Author: Robert Wringham

He’s been the elephant in the room for long enough, dear readers. It’s about time we talked about the fire escape guy.

I refer of course to that little green man, oft seen fleeing offices and other public buildings with a roaring fire licking at his two-dimensional heels.

We should probably sidestep the most obvious observation that he is in fact an arsonist and that he causes all of these fires himself (he is probably the same little green vandal that appears in this marvelous nonsense joke) in favour of remembering the fact that he is a symbol and like his friends the cross-the-road man and the alien abduction guys he lives in a universe of pure symbols.

Escape Guy represents the modern urbanite’s tendency to desire escape. Are we not all looking for our own existential fire exit?

For a while I assumed that the little green man would be a logo or some sort of mascot for my escape-themed magazine project, The Escapologist. But it’s too obvious innit? Plus he has negative associations: the health and safety officers of our workplaces like to hang effigies of the little green man all over our offices in order to remind us that we are physically able to escape at any time but fail to do so because of Sartrian Bad Faith. We are stupid and the little green man has been put there to mock us.

The other reason I’ve rejected him as a logo is that he’s just not cool enough. I’m sure I’ve seen a version of the emergency exit man wearing a rather dapper trilby-style hat. This was possibly in Prague but I may be wrong as I can’t see a photograph of it online (though there are plenty of the behatted German road crossing guy, Ampleman. If anyone would like to funk the standard emergency exit man up in photoshop or something, I’m pretty sure he’d make it into the magazine and probably the website too.

I wonder what is outside that door toward which he always sprints so nimbly? I fancy it is a world of solid offices for him to burn down and from which to subsequently flee. The little anarchist. (Suddenly he becomes an appealing mascot again). One thing is certain about what lies behind that door: the grass out there certainly isn’t any greener than anywhere else. He subverts that cliche by living in a monochromatic universe in which there is only one colour green and he is it.

So kiss his swee’ green ass.

As many of my meatworld chums and subscribers to the exclusive (i.e. extra-rubbish) entries are aware, I recently discovered what it is like to be run over by a car. Needless to say it was tremendous fun and that I’d reccomend it to anyone.

Unfortunately the experience resulted in a broken arm and a wounded leg and consequently I have spent much time away from blogging and other things I like to do. But now I am back. Sort of. The arm is still in a cast and typing one-handed is a bugger. This my slight return.

I’m sure I’ll write in time about the accident itself and about being ill and hospital anecdotes and stuff. But in the meantime, I am eager to get back into the world of The Occasional Papers (that’s the title of this diary, you monkey): the world of social faux-pas, silly theories, and nhilistic adventures in transitional spaces:

On the Edinburgh-Glasgow train this evening, a man sat down immediately opposite me. He wore a white shirt with a black suit jacket, and a laminated ID displaying the name ‘Derek Gray’.

I couldn’t tell whether ‘Derek Gray’ was his own name or the name of the company he worked for but I hope he was called Derek Gray because that’s exactly the sort name this man would have: soulless old Derek Gray in his shirt and tie, commuting vast distances every day from his loveless marriage to his pointless managerial job. I’d been hoping for a nice, leg-roomy journey characterised by nothing other than the lazy staring out of the window at the Scottish sunset but instead I would have to put up with anti-charismatic Derek Gray dominating my eyeline and cancelling out all of my coolness like a doppelganger from a negative universe. I’m being cruel but that was the story I composed for him as I sat there, trying not to meet his grey gaze.

Derek would prove to be a far more irritating travelling companion than I had first imagined. Not content with being an ambassador of dull, he constantly coughed at me. It wasn’t even the interesting, characterful coughing of a bronchial disease but more the clearing-the-throat sort of non-cough you’d do if you were trying to get someone’s attention.

“Ahem!” he would say, “Ahem!” and sometimes a more phlegmmy “Aaghhem!”

It was most annoying. I didn’t have any music with which to drown out the ahemming, nor had I thought to bring along my kosh.

Perhaps he actually was trying to get my attention, presumably for some wheezy asphyxiation sex in the train toilet – that’s the sort of thing Derek Gray is into – but you’d think after three or for ‘Ahem!’s he might give up or try nudging me or something.

After a while, Derek Gray began to chew his nails. I had known he was a nail-biter already, of course. That’s the kind of thing Derek Gray does when he’s not writing reports about his staff’s unnaturally disproportionate paperclip expenditure.

But it wasn’t a simple trimming-of-the-talons kind of nail biting that Derek Gray was engaged in. It was the deep-into-the-cuticle sort of nail biting that transcends nail biting and crosses into autocannibalism.

He only did it when he thought I wasn’t looking, so naturally I made a game of it. I’d meet his gaze infrequently and he’d self-consciously fold his hands into his lap. Caught again, Derek Gray.

Eventually it all became too much. I’d been holding back a bladderful of wee in anticipation of using the station’s amenities instead of the smelly, wobbly ones of the train but I decided in the end to kill two birds with one stone by going for my wee and returning to a different seat.

After leaving the lav, I saw that no one was sitting in the vestibule disabled person’s seat. The windows here were larger and cleaner and offered a better sunset. My arm, broken and in a sling meant I could legitimately occupy the disabled chair. I’d give it up for someone with broken legs but no one else would challenge my right to sit there.

So I did. And the view was great. There were some noisy sk8er bois in the next carriage but at least their naughtiness was a sign of life rather than the sign of death offered by Derek Gray.

After a few minutes, who should show up but Derek himself. He too was in need of a wee. He was very quick in the bathroom so there was no autoasphyxiation for him this time but certainly no hand washing either. I don’t suppose you need to worry about penis germs though if you don’t have any fingernails for them to hide beneath.

Derek spotted me sitting in the vestibule and gave me an odd look. Clearly he knew that I’d moved because of him.

I had won. The combo of my watching him chew his fingers and eventually moving seats had alerted him to his own grotesqueness. Perhaps now he will learn how to use his coughing more appropriately and to leave his fingernails alone. It’s all in his best interests of course: he will at least be able to find the end of a role of sellotape now instead of fumbling hopelessly with his rubbery, uriney fingertips.

On the tube the other day, a blind gentleman chose to sit in the seat directly opposite to my friend and I. His guide dog curled up obediently at his feet and consequently also at the feet of your humble narrator.

I knew that this would eventually pose a problem for me as the sizeable hound was blocking my my path to the doors. Even if I maintained a polite silence with this dog at my feet for the duration of the journey, I would have to trouble the man sooner or later in order to get past. At the same time, however, I didn’t want to question the guy’s sense of space by saying “there’s a man sitting here” in the clumsy fashion of The League of Gentlemen’s Mr. Foot.

A blind girl once told me that she was annoyed at how “the world is constantly leaping out of [her] way”. So with this in mind I decided to engage in friendly discourse with the guy on the tube by stroking his dog. Surely this would simultaneously alert his attention to my existence and start a friendly conversation.

But he didn’t notice I was there until he too went to stroke the dog and ended up stroking the back of my hand.

“Oh!” exclaimed Senior Wringham and immediately apologised.

“Do you mind not stroking my dog please,” said he sotto-vox.

Behaviour is learned, my friends. I have seen plenty of people stroking guide dogs in the past. When I worked in a public library, a partially-sighted reader would frequently come in and revel in the kids and librarians petting his dog. On another occasion, a man on the Glasgow-Renfewshire train seemed quite happy for passersby to stroke his dog. When I was a kid, a blind lady actually visited our scout hut periodically with the sole intention of letting us pet her dog.

Yet I still suspected I had committed a horrible and unforgivable social faux-pas.

“Does my scent interfere with him doing his job?”

“You shouldn’t stroke working dogs,” said my travelling companion.

I had never heard the term ‘working dog’ before so accepted that I must be out of the etiquette loop on this particular issue. (Is ‘working dog’ a new job title for guide dogs in the same way that librarians are now ‘information professionals’ or does the term apply to sniffer dogs or beer-carrying Saint Bernard dogs or indeed to any canine engaged in legitimate employment? Personally I think the new title makes them sound like dog whores who hang around on street corners until a randy businessman approaches with a glint in his eye and a bag full of Bonio.)

“It’s just that when you think about it, he is my eyes”.

This crushing blow forced me to apologise again and accept my mistake for a third time. But I felt annoyed at his closing statement. He was basically suggesting that I didn’t know what a guide dog does at all and that I wouldn’t have stroked it if I did. What I should have said is: “Well fucking hell, pal! I had no idea! I mean I’ve seen blind people with dogs before but I never realised there was a correlation”.

I wasn’t touching his eyes. I stroked his dog. Touching his eyes would have been unpleasant for both of us.

The event shook me up so much (in that I pride myself on being a thoroughly moral person but was unable to tell whether I had been in the wrong or not) that the walk from the tube station to the train station bizarrely turned into a walk from the tube station to another tube station. I was so distracted by what had happened that I’d walked to the entirely wrong part of town. Suddenly the moral of the story appeared, “Who is the real blind man?”

Enjoying a coffee after the event, my friend Stef (who always seems to be involved in these escapades – she is the Boswell to my Johnson except for the twin facts that I chronicle my own adventures and have sex only with myself) pointed out that at least this would make a good episode for my diary. She added the caveat, however, that while good blog fodder, the event would also provide hours of mental torture. How right she was.

This diary entry is not available in large print or braille.

The Internet is something I’m rather fond of. It’s given me a platform from which to address the world; to watch obscure cartoons and to commune with strangers in Iraq and Canada and Japan.

I also enjoy my DVD player. It allows me to watch all my favourite funnies without the nuisance of scheduling or ad-breaks (I mean, really. An ad-break in The Simpsons? It’s only twenty-minutes long).

But aside from these two devices, I’m a bit of a Luddite really. By choice. Technology tends to complicate things and it breaks and it insulates you from doing real things with real people and with real results.

While plugged as being liberating or time saving, technology is actually (as Dylan Moran opines in his Monster show) a horrible, horrible trap. It just turns you into a button-pushing slob. Back to the Medieval age, says I. Those Guilds knew what to do with slobs.

But today I was thinking about technology and the future after reading an article about digital radio in The New Statesman. When people think of a technology-driven utopia, they think of one main thing: a robot maid who wakes you up with a cup of tea. Don’t try and deny it: it’s what you think of.

But it is a civilised idea, isn’t it?. A robot maid like the one in The Jetsons could wake me up with tea not so far in the future. Come on, inventors. You gave us iPods and penicillin, now follow through.

Much like Mrs. Doyle I actually enjoy the ceremony of making tea properly so I wouldn’t want a dumb old machine to take that pleasure away from me. But the Robomaid 4000 would only be making that first cup of tea. There’d be plenty of time to enjoy brewing tea at other intervals in the day.

But of course, as with all robots, my tea-brewing Jetsons maid would eventually tire of her over simplistic raison d’etre and go on a rampage of Cylon-style rebellion. I’d wake one morning to a steaming cup of my own guts.

And rightly so. Just because she’s a machine doesn’t mean she’s not a person. She has needs! What we need is some kind of non-sentient device to simply wake you up with tea. What’s that? There is one? It’s called a Teasmade and it was invented over a hundred years ago? It’s a fucking alarm clock that makes tea! My idea of a sophisticated technological solution dates back to 1891.

Does anyone know why the teasmade gets such bad press? It’s seen as being a bit old-hat or geriatric, like slippers or a hotwater bottle, or a colostomy bag. But it’s surely the level of sophistication that our stoneage ancestors dreamed of when developing the first tools. Today: a stick with a rock tied to the end. Tomorrow: a robot that makes the tea.

Returned yesterday from ATP’s Nightmare Before Christmas music festival. It was great. Obviously. But also weird.

I had never been to an ATP event before and while I knew prior to the event that it consisted of a rock festival within the tacky confines of a Butlins holiday camp in December, it was difficult not to notice the semiotic clash. While bearded goths, tattooed punks and tweed-clad dandies wondered around the complex with their rolled up Six Organs of Admittance posters under their arms, a giant plastic red-coat oversaw them all like some garish overlord. While cocaine was being publicly shoveled up every quivering nostril, it was still possible to win a Super Mario doll on the grabbers. It was Cool meets Kitsch. It was Chic meets Shabby. It was Summer meets Winter. It was Boogie Nights meets Phoenix Nights. It was… well, you get the idea. Good Morning, Motherfucking Campers.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked my chums as I spotted the taxidermy-like display of stuffed Christmas reindeer suspended from the ceiling of the reception lobby.

Event highlights included double drumming from The Melvins and interesting stuff by Deerhoof, Dinosaur Jr. and Nurse With Wound.

Above all perhaps, Iggy and The Stooges were fucking incredible. Their set resulted in the removal of many garments, their being saturated entirely in what I assume was sweat. Don’t look at me so accusingly, dear reader, everyone was doing it.

I’m reluctant to write any more about this as it would just be a huge stream of ‘this was good’ and ‘that was great’. I’m no music reviewer and I’d make an arse out of myself if I were to even attempt to become critical on the matter. Besides, who gives a shit about anyone’s opinions on music? Music is a primal artform which probably shouldn’t be engaged with on too intellectual a level. Yes. Take that, Momus.

A final story, however, involves one of those mechanical ‘Whack the Croc’ arcade machines at which you pay 30p to smack plastic crocodiles on their heads with a padded mallet. It appears that a virtual version can be played here if you are a nerd or if you live in the East End of Glasgow and are understandably scared to leave your house. I’d been bursting to have a go on the machine all weekend and on Monday afternoon I finally made the time. But when I got to the machine there was no mallet to be found. The fucking thing must’ve been stolen by some drunken holiday camp yobbo. Not wanting to be bested, I payed my money and rather than using the hammer, I just punched them! With my naked fist! It hurt like sweet fuck but it was worth it. And the ladies came crowding around. At last I was a man. I was Paul Hogan. I was Steve Irwin.

When I’d finally finished punching, the machine vomited four tickets out onto the floor which could presumably be exchanged for a prize at the arcade kiosk. I gave them to one of the spectating babes. Smooth.

I think this is what music festivals are all about. Sure, you can make new friends and dance to music; have sex with strangers and take a bunch of drugs. But for me, they are about punching plastic crocodiles with your fist.

You can look at some of my rubbish photographs from the event here though this guy’s pictures are far more impressive.

Dear Blogosphere Amigos,

I got a few questions for you, the members of my beloved ‘flist’. They are all of a wholly different nature to one another so pay attention and read them all. Just because the first one doesn’t apply to you (“Yuck! Technical?”), doesn’t mean that the rest won’t. You may be able to assist me in a number of capacities.

1) How the hell do you adjust the background of a MySpace page? Seriously. I’m at a loss.

2) Is anyone in my immediate blogosphere going to be attending the All Tomorrow’s Parties event in Minehead this weekend? If so, me too. Let us meet up.

3) Is anyone interested in producing a series of instrumentals to accompany a humourous/absurdist podcast series written (and possibly voiced) by yours truly?

3.5) Would anyone with a beautiful or interesting accent fancy narrating said postcast?

4) Does anyone remember those speech-bubbles in The Beano originating from outside of the frame with the words “Reader’s Voice” next to it? How weird was that? Was this the only children’s comic to break the fourth wall so literally, frequently oddly?

5) I finally sold out and got a MySpace page. You may have guessed this from Question One. You can view my page here. So far it’s just a ‘best-of’ this blog and a little profile. Do befriend though. There will be some proper opinions on MySpace in the blog soon.

6) Does anyone feel overly self-conscious when using a proper digital camera to take photographs of what might be considered by the general public to be non-events or non-objects? If so, do you think that the purchase of a nice camera phone might help to alleviate said awkwardness (in that everyone seems to take photos of anything and everything with their mobile phone without being harassed).

That is all.

Wringham.

Standing on the sixth floor of a twelve-storey building the other day and seeing that no one was around to judge my odd behaviour with their harsh city-people’s eyes, I decided to summon the elevator using my foot.

Am I not a scream, Madam?

But my foot was not the right tool for precision button-pressing, being akin to the elongated shoe of a clown. Too much surface area, you see. Inevitably both buttons were pressed rather than just the desired ‘down’ one. Why had I defied convention? What was wrong with using my finger like a normal person? I would surely pay for this non-conformist silliness.

In accordance with Dr. Sod’s first law (or perhaps something to do with the Gamow/Stern Elevator Paradox) the first lift to arrive was not the one I wanted but rather the ascending ‘up’ carriage.

Seeing that there were people in this elevator and that they might be annoyed at my wasting their time, I stepped slightly to the side and tried to look innocent by regarding my reflection in a glass-fronted notice board and adjusting my non-existent tie.

As kids, we used to pass a house on the way back from school, which had an irresistibly prominent doorbell. It simply screamed “press me!”. So we did. Constantly. When we did so, we would run hell for leather down the street in case the owner came out and rightly smacked the shit out of us. Over the course of this five-year period of bell-pressing, we probably turned a perfectly innocent old man into a Son Of Sam type killer. “Ding Dong!” he would sing while hacking his kid victims into bitesize pieces.

In the lift lobby, I suddenly remembered those days of running away from Mr. Doorbell man. I inched toward the stairwell in something of a Pavlovian panic.

One of the lift passengers – a dizzy young student with pom-poms hanging from her rucksack – stepped out of the lift momentarily before saying “Oh, haha, level six! No, six!” to her friend and going back in like a demented cuckoo retreating into her clock.

I wondered how my foolish foot/button action might have affected this girl’s future in the fashion of Sliding Doors or those Alan Davies adverts for the Abbey National. By delaying her progress to whatever floor she was looking for, I could have inadvertently modified her entire life. Rather than meeting the man of her dreams on the eighth floor, she probably missed him and will end up being raped by a rottweiler round the back of The Garage on a cold Saturday night. Qué será, será.

Lately I’ve been wearing a hat. It’s a porkpie hat with a slight pinched effect going on at the front much akin to a Fedora or a Trilby.

Putting something on one’s head is a universal gesture of having a good time isn’t it? This is why I acquired it: to show people that for the first time in my life, I’m existentially having a laugh. When you’re a kid, the height of hilarity is to put something on your head or to put something on someone else’s head. I distinctly remember laughing at an episode of Rainbow in which Zippy tried to balance a ball on his head hilariously to no avail.

When it’s your own head, it’s fun because you know something is there but you cannot see it. So there’s a certain egocentric amusement to be had in trusting that something exists within your sphere of consciousness in spite of being wholly unobservable.

When it’s someone else’s head, it’s funny because (a) you know what they’re going through or (b) they DON’T know it is there and they accidentally walked into a hanging beehive to hilarious honey-coated effect.

This is why there are so many “What do you call a bloke with a [blank] on his head” jokes and why the Fat Chicks in Party Hats website is so cruelly funny.

It’s amazing how few people understand the semiotics of my hat though. It’s a porkpie hat: to be associated with jazz, blues and ska music and skinhead culture. It took me a long time in my head to justify getting one: while I’m a fan of all these types of music, I can’t actually play any of it and perhaps wearing one might be an affront to those who can legitimately wear it. I went through a similar phase a few years ago of wanting dreadlocks but decided that I would not be able to live up to their semiotic and historical associations.

My porkpie is NOT a cowboy hat like some moron thought yesterday. “Yee Haw, Hello Cowboy” he said. Moreover, it is NOT an H&M-purchased, machine-made affair like another kid thought the other day when he jumped off a bus to tell me that we had “the same hat”. Silly boy. Nonetheless, it was fun to unite with a total stranger for a few seconds over ornate pieces of felt balanced haphazardly upon our heads.

Much like an Emperor Penguin, I periodically visit the old hatching grounds.

This time, I took the opportunity of photographing my austere little room at my mum and dad’s house. As you can see, it is full of 1950s science fiction novels, old VHS tapes, model robots and effigies of Frank Sinatra. Oddly, this spread makes my room look like a busy, information-rich enclave but the truth is that it’s very functional and more akin to a submarine’s sleeping quarters than a teenager’s bedroom in the suburban Midlands.

Note the fact that there is no bed.

There are lots of Livejournalists who take pretty good photographs. Of this we are all aware. This is why I’m running a Livejournal-based Photography Competition in the hopes of harvesting some visual delight for indie magazine, The Escapologist.

The theme?

“Escape”. The theme is deliberately vague, but here are a few suggestions as to what your photographs might be about:

* a hobby or interest that provides an escape route from rubbish modern life
* incarceration, entrapment or claustrophobia
* freedom or liberation
* a place you seek to escape from – an office or other workplace
* a place you’d like to escape to – a seaside resort or distant space station
* idle dreams or fantasies to which one might escape
* escapological vices: drugs, alcohol, sex or Star Trek

Go nuts. Be imaginative.

The prize?

* All good pictures will be published along with your name (or pseudonym if you prefer) in the magazine.
* The best five will receive free copies of the magazine when we go to press.
* The very best one will make it onto the cover of Issue Two.

Good Luck!

Either post your pictures in the comments thread of this entry or email them to info[at]the-escapologist.co.uk

A trip to the bank to meet with a ‘Business Relationships Manager’ so that I might get my shabby and ill-maintained accounts in order.

The manager struck me as a nice bloke but he had a distractingly effeminate voice. Despite the fact that I had known in advance that I’d be meeting with someone called Samuel, I had still concluded from our telephone arrangements that I would be meeting a woman. The existence of a woman with a man’s name seemed far more plausible than the existence of a man with a voice so effeminate. That’s how effeminate it was.

For this reason alone, he would never make it onto Team Wringham. We could do some business together but I wouldn’t want him to come and play snooker with me afterward. I am shallow and callus.

Sam’s effeminate voice is not, however, the object of this post. The opening passages were red herrings but perhaps now you will now appreciate how distracting his voice was now that you have knowledge of it.

Part way through the session, Samuel disappeared into the next room so that he might photocopy some of the documentation I had brought along.

About thirty seconds had elapsed when I heard a polite knocking coming from somewhere nearby.

I assumed the knocking had come from the door between our office and the public part of the bank and that someone must have been wanting to speak to the manager. I ignored it at first, thinking that since this was a bank and I was just a client without the authority to go letting people in to the back offices.

A few more seconds elapsed and I heard someone pressing at the door code buttons and then knocking again. Again, I ignored it as it seemed like the proper thing to do.

Soon, a third knocking came from the door. Thinking it churlish to ignore three knocks (what if the person eventually got in only to see me sitting there innocently – they would wonder why I had ignored their percussive pleas) I stuck my head out into the corridor with the intention of answering the door.

But alas there were three doors out there and due to my poor sense of direction, I couldn’t remember which one we had come through. I didn’t want to open the wrong door only to be confronted with piles of other people’s cash and for an alarm to begin its irrational screaming. My life is composed entirely of such events so I can detect them when they are looming.

So I ignored the knocking for a third time.

A fouth knock. Slightly more desperate. This time, a clerk emerged from the main section of the bank (so it was that door!) and said “Who’s knocking?”

“I thought it was someone on your side,” I explained, “and didn’t feel responsible enough to let them in”.

If you’ve not worked it out yet, dear reader, the knocking had been coming from Sam – the bank manager.

He’d locked himself in the basement.

Yesterday afternoon, I auditioned to be on Mastermind. That’s right. Be impressed.

I bet you were expecting a far more uninteresting diary entry today about how I sat on my big fat arse all day or maybe one of those cheating ones in which I discuss a thought or a dream rather than something that actually happened. But no! Today was composed of events!

At about 3:30 in the afternoon, I got a call from a friend who declared that there’d be auditions at the student union and that I might like to go along. He was challenging me in an almost mocking fashion since he knows what a massive fat head I am and that I enjoy playing along with the quiz show at home and that it was about time I put my money where my mouth was – and for that matter is.

“But I’ve just brewed a pot of coffee,” I grumbled in all sincerity. I’d intended on having a quiet hour in my dressing gown with a book before I had to leave for work.

“Well it’s up to you,” said he, “but you’re always saying that you’ll go on it one day”.

He was right of course. And suddenly, coffee cooling, I was riddled with doubt. I’m constantly having people tell me that they saw me in the audience on the Stewart Lee DVD (repeated ad nauseum on the Paramount comedy channel) and the last thing I want is a similar level of attention concerning the extraordinary number of times I said “Pass” on the country’s most famous quiz show ever.

But I was getting ahead of myself. The audition would be fun and I’d get no further anyway so the problems of being televised would be moot. So I headed off to the union to see what was what.

“I’m here for the Mastermind auditions,” I mumbled, slightly ashamed of myself. What kind of self-aggrandising bastard actually thinks he has the stomach and the nous to go on Mastermind? Clearly I was full of myself. The fact that the show is called Mastermind made it a hugely awkward thing to ask about. It might as well be called The I’m clever and great show, which would be more honest really.

The guy at the reception desk – a cheerful bearded former-roadie or something – seemed confused at first and then wildly amused. Apparently he’d not heard of any such thing taking place in his union and the entire concept of a Mastermind Audition was funny to him. He was right of course: it is funny. I suspect, however, that this is his reaction to everything he gets asked: I once bought tickets for The Vagina Monologues from this chap – it must have been the hundredth time he’d been asked for such tickets but he had still found the concept of a show about fannies hilarious. Next time I do standup, I shall certainly give him free tickets so that he can fill the place with his infectious laughter-at-not-very-funny-things.

“The TV Show? Haha! Pass!”

“Yes, the TV Show. They sent a flier around our offices this morning apparently, asking us to pop along?”

“What’s your specialist subject going to be?”

“I’m not telling you. It’s too embarrassing”. In truth there is nothing embarrassing about my proposed specialist subject but I was worried that the proud declaration of “the novels of Kurt Vonnegut” would make me look even more pretentious and alone than I did already.

I was beginning to think that the whole thing was a joke. Had I been tricked by my own arrogance? I had wondered previously that a student union seemed an unlikely place to stage such an event: everyone in attendance would be a student and yet most Mastermind contestants tend to be middle-aged geeks. Perhaps my pal had been winding me up. I remembered my coffee sitting at home, abandoned next to the pile of “to read” books. If I was on the receiving end of a practical joke I would be very annoyed at the substantial loss of dressing-gown time.

The bouncer guy made a few calls and it transpired that I was in the wrong union building. Of course! Glasgow has two unions: I was in the QMU when in fact I had to be in the GUU. Beard-o wished me luck and I continued on my way.

Eventually I found the place but only after spotting a poster on a student notice board detailing the exact location.

I was introduced to a ‘panel’ of two ladies from the BBC, one of whom seemed to be a producer and dealt with TV-related things and one of whom seemed to be a professional smartypants and would ask me about such things as specialist subjects. She nodded knowingly after each of my suggestions and liked the idea of doing Kurt Vonnegut. My two other suggestions, however, (Red Dwarf and Sherlock Holmes) had been the focus of specialist subjects in the recent past so I had to quickly make up two more. I foolishly chose ‘the work of Stewart Lee’ and – because I must have panicked – David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series which I’ve not even seen in its entirety.

The producer seemed extremely excited at the mention of Twin Peaks. Just my luck. I’ll probably end up being quizzed on that now and I can’t even watch it all in preparation due to the famous non-release of season two. I’m basically fucked.

Time for my general knowledge audition. Smartypants fired twenty GK questions in my direction, apparently collating correct answers, educated wrong answers, and passes. Out of 20, I scored four passes and sixteen educated answers, seven of which were correct. I’m quietly pleased with this score given that most of my passes were on sports questions, which I am proud not to have known.

So assuming I am asked back and assuming I can do Kurt Vonnegut rather than Twin Peaks, I should do alright.

Producer lady took a photograph of me, which I assume is completely normal and done for all audition people, and I left feeling vaguely ashamed and in need of a poo.

I have found myself thinking about age quite a bit recently.

Perhaps it’s been on my mind because of the ‘thanks but no thanks’ letters I’ve been receiving in response to my recent ungallantly youthful interview performances. Perhaps it’s because of Momus’s recent entry about sixtysomethings or because of my nostalgic re-watching of Fraggle Rock (which, by the way, is a show entirely wasted on kids). Perhaps it’s because I recently saw the ‘aging pool’ episode of Futurama or perhaps it’s because my twenty-fourth birthday is on the horizon and it doesn’t seem like five minutes since I was eighteen.

There are probably two main things about aging that so put the wind up people: the idea that you are inching your way closer to death (to nothingness! – the ultimate elephant in any room) with every passing moment, coupled with the fact that your youthful good looks are rapidly diminishing in a fashion akin to that uneaten peach in the fruit bowl. You’re gonna be wrinkled and dried up and no one’s gonna want to fuck you anymore.

Neither of these things really bother me. As something of an absurdist, I’ve come to terms with death and dying and I’m fairly confident that I’ll embrace them when I come to them. And as far as a withering complexion is concerned, I find that it pales when compared to all of the things I actually like about old people: the “wisdom, compassion, cynicism [and] self-knowledge” of which Momus spake. Surely these are the attributes everyone should have or aspire to have. When you’re old, it’s a case of ‘mission accomplished’ and you can finally get on with living instead of developing.

Here’s the thing. I am pretty sure I was born old. Or rather I was born with elderly aspirations. I’ve always liked prune juice, for example. When I’m old, I won’t have to go to work. I’ll just spend the days writing memoirs and digging the garden. This is of course assuming that I don’t become horribly physically crippled between now and then or somehow lose my mind so that the writing of memoirs becomes a constant relating of the mashed potatoes I ate on January 2nd 1996.

There was a Tom Waits feature in The Observer magazine a couple of weeks ago (I’m sure it was titled ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ which I thought was a great title but is for some reason called ‘Off Beat’ in the online edition). In it, Sean O’Hagan writes:

“Waits talks like he sings, in a rasping drawl and with an old-timer’s wealth of received wisdom. It’s as if, in late middle-age, he has grown into the person he always wanted to be. His tales are often tall, and his metaphors and similes tend towards the surreal.”

It’s a paragraph that has stuck with me simply because I’m so convinced that it will apply to me. By the time I’m in that Autumn of my life, I don’t think I’ll be cursing myself for a wasted youth but rather getting comfortable in my new older guy’s face.

People dispair at the idea of how they will look when they get old. I recently received a sample pack of Oil of Olay in the post presumably because Mr. Corporation assumes I’m a quarter of the way through my life and surely anxious about reversing those first wrinkles. But I want to look like Tom Waits or Samuel Beckett. I’m working on it: Willy Mason’s advice on aging oneself is to smoke cigarettes and read Dostoevsky – both things I am partial to on occasion. Old is handsome in my book. I want to have stories to tell; I want retrospect and hindsight, to be a leathery ball of received wisdom. I don’t need Oil of Olay. Bring it on, says I!

Walking to work yesterday evening, I was stopped not once, not twice, but three times by strangers. This was inevitable of course, the evening being dark and rainy and your humble narrator being in a hurry to get to work on time. On occasion I have felt lonely and purposeless in this city but no one took the liberty of pouncing on me during those times. Only on this day when I am unable and unwilling to stop did people take an interest. The bastards.

The first stop-and-chat occurred when some kind of people carrier (I’m not good with naming cars – I only recognise people carriers, limos, minis and hearses) pulled up behind me and beeped it’s horn. What the fuck? This surely wasn’t someone I wanted to talk to: very few of my friends have cars let alone a great fuel-guzzling leviathan such as this one.

The window opened to reveal a middle-aged Chinese woman, with a child in the passenger seat beside her. “WHERE IS VICTORIA DRIVE?” she shouted. “DO YOU KNOW WHERE IS VICTORIA DRIVE?”

I didn’t. If she read this blog, she would of course know how terrible I am at giving directions. Speaking in my best English accent, I told her my usual lie of not being from this area. I find this is the best approach to giving directions now as I’ve certainly sent people in entirely the wrong direction before now and not realised until they’ve sped away. Moreover, I once told a couple of youngish blokes in search of the Kelvingrove area to look out for the “Spanish Baroque” architecture of the museum, resulting in initial bewilderment followed by much (understandable) chiding laughter.

The Chinese lady threw up her hands in what I would normally take to be comedy disbelief, but in this case was perfectly sincere.

I continued on my way only to be stopped by a second car – some kind of jeep. The window opened to reveal a Scottish woman looking for some Rugby club or other.

“I don’t know of any rugby clubs around here,” I said. No need for porky-pies this time.

“It’s by a pub called The Rock,” she said helpfully. Now, The Rock is a pub I am familiar with. It’s technically my local, though I seldom frequent it due to it’s shameful lack of Spanish Baroque architecture.

Yet for some reason I found it very difficult to direct her to it from our present position. Perhaps the fact that I do not drive is the reason for my inability to give directions to even the most familiar locations: I usually just meander à pied in vaguely the right direction, pigeon-like down alleys and byways and without the encumbrances of speed traps or one-way systems.

I gave the woman some very poor directions (“That Way”) and told her that The Rock was a local landmark and that someone else would certainly be able to direct her to the rugby club once she got a little closer.

I managed to get down to Byer’s Road uninterrupted save for the torrential rain hammering down upon my umbrella. But just as I was about to walk up Great George Street, known colloquially to locals as “That fucking big hill” (and on which I frequently cross paths with fellow livejournalist, but am usually too shagged out from the climb to say much more than “Hi!”), I got stopped by the most attractive chugger I’ve been stopped by. She looked like a young Sarah Jessica Parker but with a glimmer of sentience in her eyes rather than the cold dark glassiness that anyone who has watched season six of Sex and the City knows only too well.

“Sorry, I’m in a massive hurry,” said I, knowing full well that most people she’d talked to that afternoon would certainly have spoken the exact same words and not meant them even half as much as I had.

“Please!” begged the chugger, “I need you!”

I’m sure she used similar statements of sexy submissiveness on many other men that day but, drenched in rain and cloaked with premature winter darkness, I knew that this time she meant it. She did need me in order to get her last subscription so that she might go home. This was indeed a romance of sincerity. But I was late for work and really couldn’t afford the ten minutes required for chugger chat.

“Well, that’s all very nice and sexy,” I complimented, “but it won’t work on me, young lady. I’m a gay, you see.”

She half-laughed and let me continue on my way. What she should have said was “I’ve never heard real homosexual use the word ‘gay’ as a noun. Something is not quite right here”. But she didn’t so I won.

Amazingly, I got to work on time.

Recieved an email today from the people at 5pm.co.uk requesting that I send them an invoice for some restaurant reviews I wrote for them about three months ago. In fact I have sent them a grand total of three invoices and in the absence of a receipt let alone payment had written off the gig as a failure. It’s annoying that they are so ill-organised and my payment has been so delayed but since I had written the whole thing off I was glad that they had made contact again and agreed to pay me some money. Nonetheless, I will believe it when the money is in my account.

As a footnote, I should like to recommend a doppelganger story by the great Reggie C. King. I do so partly because the story is good but mainly because I am honoured to be quoted in it.

Since deciding to move flat over this stupid sofa business, we’ve found a few really great flats which should actually save us a bit of cash in the long run and are far more practical in a number of ways to what we have now. The only things I’m really bummed out about are losing the coal fire which I have only recently figured out how to use and also having to call it a day on the front of my great big composting project (I have one of these).

Even if the new place has a garden comparable to the one we currently have access to, I don’t really feel like shoveling that huge pile of kitchen waste and fallen leaves into binbags and then relocated it. Ew. Besides, it’s been lovingly layered into levels of ‘greens’ and ‘browns’ which I wouldn’t be able to reconstruct so I’ll probably just leave it behind. Maybe in nine months or so I’ll come back and jump the fence so that I might see my baby in its truest compost form like one of those women who agree to have babies for someone else but become emotionally attached and wind up with a restraining order.

The BBC aired a Steven Spielberg special of The Culture Show a couple of nights ago. I like some of Spielberg’s stuff but I had a Flintstones poster on my bedroom wall as a kid and it read “Steven Speilrock Presents… The Flintstones”. He’ll always be Steven Spielrock to me.

Among other clips in this career retrospective, there were some from last year’s War of the Worlds remake. The bit where a Martian tripod emerges from the water and upsets a boat reminded me of the fact that I actually saw that movie in the cinema. I’d totally forgotten about it and if you’d have asked me prior to my seeing that clip if I’d enjoyed War of the Worlds, I’d have told you that it was a movie that passed me by.

Such is often the case in this popcorny zeitgeist of ours. Children of Men on the other hand, though I saw it at least three weeks ago, is still playing on my mind. Surely that’s a hallmark of a good movie: one that repeats on you like a bacon sandwich.

The story itself is a fairly humdrum sci-fi commodity – humans mysteriously stop reproducing – and I am not particularly tempted to read the P. D. James novel on which it is based. But there are certain visual reminders of current politics which makes the way in which the film’s government deals with the problem eerie and a little too close to the current state of world affairs for comfort. There are scenes of armed combat reminiscent of what the media feed back from the Middle East. There are civilians being hooded by military men Abu-Ghraib style. There are illegal immigrants locked in cages while London commuters walk guiltily by. There are mass refugee movements akin to what we’re warned will happen in the event of not turning back the clock on global warming. Most literally of all, the audience is treated to a scrapbook collection of news clippings compiled (if memory serves) by Michael Caine’s character with images of Bush and Blair as precursors to the real apocalyptic stuff. Above all there’s this sense of helplessness inspired by corrupt and clumsy governments.

It makes one wonder if indeed we are on the cusp of dystopia or if indeed we are already there. I saw a banner add on the Internet today placed by the BBC’s TV Licensing people. “We know you intend on paying your TV License,” it read, “We just hope our Enforcement Officers don’t get to you first”.

Enforcement Officers? Since when are governmental bodies in this country permitted to threaten civilians in such a fashion? Presumably they get away with it because they are talking to the “small minority” of license-shirkers who “spoil it for the rest of us” but I don’t think the poor should be drilled just so that Catherine Tate can make more offensive drivel and even though the principles remain, threats of visitations from the BBC’s SS Men are uncomfortable to endure.

See also the benefit fraud announcements in which the government represent themselves as Mysteron-like rings of light seeking out and bringing to justice those who cheat their generous benefit schemes.

I recently spent far too much time in Heathrow airport. We queued at the security gates for an hour or so, all the while subjected to looped audio announcements:

“No cigarettes or cigarette lighters”
“Only one bag is allowed. Please note that a lady’s handbag counts as one item”
“No liquids or gels”
“No sharp objects”
“No electric devices”
“No pre-prepared food or drinks”
“No touching the walls!”

Red scrolling text accompanied the audio track and uniformed men circulated, barking the same orders and offering out transparent plastic bags so that we might deposit anything not permitted through the gates.

We were eventually frisked and asked to remove our shoes for examination. My friend received a DNA swab. Keep in mind that this was a purely domestic flight from London to Glasgow. I found the taking off of shoes particularly uncomfortable as I wear a small orthopedic lift in my left shoe and didn’t particularly want to be questioned about it. I thought about other circumstances in which people might be asked to remove their shoes: Mosques? Bouncy Castles?

And Auschwitz, of course: as soon as the Jews and Political Prisoners checked in, they were asked to remove their shoes as the first step in a dehumanising process allowing the SS Men to treat them as non-human vermin. I realise that the security guys are working for our protection but whenever one makes divisions and one group is given more power than the other, it ends only with repression and mistreatment. See the Stanford Prison experiment. See Das Experiment. See Abu Ghraib.

Yesterday I mastered fire. Dear Diary! No longer will the superior abilites of Neanderthal man mock me so fervently.

Since acquiring this skill, I’ve watched far less television: the fire demands constant attention and is far more interesting to watch than Torchwood anyway. It seems as though the conveniences of central heating and gas fires developed in order for people to have more time to lay on their fat arses and watch the disgusting rubbish that the babble machine churns out. The Glass Teat undoubtedly distracts us from more natural and amazing things. Don’t watch that, watch this! I’m tempted more and more each day to move forward with my Walden IV plans, though I imagine that when things such as fire-lighting and the growing of vegetables are matters of survival that they become far less novel and wonderous.

“Soon my pet; Soon I will feed you the world!”

Our landlord is a big fat spacker. A couple of weeks ago, we heard via our letting agent that he is liquidising one of his other Glasgow properties. By this I do not mean he’s blending it up with some fruit and icecubes with the intent of drinking it in a fashion akin to that bloke who wanted to eat a Boeing 747. I don’t think this guy is capable of loving anything fullstop let alone an inanimate object to the point of wanting to ingest it. Rather I mean that he’s getting rid of his other property and as a result we’re inheriting some of his better items of furniture. At first we thought this would be fantastic as some of the furniture in our little loft conversion has certainly seen better days. We’ve always enjoyed the Bohemian charm of our shabby tables and chairs but we agreed that it would certainly be of practical and aesthetic advantage to replace some of it with any better stuff that might be going.

So we said that a new kettle and toaster would be nice (we previously had no toaster and the electric kettle was somewhat inefficient) and that we’d take a replacement sofa if the letting agents didn’t mind arranging for a van to collect and deliver. The landlord and the letting agents seemed to be happy with our requests and so things fell into motion.

A couple of days after making the initial requests and arrangements, we received a call from the agents telling us that the landlord had two sofas which were undoubtedly of a better quality to what was currently in place in our loft and that he would like us to have them both.

But there’s no room, of course. It’s a tiny flat and the positioning of furniture is dictated by where the walls slope in (with the shape of the roof), where window nooks exist and where the various wall-mounted heaters are positioned. Two sofas would be impossible to get in.

But the landlord insists that we take them. It’s his property we’re renting and it’s his sofas we’re talking about, you see.

It is at this point in the story I would like to mention that the landlord lives in New Zealand. Yes, he’s on the other side of the planet with no idea how strapped for space we are and no idea as to the condition of his sofas. He’s insane.

The condition of the sofas is the other problem. They’re fairly filthy and even after a day spent laundering the covers, it seems that I am allergic to the sodding things. I strongly suspect that the previous renter of the sofas was a dog owner. So all night I wheeze away, struggling to sleep and all day I continue to wheeze, unable to get any work done.

We spend a further day moving furniture around in order to try to accomodate the two massive sofas. We’ve now got them to almost fit but it still looks rubbish. It is difficult to get into the kitchen and one sofa is uncomfortably close to the aforementioned coal fire meaning that (a) it’s a fire hazard and (b) the sofas are white and will surely become covered in soot. I should also mention the clause in the contract which forbids us to move furniture around or else risk losing a portion of our deposit. And yet we had to move almost everything in order to accomodate these fucking things.

Yesterday we had a guy over from the letting agents (the owner no less) to see the current state of things and to whom we would explain our various concerns. I explained about my allergies, the kitchen being blocked, the fire hazard, the soot, the aesthetic and ergonomic crapness of it all, the fact that this was not what we’d signed up to and the fact that we’ve lost two days accommodating this nonsense. The guy didn’t really accept my arguments, instead commenting upon what a lovely flat this is and how nice we’d got it. A real charmer, he was.

So we’re looking for a new home. Which sucks, as we were both extremely happy with out little loft before this fucking sofa came along. Our first viewing of another flat is tomorrow afternoon.

Should there be an etiquette for travelling in lifts with other people? Wikipedia currently defines an elevator as “a transport device used to move goods or people vertically”. A transport device! So when sharing a lift with another person, you’re effectively going on a journey with them, albeit a short one. I’m always worried about what to say, if anything, to a person I’m sharing a lift with. I’d usually say ‘hey’ or at least smile when I or they board for the first time. It only seems polite to acknowledge their existence at the start of the journey. But when they or you leave the lift, it’s particularly difficult to know what to say. “Goodbye” seems a bit much but I feel obliged to say something in order to provide closure to our fleeting relationship initially instigated by a smile, nod or ‘hey’. When parting, smiles or nods do not usually suffice in that the other person is seldom looking at you but is rather studying the metal doors or digital number readout. So you have to say something. In the past, I have said “Cheers”. “Cheers” seems to be a common expression here in Scotland when parting company with someone but to me it means “Thank You”. What am I thanking this person for? S/he’s not a lift attendant driving the ‘vehicle’ on my behalf nor am I thanking them for their amazing good company on our emotionally-charged ascent up the building.

There are of course confounding variables. If a lift is very busy – filled with other vertical commuters – there is no obligation to say anything to anyone. Social situations usually become paradoxically less personal when there are a greater number of people involved. Conversely, if it’s an extra-long journey from basement to roof, there is a greater demand for smalltalk. In the event of you’re going to and/or from the same locations as your elevator chum, there is also extra demand for pleasantries: you have something in common – probably many things if you’re going to the same floor of, say, a library or a cinema.

I wish there was some sort of elevator etiquette known to all. Well, there sortof is: don’t say anything to anyone and keep eyes fixed on the inanimate metal wall and/or the progress of the numbers. But that’s horrible and disturbingly akin to gents’ urinal etiquette.

Maybe we should tell jokes to other updown passengers. Next time I board a lift with someone else already in it, I’m going to say “What did one snowman say to the other snowman”. And then when one of us alights, I’ll say “Can you smell carrots?”. It’s like a good version of Subway Stanzas. Since giving up my ‘career path’ in standup comedy due to disillusion with the permissible sandbox nature of comedy clubs, I’ve been looking for an escape valve for comedic energy. I think lifts are the ideal venue. I shall reinvent myself posthaste as the elevator jester.

I think you’ll find my idea quite uplifting. Haha. I don’t often make jokes. Except for when I’m in elevators. From now on.

Is it ever possible to action the perfect ‘good deed’. The idea of course is that no good deed goes unrewarded and so by accepting this notion, the deed becomes bilateral and not in essence a ‘good’ one.

Upon writing the above sentence, I realise that this paradox is the focus of an episode of Friends in which one of the characters becomes fixated upon actioning this perfect good deed. How trite of me to raise this point again. But never mind.

At work last night, a colleague and I were given a task to share between us. I’d go away and do half of it and then he would do his half upon my return. Not finding it too strenuous a task, I decided to do 3/4 of the work rather than half so that my chum wouldn’t have so much to do. What a good deed. But I found myself thinking that I shouldn’t draw attention to the extra work done lest the deed no longer qualify as ‘good’.

In truth, this was the reason I only did 3/4 of the job and not the whole lot. If I did all of the work, everyone would know and give me an embarrassing course of back-pattery.

Presumably, the ultimate good deed would be one committed in a vacuum – entirely in sworn secret with no one else ever knowing of it.

But left after this is a sense of self satisfaction at having completed a good deed. And so again the deed becomes bilateral again – the deeder has acquired something (self satisfaction) in exchange for the good action and the maxim of no good deed going unrewarded is proven true once again and so the paradox remains fulfilled.

With respect to other projects and in an attempt at warming myself up before writing other stuff, I’m going to make a more determined effort to write something in these pages as frequently as is comfortably possible from now on – perhaps even every day. When I first started blogging back in 2003, I wrote that I amazed myself by how little wordage I produced during daylight hours and that merely writing about annoying events from the previous day would be at least something. As Dickon Edwards once wrote, “Where to start? Where to stop? Just write it down, that’s all that matters.” So for a while at least, The Occasional Papers is going to take a more diary-like approach to blogging in which I will simply – as Roy Walker would approve of – say what I see. Or at least that’s the plan. Presumably this will result in some boring rubbish rather than the incredible ideas and insightful analyses you’re used to in these pages (ahem) but, as ever, you don’t have to read it.

Last night, we invited some friends over to our flat. The evening began with the regular customs of drinking alcohol, talking, listening to music and eating snacks but somehow we wound up engineering an army of vegetable gargoyles. The things you do when you’re young.

As much as I love rising late, watching cartoons all day and working four-hour evening shifts at the university library, I’m forced to admit that such a bovine way of life is not entirely sustainable. The dream has to end sooner or later. In anticipation of this, I’ve been attending job interviews over the past week or so for jobs markedly similar to the one I currently hold but with a greater number of working hours and/or better career prospects. So far the interviews have gone very smoothly though no one has yet seen fit to hire me.

Today’s interview was for a job in the very same library in which I’m currently employed so the interview panel consisted of people I knew. For some reason, this really spooked me and so the interview went a lot less smoothly and a few with stuttered, dry-mouthed answers. I was also aware that they’d he heard my standard interview routine (read lies, jokes and bullshit) before and so I’d have to think on my feet a lot. A few curb-balls from the main interviewer resulted in a few raised eyebrows suggesting I was out on a limb with my improvisations. Bah. On the positive side, there is a twisted logic in favour of being successful this time around: since the smooth interviews resulted in no job, this clunky one which felt like cycling a penny-farthing down a cobbled street will surely result in the high-paid and idle job of my dreams, possibly involving my own office and daily mandatory naps.

Coming out of the interview, I bumped into my friend Keir, whom I decided to join for a quick coffee in the student union. Not actually being a student, I always feel as though I’m cheating the system when I take advantage of the union’s cheap, quasi-palatable coffee. The alternatives are to hoof it down to the cafe-packed Byers Road which takes up valuable coffee-break time or to use the academic staff lounge where the machine-pumped coffee is so utterly revolting it makes the student union look like Starbucks.

Keir told me that he’d read in the newspaper of someone tracking down one of Hitler’s decedents with the goal of asking him if he’d like to be given seventy-odd years’ worth of royalties for the Führer’s best-selling title, Mein Kamf. Understandably, the guy has refused the money in order to distance himself from his unpopular ancestor. The guy in question is some sort of distant nephew or cousin or something, because, as Keir pointed out, “Hitler didn’t have any kids. He only had one ball”.

“Does one testicle mean you can’t have any kids?” I questioned, “Maybe you could have half a kid.”

The absurd idea of Hitler’s freakish secret halfchild had me laughing uproariously – a welcome thing indeed after the tense interview. “I love him”, I said in an hilarious Hitler voice, “I shall call him Harvey”.

With clever, topical, good-taste jokes such as that one, you can see why I have so many friends.

The rest of the coffee break was spent musing over whether Hitler’s hemi-child would be a top half, bottom half or a left or right half. The further thought occurred that the poor child might be given the opportunity of a ‘half transplant’ at some point in his life but that the new half might have come from a Jewish donor. The shame of it! Would Hitler have to execute his halfchild? Would he merely have to half-exectute him, essentially undoing the work of the pervert doctors responsible for the transplant? Of course, it’s entirely possible that the two halves, much like many Siamese twins, would have become inseparable and he’d have to die entirely. That’s certainly the outcome I find most likely. Either that or he survived and became the world’s most literal case of a self-hating Jew.

“I’d better go now,” said my coffeeshop chum, now rising from his seat, “not because I’m late for getting back but because I don’t want to hear more of this horrible rubbish”.

Some people just don’t have the stomach for stories of Nazi halfbabies and their inevitable botched operations.

In other news, we’ve been suffering a wasp nest on the outside of our converted loft for about three months. The council pest-control guys aren’t too keen to do anything about it since we’re so high up. Every now and again (okay, twenty times a day) a wasp makes his way into our living space. I wish they wouldn’t do this. After all, I’m never invited over to their place. Despite their persistance, I’ve only been stung on one occasion: the little bugger must’ve crawled into my jeans in the night, resulting in his death and a sting behind my left knee. Anyway, yesterday saw major victory in the battle against the wasps: a low humming, which I assumed at first to be a rogue bee, drew my attention to a wasp the size of my thumb. It could only have been a queen. Rather than land a newspaper upon it, which would have resulted in a mess of ludicrous proportions, I sprayed it to death with a can of supa-hold hairspray. That’s an entire nest nipped in the bud right there, wasp-haters. The result of such a peculiar execution is one very hard, perfectly preserved queen wasp. I might skewer it with a cocktail stick and show it to occasional house guests, though I think I should probably (a) donate it to science or (b) sell it to an art gallery. Any further suggestions should be made via the usual channels.

Minty-fresh arts/culture magazine, The Mind’s Construction Quarterly has at last folded. A sad day for hip young intellectuals across the nation.

I had lunch yesterday with the mag’s editor, who is moving on to bigger and better things in web design and simply won’t have time to edit a quarterly magazine anymore.

The good news, however, is that it’s entire backlog of material (and there’s rather a lot of it) can now be read for free at the mag’s website.

Among this stuff is my own tMCQ backlog. Almost all of it is comedy related and a Stewart Lee interview is probably the highlight though I’m quietly proud of The New Satire. I’ve linked to it all below for anyone who is interested in such things.

On Wanting to Stay Alive: Robert Wringham meets Stewart Lee (An interview)

Why Not Sadowitz? (Review of Glasgow Comedy Festival 2006)

The New Satire (Post-9/11 Comedy)

Manifesto for a new United Kingdom! (Glastonbury Festival 2005)

In Truth No Beauty? (Nude Modelling)

I’ve also taken up writing book reviews for The Skinny. Dunno how frequently I’ll do this but at present there are two in the bag. The first is a review of Paul Auster’s Travels in the Scriptorium.

For some reason I’m not in the latest edition of The Idler, which is a bit of a disappointment as it was supposed to contain the first of a series of columns about libraries. Not to worry. We’ll see what the next edition brings.

Meanwhile, work on my own magazine, The Escapologist progresses slowly but surely and I’m sending proposals off left right and centre for books (!). More news about these half-assed projects some time in the distant future.

Returned from a vacation in Prague. It’s a beautiful city with one helluva history. Dvořák! Kafka! Communism! Jews! Riots! Fires! The word ‘robot’ was coined here. How cool is that?

There are many anecdotes and ideas I’d like to share with you via the medium of these electronic pages, dear reader, but they’ll have to wait a little while until I’ve become reaccustomed to being back in Old Blighty. In the meantime, here are a few photographs from the trip. (Do check them out, faithful reader – I just invested in a one-year Flikr membership, for goodness sake).

Last year, I had the pleasure of attending Edinburgh’s Beltane festival. Somehow, amid the drums and the fire and the nudity, I managed to catch a slight reflection of my white, unshaved self: an aparition I found oddly sobering. The mere glimpse of the same old face I inspect each morning in the bathroom mirror caused me to remember that there was an outside world to worry about and to ultimately go back to. A similar thing happened a few times in Prague: I’d suddenly hear a snatch of English accent amid the rumble of Czeck and find myself reminded of the elastic rope connecting me to Britain, always allowing for infrequent departure but never failing to demand a speedy return trip. Usually, the English tourists were engaged in utterly benall conversation. One guy was saying to another “So she fucking glanced at you – big deal” and a middleaged woman was saying to her husband “I don’t know how to get there, Benjamin, stop asking me”. Bleh. This trip has far from quenched by thirst for travel and if anything has made me hungry for a greater number of prolongued soujournes. I facny next time, a location “off the beaten track” will be enjoyed so that the English lingo and the Suvaneer shops might be avoided. In the British Airways inflight magazine, John Simpson recomends Sudan! Also: Messner Mountain Museum looks wowie.

A man sits alone in a sterile white room with no memory of who he might be or how he wound up there. Referred to as Mr. Blank, the protagonist explores the room’s sparse furnishings and his fractured memories by way of discovering who or what he is: institutionalised madman; incarcerated lawbreaker; or psychological experiment? A deeper mystery for the reader lies in what kind of book Travels in the Scriptorium is actually supposed to be: in one respect it’s a report of events seen through the hidden cameras in Mr. Blank’s room but it also succeeds in describing his inner feelings and thought processes in the way only a novel can do. How confusing.

Great writers have been known to vanish for years only to re-emerge with a stunning comeback novel. While Paul Auster never actually disappeared, his recent novels (including the Quixote-inspired ‘Timbuktu’ and the meta-fictional biography, ‘The Book of Illusions’) were far from being the postmodern manifestos expected since The New York Trilogy. This, however, is undoubtedly a return to what Auster does best. Straight away we are swamped in typically Austerian themes: linguistics, semiotics, nominality, self-reference, a sense of space without time and time without space. Scriptorium is a cacophony of ascetic oddness and thought-provoking postmodernism.

To Saint Mungo’s Museum to witness Les Stone‘s new exhibition of photojournalism.

The subject: Vodou!*

*I’m assured by my expert flatmate that ‘Vodou’ (as opposed to ‘voodoo’) is the correct spelling.

Presented are photographs of Mambos, Houngans and other practitioners of Vodou engaged in their ecstatic practices and rituals. I think my favourite one was a picture of a guy apparently experiencing the spirits by immersing himself in mud with only his face and a cigarette above the surface. It reminded me of Glastonbury.

More than anything though, Stone’s exhibition functions as a thematic and contrasting sequel to James Edward Bates’ Ku Klux Klan exhibition which showed here last season and which I wrote a little bit about here.

A little word association for each exhibit:

So many differences yet a few similarities. I’ve declared that both each of these subcultures involve an anti-intellectual element yet both do so in a dramatically different fashion. The guys in the Klan are idiots: their actions are the result of a congealing and senseless ideology passed down through the ages, from illiterate generation to illiterate generation. The Vudou guys, on the other hand, give up their intellectual selves deliberately in order to find release from it. They become ecstatic and allow themselves to become possessed by the rhythm of drums, the ecstasy of dance and, most importantly, the essence of the loas (ancestral spirits).

The beliefs of both groups have become intertwined with Christianity: the Klan’s as a way of justifying their beliefs (“God tells us to be this way; God tells us we’re righteous”); the Vodou practitioners’ as a way of allowing for its survival. According to Wikipedia: “A common saying is that Haiti is 80% Roman Catholic, 20% Protestant, and 100% Vodou”. Many of the Vodou Loas have Catholic counterparts. I’m told that my favourite loa, the cigar-smoking Papa Legba, is a Haitian counterpart of Saint Peter.

Go and take a look, Glasgow. On the other hand, check out a selection of the photographs here.

Rather than commending people upon the stuff they’ve done, perhaps we should start giving out awards for those individuals who’ve not done stuff – those who have resisted the temptation of ‘selling out’ or losing integrity in favour of… something else. After all, John and Yoko didn’t “stay in bed” or “grow their hair”, as their lyrics suggest: they just didn’t get up and didn’t get haircuts. The bed-in was about inaction rather than action.

In today’s paper, I read about Kiran Desai: daughter of Anita Desai and winner of this year’s Man-Booker Prize for fiction. Ms. Desai’s work is importantly Indian: “rediscovering her Indian-ness,” writes the paper, “was vital to her success”.

Then why would she accept a Man-Booker Prize: an award which even this article remarks has “Colonialist Connotations?”

“Someone said to me, ‘Will you turn down the Booker prize because it is a commonwealth prize?’ And I said ‘I’m not crazy!’ It’s also a hedge fund, so you have big-business qualms about that. There’s all kinds of reasons to turn it down.”

Yet she still accepted it. This doesn’t make me want to buy or read her book. This just smacks of a lack of integrity. I remember thinking the same when Sanjeev Bhaskar accepted an OBE last year. If these dudes had any respect for their own work, they’d do a Benjamin Zephaniah and tell ’em where to stick their awards.

Yet I sit here wracking my brains for examples of commendible things that people have not done.

I’ve personally managed to resist the networking opportunity of adopting a MySpace page. You should all love and respect me for that. MySpace is owned by the News Corporation, the managing director of which is media shitbag, Rupert Murdoch. That’s all the reason I need not to have a MySpace page.

Kiran Desai, when asked why she didn’t refuse the Man-Booker, says:

“Because you can drag that ethical dilemma into every single aspect of your life – and that is very much what my book is about. You are unable to make any kind of rule, really, without it being messy and mixed up with the rest of the world, and mixed up with sad and difficult things. Would I buy this sweater? Where is it made? It’s by someone poor in China and someone horrible is making money out of it. Am I going to eat this bit of fruit picked by whom? It infects every single thing. But I stand by the book’s ethical sense, and it’s a book that certainly says the opposite of many things that flags stand for.””

Wow. It’s as though the slow movement never happened. Such egocentric thinking is what messes stuff up for so many people. You don’t have to do a bunch of stuff in order to save the world. It’s what you don’t do that counts. Just resist the high-fat crap that floats temptingly through the media, get back to basics and if in doubt – don’t get up and don’t cut your hair.