Author: Robert Wringham

To the Glasgow contingent of the International Climate Strike where I march with thousands of truant schoolchildren, shouting “Fuck You, Boris Johnson!”

Look, they started it.

Among their midget ranks I loom like a benevolent periscope, admiring the sights from high above their heads and providing a convenient landmark for other marchers to orientate themselves. “Yes, Mum, I’m between the green flag and the geek.”

There are loads of great placards including “Earth is More Important Than Homework” and “Too Cool for School? Not In This Climate.”

The best one though (or at least the cutest) is a placard that shows Marie Kondo saying “Climate Change Does Not Spark Joy.”

I am afraid of spiders but delighted by ants. I always want to know more about ants–about their culture, the ways they communicate, what sort of music they’re into–but I don’t want to know anything about spiders. Even a picture of a spider lifts my intestines up into my chest as if I am in free-fall.

One day, in Montreal, Samara comes with me to the Bibliothèque Nationales, so that she can vet a big photographic book of ants for me in case there are any pictures of spiders.

I hide behind my hands and listen to her turning the pages one by one.

“That one’s fine,” she says, “that one’s fine, this one’s fine, oh this one’s adorable.”

“Thank you for doing this, honey,” I say, still hiding, and I wonder if she finds this charming or if it’s finally dawning on her what she’s got herself into.

“This one’s fine,” she says, “this one’s fine, this one’s… oh my GOD.”

“A spider?” I ask.

“Yuh-huh.”

“Are they eating it?”

“They’re eating parts of it,” she says, “And parts of it are eating them.”

“I don’t want to see it!,” I say, tightening the gaps in my fingers, “And I don’t want to hear any more about it!”

“Shh!” someone says, “Tabarwet…”

I listen to Samara close the book and put it back on the shelf. I hear it slide tightly and firmly, safe between the other entomological quartos.

Sometimes, at night, I think of that book and the horror I know it contains, on the other side of the ocean, existing.

Samara asks what a tiny home ghost story would be like.

“Smol,” I say.

Once l’esprit de l’escalier has kicked in, I realise that, since the story would be set in a converted shipping container, it would have to be about the ghost of a stevedore stranded deep inland with a couple of earnest hipsters.

The ghost and the hipsters would have different points of view on, like, everything.

Ellison mentions a book called the Jingle Jangle Tales. I don’t know what it is and I don’t care but it makes me imagine Crump-esque novel based on real and imaginary Jimmy Savile crimes, “Jingle Jangle” being one of his puerile catchphrases. It really could work. Jingle Jangle Tales: What Jim’ll Did Next.

There’s a big black tomcat who sits in the window of a flat downstairs. All he ever does it sit there on the back of a couch, watching people come and go with his big, golden eyes.

We call him Owly because (a) he looks a bit like an owl, and (b) we’re a pair of knuckle-heads.

Anyway, I’ve not seen him for a while. I hope he hasn’t died or run away. But why would he run away when there’s so much owling to be done?

That’s what we say he does, owling. He’s owling out into the street, burning holes into walls and through hedges with his piercing golden gaze.

“I saw Owly,” Samara might say when she comes in from work.

“Was he owling?” I’ll ask.

“Yes,” she might say, “Almost took my eye out.”

I hope he’s alright because who would do the owling? I don’t want to get roped into it.

To an arts centre (let’s not name it because I’m about to be a swine to it) for nine experimental short films from Japan, circa 1981.

In the event it’s only five films but that’s okay because I’m not sure how much longer we’d have been able to take it. And it’s not just our party of misery guts; half the audience is restless and squirming and quick to whisper to their neighbour about, tee-hee, maybe being the first ones to stand up and leave.

The problem is not that the films are naff (though they are naff, the point of screening not being to applaud their brilliance but to glimpse some creative acts whose points of origin happen to be a long time ago in a far-flung land) but that the screening room is so impossibly uncomfortable.

It’s hot and so poorly ventilated that we must all breathe air that has passed through the lungs of sixty other open-minded cinemagoers first, the oxygen value rapidly diminishing with every shallow gasp. I’ve suffered through many a Fringe sauna and leaky poetry tent in the name of ART but this screening room took the absolute cake.

Something does strike me about the films though and that is how pure and playful they are. They’re such small deals. Many short films now, though perhaps critically “better” than these five, exist either to launch careers or to show how sporting some famous director is to slum it in the upstart world of shorts.

But these are mere capsules of honest fun, almost like home movies. They are minor acts of affecting change in the world, like using your hands to cast animal shadows on the wall when there just happens to be a lamp at an obliging angle. Like my diary, I think. No biggie. Just shadows on the wall.

You’re holding a beer mat to the mouth of a pint glass with a wasp trapped in it when the voice says, “give me your wallet and phone.”

“Okay,” you say, “but there’s something you ought to know…”

Reader Eric emails:

I’m enjoying your recent content, even the posts about your moth problem.

Even? Let’s assume he means “especially.”

My mother-in-law emails from Canada with reference to the wedding cake incident:

I agree, she should have tackled you! It is her fault. Love, Mamen.

And yet an apology from my wife does not seem to be forthcoming.

After some thoughts about the size of things, Reggie comments:

In real life, that chap is no doubt the same size all Hollywood actors: smaller.

Invisible to the naked eye, sometimes.

With reference to my slamming of Stranger Things 3 and its looking like a Laser Quest, Neil asks:

Fancy a game of laser quest?

I do not!

And finally, Neil shares with us his Touching the Void-like first-person account of his stairwell nightmare:

At this point I was pretty sure that I was going to be spending the night in a stair well.

His whole account is here:

To a pub quiz with our usual team but in a different pub. We’ve been wanting a change of scene–but not so big a change that would see us doing anything together other than answering general knowledge questions. That way madness lies.

Neil arrives a little flustered. He’s been trapped in a stairwell. He tells us how the emergency exits were all locked and how various alarm buttons did nothing. He was even shouting “Help!” through a tiny window. It’s a thrilling and hilarious tale that ends with our brave friend somehow escaping into a car park and climbing over a locked gate to the street.

If that had been me, it’s safe to say that my wife would now be going back and forth on whether Futura is a good font for a MISSING poster.

Tonight’s quiz is run by a softly-spoken Canadian and the questions are just right. A good quiz question is ideally a catalyst for conversation, more like a riddle to be chewed over together than just something a person will immediately know.

This said, we’re happy to advance a few places in the table when Samara correctly answers nine out of ten questions in a round about murder and death. Who have I married?

I remember that we have in fact quizzed in this pub before. It was about four years ago and we were asked “which product was invented by Richard Gatling?” We began to discuss whether, it being such an obvious answer, “the Gatling gun” could be a red herring and that something like “semi-automatic weapon” would be more strictly correct. Laura, however, was very insistent that Richard Gatling invented the teabag.

“What?”

“The teabag. Honestly. I know this.”

“Are you sure?”

“YES,” she’d said, “I. Am. Positive.”

She was so adamant that Richard Gatling had invented the teabag that we played this as our answer, leading to various jokes about thousands of tiny perforations.

Since then, of course, we’ve all had a Gatling Moment. Mine was to insist with religious fervour on a belief-based-on-nothing that a Scottish boy had once sold the world’s most expensive egg to the queen (rather than, more reasonably, a stamp). And Fergus once insisted with much thumping of the table and resisting all attempts by our negotiators to talk him down from his bell tower, that a tennis ball is bigger than than a baseball.

We’ve been watching Stranger Things 3 on Netflix. Or, rather, I’ve been watching it. Samara, being less in denial about mortality than I am, gave up after three episodes.

It’s utterly hopeless. The makers must have forgotten that being cute, funny, and spooky was not only their strong suit but also the whole point.

This year is all about CGI monsters and people running breathlessly around in featureless corridors shouting things like “shut up and run!” and “I’m taking this car!” and “stop talking!”

A Terminator-like super-soldier has just turned up to whet nobody’s appetite. And why does the Mayor look exactly like one of the journalists? I honestly can’t tell which one is which.

The whole thing utterly incomprehensible and feels like watching some people you don’t know playing Laser Quest. Duffer Brothers? Duffest Brothers more like. Am I right? (Yes, I am right).

To a local bar whose arty backers recently pulled out. If the bar survives at all, it will not be as the moody cool spot it’s been these past few years.

Tonight, the main floor jumps with noisy and excitable teens while a handful of existentialists huddle on the mezzanine.

We have an enjoyable night in our corner and everyone’s on good form.

Laura mentions visiting a money-to-burn artist couple who have given a whole apartment over to their pet cats. It’s decorated, she says, with works by Alexander Calder and Joan Miró.

“There’s no way they have a Miro cat flap,” says Neil, “that’s a classic screen memory.”

“Cat flat,” says Laura over the noise.

“I mean it’s hilarious that they dote on their cats like that but there’s no way there’s a Miro on a cat flap.”

“Cat flat,” says Laura again, “flat.”

“What’s a cat flat?” says Neil.

“A flat for their cats. There are Miros in the cat flat, not on a cat flap,” says Laura.

“Oh!” says Neil, “cat flap, yes.”

I’m not sure what my face is doing at this moment, but it clearly betrays my thoughts:

“Well,” says Neil, “at least that’s tomorrow’s blog sorted.”

In the cinema the other day, I found that I was still thinking about my projects for the first half-hour of the action.

This is unusual. I normally find that sitting in the darkness with nothing but the film in front of me is a surefire way to mute the internal racket.

So today, drastic action clearly required, I sit down with notebook and pencil.

I empty my thoughts onto the verso and then form a mid-term plan on the recto. I then smash said plan into reasonable, doable tasks for ToDoist to gobble up and for me to forget about.

And now I know where I stand. It’s like a reset button.

This seems to be something I just have to do once every few months. I think it’s because, when all’s said and done, I’m actually a bit thick and need to think things through very carefully if I’m to understand them on a level visceral enough to do any good.

Whatever the reason, I now feel like I’ve been through whatever the opposite of a threshing machine is.

And now… back to the hard drinking.

To Cove Park, an artist-run centre on the rural west coast. We reach it by train and by ferry.

We’re the ferry’s only passengers and the boatmen have to extend the ramp just for us. We’re a minute late and the boatmen have already begun to unmoor. This makes them us hate us a bit, presumably because they’re now no longer able to take off their trousers for the return journey (or whatever it is they like to do when they have an empty).

It’s temping to keep saying things like “yo-ho-me-hearties” to annoy them even more but I manage to restrain myself. I think I’d have ended up being quietly plopped over the side and into the Firth, my final thought being oh look, a plastic fork.

At Cove Park, we rendezvous with Alan who shows us the grass-roofed pods and shipping container residencies, and then off we go for a day of the sillies around the peninsula.

We drop into Helensburgh, visit Ross at his house (where we eat soup with an original Soup Dragon), and drive past Faslane where Alan forbids me from bouncing pennies off The Bomb.

Finally, we head to Hill House to marvel at “the box,” the impressive cage now surrounding the house to help thwart its ongoing fall to rising damp. The official website has a quote from the President of the NT who says the house is “dissolving like an aspirin in a glass of water.” You’ve got to give him points for, well, not poetry exactly, but at least for not putting on the middle-manager claptrap voice when he stepped up to the mic that day.

In said box, we walk up and along some catwalks around the outside of the house. I don’t quite make it to the highest point, which would have afforded me a view over the rooftop, because when I make the mistake of looking down through the steel-mesh gantry, my stomach uncharacteristically tries to escape my body.

Still, I now have a good idea of what a Mackintosh Masterpiece looks like when it’s spinning, which is a nice thing to strike from my bucket list.

Home again only to lose another raisin.

Yesterday, I took some raisins from the jar in our kitchen. A single raisin fell to floor and, impossibly, has yet to be found.

The same thing happens again this morning. If this continues, we’ll be ankle-deep in raisins and we won’t be able to see any of them.

I spend too much of the day following news of the Benn Bill, the most powerful weapon at the moment in the arsenal against you-know-what.

Rolling news always leaves me feeling slightly demented and incapable of doing anything like work, so I cut my losses and go to the cinema for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood:

Pussycat: Obviously, I’m not too young to fuck you. But obviously, you are too old to fuck me.

Cliff Booth: What I’m too old to do is go to jail for poontang. Prison’s trying to get me all my life, they ain’t got me yet. The day it does, it won’t be because of you. No offence.

I mean who talks like that? Poontang. No offence. I sort of love it.

When I return to the news, Caroline Lucas has lambasted Jacob Rees Mogg for lying around on the benches like a Lothario. She never misses a chance to fight evil and she really shows him up. I hope one day to see her drag him by the ear out of the House where the protesters can tear him limb from limb. Actually, that might be the Tarantino talking.

The new Idler magazine is handed to me by Hanson, dutiful postie to our Scottish Belle Ombre.

Hanson’s excited because the chap from Sleaford Mods is on the cover and gurning at us through the cellophane.

Tearing off the wrapper, I turn first, as is human and natural, to my column. It’s probably my worst one yet. It’s all about how I archive my paperwork.

I don’t recall what hurry there was on the day I wrote the piece or in what flavour of spiritual funk I found myself, but in terms of ideas I was clearly running on vapours. I must remember that the column is one of my most consistent and important outputs and I resolve to do better.

Still, there are two lines I’m quietly pleased with:

The idler prevails by putting her feet up and leaving them there.

And, to describe the joy of throwing things away, I describe my paperwork as:

snuggled down warmly in the landfill.

Maybe I’m being paranoid, but these conjoined minuscule moments are probably why I didn’t get fired or spiked.

As it happens, today is filing day for the December issue and I’ve been asked to write about winter clothes. I do have a way to tie this to the column’s “escape” paradigm and I have already sprinkled it with what are hopefully some enjoyable and unpredictable turns of phrase, but I’m still left thinking of Will Self’s term for this sort of thing: “the new glib.”

As I say, I must do better, even if it means defying the idler’s credo of trying harder. And I will!I will!

I go for a lot of walks and, as I do so, I feel a near-constant urge to pick up litter.

I’ve considered buying some gloves and bin bags for just this purpose: so that my walks might be more useful than mere exercises in burning calories, collecting steps, and providing an admittedly-important space for thought.

And yet I resist. As compelling and reasonable as the urge to pick up litter might be, I don’t want to become an unpaid a litter picker. I’m already a barely-paid (but integrity-rich) writer and a (very, very) poor man’s David Sedaris. There’s a point of justice here too: the council should divert funds away from middle management and into picking up litter faster than people can drop it and, of course, people shouldn’t be dropping it in the first place.

So I’ve decided to impose a little rule about picking up some litter: I will pick up plastic take-away forks. Goodness knows there’s enough of them around and they’re often overlooked by the council’s “pro” litter-pickers on account of their being small. That way, I can increase the utility value of my walks without becoming obsessive about it or feeling like a volunteer patsy.

I have a thought about small pieces of plastic litter that go unpicked: they probably end up in the ocean and jammed into some innocent blowhole, don’t they? I mean, Glasgow’s not a coastal town, but these plastic forks and bottle caps and the likes are probably rained along the gutters, washed into the Clyde, swept into the Firth, and onward into the sea. It hardly takes geological time for Senga McWeegie’s absent-minded take-away forkdrop to end up juddering like a schoolboy’s ruler from some sinless Caribbean swim bladder.

So that’s what I’ve started to do. On my walks, I pick up forks and I put them in the bin, working on the assumption that they’ll soon be snuggled down warmly in the landfill (yes, this is a time-travelling hyperlink to the age of the Morlocks) where they can’t be any more trouble. Join me! Pick up some forks! Stoop, I dare you, for the Oceans!

I’ve never been overly fond of dogs but my wife loves them and her enthusiasm is clearly rubbing off on me.

Whenever we see a dog being walked, or sitting in a car, or waiting patiently outside a shop, or miles and miles away from us in the distance, or in a painting, or in a Where’s Wally? book, or in a dream she’s had, my wife says “a doggo!” and I say, “yes, marvellous,” and then life is allowed to continue until the next canine friend comes along.

But now, when I see a dog on my own, my association is no longer of Cujo chewing through the side of that Ford Pinto, but of my happy wife’s glee at their species’ simple existence.

Today, I saw a Golden Retriever on the train home from the wedding and he was being so good that I’m fairly certain the pupils of my eyes turned into love hearts.

The dog was clearly troubled by the motion of the train, but because his man wasn’t scared, the dog followed his lead and retained his cool.

He was such a good boy (a “twelve out of ten good boy,” as I’ve learned to describe it) that I felt in my bones that he should be given a loving pat-pat on the head and also, if at all possible, a biscuit.

That’s proper dog fondness isn’t it? I like dogs! I think to myself. Hooray! I like dogs at last! I’m normal!

Samara looks on with joy in her heart.

Hurrying to our connection at Crewe station, I hear a furious yapping and growling from some dogs around the corner. We soon see that the yappers are a pair of lint-coloured, crooked-fanged gremlins being carted around in a pushchair. They’re going berserk because they’ve spotted another dog from across the concourse.

In what is clearly a test, Samara asks if I still love doggos.

I pick up an imaginary telephone, calmly dial an invisible number, and say coolly, “gas them.”

So am I back to Square One now? Or is it simply that some dogs are 12/10 good boys while others are throttlable bastards?

Today is my sister’s wedding and, in the afternoon, Samara and I find ourselves alone in a room with the wedding cake.

It’s a beautiful, three-tier lemon cake and, so far as I know, none of the other guests has even seen it yet.

The excitement is too much for me and I decide that I want to touch the cake with my finger. Must touch the cake with my finger.

So what? I just want to be able to reminisce about touching the cake with my finger while nobody’s looking. I’m making memories.

“I’m going to poke it,” I say aloud, advancing upon the cake as if under the control of a hypnotist.

“Please don’t do that,” says Samara, but I pretend I haven’t heard her and I continue in my zombie march, my Judderman shadow cast upon said confection, eyes wide and finger extended like a malevolent Aye-Aye.

And I touch the cake with the tip of my finger.

What happens next is a bit of a blur, what with all the screaming devils in my head and all, but who’d have thought a wedding cake would be so soft?

My finger leaves a dimple in the icing.

It’s only slight. A minor imperfection. It’s not like I rammed my whole hand into it.

“Look what you did!” says Samara.

“Fuck,” I say.

The thought flickers across my mind that maybe I can correct it but, fearing a Father Ted-style “tapping out the dent in the car” situation–I throw the thought aside as most people would throw aside the thought of poking an unattended wedding cake, and decide instead to run away quite quickly.

If anyone should ask if I saw who touched the cake, I’ll pretend I’ve never even heard of cake. What is cake?

But, just as I turn on my heels, I find myself eye-to-eye with… some guy. A bloody witness!

A man with wire-rimmed glasses and a soul patch has come in and is staring at me. He’s seen the whole thing.

I consider pulling his trousers off in one sudden tug, but my wife is clearly already appalled enough by my behaviour for one wedding so we just walk past him sheepishly. It takes about an hour.

But whoever that guy was, he’ll always know that the bride’s brother at that wedding in 2019 poked the cake.

If he’s anything like me, the secret will nourish him for years to come. He’ll remember it at random moments–standing in line at the cinema, renting a lilo, repairing a shoe–and he’ll laugh. And people will look at him like he’s mad and this will make him laugh even more.

Or maybe–just maybe–he’s a TELL-TALE TIT.

Finding him and killing him is the only option now isn’t it?

Oh, why did I have to poke that wedding cake? I don’t even know anymore. But I think we can all agree that it was Samara’s fault. Imagine being in her position and not rugby tackling me to the ground. Honestly, you can’t take her anywhere.

On an England-bound train to attend my sister’s wedding, fields of harvested wheat zip by and a young business consultant sits at a table across the aisle.

She has a tattoo of a pineapple on her inner arm, one of a flamingo on her calf muscle, and a large bottle of Birra Moretti–opened but completely untouched–to the side of her laptop.

She’s beavering away at said laptop, or at least was beavering before collapsing suddenly into her own folded arms in the classic stance of white-collar despair.

On her screen is the source of her misery: a SWOT analysis for a gastropub.

Now, it’s not nice to make fun of the baffled or to withhold help from those who won’t help themselves, but bloody hell girl, the answer’s right in front of you! Drink the beer!

No more! Please, no more!

Alan came over this evening to take some pictures, one of which will become the author photograph for a new book jacket. This meant another session of looking at my own dopey face on a screen for longer than is strictly healthy.

While it doesn’t have to be perfect, I don’t want to look at the book jacket on publication day only to see an entire asparagus hanging from a gap in my teeth or a sinister robed figure reflected in my glasses.

“Bloody Hell,” I’ll say, “This was approved by twelve different people.”

My task was to select three or four options from Alan’s shoot of a hundred. It’s a sort of torture to look at so many samey pictures of yourself. It’s like when you say the same word over and over until it loses all meaning, the worst word to plunge into meaninglessness being your own name. It’s a sort of existential threshing machine. I’m honestly not sure I could tell the difference now between my own long-serving face and, say, a lemon blancmange.

If I look in the mirror tomorrow and there’s an actual, factual lemon blancmange looking back at me, it’ll seem perfectly reasonable.

If you think this is vanity, it really isn’t. I don’t ever want to see the likes of Me again.

An interesting thing, at least, in looking at so many versions of what is essentially the same photograph is how the slightest angle of the head or the merest flicker of a thought on the lips can change a picture’s meaning so drastically. It’s like how the right or wrong choice of word can nail a sentence or leave it feeling too breezy or stilted. Though I don’t remember doing anything drastically different in any of these shots, the mood varies between “candidate for Young Journalist of the Year” and “it’s a good job we caught him when we did, m’lud.”