wretched of all social out-groups: the mouth breathers.

So long, mouth breathers! I don’t need your friendship any more, for I have ascended. What’s more, I was never really your friend at all! Hahah! All the time you were talking, I could only gawk into your massive, wheezing maw as if you were something to throw balls through at a fair.

Mouth breathers, I tear up my membership card and I eat the pieces. You may notice that I can breath while chewing. Necromancy, I know.

Sadly, the last couple of weeks have involved some post-operative chicanery and I’ve been obliged to join the second-most wretched of all social out-groups: the people who use nasal sprays.

Hi there, nasal sprayers! Please be my friends. Pay no heed to the disgraceful way I retired from my position in the Mouth Breathers’ Club. I will never betray you, my favourite new friends.

Nasal sprays must rank among the all-time most arcane and uncharismatic objects in the world, along with ear trumpets and balaclava helmets. While you’re certain someone must have used such things at some point in history, you can’t quite believe that anyone uses them in modern times. There must be at least one ear trumpet or balaclava helmet currently in existence, but you can’t quite recall witnessing their usage.

Imagine my surprise then, when I discovered a whole section of the pharmacy dedicated to nasal sprays. There were about seven-thousand different sprays to choose from, each poised and ready to be squirted up the snouts of the nation.

I chose a spray called a “Saline Nasal Mist” because it was cheap and the description of it as a “mist” felt slightly luxurious.

It wasn’t a “spray” like something a cat would do up a garden fence, but a “mist” capable of caressing my nasal cavities with its soothing mistiness.

Sadly, the French translation on the bottle is “Vaporisateur nasal salin”. No soothing mist for the French. Just a cold, industrial “vaporisateur”. Spare a thought for the unmisted nez.

The instruction on the bottle is to “use for daily hygiene and for rinsing of nasal mucous membranes” with no reference to the operation I underwent. Given that there are so many brands of nasal spray available in the pharmacy, people must be using nasal mists for fun.

Recreational use of a Nasal Saline Mist is perhaps the most perverse thing I’ve ever heard of. If you’re doing it, stop it immediately and turn yourself into the police. Or at least take comfort in the dignity of a less-disgusting vice, like pornography or hard drugs.

In the meantime, however, I am obliged to carry on using the Saline Nasal Mist for the duration of my nose’s convalescence. *squirt*. Ah, that’s the stuff.

17. Eat the first-prize giant vegetable at a village fair.
22. Do a “dark reboot” of my signature.
56. See the original “dogs playing poker” painting (Louvre?).

On Wednesday evening, we reviewed our bucket lists. Samara only ever had one item on her list. To touch a penguin. We did it in 2011, which is why we can’t go back to Sea World.

My list, on the other hand, contains 147 different items, arranged in descending order of priority with colour-coded tabs and guesstimates of fulfillment dates. Needless to say, I’ve not done any of them.

11. Sleep at a Draclia’s house.
12. Drink from a real coconut.
33. Stop using the word “guesstimate”.

One item, I’m slightly embarrassed to confess, is:

49. Learn how to throw a punch.

“Pfft” said Samara, “I can teach you that.”

Samara and I have been together for five years and though I probably suspected it intuitively, I didn’t know she contained so much chin music.

“Uncle Felix,” she explained.

Ah yes. Uncle Felix.

“First,” she said, “you’ve got to stand properly.”

We got out of bed.

I always knew I’d end up sparring in my pajamas, but I never thought it would be with Sammy.

She adopted a stance of frankly terrifying solidity and I tried to mirror it.

“No, silly!” she said, “Like this! At shoulder’s width. Ground yourself.”

After few aborted attempts, I finally got it. I never knew standing could be so complicated.

“Did we remember to send Uncle Felix a Christmas card?” I said.

“Right,” she said, “now show me what you’ve got.”

“Pardon?”

“Show me what you’ve got,” she said, “Punch into the air.”

I thumped, fairly impressively I thought, into the air. I was like a Mantis Shrimp. Samara rolled her eyes.

“Okay,” she said, “that wasn’t so bad. But try doing it more like this.”

Her fist tore through the air like something from Mortal Kombat II. There was a whooshing sound as the air got its shit together and filled the gaping cavity she had left in it.

“Crumbs,” I said.

I don’t think I’d ever been moved to say “Crumbs” before.

“The key,” she said, “is to start with your fist facing upwards like this,” (she demonstrated) “and to twist before you connect.”

“Blimey,” I said. Familiar territory, blimey, but it came out involuntarily.

“And,” she said, “this is the clever part. Aim a few inches behind the object you’re punching. That’s called following through.”

The way she said “following through” made me feel as though I should be writing it down. But all my sharpies and page tabs were in the other room.

“Hmm,” I said.

I punched the air in the way she had instructed, keeping my defensive left fist near to my chin, like I’d seen boxers do on telly.

“That’s great!” she said.

“It is?”

“Yes!”

And that’s how my girlfriend taught me how to properly snotter someone.

Maybe she can help me with:

122. Eat a raw onion without wincing.

Well that’s the end of me.

I have a hammock. Nothing will ever get done again.

I’m supposed to be writing a book (three books actually) but now there’s a hammock on the scene I can’t imagine how this is all going to work out.

No successful author could ever have had a hammock. You’d never get past the words “This book is fondly dedicated to my hammock, without whom…”

Actually, Somerset Maugham liked hammocks. His resolve must have been nothing short of extraordinary to clamber out of his softly rocking cradle every so often to shit out a few lines of Liza of Lambeth before waltzing, giddy with industry, back to the hammock and conking out again.

The thing is, when you’re in a hammock nothing else matters. The only thoughts that can occupy your drowsy mind when you’re in a hammock are things along the lines of aaah, hammock and aaah, hammocky-wammocky and I wonder how much longer I can stay in the hammock?

The answer to the latter question is inevitably “oh, a long while yet” because there’s always more time for a hammock. There is no higher state of being.

In my case, this is quite literally true. We live on the fourteenth floor and our hammock is out on the balcony.

Naturally, the view across the Montreal Plateau is spectacular but Samara is concerned that she might come home from work one day and find that her partner has Charlie Chaplined himself over the railings somehow and has found himself Harold Lloyding from somebody’s flagpole over L’avenue du Parc.

I keep assuring her that it’s probably fine.

I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon rocking side to side in the hammock, eating honey directly from the pot with strawberries and toasty soldiers.

This is the life of a contracted writer, folks. A fucking disgrace.

Needless to say, the honey soon attracted hornets. They were extremely persistent but it’s hard to be angry with much of anything, let alone insects, when you’re in a hammock.

After convincing the hornets that they weren’t getting any honey, I spent the next half hour nonsensically singing “Bees, bees, the musical fruit.”

I think the summer heat is getting to me.

Luckily, you don’t have to work very hard when you have a hammock, even if you wanted to (which you don’t). There’s nothing to work for anymore. You have a hammock. You’ve made it.

You certainly don’t need vacations any more because the only place you want to be is in your hammock. The need to impress people by, say, dressing nicely or not being covered in honey seem like a pretty shallow suggestions from a hammock.

That’s why there’s that song, “If I had a Hammock”. Believe me, if I had a hammock (and I do), I’d hammock in the morning, I’d hammock in the evening. All over this land? Oh yes.

On Canada Day–the day on which the whole of Montreal uproots itself and, in a citywide Mad Hatter’s tea party, swaps houses–I had intended to help my brother-in-law move into his new apartment, but instead I stayed in the hammock, watching the clouds form and re-form, safe in the knowledge that industry was happening everywhere but here.

Horizontally, I wrote a few words of a letter to friend Fraser and had a bash at doing one of those sudokus. I don’t really understand what you’re supposed to do though, and the exercise was distracting me from enjoying the hammock properly so I just drew happy faces where the numbers are supposed to go before checking the answers page on the off change I’d cracked it with lateral thinking. (I hadn’t).

From a hammock, you can make believe that you’re a sailor, a Mayan, an explorer, a baby, or a ferret. But not if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything ever again.

Lots of walking this week.

As deliberate leisure activities go, a stroll is up there with pruning bonsai trees, blowing smoke rings, and of course the all-time Number One.

I am lucky to have a life with so much walking in it. The alternative would be unbearable. Consider the tedious effort of car ownership: trying to decide whether you should be more worried by the “rattly noise” or the “clanky noise” and rubbing the damn thing with Turtle Wax on Sunday mornings when you could be watching Spongebob on the telly or playing mouth trumpet in a bubble bath.

As a perpetual pedestrian, you’ll never catch me in a place called “Jiffy Lube” or haggling with a man in a blue boilersuit over something called a “flange compactor.”

Admittedly, you might find me in a place with a name like Jiffy Lube and buying something with a name like flange compactor, but that’s my own business.

Naturally, my insistence on walking (combined with my refusal to wear a watch or carry a telephone) infuriates my friends because I’m always late for everything. For years, I thought the opening scene of Titanic was the bit where DiCaprio drowns and makes a face like a poorly frog. I must have been late to the cinema.

Walking is a way of getting exercise without it being a big event. I need never suffer the spandex indignity of the gym. On my regular Friday walk, I happen to pass a gym window through which I see people on treadmills, sweating profusely but going nowhere. I feel like a wild sparrow seeing a canary in a cage, swinging on his trapeze like a little yellow doofus.

Walking is a guilt reducer. Because of the frequent exercise, I feel less guilty when I eat a massive cake, which is often. And because of the carbon emissions I’m not farting out of a car, I can feel less guilty about flying to Honolulu for the third time in a given winter.

When walking, you see things you wouldn’t see from a car. You see the masonry and statues at the tops of buildings, which leaves you with questions like “Why is there a statue of Aristotle in Wolverhampton?”.

You see clouds forming and reforming in the sky. You see women in lululemon yoga pants of questionable opacity picking up their dogs’ poos, and suddenly your problems don’t look so bad.

More than anything, walking keeps you sane. It finds for you a few moments of solitude, in which you can mull things over and solve your problems by barely thinking about them. Solvitur Ambulando is Latin for “it is solved by walking.” Probably.

There’s always a story to tell after a walk. In Montreal, I once saw a hawk plummet from the sky, seize a smaller bird in its talons and fly off again into the night. Nobody saw it but me.

If that doesn’t do anything for you, I once saw Scroobius Pip eating a Twix.

Walking is quite literally the way forward. All you need are shoes. And feet. And clothes. Maybe a mustache. But that’s optional.

“We should try a Žižek film one of these nights.”

“I’ve seen one,” said Samara, “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. It was very good. Saw it at Neil and Laura’s place.”

Neil and Laura live on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Samara has never visited them without me, yet I have no memory of the four of us sitting down to watch that film.

“You wouldn’t remember it” she said, “because I watched the film with Laura. You and Neil were playing Monopoly and screaming at each other because one of you was the shoe.”

“Oh,” I said.

I can’t say I cared for the breezy way she said “one of you was the shoe”.

Monopoly, for me, is no trivial game. It’s about long-term strategy, the tactical balancing of reason with lust, and the game’s inherent satire of the real-life capitalist system. The thrill of crushing your opponent’s stupid face into the dirt is pretty great too.

You don’t just win suddenly like in Hungry Hungry Hippos or Mr Pop. You torture your opponent over the space of about a fortnight.

If Neil and I had been “screaming at each other” it was certainly about something more complex and passionate than one of us being the shoe.

I imagine it was something to do with Neil not liking the taste of my dust.

“As a point of fact,” I said to Samara, “it was nothing to do with who was the shoe.”

“So it was about the dog then,” she said.

It occurred to me, horribly, that she was right. Neil and I had argued about who was going to be the dog.

Neil likes to be the dog because his surname is Scott and the dog token–a Scottie–matches his name.

But I also like to be the dog because it’s the only token that’s based on a living thing.

“No,” I lied.

“I see,” she said, “You completely missed that film–a quite sexy film, actually, in the company of your girlfriends in their pajamas–because of who got the Monopoly dog.”

The thing is, I just can’t empathise with a cannon or an iron. I just can’t care if a boat goes to jail.

I suppose being the car would at least make free parking more exciting. Otherwise you’re just a shoe in a car park. That’s no way to become a wealthy hotelier. Not even on Park Lane.

Obviously, if we’d been playing Star Wars Monopoly, none of this would have happened. In Star Wars Monopoly, I’m equally happy to be Chewie or R2 or Leia. (My mother always chose to be Vader, incidentally, which tells you all you need to know about life in our family).

“I just like the dog is all,” I said.

I couldn’t bring myself to add that our racket had also been about the hat.

Neil’s second choice of token is the top hat, but I like my dog to wear the top hat so I need both pieces.

A dog can’t go to town without his hat. I stand by that. There are more important things in life than sexy philosophy movies.

Even now, six days later, I get a shudder when I think about the microwavable pie on Lord Wellington’s countertop.

The pie smelled of month-old diarrhea and it was his lunch. He’d already taken a bight.

He didn’t seem to mind or notice that the pie smelled of month-old diarrhea.

We had taken advantage of some warm weather and walked into town, bringing with us a selection of paperbacks to sell to the second-hand bookshops.

We took our books first to Lord Wellington’s shop. Stinking pies aside, it’s the best second-hand bookshop in the whole city.

I’m always slightly nervous about approaching Lord Wellington because he seems to hate all books and anyone who reads them.

You never know if he’s going to grouchily buy your books or bludgeon you senseless with a remaindered copy of The Ladybird Book of Hate.

Today he said:

“Put them on the counter. I’ll take a look when I can.”

The shop was completely empty of customers and there was nothing I could see (the stinking pie?) to prevent him from sizing them up immediately.

He was just being, as they say in these parts, a dick.

Eventually, he gruffly told us that “there’s nothing I can use here” and we left with our books still in hand.

Once outside, we burst out laughing.

There were some really good books in the batch: modern classics by people like Anthony Burgess and Philip Roth, precisely the kind of books he sells for $8.

We’d been prepared to give them up for basically nothing. Lord Wellington had simply been in a spiteful frame of mind and it had cost him about $100.

That kind of dough could keep him in stinky pies for ages.

We went instead to another book dealer called Haruka. A book of baby names in his very shop tells me that his name is Japanese for “far out” or “distant”.

In the event that I’ve eavesdropped inaccurately and his name is actually Haruki, then his name means “clean” or “cleaned up”.

None of this means anything. He is both filthy and close.

This little tour of two book shops is the way it always goes when we want to offload books. We always try Lord Wellington first because on the rare occasions he buys books, he pays in cold, sexy cash. Haruka, on the other hand, takes everything indiscriminately but only offers store credit.

The problem with getting store credit from Haruka is one of diminishing returns. We’ve read almost all of his books: literally the very copies on his shelves.

For all I know, we are his only stockists and his only customers. He just sits there waiting with the door open in case we drop by.

Haruka’s shop is jammed full with books that used to be ours. It’s a solid cuboid of our paper and our fingerprints.

The effect is quite eerie. The place is like a tribute to our apartment. I’m thinking about giving him all of our furniture when we eventually leave town so that an exact replica of our apartment might live on.

We struggled to find anything we’d not already read and didn’t already have our own coffee rings on it, but we were determined to spend some of our credit.

It was not so bad, hunting for fresh books in there. Haruka doesn’t eat stinky pies and he has a green parrot who occasionally says something.

Previously, I’ve heard the bird say “gonads” and “pamphlet”.

We grudgingly settled on some books that might be tolerable.

Looks like this is going to be the summer of Nick Hornby.

“Isn’t that Tony Millionaire?”

Samara is steadier on her feet in the world of cartoonists than I am.

In fact, she’s generally better at keeping track of people’s faces full stop. For much of my childhood I thought that Danny DeVito was Bob Hoskins and that Bob Holness from Blockbusters was the skeleton from the Scotch videotape adverts.

“Yes,” she said, “That is Tony Millionaire.”

It was hard to believe. I like Tony Millionaire a lot. And, an illustrator, Samara is in quiet awe of him. And he was sitting right there like a normal person.

We were at an indie press fair. All around, earnest young people sat behind trestle tables laden with exquisitely mimeographed fact sheets about exciting new genders, four-panel photographic comic strips made at the denouement of a pilgrimage to the last remaining chemical photo booth in Winnipeg, and potato-printed tales of lovely woe.

Ravenous throngs jostled.

Tony Millionaire sat behind a trestle table too, but in front of it was a circle of emptiness because the comics fans recognised him and they were shy about talking to him because he created Billy Hazelnuts.

I’m a big tall idiot though, so I marched right through the sacred circle and said hello to Tony Millionaire.

“Hello!” I said, “You’re Tony Millionaire!”

“Yes!” said Tony Millionaire, rising chirpily from dormancy like a fortune-telling robot on the end of a pier, “the famous cartoonist!”

I had known he was Tony Millionaire already. Because Samara had told me so. And Because he was clearly and horrifically Tony Millionaire.

I extended a hand and he shook it kindly.

“How’s it going?” I asked, “What are you up to?”

“It goes pretty good,” he said, “I’m hawking copies of my latest book. They’re forty dollars.”

He slapped the top copy as he said “forty dollars.”

“Nice,” I said.

“It’s a treasury!” he said, “All my work from the last twenty years.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’ve already got most of your work from the last twenty years. I mean, my partner has.”

It was then Tony Millionaire noticed Samara.

“Oh,” said Tony Millionaire, looking down at his notes, “Well, that’s great.”

Just as I was debating internally whether I should tell Tony Millionaire that he was the third or fourth Tony I’d met that week (I was vague on the numbers because one of the “four” Tonies was not a human being at all but a shoe shop called Tony Shoe) I suddenly noticed that an odd shift in atmosphere had happened in the room.

Tony Millionaire, the famous cartoonist, had been made shy by my girlfriend being the proud owner of much of his work and existing.

Samara is so lovely that she can make famous cartoonists–of whom all other cartoonists are shy–shy.

“Hey!” I said to Samara, trying to lighten the mood, “It’s Tony Millionaire!”

“Yes,” mumbled Tony Millionaire, “the, um, the famous cartoonist.”

“The what?” said Samara, blissfully unaware of what was going on.

“The… famous, um, cartoonist,” he said.

“He’s selling his new book,” I said.

“Yes,” said Tony Millionaire, “they’re, um, forty dollars or something.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Samara, “No wonder they call you Tony Millionaire. Eh?”

“Yesm,” said Tony Millionaire.

*

Tony Shoe once met a famous person too. There’s a signed photograph of Peter Faulk on the wall there, who allegedly once bought some shoes from Tony Shoe.

It was the summer holidays of 1992 and my little sister and I were running around some ancient monolith or other when we came across a grounded flock of pigeons.

We weren’t stupid. When we came across a grounded flock of pigeons, we knew what to do.

No pigeon was ever safe when we were around, especially when we happened to be on holiday somewhere like the Rollright Stones or the Newgrange Megalithic Passage Tomb.

We were almost certainly missing Batman on the telly and we already had the sillies in us because moments earlier we’d spotted an earnest-looking young man dowsing for ley lines in a homemade pyramid hat.

Those feathered cretins were for it.

And so we careened into them like a couple of insane-with-mischief, unleashed dachshunds, tongues lolling, sending the pigeons flying and shitting into the skies.

“Yaaaay!” we said, and “Whoooo!” and “Heeeeeya!”

This was the business.

On holiday, out of school, surrounded by mysterious standing stones and we’d even been given a flock of pigeons to send flying flapperty-flap.

We were in Heaven.

Or possibly Devon. As I say, I can’t remember which holiday this happened on.

We watched as the pigeons circled the undoubtedly Cornish (or possibly Scottish or Welsh) skies as pigeons are wont to do.

We wondered if they would be so audacious as to return to their pecking grounds and risk a second menacing.

But suddenly, two old women appeared from nowhere.

Such an occurrence would not be remarkable if we’d been hanging out by the fountain in Dudley marketplace or by the statue of the horse called Albert in Wolverhampton town centre, but sudden biddy appearance is a spooky thing when you’re on holiday somewhere like the Avebury Circle or the Ring of Brodgar, the mists swirling.

Stomping around Pagan Britain with your Mum and Dad is all well and good until supernatural harridans are summoned.

We weren’t stupid. When spectral hags popped up, we knew what to do.

We acted casual.

I idly kicked at an imaginary bit of thing and whistled the melody from the theme tune of Rolf’s Cartoon Club.

My sister sunk her hands into the pockets of her Ivy the Terrible dungarees and rocked cutely from side to side.

The crones meanwhile fixed us with glowing white eyes before continuing on their way, pretending to admire the Henge or whatever it was.

“There are a lot pigeons around here,” said the first old woman airily.

She said it to her sister but clearly meant for us to hear her.

“Yes,” said the second old woman, “And one or two pigeon bullies too.”

Yaaaaah! She was talking about us. We were pigeon bullies.

We weren’t stupid. When you’re passively-chided by gay-for-pigeons elderly sisters in the presence of the dolmen of Trethevy Quoit or the cairn-circle of Moel ty Uchaf, we knew what to do.

My sister blew a very loud raspberry in their direction and I made a farty gesture with my arse and we ran away.

We did not look behind us in case the old women had vanished or we’d angered them into revealing their true batrachian forms.

It would be a modest day’s work for them to magically stop the hearts of a couple of tiny and perfectly innocent pigeon bullies.

The wickedest thing I ever did was convince my little sister that the orange hippo was the hungriest one.

Aged 9 and 7, we sat on the living room carpet playing the game. I’d just won my eighth “campaign” when it all kicked off.

I know this for certain because it’s all recorded for posterity in my hand-decorated Hungry Hungry Hippos log book.

“WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS WINNING?!” she snapped.

My sister isn’t a bad loser by nature but I’m certainly not the best winner and, looking back on it, my celebratory dancing and waggling of my posterior in her face could have been taken as provocative.

The subsequent cocky posturing can’t have helped either.

“In life, Katherine,” I said, striding around with the swaggering self-importance reserved for firstborns, “there are winners and there are big fat smelly losers.”

“AAAAAAEEEEEEEEEE!” she said and made a lunge for me over the game board, scattering marbles hither and–to some extent–thither.

“Okay, okay,” I said, not wanting to get cooties all over my “Bedrock Olympics” tee-shirt depicting Wilma and Betty throwing stalactite javelins, and Fred and Barney attempting to play soccer but finding that the ball has been mistaken for an egg by a broody Dino, much to the amusement of Bamm-Bamm and Pebbles.

“If you start behaving in a civilised fashion,” I said outrageously, “I will let you in on my strategy.”

“How can you have a strategy?”, she spat, “This isn’t chess. It’s Hungry Hippos.”

“Hungry Hungry Hippos,” I corrected her.

“IT DOESN’T MATTER! There’s no strategy! You just mash away at the levers and the luckiest person wins.”

“Tsk, tsk,” I said, pushing my luck further than luck has ever been pushed before or since.

I’d seen Tsk Tsk printed in an Enid Blyton book but I didn’t yet know it was supposed to represent a tutting noise and so I pronounced it outright as “Tusk, Tusk”. Even so, it was deliciously derisory.

“Tsk Tsk, Katherine. If you were more attentive you’d know that one of the hippos is hungrier than the others.”

She mulled it over.

“The orange one?” she said, observing correctly that I’d selected the orange hippo. I always selected the orange hippo. I was playing the long game.

What she had not observed is that I also made a point of sitting with my back to the fireplace, taking advantage of the fact that the living room floor was ever so slightly sloped in that direction.

“Yes,” I said, “The orange hippo is the hungriest of all four hippos. A wise old man once told me…”

“THE ORANGE HIPPO IS NOT HUNGRIER! IT IS THE SAME AS ALL THE OTHERS! MUM! MUUUUM!”

I nipped a toke from an imaginary pipe in what I imagined was a professorial manner.

“Not so,” I said, sinisterly adding, “And don’t cry to mother. I assure you that she cannot hear you.”

“WAAAAAH!”

“The Orange Hippo appears hungrier,” I said, “because of it’s unusual hue. You see, it’s the only hippo not painted in a primary colour.”

This was a lie. One of the hippos was green.

“Orange, being a mixture of red and yellow, has twice the gravitational pull and so the white marbles are attracted to it like a magnet. Here, you try it,” I said.

We swapped places so she could witness first-hand that the orange hippo was the hungriest. The slope in the floor served its purpose and for once my sister won the game.

She was convinced. I really had her believing that the orange Hungry Hungry Hippo was hungrier than the others.

A few days later, she came along proposing we play a certain game involving a quartet of semi-amphibious pachyderms, one of whom, she thought, had a bigger appetite than the others.

“Yes, I suppose I could come out of retirement,” I said, cracking my hippo-slamming fingers.

“But I want to be the orange hippo,” she said.

“Naturally,” I said.

We set up the board as usual on the living room carpet, I sitting in my usual spot with my back to the fireplace but my sister proudly with the orange hippo before her, leaving me with the yellow hippo.

Needless to say, another eight victories were added to my log book in an overly-deliberate, even pantomime, fashion. She was furious.

★

Katy got her own back on me a few years later. We were driving, as a family, along the motorway to Rhyl. It was raining and our father was impressing us with his ability to predict when the rain would intermittently stop.

Needless to say, the rain only stopped when we happened to drive beneath a footbridge. My sister caught on very quickly and was soon joining in on predicted the stops. “Stop!” she’d say and the rain would momentarily stop.

“You must have worked it out by now,” said Dad, laughing.

I mulled it over.

“Holes in the clouds?”

☁️

If you enjoyed this story, (a) shame on you, and (b) please consider buying my books A Loose Egg and Stern Plastic Owl for countless other acts of evil.

Why must it always come back to sport? Why can’t the world love me for what I’m naturally good at?

“Honey we’ve been through this,” says Samara, “people just don’t give medals out for swearing.”

It’s a bastarding oversight if you ask me.

As an immigrant to Canada, the easiest way for me to integrate seems to be to take an interest in hockey. After all, I’ve already eaten my body weight twice over in poutines and nobody seems interested.

It has not been so easy though. I’ve never been a sports fan. It took me three “hockeys” to stop referring to the game periods as “movements” or “acts”.

But I’m sincere! A month ago, at the dawn of the Stanley Cup playoffs, I officially adopted the Montreal Canadiens (“the Habs”) as my team by placing a modest wager for them to win the cup. Every two days now, I go along to a pub or to my in-laws’ house and marvel at the Habs on the television as if they were exotic sea horses in a tank.

I’m happy to say there’s far more to the Canadian national sport than one might imagine. There’s genuine peril. The referees for instance wear water wings in case the ice should melt and they plunge fifty fathoms.

Excitement is also heightened by Hockey Voodoo: a complicated system of rituals and superstitions surrounding the game. Otherwise sensible Montrealers go around alphabetizing their shirts for luck and pirouetting over pavement cracks.

“Don’t say we’re going to win!” they say, “You’ll jinx it!”

“We’re definitely going to win,” I say, and then they have to go and stand in a corner to quickly recite the seven-times-table while stroking a horse shoe to neutralize the jinx.

You can even, it turns out, directly control the players with your mind.

“Focus!” my father-in-law shouts when one of our players takes a shot. And I do it. I do it for Canada.

When I hold my mind in just the right way, that puck is in the back of the net. I just have to be careful not to direct my psychic energy too hard in case I accidentally shit myself.

So far, the gentle guidance of my psychic command has won eight games for us out of twelve. I challenge any skeptic to argue with those statistics.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to suggest I am the Fifth Beatle of the Montreal Canadiens. For the remainder of the playoffs, the Canadian military, if they have any sense, should organise their troops around protecting my magic brain.

The Habs are something of a national favourite and nobody can quite believe how well they’re doing at the moment. Since they’re ahead, the whole country is holding its breath. It’s a bit like that scene at the end of The Italian Job. Nobody move a muscle. It could upset the balance. “Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea.”

For the rest of the season, we should leave all our clothes unwashed in case some microorganism living in them has had something to do with the team’s success.

Nobody should get a haircut either, on the off chance that your magic locks are the reason the team are winning.

Woe betide anyone who takes up chewing on the right side of their mouth instead of the left.

Thinking about it now, my hair will be a half millimeter longer now than in the last game. I’d better get a trim.

“Could you take half a millimeter off my hair please?” I’ll gingerly ask the barber.

“Hockey Voodoo,” he’ll say, nodding sagely. He’ll tap the side of his nose enigmatically and not charge me lest he be responsible for my modified bank balance forming an unlucky number.

As a final precaution, I suggest we precisely recreate the circumstances in which the Habs won the Stanley Cup in 1993. We must all wear stonewashed jeans, X Files t-shirts, and too much gel in our hair. I for one will be doing my bit by playing Pogs and stinking of lynx antiperspirant.

Of course, my writing about the situation today has probably jinxed everything. If the Habs lose their next game, you’ll know why. Everyone flick their light switches to the rhythm of the national anthem or we’re doomed.

If I had known sport to be so OCD-friendly, I’d have become a fan ages ago.