Author: Robert Wringham

“Minimalism”, I once wrote in these very pages, “is anorexia projected outwards”. This suspicion that my ongoing dedication to asceticism might be a mental illness was further demonstrated this week.

“It’s pathological!” my girlfriend teases me after I decline a carrier bag at the pharmacy. As a result of doing so, I had been forced to walk around the rest of the shops with a box of condoms and a roll-on deodorant, repeatedly showing the receipt to security guards to demonstrate that I’d bought the goods elsewhere.

“Don’t you see? When your minimalism interferes with day-to-day activities, you’ve got a problem,” she said.

I refuted this because, to me, the mild inconvenience of walking around with a box of johnnies and a niff stick™ was preferable to the burden of being responsible for another fucking carrier bag. But was this the skewed perspective of a mentally unstable individual?

Later in the week, we went for dinner with our friend Shanti. Somehow we’d gotten onto the subject of whether or not you’re supposed to jam your wallet into the mouth of someone suffering an epileptic fit.

“That’s not for fits,” someone pointed out, “You’re thinking of spoons. You have to put a spoon in their mouth to stop them from swallowing their tongue. You do the wallet trick if you need to snap a broken bone back into position. They bight down on it to distract from the pain.”

I love discussing the strange idea that shoving a spoon into the mouth of an epileptic is supposed to be useful. Imagine recovering from a horrible fit only to find that someone had placed a spoon in your mouth. “What’s this?” you’d ask. “Oh, you know, it’s a spoon,” a well-meaning stranger would reply. And you’d say, “Right.”

I also like the idea that you might have to do the wallet trick one day only to enrage the patient who, a lifelong vegan, becomes offended that you’d forced a piece of cowhide into their gob.

On this occasion, however, I didn’t wax lyrical on the epileptic/spoon myth or the sudden idea of snapping the bone back into place in an angry vegan. Instead, I got my wallet out.

“My wallet wouldn’t be much use there!” I bragged, “It’s about as thick as a beermat.”

I never miss an opportunity to brag about the slenderness of my wallet. To the dedicated minimalist, a slim wallet acts as a sort of talisman: a symbol of minimalism carried around at all times. So proud am I of my super-slim wallet, I actually like to get it out and demonstrate the contents at dinner parties, much as I was doing now, oblivious to the fact that nobody is really interested. The way I see it though, is that since I’ll never have children, I should be able to use the time normally allotted to showing photographs of my children in any way I like. People at dinner parties have no choice but to listen.

“Look, here are my cash cards, a health insurance card, a few bank notes, my casino membership card, my press ID card AND THAT’S ALL,” I conclude proudly. “No receipts, no business cards, no loyalty cards, no photographs of my mewling spawn. Just the essentials.”

Our friend, to her credit, seemed genuinely impressed.

Upon demonstrating the handful of essential plastic cards, I saw that my library card from Glasgow was still in there. I have no plans to go back to a Glaswegian public library and by the time I’m in one again the card would have surely expired. I had a rare opportunity to permanently remove something from my wallet.

Naturally, I made a big show of this by removing the card and stuffing it ceremonially into the milk jug.

My girlfriend, presumably recognising the signs of my “pathological” malaise, extracted the from the milk jug, cleaned it off and popped it into her handbag.

At first I shrugged this off. If she wanted to harbour this burden out of the extreme off-chance that we’ll want to borrow something from a Glaswegian library, she was welcome to do so. But now it’s slightly starting to bother me that the card continues to exist in my material sphere. I don’t want it any more! The fact that it exists outside of a garbage can is starting to pull at my attention. Even though my girlfriend has ostensibly taken responsibility for it, I still know that it’s there and still mentally account for it.

The worst thing about all this is that I can’t possibly tell my girlfriend about this and ask her to throw it away because then she’ll have the final confirmation that I’m mental.

Suicide is the only way out of this.

On our way to sunbathe in the park, my girlfriend and I chanced across three uniformed policemen enthusiastically singing ‘Jingle Bells’ by the roadside.

One of the officers was even keeping their rhythm with a set of sleigh bells, adding quite the festive vibe to an already merry scene. I’m not sure which was the biggest juxtaposition: singing policemen or the sound of ‘Jingle Bells’ in the 30°C Montreal sunshine.

My first thought was that the carolers weren’t real policemen but surely some sort of performance art troupe. Such would be typical in the public spaces of Montreal, so this would explain the strange out-of-season caroling to which we were bearing witness.

I then noticed that the uniforms of the cops – complete with night sticks and firearms – were pretty authentic. What was going on?

My girlfriend pointed out that the nearest car to the trio of festive policemen contained a woman seemingly sleeping in the passenger seat. Ah, now it was clear. The cops, perhaps concerned that she might suffer heat stroke behind the car’s windscreen, were in the process of waking her up through the medium of Christmas songs. They were being civil-minded but also playing a joke: when the woman woke up, she would disorientatedly think she had slept until December.

Even to a curmudgeon like me who hates all acts of merriment or human happiness, this was pretty funny. I watched on for a while and enjoyed seeing the expression on the dozing passenger’s face as she awoke to this slightly bizarre spectacle.

I wondered for half a second where the cops could possibly have found sleigh bells at such short notice. The park is always full of creative buskers though so maybe the cops had formed an alliance with one of these musicians and borrowed the sleigh bells to complete the charade.

It was a quite brilliant and lovely scene. The policemen of England might be savage and humourless meat-heads but it became clear to me that their Canadian counterparts were not so bad.

We set down our beach towel and settled down for an afternoon in the sunshine. No more than ten minutes had passed when the chorus of Jingle Bells once again picked up from the location of the three policemen. Strange.

Ten minutes later it happened again. And again. And again. What the fuck was going on?

It soon became apparent that my impression of cops waking a sleeping woman in a jovial fashion was to overestimate the value of their joke. They hadn’t been trying to wake the woman in the car.

This had not been a spontaneous or well-meaning prank. The cops had been in the park all afternoon on some slack duty and had decided somewhere along the way that Christmas caroling in the 30°C sunshine would be amusing enough a joke to perform repeatedly in public. Drunk from the attention that the public (sadly including myself) had been giving them, this would continue ad-nauseum until the sun went down.

Or possibly until it went Nova and destroyed all life on the Earth.

But what about the sleigh bells with which one of the officers had been keeping festive rhythm? God, the bells were the damning evidence of a further level of preparation. They hadn’t quick-wittedly borrowed them from a busker at all. One of the cops must have planned this in advance and brought the bloody things along with him from home.

Not only was this not a spontaneous act of impromptu wit, it wasn’t even something they’d connived suddenly by way of passing the time. It had been planned at least a day previously. Perhaps it is an annual tradition they have. Perhaps they do this every day.

Comedy should really be left in the hands of experts. It’s a dangerous commodity and shouldn’t be tossed around by just anyone. In fact, I’d be willing to volunteer for some sort of comedy police force who go around arresting people who dare to make poor, dim-witted or laboured jokes in public.

The Plain People of Cyberspace: “Ah, but don’t you see that by being a humourist dabbling in the policing business, you’re committing the same sin as the cops were but the other way around?”

Quiet you.

Reading a library copy of Haruki Murakami’s South of the border, West of the sun today, I noticed that someone had fixed a typographic error in the book by penciling an ‘r’ into the misprinted word, ‘unb oken’.

The manual correction of typos in library books strikes me as a slightly odd thing to do but is something we’ve probably all seen before. Oddly enough, the last one I can remember seeing was in a copy of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: also an Haruki Murakami novel. Maybe there is specifically something about Murakami readers that leaves them so inclined.

If we were to ask them about this behaviour, I’d like to think that they’d have an appropriately mindful Murakami-esque response: “I just can’t stand to see an incomplete or misspelled word. I don’t know why. I just can’t. It is what it is”, and then maybe they’d go and talk to a stray cat for a while.

It strikes me that you’d have to be a very singular person to do correct a typo in a mass-market paperback. What is the motivation? When I see a typo in a book, it may momentarily derail my reading but once I’ve acknowledged the typo, I just ignore it and move on.

By correcting the typo with a pen, all you’re doing is correcting the typo in one copy of a book, of which there are thousands, even millions, of other copies. There’s presumably no motivation on behalf of the corrector to fix all of the copies of the book. (Unless, of course, there is. Perhaps there’s a subculture of typographic bounty hunters travelling the libraries and bookshops of the world, patiently waiting to be discovered and interviewed by Louis Theroux).

Maybe this is the difference between typo correctors and people like me. If ever I find myself correcting typos, it’s as a professional editor and always in the master or proof copy of a book which has not yet been mass-printed.

This being said, I think the typo correctors should be praised for making this tiny difference in the world. I’ll miss this sort of thing when everything is digital and correctable at the source.

“Suppose you chomp down on an abscess and shatter your jaw,” says my dad in the cautionary tone of someone who knows about life or has at least been told a lot about it.

“Or suppose you get completely paralysed from the neck down. A proper superman job. How are you going to get home then?”

We are having a conversation about travel insurance. All I have asked for are the names of a few reputable brokers. Instead, my dad has opened my eyes to a seemingly endless score of terrifying “what ifs” that can happen around the globe.

“What if you put your foot down a rabbit hole and trip, cracking your head off a rock?”

I never knew this man had such a cool imagination. He lives in a world of “indemnity policies” and “negative equities” and “shadow cabinets”: things I had always assumed to be mind-picklingly officious. It turns out I might have been wrong. The field of insurance is as entertainingly grisly as a trip to the London Dungeon.

Come to think of it, the shadow cabinet sounds pretty spooky as well. Like something Lord Voldemort might be involved in.

“You hear about these kids,” he says, “who step on a jellyfish in Crete and spend the next forty years in a grubby Greek hospital, wriggling their eyebrows at nurses – once for yes, twice for no.”

After some more blood-curdling tales of potential holiday woe, my dad explains that my policy should include something called “repatriation”. Apparently, it is best to have a sort of escape plan built into your insurance policy: so that the company will charter a flight back to Old Blighty if you end up in a coma or a head in a jar.

“LastMinute.com isn’t much use if you’re in an Iron Lung in Baghdad with organ leggers asking suspicious questions about your teeth”, he warns me sagely.

I’m not going to Baghdad though. I’m going to nice places like Montreal, where there’s a really good socialist health service in place. A nice Canadian hospital is probably a good place to be in such an event. At least I wouldn’t have orange-skinned British nurses sponging me down with MRSA.

“And China? You don’t want to think about what you can catch in China. They invented SARS. And India? That’s where Delhi Belly comes from. And Poland? Whoa, Poland. Try pronouncing allergic to penicillin in that language.”

All this talk of jellyfish and eyebrows is putting me off going anywhere ever again. Who needs beaches and bad wax museums anyway? I might just stay at home.

“Home? Do you have any idea how many accidents happen in your own home? You’re scared of terrorism but you’ll twice as likely suffocate in your own bed.”

That’s it then. I’ll take one middleclass life of living in fear, sustantivo.

People sometimes ask me why I have such a stupid voice. “Why do you have such a stupid voice?” they ask. “Why, why, why, why, why?”

It is not an unreasonable question. My voice sounds like two Mancunian butchers trying to hold a conversation while crossing a corrugated bridge on a tandem. “Yah, yah, yah,” I say, “Blah, blur. Blur, bloh, Bleh?”

Arsevoiced and scatterfashion, my accent is untraceable and my odd turns of phrase have origins everywhere and nowhere. Some people suppose I am from Liverpool or thereabouts but they are as wrong as this analogy about a nailbomb in a crèche.

The explanation for this wonky bumvoice probably lies in a childhood spent watching American cartoons. I have always been especially prone to American colloquialisms and to Canadian raising. My old friend Bladders, a real television junky, was similarly afflicted. In fact, our entire education probably came from American cartoons and the way we speak is just the tip of the iceberg:

In the early 90s, the Wringham household didn’t have satellite television. Just the usual shitty four channels for us. When Channel Five became a reality, my sister and I would sit dot-eyed with anticipation in front of the promotional Spice Girls “Power of Five” place-holder that aired for weeks before Five began their actual broadcasting. We did this for hours.

Bladders, however, despite being as poor as a Dostoevsky protagonist at the end of a tax year and smelling constantly as if his pockets were filled to the brims with haunted yoghurt, had been mercifully blessed with an illegal cable package. He had the poker channels and the weird documentary channels and everything: he even knew the number of the channels you had to flick to in order to catch the 60-second porno previews at midnight. So whenever I could, I used to go over to Bladders’ house specifically to watch new American imports like The Simpsons.

Together he and I developed a love for the character Hans Moleman. We had both spotted him in the early days of the series. I didn’t know the character’s name but Bladders was under the impression that he was called “Edgar Allen Poe”.

The source of Bladders’ confusion lies in an episode in which Hans Moleman is seen pootling along in his new car only to be driven off the road into into the front of a roadside house, which then burns to the ground. A signpost outside the now-destroyed house reads “Birthplace of Edgar Allan Poe”. The joke, obviously, is that this old man has inadvertently destroyed a piece of irreplaceable American heritage, but the young Bladders believed that the comedy arose from Hans Moleman/Edgar Allen Poe driving into his own house.

I’ll be the first to admit that I didn’t know who the real Edgar Allen Poe was at this age. This must seem strange to the American readers of this blog, but in England we are not taught about Poe at school. Here, we’re taught proper literature like Shakespeare and Dickens and that story about the prosperous dung beetle.

Yet the words “Edgar Allen Poe” did seem familiar already, so I had an inkling that maybe this Simpsons character was not so named.

Oddly enough, it was a Simpsons Halloween Special that taught me who Poe actually was. The education I received from American television shows may have been slow but it got there in the end.

The guy with whom I share some office space often leaves his “silver bullet” pen behind. Apparently capable of writing both underwater and in outerspace, the bullet is a very silly and ostentatious piece of stationery, resembling a Cyberman suppository.

Never having a pen myself, I inevitably make use of the silver bullet in Steve’s absence. I’ve probably saved about 0.3p on ink so far. That’s cash in the bank, that is.

About to leave a local cafe today, I see a slightly manic-looking lady struggling with the electric door from the other side. She is seemingly played by Michelle Gomez from Green Wing and her stressed demeanour suggests, “Let me in! The vein in my head has stopped throbbing, which means I need coffee!”

The door is one of those wheelchair-accessible doors that requires you to hit a wall-mounted pad upon approaching. It causes much confusion, as I’ve seen in the past, partly because the pad will be significantly behind you by the time you reach the door and partly because there is an eye-level sign reading “Automatic Door”, which it isn’t.

I hit the pad on my side of the door to let the helpless lady in. The kooky door opens outwards and the woman, not seeing how I’d achieved such a miracle from so far away, shoots me an expression of gratitude and amazement. To her, I am a magical door-opening shaman. With a big cock, probably.

Needless to say, I decide to milk this for a bit

By way of explaining my door-opening powers, I produce the silver bullet from my suit pocket. “It’s easy with a Sonic Screwdriver!” I say, waving it back and forth.

People often say I would make a good Doctor Who. These people are correct. I would spend my twelfth incarnation TARDISing around, rescuing people from confusing electric doors all over the universe.

Instead of the “Oh, you dashing cad!” I had both expected and deserved, the lady’s expression of amazement melts into one of loathsome pity. Perhaps she doesn’t understand. I wave the silver bullet around in the air a little bit more. “Sonic Screwdriver?”

Her look is one of positive revulsion. Reflected in her eyes is a contemptible nerd with a pen.

I decide not to say “Sonic Screwdriver” for a third time or drop into a Doctor Who-themed breakdance, instead silently returning the pen to my pocket and leaving.

From the very periphery of my vision, I saw someone sit down at the table next to mine.

Reading a book, I was only dimly aware of his presence at first, but it soon occurred to me that the man was staring into the side of my head, like an off-duty phrenologist who doesn’t believe in a work/life balance.

Too bashful (okay, frightened) to challenge his gaze immediately but too distracted to return to my book, I instead looked straight ahead for a second as if exchanging glances with the studio audience.

As I did so, I realised that the pub was relatively empty. He had selected the table next to mine above all the other tables to choose from. My one free moment in an otherwise hectic week was being tarnished by a staring nutter.

I decided to risk a glance in his direction. I did so with trepidation in case his eyes were mad, whirling pinwheels or ghoulish empty sockets in his head.

But no. Normal human eyes. And as I met his gaze, the man immediately stopped his staring and looked down into his pint instead. At least he wasn’t bonkers enough to think that staring at other people in such close proximity is normal behaviour. In fact, he didn’t look mad at all. He was a youngish man, conservatively dressed and drinking a pint of Ruddles County Ale.

A mad person wouldn’t drink Ruddles would he? Yet he had sat down next to me in an otherwise quiet pub and he had definitely been staring. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and return to my book.

But I couldn’t. I soon felt the tractor-beam tug of his horrible eyes.

Reading Dostoevsky while suspecting being stared at is like trying to urinate in the presence of an expectantly blinking kitten. Despite conscious efforts, it is impossible to relax the correct muscles.

I looked up at him again and he quickly returned his attention to the froth of his Ruddles. It was becoming a fairly silly game.

As if God in his Heaven was tiring of this silly game and had decided to throw in a plot device, I suddenly needed the toilet. I didn’t want to take my coat and bag with me and I had half a pint of my own Ruddles left to enjoy.

I decided to put the man’s staring powers to good use.

“Would you watch my pint while I go to the bathroom, mate?”

He responded with a cordial and perfectly un-insane affirmative gesture. Excellent. A good leader recognises the special skills of his followers and this man was good at staring. He could look at my things and prevent them from being captured by crows while I was micturating.

Upon returning, I was dismayed to find that my pint had gone. The staring man had watched my pint very well. He had watched it disappear into the hands of the glass collector.

I shot the man a “WTF” expression but he seemed too distracted to notice.

“Yes!” he said suddenly. I followed his gaze to a television screen mounted on the wall above my table, upon which a phosphurdot footballer was celebrating his goal.

The mad staring-eyes man had not been looking at me at all. He’d been looking at the screen above my head.

I had deduced from their behaviour that adults desired two things: money and small reusable bags.

One type of small reusable bag was the sort of airtight plastic bag in which you might store an uneaten sandwich in the refrigerator. This type of bag was not simply reusable but resealable, potentially making it the ultimate in small reusable bag technology.

Another sort of small reusable bag was the type of bag the bank might give you if you were to withdraw some money in the form of coins. The bag could hold £20 worth of pound coins, £40 worth of 50p coins and so on.

The sharp-minded among you will notice that this item combines the two main adult desires: small reusable bags and money. For this reason, these small reusable bags must be handled very carefully. If you were to use one to carry a mixture of pound coins and fifty-pence coins instead of the correct denomination/value, the bank would have to call the police and mummy and daddy would spend a night in the cells. Needless to say, this type of small reusable bag must always be taken very, very seriously.

The importance of small reusable bags is demonstrated in the following adventure:

At my primary school, there was a strange fad for collecting the springs from ballpoint pens. It seems curious now, but no more curious than the adult currency of small reusable bags. If there is enough room in the world for both the Sterling Pound and the American Dollar, there is surely also enough for small reusable bags and the springs from ballpoint pens.

I don’t want to blow my own trumpet too hard but my collection of springs from ballpoint pens was of a championship level. It was the second best in the whole class, second only to the collection of Christopher Quigley whose access to his father’s Parker Pen cabinet was quite an advantage.

I kept my springs from ballpoint pens inside my lifting lid desk but one day I decided to take them home, perhaps to show to my family in a springs-from-ballpoint-pens cabaret show. Since I had no container in which to transport them, I borrowed a small reusable bag from none other than spring connoisseur Christopher Quigley. He generously emptied 75p (a combination of twenty, ten and five-pence pieces: something I would eventually learn was highly inappropriate use of such a bag) into his desk and allowed me to borrow the bag for the evening.

The next day, perhaps drunk on the success of my springs from ballpoint pens orchestra, I returned to school without Christopher’s small reusable bag. It had completely slipped my childish mind.

When Christopher’s 75p went missing from his desk, an enquiry was launched.

The 75p had been prey to an unscrupulous classmate who had recognised the opportunity to strike. Without the small reusable bag to protect it, the 75p was ripe for the picking.

“You mustn’t take other people’s money bags,” the teacher told me firmly. I was beginning to think he had misunderstood the situation and that he was of the opinion that I had stolen the money. It soon became evident, however, that he was fully informed of the situation and it was the theft of the bag which irked him more than anything.

The shame I felt was immense. “You mustn’t take other people’s money bags” sounded as though I had conducted a proper robbery. Only now did I fully appreciate the importance invested by adults upon small reusable bags.

Now I’m adult myself, I don’t know what the fuss was about. I have a whole box of small reusable food bags in my kitchen and it cost me approximately 40p from the Supermarket. I’ve also discovered that small reusable money bags are available for free from the bank. You only have to ask.

Depending on when you asked, his family had either died in a cult suicide or had been poisoned by exposure to radioactive material. On another occasion, they had been murdered by an angry milkman.

Whatever happened to Bladders’ family, he now lived with his uncle in a damp-smelling semi-detached house. They lived in squalor. I once saw a pint glass filled with Branton Pickle on the side of the bathtub. When I asked him about it he denied that it was Branston Pickle. Apparently it was sweetcorn niblets and Marmite.

On another occasion, I was confronted by a perfectly intact turd the size of a swamp adder in the toilet bowl. As the toilet didn’t seem to be working and I had to pee pretty bad, I was forced to hold my breath and close my eyes and tell myself that I wasn’t urinating onto some dark god from H. P. Lovecraft.

I once noticed that a panel was missing from the window by the front door and that there was dried blood on the sill. Bladders explained that a passing carnival freak had broken the window in the night, but it was plain even to my eleven-year-old self that his uncle had come home drunk, without a key and had punched a hole in the glass to open the door from the inside.

By most social conventions, I shouldn’t really have spent so much time with Bladders. He was unkempt, was probably abused by his alcoholic uncle, was two years older than me, smelled like something from Jeffrey Dahmer’s kitchenette and would concoct increasingly bizarre legends about his possibly-dead/possibly-living-in-Wolverhampton family. One Sunday morning, I found him drinking fortified wine from an egg cup. Laughing.

Given all this, why were we friends? I think our initial bond had happened when he asked me in the school playground if I liked football. I’d never been asked before: at the Dudley School for Young Cannonfodder, it was taken for granted that all boys liked football and that they would support either the Wolverhampton Wonderers or West Bromwich Albion. I told Bladders that I did not like football. “Good,” he said conspiratorially, “Me neither”.

We also shared superficial but locally unusual tastes. And so our relationship mostly revolved around quoting Monty Python (“Run Away! Run Away!”), The Fast Show (“A little bit whoooa, a little bit weeee!”) and Winding up Nathan (“You call that an Omelet?”).

He was a huge Star Trek fan and his bedroom was a shrine to his favourite television show. He didn’t have any money so he didn’t have much in the way of the videos or toys (though I do remember a cool transporter unit, in which you could place a character’s action figure and “beam him up” using a light-and-mirrors mechanism) so instead, he had covered the walls and ceiling of his room with Star Trek-related cuttings from the Radio Times.

I realise now that such behaviour is borderline psychotic. It is even akin to the behaviour of Eugene Tooms on The X Files, who would make nests out of newspaper and bile: a practice I believe is still popular with members of the Conservative Party.

At the time, however, I found such creativity the very height of it all and it wasn’t long until I’d made my own bedroom nest of TV-related cuttings and junk. In fact, I’m still finding bits of stuff around my parents’ house, almost fifteen years later.

I’m writing about Bladders because today, I found a photograph of me and Bladders, arms around each other and grinning like loons. We were wearing his homemade Starfleet uniforms (red ones, for Engineering and Security guys) and on the reverse of the photo, my handwriting says, “Best of Friends! 1995”.

We truly were the best of friends! I scanned my memory for suggestions of why we ever fell out. There was the time Bladders got carried away in a tickling match and I’d fallen halfway down the stairs. But that wasn’t it. There was also a time when he said he “kept me around” because I was “funny looking”, which I remember being hurt by but had not mulched our friendship.

About two years after the “Best of friends! 1995” photograph was taken, Bladders made a move on one of my girlfriends. In return, I gave him a fat lip and we never spoke again. Dick.

Applying for immigration into another country is the bureaucratic equivalent of surrendering your bum for scrutiny by stormtroopers. Officiously they would examine the wrinkles of your poop hatch with a jeweller’s eyeglass, checking for traces of mortal turpitude with the careful precision of Dr. David Banner putting the finishing touches on a ship in a bottle.

It’s invasive, is basically what I’m saying.

Worryingly, this analogy may not even be an analogy. Once the paperwork part of my application is over, I’ll have to undergo a very real medical examination. I don’t know how intimate this procedure will be, but if it’s anything like the rest of the process it will probably be cellular.

Strewn across my desk today is my life-so-far in paperwork: birth certificate, passport, career history, school reports, travel history, financial details, Pog collection.

My favourite archival document so far is my birth certificate. What is this document actually for? Do I really need paper to demonstrate that I was born? The facts that I can play the saxophone and I’m not a zygote should be enough, no?

To the minimalist, the birth certificate is a vexing problem: get rid of all other Earthly possessions but you’ll still have this piece of paper – your oldest possession – to carry around. Cursed with ownership as soon as we plop out of our mums. It’s like the story of the bloke who almost succeeded in eating an entire airplane only to be stumped eventually by the indestructible – and indigestible – black box recorder.

Each significant stage of life generates admin. I hope I never die: the paperwork would be a nightmare.

Another thing I have to do is call on all of my past bosses to concoct an ‘attestation of employment’. So far, the process of acquiring such documents has gone like this:

Boss: Hello, Tastychickenbucket. How can we meet your poultry needs?
Me: Hi, Boss! It’s Rob!
Boss: Who?
Me: Robert Wringham, Boss! I used to extract the crud from the chickens so that the kitchen boys didn’t get covered in crud. Remember? The crud?
Boss: Well, well. Look who came crawling back. Couldn’t find your way in the crud industry?
Me: No, I’m not in the crud-extraction business any more. I’m a semi-successful writer and comedian. But I want to emigrate, you see, and I need an attestation document to… hello?… Boss? Hello?

The volume of data accrued about our lives is incredible: my school, for example, has recorded every last exam I sat, every forgotten module, every inconsequential PE lesson, merit award, every afterschool activity. It’s all there, documented in cold, hard ink, available at a phonecall.

Savings, outgoings, National Insurance contributions, medical history, allergies, family history, personal skills: every last element of life needs to be handed over to the authorities.

Like divining for clues about the future from the patterns in some tea, I wonder how much about a person’s character the authorities can derive from all this arse-gazing. Does my C in a French exam say much about my character? Will my afterschool badminton club woo them into allowing me over? Will my traces of Jewish DNA be a help or a hindrance? I don’t know what sort of racists they are!

In The Prisoner, Patrick McGoohan famously shouts, “I’m not a number! I’m a free man!” The idea of a man being reduced to numbers seems frankly Utopian today, as I’m confronted with my own bodyweight in paperwork. Can’t there be some sort of Orwellian ID card from which they can determine everything? That would be brilliant. The government should look into that.

“I’m going to fix myself a nice, hot cup of coffee,” I snicker childishly, “Would anyone else like one? Coffee is so tasty and warm and it’s such a pick me up on a chilly winter’s day.”

This was the Mormons’ fourth missionary visit to our flat. I had made a point of testing their faith whenever they came over. I’d start by offering them hard liquor and continue by asking moronic questions about their afterlife: apparently Dr Banner would be welcome in the Celestial Kingdom but the Hulk would have to be left at home.

Their first visit had been in my absence when flatmate, Spoons, who has a uncomplicated mind, had been coerced into letting them in. To this day I wonder what they had told him via the entry phone. Apparently their religion invests in them Derrn Brown-like powers of persuasion and even picking up the phone to them was like looking into the eyes of the gorgon.

Bashfully, Spoons had told me of the Mormons’ first visit. Still more bashfully, he told me that they would join us every Wednesday evening until (a) we were converted or (b) they were converted. One second they had been wondering freaks taking pause on the doormat, the next they had become regular parts of our lives.

“What were you thinking, Spoons?” I ask, appealing to what approaches reason in him, “You’re a Catholic! Your god must be spinning in his grave.”

Spoons assured me that the Mormons’ regular attempts at conversion would be a good test of his Catholicism and my Atheism and besides, the Mormons were all women and they were really, really, hot.

“Hot Mormon women?”

“Yeah,” said Spoons, crossing his heart and hoping to die, sticking a needle in his eye, “One of them looked like Gillian Anderson. She was stunning”.

Four visits later, I have still not seen the Mormon that looks like Gillian Anderson. Either the Mormons save their best-looking Missionaries for inaugural visits or Spoons had lied to placate me.

The three women who regularly visited us, while not bad looking, had impossible-to-offend, glazed-over demeanours as though their souls had been laminated. They wore the same facial expression chosen by Cliff Richard an a few of the more attractive Autons. One of them, Sister Audrey, had a slightly squiffy eye and would often go on hysterical tangents about how great Joseph Smith was and she would have to be reigned in by the other two: Sister Winnie and Sister Kate. Yes, Sister Audrey was the hottest. If they were to convert me, Sister Audrey would surely be my Fanny Alger.

I had initially decided to sit out of their conversations with Spoons, opting instead to sit on the other side of the room, smoking cigars and drinking coffee and masturbating. The Mormons did not respond to this no matter how loudly I coughed to get their attention.

I don’t know if it was their Derren Brown Powers or if it had something to do with Sister Audrey’s squiffy eye, but as I earwigged their conversations, it became all too tempting to join in.

The ‘lesson’ I remember most fondly is the one about the various levels of Mormon afterlife. I remember them saying there is no Hell to worry about but there are levels of Heaven called ‘Degrees of Glory’. After you die, you become a ghost. The quality of your hauntings are judged by someone and then you are allowed into one of three classes of heaven.

The best class of heaven is called the Celestial Kingdom. They have everything there: extra legroom and sexier stewardesses. Your meals are all-inclusive and the toilets are clean. The two ‘coach’ classes of heaven, behind the curtain, are certainly not bad but if you’re in one of them you probably can’t help but wonder how things might have been different if only you had been a better ghost.

Sister Audrey explained the three classes of heaven as three stars in the night sky, the Celestial Kingdom being the most brightly-burning. This metaphor confused me for ages: I genuinely thought for a number of weeks that Mormon heaven was a physical place in outer space, like something a Scientologist might believe. Interestingly, I find this less mad. I think L. Ron Hubbard would kick Joseph Smith’s ass in a fight.

I’ve since discovered that Mormon ghosts do not fly off into outer space. I have also discovered that the Sisters lied about there being no hell: the lower class of heaven – the Telestial Kingdom – is indeed a shithole for cunts.

As the weeks passed, I asked Spoons how the hell we were going to get rid of the Sisters.

“The same way I get rid of anyone I don’t like,” said Spoons, “I wait until one of us dies”.

Even then, I protested, you would not be free. You’d probably end up sitting next to one of them in the Celestial Kingdom.

“Robert, I doubt you’d end up in the Celestial Kingdom,” said Spoons.

He is wrong. I’l be there. Life is cruel that way.

In the end, Spoons and I did a far more heroic thing than wait for death. We eventually moved house.

“Coffee is so tasty and warm and it’s such a pick me up on a chilly winter’s day,” I say to the Mormons on that fourth visit, “Oh! But Mormons can’t have stimulants. How silly of me, I’m sorry. Slurp, yum”.

“Actually,” said Sister Kate, “We only abstain while we’re on Missionary duties.”

I’ve since discovered that is a lie too. Those lying Mormons. If there is one thing I learned from their lessons, it is where liars go when they die. Burn in Narnia, you not-bad-looking lunatics.