Robert Wringham – Page 8 – Robert Wringham // Writer-Comedian

Tomato Plant

We were visiting Alan at his allotment a couple of weeks ago and he asked if we’d like to take a tomato plant from his greenhouse.

I don’t remember saying yes but I was carrying a tomato plant in my hands as we walked home, so I suppose I must have.

A few days later, Samara suggested that we replant it into a bigger pot.

“Do we have to?” I protested. I wasn’t sure the effort was necessary. It was fine as it was. I called Alan to find out.

“Oh yes,” he said as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, “it will need repotting.”

“How will I do that?” I asked, and I could hear him thinking me an idiot down the line.

We live in a city, miles away from anything like a garden centre, not that I’d be seen dead in one anyway. Plant pots and soil just aren’t a part of my life.

The last time I needed a plant pot for something, I had to buy it on Amazon. It had cost £3 and took three days to arrive and two entirely different “I’m sorry you were out” cards. I didn’t want to go through all that again.

“Come back to the allotment,” he said, “and I’ll find you a pot.”

“Okay,” I said, “Tuesday?”

“Tuesday,” he said.

On Tuesday, Alan called to tell me to meet him at his lock-up instead of his allotment. “Sure,” I said. I didn’t mind because the lock-up is closer to my flat than the allotment. Unfortunately, some heavy rain the night before meant that the lane in which the lock-up lives was a brown river of mud.

“Why did you wear those shoes?” asked Alan, looking at my mud-engulfed brogues.

“Well, it was these or my slippers.”

“Don’t you have any Wellies?”

“No,” I said. I thought of that bit in Seinfeld when Kramer asks Jerry if he’s got any black paint. Jerry says, “Yeah, in my toolshed, next to the riding mower.”

As we stood in the rain, up to our ankles in mud, we chatted about this and that and finally, he pulled two plant pots from his car’s back seat.

“Two?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said, “One for now and another for in a couple of weeks.”

I hadn’t thought this was going to be such a project. I hadn’t consented, so far as I could remember, to any of it. And now there was mud in my shoes and rainwater in my socks and I was being handed two plant pots, some instructions for the future, and apparently a need get some serious outdoor boots if I wanted to get ahead in life.

“Okay,” I said in a sort of coma.

A rat the size of a guinea pig but as fast as a cat suddenly struck out into the lane. I decided to go home.

“Don’t forget your pots,” said Alan.

I did not forget my pots.

We repotted the tomato plant. When Alan came over tonight, he saw how much the tomato plant had grown and how healthy-looking, and he seemed to be impressed. Maybe even surprised. He nodded approvingly.

As he was leaving, I asked if he’d take the third pot back with him. “It’s really too big,” I said, “I don’t want such a big bucket of soil in my living room.”

“Just keep it for now,” he said.

He was going home on his bike and the pot would be too big to carry.

“And it’s up to you,” he said, “but you’ll need a bigger pot if you want to get any tomatoes.”

And then he was gone.

If I want to get any tomatoes? I had never considered that any of this had been about the tomatoes. I suppose I thought it was about the extra greenery or something.

Do I want to harvest my own tomatoes? Not especially. So long as civilisation stands, I am content to buy my tomatoes in the shops, rarely, on a whim, for 40p. And after civilisation, I probably won’t be worried about tomatoes. Wellington boots maybe.

How long do I have to keep this plant alive for? I suppose I’d been carrying a general assumption around that tomato plants die in the autumn. But what do I know? Do I need to update my will?

Tomatoes. Why would anyone want to grow tomatoes?

Pandemic Moments

There’s a small park near to our flat. It contains only four trees, but they’re quite large and their intermingled leaf canopy teems with life. Pausing there today, with no car noise thanks to the lockdown, it feels like being in a real wood.

We hear birds tweeting above us and twigs snap softly underfoot. The sun shines through the branches, casting patterns onto the earth. I feel a brief, welcome connection to nature. I could live in the woods, I think, insanely.

Suddenly a piece of dust violently blows into my eyeball even though there isn’t any wind. As I’m trying to extract it, a sharp piece of tree bark falls from above and hits the back of my neck. “Ow!” I say, when it surprisingly stings.

Nature. They should cordon the whole thing off.

Our through-the-wall neighbours, whom we never meet and do not know, are very excitable. They sometimes burst into blissful hysterics that can only be attached to some wonderful near miss. It’s probably a computer game or something, but I like to imagine they’re training a dog to catch treats thrown from zany angles.

Samara unintentionally reveals at breakfast that she thinks the song, “Popcorn,” is called “Greensleeves.”

I don’t tease her because I’ve made similar mistakes myself, and to illustrate what “Popcorn” is, I sing it: “pip-pap-pap-pip-pippy-pap / pip-pap-pap-pip-pippy-pap / pip-pap-pip-pop-pipperty, pip-pop-pipperty-pip-pip-pip-pap-pop.”

“Oh,” she says, “What’s Greensleeves then?”

“Does the phrase ‘Hey Nonny Nonny’ mean anything to a Canadian?” I ask.

“No,” she says.

“Well,” I say, “it’s like something Tom Hodgkinson would play on a lute. I think it’s Medieval or something. It makes me think of minstrels trying to see who can play it the longest before the king finally snaps and orders their hands lopped off.”

I hum it for her.

“I’ve heard that on Call Waiting,” she says.

“That’s the one.”

Culture in lockdown, since the pubs and cafes are still closed, happens in take-out queues. Today I talk to a man two metres away about my renewed enthusiasm for Reggae.

I like how residential areas are more happening places now that everyone stays close to home. A common sight in our neighborhood is that of bare feet sticking out of windows, wriggling in the sun.

Our living room is bathed in sunshine in the mornings, while our neighbours across the street get theirs in the late afternoon. Sometimes, I’ll be crashed out on the chaise with a book or something when I get a sense of being watched.

Invariably, it’s Deep Roy, an older woman who lives opposite and makes a point of opening her window to fully bask in this 4pm light. I think it’s her daily mindfulness moment or something.

Her eyes are closed in peaceful contemplation whenever I look, but she faces squarely into our flat and it’s a little disconcerting when you’re concentrating on the fourth level of your precariously-balanced playing card tower or putting some science into getting your porn site search terms just right.

Yes, Deep Roy is my name for her. She’s not a little person in case you’re wondering. She just looks like Deep Roy. What’s wrong with that? I like Deep Roy.

On a walk this afternoon, I pass the small local cinema I used to go to pre-lockdown. All closed up now, it was my sometimes treat to attend the £7 matinee of whatever’s on, a great way to avoid doing anything useful.

It’s not a very good cinema. It’s too small to enjoy anything Star Wars-y and once, when I saw It, it smelled like wee.

It crosses my mind today though, that it’s such a small cinema, the bosses might be amenable to my calling up and asking for a private screening. Just me, eating popcorn (not greensleeves), in the centre seat of the otherwise empty auditorium. That wouldn’t contravene lockdown rules, would it?

“What would you like to see, sir?” a solicitous manager would ask on my theatrical fanning out of a hundred quid in notes.

“Just put something violent on and leave me alone,” I’d say.

I do wish I had some money.

I read somewhere that a certain sign of dehydration is “if your urine has a bit of colour to it.”

It’s one of those lines that will change a life forever if you’re not careful. I spend the rest of the day systematically drinking water and monitoring the tinge of my whizz.

My urine always “has a bit of colour to it.” Doesn’t everyone’s? That colour is yellow. Everyone knows that urine is yellow. Don’t they? Isn’t it?

Idea for a project. Piss Diary. Or, The Yellow Book.

Another life-changing phrase entered my lug hole 242 days ago (you’ll see in a moment how I know this).

It was Laura, in a bar one night, when she bragged about reaching “enlightened” status in the productivity app we both use.

“I am enlightened,” she said, dementedly.

I was impressed. To reach enlightened status–the very last status after passing through the ranks of “guru” and “genius” and so on–she must have completed something like 100,000 tasks.

I hadn’t ever cared about my productivity status but that was because I’d never thought it possible to end it. And here was Laura, claiming to have done so. “I am enlightened.” It wasn’t her fault, but she’d sewn a seed of madness in me.

The productivity app allows you to set a goal of a daily number of tasks. I set mine to a modest three tasks, a task being something in the scale of “mention Deep Roy in your blog” or “buy more tea.”

Doing three things of that ilk did not seem to be troublesome or overly ambitious, but I still ended up somewhat in thrall to the streak. Before going to bed each night, if I hadn’t done three proper things, I’d try to remember if I’d done something unscheduled, add it to the app, and cross it off immediately to make up the shortcoming. Occasionally, I’d cheat outright and put “skive” on it and tick that off.

Yesterday, I forgot do a third task and the app was kind enough to point it out to me this morning. “You have completed your goal ZERO days in a row,” it said. “Your longest streak is 241 days: 12 October 2019-June 9 2020.”

The dream is over. It’s like the end of a game of Jenga. I feel oddly at ease.

When I mention this on Twitter, Todd replies that streaks are bad for him and make him anxious.

I realise now that it’s the same for me and that I’d been waiting ages for an accident like yesterday to happen. Free at last.

It rained quite heavily last night. We live on the top floor and a drip has made itself known in the spare room.

This is going to be a lockdown saga, of course, but I’m glad the problem is in the spare room and not dripping onto my actual sleeping head like last time.

I email the letting agency for directions and I put a “drip” emoji in the subject line, just to show that I’m a friendly guy and that I’m not angry with them.

Career? What a Scam!

Originally published in Idler 48.

With this column, editor Tom has asked me to share my escape plans and tips for breaking free of wage slavery and consumerism. I don’t mind sharing them: I want as many people as possible to escape the systems that ensnare us and juice us for our life blood. Besides, I have no shortage of escape plans. I collect them. I create my own. I dream them up in the night.

Over the coming months we’ll speak of exciting job replacement schemes, anti-consumerist wheezes, cautious half-measures, and philosophical internal adjustments. We can escape into an idle paradise of our own devising if we want to. I say “we” because I believe we’re all in the same boat, but you don’t need much social backup in order to escape: just do it yourself.

As an idler you’ll already have come to the conclusion that career is the single most obvious scam ever devised. And yet, it can be awfully tempting to get mixed up with it. If you haven’t already, I implore you to put the whole silly idea out of your head this very minute. Abandoning the idea of career altogether is the single most practical thing you can do today and here are my tips for doing it.

1. Know that it’s a scam. You know it intuitively, but you must place this knowledge at the very top of your consciousness and act upon it. Much like motorcars, wristwatches and fancy hats, career is sold to us a way to distinguish ourselves. It’s a product designed to appeal to our need for identity but ultimately to pump our energies off to wealthy folk at the top. It’s really a kind of pyramid scheme and no matter how clever you are it’s quite impossible to beat the system. Seeing work as identity instead of the soul-crushing waste of time it clearly is might be a good deal for those born into political or showbiz dynasties, but a poor one for the majority doomed to be salespeople, quantity surveyors, or (shudder) “co-directors of digital innovation.” So know it truly, reject it, and tell others: career is a scam.

2. Understand that it’s socially irresponsible. We’re encouraged to get onto a career path as soon as possible, told that thoughtfully selecting our GCSE subjects at the age of 14 will give us an advantage. But even if this were true (and it isn’t) what is meant by this advantage? That upstreaming your peers is somehow good or noble or right? Only a sociopath would believe that. Once you understand that career requires you to clamber over the corpses of your friends, it will hopefully be less appealing.

3. Choose to live in the present. Career requires us to live in the future by instilling a constant need for progression, and ultimately to live in the past with its promise that we’ll one day look back on a glorious toil narrative from an armchair somewhere. Bugger that. Get yourself an armchair today instead. Sit in it, take a nap, and gradually come up with more exciting ideas than ogling the ever-advancing next rung of the ladder or some distant retirement vision. You can’t win at careerism, so my advice is to stop trying before it’s too late.

4. Put career into perspective. If you want to put your mind off the siren song of career, it helps to embrace the full glory of reality by recalling that no action matters very much. We’ll all be dead one day and that’s fine. Put your feet up. You’ve got a hundred years at best and you’re already a good way through them. And imagine dying in pursuit of a career, cracking your nut on a shelf edge or choking on something unspeakable in a staff canteen. It’s better to enjoy the gentle ride down the river on your own terms.

5. Revel in the vagaries. To be successful in a career you must have a goal and scramble towards it with single-minded vigour. Instead, be vague about your ambitions and enjoy life. Thus spake Oscar Wilde: “If you want to be a grocer, or a general, or a politician, or a judge, you will invariably become it; that is your punishment. If you never know what you want to be, if you live what some might call the dynamic life but what I will call the artistic life, if each day you are unsure of who you are and what you know you will never become anything, and that is your reward.”

When you see career as a scam, that it encourages you to act in ways contrary to your interests and even those of society (which needs compassion, not careerism), it will be less tempting to involve yourself and far easier to escape for good. Career: just walk away.

🐌

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Escape Rustout

Originally published in Idler 61.

Thanks to my tenuous association with workplace psychology, I was invited to attend a managerial conference in a corporate hotel on the sunkissed banks of the M8. It was always going to be dreadful, but I attended out of anthropological interest and also because I thought there might be some free wine to be had. There was no wine, only orange juice, but I found the strength not to tear the place to pieces.

My souvenir of the day (or my “take-home” as these managerial types strangely say) was a single word: “rustout”. In contrast to the more familiar “burnout,” when a wage slave’s head pops from having too much to do, “rustout” is when he or she simply decays, physically and spiritually, because of boredom.

At first, it looks like just another pro-work idea. It makes me think of a Thomas the Tank Engine character who, not one for pulling carriages all day long, stays in the engine shed and falls to rust. “It’s train cancer, Percy,” says the Fat Controller, “and wholly deserved.” That is surely the intended implication of this “rustout” and apparently the word comes from a German expression that “he who rests, rusts.”

But what caught my attention is the distinction between burnout and rustout, partly in its own right as an observation of the two ways a job might destroy the soul, but also the that the managerial creed know about this, its headmen perceiving two diagnosable workplace conditions.

Unfortunately, the treatments they’re currently peddling leave a much to be desired. The working theory is that while burnout comes from too much stress, rustout comes from too little. Give the rusting worker more to do, they say.

My own experience tells me that office rustout comes not from being unstressed but from not valuing the mission of work full stop. It comes from knowing that no matter how you slice it, the whole thing is ultimately a waste of human life and you’re only there because there’s rent to pay. Boredom springs from the fact that office life doesn’t — can’t — provide spiritual rewards for a moist, creative, human brain. It’s not even supposed to. It’s an economic arrangement.

Under these conditions, even when you’re challenged by quantity or quality of your tasks, the challenge only exists within the meaningless confines of the Holodeck of the workplace. So how can one really escape rustout?

Don’t go to work in the first place. There are many ways to avoid reporting to a job every day, some of which have been covered in previous editions of this column. Avoid jobs wherever you can as, in the modern age, they are uniformly unsatisfying. Never accept a job and you’ll never experience rustout. With so much to do and experience, rustout does not happen in the real world.

If you must go to work, use your time at the desk to plot your escape. Instead of fantasising about a lottery win or a distant pension like other wage slaves, actively plot your escape. Consider self-employment, creative practice, reducing expenses and saving the difference to bring retirement radically forward; plot the steps you’d take to get such a project of the ground. A sitting position with the access to the Internet and a notepad to hand is no bad starting point for an escape attempt. The very act of finding moments at work in which to do this without the knowledge of one’s supervisors will keep things interesting and help to avoid oxidation.

Work part-time. Find a way (see this column in Idler 53) to reduce your employment to three days instead of five. Embrace minimalism and the anti-consumerist mindset so that you can afford the reduction in income. A three-day work week is not so bad: you have the novelty of a first day in the office after a long weekend, the relief of a hump day, and then the Friday Feeling before another long weekend. The diversity of feeling along your three days and the reduction in resentment about the work’s infringement upon one’s life will help you to avoid becoming a rusting shed engine.

Lead a good life outside work. Harry Hill once said a bizarre thing to a heckler, a retort now famous among comedians. He said “You say that to me now, but I know that when I get home, there’s a nice roast chicken in the oven.” What he meant is that he’s got other stuff going on, a private treat waiting for him outside his rather silly job. It’s easy to fall into a cycle of returning from work at 6pm to nothing but television and some utilitarian cookery before the desperate need to sleep. This is a considerably rust-promoting pattern and it’s a life your managers and employers are perfectly happy for you to lead, regardless of any noise they like to make at conferences about reducing rustout. Defy them.

Despite learning of the condition they’ve dubbed “rustout,” the solution proffered by office managers is to pile more work onto the bored wage slave, to find a balance between explosion and implosion. What kind of a world is that? Escape it.

★

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Escape the Hot New Thing

Originally published in Idler 62.

Patience, at the risk of sounding like an aunty, is a virtue. It really is. Patience keeps you sane when you’re waiting for a bus and, more vitally, is the key to escaping The Hot New Thing.

The Hot New Thing is a kind of curse. It leaves you forever dissatisfied, slurps the money from your wallet, shatters your sense of perspective, and wastes your time. It is fuelled rather negatively by what the kids on social media call “FOMO,” the Fear of Missing Out. It requires a lot of undignified chasing and “keeping up,” two things that are inherently anti-idle.

The Hot New Thing is also anti-idle in that it requires you to act! You have to tune in at a particular time, get yourself down to a certain place before it all runs out, gobble it up before the world moves on. Meanwhile, what we might call The Good Old Stuff doesn’t require anything of you at all. It’ll just float into your lap when you need it. You’ll be browsing the shelves of a library or flipping through the sale rack, and there it will be.

The Hot New Thing is expensive, not because it’s good but because it’s hot. It’ll be cheaper later on when it’s cooled down. In fact, it will probably be free later because the world won’t care about it anymore, and supply and demand will have relieved it of a price tag.

The Hot New Thing is rude. It jumps the queue. There you are, in your idler’s deckchair, minding your own business and savouring a lovely old Penguin, when suddenly The Hot New Thing pops up and demands attention. Well, I’m sorry but it can wait. You’re not obliged to pick up the telephone just because it’s ringing. Culture is not a whack-a-mole, to be anticipated in a state of urgent readiness and then seized upon and savaged. Life is not about rolling as much claptrap through your system as possible and getting it all safely into the outbox.

Worship of The Hot New Thing would have the world in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. Even as it’s happening, what professed to be The Hot New Thing is cooling and The All-New Hot New Thing is on its way. In the cinema, they show trailers for movies due for release in a month’s time or “next summer” or “in the fall,” and you think “Jesus, I’ve only just sat down to watch this one.” The film industry wants you excited for dinner before you’ve even had your breakfast.

The cultural filter that comes to your rescue when you escape The Hot New Thing is remarkable. When you live perpetually five years behind everyone else, only the finest things reach you because history has already had its way. This week I watched two good movies — Birdman and Nightcrawler — because their reputation as films worth watching has remained intact for five years, not through marketing but through evolution. The most popular films of the same year were called Transformers: Age of Extinction, The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, and Maleficent. Who cares about any of that lot now? What a load of junk! And yet at the time, they were The Hot New Thing. If you’d gone to see Maleficent on its opening weekend like a good little consumer you’d have wasted your time and money. You could have been enjoying the very best of 2009 instead and then, five years later, watching Nightcrawler and Birdman for 50p from a Glasgow Cancer Research shop, bypassing Maleficent, whatever that might have been, entirely.

And that’s just the five-year filter. I recently saw Network (1976) and Some Like it Hot (1962) for the first time. I read Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square (1941) — as recommended by John Newlands in the Idler letter pages — and Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936). These were joyful and surely among the finer fruits of the twentieth century, and yet cost not a penny thanks to the public library and a little patience. Good things remain fresh almost forever or are, better yet, timeless. A Beano from five years ago (5p on eBay or free in a dentist’s waiting room) is basically the same thing as this week’s Beano (£2.75). Good things come (there’s my aunty again) to those who wait.

Older books or films or records are too often seen as landfill or yesterday’s news. Worse still, anything with a whiff of “classic” about it might be consumed as some sort of wholesome moral roughage — that terrible feeling of “I really should have read Of Mice and Men by now.” Something old and whose reputation has survived is not necessarily high-minded or highbrow though. Think of Gremlins (1984) or Stephen King’s first five books (1974-1978) or Sherlock Holmes (1887-1927).

Speaking of Holmes, I broke my ethic of patience in 2010 to watch Sherlock on the BBC iPlayer as soon as it came out. I didn’t care for it. Cumberbatch is acceptable as Shirley but at least half the enjoyment of Holmes is the escape from modern life and onto the frosted flagstones of 19th-Century Baker Street, so a modernisation would need to add something extraordinary to make up for all those dreary, managerial skyline shots of the Oligarchs’ London, gherkins and all. Andrew Scott’s portrayal of Moriarty is almost as cringeworthy as everyone’s pretending to like it. Today, Sherlock, The Hot New Thing of 2010, is barely remembered and nobody seems to like Cumberbatch anymore at all. It never became The Good Old Stuff. I should have trusted my rule and waited.

You can enjoy The Good Old Stuff in peace without being cast asunder in The Big Conversation. Nobody’s interested in your thoughts about a movie from six or sixty years ago. Unless they are, of course, in which case you’ve got a friend worth keeping.

The wise idler allows things to age a little — to congeal and marinate in time — before letting them in. The wise idler is patient.

★

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

Outdoors In

Originally published in New Escapologist Issue Eight.

Fresh air is overrated. If it’s not carbon monoxide, my city-slicker lungs refuse to breathe it. A born urbanite, I prefer the human-made and the artificial to the natural. I’m perfectly happy for the natural world to continue unspoiled: I’d just prefer not to be in it.

People say that our built environment will be the death of us–the asbestos, the chemicals, the GM food and all that–but do you think nature wouldn’t kill us unthinkingly as soon as we give it chance? There are mountains that would collapse upon us without a moment’s consideration; oceans that would engulf us; tiny insects that would crawl up our piss pipes and lay their thousands of tiny eggs in the unnamed cavity within. All for no reason whatsoever!

There’s a book of mawkish animal photography called With Nature and a Camera. You know what I call it? With Nietzsche and a Camera. The natural world–the sublime, as artists call it–is as bleakly nihilistic as it gets. Nietzsche said “when you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.” Not in my experience. Looking out at the the sea, to me, is like looking into the unseeing glass eye of a taxidermied stoat.

Give me the indoors. Give me the city. Give me a bong and a box set of The Wire and fuck off with your natural world.

My experience of it is minimal. The last time I slept in a tent was at a music festival festival (as far from civilisation as I’m ever willing to stray) at which a fourteen-year-old twatofaboob started a barbecue mere inches from my head and almost kebabbed me in my sleep.

I once went “munro bagging” with some ignoramus colleagues. Far from being an attempt to seduce a waitress from a 1950s theme diner like I thought, it was actually a testosterone-fuelled clamber up a Scottish mountain high enough to have snow on the bastarding top. Needless to say, none of the things I brought with me were of any help whatsoever. It’s the last place on Earth you’d need to be wearing a New York Yankees costume. The headlines the morning after twelve librarians were airlifted from a mountain are not worth looking up.

And yet, Harmony With Nature is all too often cited as a key to the good life, a way to reconnect with our primal selves or something. Personally, I tend to reconnect with my primal self whenever I take a day off from work: I let my beard grow and roam around bellowing in my pants. But Tom Hodgkinson and his friends would have us “till the soil” and he seems happy. Journalist Richard Touv points out that a lack of nature in one’s life can lead to attention deficit disorder, depression, and obesity; and I’m living proof of that. So here’s a number of ways in which urbanite slackers such as myself might be able to merge safely with nature without it unthinkingly killing you in the process.

1. A fish tank

Short of a pet rock, an aquarium fish must be the least inspiring house animal of all time. They’re less of a domesticated friend than an aquatic prisoner. They don’t know who you are, don’t know how to relate to you, and I’ not even sure they’re aware of being in a tank. Fuck. They’re the Big Brother contestants of the natural world, forgetfully re-exploring the eight literal corners of their world, occasionally interacting with each other in the most perfunctory of ways, and living for the moment that the lid opens and they can suck up their tetra flakes, pinched onto the meniscus as if by the hand of God.

The great thing about a fish tank though, is that a whole ecosystem can be represented there: as well as fish, you can have plant life, algae, filth-gobbling snails. It’s a perfectly safe cuboid of nature in your own home. I like their long stringy turds too. Beats watching golf.

2. Cabinet of curiosities

If you’re a seasoned traveller or have friends who are seasoned travellers or have access to eBay, a cabinet of curiosities is a great way of allowing a sample of the outside in. River-polished stones; prehistoric fossils; paper-light small animal skulls; dried leaves and flowers; snake skins; anthropological pilferings: all objects you could add to your Victorian case of scavenged talking points. Not much of a joke is it, this one? I rather like the idea.

3. Pet Man

I used to have a pet man. He didn’t know he was my pet man, but the fish didn’t know they were my pet fish either. A glance out of my living room window afforded me a view through the curtainless bay window of one of nature’s most wretched specimens: a bachelor. He would sit, watching television, in his pants all day long. Around midnight, he’d fold his couch out into a bed, upon which he would sleep from midnight to noon. The effect from my perspective was of having a pet man, his one-room home a kind of human-being-itarium. “How’s your pet man?” people would ask me on the phone. A quick look out the window would qualify me to say, “He’s watching the television.” “Great!” they’d say.

4. Snow globe

The snow globe is nature safely contained in a glass blister. Terry Pratchett, in one of his books, calls them City Eggs, the idea being that a snow globe is the ovoid state of a living city: the landmarks of Paris or London or Cairo surrounded by glittery albumen. I love this idea. In the event that you ever have to go out into real nature, away from civilised society, take one of these City Eggs along with you as an emergency measure. Gawp into it and pine for home, remember the romantic smells of kebab shops and the sound of teenagers puking in the streets. When at home, as everyone in their right mind will be, give the snow globe a shake and imagine what it might be like to be in some weather.

5. One of those framed pictures of a woodland grove complete with trickling waterfall that you sometimes get in Indian restaurants

To complete the illusion of being in a woodland grove, why not buy one of those magic tree air fresheners from a car accessories store and waft it under your nose? Ah, fresh pine.

8. Christmas Tree

If you want to be able to smell real fresh pine, why not get yourself a Christmas tree? The best time to get one is when everyone else has thrown theirs unceremoniously out of the window on New Year’s Day. If your house is big enough, you could bring an entire discarded post-yuletide pine forest indoors and pretend you’re Tom Bombadil from Lord of the Rings. When somebody rings your doorbell, peek at them through the letterbox and, crouching in your indoor forest, quote from Tolkien’s best ever writing: “Hey dol! merry dol! ring a dong dillo! Ring a dong! hop along! fal lal the willow! Tom Bom, jolly Tom, Tom Bombadillo!”

7. A vivarium

Entombing living creatures in a glass menagerie? Why stop at fish? Spiders, stick insects, small amphibians, chipmunks, gerbils, mice, rats, earwigs, the unwittingly cloned homunculi of your human enemies. A whole world of small animals are eagerly waiting to be incarcerated in one of your artificially-regulated dioramas.

8. Bonsai

Even safer than a brick of fish is a miniature forest on your own desktop. To the Western agoraphobe, the Japanese art of bonsai might be the most interesting natural microcosm of them all. A stunted tree is a great way to observe nature in miniature. You won’t be expected to climb the tree–wheezing fatly and scuffing up your converse–nor will it burst a root through your living room floor in a hundred years time. Best of all, there’s probably a Japanese Hikikomori type out there somewhere, admiring a miniature English oak from the comfort of their closet. In a way, the two of you are married.

9. Yoghurt

The oldest empire on the Earth. Bacteria! Open a Yakult and look at it for a while. Ask it a question. You are at one with microscopic nature.

10. A David Attenborough DVD

Ah, safety. Watching a David Attenborough DVD is like a return the womb. Except that you’re probably not surrounded by amniotic fluid. If you find that you’re surrounded by amniotic fluid, you should probably see someone about that, as you may unknowingly be some kind of really awful serial killer. Aside from that fact, watching a David Attenborough DVD is like a return to the womb. If the womb was anything like a living room with a DVD player in it. Which it’s not. Womb.

11. Your own self-confirming prejudices

Unless you really want to go outside, why not take a stroll through the primitive Holodeck of your own imagination? Slap on an eye mask, and take a walk in the exotic wilderness of your brain. Try and imagine what nature might look like, feel like, smell like. Don’t worry if it’s too smelly: you can imagine up a thermostat-like dial and turn the pong down. If you find yourself involuntarily fantasising yourself crushed by an avalanche or impregnated by a parasitoid wasp whose larvae devour you from the inside out, you should probably either see a psychiatrist or simply not use your imagination again. Board up the windows and place an advert in the Exchange & Mart and be done with it.

Nature. It’s what’s for dinner.

🌲

If you enjoyed this story, (a) shame on you, and (b) please consider buying my books A Loose Egg and Stern Plastic Owl for countless other flights of fancy.

Escape the Snip-Snip Tyranny of the Barber

Originally published as “Cut Back” in Idler 64.

Hairdressing? What a scam! Just because hair growth itself is inescapable–advancing like the undead, imperceptibly but inevitably–the barbers think they’re inescapable too, that we’ll come crawling back in six weeks’ time for more of the same abuse. Well, I’m calling them out. You think you’re so special with your handlebar mustaches and your oh-so-hilarious “cock grease,” but it’s just a pair of scissors, mate! Anyone can do it.

Samara and I have been cutting each other’s hair. It hasn’t even made us look insane and it categorically has not involved a pudding basin. Once every couple of weeks, we put a beach towel down on the floor, position a chair on top of it, and once the sitter sits, we get stuck into our loved one’s head.

I was nervous at first. I didn’t want to give my favourite person a wonky haircut and for her to have to go out the next day looking like Jim Carrey in Dumb and Dumber. Worse still, I was afraid I might hurt her. I didn’t want to sneeze and then to look down and see my beloved’s ear floating in a cup of tea.

But fear is worth fighting–and so is the world of barbering–so the experiment was worth a shot. It would feel good to learn something new after so many years of unlearning things while sitting in barbers’ chairs, staring mindlessly into the purple parallel universe reflected in the barbicide. “I’ll do it,” I said, and we invested in a pair of cordless hair clippers. Here’s what we found:

1. You save money

Our journey into skull topiary began when Samara was charged £30 at a women’s hairdressers for a cursory trim. She’d recently had her hair cut into the rather fetching pixie style, and while £30 always seemed pricey in the past, it was now downright ridiculous.

This has been a longstanding inequality, hasn’t it? That women should pay so heavily for the haircut a man would get for a fistful of bollock-warmed pocket change including various expired coins and a small plastic washer. Women with short hair could conceivably go to a men’s barbershop, but they’re often refused and frankly, even I with my humongous penis don’t feel comfortable in the hyper-masculine world of the barbershop with its football and “banter” and somethings-for-the-weekendses. My girlfriend’s desired Mr Spock haircut can be achieved in about five minutes, so such a high fee is illogical, Captain.

2. Never talk to a hairdresser again

I wish I could agree with friend of the Idler Bill Drummond that barbers are worthy of being interviewed for an art project. I’m sure they’re as interesting as anyone else if you get to know them properly, but in the fifteen-minute intervals I’ve spent with them on a strictly economic arrangement, they usually expose themselves as, well, somewhere on the reactionary side of normative and, in any case, incapable of following instructions. I’m absolutely certain they’re not all like this but my last hairdresser, after muttering something appalling in response a radio news item about Israel, scratched my ear with the scissors, drawing a spectacular geezer of blood. Being able to say “if you prick us, do we not bleed?” was almost, but not entirely, worth it. Also, my unasked-for Playmobile haircut looked like it was on sideways. So yah-boo to the lot of ’em, all the way to wherever it is hairdressers go when they die. Hell. That’s the one.

3. Stay sharp

Thanks to the frugality and convenience of home barbering, you can do it whenever you like and, as such, stay perpetually sharp. It becomes regular maintenance like shaving or trimming your toenails. You never have to endure periods of having slightly-too-short hair or hair that is overdue for a cut. You can do it on a whim, whenever you like. We now cut each other’s hair every couple of weeks, a regularity that would have been too expensive before.

4. It’s easy and fun to learn

There is something in the region of seven million styling tutorials available, for free, on YouTube, and the people who present them tend to me funny and adorable. It also suggests that removing one’s own surplus fur in the interests of creativity and self-sufficiency is on the rise among young people, which is a heartening thing.

5. Creativity

I like how hairstyling is a bit arty, a way to bring some creative sauce to everyday life. We can take inspiration, bring ideas into life with ease, follow up on styles we’ve seen about town or in films. I’m currently working towards a David Lynch look myself–that is, the hairstyle of David Lynch himself, not a hairstyle inspired by the general ambiance of Twin Peaks. That’s too creative.

6. It’s a nice way to give each other attention

As a way to spend time together, it’s a nicer and more engaging activity than watching the latest platter of twaddle served up by Netflix. If you do each other in the same evening, it serves as a little bonding exercise, like a couple of monkeys grooming each other. I like to luxuriate in combing her hair and generally paying tribute to her through this small act of personal service. It’s nothing short of a way to show love.

It makes me think of my Grandad whose hair was trimmed weekly by my Nan. We all found this very, very funny at the time (why didn’t the tightwad just go to the barber like anyone else?) but the decision to bring this particular service in-house now strikes me as wise, loving, and frankly, a little bit punk rock.

You don’t have to have a partner to bring hairdressing in-house. Your hairdressing technique can be completely self-sustained so long as you’re happy with a simple style. Some Japanese monks shave their heads themselves, every morning according to writerly monk Shoukei Matsumoto. You can even buy a special gizmo for a fiver on eBay that lets the monastically-inclined make quick work of a one-man crewcut.

6. Bring it in-house

Cutting your own hair or that of your partner is part of a broader parable about ceasing to outsource important duties. Duties like cleaning, repairing, gardening, cooking and childcare can be outsourced to professionals in various ways, but these are precisely the things we should do for ourselves if we seek to bond with our immediate environment (as a flaneur does), to live mindfully, to live beyond commercial or consumer concerns, and to live the truly idle life. It was always a paradox of idling that we take personal responsibility–the DIY ethic of punks–to live more freely in the long run.

So give it a go, I say. You’ve nothing to lose: in an absolute worst case scenario, you’ll need to shave your head down the wood. But you’re unlikely to trepan anyone. If you have a significant other, cut their hair (if they want you to — and not in their sleep — or yours) and ask them to cut yours. It’s a lovely night in, saves money, lets you be a bit creative, and gives you an enshrined-in-law right to chuck a brick through any barbershop window*.

*it does no such thing — Ed.

★

If this resonated with you, you’re probably already doomed so you might as well buy my books Escape Everything! and The Good Life for Wage Slaves for additional wisdom from the goblin king.

The Sex Life of H. G. Wells

H. G. Wells was a very sexual being. He wanted you to know this.

“Let’s get it on,” he would say, “and this time let’s put some stank on it.”

Yes, H. G. Wells–professorial chubbychops, writer of Mr. Britling Sees It Through, and all-round Proper Old Chap–secretly wrote a book, which I am reading, about his career as “the Don Juan of the intelligentsia,” or, to update the parlance, his life as an absolute shagger.

Wells sealed the manuscript into a box, using goodness knows what adhesive, leaving stern instructions for it to be published only after his death, when he could be fairly sure they couldn’t catch him.

Don’t worry, I’m not here to gleefully reveal H. G. Wells as problemattic–“Not Wells!”–but rather the contrary. I’m actually a bit miffed at the book’s lack of sauce. I’m afraid I made up the line about putting some stank on it.

I’d been hoping for descriptions of a frisky H. G. Wells squirming among the velour cushions of his ornate and brass-knobbed time machine, plucking a candlestick telephone receiver from the gilded dash and bellowing into it, “get the poppers out, Maura, IT’S NAUGHTY TIME,” before zipping promptly home to put some hot breath on a butt plug.

“Maura, I have returned and I’m partial for it!” I hoped he’d call up the stairs, before compressing an unlikely wall panel to reveal a hidden doorway, a golden glow cast upon him from the brassy domes of The Latest Devices within.

“The steam-driven rump padeller,” I wanted him to say, his eyes twinkling over a cityscape of potential intrusions, “the gentleman’s personal gentleman… and, ah yes… Mrs. Beaton’s Christmas Special.”

And then Maura would appear, dressed as an Eloi.

And then an Eloi would appear, dressed as Maura.

But no.

I am, I should say, only half way through the book, so there’s still hope we’ll be treated to such beautiful scenes, but there’s been an unexpected lack of imaginative rumpy-pumpy so far.

He never propositioned a chimneysweep, never asked for time alone with the Mechanical Turk, never ordered a zoo animal to his rooms under the pretense of science, never telegraphed Houdini in a state of panic (“MY DEAR DISCRETE ERIC. STOP. REQUIRE KEY FOR A SCOTLAND YARD STANDARD ISSUE BRACELET No. 12. STOP. ASKING FOR A FRIEND. STOP.”), and never bored a hole in a melon.

“I have never,” Wells implies with his silence on the matter, “taken a neckful of hot Victorian chod.”

Look. I’m not saying people should try such things if they’re not completely into them, but he describes himself over and over in this here book as a libertine. It’s libertine this and libertine that, but so far as I’m able to tell, he only has about six notches in his bedpost and it never once crossed his mind that he could lower himself onto it.

And that’s fine! But it’s normal, not libertine. It’s like saying, “I’m mad for ice-cream, me” and confessing you’ve only ever tried strawberry. One word, H. G.: Choconut.

One might almost say his life was chaste when you remember he was a celebrity, loved by all. In fact, it was probably the law in 1910 that anyone crossing paths with “The Marvellous Mr. Wells” must take their trousers off and await his instructions.

“Tell us a story about your day, Grandpapa.”

“Ee, well, it were a right honor to be asked to serve as an on-street toast rack to the great futurist, Mr. H. G. Wells…”

I realise it’s a bit strange that I’m getting bent out of shape about things that didn’t happen a hundred years ago. I just think it’s a shame is all. Entering that mouth, I’m sure you’ll agree, would have been like going through a car wash, sudsy bristles rubbing along the roof. And all the while, you’d be thinking, “I can’t believe it. The tip of my dingus is but inches from the brain that gave us Kipps!. Two inches, now three inches, two inches, three inches…”

Still, despite his dissapointing lack of imagination in the bonking department, he was no stuffed shirt and it’s nice to think of an elderly H. G. Wells finishing a bowl of soup and then harumphing off to write his sex memoir.

Fine. I accept it. H. G. Wells was a sexual fellow. Vanilla perhaps, but sexual.

And now at least we know where the inspiration came from for those tripods.

🍆

If you enjoyed this story, (a) shame on you, and (b) please consider buying my books A Loose Egg and Stern Plastic Owl for countless other flights of fancy.

Good Morning

Oh my God, what a night.

I woke at 4:30 from a terrifying dream. It was just like in the films. I sat bolt upright, panting and confused, not entirely certain of where I was.

As I tried to shrug it off and go back to sleep, I found myself sliding into the clutches of the nightmare again (oh no!) so I decided to rinse my brain by putting a podcast on.

Adam Buxton was interviewing Charlotte Gainsbourg and, for several minutes, all was right with the world again.

Just I was drifting off, the podcast was interrupted by an unfamiliar twinkly-bleepy noise. I ignored it because, although I’d not heard such a thing before, we do have slightly spotty Internet that occasionally interrupts streaming videos and the likes. Besides, I was already falling asleep.

The podcast returned. And then failed again. Returned and failed again. I was in the process of sleepily concluding that I should pluck the bud from my ear and ignore whatever technological shenanigans were going on, but I’m extremely glad I didn’t because of what would happen next.

“I’m a comedy writer,” said Charlotte Gainsbourg, “but I don’t just go for the lols.”

What? Even in my state of half-sleep, I realised that the voice in my ear had ceased to be Charlotte Gainsbourg and that the phone must have inexplicably skipped to a different interview.

Then the the twinkly-bleepy noise happened again, followed by a robot voice saying “this selection is unavailable.”

But!, my sleepy brain struggled to object, I’m not trying to select anything. What is at work here? Did that Thing escape from my dream?

The twinkly-bleepy happened again and then the robot voice said, “Now Calling… Wentworth.”

What?

Beat.

Oh my God!

I scrambled for the handset and, sure enough, “WENTWORTH. CALLING….” was displayed on the screen and I was thankfully able to think quickly enough through the sleepfug to terminate the call before connection.

What the fuck was going on? Why was my phone trying to call my friend at 4:30 in the morning without my say-so?

It was a crazily narrow escape. It would have been embarrassing to have to explain to my older, wiser pal that I’d had a scary dream and that my phone was acting independently and I was not yet certain if the two things were related.

If I’d have plucked the ear bud–or already fallen fast asleep–and not heard the “Now calling…” warning, the call would have connected. And if the ghost in the machine hadn’t chosen Wentworth, it could even have dialled the number of, say, my agent or a publisher or a local news station.

I still don’t really know what happened but, short of paranormal phenomena, I’m guessing this has something to do with the pound-shop hands-free kit I’ve been using to listen to podcasts.

There’s a microphone on it, so perhaps it interpreted my senseless nocturnal mouth noises as “skip” and “call Wentworth.”

Which is crazy. I don’t, to my knowledge, have a voice activation system installed. Can this have happened? Is it possible? Am I a clueless grandpa now, completely alienated by technology? Are ghosts real? And if they are, why are they fucking with my smartphone? And who am I talking to right now? Are you real? Am I?

You know, I think I’ll go back to bed for a bit.

Apologies in advance if I call you.

Coin Slot

A cut passage (a murdered darling) from my manuscript:

I put my palm on the trepanned head of a plastic guide dog to steady myself. As I regarded its coin slot, it seemed to sing that I should pop my door key inside it.

It had to go because it required too much explanation. Not everyone, especially overseas, knows what these guide dogs are, and to explain it would kill it.

I’m also not sure how recognisable these mad thoughts are to ~~normies~~ the hinged.

Parasitic Wasps

Friend Kristin has read my moth diary and she’s keen to tell me about a “natural” solution involving parasitic wasps.

Apparently you release the wasps at home and then seek out any unhatched moth eggs, feasting on them as the world’s grossest caviar.

Unleashing some wasps is immensely appealing, but I can’t help wonder if the situation wouldn’t get out of control. What, prey tell, will eat the wasps? Before you know it, you’ve entered an “old woman who swallowed a fly” situation and you now have a rather impractical horse infestation and you’re spending your evenings filling out the import forms on various apex predators. Your little West End flat becomes known as the spot where passersby are routinely plucked off the street by tentacles. We’d never get post again.

As it happens, the pheromone trap is doing rather well, our ten-moths-a-day murder count now reduced to one or even fewer. The trap now resembles a luscious moth-wing carpet, which I now plan to use to repair the various holes they’ve made in an act of mortal irony.

You Come Home From Work

You come home from work and you turn the television on. Something’s wrong. Inspector Morse is on every single channel.

You thump the top of the set in a caveman bid to escape John Thaw’s stern face but your hand passes through the set with a sickening tear. The television set is made of paper!

The knobs and dials are paper, the remote control is paper, the set-top aerial is a triangle made from paper.

And that’s how you discover YOU’RE IN THE ARMANDO IANNUCCI SHOW. It’s 2001 again and you’ll have to come home the long way.

You’re On Holiday

You’re on holiday in California, admiring the view at Big Sur, when you approach a local to ask for directions.

The man panics. “It’s no good!” he shrieks, looking around helplessly, “I can’t do it!” and then he leaps into the canyon.

Only the canyon’s not a canyon. The Californian passes through it with a sickening tear and runs on and on into an impossible white distance.

And that’s how you discover YOU’RE IN THE TRUMAN SHOW. It is Season 3 and the ratings are in the toilet.

After the Storm

It’s been an atypically social week, something friendly lined for every single night and three of the days.

So many pint glasses and ticket stubs has meant putting my Street Fighter health bar into the red and storming the treasury in a way not strictly compatible with the lifestyle of a twenty-first-century person of letters.

My idle self feels happy to have blown a week off so decadently, but as I look at the week’s spoils, it’s hard not to feel a pinch of dismay. Was fun had? Yes. Was your heart or mind opened even a crack? Oh yes. How’s your manuscript coming along? Quiet, you.

Climate Change Does Not Spark Joy

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.”

This One’s Fine

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.

Stevedor

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.

Jingle Jangle

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.

Owly

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.

Shadows on the Wall

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.

Why Did I Look?

I peep onto Twitter because some people have messaged with regards to the record player query.

I haven’t looked at Twitter for a while and I quickly regret it. It’s full of people talking absolute whazz in a deplorable tone. They’re not deplorable people (many of whom I know in real life and would gladly kiss on the mouth) but there’s something about social media that pumps up the blood pressure and the only way to stop it from bursting through the top of the cartoon thermometer is to tap out something horrible to the world and then to click “tweet.”

In response to my record player question, someone has said something like “fine, be a hipster if you like” and I see where he’s coming from but it’s the tone. Nobody has ever spoken to me like that at this blog or by email. I remember Tom Hodgkinson saying something about how newspapers with social media or comment sections have a responsibility to act as pub landlords, the publican being able to curate their clientele by barring the trouble-makers and designing a place that doesn’t actively attract unpleasantness. That’s ultimately what I’ve been trying to do with this website and New Escapologist.

Tomorrow I’ll send the newsletter version of this diary to 150 people, a microscopic number of eyeballs in Internet terms, but, thanks to today’s Twitter “experience”–if that doesn’t degrade the meaning of the word–I’ll be extra glad to do it. I think of Jaron Lanier saying “what if deeply reaching a small number of people matters more than reaching everybody with nothing?”

I suggest on Twitter that maybe it would be a safer and happier platform if people could opt out of the likes system. Those choosing to opt out would never again court popularity over quality, nor would they be made to feel inferior for not winning “enough” likes. Naturally, nobody likes or RTs or probably even notices my tweet, lost as it immediately is in the maelstrom.

When I’m done dirtying myself on Twitter (some of the tweets are perfectly helpful and friendly), I go for a walk. I notice that someone has moved the bricks, not out of the bin shed but at least into a position where some of the higgledy-piggledy bins can fit more properly into their nooks. More info when I have it, bin shed fans.

Wasp Fancy

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…”

Postbag

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:

Thousands of Tiny Perforations

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.

The bricks are back

Good Lord, the bricks are back. Someone must have seen them blocking the entrance a little and moved them. But instead of thinking “let’s get these out of our lives” and moving them to the bulk uplift area on the street, they’ve returned them to their previous place in the bin shed. They must have thought, “hey, that industrial rubble isn’t where it normally sits!”