The Occasional Papers

People are getting better at the “practice” versus “practise” rule. Have you noticed?

Bloggers get it right more often than not now. Submissions I receive for New Escapologist, even when they’re terrible, get “practice” and “practise” spot-on.

It’s like when supermarkets a few years ago started describing their express checkout lanes as being for “five items or fewer” instead of the incorrect but time-honoured “five items or less.”

You see, “practice” is a noun and “practise” is a verb. It’s “an artistic practice” but “practise makes perfect.”

I’m a bit of a grammar pedant with strong feelings about ugly words, but I’m sorry to say I’ve been left behind on this “practise” business. For me, it’s all “practice” and always has been, but apparently that’s the American way.

For once, I distance myself from the pedants. It can all, I think, be “practice.”

I still prefer “foetus” to “fetus” though.

This just in:

I finished Rub-A-Dub-Dub today. It has been a most treasured summer read for me. Brilliant and funny (I think I averaged one chortle per page). Hit me in the way the best Kurt Vonnegut books do: a humane portrait of the absurd, futile and grotesquely beautiful enterprise of being human.

So fuck this guy.

One chortle per page is good whack, by the way. The book is 281 pages, making it better for your abs than any kind of workout.

And this is the sort of thing I like to see:

Found another one at my parents’ house. Dime a dozen.

Conventional wisdom: got a mouse? Act fast!

Samara: well, we gave him a cute name and some backstory.

Aaaand, we’re Kickstarting again.

Here’s where to go, if you’d be so kind.

Not too many of these left on Planet Earth.

I gave these out at gigs in 2008. Made by Eric and Tommy.

Alan Yentob died. I used to think I was the only person who liked him. And I did like him. I thought he was cool.

But Amol Rajan’s tribute to him is something else:

Engaging, witty and endlessly curious, he brought energy and warmth to every conversation. He was generous with his time, fierce in his convictions, and full of joy in the work of others.

To work with Alan was to be inspired and encouraged to think bigger. He had a rare gift for identifying talent and lifting others up – a mentor and champion to so many across the worlds of television, film and theatre.

Modern art never had a more loyal ally. His shows were always brilliant, often masterpieces, sometimes seminal. So much of Britain’s best TV over five decades came via his desk. That was public Alan. In private, he was magnetic, zealous and very funny, with a mesmerising voice and mischievous chuckle. He oozed fortitude until the very last.

He had his foibles and failures, but Alan Yentob was one of the most generous, influential, singular, passionate, supportive, creative and loved men of his generation. I commend his spirit to the living.

Now, that’s a loved man. Imagine a colleague saying that about you!

Some favourite Yentob things:

1. He is one of the “men” in Nigel William’s Two and a Half Men in a Boat.

2. BBC’s Arena arts documentaries – here’s my playlist of about 50 episodes scrounged up for rainy day viewing whenever they appear on YouTube. I wish the BBC would put all of them online in an archive – there were hundreds of these made, as well as Monitor, Ombnibus, and Imagine strands.

3. Dickon Edwards’ 2006 account of being on Imagine: “Mr. Yentob is nowhere to be seen.”

4. A 2016 Guardian profile of Yentob, “the last impresario.”

5. Cracked Actor

In an empty elevator this morning, I used the mirror to squeeze a zit.

It was a luxurious experience. The mirror was huge, wall-to-wall. The lighting was bright and even. What better opportunity for an act of minor surgery?

Just as I was getting to grips with it, a tiny voice said “hold the lift,” but it sounded distant and surely not for me (this was a bank of six elevators).

A woman slithered in sideways through the closing doors. “Oh sorry,” I said, “Did you just ask me to hold the lift?”

“Yes, but that’s alright.”

“I was just using the mirror to squeeze a zit,” I said.

“Ah.”

“So I wasn’t being an arsehole,” I said, “Just disgusting.”

Glad we got that cleared up.

Thanks to a Rub-A-Dub-Dub reader for telling me about the Society of Fat Mermaids. Fantastic.

There’s a moment of phone scrolling in the novel where Mister Bob plausibly stumbled upon this. Let’s choose to believe he did.

A neighbour is setting up some deckchairs and a picnic table on the back court.

This is what I call “the Glasgow rain dance.”

See also: “summoning a postman” (drawing a bath).

The view from our back window is fairly depressing. We live three floors above a busy commercial street, so our “back court” (the area where wheelie bins thrive) is actually the flat roof of a restaurant, all stainless steel extractor fans and outlet vents.

We can see various neighbours’ back courts at their vista of junk, including mountains of seldom-touched outdoor children’s toys, dropped bicycles with training wheels still attached, and hopeless lockdown purchases: mini trampolines, hooded barbeques, not used since we moved downmarket almost four years ago. There’s a fridge-freezer out there, and a never-again-to-be-collected wheelie bin with planks of wood burping out of it.

What frequently cheers me up though, when looking out of said window, is the sight of my downstairs neighbour walking his cat.

The cat is quite a fancy longhaired breed, but he seems to cooperate quite demurely with his master’s antics.

He’s not even on the lead today.

If you have a bite of apple after a bite of sandwich without waiting long enough, it tastes exactly like your school lunch box.