Author: Robert Wringham

I think I’d have an excellent career as an agoraphobic. I’ve been thinking about going into it for some time but as with any horizontal career move, I’m waiting for the appropriate moment. I don’t have any formal qualifications but with a history of general obsession/compulsion and of various complex fetishes and phobias, I’m sure I’d make an excellent candidate.

The fact of the matter is that agoraphobia is a growth industry. It’s in the interests of the government and the pharmaceutical giants to keep you off the streets and popping the ho-ho pills. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get some sort of subsidiary for it. Yes. “Benefits,” I think they’re called.

It’s the way forward. Whenever I imagine ‘happiness’ I see myself idly playing the trumpet in the bath, with a fruity-looking cocktail on the side. You couldn’t do that in the outside world, no matter how laizez-fair your office environment.

I bring up this subject because I enjoyed a few days away from work last week. The thought of waiting workload is unappealing but far more unappealing is the idea of ‘going outside’ to get there. Outside is for wasps and weather. Inside is for towels and tobacco.

It’s always amused me when people have said, “Well, at least it gets you out of the house”.

What on Earth are they talking about? They’ll usually say it in response to the declaration that you’ve been at work that day; or at the hairdressers/fishmonger/bottle bank/public library/brothel/hardware store; or some other uninspiring everyday place.

Me: “I’ve just been standing in the street, shaking my lad at the pretty lay-dees”.

The plain people of cyberspace*: “Well, at least it gets you out of the house”.

What’s wrong with these people’s houses?

Why is labouring in an office or a factory better than being at home with your books and your microwave pizzas? Why is shopping at Tesco a higher state of activity than watching television in the warmth of your pajamas?

Those people are weird.

I imagine that being an agoraphobic “in this day and age” is far easier and potentially lucrative than being an agoraphobic in the nineteenth century or even the modern world as it were fifteen years ago.

We have the Internet now after all so we can do our shopping and trading and monitoring of business from our home computers. This isn’t even seen as being eccentric anymore.

You don’t need college or school when you have true, reliable, seldom-biased Wikipedia.

You wouldn’t starve to death. All of your food could be bought via the net and and books or videos or other consumables could be acquired likewise. You could even adopt a circular metabolism by selling the stuff on eBay once done with it. Not your food, obviously, but your books et cetera – the gods of eBay froun upon poopoo being listed for international auction (yet they encourage the listing of Dan Brown novels – there is no consistency in this world).

Imagine if everyone was agorobobic. Our carbon footprint would be smaller for one thing. I imagine the fashion supplement of the newspaper would be less interested in designer duffle-coats and would give promience to the latest pyjama and dressing-gown combinations. The showbiz pages would feature the latest photographs of celebrity stay-at-homes with oversized beards and kleenex boxes upon their feet. The new sports would be origami, sex and chess. The new motoring supplement would focus exclusively upon model railways and Scalextrick.

There would have to be a brave few who would deliver the mail and keep the electricity flowing and the crops in production. In fact the more I think about it, the more I recognise the importance of “non-agros” to my vision – or “Norms” or “Mundies”, if you will. Heck, let’s not beat about the bush. We shall call them “Morlocks”. Only the bin men can take our smelly garbage to an appropriate resting place far, far away.

OK – the agorophobes would have to be a new social class. We would sit at the top of the class system, god-like monarchs who stay at home, pushing our money around electronically and nodding approvingly from afar. Noble, we at once the the consumer market, the royal family and the government.

Me (Calling down to the quiet street from a high window): You there! There’s been no mail delivery and my pants must be sent to the laundrette post-haste! What day is this?

Bin man: Why, its Christmas day, mistah.

Ah, so easily we lost track. Our pipes and slippers seemed the heith of it all but at what cost, dear reader, at what cost?

< size="1">*The plain people of cyberspace. This is a reference to the excellent Myles Na Gopaleen – a humourist whose works I am developing an obsession with, largely thanks to . In his newspaper columns he will frequently publish imagined conversations between himself and ‘The plain people of Ireland’. I might continue to rip him off… um… homage him in this way for a while.

Sauntering along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, seeing what might be what and who might be whom, I chanced across a strange scene.

The Royal Mile during the Festival is, of course, a metric kilometer of patently strange events but this one seemed a tad too domestic for performance purposes. Consequently, it became “strange” in this context by its very kitchen-sinkness. Several people had gathered to watch.

It seemed to me that a dispute had resulted in a young girl breaking the finger of an older man with a beard. She stood at the steps of her flat. He stood just outside of the door. The police had been called in. The bearded man was showing his finger to one of the officers who was trying to ascertain whether or not it was actually broken.

The young girl was very pretty. She had nice hair and a red dress. The older man was drunk and had food in his beard. What had happened?

Above the muttering ruminations of the crowd, my attention was snagged by the discourse of street sweepers.

One street sweeper, leaning casually on her broom, said to her colleague: “You see, I used to want to be in the police. But I couldn’t deal with that.”

That she had once abandoned the idea of being a police officer in favour of being a street sweeper was interesting. I wonder what made her change her mind?

Perhaps she took the phrase “clean up the streets” a trifle too literally and from there it was a downward spiral.

Not one for adding to the publicity of other people’s affairs, however, I continued on my way.

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.”