Don’t you?

“You gotta help me, Doc,” I say truthfully, “The music in your waiting room is really fucking dreadful.”

Having just got back from a city break in Rome, the bad music in the Glaswegian doctors’ waiting room highlights one of the differences between UK cities and those on the continent. In Rome, they play classical music on the tube. It turns a mundane everyday micro-journey into a potentially enriching experience. In Glasgow (and on the RyanAir flight home) the music in public spaces tends to be of a quality so low it makes your mobile phone ringtone sound as though Mantovani was involved in its production. I wonder why? If you’ve got the ability to pump music into people’s ears why not make it half decent? It can’t be a money issue. Classical music is basically free.

Today in the doctors’ office, I had arrived fifteen minutes early for my appointment, eager to see my GP about [insert horrible ailment here]. Trying to read my book, I am distracted by the music on the waiting room sound system. It’s horrible. Really intrusive.

The first song was the one in which overrated simpering cock-pop band The Beach Boys (at least I think it’s them) try to encourage a consortium buyout on Bruce Forsyth’s face:

“Come all without, come all within,
Let’s all club to together for the frightening chin.”

Or maybe I’ve misunderstood the lyrics. Setting up a commune in the spacious jawbone of any popular TV personality (especially one as famous as Brucie) is a laudable cause but the song must be twenty years old now and I don’t think there has been any progress on the buyout. It would have been in the newspaper.

The next song was by a band whose name I do not know, but it is an utterly revolting number about a vain person apparently known by the singer. One of the lines goes:

“I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you, don’t you“.

Who is she talking to? Is she talking to me (the listener) or to an unseen person within the song’s narrative?

If she’s talking to me, I’m astonished at the suggestion that I might think her song was about me. The thought hadn’t entered my head until she got so vehement about it.

It’s the final “Don’t you” that scares me the most though. If I wasn’t paying attention to her song before, trying desperately to ignore it, I was certainly aware of it now. It was like being happy-slapped by a stranger. It’s a horribly aggressive and unsolicited lyric and makes you want to respond but you can’t because the person singing it is safely locked away in a recording studio somewhere in the past. But if I could reply it would be by saying “Who the hell are you? Leave me alone, you aching butthole.”

But no. Of course, she is addressing the fictional person within the song’s narrative: the vain man who has somehow wronged her. But even this doesn’t quite make sense. Why would she claim the song wasn’t about him when it was entirely directed at him?

Singer: “I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you, don’t you“.
Unseen person: “Um, yes. I do. You are saying these words to me after all. And can you stop shouting please? You spat in my eye a bit there.”

The icing on the cake of all this horrible middle-of-the-road and lyrically baffling music was that when the radio DJ chipped in he told me that the time was 11:45. But it wasn’t! It was about 5:30 in the afternoon. Some dipshit had taped this off the radio! The music would all have been forgivable if the it was just coming in on the radio. We all know DJs are stupid and just play what the record labels have told them to play. But someone at the doctors’ office had thought that this chunk of mid-morning radio it was especially good enough to tape and to bring in to work. Fuck!

According to the doctor, music is required in the waiting room so that waiting patients aren’t tempted to eavesdrop into sensitive phone calls at the reception desk. Fair enough, I decide (though now I think about it, who talks about their medical condition to the receptionist?).

Could you not put on some relaxing classical music or something instead though?

No. Apparently the young people who use the centre don’t like the classical music. They find it too formal. And you can’t upset the young people. If they stop coming in for their weekly swabs, half of Glasgow will have chlamydia before you can say “Irn Bru-soaked ratbag”.

I suggest that a long, deafening tone might be better.

The doctor worries that this would make people think they had tinnitus and she’d end up prescribing unnecessary medications.

I’m tempted to put together a mix tape of ‘suitable for everyone’ music to take in. But that’s the behaviour of an old man, isn’t it?

The Printer

One of the nice things about the day job I currently occupy is that I get to float around a lot in the library world, visiting other libraries and their librarians for little purpose other than extending a professional handshake between our offices. Among other fun activities, this usually results in copeous amounts of tea being swigged.

Today I had the oportunity to visit the librarian of a local college. Having worked in some of this country’s mightiest academic biblioteques, these little repositories always strike me as being a little parochial and twee. The shabbiness of it all is magnified when the librarian inevitably comes out with something like “An absolute fortune was thrown at our fiction collection this year” when to me said fiction collection looks about as impressive and appetising as the coffee table of a dentist’s waiting room.

I don’t say anything of course. Unlike aforementioned libraries of academia which are contructed over the centuries by a thousand different librarians, these little collections are always somebody’s baby.

Today, our meeting was constantly interrupted by a nearby laser printer whirring into life. The librarian had deliberately positioned it near his office so that he could monitor what was being printed by the students.

The printer and its use seemed to be a passion of his.

Ever since the college had provided free printing to its students – the librarian tells me in detail – he has felt obliged to monitor the printed material so that the facility wouldn’t be abused. But this college, exclusively attended as it is by “sports” students and the occasional disinterested baker, the printer sees nothing but abuse.

The students, it seems, use the printer exclusively to annoy the librarian.

Today someone had decided to print an entire telephone directory.

“Right, that’s it!” he screams, “Who keeps doing this?! Ye’ll be banned for life when I get my hands on ye!”

Portly and outraged, he is the very embodiment of frustration. I can see why the kids do it.

Livid, he slams the substantial document into a nearby recycling bin, waves his fist and shouts “I mean it!”

There is more giggling. I stifle one myself.

“The worst thing of it,” he says to me back in the office, “is that I’m only here to monitor this 50% of the time. The library stays open long after I’ve gone home”.

I wonder if he lies awake at night worried about the printer output; whether his dreams are punctuated with the whirr of an imagined laserjet belching out page after infinite page of his own subconcsious.

I doubt very much that the kids abuse the system once the librarian has gone home. They clearly only do this for the sport of making him explode.

This evening I set about printing The New Escapologist. I have invested in a semi-nice laser printer for the sole purpose of doing this.

In my attic flat tonight I feel like one of the early zinesters or pamphleters – Thomas Paine or Hugo Gernsback – generating subversive material from my own “printing press” way above the masses in my drafty garret.

“They think I am mad! They say ‘what is to be done with that Robert Wringham and his unstoppable printing press?'”

I remember the printer at the college library today and wonder if those kids know what a gift such a thing is. I had to invest money in a printer and in ink and in paper to get this project going. They could have their own underground magazine running from this library – for free – if the idea entered their spotty little heads. But only after the librarian had gone home.

An Invitation to New Escapology

Originally published at New Escapologist

“If [the populous] were not mentally deficient, they would of their own accord have swept away this silly system [of work, money and status] long ago.”

– Robert Tressell, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists.

“Run Away! Run Away!”

– Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

“See Istanbul, Port Said, Nairobi, Budapest. Write a book. Smoke too many cigarettes. Fall off a cliff but get caught in a tree halfway down. Get shot a few times in a dark alley on a Moroccan Midnight. Love a beautiful woman.”

– Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine.

During the 1900s, Ehrich Weisz – better known as Harry Houdini – made popular the art of escapology. By 1904 he had become something of a sensation, performing his astonishing routines on the Vaudeville circuits of Europe and America. He could defy handcuffs, explode from the beery guts of wooden barrels, flee locked jailhouses and escape unscathed the maddening Chinese water torture cell. He was the David Blaine of his time, except for the fact that Houdini was adored by women and that he was seldom if ever accused of being an irritant or a wanker.

It was surely no coincidence that Houdini’s popularity as an escape artist came about during a time of technological and political revolution. It was during the 1900s that Ransom Eli Olds implemented the first mass production of marketable cars; Thomas Edison’s phonograph made a commodity out of music; and the colonial expansion of Europe and America prompted the birth of the somewhat unpleasant political period known now as New Imperialism. Technologies and movements initially plugged as being liberating would soon be discovered by thinkin’ types to be nasty, horrible traps designed only to placate, segment and enfeeble. When people become dependent upon companies or governments to entertain them, to transport them, to plan their days and to import their goods, they forget what it is to be free, alive and autonomous. It must have been around this time that the concept of a person being owned by his or her property rather than the other way around was coined and the nostalgia for simpler times kicked in along with the desires to backpeddle or to escape this new world of consumption, gimmicks and psychological detritus. The work of Houdini and his contemporaries escaped the province of curiosity – that of conjuring and ventriloquism – and into the universe of metaphor.

This is not to say that progress should be resisted, nor is it to suggest that there was ever a time of perfect psychological or technological harmony. Philosophy writer, A. C. Grayling reminds us that looking to the past in order to find inspiration on how to live today can be fallacious:

“’Things have got worse’, people say, clucking their tongues; ‘crime is up, the quality of life down, the world in a mess’ … Such sentiments are misleading because they premise a belief that somewhere or sometime the world had something which has since been lost – a cosy, chintzy, afternoon-teatime era when there was neither danger without nor unease within.”

Nonetheless, while this cosy, chintzy, afternoon-teatime era undoubtedly never existed it does provide an ideal – something to aspire to and to consider when sitting in an open-plan office, doing pointless work to pay off your pointless debts or to secure your pointless place in a pointless city.

We are told to shut up and to knuckle down and to get on with it; to pay into the pension pot; to pay money to various forms of government; to pay off the mortgage or else suffer the humiliation of hunger and squalor or be accused of being awkward or crazy or radical. But what if there were another way? What if it were possible to actually ‘do a Houdini’ and escape this nonsense permanently, ethically and rewardingly? This is what New Escapologist is founded to discuss. Rule #1 of leading an interesting, enriching life is to recognize your escape routes. Rule #2, of course, is to know when to take them.

Two Churches of Escapology

When one begins to think about the various ways in which people try to escape reality, two major types of escape route emerge. The first involves the temporary retreat into simple escapist pleasures – going to the pub, reading novels or consuming vast quantities of hallucinogenic drugs as though they were jaffa cakes. The second is the attempt at permanent resettlement – by moving to a countryside ecovillage, by escaping to a lottery-funded villa on the seashore, or giving up and becoming a tramp – and involves working toward a self-sufficient lifestyle and the marvelous feeling of ‘sticking it to the man’.

From this, we can establish the two churches of escapology: the passive (watching DVDs every night) and the active (running away and starting a commune). Both allow for escape from reality but the two approaches are worlds apart.

The former is done every day by every one of us: it is cigarette break at the office; it is the ‘me time’ in the evenings; it is a cheap vacation in Prague or Blackpool. The latter is undeniably a path for the hardcore escapologist: breaking out of the prison invented by managers and conventional discourse once and for all into a self-controlled world of one’s own arrangement. But this is frowned upon by the powers-that-be: try getting planning permission for a tiny woodland shack or see what the waiting list is like for a humble city allotment. The bureaucrats don’t do much to help freewheeling escapologists.

Paradoxically, the second route – the hardcore church – is in many ways the easier of the two. Despite the bureaucratic problems involved and the being branded eccentric, it is comparatively easier to be hardcore than softcore. The ‘simple pleasures’ model involves a lifetime of dedicated scheduling and the constant seizing of spare time and stolen moments, not to mention the continuing struggle of actually attending your unfulfilling job or checking bank balances or shopping in supermarkets. The hardcore church, on the other hand, involves submitting to one simple direction: walk away.

You can walk away. If there’s one thing to learn from Jean-Paul Sartre it’s that all human beings are essentially free: there are no physical shackles keeping us in these awful places. You can get away from the stinking cities, the traffic, the stress, the boredom, the tabloid witch hunts and the carcinogenic food at the drop of a decision. This is the one doctrine of the church of hardcore escapology. Remember that song from the mid-nineties by a band called Cast? One of the verses went something like this:

If you’ve played all the games they play
You played them yesterday
Walk away, walk away
If you’ve been, where they want to go
Seen all they got to show
Just walk away, walk away, walk away

Fed up of work? Finally discovered the truth that the house always wins? Realized that TV fails to entertain you on any given night? Walk Away.

In the church of simple pleasures and temporary retreats, we can see that there is very little walking away involved. In fact, the central doctrine of this church is to continue plodding through the tough, prescribed life of work and government but to make the most out of those oases of me-time. It is the ‘fight’ to the hardcore church’s ‘flight’. The trouble is, however, that it’s a losing battle. Our grandparents (and some of our parents) all fought in at least one Great War on behalf of their government and all they have to show for it in the winters of their lives is a beat up old Volvo and a home on a council estate in which they live in fear of “asylum seekers” or “ASBO kids” or crooked salespeople – all anxiety-producing fictions generated by the Daily Mail and The Sun.

Nonetheless, the church of simple pleasures is healthy in moderation. Even if I were to escape properly and were to live on an arable farm in the middle of nowhere with my best friends and some playboy bunnies and a solar panel, I would probably want to take The Simpsons and Babylon 5 along with me. Let us not throw out the baby with the bathwater now. But it is important to remember that this church, while acting as a balm to sooth the modern ailment, is temporary and in the long run only goes to further feed the systems of oppression. These escape routes have, after all, been provided by the system to act as distractions from the ideas of anarchy or more permanent channels of escape. The doctrines of this church, while being immediately liberating are ultimately fallacious and should ideally be employed as a stepping stone path toward the hardcore church.

The hardcore church is about anarchy and self-sustainability. It is about the rejection of government, the rejection of big corporations and the rejection of dependency at large. It about liberation and self-empowerment. Once a full-paid member of this church, one will not need anything from anyone else other than good company. The comedian, Simon Munnery, once opined that the only way to get out of the rat race is to refuse to be a rat. This sounds logical enough and this is what the hardcore church preaches. If you can grow your own veggies and milk your own cow, you don’t need Tesco anymore. If you can recycle your own poo and filter your own water you will never again need to tangle with those goobers at the council. If you have a solar panel and/or a small wind turbine, you can forget the meaning of electricity bills. You will at last be able to say that you have escaped the rat race.

Manifesto

In 1929, the gay poet-come-journalist, Brian Christian de Claiborne Howard wrote a sort-of manifesto of Bohemianism. He divided a page into two halves labelled J’Accuse and J’Adore and listed within the two halves the things of which he approved and disapproved and by extension what should and should not be tolerated or aspired to when enjoying a Bohemian lifestyle. It was a bit like a MySpace profile but ninety-odd years prior to their invention and 200% less ugly. Among his J’Adores were love, food, freedom and art and among his J’Accuses were missionaries, bureaucrats and other self-righteous party-poopers. It is with Howard’s model in mind (for the Bohemian tendency to be free and to rebel is at the heart of Escapology) that something akin to an Escapologist’s Manifesto can be drawn.

New Escapologist

This is where New Escapologist comes in. At New Escapologist we posit that the retreat into fantasy and consumption and vice is a valid element of everyday life and is a result of uniquely contemporary boredom, strife and pointless toil. At the same time, we take the stance that these retreats are temporary at best and that there are a multitude of ways in which one can discover, as the graffiti says, that another world is possible.

Published
Categorised as Features

Pocket Squared

A pocket squared is a pocket halved.

Mooching aimlessly around Hyndland last night, I crossed paths with an older chap resembling Gay Talese. I don’t think he was though. Gay that is. Ahem.

The man was dressed rather wonderfully in a suit and wide-brimmed hat and most notably sported a midnight blue pocket square handkerchief.

Casually wondering if I could get away with wearing such a garment in Glasgow without being snottered irrevocably, my hand became drawn to my own breast pocket.

To my surprise I discovered that the pocket was still stitched up, as fresh as if I had bought it only yesterday. I did a quick sum in my head and discovered that I had owned this suit jacket for eight years.

The bloody pocket had been stitched up for eight years without my ever noticing. Eight years this recatangle of fabric had been a professional pocket impersonator.

It may as well have been painted on.

I find this more distressing that you can know. What does this say about me? Answers on a postcard and don’t be afraid to get Freudian on my ass.

Scottish Comedian of the Year 2007 final

Originally published at The Skinny

Scotland has brought us some truly immortal comedy institutions: the Edinburgh Fringe, Ivor Cutler, Billy Connelly and those see-you-jimmy hats. A Scottish comedy awards ceremony would certainly be more enjoyable to attend than, say, a Cornish one. Rory McGrath can only spread his talent so far.

And enjoyable it was. Personal favourites were resident Australian Rowan Campbell and Glasgow’s uninominal Teddy. Rowan’s routine looked at how Australians are often seen dismissed as a nation of petty convicts (“Quick, hide the bread”) and featured a marvellously twisted explanation of how the incriminating indiscretion of his Scottish ancestor was actually a powerful political statement. I’ll leave it to your imagination to figure that one out.

Teddy’s routine about an emasculating sexual encounter, which decency forbids we go into here, felt far more honed and refined than many of the night’s acts. While other performers would frequently flutter between unrelated one-liners and a wide sample of random (but undeniably funny) gags, Teddy focused on one perfectly orated story and hung his jokes off it expertly. This is the skill of a talented, thoughtful humourist.

A theme of the night, quite rightly, was critic-baiting. The large audience would periodically boo the X Factor-style judging panel. YouTube’s famous ‘Wee Man’ berated Chortle’s Steve Bennett for a bad review. “Just another chav act!” he spat angrily, “No, Steve! It’s another fucking NED act!”

The winner of the ‘Big Banana Boots’ trophy was newcomer Sean Grant for some great material about his ugly son. Second and third prizes went to Greenock’s Jay Lafferty (the shortlist’s only comedienne) and Aberdeen’s Gus Tawse whose act includes a great skit about the death of his wife – “I can’t help but think I’m partly responsible. I beat her to death with a shovel”.

All in all, this was a great showcase of Scotland’s up-and-coming talent. Look out for them all at the Glasgow comedy festival in March.

All Organic

Some further recollections concerning the burgeoning greengrocer band, Cauliflower Ear.

Instead of a bass guitar, a hollowed-out pumpkin had been employed and strands of lemongrass were being used for strings. The result was a highly organic sound.

The drum kit was an elaborate system of butternut squash and aubergines, though the high hat cymbal was simply a regular high hat cymbal. I suppose it must be difficult to replicate the sound of a cymbal using only vegetable produce, though I must say this shattered the illusion somewhat.

One guy didn’t do much. He just stood about shaking a coconut filled with dry pulses and occasionally ringing a bell pepper.

The highlight of the evening was surely the marvelous solo on tuber.

Cauliflower Ear

This weekend I spent an evening in my favourite pub. As a point of fact it’s not actually a pub at all – it’s a private club. I’m not a member though so I don’t have one of the magic keys required to get in. Instead I hang around the doorstep with the smokers until someone opens the door. Taking my cue, I dash inside faster than an oiled-up chimp.

My nom-de-plume is written a hundred times in the guest book. Take that, society.

On the upper floor, some sort of live musical event was going on and after some drinks, a librarian friend and I decided to go up to see what was indeed what. Apparently she knew the guy vending the tickets and he would let us in for a few minutes for free. This night, it seemed, was all about subterfuge.

Once in, I noticed a chap standing stock still on the dance floor, drinking beer on his own. He wasn’t part of the band but he appeared to know them and to me he seemed very familiar.

After a short while it occurred to me that he works in my local fruit and veg shop. It’s quite a sobering experience to spot your greengrocer on a Friday night. When a drunken superman, you don’t want to be reminded of how, during civil hours, you pretend to weigh up the benefits between varieties of lemongrass but don’t in truth have the foggiest idea what the difference might be.

“Hello,” I said, “You work in the fuit shop”.

“Hello,” he said, “You shop in the fruit shop. You and your broken arm.”

After a while it occurred to me that he was not the only greengrocer in my vicinity. The guy on bass guitar was a greengrocer and the guy in the ticket booth was also a greengrocer. The place was swarming with the blighters. I had found the nest.

The girl on keyboards also seemed familiar and I had concluded that I recognized her from my work at the university library but now I think about it, she too was a greengrocer. A she-grocer. She had once undercharged me for some basil pesto.

This was a bit awkward. In truth, the head greengrocer and I had seen each other in pubs and on the street before but we had always ignored each other. Acknowledging each other’s existence outside of the world of vegetables would violate the patron/greengrocer code of social conduct.

“Well,” I said, I shall see you around. Next time I want a pineapple I’ll come and say Hi”.

My librarian friend and I went back downstairs to our fellows. That’s how it works at this place. Librarians downstairs, greengrocers in the attic. It’s got a very high gini coeficient for a single premises.

Later in the evening, I was having a wee in one of the toilets, the cubicle door hanging open in a carefree manner. That’s the kind of party animal I am.

Suddenly, someone starts talking to me.

It is the head greengrocer, washing his hands at the sink. It is encouraging to see him doing so, I think, as he has responsibilty for handling my mushrooms. I can’t hear what he’s saying though so I wonder over to him.

“This had better be good,” I say, tipsy, “I put my willy away for this”.

He tells me about the greengrocer band. He’s not in the one I had witnessed upstairs (“Electronica? Pah!”) but rather he is in an entirely separate greengrocer band which plays heavy metal.

I suggest to him a few fruit-and-veg band names he could use. The Vegetables. The fruits. The Smashing Pumpkins. Cauliflower Ear. My personal favourite is ‘Part Zucchini’ but he doesn’t like any of them.

I tell him he’s actually a bit of a local celebrity – the fanciable greengrocer – but that I think people get carried away when they’re in such close proximity to so many courgettes.

His friend, the bass player, is at the urinal and he asks if people fancy him too. I say “No, you’re known as the grosser grocer”.

On this note, I go back to doing my wee.

Defying Odds

In the park today, a sycamore leaf came detached from its shackles, spiraled down through the air and landed neatly upon my head.

It was a moment of simple and unexpected loveliness. Rather than bat it away squeamishly I let it lie on my bonce until it chose to leave of its own accord and join its festering fellows on the wet ground.

In hindsight though, I’m not sure I like the fact that a leaf can fall on my head in such an unsolicited fashion. For a leaf to land on my head defies the odds. And one can only defy the odds so many times in life. To do otherwise defies the odds.

If I’m going to go around defying odds I’d rather it would be for a more interesting end than having an autumn leaf momentarily touch my cranium. I’d be happy winning the lottery for example or getting into the record books for the largest number of sweetcorn niblets jammed up a single nostril.

This trespass of nature was only the first reportable event to take place in the park this evening. And I was only there for ten minutes.

Sometimes a walk in the park is anything but a walk in the park. I’ll leave it to you to mix your own metaphors. It’s a piece of cake.

Of course, we’ve seen this proven several times in the past. The park is a hazardous place, filled with footballers and lonely drunks.

It’s also full of dogs and bees. “When the dog bights,” sings Julie Andrews, “When the bee stings, when I’m feeling low, I simply remember my favourite things.”

Well I certainly didn’t think of my favourite things when these happened to me. Quite the opposite.

Next, I am accosted by drunk children. “Either of you two got a light?” one of them asks. I am only dimly aware of his request since my attentions are focussed upon a pair of dogs wildly circulating the park. I’m not very fond of dogs (jumpy, growly excitable things) and I couldn’t see the humans who should have been attached to them.

There’s actually a local horror story about a man who takes pleasure in his horse-sized rottweiler jumping up at people in Kelvingrove park. The words “He’s only playing” fill me cold dread.

“Hoy! Either of you two got a light?” asked the kid again, annoyed at being ignored. I feel that the question is being aimed at me but what does he mean “you two”? Have I become so duplicitous that he can see both of me?

And then I realised that a studious looking girl had become caught up in my orbit. Listening to her iPod though she didn’t seem aware of me or the drunk and hooded nedspawn.

I told the kids I didn’t have a light but their leader continued to shout their request at the iPod girl.

“I don’t think she can hear you,” I said, “She’s listening to music”.

“Wha-?”

The kid didn’t seem to get it at all. I found this odd since he himself had iPod wires dangling from his shoulders.

The pre-Copurnican girl continued on her way oblivious to the world outside her head.

What a lovely way to live. I’m going to invest in a pair of builder’s protective earmuffs so I can ignore everyone. No more overheard train conversations for me.

I don’t know how this story ends so we’ll assume it involves a pterodactyl.

Premature Festivities

Trite observations is it?

The plain people of Cyberspace: Is it just me or does Christmas get earlier and earlier every single year?! This year, I saw an Argos Christmas advert in October! OCTOBER, mind!

Is it just me or does everyone say the same thing every year? And earlier and earlier at that? Pah!

There may be some truth in this. I bought a box of “Christmas Mince Pies” today for a spot of premature festivity behind closed doors. The sell-by date was November 12th.

I look forward to seeing Hanukkah in March; Halloween in April and Dinner for Breakfast.

Gone Shopping

Everybody loves shopping and your humble narrator is no exception. Today I donned my special shopping clothes, did my special pre-shopping stretching exercises and entered into the world of acquisition bliss.

I have bought 100 sick bags.

They really are a steal at just 12p. You don’t get much for 12p in today’s economic climate. The best things in life really are [almost] free.

Clicking ‘confirm’ at FirstAidWarehouse.co.uk brought about one of those rare existential moments of total self awareness. “What am I doing?” I laughed. “I’m buying 100 sick bags is what”.

The Plain People of Cyberspace: But why? Please tell us why. We’re dying to know.

Of course, I don’t plan to be sick one-hundred times (unless I find myself accidentally watching The Catherine Tate Show again). To explain: I’m going to print logos onto them and give them away as free gifts with the first one hundred copies of The New Escapologist, the rough-and-ready underground magazine of which I am the editor.

I’m hoping the complementary sick bag will sway those ‘maybe someday’ customers. I think I’m on to something.

Swim East

The main problem with being an autodidact is that you never know how to pronounce anything properly. Books are all well and good but it’s difficult to detect from them the silent “t” in “Paolozzi” or where the emphasis lies in “Dalí” (which I only recently discovered last week while in Barcelona).

I hope this flaw didn’t betray my informal education too crudely in the job interview I attended today.

Many twentieth century artists were discussed.

The job? Librarian of Edinburgh’s Dean Gallery. I am not holding my breath over this. I think things went well in the the interview itself (though I may have jabbered a little too excitedly when we got around to discussion of modern art) but the competition is assuredly rather steep and I am frankly very proud to have even been invited to interview.

If I get the job I will be as happy as a bag of pickled pigs. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has everything I could want from a job: seclusion, nutritious surroundings, copious quantities of seriously great twentieth century art, green space, the perfect subject matter, seemingly lovely colleagues, great espresso at the in-house cafe. There is even a giant robot to keep me company, for goodness sake.

It would be entirely my element. Needless to say I wore my waistcoat today.

Walking around the grounds prior to the main event, I pause while a man takes photographs of some impressive statuary. “Come along!” he sings, as camp as Hi-de-hi, “you’d only enhance the photograph anyway!”

This is the sort of punter I would serve every single day.

The more I think I’ve probably not got it. It was a style-over-substance interview – a crime for any champion of the postmodern – and personality in such contexts only goes so far. But no counting robot chickens before they’re hatched.

My question to the panel: “Does it ever get boring, working in paradise?”

More photos taken today here.

Crop Circles

Seated opposite a large-headed man on an Edinburgh-bound train this morning, I remarked internally at how corn-like his hair was.

It was cropped short and blunt. Well, I mused, it is harvest time.

For the duration of the journey, I idly fantazised as to what it would be like to fashion crop circles upon his massive head.

It would be a quite singular experience I think and would undoubtedly involve a tiny scythe and a spirograph.

As I left the train (how did I not see this before?) I noticed that his noggin was leaping with field mice.

Holiday Snaps

Returned this week from Barcelona where I witnessed first-hand the super-odd Antoni Gaudi architecture. A few snaps can be viewed here.

I’ve noticed that most people’s holiday snaps of Barcelona (especially those of the Casa Milà and the Sagrada Família) look exactly the same. An explanation: it’s very difficult to get photographs of the large and up-close Gaudi buildings and so everyone either finds the one perfect position to take it from or plumps for a huge lens-filling shot of wobbly windows. I think my rooftop shots might save my set from total conformity though.

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While staying in the fabulous Hotel de Catalunya, I noticed that a complementary foil-wrapped chocolate had been placed on my bedside table, the poop of a candy rat, after the first night.

After the second night, two chocolates had been left.

I wonder how far the hotel staff take this cumulative chocolate delivery system? If one has been there for three nights, is one rewarded with the appropriate number of chocolates or is there an upper limit to their praline generosity? If not, and the number of complementary chocolates is always proportionate to the number of nights stayed by the guest, the long term residents would have serious problems with door-opening.

I can imagine trying to go to bed after three weeks in the same room and having to sweep the chocolates off the bed covers and hearing them rumble across the wooden floor.

If you didn’t like chocolate for whatever reason or if you were perhaps lactose intolerant, you might find this whole thing rather invasive, even frightening. Since you weren’t eating the chocolates to begin with, you would accumulate them even faster than the long term guests. Slowly and surely they would come to your room, like zombies to a boarded-up farm house, until every last cubic centimeter of space is taken up with walnut whirl. And yet they will still come. The robotic maids understand no limits. Death by chocolate etc.

Back in reality, I don’t know what the idea behind this cumulative complementary confectionery (CCC) arrangement might be. It’s no incentive really. To the guest, it would be a highly expensive and indirect way of acquiring chocolate.

As I was only staying for two nights we shall never ever know the nuts and bolts of this reward system. I’ve failed once again on the investigative journalism front haven’t I?

The Tail

The voice was both monstrous and fey.

It asked: “Do you want anything from the trolley?”

Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do. You. Want. Anything. From the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Doyouwantanythingfromthetrolley? Do you want anything from the trolley. Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley?! Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley, do you want anything from the trolley do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley?

The voice was asking us if we wanted anything from the trolley. It and the trolley were attached to a fat middle-aged man.

Not a single passenger in Coach F of the 16:42 from Aberdeen to Glasgow wanted anything from the trolley.

There was only about twenty-five minutes of the journey left. Humans can survive without sustenance for that long. Food was not required by anyone. He may as well have been selling scuba gear: there was no market here for egg sandwiches.

There was something disconcerting about seeing a middle-aged Ricky-Tomlinson-looking fat man selling sandwiches for ScotRail. Why was he in this situation? Like many of my father’s post-war dad-generation, he resembled one of those instant disguises you can buy in joke shops: a pair of lensless spectacles with a strawberry nose and a plastic moustache attached.

Rotund, gasping, largely extinguished; how had he got to be fifty-something without figuring out how to avoid jobs like this one? He should have been at home with a pipe and a dachshund or at the very worst, shuffling paperwork for an air conditioning company.

How did he even get this job?

Train Company guy: I don’t know, Mister Creosote. We normally only hire healthy young women for this role.
Fat Guy: Please. I’m at the end of my tether. A lifetime career in the yogurt industry has come tumbling around my ears. Everyone wants that actimel stuff now. We can’t manufacture probiotics!
Train Company guy: Hmm. Maybe we can come to some arrangement. [Produces an oversized baby romper and bonnet]. Put these on for me and dance.

I expect the interview went something like that.

He was too fat to comfortably move down the gangway. He looked like he might get stuck. The father of a kid sitting opposite me had stowed a skateboard in the overhead luggage rack. In an emergency, could we use it as a shoe horn?

As he trudged along, hips unavoidably rubbing against our shoulders (“Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley?”), I noticed something hanging by a string from his arse.

Looking closely, I saw that it was the plastic packaging rings from a six-pack of canned lager. It dangled pointlessly, a limp tail, from his pinafore strings.

It was the finishing touch on a spectre of shame. It was the jaunty hat grudgingly worn by teenage workers in a fast food kitchen. It was the insulting tip left to a Starbucks server. It was the wise-ass alligator puppet with whom the Shakespearian actor is forced to work after his stumble into television presenting.

I’d like to make it clear that I’m not taking the piss out of this unfortunate character. I filled with love for him and wanted more than anything to invite him to work in the easy-going and well-paid capacity as my personal assistant for life. But I don’t have the money. A year ago I was pouring coffee myself.

For the rest of the journey, he stood in the vestibule with a drunk woman, sharing her bottle of Budweiser. Complaining he said, “I’ve been doing this job since Birth”.

Or maybe he said “Perth”.

***

On our arrival into Central, the boy sitting opposite me began exploring the undersides of the seats. “Dad, where’s my skateboard?”

The boy’s dad, a handsome young Samuel Beckett who had been reading a lengthy article about Captain Beefheart in a music magazine for the duration of the journey, began looking around similarly low locations.

“I think I saw you put it up top,” I said helpfully to Beckett.

Beckett looked at me with dagger-eyes. “Oh, did you?” he said.

His tone trod a border between suspicion and irritation. I think he had tried to lose the skateboard and I’d ruined his plan. I sure hope it wasn’t the bane of his existence or anything.

Scaramouche, Scaramouche

Loath as I am to be the boring git at the cocktail party, allow me report upon the dream I had last night.

I should point out first of all that this event is notable in that Robert Wringham DOES NOT DREAM. Or if he does dream, he seldom remembers doing so. I assume it’s something to do with being a fictional person. If real people dream up bizarre fictions between the sheets, a pixie such as myself would probably dream factual events. We can’t have any more bridges connecting the realms of the real and the not real. I already have several paranoid theories about how my actions are to blame for causing 9/11.*

The dream begins on Edinburgh’s High Street: a place I know very well having spent large portions of my life there. I walk down one of the sloped alleyways to where (in reality) there is a popular pub called the Jolly Judge but now (in the dream) is a strange medieval tavern.

As I open the door, smoke fills out into the alley. I note the strangeness of this. There is supposed to be a smoking ban. (Not even my dreams are safe from the legislation of the superego).

To my horror, a Queen tribute band is coming to the end of their set on a slightly raised platform of a stage. I don’t know much about Queen but they are doing that dreadful number which starts “one dream, one love, one tired decision” or something.

A bouncer tells me that it is their second encore and that they will be leaving shortly.

“A Queen Tribute band?” I spit angrily, “what were you thinking, dick head?”

Apparently my dream self knows the bouncer to be the organiser of the event. It seems we have a history. He does not appear perturbed at being called a dick head.

The reason for my anger? I am here to perform my own one-man Queen tribute band. I can’t believe how inappropriate this scheduling is.

Equipped only with a snare drum and a stick-on Freddy Mercury mustache, I don’t know how I am supposed to succeed in this task but my dream self doesn’t seem to mind. It’s comedy apparently.

The four-piece band don’t seem to have made any effort with their costumes either. There’s not a Brian May wig in sight and the denim-clad lead singer looks more like Tommy Saxondale than Freddy Mercury. I don’t think a single one of them is gay either. But their music is good. They sound exactly like Queen and the audience love it.

The sense of trepidation sets in. I could feel dream butterflies in my dream stomach. Oh, for a dream lepidopterist with a dream endoscope. How can I follow these talented musicians with my Early-Learning-Centre drum and my joke shop tache?

The Plain people of Cyberspace: Maybe it will work. Maybe it will be so embarrassing and you will look so wretched that it will be brilliant. You could be the next Tommy Cooper or Ted Chippington.

Me: That’s what I hoped for too. But the crowd had come for music and they were drunk on whatever medieval drinks the bar staff were serving in those tankards and animal skulls and I really wasn’t sure I would cope with this.

It seems there is to be a five-minute intermission between acts. An MC in a lime green suit and a string of French onions about his neck boards the stage and tells them that “if you liked that, you’ll love our next act”.

The drummer of the Queen band comes over to talk to me. He asks me what he thinks I’m doing, doing a Queen tribute. He looks like a young Bill Oddey with a sweaty fringe combed down over half of his face. He is annoyed.

“We’re the only Queen tribute band at the festival this year,”. I can tell he is irritated. The last thing I want is to get involved with an 80s tribute band mafia.

“Don’t worry,” I say, “This is just a one-man comedy thing. I’m covering for Mitch Benn. It’s nothing like yours and he’s been doing this for years.”

I love how my sleeping mind dropped in this piece of rationale to help explain why I had embarked upon this odd project. I was friends with musical comedian Mitch Benn in this dream and the Queen gig was a favour for him.

In reality, I once met Mitch Benn at a gig above the Wolverhampton Varsity. He sold me one of his ‘Radioface’ CDs for half the sales price. Perhaps stepping in for him at the Queen gig (in reality he doesn’t do this, I don’t think) was recompense for this. Still, this seems like a high payment for a £5 CD discount from five years ago.

Back in the waking world, I’m still annoyed at Mitch Benn for putting me in this position. If anyone sees him, kick his ass for me. And then pretend that you thought he was Bill Baily. He’ll hate that.

I wish I could conclude this description with an explanation of how the dream ended, but alas, my mind wondered before I could perform my one-man tribute to AIDs and I swam into a far more disturbing scenario with some dancing bears. My mind is a disgusting place to be.

The meaning behind this dream? In March 2008 I will have my very own one-man comedy show at the Glasgow Panopticon. Among other things I will be reading entries from this blog and improvising a diary entry live on stage. There will be a snare drum involved (but no mustache that I can think of). I guess the dream is a symptom of feeling slightly unprepared for this and of relying on other people (theatre managers, technicians, musicians, promoters) for the first time in a long while. I know it will all be fine and that I’ve got an entire six months to sort things out but when I think about it too carefully I do a runny poo.

* “… theories about how I am to blame for 9/11”. Yes indeed. The main one concerns how I failed to flick the bathroom light switches 27 times on the evening of 9/10. Another involves a punishment for touching myself during Her Majesty’s Christmas speech in 1997.

English Bastard

Originally published at Meat magazine

Being an Englishman in Scotland and being perversely fond of the fact is probably the UK’s answer to America’s ‘wiggas’. Whenever I accidentally utter a Scottish colloquialism (“Och, Aye”) in my Brummie accent I can’t help but think of decrepit, benign Hans Moleman on The Simpsons wheezing, “Cowabunga, dudes”. It’s tragic. It’s sad. It’s Neil Kinnock dancing to ‘Things Can Only Get Better’. It’s Richard Madeley dressing up as Ali G. “Is it ‘cos I is black?”

Despite the fact that I left England because its climate, people, diet, politics, history and scenery make me want to be sick into a big bag, the only way to avoid becoming the aforementioned monstrosity is to become more English. Sincerity is everything. So against all expectation, I have moved my accent half a degree south of its natural tendency and have taken up drinking copious amounts of tea. I have even started following Midlands football for the first time in my life: Up, may I venture, the baggies.

At the recent parliamentary elections, I voted for the Scottish National Party. It felt like a peculiar betrayal – peculiar in that I quite frequently masturbate, laughing, to the idea of England being hit by a massive asteroid and everything in it being reduced to dust and ash.

Back in Birmingham, I never identified with England. I was, like my hero Kurt Vonnegut, a man without a country. Perhaps I was too close to England and unable to see it without warts and all (by warts I refer mainly to ASBOs, skinheads, rotweillers, tabloid witch hunts and Johnny Vaughn). From here in Scotland it looks like a silly little BBC wonderland. I’m quite fond of it now. Through my binoculars, it’s is about David Attenburgh and Dressing Gowns and Doctor Who.

It’s a truism to say that you have to remain an outsider in order to properly understand a given place or society. I recently interviewed Judith Levine, author of the acclaimed book Not Buying It. I had asked her about the anthropological approach she adopts in order to study her own America; she said that she often felt divorced from her culture because of this approach but that it was necessary in order to act as critic.

I can’t help but feel something of a fish [and chips] out of water myself but at least it allows me to put some thought into my own never-before-bothered-about nationality. Whenever Stephen Fry and Rowan Atkinson appear in American movies, they are sold as being quintessentially English; while on British screens they assuredly come across as cultured, witty gentlemen but not necessarily grounded to any particular nation.

You can’t help but be an ambassador for your country when you visit another one, hence the recent media reaction to the yobbish behaviour of some English tourists in Spain. I didn’t even know I was English until I stepped off the plane at Glasgow Prestwick and got called an ‘English Bastard’ by a passing drunk.

When going abroad, you can’t help but take a bit of your atmosphere with you in a bucket. People are fascinated with diversity even in this modern globalized world of ours: they want to know about where you’re from, whether the stereotypes are true, what the difference is. When Scottish friends ask me how different England is to here; I tell them that it’s about the same as Scotland except that you can’t get proper haggis or decent medical facilities.

England, of course, is a complete myth. The only red telephone box I think I’ve ever seen is actually in the grounds of Glasgow University. In American movies, you can usually see Big Ben from the window of any British house, yet I only walked past it two or three times even when I lived for a spell in London. Tea, by the way, comes from China. Fish and Chips, if anything, are Scottish since the cheap fish required by the working-class dish comes from the North Sea where shoals of cod were abundant in the nineteenth century. Even the Queen is German. The only actual English thing I can think of is the humble faggot – a foodstuff which mysteriously never did well in America. Perhaps I’m being a tad glib – England gave us the World Wide Web. And Tarmac.

In spite of my ‘become more English’ strategy, I’ve actually taken up Scotts Gaelic lessons: surely a skill so Scottish that it would impress even the most hardened Scottish nationalist. In my first lesson, I was to be taught to say, “Hello. My name is Robert. I am from England”. But instead, I persuaded my teacher to change this to “Hello. My name is Robert. I am from Nowhere”. Since the concept of ‘zero’ didn’t hit the Scottish islands until the twentieth century, the Gaelic lingo has difficulty with negative words such ‘nothing’ or ‘nowhere’. So the best we can do is “Tha à Sasainn, ach chan eil ‘n àite sam bith“, which roughly means, “I am from England but not that England”.

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Bored with a Capital ‘I’

Originally published in New Escapologist

I don’t know about you, but I sometimes become so utterly sick of being myself that I would do anything to escape if only for a moment the curse of being ‘Me’. I imagine this is why some people watch soap operas: they enable you to vicariously experience other people’s domestic crises and spicy liaisons and to take you away, for twenty-eight minutes a day, from your own.

I don’t just mean to talk about being tired of one’s life – the trappings and commitments, discomforts and barriers involved in being yourself – but rather the idea that it’s possible, even easy, to tire of having the same sorts of ideas all the time or of hearing the same inner voice echoing around the walls of the same old skull.

I’ve occupied this particular skull for twenty-five years now. It’s nice. I think I’ve finally got the décor right but it can sometimes get a bit claustrophobic in here. Oh, to sneak out and visit the mind of a neighbour – perhaps for tea and toast.

Jean-Paul Sartre in his play, Huis Clos famously suggests that “hell is other people” but can you imagine how uncomfortable it must be to be locked away for all eternity with only yourself for company? Maddening to say the least. Sure, it would be fun comparing identical birthmarks and blemishes to begin with but you’d be at each other’s sanctimonious throats in less time than it takes to read an emergency exit sign.

It might be interesting to be able to change who you are occasionally; to somehow undergo the experience of being someone else for a little while. Alas, until scientists develop a magic portal akin to the one from Being John Malkovich, there is very little you can do about this. You’re stuck with your own personality and completely unable to leave that head of yours from now until the day you die. Doesn’t that freak you out just a little bit? No wonder some people go nuts, wake up one morning and decide that they’re Jesus.

The idea of ‘the self’ didn’t even exist properly until Sigmund Freud invented it in the 1920s. I don’t mean to be deliberately facetious in the same way that dull people quip that Isaac Newton invented gravity: gravity is clearly a universal force which existed prior to its being written about by Newton but the self is a comparatively new manmade concept akin to romantic love, sexual taboos or belief in an afterlife. It’s almost impossible to imagine life without some of these things now but the three aforementioned examples have clearly been challenged respectively by swingers, bohemians and atheists. Today the new escapologist can take on the idea of abandoning the self in pursuit of true psychological freedom.

Perhaps the best thing to do first in order to escape your boring old self is to identify exactly what this boring old self consists of. You might want to spend some time in dark cupboard to do this or in a sensory deprivation tank so that you can enjoy a good long period of summing yourself up akin to the guy in Haruki Maurakami’s The Windup Bird Chronicle who spends days on end sitting at the bottom of a dry well formulating ideas about himself.

Subverting the norm

Alternatively, you might want to take a personality-orientated psychometric test such as the ‘Myers Briggs [Personality] Type Indicator’ (MBTI). Check it out on the Internet. As a left-winger armed with a psychology degree, I must disclaim that I have never been a fan of this sort of thing. I dislike the idea of the existence of any standardised test which is capable of tagging people and making their inner secrets a matter of quantified communicative interest. I find it extremely tacky. But bear with me: while I’m recommending giving MBTI (or other similar system) a shot, I’m about to tell you how to grossly pervert it in the name of psychological freedom. Oh yes.

In order to explain further the borderline rightwing ‘ickiness’ of psychometric tests, I’d like to alert you to the case of Arthur Jenson whose controversial use of the IQ system ‘proved’ that black Americans were subservient to white Americans. Nice, huh? This kind of analysis is just a way of using science to label, dissect and ultimately govern, control and placate the masses. I feel for Freud: like how Nietzsche’s writings about ‘supermen’ were interpreted by Hitler as “kill all the Jews”, I doubt Freud anticipated how his ideas would be used.

Once we’re all analysed to the full extent of psychometrics and our details recorded, we become what Michel Foucault called ‘The Calculable Man’: the human being who can be represented by a few lines of text or shorthand code and governed with the corresponding measures invented to control ‘that sort of person’. It’s a great way of splitting society into chunks and dealing with them accordingly. It’s how Derren Brown figures out what people are thinking but where he uses it to entertain, governments can use it to render powerless their peoples. Rather than the conventional, more common-sense idea of government being able to unite society into one national easily-governed force, Freud’s ideas and those of Myers-Briggs or IQ-style psychometric tests show us that individuality should be encouraged by governments and companies (“Because you’re worth it” / “Just Do It”) in order to divide society into a number of groups because individuality only goes so far.

Freud’s nephew, Edward Bernays (left), is often seen as being the father of modern Public Relations (PR). He employed his uncle’s ideas to come up with a new concept of PR and person-focussed marketing: to sell products that appeal to individuals and can help foster in them an off-the-shelf construction of individuality. An iPod, for example, will appeal to Type A while record players will appeal to Type B: each shall be marketed accordingly. He arranged for 1929’s ‘torches of liberty contingent’ (as documented in John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton’s brilliant expose of PR history Toxic Sludge is good for you and in Adam Curtis’ eye-opening documentary, The Century of the Self): a women’s liberation movement in which hundreds of women would march down New York’s streets brandishing cigarettes. Until then, there was a perception in America that women shouldn’t smoke and so this was a hugely equalising movement.

Equalising? Sure. Women became liberated. As a result, cigarette sales doubled, a lot of tobacco companies got rich and from then on every family soon had two cars and every house doubled in price. With women in the game, companies had doubled their markets for almost every expensive product. Eventually men would undergo a modernisation process too so that sales of cosmetics might go up and homosexual couples would be able to buy a product called ‘marriage’ and become as miserable and taxable as everybody else.

Go get your MBTI letters. Do a quick test on the Internet or track down a qualified MBTI tester. You will find your ‘self’ represented by four letters. You’ll be represented by something along the lines of “INFJ” with each letter referring to a particular element of your ‘personality’ – in this example you’re an introverted person who uses intuition rather than facts, feels rather than thinks and plans carefully rather than acts spontaneously. They’ve got your number now, or rather, your letters. You’ll now be able to read a pre-packaged profile of yourself (one of twenty-eight types of person) and it will be so eerily similar to the sort of person you believe yourself to be that you’ll want to run screaming for the hills.

Yeah, it is spooky. But on the plus side, you have now identified precisely the ‘self’ you must seek to escape if you’re going to enjoy a holiday away from your own head.

Next, have a look at the complete matrix of MBTI personality types and seek to think and behave in ways utterly the opposite of the way you’re supposed to. If you find that you normally behave in an introverted, gentle way, join a fight club or something. If you find that you normally behave in an extroverted, aggressive way, join a chess club. Of course joining a chess club might not be ‘you’ but that’s the whole point. Experience how the other half lives.

I’d like to see some sort of Wife Swap-style reality TV show produced for Channel 4 which forces people to do things that go against their personal nature. It would be scary but hugely invigorating for the people involved and we’d all learn a lesson from watching it.

Role some bones

Why not try a ‘Dice Man’ approach to intellectual freedom?

In 1971, Luke Rhinehart wrote a kick-ass novel about a man who casts dice to make decisions. Sometimes they might be fairly trivial decisions such as what he should have for breakfast (but usually containing one or two undesirable options, introducing an element of Russian roulette into the game) or completely life-changing decisions such as whether he should leave his job or cheat on his wife that day.

The intellectual element is largely removed from the decision-making process so he gives himself over to chance and ceases to be ‘himself’. Instead he invents an all-new fractured, random self. You may not want to go this far but I recommend reading the book and its sequels any day of the week: again, it’s a hugely liberating model of living.

In The Dice Man, Rhinehart’s character (unsurprisingly a Freudian psychoanalyst) experiments with ‘dice therapy’: encouraging his troubled patients to live by the dice. If you’re looking for a flight from your own pedantic, predicable self it’s worth a shot.

Whichever approach you take to finding psychological sovereignty, the is one important thing to remember. The dandy/artist Sebastian Horsley probably put it most succinctly:

“Freedom is an internal achievement rather than an external adjustment.”

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Fuck the mall: Judith Levine

Originally published at New Escapologist

The polar ice caps are melting, war is rife, natural resources are running out by the clappers and poverty is most definitely not history. Humanity’s ecological footprint is 23% larger than the planet can handle in terms of regeneration: as a species, we’re consuming far too much. While New Escapologist wouldn’t want to point its beautifully manicured but nonetheless accusatory finger in any particular direction, your personal shopping habits probably aren’t helping things.

In 2005, journalist and author, Judith Levine decided to stop shopping. After a particularly stressful period of Christmas shopping and coming to the realization that over-consumption is precisely the thing that is destroying the planet and making everyone hate America, she decided that enough was enough.

New Escapologist: Most people know the answer to this these days, but in a nutshell, what is wrong with our current consumptive habits?

Judith Levine: We consume too much. Our consumer products use too many resources to produce, ship, and run. They obsolesce quickly, so we’re forced to throw them away — or we tire of them quickly and throw them away before they’re used up. And they aren’t biodegradable or we cannot or do not recycle them.

NE: I can’t stand shopping. I find it a real stress: the hard lighting, the crowds, the fact that the items you lusted after in the store seem cheap and pointless when you get them home. Yet other people seem to love it. There’s that term, “retail therapy”, which to me seems really odd. “Depressed? Buy a CD!” I don’t understand that relationship. What do you think the attraction to leisure shopping is?

JL: You’re shopping in the wrong places. There are many lovely things to have, which look and feel just as lovely, or even lovelier when you get them home. Plus, shopping distracts us from other troubles — and who doesn’t want to be distracted from time to time? This week, I’m in the midst of a terribly anxiety-producing medical test. I keep saying to myself, thank god for shopping.

NE: It’s been a few years now since your ‘Not Buying It’ experiment. Do you think you’ve escaped (or minimised) your desire for ‘stuff’?

JL: I never have had a big desire for ‘stuff’ — and since ‘Not Buying It’, even that desire has diminished. I just know I’m as happy without it. My weakness, however, is experiences: movies, theatre, food. While I’ve learned what I can live without, I also learned what I can’t live without. Ice cream is one of them. And each time I go to a movie or the theatre, I realize how much I enjoy it. Cutting down on consumption has all the obvious environmental advantages. But a less-remarked result is that buying less intensifies the pleasure you have in the things/experiences you do buy.

NE: ‘Not Buying It’ had something of an anthropological flavour to it, which I feel adds to the book’s integrity. Was it strange to examine your own culture in such a way? Did you feel at all ‘divorced’ from your culture when examining it so closely?

JL: Yes, and this was both an interesting and at times a troubling experience. I am often writing from the position of critic — always, in fact — so I am always, in that sense, an outsider. But the consumer culture is so pervasive. Once you’re outside it, you feel you are outside everything! Advertising becomes a kind of heiroglypic you find yourself decoding. You (or I) feel judgmental of others (and, in my case, fight against that personal judging). You feel superior, but also lonely. Not seeing the latest movies or reading the latest books puts you on the margin of conversations with friends and neighbors, indeed, outside of virtually the only shared social experience we Americans have.

NE: There have been a number of other ‘challenge-orientated’ studies since the turn of the millennium. Morgan Spurlock’s ‘Supersize Me’ and Dan Kiernan’s ‘I faught the law’ spring to mind. What do you think has been the effect of these?

JL: There are a number of copycats of my book too, including “No Impact Man” (see the website). I think there’s a way that people misinterpret them. To me, these are a kind of ordeal art, an experiment in extremism in order to understand the ordinary. People often think you’re advising them to do the same: go cold turkey. That would be like telling someone who wants to lose weight that she should stop eating altogether. There can be another paradoxical effect of this ordeal art. No Impact Man, who doesn’t take the elevator and is foregoing toilet paper for the year, gives people the impression that you have to be crazy to try to do anything about global warming. If you focus only on personal behavior, and the personal behavior is bizarre and masochistic, most people will throw up their hands in despair. Without talking about politics, you leave out the most important “something” that people can do: behave as activist citizens — agitate to change policy.

NE: Some readers may be familiar with your earlier works. I personally found ‘Harmful to Minors’ to be real tour-de-force stuff but there is also ‘My Enemy, My Love’, a book about contemporary masculinities. So you’ve covered the big two: sex and shopping. What do you think you’ll turn your journalistic interests to next?

JL: I have a fourth book too: Do You Remember Me? A Father, a Daughter, and a Search for the Self, which is a memoir of my father’s dementia and our family’s dealing with it, as well as a critique of the medicalization of aging — that is, the idea that aging is not a stage of life, but a disease. To me, all these things are connected: I’m interested in the ways that the big forces of culture, history, and politics are expressed in intimate life. Consumer culture has an increasing effect on how we feel about ourselves and how we relate to each other, socially, politically, sexually, familially. Now I’m casting around for ways to talk about the intersections between consumption, sexuality, and aging.

NE: What’s the future of the human race? An optimistic world of green energy and intellectual freedom or the total rape of Earth’s resources followed by a Starbucks-funded escape to Mars?

JL: As the daughter of communist (idealist) Jews (pessimists), the message I got was, “We’re going to make a perfect world, Gott villing, vee should live so long.” My motto is Gramsci’s: “Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” I’m skeptical, critical, dissatisfied, and sometimes so depressed and terrified I have a hard time getting out of bed. But my way of dealing with it is to be an activist. More and more people are figuring out that we have no choice but to take drastic action to save our poor Earth. Like every other environmentalist, I just hope enough people wake up fast enough. But the policymakers won’t wake up without our shouting fulltime in their ears.

Judith’s book Not Buying It is available from bookshops and public libraries. Her website with blog can be found at www.judithlevine.com

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On escapism, conservation and amusing typos: Dave Till

Originally published in New Escapologist

Welcome to Findhorn, a seemingly unremarkable little town in the highlands of Scotland. But slightly north of the main town lies the Findhorn ecovillage, which (like Glastonbury’s Festival and Roswell’s ‘incident’) has surely become more famous than the original namesake. To save the bother of a very long drive, New Escapologist caught up with long term Findhorn resident, Dave Till. While you’re stuck in that horrible office all day, Dave is looking after Findhorn’s publicity campaign and writing and performing poetry. Take that, society.

New Escapologist: What do you think is the main thing to bring people to Findhorn and other egovillage-type (sic) settlements? Do you think it is because of a positive quality unique to them or because of a negative quality possessed by regular city life?

Dave Till: Egovillage? I love that idea! Perhaps that should be the next project – forget co-operation and go for the purity of a self-centred approach. Anyway to answer your actual question I think people come to ecovillages because of positive qualities held by them and also to escape negative experiences in the city. i.e. a bit of both.

NE: When an individual becomes a resident of Findhorn, how do they contribute to the community? Does one take out a mortgage or pay a rent or do things work more like a commune where everyone works on community to make their contribution?

DT: Some people have mortgages (though God knows they don’t get them based on the low income up here), some people pay rent, some people get their accommodation as part of their work. Things are very varied now – much more like a real village. In the early days, everybody came and was resident and got their board and lodgings in exchange for work. There was much more of a communal feel then I think. However most people who work here also contribute to community rotas like washing up and cleaning the guest accommodation. Even the managers of the Foundation. For those people who live here but don’t work for the Findhorn Foundation there is the community association – the NFA (New Findhorn Association) – by which they can plug into the community in a more formal way.

NE: What do you think the general naive perception of Findhorn might be? Do people tend to find the notion romantic/appealing or is there a fear of otherness or eccentricity to contend with?

DT: People who hug trees, talk to flowers and have resident Nature Spirits. Some people find that notion romantic but I find it rather twee and annoying – like being stuck inside a permanent re-run of Finian’s Rainbow with only Tommy Steele for company. However life here is thankfully not like that. There is certainly a fear of otherness and eccentricity found in the region and the community has trouble in being taken seriously by the neighbours. But again things change. The community has been here almost 45 years and no matter how wacky you are, familiarity creeps in. Our local (Moray) Council has invested money and time in the UN-sponsored Ecovillage training so we get more and more acceptable as time goes on. The local SNP MP pops in every now and then too. Someone recently tested out our carbon footprint and found it to be the smallest in the whole of the UK (though God knows how they work that out) so that gives us a fashionable claim to eco-worthiness. Also the community is an NGO (non-governmental organization) with the UN and has been for a while, so we do have international recognition too.

NE: Tell us about the whiskey barrel homes [pictured left]. They strike me as excellent innovations!

DT: Yes – houses of spirit. An enterprising American , Roger Doudna, long-term resident here, went to the local distillery and found out they were selling off the huge oak vats that they use to store the whisky. He was zany enough to see their potential as the building blocks for circular homes so now one corner of the community is made up of these special dwellings and very nice they are too. All the walls are curved so there is no way you can buy your fitted units from IKEA.

NE: Findhorn ‘products’ such as your books and onsite courses are very interesting but there is something I’ve always wondered about them: are they a necessary evil in order to generate revenue or is this sort of activism genuinely pleasurable and a part of your credo?

DT: Personally I manage to do without the books completely without any reduction in my quality of life. After a hard day of community toil I seldom sit down with one of Eileen Caddy’s books, I’m much more likely to read the Film and Music section of the Guardian. The courses generate the largest source of revenue for the place and they do seem vital and an essential introduction to community life – especially Experience Week but it has been a while since I’ve done one. However they pay my wages so I’m not knocking them.

NE: I’m very interested at the moment by the concept of ‘voluntary similcity’ (sic). Would you describe life at Findhorn as voluntary simplicity?

DT: I love these typos. A similcity sounds like an online community or something. Life at Findhorn is seldom simple. It is complicated and challenging as a village emerges from a more basic community. The ethos is simple I guess but the challenges are varied. We all live in challenging times and Findhorn is no exception.

NE: What can New Escapologist readers do to embrace the Findhorn spirit without leaving the city?

DT: Buggered if I know. Get up here you lazy bunch of stay-at-homes. You can even fly to Inverness though of course we don’t encourage it because of the carbon issue. It’s funny that these days, no-one here likes to be seen either at the airport or at the local Tesco but of course both are frequented. I use a false beard.

NE: What do you think the modern western lifestyle lacks most?

DT: A viable alternative to both capitalism and communism. A non-religious set of spiritual practices. New community models. An escape from both advertising and spam.

NE: Got room for another gentle anarchist out there?

DT: We are not very anarchic but gentle people do pretty well. Out there?? It’s not somewhere in space – we’re not far from the A9, close to Baxters Soups – civilisation is nearby!!

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Categorised as Interviews

The Commentator

The word “remarkable” is probably meaningless if you’re the sort of person who remarks upon everything. Maybe you would reserve the word for truly remarkable things – extraterrestrial visitations, for example, or a faulty KitKat with no wafer in it – but I doubt you can distinguish between levels of remarkability if you’re the type of person who finds polystyrene exciting.

I think this as I sit on a Glasgow-bound train from Dundee and the man behind me, in a constant monologue to a silent friend, relates the most mundane things imaginable with the verve of a seasoned Jackanory presenter.

Everything is remarkable to him: every last non-event is a piece of hilarious and endlessly reportable news. His life is a story in which every last sentence ends with an exclamation mark. He knows nothing of the world of the fullstop.

His voice is that of a Shakespearian performer and so everyone in the carriage must share his cardboard news. He makes the private public. He is a living weblog. Possessing the unusual combination of being both loud and dull, if he worked for the Samaritans switchboard, every last one of his callers would wind up as deaf suicides.

I know a few people with unusually quiet voices akin to that of William Wilson’s evil twin or the ‘before guy’ on a Strepsils advert. The universe must somehow balance out this unruly segment, hence, the Brian Blesseds of this world.

Much to the mortification of an old woman to my left, old Big Gob also swore a lot. Everything was “fucking” to him. Laughing, he said “At half time I ate a fucking orange!”

Bah.

Irritated, I turn around in the fashion of a ten-year-old in a school assembly when the head teacher has singled out “you at the back” for chewing gum or looking a bit gay. I simply cannot help myself. With the vested interest of a freakshow spectator, I want to see what sort of idiot has a voice like this, swears so frequently and thinks that his one-day-late free gift from PC World is worth talking about so fervently or at all.

The voice belongs to a giant, well moisturised, amateur Nazi. He is young, Aryan, and despite a down-to-the-floorboards shaven head and fists like pigs’ heads is oddly handsome. He looks a bit like a Mitchell Brother but without the sphincter for lips.

The fact that he transpired to be this gentleman thug is the only reason I refrained from smacking him about the chops, pulling back his waistband and pouring my ScotRail coffee into the expanse of his trousers.

That and the fact that I am not Bugs Bunny.

If I had assaulted the noisy man, I would have been outed as being a librarian and the Metro newspaper would report the incident with a comedy skew.

It soon becomes transparent to those of us in Coach F (the designated quiet coach, by the way) that Big Gob and his friend work for the Navy. He has a few stories about being on Manoeuvres in the “Bristol Fucking Channel”.

You might imagine that this would make for at least semi-interesting eavesdropping but even his Navy stories were dull. Highlights included discussion of a “fucking spanner” which proved particularly effective on some tight nuts and memories of a former commanding officer who would address the men each morning with the phrase “Good morning, men”.

He found the latter story particularly funny. “Fucking funny” in fact. I suppose we could give old Big Gob the benefit of the doubt and assume that “Good morning, men” is unusually camp or cheerful for a commanding officer – akin to a vampire saying “hello, chaps” as he comes to suck your blood or a mass nuclear bombing being preceded with informative leaflets apologising for the inconvenience. But I doubt it. He was just a boring man. A boring, Mitchell Brother-faced DVD commentary-speaking Chubby Brown-tongued wally.

The thought occurs that some poor bugger might one day have to share a U Boat with him.

Rolling Roy

Walking through the park this evening on the way back from work, a most unusual sight struck my roving peepers.

A guy in a shop-mobility scooter was ambling along the uneven grass and suddenly became stranded upon a raised manhole cover.

Naturally your humble narrator resolved to help him out of the tricky situation.

Right hemisphere: Ignore him. Look at those seventies trousers. He’ll be a total nutter.

Left hemisphere: Shame on you, my conjoined friend. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. Edmund Burke.

Always come armed with a quote when wrestling with yourself internally.

I went over to help the guy.

Having learned from an incident with a guide dog earlier in the year, I knew that some tact must be employed before getting tactile.

“Do you need some help?” I asked.

“Aye,” he rumbled gutturally, rear wheels spinning pointlessly. He was a beetle on its back, mandibles flailing.

I gave him a push and he bumped soundly over the protruding piece of metal. A good day’s work. I would probably get to meet Esther Ranson now.

He extended his hand for shaking purposes. Trite, I shook it.

“My name’s Roy,” he growled, “What’s yours?”

He said this drunkenly through yellowed teeth. Just great. He was one of those lonely nutjobs to whom you show one iota of affection and you become their spunky valentine for life.

Right hemisphere: Now look what you’ve done. You’ve engaged with a handicapped drunk. You’re in deep trouble now. You’ll have to write a terrible blog entry about being a “nutter magnet”.

Left hemisphere: What was I supposed to do? Ignore him? He was capsized.

Right hemisphere: You should have left him. He was clearly a drunk. He’s probably come all the way on that thing from the East end.

Left hemisphere: You leave the East end out of this. You’re always having a bash at the East end. It’s not that bad there. They have a cathedral. The Irn Bru factory is out there.

Right hemisphere: They have a plague pit as well. The streets are paved vomit and dog poo. And they like it like that. Vomit and dog poo is sweet ambrosia to an Eastender.

Left hemisphere: This is all academic. What are we supposed to do now? He’s still shaking my hand and asking for my name. Shall I tell him it’s Graham?

Right hemisphere: Just smile and pretend you hadn’t heard.

I smiled and pretended I hadn’t heard. If only I had listened to my inner Daily Mail in the first place and I wouldn’t be in this mess. “Nice to meet you, pal.” Jovial. “Have a lovely day.”

I began to walk in a westerly direction. Walk/Sprint, whatever.

“Come back,” I heard Roy say in desperation. I wonder now if I imagined this but I don’t think I did.

Left hemisphere: God, did you hear that? He’s desperate for friendship.

Right hemisphere: Of course he is! He probably ran over than manhole deliberately. Don’t you see? It’s a trap!

Left hemisphere: Christ, you’re probably right. Better not look back.

On this, I hear the sound of urgent tires approaching.

Right hemisphere: Shit, he’s coming after you. Act like Doctor Who and find some stairs.

Left hemisphere: I’m scared.

Right hemisphere: Humourize him. Give him an hilarious nickname.

Left hemisphere: Okay. Um. Rolling Roy.

Right hemisphere: That’s the stuff. Nothing to be scared of. He’s not one of the Wheelers from Return to Oz. He’s just a harmless old man.

Left hemisphere: You’re right. I could have taken him in a fight.

Right hemisphere: You da man. You could take anyone in a fight.

Left hemisphere: I could have punched him in the face and taken his wallet.

Right hemisphere: Whoa, too far.

The sound of wheels transpires to be that of a bicycle courier. I afford a look back and see that Roy is still where I left him. He is talking to a tree. I am safe.

Chat Line

Allow me to recall the time your humble narrator phoned a supposedly sexy chat line.

The plain people of cyberspace: “I’ve never called a chat line, sexy or otherwise and you are worse than Hitler for having done so.”

Me: “It was for research, okay?”

Lonely, horny research.

For those of you too decent to ever try calling a sexy chat line, this entry may be of especial interest to you. For instance, let me explain who these things normally run:

You are invariably presented with two main options: you can engage in live chat with a floozy of your choozy; or you can listen to a pre-recorded story about what Tart A got up to with the window cleaner or what Tart B did with the greengrocer.

Tart B’s story is markedly distracting. One is left wondering about the poor old lady who ended up purchasing that cucumber.

On this occasion, I decided to listen to a story. I imagined that talking live would leave me in an awkward position of saying things like “Yes, I would like to see your dirty pillows” or “Yes, my sausage is twenty-two inches long” and feeling like a bit of a wazzok. Also, I remember hearing something on the radio about call centre girls feeling offended when the callers abruptly hang up at the end of the conversation. But I imagine it must be difficult to sign off non-chalant when you’re scrabbling around in desperate need of a tissue and the queue for the phone box is getting longer and longer.

So I dialled ‘2’ for stories.

I was presented with a plethora of options for what sort of monkey business I should like to hear about:

“If you’re the sort of gentleman who likes Bristols as big as yer noggin, dial ‘1’ now,”

Well, who doesn’t like Bristols as big as yer noggin? I’m sure I could plump for something more adventurous though so I waited for further options.

“If you’re the sort of gentleman who likes men’s bottoms, dial ‘2’ now,”

Now, I like men’s bottoms as much as the next man but a chat line story about them might denigrate into depths I have little interest in. Poopy depths. So I held the line.

“If you’re the sort of gentleman who likes to be spanked on the gulliver with a wet haddock, dial ‘3’ now,”

Everything is sexy for someone. I have no interest in being spanked in the gulliver or anywhere else with a wet haddock. Only a nice petit sardine would hold my attentions. I’m not a pervert.

“If you’re the sort of gentleman who likes to hide in the credenza and watch John and Caitlin kissing by the rubber plant, press ‘4’ now,”

Strangely specific, this one wasn’t really for me. I didn’t know who John and Caitlin were and I don’t have a credenza. It also struck me though that the sort of person who would normally phone a sexy chat line would be precisely the sort of person who likes to hide in a credenza and watch other people kissing. They would have done well to make this Option 1. A woeful lack of respect for the caller’s time.

But of course they keep you on the line for as long as possible, don’t they? They want your money. I’d been on the line for two minutes already at a cost of five euros a minute and I’d still not been taken through to the good stuff. I was still in the reception area. Whatever the next option, I would have to go for it.

“If you’re the sort of gentleman who likes kissing ladies’ front bottoms, dial ‘5’ now,”

Yes! Who doesn’t enjoy kissing ladies’ front bottoms?

I dialled ‘5’.

What followed was a strange narrative from a girl who apparently got the horn from talking to “intelligent brainboxes” like me.

This was all well and good but I’d phoned up to hear rude words, not to be complemented on having two science degrees.

It continued in this vain for quite a time. She kept going on about how nothing floats her boat like brainy, clever boys like me and that nothing put dew on her daisy like boys who liked hanging out in libraries and had read a lot of books.

A childhood friend once told me that he’d phoned an utterly vanilla chat line once and had been put through to a woman who wanted to do a wee on him.

I began to suspect that a similar mistake had been made today. I’d wanted to hear about kissing ladies’ front bottoms: not to be plunged into a fit of hubris.

On the other hand, perhaps the psychological profile of the man who likes to “venture south” is one of an intelligent, affected person who cares about other people’s pleasure as much as he does his own. Perhaps this wasn’t a confusion but rather a highly responsive means of giving the caller precisely what he wanted to hear without his even knowing it.

Only the deep sea diver would want to forgo complements on his superior trouser snake in favour of complements on his superior intelligence.

Ooh, the telephone sirens. This was going to cost me a fortune.

Perhaps a more honest service could be set up where people respond to advertisements placed in ‘Psychology Today’ or ‘Genius Gazette’ or ‘Reader’s Reader’ or some other egghead magazine in order to be given ego puff points.

“You are so clever, I just know you could calculate Pi to at least thirty places!”

“Talk Latin to me, big boy!”

“110001000111101100111001110!”

“Memor impetro bill payer’s permission pro vos planto is dico.”

Librarium Part Three

This is the third edition of my Idler column about interesting libraries.

*

Librarium #3:

Scotland’s oldest public library

By Robert Wringham

The modern provincial library is a useful thing if you want to check your hotmail account or read a biography of Sharon Osborne. Due to the pressure put upon librarians by councils to increase the number of books issued, public libraries often fall victim to fad and fashion: constantly acquiring books connected to popular TV shows, pop bands or literary trends. Titles relating to Pokemon, Furbies, The X Files or The Spice Girls strangely don’t get checked out anymore and so it must all be discarded by way of a book sale or a cermonial burrial to make way for the new stuff: Harry Potter, Celebrity Love Island and Arctic Monkeys.

And so the library becomes a transient entity: in a permanent state of flux, constantly mutating in order to keep up with what’s in vogue. In the event of a viral apocalypse, alien historians will be able to look at our abandoned libraries in order to see precisely how the silly Earthlings occupied themselves circa the time of their downfall. “Audiotape biographies of Big Brother contestants?” they’ll exclaim, “No wonder it ended so agonisingly”.

It is precisely the transient nature of libraries that comes to mind when visiting the marvellously static library at Innerpeffray: an institute proud to advertise that it was the first public lending library in Scotland.

The library no longer circulates its books or even updates its collections. It exists as a relic of days gone by; as a walk-in time capsule from the nineteenth century. Believe me when I say that this is no criticism. It’s not uncommon for romantic idlers to pine for a less-strenuous past: a time in which trash culture did not flood into our every orifice through iPods and billboards and reality television shows; a time in which work did not involve sterile open-plan offices and pikeys in pinstripe dishing out meaningless task after meaningless task. Of course, such an idea is childishly idealistic: the societal cankers of the nineteenth century (disease, slavery, heavy industry, music halls) were far worse than the mild nonsense we tolerate today. Nonetheless, one can be excused for believing in an ideal and idle past if using Innerpeffray Library as evidence.

The library itself is a fairly small enclave of book-filled cabinets. “Dickensian” is probably the word most people would search for to describe it. Large, old-fashioned desks occupy most of the floor space, which in turn are covered with open and antiquarian books resting delicately on cradles. A view from a window reveals yet more history: an old chapel, a graveyard and a closed-down school. Innerpeffry is Victorian Scotland’s version of Pompeii.

The couple who look after the library are the charming Colin and Anne Edgar. They seem surprised at receiving visitors and instantly set about making cups of tea. When I mention that I too am a librarian, they get out the biscuits.

Innerpeffray Library is certainly worth a visit if you live in Scotland or are visiting the nearby cities of Perth or Stirling. Admission is £2.50 (50p for kids).

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Categorised as Columns

John Hegley : Letters to an earwig

Originally published at The Groggy Squirrel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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