Author: Robert Wringham

Whenever I read celebrity interviews in the Guardian‘s saturday supplement, I always think about how I would answer the same questions if it were me being framed as an object of curiosity by the major national newspaper.

You do the same, dear reader. Do not try and deny it. We all think we are special. But we are not. It is only celebrities who are special. And possibly me.

Obviously I’d be very mysterious and interesting about it all because I’m a very mysterious and interesting person. Each answer would be an imparting of advise to the public, who are desperate to be shown how to live by the various figureheads of gliteratti, literatti and cliterati.

Today’s interview was with Regina Spektor, with whom I am in love. She’s the interesting Jewish New York jazz singer babe that Amy Winehouse never became. Do you hear that, Winehouse? You failed us all. I don’t want you anymore. You are nothing to me now. Regina and I have a beautiful thing going on and next summer we’re going to cycle around Oxford on a tandem and smoke exotic cigarettes on a Balkan midnight. In my mind.

When I read these interviews though I fall at the first hurdle. Perhaps reading too much into the questions, I hardly ever know what the interviewer is on about. To me, many of the questions are like the cryptic bit at the bottom of an email personality questionnaire which always asks “Who is the least likely to respond?”

To what?

A case in point:

The first thing asked of Ms. Spektor was, “When were you happiest?”

As much as I’d like to subvert the trite and saccharine question by adopting the role of some horrid character (“When I watched my mother dying. It’s a real pleasure to visualize her even now sinking into the abyss”) I feel that I aught to give a more truthful response. The public wants to know all about me after all and not some horrible character lurking in the corners of my mind or perched gargoyle-like at the tip of my tongue waiting silently like a bound-and-gagged Tourettes homunculus to leap out suddenly at a job interview or a funeral and irrevocably sabotage my life.

No. The problem is that I don’t understand a lot of these aparently popular human emotions that get bandied around as though there were no alternative. I don’t know what happiness is exactly. When I imagine happiness, I visualise myself reading novels in my pajamas upon some soft cushions. But is that happiness? Contentedness really. Or comfort or something.

A guy in the “Are you happy” column of the same magazine writes that he “can be dark, bleak, pessimistic but that doesn’t mean [he is] unhappy”.

I can understand pleasure. I enjoy eating, smoking, drinking coffee, chewing pens. I enjoy books, comics, Charlie Chaplin films, jazz music and those things made of pins which mould to the shape of your hand but while these are pleasure-giving commodities or sensations. They don’t make me conclude that I am “happy”.

Perhaps happiness was invented by Epicureans: the school of philosophy that saw life as absurd and aimless other than the aim to minimize pain and to maximize pleasure. Perhaps this maximization of pleasure is happiness.

When I have more jobs in my outbox than my inbox: the cat is combed, the kitchen sparkles and the notepad bursts with new ideas. I feel something alright. Happiness? I’d call it satisfaction.

And it goes on like this. I don’t understand what people mean by “Forgiveness” either. If one is wronged and asked to forgive, what does one have to do? Forget it happened? How can one consciously erase a memory? Even if you just ignore the fact, you’ll always know that your chum fed all of your favourite ice cream to the dog. I don’t really understand “anger”. I can feel frustrated or wronged but I get over it.

It’s a good job I don’t get interviewed in newspaper supplements. I’m far too neurotic. But I doubt anyone else has decent answers to the above either and that the celebrities just humour the magazine by saying things like “playing conkers, aged nine” or “eating a sandwich bigger than my head”. I don’t see myself as some cold non-human anthropologist like Spock or Mr Data from Star Trek because if challenged I don’t think anyone really knows what they are talking about when it comes to emotions or the mind. As psychotherapist Albert Ellis used to say (I learned this from today’s magazine too), “all human beings are out of their fucking minds”.

Before I attended the Glastonbury music festival in 2005, I would always say “I go to Edinburgh every year” when other hairy people asked me if I’d ever been to a festival.

I’d know they wouldn’t be happy with this response of course: they meant music festival – and specifically in the one-weekend, sensory-overload, drug-fueled, covered in mud sort of way but my reply about Edinburgh was my punishment to them for being overly presumptive.

If you’re not going to include literature, comedy, theatre or film festivals under your schema of ‘festivals’ then don’t speak to me. You’re prejudiced against squares, you are. Why aren’t you at home listening to music by faux-squares like the Kaiser Chiefs or something?

I’d like to come up with a retort for the similarly presumptive “Who do you support?” question which doesn’t involve football or the supporting of one’s legs in return for their supporting of one.

The best I can come up with is: “Who? Who? I think you mean WHOM! Arsenal!”

The fans of footy don’t like this sort of banter though and pointing out grammatical inaccuracies to them is a good way of finding yourself reduced to your component molecules.

Last week resulted in multiple sojourns to Edinburgh to soak up the foamy suds of the now-in-full-swing Festival. Now that I’m there with plenty of real music festival experience to compare it too, I realize that the two sorts of festival are remarkably similar experiences. Both involve lots of slow walking about in orderly lines.

Saturday in particular involved a lot of this sort of shuffling but was otherwise great and summed up everything I love about festival Edinburgh. I spent most of the time hanging out in the marquee of Luke Wright’s Poetry Party, drinking cheap beer and listening to the UKs best poets (Tim Turnbull, Martin Newall, John Hegley among others) for free, surrounded by wonderful friends.

After that, a quick trip to see Simon Munnery doing Phone Book Live and then himself again with Miles Jupp in the brilliant Johnson and Boswell: Late But Live.

My strangest Fringe experience of the year (so far) took place while poking around the market at Grass Market. A man was selling peculiar and slightly grotesque objects – which might have appealed to Lord Whimsy in a particularly peculiar mood. The salesman beckoned theatrically at a large Aleister Crowley-looking goth who had come up to his table to browse and directed him to the boot of his car.

I overheard him saying to the bald, six-foot goth in floor-length leather jacket, “Come and have a look at this skeleton”.

From the boot of the car a box not much bigger than a shoe box (but not yet a shoe box!) was revealed and presented to the goth in a carefully balanced fashion. The way it was handled by the salesman suggested that the contents must have been highly fragile.

The goth looked at it carefully but unemotionally. I recall specifically that he held his head at a slanted angle akin to a curious emu investigating a hedgehog turd.

Apparently unimpressed, the goth floated away, leathers swishing behind him. I swear I heard a crack of thunder.

The salesman shrugged and put the box away.

I suppose I could have gone and investigated this peculiarity for myself but it was raining and I needed a wee.

But I wonder now what sort of skeleton could have been in the box. A human baby? A small animal? A single skull? I prefer to imagine that it was some sort of carnival grotesquery – a Fiji Mermaid or an Angel or an extra-terrestrial.

Due to my temporary lack of investigative spirit, the readers of this blog will have to remain unsatisfied. Sorry about that. No closure to this anecdote, fatty.

Back in my theatre days (oh yes), we used to play a warm-up game called “What’s in the box?”, devised by yours truly. An empty box was passed around the characters of the play (who had collectively decided beforehand on the imaginary contents); each of them would react in away according to their character and a single onlooker would have to hazard a guess. Of course, it was usually a severed cock.

I motion that we, the livejournal community, play a little game of “what’s in the box?” right now by utilising the limited data of the goth’s expression. We are cheating, I suppose, by having knowledge of the boney truth: the box contained a skeleton. But what kind, you schlub, What kind?

Most people reminisce about sexual encounters, holidays in Spain or the general ‘good old days’. Not me. I apparently reminisce about old cartoons. And if they happen to be really bad straight-to-video releases then so much the better.

Today, seemingly for no reason, I remembered an animated series called Sylvanian Families. Now, Sylvanian Families were primarily a range of crappy doll house-type toys for girls involving various ‘families’ of woodland animals (oddly including bears). I played with my sister’s toys endlessly as a kid and usually made them all have sex in a big pile in the living room of the deluxe cottage. They liked it, the animal slags.

I guess the manufacturers of these toys tried to emulate the successful toy/cartoon partnership done so well by He-Man and the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Sadly, their cartoon was a load of bollocks so it never really got shown on TV and no one ever gave a shit. The wikipedia page doesn’t seem to know whether Sylvanian Families were a line of toys or a cartoon. I guess I’m the only person who knows. Que sera sera.

The one episode of the Sylvanian Families cartoon I can distinctively remember is one in which the Families’ common enemy, ‘Pack Bat’, decides to pull a bank heist. Yeah, hardcore. The kids watching the cartoon must have suddenly felt out of their depth: their happy animated toy-spin-off series about tree-dwelling woodland families had turned into Oceans Eleven.

At some point in the episode it was revealed that the standard unit of currency in the Sylvanian Families world is that of the leaf. That’s right – they use leaves for money.

Not the leaves from some magic tree owned by the Sylvanian bank, mind you. Not the leaves from the only Oak Tree in the Sylvanian Forest. Just leaves. The urban equivalent of this madness is a Londoner giving up on cash and taking up a barter system with a currency of carbon monoxide or pigeons.

And this is what Pack Bat wants to steal from the Sylvanian Bank? I’m pretty sure that at the time of watching it (aged eight) I realized that Pack Bat was a moron and that leaves would never have any financial value in a woodland economy. The Sylvanian Families (and Pack Bat) live in what you might call a Forest Democracy, but I say that they’ve made such a mockery of the concept of money that they might as well just ‘fess up to being communists right now.

I’m reminded now of Star Trek‘s similar attitude to money. Our main Star Trek guys have no need for money: they have replicators so that all of their food and material objects are free and so going to work is either (a) a total waste of their time and symptomatic of an ingrained slave mentality or (b) the result of a desire to improve the world they live in through working hard. They’re communists! They might look like little Utopian Americans going around the vastness of space, policing the galaxy in spandex pants but when you think about it they’re actually communists made good.

When our main Star Trek guys are forced to trade with civilizations who still have money on their home planets, they INVENT money to trade with. It’s hilarious.

“Still working for the old kablingy, eh? Well, no matter. Here is some precious money for you (haha) in the form of Federation Credits. We printed it this morning just for you.”

Why would any business-minded alien accept that crap? Seems to me that Star Trek‘s ‘Federation Credits’ have about the same value as Sylvanian Families‘ ‘Leaves’.

The phrase ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees’ must have never developed in the Sylvanian Forest. Or maybe their insistence on using leaves as currency was originally a response to the old adage. Who knows?

*

Everyone should visit Wolverhampton. Just once. Visit it in the same exploratory way that you might visit Easter Island or Hollywood or Hell. It’s a highly life-affirming town in that it reminds you that there are places in the world far more bleak and frightening than your own poorly mind.

Circa 2001, a friend and I sit giggling at our usual table of the Wolverhampton Costa coffee shop. We are students. We are high on caffeine and Socrates.

Across from our table sits a lonely looking bald man, impeccably dressed and indefinably handsome, poking absently something white and frothy with a long-handled spoon.

“Hey, look at that guy,” I mutter to my chum sotto-vox, “I didn’t know Malkovich was in town”.

Back in 2001, anyone in our field of vision who happened to be bald and at all rugged would be John Malkovich. I think we had developed something of a fixation with Spike Jonze’s movie, Being John Malkovich or more specifically with the acoustically pleasing words “John Malkovich” or, even better, “Malkovich Malkovich”.

In this case, however, the man in the coffee shop really did look bit like the actor in question. When I try to remember the situation I actually see John Malkovich himself in the role of his lookalike.

This was all too much for my silly friend so he decided to turn around, attract the attention of the Malkotype (“Excuse me, sir”) and inform him articulately that:

“My friend and I were just your startling resemblance to the actor, John Malkovich.”

“And that your pastry looks suspiciously like a horse’s willy,” I whispered.

“And that your pastry looks suspiciously like a horse’s willy.”

How the guy responded to this purile double-whammy I have no recollection but the two of us spent the next few minutes laughing like idiots presumably before being distracted by something else; perhaps a barista vaguely resembling John Cusack or a sticky bun in the shape of a donkey’s bottom.

We really were a pair of morons. The bleakness of Wolverhampton truly brought out the worst in us.

Weeks passed. It was a Tuesday. We were to attend a seminar on Information Literacy: someone would come from the university library to demonstrate the ins and outs of how to search for books in the library catalogue etc. That person, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, was the very same man we had once likened to John Malkovich in a Costa coffee shop.

John Malkovich, it transpired, was the head of university library services. Knowing that I had interests becoming a librarian after graduation, we joked that our cruel Malkovich/Horse’s Willy routine would irrevocably mar any career I had in libraries.

Well, what goes around comes around. Six years later I live over three hundred miles away in the city of Glasgow and am invited by the University of Wolverhampton to attend a job interview for a very well paid and comfortable position in their library.

If Malkovich is on the panel, I am fucked.

My main priority today is to work on growing my hair. To do this I adopt a thoughtful stance and meditate upon as many follicle-stimulating notions as is cognitively possible. I imagine spider plants growing in fast-forward; earthworms evacuating a moist lawn; a portly diner slurping spaghetti in reverse. That sort of thing.

The most useful image I have so far summoned to the inner eye is that of a Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper Crazy Cutz play set. Trust Tomy.

I suppose you are wondering why your humble narrator is engaged in such an activity. The answer, dear reader, is simple. It has been cut far too short. Far too!

At least I have nobody to blame but myself. Less fond of having my hair cut than most people are of going to the dentist, I decided this time to make the most of it. If I were to have an extra inch taken off I would be able to procrastinate for a few weeks longer than usual from having it cut again. So that’s just what I did. But now I regret it.

My new hairdresser is a most jovial fellow though. Most hairdressers, as I am sure you have observed, will ask about football and holidays. I don’t want to talk about either. I don’t know enough about either topic to pretend to be interested and if I were to truthfully declare in the barber’s seat that “football is little more than the repulsive goading of yobs”, I would find surely myself standing in Great Western Road with half a haircut and an ear in my hand.

Hairdressers also ask you what you do for a living. I can either say “I am a comedian” which isn’t quite true but beats having to explain what a humourist does or “I’m a librarian” which can prove similarly awkward. I am here to have bits of my body professionally removed: telling jokes or discussing library etiquette are not something I want to do in such a situation.

There is nowhere to go with this line of conversation is there? In the real world, such would be a two-way exchange of ideas. In the hairdressers I can’t ask him what he does in return because I know full well what he does: he cuts hair and makes small talk.

The chap responsible for removing my cranial surplus today, however, was of a very different breed. Far from the usual shaven-headed thug or screaming freak I’m used to, this guy was a lovely big gentle bear – an artist who only came to cut my locks once his assistant had washed and conditioned me and made us both some tea. His conversation was more amusing than the average smalltalk too. “Most hairdressers talk about football or holidays,” I told him, “but today we’ve talked about nuclear bombs and being buried alive”.

He laughed a proper laugh from the belly. It was true. He’d told me about a dream he had in which he witnessed a mushroom cloud in the desert. Later, we’d talked about the Kill Bill movies and that his favourite bit was the buried alive sequence.

The staff of this particular salon were apparently disappointed with the recent terrorist bungles. Far from being afraid of the idea of terrorism coming to Glasgow, they chose to dwell upon the ineptitude of the bombers and how they (hairdressers!) would have done it.

“If it were me,” he said, “I’d go out to the middle of Paisley with a bomb in a briefcase. BANG! Hundreds of people dead.”

A particularly good one was:

“I’d just nuke everyone. Middle of Glasgow. BANG! Everyone would be dead. That includes you, Delores and Shantelle. Dead. You’d not have to worry about getting a good tan anymore, Shantelle. You’d have a lovely tan for a split second right before all of your skin melted off.”

I am definitely going back. Once my hair returns.

I went this lunchtime to the convenience sandwichery run by The Wanko.

I have been going there a lot lately as they have the most adventurous soups on offer in the whole of Glasgow. I’m not talking about your average creams of tomatoes or your potatoes and leaks here: I’m talking about ‘Carrot and Dinosaur’ or ‘Chunky Vegetable and Mr. Benn’. They’re very imaginative. Today, for example, I enjoyed a hot bowl of ‘Parsnip and Atom’ bisque. Spicy.

But I don’t just buy their soup. No! For they have a wonderful soup-and-a-sandwich deal. No hunger for you, sir.

While the soups appear to be the product of a pan-dimensional time-travelling specialty chef, the choice of sandwiches is a tad conservative. Six out of the eight options are entirely meat-based (even the bread is meat) leaving only cheese or tuna to choose from. I avoid cheese because I’m slightly allergic to dairy products, so I have tuna every single time. Yes, readers, every single time.

This, of course, is a bit of a cheat on my behalf. While I grant myself fish “on occasion”, this rapid influx of tuna really does call my vegetarian status into question. If I keep this up, I’ll probably not be allowed to use the special parking spaces anymore.

Far worse than any betrayal to one’s personal ethics, however, is the awkwardness of asking for the same sandwich filling every day. The women in the shop recognise me as a regular customer now and they must have noticed the fact that I have tunafish every single day. I bet they call me ‘Mr. Tunafish’ behind my back.

I don’t want to be Mr. Tunafish.

How would you like to be Mr. Tunafish, reader? You wouldn’t, huh? Not nice is it?

The day that one of them says, “Tunafish today?” in anticipation of my order will be the day I shriek, “No! Why would I want tunafish! I’m not obsessed with tunafish. I don’t even like tunafish. I’m not a deviant!”

They will find me the following morning hanging from a joist, the suicide note written in tuna mayonnaise.

The truth, I tell myself, is that no one has noticed my dietary habits and that I am, as ever, being a paranoid imbecile. No one is interested. While I’m sure the women are vaguely familiar with the fact that a long-haired sharp-suited man visits the sandwich bar on most days, I doubt very much that they’ve noticed his tuna problem. Perhaps my opting for a different soup every day throws them a curve ball and makes them forget. And anyway, they serve a large number of people. Their queue often backs out onto the street: teams of local workers desperate for their daily juxtaposition of bland meat sandwich and magical soup from outer space.

Every day, they ask me if I would prefer white bread or brown bread for my [tuna] sandwich. Every day I say that “I’ll go either way”. This is my signature catchprase: it at once voices my bread apathy and declares my rampant bisexuality. They know what I mean. The fact, however, that the joke is new to them every day suggests that they won’t remember my penchant for tunafish sandwiches either.

But what if I’m the only person they ask this to? What if my little joke has stayed with them and now they’re taking the piss? What if no one else gets the white/brown choice? I bet they only really have one colour.

Now I come to think of it, the bread never seems to be particularly brown or white: it’s kinda seedy.

What if they see me coming and they say “Oh here comes bisexual old Mr. Tunafish. He’ll have sex with anything! He’ll have sex with a fish!”

Well, ladies, I wouldn’t have sex with a fish. Just to clear that up.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll just have cheese.

*

If you take a chimpanzee and put him in a soldier costume, what do you have? Monkey in a soldier suit? Think again, Sir. You got yourself a willing supporter of your cause!

Why do I bring this up? Partly to tickle your fancy (teehee, monkeys) and partly to make a very good point but I’ll come back to this in a moment.

Walking home from work today I saw a fat man sitting in a bus shelter reading a Rob Grant novel. Haha, what a nerd I said to myself. What book am I reading? Only Steppenwolf. I win. Idiot.

The later half of the thought was pure comedy to amuse myself but the initial Haha, what a nerd was a genuine response the portly visual stimulus.

This is far worse than any regular value judgment though, because I myself travel around on busses and I have in fact read everything by Rob Grant. So it’s a self-loathing value judgment. In a way, it’s more honest because I know what it’s like to be a dufus but at the same time it seems oddly hypocritical to be having a go at other dufi (albeit privately in my head and now in this top secret diary).

A bit further along on my journey, I got stuck behind two elderly Asian ladies. They were extremely slow moving and walked side by side so as to take up the width of the entire pavement. Unable to sidestep them due to a wall being on one side and a row of parked cars on the other, I had to fart along at their speed until we sluggishly reached the end of the street, a frustrated tripartite Hydra.

Get a move on, you old biddies I telepathically roasted them before feeling slightly ashamed of myself. But it was the follow up thought that was the most neurotic. I noticed that I had first thought of them as “biddies” rather than make any internal reference to their ethnicity. This, sir, means I am genuinely unracist. Score.

But this is stupid! Being unracist isn’t anything to be proud of. It should be the moral standard. It’s like those irritating people who declare their liberalism in MySpace profiles by putting ‘fascism’ and ‘bigots’ into their ‘dislikes’ column. Well, obviously. Then again, they put Fair Trade icons on food packets if the company behind the product successfully made the effort to not economically rape a small African community. Maybe someone should take the effort to print up some ‘unracist’ teeshirts for people like me.

But nonetheless, it was a value judgment. Followed by some thoughts about the value judgments I didn’t make. What is going on in my head?

Going for a tidy hat trick in the wrong thoughts stakes, a third one occurred after a twentysomething sped by on a skateboard. He was longhaired and wearing teeshirt.

Scruffy Sod I said to myself. This was the one that shocked me the most! I look like this guy most of the time! I wear teeshirts and have long hair – hair longer than this chap’s in fact. Just because I was wearing a suit when I bumped into this fellow doesn’t mean I’m any better than him.

But there we have it. I was wearing a suit.This was the cause of all my evil [unracist] bigotry.

I was the monkey soldier.

Remember the experiment where Zimbardo dressed a bunch of students up as zookeepers and monkeys? It wasn’t long before the “Keepers” were covered in poop flung by the “Chimps”.

As Papa Kurt himself tells us, we are who we pretend to be so we must be careful who we pretend to be.

As an aside, is it “Monkey Soldier” or “Soldier Monkey”?

I had been hit by a car. Not just any car but a black cab: the sort of vehicle that boasts its zinc-coated titanium body so that the passenger can know that he’s “in safe hands”. If you have one thrown at you however, it is akin to being hit by a small military tank.

My forearm was broken in two places. A once straight bone now resembled a lightning bolt. They had to cut my glove off with scissors. The fracture didn’t hurt per se but all was numb and my fingers wouldn’t move properly. The room spun around me, rotascope, as though seen through the eyes of a sitcom drunk.

This shouldn’t be happening to me, I thought. I’m a gentle person. I was never a tree climber as a kid: I stayed indoors to read books and make my sister’s Barbie dolls kiss each other’s un-nippled boobies. They liked it, the tarts.

Yet here I was; sat silently on a lumpy hospital bed in the Accident and Emergency department of Glasgow’s Western Infirmary and had been administered my first of many shots of morphine.

Nurses asked me questions: was I allergic to anything? Yes! Nuts and Penicillin. Who was my next of kin? I don’t know, probably my mother but she lives in Birmingham. What was my blood type?

Blood type? Do people actually know what their blood type is? This never struck me as something that people should know but now I was in a situation where it was surely vital. I was worried principally about why they needed to know: I didn’t feel as though I had lost any blood. I didn’t need a transfusion did I? It would explain the spinning room and the shortness of breath.

No. Just for the files. I felt as though I might be sick into my own hat but at least I was able to help the NHS keep its paperwork tidy.

I had no idea of my blood type but I became aware, in this state of total discombobulation that I did know someone else’s blood type: someone very close to me. My mother? My best friend from school? My first love? Nope. Try Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock.

It was one of those moments of total self-awareness. One of those defining episodes where you see yourself in the third person for a second, take a good long look at yourself and realize who you actually are.

I, apparently, am the sort of person who doesn’t know a potentially vital piece of information such as his own blood type but does have a wealth of mental detritus concerning 1960s television science fiction series to the extent that he knows about the chemistry of what flows through one of the character’s circulatory systems.

I’m a bit of a nerd, aren’t I?

In case you are wondering (either out of perverse curiosity or out of a genuine medical concern for the chief science officer of the USS Enterprise), it is Type M.

You’re probably dashing off to Google right now to check on this. Sadly, all you will find is “T Negative”, which is wrong! T Negative was the blood type of Spock’s father, Sarek. Spock, being part human, is a unique Type M.

I am a bigger nerd than the Internet itself – a system of talking computers built by nerds for nerds in a world of nerds and I still don’t know my own blood type. If only “Wringham blood type” would bring something up on Google. But it doesn’t. Odd that.

I have spent the past week in Dublin. Well, I say Dublin but the working farm on which we stayed was more specifically located about thirty miles out of the city in a rural district called Kiltale. Oddly enough we stayed in the loftspace of a converted farm building. That’s how bohemian I am, folks. I spend all of my regular city hours living in an attic only to stay in another attic when I go on holiday. I can’t live in normal houses. Being three floors up in a space originally designed for the storage of timber is the only way I can sleep.

There was of course a difference of view. In Glasgow the view from my window is of Hyndland’s crumbling townscape. In Kiltale the view was this:

Dublin was great. It had a far more European feeling than I had anticipated. Yeah, I know the Republic of Ireland is a proper part of Europe and everything but in my mind’s eye Dublin was going to be a fairly British-feeling city and I did not believe that the tiny plane journey from Glasgow (barely a takeoff and a landing than any kind of ‘flight’) would qualify this as a real trip ‘abroad’. But in fact Dublin does have that wonderfully disorientating foreign feeling to it.

Having said this, it also feels in some ways like a parallel universe version of London: one that you might see on that old sci-fi show, Sliders or in a Philip K. Dick novel. There is the same sense of ‘bigness’ that London has plus a common lingo, yet everything has a deliberately Irish flavour. The postboxes, for example, are the exact same style as our UK ones except that they are green! Since our red postboxes are so iconic that’s a pretty substantial inversion (just like, I may venture, on the episode of the aforementioned Sliders in which the Golden Gate Bridge was blue). As documented by Dickon Edwards recently, the pedestrian crossings of Dublin are far more lovely than ours in Britain. Where ours leave the pedestrian anxiously awaiting his turn, these ones give him priority. While ours make a squealing ‘hurry or die!’ racket, the ones in Dublin me a far more friendly ‘pukk pukka’ noise akin to Pacman gobbling ghosts. Much better.

While Glasgow’s statuary is of the likes of Donald Dewar; Dublin has a large number of immortalised Bishops. And writers, of course. One of the first statues I recognised was of James Joyce. Dublin is a city that idolises its writers (again, much like in an episode of Sliders in which intellectuals are given celebrity status rather than sportsmen or models). I read somewhere that writers don’t have to pay income tax here.

I’ll not bore you much more, dear reader, with what I got up to in Dublin. The Occasional Papers was never intended to be a travelogue. Besides, whenever I go on holiday I seem to do the exact same things as I do at home: sit around in cafes and look at museums and libraries.

The museums of Dublin, like those of Prague, have a highly conservative approach to curatorship. A sign on the wall at the Museum of Natural History informs the visitor that photography is forbidden as are mobile phones. This is a stark contrast to the museums of Glasgow where everything is very hands-on and stuff like photography are encouraged. As a mark of cheeky rebellion, I took a photograph here anyway (see above – it’s a bit wonky because I hurried my taking of it while the security guard wasn’t looking).

Personally, I’m rather old school when it comes to museums. I get annoyed at the happy-clappy “themepark-ization” of the ones here in Glasgow and would rather have a somber, contemplative experience in them than a fun-packed multimedia ‘journey’. When the subject matter in hand is of dinosaur bones and flint axes, the flash animation installations seem a tacky semiotic clash. On the other hand, the spectacularly dull Dublin Writers Museum holds a bronze-looking sculpture of Oscar Wilde’s head, which is half-obscured by a cardboard ‘no photography’ sign: here the administration literally gets in the way of the exhibits and it makes you think that the hands-on approach to curatorship might not be such a bad thing after all. If only someone would develop a happy medium.

As any office drones who read this blog are fully aware, most companies offer to their staff a choice of ‘early’ lunch slot and ‘late’ lunch slot: the former occurring at noon and the latter at 1pm.

Whenever I’m engaged day-job work, I almost always opt for the ‘late lunch’ option since I’m a fan of the ‘pacing yourself’ model of surviving the tedious office day. Aside from this reason, I also have an idea about ‘delayed gratification’: the longer you can wait out some horrible discomfort (in this case, crippling hunger) the more pleasurable the ultimate reward will be. It’s true.

Today, however, I experimented with the art of the early lunch. suggested to me over a beer in a seedy but cosy pub the other night that the ‘pace yourself’ model is fallacious. The hungry hour between noon and 1pm, he argues, will be uncomfortable and slow while an early lunch can only result in a more pleasant, motivated and speedy afternoon.

I wasn’t 100% convinced. While I saw the logic to his hypothesis, I also see the logic to most of Carl Pilkinton‘s ideas. (“Issac Newton did not contribute much to human civilization as discovering gravity did not affect us as it had always been there. Had everyone been floating about then he would rightfully deserve the amount of credit he receives.”) The best manias are universally convincing.

The findings of the early lunch experiment are conclusive: it is better.

The first advantage concerns what I now call a ‘Reverse Auschwitz Soup Line Effect’. In the History Channel’s favourite death camp, a top-notch survival skill was to assume a position at the back of the soup line. The chunks of meat in the soup would apparently always sink to the bottom of the soup vat and consequently the first thirty or so bowls of soup doled out would be pure liquid. The prisoners who realised this kept it quiet and ate meat each day (though I doubt very much that it was Kosher). The prisoners who failed to notice this all died.

In the modern urban lunchtime eatery, the exact opposite is true – hence the ‘Reverse Auschwitz Soup Line Effect’. This has gone largely unnoticed due to the lack of television documentaries about sandwich bars – something I hope one day to rectify when I’m instated as the rightful king of everything. I advise all officially afflicted people out there not to wait out the early lunch slot but to rush out as soon as the clock strikes midday and to laugh arrogantly at those poor, foolish colleagues who instad choose to gawp at their spreadsheets with rumbling tummies.

Today, I was the first person in line at the sandwich shop and I was rewarded with a tuna roll overflowing with tunafish and salad. Normally, it the tuna is spread pretty meagerly as though it were a patte.

Of course, this could be avoided if the sandwich lady would just dole out the tuna in respectable and consistent quantities. I suspect involvement of The Wanko himself somewhere along the lines. He owns this town.

The second advantage is that Neil’s reasoning is spot on. No longer do I feel sluggish and suicidal. I can concentrate! The hours will certainly zoom by.

In other news, look out for a Wringham article in the forthcoming edition of the excellent Meat magazine. Available in Borders bookshops and some other places. Also two online interviews: one with the infamous Jo Bloggs and one with the bonkers Cap_Scaleman. Hurrah!

“[There] is a sort of defeated moralism. If you are only slightly peculiar, there is the possibility that a shouting at will save you and bring you back to the straight and narrow. But, if you are too far gone in any direction, there is no hope; either there is nothing that even a shouting at can do for you or you are simply pitiable.” – Reggie C. King.

If last night’s events are anything to go by, it seems that a new craze has descended upon the city like a fat, three-arsed spider.

I’m talking, of course, about drive-by insults. American cities have proper crime with drive-by shootings but here in Little Britain we have this other form of abuse-in-motion, which I postulate might someday be known as “Tit!”-and-run driving.

“Fags!” shouted the first of the evening.

“Nice Hat!” bawled the second.

“Fudd!” spat the third, particularly aggressively.

A fudd, for the non-Glaswegian among you is a finely-crafted synonym referring to what is more cordially known as a “lady’s tuppence”.

Each of their insults fell victim to the doppler effect. Defied by simple GCSE physics.

It’s astonishing what small and insignificant things can antagonise some people to the extent that they feel obliged to shout abuse at a stranger from the window of their car.

All I had done was wear a hat.

Yet it made my friend and I the objects of three aggressive drive-by insults. It wasn’t even a particularly extravagant hat: just a black porkpie which is in entirely good proportion and I don’t think makes me look strange or gay.

I don’t think your dress sense has to be particularly extravagant to attract such attention any more though. This afternoon, I received another derisive attire-based comment from a stranger but this one was perhaps the oddest. A slightly chavvy schoolgirl took the briefest of glances at me before squawking, “Hah! Can I borrow your suit?!”. Since the girl had at least been brave enough not to deliver her insult from a speeding vehicle, I was able to retort. I said: “I don’t think so. Such an exercise would be uncomfortable for both of us” .

But why had she found a man in a suit so worthy of comment? I was clearly walking back from work. Don’t most people wear suits to work? It’s quite funny really. I suddenly remember that Fast Show sketch in which Mark Williams, seemingly disgusted with every single person he sees, shouts from his car window with impossibly increasing shrillness, “Brick Layer! Carpet Fitter?! Milk Man!!! Shop Keeper?! PAPER BOY??!“

It does make me wonder though how genuinely different people get by. What of dandies, punks, ethnic minorities, goths, people with missing limbs, baldies, fatties, transexuals, the aged? What of the tattooed, the birthmarked, the deformed, the limping? How do they walk down the street without being showered by the spittle of passing drivers?

There is a rather strange man who patrols my street in a massive cowboy hat, constantly swearing at himself and spitting on his own shoes. You’d imagine that such an individual would take away the attention from marginally different people such as myself in a similar fashion to the how planet Jupiter protects the Earth from so many asteroids. But alas it seems not to happen.

Perhaps it is the very fact that I occupy a grey area between ‘sane’ and ‘bonkers’ that bothers people so much. Maybe they are fine with those individuals who are clearly properly mad but when a fairly regular bloke decides to wear a hat, it has the tendency to confuse and upset.

Let that be a lesson to you, dear reader. Society only understands extremes – the sane and the crazy; the totally ascetic and the utterly greedy. I am proud to announce that this blog and all my subsequent works will now represent a voice for the new minority: the marginally peculiar and the vaguely odd. Unite, slightly strange brothers and sisters!

“Never talk about religion or politics,” the cliche-generators always say. Better not mention the Scottish Christian party then. Oops. I just did.

The Scottish Christian Party, for those not in the know, are a slightly right-wing political party aiming to mix Christian “morals” with government. Their very existence, if it weren’t so absurdly hopeless, should literally put the fear of God into us. They are very ambitious though and were the first party to display their promotional signage around Glasgow, followed shortly by the Greens. In fact, they displayed their signage even before the election were declared – which is illegal!

By voting for the SCP, you are essentially voting for God.

The other parties have got their work cut out for them then. How can they possibly compete with that? The only hope Labour has now is to get James Bond or Gandalf on their side. Son of Kong for the Green Party? Batman for Solidarity? Of course, the Lib Dems already have Lembit Öpik.

Now its established that fictional devices may enter into the political arena in times of crisis, I should like to propose a new party: the Democratic Telepathy Party.

At the core of my party’s manifesto is the belief that true democracy cannot be achieved without the aid of telepathic technologies. My party will divert all of its funding and energies into developing the technology (or stealing it from aliens) in order to enable the entire population of Scotland, nay, Britain, to to ‘plug in’ to a gestalt collective consciousness.

It will be the ultimate leveller. At last men and women will understand each other. Rich and poor will understand how the other side lives. There will be no more race hate, fattism or verbal abuse toward those who have taken it upon themselves to wear elaborate hats.

I imagine that when the collective consciousness (sponsored by Virgin) kicks in for the first time; knowledge will flow suddenly between all heads and everyone will become aware of everything that has ever been known by anyone in a single nanosecond. There will be a sudden revelation in which every man, woman, ladyman and child will say “Huh. So that’s what it’s all about”.

It will be the dawn of mass realisation on all fronts at how shitty we have always been to each other.

Sir Alan Sugar from TV’s The Apprentice will have a million voices reverberate through his mind saying, “You’re Fired!” And he will say, “Whoa. That’s horrible. Is that what I’ve been doing to people? I mean, I’ll survive, but ouch.”

Vote Telepath for a glorious, single-minded future!

I have developed a strange new mannerism.

Every now and again, I will blow air forcefully from between my pursed lips. It is my new ‘sigh’. I don’t know where it came from.

In the good old days, my sighs were rumbustious and horsey, causing my slack lips to billow rudely like a couple of wind socks. I was very proud of that particular sigh. It was emotive and I think the perfect physical manifestation of the emotions behind it. It would say “This job is a tedium and I have persisted but soon I shall go and do something else”.

The new sigh is less emotive, I feel, and unnecessarily polite. It is small and twee and makes it look as though I am playing an invisible flute.

I seem to do it more frequently than my big old horse-faced sigh too. It sometimes arrives entirely unprovoked as I walk innocently down the street. It is quite disconcerning to be pounced upon by a rogue sigh – especially when it’s not even your own.

Does anyone remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Mr. Data had a facial tick imposed upon him by his twitchy evil twin, Mr. Lore? Lore used a strange little gadget to remove his own facial tick and transfer it on to the chops of his brother. We never did see that gadget again did we? I wonder what it was called? I call it a “twitch relocator”.

Anyway, either the same thing has happened to me and I have been visited by my doppelganger with the intent of swapping sighs or I’ve picked it up from somone else like a social disease.

Behaviour is learned, my friends, but I don’t know where this could have come from. Who might I have observed sighing in this fashion? A disenfranchised penny-whistle player perhaps? In order to counter the damage, I plan on watching endless Arthur Smith Grumpy Old Men monologues and interviews with depressed horses at the Grand National. Perhaps then I will get my old sigh back.

But learn from this, dear reader. Take precautions when laughing it up with chums. The last thing you want is a confusing new mannerism on your already overly-animated face.

There was a twenty-second item on the breakfast news this morning. The writer Kurt Vonnegut is dead, it said. He was very influential, it said. He had opinions.

And then they went back to the usual stuff about Londoners killing each other in domestic disputes and school children eating badly.

It would be remiss of me not to say something about Kurt Vonnegut. Yeah, everyone else on the Internet is lamenting his death and I doubt I can add anything to this swansong but I feel like I want to note his death so that when future historians look specifically to my blog as an historical resource, they will get a nice big boner at this reference to a real and corroborated event.

He was without a doubt my favourite writer. Maybe there is someone’s work which I have not yet read and happens to be funnier, smarter, scarier and more prophetic than Papa Kurt’s stuff but I find that increasingly unlikely.

A few moments after watching the news clip this morning, I realised that this would be one of those “you’ll always remember where you were” moments. When I mentioned this to my friend David today he said that the same thing happened to him when Syd Barrett died. For some reason, I struggled to remember who Syd Barrett was despite the fact that I have one of his CDs and have always liked Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon was the first album I ever listened to). The only face that would come to mind was that of Sid James. My three years studying psychology qualifies me to say “It’s funny how the brain works”.

It was Vonnegut’s brain that failed him in the end too. Apparently, he failed to recover from an incident a few weeks ago when he fell on his head. It’s a blackly trivial end for such a great man. I had expected he would have been zapped off by a Tralfamadorian spaceship or something. The anti-climax of it is almost akin to the splattering of Walt Whitman’s brain.

I don’t know why this has upset me so much. Kurt had a fair innings and had, after all, tried to commit suicide on occasion so he was probably fairly used to the idea of dying. I’m fairly positive he had written all he was going to write – Timequake officially being his final novel succeeded only by a book of laundry lists and political musings in 2005 – so it wasn’t one of those tragic died-so-young Nick Drake affairs.

Today I carried around a battered copy of God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater and told people I met that the writer had died today.

You can see me holding the book in this photograph.

“All persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental, and should not be construed.”

I recently acquired a nifty little musical instrument called a Jew’s Harp. It was a gift from my grandad who tells me that he can no longer play it since all of his teeth have fallen out.

Given that the harp generates its mournful song by vibrating against the player’s incisors and using his skull as a resonance chamber, I can’t help but wonder whether it was playing this instrument that caused grandad’s teeth to escape their dribbly prison.

So far I have enjoyed playing the Jew’s Harp tremendously. It’s a delightfully easy instrument to play: a bit more complicated than a kazoo but infinitely simpler than a harmonica. All you have to do is find the best position for it against your teeth and control the notes and pitch using a combination of vowel-shapes and intakes of air. It’s as simple as a whore’s tit.

I plan to use it in a stand-up set at some point and most probably on my forthcoming podcast (though it will pale in comparison to the podcast’s excellent theme music composed by LiveJournal’s very own eccentric elephant, ).

Nonetheless, I am worried about the damage it might end up doing to my teeth. My grandad’s mouth – as ever – serves as a woeful parable and my teeth are pretty horrible as they are: yellowed mementos of oh so many toffees.

The biggest mistake I have made in a long time was falling out with my dentist. I can’t go back after what I said to him (no sir-ee-bob) and it’s proving impossible to find another one since any NHS dentist these days has a waiting list longer than the complaints desk queue of the average Tesco Metro. So it’s important that my teeth don’t fall out any time soon or I’ll be in an awkward oral situation. I’d better start enjoying soup.

I suspect it might be prudent for me to keep grandad’s harp for posterity but to acquire a new one. Grandad’s one is over seventy years old so I’d have no one to sue should actually end up gummy.

I am visiting my parents right now in Dudley: a town famous for unleashing Lenny Henry upon the world and for manufacturing the only still-functioning part of the Titanic – the anchor.

As usual, when I arrived in my old room last night, I was greeted with a pile of new socks and boxer shorts. I think my mum buys so many socks on my behalf due to the fact that every time I visit, I take off my shoes at the front door (as is the law in parental households – and don’t even think about touching any walls) to reveal a gaping hole in the big toe of each sock, the toes themselves protruding pinkly.

This seems to bother my mum substantially. She can tolerate my constant career failures, strange romances, televisual obsessions and existential crises but sock holes is where she draws the line. Dad owns a pair of fingerless gloves, I argue, to which there is little difference in principle. How am I supposed to open bananas with my feet if they are all wrapped up in sock?

I’m not particularly ashamed of my inability to own a single sock that doesn’t resemble cartoon swiss cheese: Einstein had the same problem. He said, “When I was young I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks.” See also: this.

It’s nice that my mum buys me so many socks. I mean, you have to use them and they can be pretty expensive so I’m grateful of course. You’re never far from a makeshift puppet show in my house. So many of my socks at Dudley does however mean that I have to bring either a spare empty bag down from Glasgow in order to carry them all back or else bring only one bag filled with things I can jettison or leave behind in Dudley for the next time I visit.

The same goes for pants: you’ve got to have them. My mum has a good eye for pants and I’m happy to let her do my pant shopping. This does not make me a weird nerd (although on those rare – I mean numerous – occasions that I “make it with a girl” it is strange to get down to my boxer shorts and to think albeit briefly – pun intended – of my mother. I do hope this is not her intent. She is so old and warty).

It is perhaps strange to travel half the length of the country with a single bag filled exclusively with new socks and underpants. I like how it is such a huge thing to carry yet entirely light in weight. I also like the idea of accidentally abandoning it in a train station somewhere and for the bomb squad to do a controlled explosion on it only to be showered with fragments of pant.

The nights are getting shorter and the sunshiney walk home from work can be a pleasant thing. Mine takes me through Kelvingrove Park: a walk marred only by increasingly numerous games of football. Oftentimes the football pitch is occupied by a disorganized kick-about between uneven teams of young children (“What’s the score? 45-11!”) but more frequently it is a proper game between adult players. They have a referee and linesmen and everything.

My worry is that their ball will come hurtling in my direction at a speed only possible when propelled from the leather-clad foot of an adult Glaswegian male. The goals do not have nets attached to them so in the event of a goal being scored when I’m walking past, I could become more than a fleeting spectator. In the event of a ball coming in my direction I can foresee only four possible outcomes:

(a) One of the players will shout “Kick the ball back, mate?”. I will attempt to kick the ball back to him only to have my shoe fly off and enter a low Earth orbit. There will be much amusement.

(b) One of the players will shout “Kick the ball back, mate?”. I will attempt to do so only to have the ball fly off in the opposite direction and into a passing grandma.

(c) One of the players will shout “Kick the ball back, mate?” and I will run away emu-like out of the fear of Situations (a) or (b). Whenever I run, it can only be described as emu-like.

(d) The ball will hit my already twice-fractured arm and it will be in plaster for a further two months.

I just can’t bring myself to like football. The very sound of a boot hitting a leather ball is aggressive and I wince when I hear it. I’d love to think of a professional football match as something other than the goading of a thousand yobs.

I’d love to be able to engage with my working class roots (honest, gov’) by embracing the beautiful game. But whenever I contemplate it, I feel a nausea like no other. Professional football just seems like another commercial instrument in the oppression of working class people: have you seen how much a season ticket costs lately?

It would also make me feel less awkward around a large section of the population: being able to say “Looks like Celtic are through to the finals” should more than compensate for my poofter hairstyle. So I’ve been meaning for a long while to attend a Partick Thistle football match – surely the most working class and least commercially driven (or just less commercially successful?) footballing event Glasgow has to offer. I am still committed to doing this (I’ve just not found the time or courage or a tough-looking escort yet) and I’ll assuredly write about the experience in these electronic pages when I do so.

Football is bizarre. Why does it get a special section on the news? I’m sure lots of people like football but there’s no ‘shopping’ section or ‘arts’ section. I also like it when you try to talk about something non-footy during a football-based situation: they hate it! If you liken a player or an event to something from a movie or a novel or real life it just confuses and infuriates.

Something that makes me feel a bit better about footy is this:

I’ve been doing a bit of temping lately which means a lot of work in offices. I’ve come to notice something about the soundtrack in these places. While they all vary depending upon the number of telephones and computers and proximity of the office to the public, there is one aspect of the office soundtrack which is surely present in all offices across the globe.

I refer of course to rumbling tummies. Every office I’ve ever worked in would have a consistent soundtrack of gastrological gurgling.

Presumably this is because “office people” have to commute a long way for the privilage of working in these soulless little rooms and seldom have time for something as decadent as breakfast. Important people are always in a hurry: important people don’t eat breakfast. Worse still, the most ‘important’ of them will forsake their lunch breaks as well.

One can’t help but think of the rumbling of so many tummies as a symbol: something of an acoustic representation of a hunger like no other. Biologically they lack food but the rumbling tummy also represents a longing for other nutrients: freedom, human interaction, colour. In famine-ravaged countries there is no food but in the office there is no anything. It’s just a room full of staplers and inboxes and hungry people pretending to be busy.

Homo-Officious does eat occasionally of course (the corporation is a slow killer – we’re engaged in a tedious Day of the Triffids-style apocalypse in which humanity must slowly starve with no sudden asteroid or superflu to put us out of our misery). Every office has food in it, usually positioned in a specially designated ‘grub corner’ and stored in plastic Tupperware boxes that the workers have brought in from home to help salve their colleagues’ misery. The food is usually cake or sweets: comfort food. The way these ‘happy tubs’ are positioned in one corner of the office remind me of the way food is placed inside the cage of a hamster or gerbil: a corner for eating; a corner for shitting and a corner to slowly die in.

I visited an office today situated away from the city centre in a strange nowhere place called ‘central key’ where everything seems to revolve around a company called M Computing in a sinister fashion akin to how everything revolves around a cannibalistic butcher in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen. (Their slogan is “making new opportunities” despite the fact that their HQ is in an actual wasteland). It was just an office block in the middle of an urban desert. The view from the east windows: a motorway. The view from the west windows: (appropriately) the ruins of an old bakery.

There was no where to eat! The nearest café must have been about a mile’s walk. The company seemed to have tried to counter this by providing a ‘canteen’ in which no food is actually prepared on the premises but rather shrinkwrapped sandwiches are delivered from somewhere else and all of the coffee is of the instant just-add-water variety. How space age! Actually, ‘how concentration camp’ might be a better expression. Arbeit macht frei: work brings freedom apparently so explain how I drink good coffee and eat good food only when I’m unemployed.

Tubs of cake indeed. And instant coffee. I can’t imagine that the “dystopian” vision of a workforce hooked up to a system of intravenous drips would be any worse. At least in such a workforce people wouldn’t have rumbling tummies.

Those of you who enjoyed my recent story about Derek Gray may be amused to know that the nail-biting office functionary is now a published writer. In fact, he wrote the main feature in the books pages of this month’s edition of The Skinny. Who knew he had it in him?

Here’s what happened:

I took the bait of writing the feature this month. I had never been asked to do a feature at this magazine before – only reviews. It was a seemingly tricky project which no one else would touch: 850 words on a local bookshop. At The Skinny you normally only get space for about 200 words in which to do a proper book review. This thing was a full-length feature and it was about a retail space of all things. It had the potential to be pretty boring and unrewarding.

But in need of brownie points as ever, I checked out the bookshop (which turned out to be more of a toyshop for mods than anything) and wrote an 850-word Barthes-style reflective mini-essay on contemporary British “magazine” culture making reference to the likes of Rick Poyner, Momus and Nathan Barley. In the end I was perversely happy with it: I’d turned something potentially pointless into something affected and personal. Normally The Skinny don’t like critical stuff but I figured that since they really needed something to fill the space and we were so far past the deadline anyway that they’d just take it anyway.

But they didn’t. Obviously. Why did I think I could coerce them into doing so? The piece didn’t even get past the section editor let alone the sub-editor. To make matters worse, I had been told the wrong word count! They didn’t have space for 850 words: all they could manage was 400.

I had put the effort in for nothing! My work got cut down to half of its original content. All of the clever stuff I’d put in had to be removed until all that remained was a blah-blah description of a not-very-good city center shop. We were back to “Boring and unrewarding” again.

“Can you put it under a pseudonym?” I groaned when I heard the news. The guy was way ahead of me though. He’d read this blog and had plumped for ‘Derek Gray’ as a suitable publication name.

A cafe should not really feel like transitional space – it is not a meta-place akin to a subway cart or an elevator. Instead it should be a place in which important business is enjoyed, specifically the business of drinking a cappuccino or a big cup of tea deliberately and with plenty of time. It’s a way of ‘being with’ strangers: to observe them all and to observe them observing each other. It’s like an intellectual version of dogging.

Sadly, in the world of the nine-to-five in which I am currently entrenched (it’s anthropology, I tell myself) this is not always so. A queue winds its way around the cafe; a snake eating its own tail while it waits for something more nutritious. There are only two tables and a bar to choose from. One cannot help but feel self conscious as twenty or thirty people watch you eat your messy tunafish bagel.

The cafe I speak of is called The Patio and it’s in a strange nowhere part of the city where the Bohemian West meets the bustling city center.

As I sat in there today I tried to read the copy of Philip Roth’s The Breast which I had picked up at the library but too many eyes were upon me for me to be able to get past the first page without squirming in my skin.

So instead I just ate my sandwich and looked around at the efficient surroundings. I noticed that the typeface in which the menu and cafe logo are written is exactly the same as that employed by the Beanscene coffee chain. Why would they do that? Do they think people will see the font and assume it is part of the same chain without actually reading the words “THE PATIO”. Odd.

Upon the counter is a framed photograph of a man. I had noticed this before and had wondered before why such a photograph would be there, facing the public. The enframed man is young, bespectacled, perhaps a tad too respectable. I assume he is the owner of the cafe.

Today I noticed that someone had stuck a notice beneath his image. For a long time I thought it said “Wanko”. This tickled me terribly.

But then I realised something else was written beneath “Wanko”. It read “Dead or Alive”. Oh, I get it. “Wanted Dead or Alive”. How amazingly witty. Beats Philip Roth any day.

Disappointed, I headed back to the office, unfulfilled by my luncheon in a transitional space where guerrilla artistry turns out just to be some moron flirting with the boss.

I’ve not worn a watch in a good year or so. There is something preferable about being a ‘timeless person’. Of course, you still live in the world of minutes and hours along with everyone else but it’s liberating to ditch the symbol of it from your personal attire and you certainly do get out of the habit of clock-watching when you’re no longer carrying a clock around with you.

A watch is something that creatures of time carry around with them in the fashion of an air-breathing scuba diver would take a tank of air with him on a trip underwater. Away from clocks, you carry a watch. In fact, you wear one anyway. Imagine that scuba diver wearing his scuba goggles and air tank while sitting at home. That, sir, is obsessive.

My current excuse for not wearing watches is that “I’m allergic to them”. After a while they do in fact cause me to sweat and after a further while causes a little patch of eczema. There is a medical reason for my lack of punctuality. Take that, society. The laws of time don’t apply to me – I got a note from my mummy.

This was all well and good two months ago when meeting people usually consisted of meeting my own chums and other bohemian layabouts in cafes. I used to live like a character from an Haruki Maurakami novel, that is, in fairly luxurious and self-inflicted unemployment. But needs must as the devil drives et cetera and I am now working as an office-bound librarian of sorts. The world of work is one of meetings and lunch hours and cigarette breaks and deadlines and flexitime and agendas and minutes and all manner of other time-related ideas.

I’m still determined not to wear a watch though. Me = Anarchist.

While actually working this problem is taken care of by the fact that my laptop has an everpresent clock on the screen: further testament to the fact that no one really wants to think about time other than the drearily employed.

Lunchbreak can be problematic though. I can usually guess within five minutes but getting back to the office five minutes late never looks good even if you frequently counter the occurrence by arriving five minutes early. So I’ve started lunching in the park at the back of the office building. It is within earshot (and ‘eyeshot’ too!) of the University bell tower, which chimes politely and unobtrusively every fifteen minutes.

If only all clocks were ‘public’ and infrequent rather than ‘privatised’ and on every wrist and screen. I feel sorry for time locked up in watches just as I feel sorry for air locked up in bubblewrap. How demeaning for it.

All this thinking about time is due to my reading Faster: the acceleration of nearly everything by James Gleik. I’ve just discovered that there is a nice website to accompany the book. As a massive fan of “short range vertical transport” vehicles (I have written about them here on occasion), I was very happy to see a chapter in this book about elevator behaviour (relating in particular to the door-close button).

The chapter kicks off with this quote from Douglas Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby (have you read that one, ?):

““In the elevator industry, a door close button is called a pacifier button. They’re installed simply to give the illusion of control to your elevator ride. They’re almost never hooked up to a real switch.”

Apparently (as I have frequently suspected) the button does nothing. It is as good as a placebo. In Japan, according to the book, elevator designers noticed that door-close buttons in Toyko have been jabbed so many times that the paint frequently flakes off them. So they installed other calming “placebos” including screens with peaceful images of blooming cherry blossoms. What powerful cultural signifiers! The image of a melting door-close button could almost be an emblem of the Tokyo business scene – Hell, Japanese society at large.

I have a theory about people’s impatience at the elevator doors seemingly not closing fast enough. Despite the fact that most elevator doors are defaulted to close after a tiny five seconds, people go nuts with impatience. It takes place, I reckon because elevators (and some other forms of transitional space) are “time traps”. Because of the way our behaviour is shaped by these environments – the close proximity to other people, the transient nature of it all – time seems to slow down, or rather we become more aware of its passing. It’s a phenomenon akin to the fact that you’re advised by dentists to brush your teeth for three minutes but only ever manage about 30 seconds: it’s not because you want to cut short this activity but because one’s gob is such a sensory organ it is difficult to perceive exactly how much time has passed.

Time to sign off, I think. Going to listen to Jon Ronson talking with his mouth at the Mitchell Library tonight.