The Occasional Papers

Pull up a pew, male readers. There’s a way to go À Rebours between three and eight times a day without even pausing to think about it. Yes, I’m talking about sitting to pee.

“But that’s what ladies do,” says a twat I know called Jeff.

But what’s wrong with that? I like ladies. And I’ve definitely had more lady friends than Jeff, possibly because my shoes aren’t spattered with wee.

“It’s lazy,” objects my friend Dan, who seems to think that a complete unbuckling and debagging is somehow less effort than opening the fly and unleashing the thunderprawn.

Sitting to pee is the superior and admirable act of an Übermensch.

For starters, it’s an opportunity to read. While you’re sprinkling urine all down your shins, I’m learning something. Sitting also means you don’t have to switch on the blinding bathroom light if you need to make a midnight dash.

When sitting, you no longer piss on the toilet seat or the floor or your shoes. Why would you want to piss everywhere? You know someone has to clean that up, don’t you? You may even have to clean it up yourself. Why are you pissing everywhere?

You can take your time if you sit. Life is busy. A bathroom break can be a nice retreat from a hectic world. The one in my old office was certainly a bastion to me. I’m not sure I could have survived a single working day without punctuating it with lengthy toilet breaks in which I could gather my thoughts in privacy. The lavatory is my Fortress of Solitude, and there I shall make my stand, or rather, my sit.

You can do a bonus poo. Yes, you might end up passing an unplanned solid. This bonus offloading can only be helpful to your body. To the minimalist, it’s a no-brainer.

It leads you to appreciate a fine piece of Victorian industrial heritage. I have mixed feelings about the Industrial Revolution, but one indisputable marvel of the nineteenth century is the porcelain throne. The cistern and the sewerage system are incredible feats of engineering. In terms of infrastructure, the labyrinth of sewers beneath our city streets is as mind-boggling a testament to human ingenuity as the Internet. Make the most of it. Sit on it.

You can reject the bestial. In Primo Levi’s Holocaust memoir he mentions his bunk mates urinating “bestially” while walking around the room. I know the free man doesn’t walk around while peeing, but there is certainly something animal-like (or at least ungallantly drive-thru) about standing to release the yellow cable.

It frees the hands. If you touch neither the seat nor your sweaty old kok with your hands, you’re unlikely to get germs on your fingers and pass them into your mouth. In public washrooms, other men have pissed on those seats you’re lifting. It also frees the hands for other masculine activities such as reading the business pages, smoking a pipe or knitting a manly tea cozy.

You don’t have to remember to return the seat afterwards. I live with a ladyperson. A lot of my male friends also live with ladypeople. Some of the cooler bars I go to have unisex bathrooms. A number of my friends are cohabiting female couples. I want to help usher in a world where women don’t have to worry about falling in. You may accuse me of Utopian thinking, sir, but it’s easily achieved. Since I never lift the seat, I don’t have to remember to replace it. And so this oft-cited source of frustration between men and women can be eliminated.

It’s bonus sitting time. Obey gravity and relax. What’s the point of fighting for a seat on a crowded bus or train if you’re going to voluntarily stand in this other situation?

You can be an Internationalist. American men are behind the curve when it comes to sitting to pee. In Germany, sitting to pee is actively encouraged. The German word for one who sits is a sitzspritzer. Probably. There has even been a mass installation of little gadgets into German public bathrooms, which make irritating noises for the duration of a seat being in the upright position. In Japan, 40% of men sit to pee. Some Muslim men sit to pee too because it’s seen as disrespectful to pray (which Muslims do every few hours) in unclean clothes or shoes.

Standing while pissing is so white-bread. Join the rest of the world and take a seat.

Never get a bus. That’s my policy.

Whenever I betray my policy, I live to regret it.

But every now and again–for reasons always elusive–I like to say “bugger the policy, let’s get the bus.”

I suppose I like to stick it to the man. Even if the man happens to be me: sober, reasonable me from the past who learned his lesson in being disappointed by buses and vowed to always stick to the policy in future. What does he know?

This is why, tonight, Samara and I found ourselves standing and waiting and swearing and waiting and hoping and waiting and waiting.

Do the drivers try to stick to the schedule any more? Do they even know there’s one?

(Somewhere in a bus terminus east of Montreal, a snoozing man thinks Maybe I should have told them about the schedule. Ah, they’ll work something out).

Walking is always better. You get home faster. I know this because it’s what I normally do. I almost always choose to walk precisely because of situations like this one teaching me (almost) a lesson.

Waiting tonight in the sticky heat, a skunk had blown off somewhere to make things more interesting.

I’ve never seen a skunk. Only smelled them. They are stinky phantoms of the night.

I should never have betrayed the policy.

I suppose we could have started walking once it became clear that the bus wasn’t coming any time soon, but it was always clear that the bus wouldn’t come any time soon. That’s why there’s a policy.

Sadly, when you’ve been waiting for twenty minutes, you’re invested: you have to carry on waiting until it comes, even if it takes until the Sun goes nova and swallows us all.

Never get a bus, I think, It’s so beautifully simple. Why didn’t I stick to the policy? The policy! The policy!

A raccoon trundled across the street. I wondered how he would interpret the skunk smell, but didn’t have time to witness it because the bus arrived just as things were getting interesting.

The bus finally ambled into our lives. It was acting all normal and reasonable as if it weren’t half an hour late in the middle of the night. Perhaps predictably, it was crammed with frustrated sleepy people.

It was one of those long buses with a concertina middle, so it looked like a bendy straw packed with meat.

We found ourselves crammed in between a twelve-foot-tall Rastafarian man and a tiny old woman with an eye patch.

The driver was playing opera on the radio.

“That reminds me,” said Samara, “I saw the opera singer on the bus this morning.”

I imagined the opera singer muscling in among the commuters in his tuxedo, rumbling a libretto. The passengers would throw flowers.

“Was he singing?”

“No,” she said, “He was wearing shorts.”

“Oh,” I said.

“I don’t like that at all,” said the eye patch woman, “it’s hard to picture an opera singer on a bus wearing shorts.”

“Very disconcerting,” said the Rastafarian.

I agreed. Why would an opera singer be wearing shorts on a bus? We will never know.

The night bus rumbled ever onward.

For all I know, I nodded off and we’re still on the night bus. Or worse, we’re still waiting for it and I slept through the raccoon/skunk reaction.

Maybe we’re all still waiting for the night bus and we’ve all nodded off.

Night bus. Night bus.

Night bus.

It came to me (as all good things do) while lolling in the hammock and watching the clouds go by:

Why, I wondered, (why?) is there no Sausage Fest?

There are plenty of sausage fests, obviously. Just pop into an online sexy chat room or a real-life Laser Quest and you’ll probably see one. But I’ve never heard of an actual Sausage Fest.

It’s so obvious.

Sausage Fest 2014 would be a massive village fate or food festival completely dedicated to sausages.

As well as various sausage-tasting marquees and meat grinder demonstrations and Noble History of Everyone’s Favourite Offal Format displays, you could have sausage-related fun and games like Sausage Wanging, Guess the Weight of the Sausage, Chipolata Bobbing, and (of course) Hide The Sausage.

“Name That Meat” could be a fun carnival game in which you pay a pound to studiously nibble a diskette of sausage and shout “pork!” only for a carny dressed as a butcher to pull surprising words like “stoat” and “chickpeas” from golden envelopes.

You could spend many a fine hour playing Find the Sausage In the Haystack, impress your date with Sausage Test Your Strength, take in a Highland Games-style Sausage Toss and (for the kids) Pin the Sausage on the Donkey.

Good clean fun.

I’d draw the line at running a Punch and Judy Show. You wouldn’t want to stir the attendees up too much with the idea of sausage theft. Festival Security are going to have a hard enough time as it is.

Over in the live entertainment quarter, you could have sausage-related bands like Grinderman, Longpigs, The Jazz Butcher, and of course Sausage. £35 entry, SJs (Sausage Jockeys) after midnight.

Absolutely no Richard Bacon.

If budget permits (and why wouldn’t it? This’ll be a smash) you could have other stages like middle-brow sausage poetry, sausages of the world, sausage burlesque, and a stand-up comedy tent for sausage-based jokes (though I for one can’t come up with any).

Given the name “Sausage Fest”, I wouldn’t want people getting the wrong idea about it. To make sure there’s no confusion, we’ll have hunks in lederhosen giving out knockwursts at the door.

After a few years, you’d start getting well-seasoned sausage crusties who remember how Sausage Fest was better in the old days, before the new fence was put up. The new fence is not in the spirit of Sausage Fest (even if, as an electrified fence, it happens to be useful for cooking sausages on) and neither are those new corporate big-brand bacon marquees you get now. Sausage Fest used to be about the sausages. Now it’s just about American-style weenie roasts and feeding the capitalist sausage machine.

But for now, it’s such a good idea. Who wouldn’t come to Sausage Fest? The advertising campaign is a no-brainer. Unlike some of the sausages.

We should immediately open an Olympics-style bidding process for the city or county best equipped to host it. This will be little more than a formality, obviously. I think we all know who’s going to host it. Cumberland.

Hamburg, Worcestershire and Brussels already have things going on with Burgerstock, Camp Saucy, and Sprout Fest.

As a vegetarian of course, I will be protesting Sausage Fest. And as a writer I must object to any sausage-based puns and innuendo. No, Sausage Fest is not something this writer could get behind.

I went into hospital today for a CT Scan.

A CT Scan is the one where you’re slid backwards like a car mechanic until you head rests inside a giant freestanding doughnut. The doughnut is made from the exact same shiny white plastic they use for stormtrooper helmets on the Death Star.

Even though I knew the procedure was simply a bit of follow-up to the minor operation I had on my nose recently, CT scanners are used so often on TV as visual shorthand for “scary cancer-related medical procedure”, I don’t mind admitting that the machine made me feel a little nervous.

As I lay on the flatbed (it’s a scanner remember), wondering what would happen next and whether it was possible for something to go wrong and for me to emerge from the machine with a head like a baked potato, the technician came in.

“Hello,” I said.

“Hi,” he said.

He looked more like an IT support guy than any kind of medical professional. He wasn’t wearing scrubs like everyone else I’d seen around the department but a red tee-shirt and baggy bluejeans. He was young and stubbly and had that eternally dreamy look that you get on people like Edward Snowden.

A total stoner.

“What can I expect?” I asked by way of confessing to nervousness, “Any flashing lights or sounds?”

“Nope!” he said cheerfully, “You’ll see absolutely nothing!”

“Nothing?”

“Nah, you’ll be completely blind.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Because I’m going to give you this blindfold to wear.”

“Oh, okay.”

I got the impression that the blindfold was a kind of pacifier given to people they suspect of being nervous nellies who might panic in mid-scan and fuck everything up. People like me.

He put the blindfold over my eyes. It was just a thin piece of gauzy cloth, about the size of a bookmark, and almost entirely see-through. It was the worst blindfold I’d ever seen. I thought about the other people it had comforted though, people with cancer, and how they were braver than me. Definitely a pacifier.

“It takes about two minutes,” he said.

Two minutes my foot. He was placating me again. I’d be dunked in and out of the machine in about twenty seconds.

“It’s terribly painful,” he said.

“What?”

“Just kidding,” he said.

“Fuck you very much,” I didn’t say.

He left the room (I could still see through the blindfold) and looked at me through the window of the control booth.

“Okay, the machine is going to start now,” he said through a wall-mounted radio, “You don’t have to do anything. Just stay very very still. Or you’ll be immediately killed.”

“Har-Har,” I said, but I’m not sure he could hear me through the glass.

As the conveyor belt thing maneuvered me into the giant free-standing doughnut I closed my eyes just in case I really was supposed not to see anything, and decided to scare myself by pretending I was Walter White in for a scan.

This is something I do a lot of. Whenever I’m waiting on a subway platform and I hear the train approaching, I think to myself You’re definitely on the platform and not on the tracks, right?

I don’t know why I do this.

It scared me too much, so I changed my fantasy. I now decided I was having my head dunked into the Guardian of Forever and that, if I were lucky, I might get a look up Joan Collins’ skirt.

I don’t know why I did that either.

“Okay, that’s it,” said the technician’s voice on the radio. “Come on out.”

I was surprised to find I was no longer in the doughnut, that I’d been maneuvered out of it again.

I stood and walked out of the room. It felt rude to just leave without saying goodbye face to face. After all, this guy had seen inside my skull. So I went into the technician’s booth.

On his computer screen was a high-resolution image of a cross-section of the top of my head. I was slightly irritated by how huge my nose looked from that angle. A real Concord.

If anything, I’d expected a kind of grey and general image like when people photocopy their arse at the office Christmas party or what I assume the airport security people see when they’re operating the nudielator.

“Hey look,” I said to the technician, “That’s my brain.”

And it was. I’d never seen my brain before.

My brain. My home. Was this how my grandparents felt when they looked down at their house in that helicopter ride on their fiftieth wedding anniversary?

My brain. The source of my ideas and hopes and fetishes and phobias. My whole universe.

“I know, right?” said the technician, “and it’s so small.”

Well obviously.

Is is possible to be timesick, in a similar way to being homesick?

When I awoke this morning it was still dark. This is strange, I thought. I normally wake around 10 or 11 and only then because the needle on my internal caffeine-o-meter has dipped into the red.

I looked at the glowing red digits of the alarm clock and saw that it was 4:35. Very strange indeed. I’d only gone to bed an hour and a half ago.

It did not take very long to find why I’d been woken in the middle of the Canadian night. “Mother”, the computer who looks after our ship the Nostromo had detected an alien presence on a nearby asteroid and thought it might be fun to defrost the crew so that we could go lumbering around in the alien’s egg sacks, getting yawn-raped by facehuggers.

Wait, not that.

No, I’d woken early because…

because…

I was going to be sick.

I dashed to the bathroom and evacuated a mysteriously undigested veggie burger I’d eaten (or at least chewed) seven hours ago.

Now obviously, this was the cause of my illness. Something had gone wrong and my supper had proved indigestible. But the strange thing was that the only image present in my mind at the time of the puking was a public transit turnstile covered in ancient dust.

Let me explain.

Earlier in the day, I’d stumbled upon a YouTube video in which a high school history student had been granted access to an abandoned monorail station at the Merry Hill Shopping Centre in Dudley where I grew up.

Some of my first tastes of freedom (being allowed, at the age of 10, to go out without parental accompaniment) took place in that shopping mall. Riding around on the monorail with friends was no small part of that. (I remember being on it once with Snot Rag and a boy called DT whose flat head and acne made him look as if he’d been set on fire and beaten out with a shovel).

At the time, the monorail–a neat electric train gliding soundlessly over the stinking, motor-centric Midlands–seemed like something from an impossibly exciting future. Specifically (and this may have been the reason it closed down) it was from a rather obsolete idea of the future, a healthy Jetsons future characterized by clean and elegant ways to travel between pleasure gardens and geodesic domes.

They closed the monorail system in 1996 and eventually dismantled it. I have a strong visual memory of sections of the track being lifted out by cranes.

For one reason or another, one of the four monorail stations was never dismantled and simply left attached to the mall as a curious and inaccessible little vestige. To this day, you can see it if you walk or drive by. I’ve always been curious about it, assuming it had been converted into a storage unit or a base for mall cops.

Anyway, the YouTube kid was granted access to the station and, joy of joys, it looks exactly as I remember it. The signage, the schedule, a schematic of the New York-inspired station names (Central Station, Time Square, Boulevard), the red digital “train arriving” displays, the eerily-still-functioning wall clock, and some monorail-inspired drawings done by children of a nearby primary school who will now all be adults.

After a while, this little tour of the monorail station began to give me the willies. A piece of my adolescence almost perfectly preserved, it seemed to split my brain quite jarringly into two separate eras. After a couple of minutes, I began to think it might still be possible to hop onto the monorail and go hang out in long-extinct Jolly Giant toy shop.

In a way, I’m overjoyed because almost everything from that period of my life is now all but completely changed, but there was something impossibly dizzying about knowing that this was still there. In theory, I could be there myself in a couple of days.

It was the image of the dust-covered turnstiles I couldn’t shake from my mind this morning as I puked up my veggie burgers in a Montreal toilet, 3000 miles and 18 years (or so I thought) away from that Monorail station.

And that, my friends, is timesickness. Obviously, my actual sickness was just because I’d eaten something which hadn’t agreed with my stomach, but it felt exacerbated by some kind of night terror about this unexpectedly survived remnant of my childhood. I’m perfectly happy with my adult life but this unexpected leak from the past reminded me too jarringly that what’s gone is gone. Except, you know, for the bits that aren’t.

*

Hungry Hippo scams? Fly resuscitation? Geiger counters for Christmas? If you’ve been enjoying this strange weekly weblog (41 weeks now, chain unbroken, universe undestroyed) perhaps you’d consider backing my forthcoming book at Unbound.co.uk.

“My wife has a beard of bees.”

“My wife no longer requires this bowling trophy.”

“My wife’s incisor is stuck in your dreadful peanut brittle.”

These are just some of the phrases which, as of this week, I have the right to use. In fact, I could now use any one of an arsenal of wife-based phrases.

Yes, Samara and I were married on Monday the 28th.

Tax dodge.

Also love.

Neither of us could quite face the shame of a full synagogue wedding, so we hired a rogue Rabbi and a portable chuppah for a home ceremony with just six guests. It was lovely. Other relatives joined us for a little cocktail party afterwards, with music and merriment and fancy cakes. It was a good day, and it left us both very happy.

I also got a coconut out of it. Dear Diary!

My new mother-in-law (an entire untapped genre of jokes open to me there, incidentally) had read in this very diary that an item on my bucket list was “to drink from a real coconut”.

“You remember that bucket list item you mentioned on your blog?”

“To eat the first-prize giant vegetable from a county fair?!”

“No, the coconut one.”

“I’m listening.”

Some of the guests remarked on how easy it would be to drink from a coconut and that it wasn’t really worth putting on a bucket list. But where are those people now? Toronto mostly. And let that be a lesson to them.

The idea of drinking from a coconut has appealed to me since January this year when I’d anticipated getting the chance to do so in Hawaii. Sadly, the bars there only seem to serve the world-famous Hawaiian piña colada in plastic coconuts. What kind of crap is that? A plastic coconut? Get some class. Real sophisticates drink from real coconuts.

And today was the day. Monday 28th will always stand out in my memory as The Day of the Coconut. And for some other stuff too.

We soon found out that opening a coconut with even the best kitchen meat cleaver is like trying to get into Princeton armed with an Applied Learning Certificate from Dudley College.

It’s not like peeling a banana or shelling a cashew. (Not that I was there, of course. I was busy playing Boggle with the Rabbi.)

After failing to trepan the cursed drupe with all manner of kitchen utensil and a few screwdrivers and chisels, my mother-in-law resorted to an electric saw.

Digging through the basement for a power tool capable of opening a coconut is probably not something most women imagine doing on their daughter’s wedding day.

My mother-in-law is fucking metal.

The electric saw worked like a charm and, a miniature paper parasol later, I was a married man slurping whisky and coconut water from the shell of a real coconut.

If only my childhood self could see me now. He’d probably say “What the fuck? What are you doing in Canada? And what’s that, a coconut? We were supposed to be an astronaut. Jesus Christ.”

The wedding, needless to say, was lovely.

“My husband never seems to have any change.”

“My husband dances in supermarkets, libraries and lifts.”

“Apparently, my husband runs a blog about our life together.”

Just some of the cool phrases I imagine Samara’s looking forward to using.

I had a minor operation on my nose a couple of weeks ago. Not a full Joan Rivers you understand, but a no-less-exciting (and long overdue) procedure to help me breathe properly.

Somehow, I’ve been alive for over thirty years without actually taking a proper breath. Needless to say, this lack of oxygen is entirely to blame for every failure, mistake and error of judgement in my life so far. It is good to have a clean slate now. At last, with air running freely through my hollowed-out conk, I can get on with finding success™!

The day of the operation was quite an exciting one. The only moderately traumatic part was the anesthetic injection, which had to go right up my nose, into secret far-north nasal catacombs I never knew existed. I thought I was an expert in nasal excavation, but apparently there are schnoztic depths to which even I had never ventured.

It may have been my imagination, but I’m fairly certain I could feel the tip of the needle scraping the top of my skull from the inside.

Next, a nurse had to “ground” me. I’d assumed that the surgeon would be using a scalpel to conduct the operation itself, but he actually used a futuristic Star Trek-style laser device for which I had to be “grounded” by some kind of earth wire attached to my [rippling] stomach [muscles]. It was pretty amazing.

The smell of burning proboscis flesh, incidentally, smells exactly like barbecued beef.

Delicious.

All of this means, of course, that I’m no longer a member of that most wretched of all social out-groups: the mouth breathers.

So long, mouth breathers! I don’t need your friendship any more, for I have ascended. What’s more, I was never really your friend at all! Hahah! All the time you were talking, I could only gawk into your massive, wheezing maw as if you were something to throw balls through at a fair.

Mouth breathers, I tear up my membership card and I eat the pieces. You may notice that I can breath while chewing. Necromancy, I know.

Sadly, the last couple of weeks have involved some post-operative chicanery and I’ve been obliged to join the second-most wretched of all social out-groups: the people who use nasal sprays.

Hi there, nasal sprayers! Please be my friends. Pay no heed to the disgraceful way I retired from my position in the Mouth Breathers’ Club. I will never betray you, my favourite new friends.

Nasal sprays must rank among the all-time most arcane and uncharismatic objects in the world, along with ear trumpets and balaclava helmets. While you’re certain someone must have used such things at some point in history, you can’t quite believe that anyone uses them in modern times. There must be at least one ear trumpet or balaclava helmet currently in existence, but you can’t quite recall witnessing their usage.

Imagine my surprise then, when I discovered a whole section of the pharmacy dedicated to nasal sprays. There were about seven-thousand different sprays to choose from, each poised and ready to be squirted up the snouts of the nation.

I chose a spray called a “Saline Nasal Mist” because it was cheap and the description of it as a “mist” felt slightly luxurious.

It wasn’t a “spray” like something a cat would do up a garden fence, but a “mist” capable of caressing my nasal cavities with its soothing mistiness.

Sadly, the French translation on the bottle is “Vaporisateur nasal salin”. No soothing mist for the French. Just a cold, industrial “vaporisateur”. Spare a thought for the unmisted nez.

The instruction on the bottle is to “use for daily hygiene and for rinsing of nasal mucous membranes” with no reference to the operation I underwent. Given that there are so many brands of nasal spray available in the pharmacy, people must be using nasal mists for fun.

Recreational use of a Nasal Saline Mist is perhaps the most perverse thing I’ve ever heard of. If you’re doing it, stop it immediately and turn yourself into the police. Or at least take comfort in the dignity of a less-disgusting vice, like pornography or hard drugs.

In the meantime, however, I am obliged to carry on using the Saline Nasal Mist for the duration of my nose’s convalescence. *squirt*. Ah, that’s the stuff.

17. Eat the first-prize giant vegetable at a village fair.
22. Do a “dark reboot” of my signature.
56. See the original “dogs playing poker” painting (Louvre?).

On Wednesday evening, we reviewed our bucket lists. Samara only ever had one item on her list. To touch a penguin. We did it in 2011, which is why we can’t go back to Sea World.

My list, on the other hand, contains 147 different items, arranged in descending order of priority with colour-coded tabs and guesstimates of fulfillment dates. Needless to say, I’ve not done any of them.

11. Sleep at a Draclia’s house.
12. Drink from a real coconut.
33. Stop using the word “guesstimate”.

One item, I’m slightly embarrassed to confess, is:

49. Learn how to throw a punch.

“Pfft” said Samara, “I can teach you that.”

Samara and I have been together for five years and though I probably suspected it intuitively, I didn’t know she contained so much chin music.

“Uncle Felix,” she explained.

Ah yes. Uncle Felix.

“First,” she said, “you’ve got to stand properly.”

We got out of bed.

I always knew I’d end up sparring in my pajamas, but I never thought it would be with Sammy.

She adopted a stance of frankly terrifying solidity and I tried to mirror it.

“No, silly!” she said, “Like this! At shoulder’s width. Ground yourself.”

After few aborted attempts, I finally got it. I never knew standing could be so complicated.

“Did we remember to send Uncle Felix a Christmas card?” I said.

“Right,” she said, “now show me what you’ve got.”

“Pardon?”

“Show me what you’ve got,” she said, “Punch into the air.”

I thumped, fairly impressively I thought, into the air. I was like a Mantis Shrimp. Samara rolled her eyes.

“Okay,” she said, “that wasn’t so bad. But try doing it more like this.”

Her fist tore through the air like something from Mortal Kombat II. There was a whooshing sound as the air got its shit together and filled the gaping cavity she had left in it.

“Crumbs,” I said.

I don’t think I’d ever been moved to say “Crumbs” before.

“The key,” she said, “is to start with your fist facing upwards like this,” (she demonstrated) “and to twist before you connect.”

“Blimey,” I said. Familiar territory, blimey, but it came out involuntarily.

“And,” she said, “this is the clever part. Aim a few inches behind the object you’re punching. That’s called following through.”

The way she said “following through” made me feel as though I should be writing it down. But all my sharpies and page tabs were in the other room.

“Hmm,” I said.

I punched the air in the way she had instructed, keeping my defensive left fist near to my chin, like I’d seen boxers do on telly.

“That’s great!” she said.

“It is?”

“Yes!”

And that’s how my girlfriend taught me how to properly snotter someone.

Maybe she can help me with:

122. Eat a raw onion without wincing.

Well that’s the end of me.

I have a hammock. Nothing will ever get done again.

I’m supposed to be writing a book (three books actually) but now there’s a hammock on the scene I can’t imagine how this is all going to work out.

No successful author could ever have had a hammock. You’d never get past the words “This book is fondly dedicated to my hammock, without whom…”

Actually, Somerset Maugham liked hammocks. His resolve must have been nothing short of extraordinary to clamber out of his softly rocking cradle every so often to shit out a few lines of Liza of Lambeth before waltzing, giddy with industry, back to the hammock and conking out again.

The thing is, when you’re in a hammock nothing else matters. The only thoughts that can occupy your drowsy mind when you’re in a hammock are things along the lines of aaah, hammock and aaah, hammocky-wammocky and I wonder how much longer I can stay in the hammock?

The answer to the latter question is inevitably “oh, a long while yet” because there’s always more time for a hammock. There is no higher state of being.

In my case, this is quite literally true. We live on the fourteenth floor and our hammock is out on the balcony.

Naturally, the view across the Montreal Plateau is spectacular but Samara is concerned that she might come home from work one day and find that her partner has Charlie Chaplined himself over the railings somehow and has found himself Harold Lloyding from somebody’s flagpole over L’avenue du Parc.

I keep assuring her that it’s probably fine.

I spent the better part of yesterday afternoon rocking side to side in the hammock, eating honey directly from the pot with strawberries and toasty soldiers.

This is the life of a contracted writer, folks. A fucking disgrace.

Needless to say, the honey soon attracted hornets. They were extremely persistent but it’s hard to be angry with much of anything, let alone insects, when you’re in a hammock.

After convincing the hornets that they weren’t getting any honey, I spent the next half hour nonsensically singing “Bees, bees, the musical fruit.”

I think the summer heat is getting to me.

Luckily, you don’t have to work very hard when you have a hammock, even if you wanted to (which you don’t). There’s nothing to work for anymore. You have a hammock. You’ve made it.

You certainly don’t need vacations any more because the only place you want to be is in your hammock. The need to impress people by, say, dressing nicely or not being covered in honey seem like a pretty shallow suggestions from a hammock.

That’s why there’s that song, “If I had a Hammock”. Believe me, if I had a hammock (and I do), I’d hammock in the morning, I’d hammock in the evening. All over this land? Oh yes.

On Canada Day–the day on which the whole of Montreal uproots itself and, in a citywide Mad Hatter’s tea party, swaps houses–I had intended to help my brother-in-law move into his new apartment, but instead I stayed in the hammock, watching the clouds form and re-form, safe in the knowledge that industry was happening everywhere but here.

Horizontally, I wrote a few words of a letter to friend Fraser and had a bash at doing one of those sudokus. I don’t really understand what you’re supposed to do though, and the exercise was distracting me from enjoying the hammock properly so I just drew happy faces where the numbers are supposed to go before checking the answers page on the off change I’d cracked it with lateral thinking. (I hadn’t).

From a hammock, you can make believe that you’re a sailor, a Mayan, an explorer, a baby, or a ferret. But not if you don’t want to. You don’t have to do anything ever again.

Lots of walking this week.

As deliberate leisure activities go, a stroll is up there with pruning bonsai trees, blowing smoke rings, and of course the all-time Number One.

I am lucky to have a life with so much walking in it. The alternative would be unbearable. Consider the tedious effort of car ownership: trying to decide whether you should be more worried by the “rattly noise” or the “clanky noise” and rubbing the damn thing with Turtle Wax on Sunday mornings when you could be watching Spongebob on the telly or playing mouth trumpet in a bubble bath.

As a perpetual pedestrian, you’ll never catch me in a place called “Jiffy Lube” or haggling with a man in a blue boilersuit over something called a “flange compactor.”

Admittedly, you might find me in a place with a name like Jiffy Lube and buying something with a name like flange compactor, but that’s my own business.

Naturally, my insistence on walking (combined with my refusal to wear a watch or carry a telephone) infuriates my friends because I’m always late for everything. For years, I thought the opening scene of Titanic was the bit where DiCaprio drowns and makes a face like a poorly frog. I must have been late to the cinema.

Walking is a way of getting exercise without it being a big event. I need never suffer the spandex indignity of the gym. On my regular Friday walk, I happen to pass a gym window through which I see people on treadmills, sweating profusely but going nowhere. I feel like a wild sparrow seeing a canary in a cage, swinging on his trapeze like a little yellow doofus.

Walking is a guilt reducer. Because of the frequent exercise, I feel less guilty when I eat a massive cake, which is often. And because of the carbon emissions I’m not farting out of a car, I can feel less guilty about flying to Honolulu for the third time in a given winter.

When walking, you see things you wouldn’t see from a car. You see the masonry and statues at the tops of buildings, which leaves you with questions like “Why is there a statue of Aristotle in Wolverhampton?”.

You see clouds forming and reforming in the sky. You see women in lululemon yoga pants of questionable opacity picking up their dogs’ poos, and suddenly your problems don’t look so bad.

More than anything, walking keeps you sane. It finds for you a few moments of solitude, in which you can mull things over and solve your problems by barely thinking about them. Solvitur Ambulando is Latin for “it is solved by walking.” Probably.

There’s always a story to tell after a walk. In Montreal, I once saw a hawk plummet from the sky, seize a smaller bird in its talons and fly off again into the night. Nobody saw it but me.

If that doesn’t do anything for you, I once saw Scroobius Pip eating a Twix.

Walking is quite literally the way forward. All you need are shoes. And feet. And clothes. Maybe a mustache. But that’s optional.

“We should try a Žižek film one of these nights.”

“I’ve seen one,” said Samara, “The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema. It was very good. Saw it at Neil and Laura’s place.”

Neil and Laura live on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. Samara has never visited them without me, yet I have no memory of the four of us sitting down to watch that film.

“You wouldn’t remember it” she said, “because I watched the film with Laura. You and Neil were playing Monopoly and screaming at each other because one of you was the shoe.”

“Oh,” I said.

I can’t say I cared for the breezy way she said “one of you was the shoe”.

Monopoly, for me, is no trivial game. It’s about long-term strategy, the tactical balancing of reason with lust, and the game’s inherent satire of the real-life capitalist system. The thrill of crushing your opponent’s stupid face into the dirt is pretty great too.

You don’t just win suddenly like in Hungry Hungry Hippos or Mr Pop. You torture your opponent over the space of about a fortnight.

If Neil and I had been “screaming at each other” it was certainly about something more complex and passionate than one of us being the shoe.

I imagine it was something to do with Neil not liking the taste of my dust.

“As a point of fact,” I said to Samara, “it was nothing to do with who was the shoe.”

“So it was about the dog then,” she said.

It occurred to me, horribly, that she was right. Neil and I had argued about who was going to be the dog.

Neil likes to be the dog because his surname is Scott and the dog token–a Scottie–matches his name.

But I also like to be the dog because it’s the only token that’s based on a living thing.

“No,” I lied.

“I see,” she said, “You completely missed that film–a quite sexy film, actually, in the company of your girlfriends in their pajamas–because of who got the Monopoly dog.”

The thing is, I just can’t empathise with a cannon or an iron. I just can’t care if a boat goes to jail.

I suppose being the car would at least make free parking more exciting. Otherwise you’re just a shoe in a car park. That’s no way to become a wealthy hotelier. Not even on Park Lane.

Obviously, if we’d been playing Star Wars Monopoly, none of this would have happened. In Star Wars Monopoly, I’m equally happy to be Chewie or R2 or Leia. (My mother always chose to be Vader, incidentally, which tells you all you need to know about life in our family).

“I just like the dog is all,” I said.

I couldn’t bring myself to add that our racket had also been about the hat.

Neil’s second choice of token is the top hat, but I like my dog to wear the top hat so I need both pieces.

A dog can’t go to town without his hat. I stand by that. There are more important things in life than sexy philosophy movies.

Even now, six days later, I get a shudder when I think about the microwavable pie on Lord Wellington’s countertop.

The pie smelled of month-old diarrhea and it was his lunch. He’d already taken a bight.

He didn’t seem to mind or notice that the pie smelled of month-old diarrhea.

We had taken advantage of some warm weather and walked into town, bringing with us a selection of paperbacks to sell to the second-hand bookshops.

We took our books first to Lord Wellington’s shop. Stinking pies aside, it’s the best second-hand bookshop in the whole city.

I’m always slightly nervous about approaching Lord Wellington because he seems to hate all books and anyone who reads them.

You never know if he’s going to grouchily buy your books or bludgeon you senseless with a remaindered copy of The Ladybird Book of Hate.

Today he said:

“Put them on the counter. I’ll take a look when I can.”

The shop was completely empty of customers and there was nothing I could see (the stinking pie?) to prevent him from sizing them up immediately.

He was just being, as they say in these parts, a dick.

Eventually, he gruffly told us that “there’s nothing I can use here” and we left with our books still in hand.

Once outside, we burst out laughing.

There were some really good books in the batch: modern classics by people like Anthony Burgess and Philip Roth, precisely the kind of books he sells for $8.

We’d been prepared to give them up for basically nothing. Lord Wellington had simply been in a spiteful frame of mind and it had cost him about $100.

That kind of dough could keep him in stinky pies for ages.

We went instead to another book dealer called Haruka. A book of baby names in his very shop tells me that his name is Japanese for “far out” or “distant”.

In the event that I’ve eavesdropped inaccurately and his name is actually Haruki, then his name means “clean” or “cleaned up”.

None of this means anything. He is both filthy and close.

This little tour of two book shops is the way it always goes when we want to offload books. We always try Lord Wellington first because on the rare occasions he buys books, he pays in cold, sexy cash. Haruka, on the other hand, takes everything indiscriminately but only offers store credit.

The problem with getting store credit from Haruka is one of diminishing returns. We’ve read almost all of his books: literally the very copies on his shelves.

For all I know, we are his only stockists and his only customers. He just sits there waiting with the door open in case we drop by.

Haruka’s shop is jammed full with books that used to be ours. It’s a solid cuboid of our paper and our fingerprints.

The effect is quite eerie. The place is like a tribute to our apartment. I’m thinking about giving him all of our furniture when we eventually leave town so that an exact replica of our apartment might live on.

We struggled to find anything we’d not already read and didn’t already have our own coffee rings on it, but we were determined to spend some of our credit.

It was not so bad, hunting for fresh books in there. Haruka doesn’t eat stinky pies and he has a green parrot who occasionally says something.

Previously, I’ve heard the bird say “gonads” and “pamphlet”.

We grudgingly settled on some books that might be tolerable.

Looks like this is going to be the summer of Nick Hornby.

“Isn’t that Tony Millionaire?”

Samara is steadier on her feet in the world of cartoonists than I am.

In fact, she’s generally better at keeping track of people’s faces full stop. For much of my childhood I thought that Danny DeVito was Bob Hoskins and that Bob Holness from Blockbusters was the skeleton from the Scotch videotape adverts.

“Yes,” she said, “That is Tony Millionaire.”

It was hard to believe. I like Tony Millionaire a lot. And, an illustrator, Samara is in quiet awe of him. And he was sitting right there like a normal person.

We were at an indie press fair. All around, earnest young people sat behind trestle tables laden with exquisitely mimeographed fact sheets about exciting new genders, four-panel photographic comic strips made at the denouement of a pilgrimage to the last remaining chemical photo booth in Winnipeg, and potato-printed tales of lovely woe.

Ravenous throngs jostled.

Tony Millionaire sat behind a trestle table too, but in front of it was a circle of emptiness because the comics fans recognised him and they were shy about talking to him because he created Billy Hazelnuts.

I’m a big tall idiot though, so I marched right through the sacred circle and said hello to Tony Millionaire.

“Hello!” I said, “You’re Tony Millionaire!”

“Yes!” said Tony Millionaire, rising chirpily from dormancy like a fortune-telling robot on the end of a pier, “the famous cartoonist!”

I had known he was Tony Millionaire already. Because Samara had told me so. And Because he was clearly and horrifically Tony Millionaire.

I extended a hand and he shook it kindly.

“How’s it going?” I asked, “What are you up to?”

“It goes pretty good,” he said, “I’m hawking copies of my latest book. They’re forty dollars.”

He slapped the top copy as he said “forty dollars.”

“Nice,” I said.

“It’s a treasury!” he said, “All my work from the last twenty years.”

“Oh,” I said, “I’ve already got most of your work from the last twenty years. I mean, my partner has.”

It was then Tony Millionaire noticed Samara.

“Oh,” said Tony Millionaire, looking down at his notes, “Well, that’s great.”

Just as I was debating internally whether I should tell Tony Millionaire that he was the third or fourth Tony I’d met that week (I was vague on the numbers because one of the “four” Tonies was not a human being at all but a shoe shop called Tony Shoe) I suddenly noticed that an odd shift in atmosphere had happened in the room.

Tony Millionaire, the famous cartoonist, had been made shy by my girlfriend being the proud owner of much of his work and existing.

Samara is so lovely that she can make famous cartoonists–of whom all other cartoonists are shy–shy.

“Hey!” I said to Samara, trying to lighten the mood, “It’s Tony Millionaire!”

“Yes,” mumbled Tony Millionaire, “the, um, the famous cartoonist.”

“The what?” said Samara, blissfully unaware of what was going on.

“The… famous, um, cartoonist,” he said.

“He’s selling his new book,” I said.

“Yes,” said Tony Millionaire, “they’re, um, forty dollars or something.”

“Jesus Christ,” said Samara, “No wonder they call you Tony Millionaire. Eh?”

“Yesm,” said Tony Millionaire.

*

Tony Shoe once met a famous person too. There’s a signed photograph of Peter Faulk on the wall there, who allegedly once bought some shoes from Tony Shoe.

It was the summer holidays of 1992 and my little sister and I were running around some ancient monolith or other when we came across a grounded flock of pigeons.

We weren’t stupid. When we came across a grounded flock of pigeons, we knew what to do.

No pigeon was ever safe when we were around, especially when we happened to be on holiday somewhere like the Rollright Stones or the Newgrange Megalithic Passage Tomb.

We were almost certainly missing Batman on the telly and we already had the sillies in us because moments earlier we’d spotted an earnest-looking young man dowsing for ley lines in a homemade pyramid hat.

Those feathered cretins were for it.

And so we careened into them like a couple of insane-with-mischief, unleashed dachshunds, tongues lolling, sending the pigeons flying and shitting into the skies.

“Yaaaay!” we said, and “Whoooo!” and “Heeeeeya!”

This was the business.

On holiday, out of school, surrounded by mysterious standing stones and we’d even been given a flock of pigeons to send flying flapperty-flap.

We were in Heaven.

Or possibly Devon. As I say, I can’t remember which holiday this happened on.

We watched as the pigeons circled the undoubtedly Cornish (or possibly Scottish or Welsh) skies as pigeons are wont to do.

We wondered if they would be so audacious as to return to their pecking grounds and risk a second menacing.

But suddenly, two old women appeared from nowhere.

Such an occurrence would not be remarkable if we’d been hanging out by the fountain in Dudley marketplace or by the statue of the horse called Albert in Wolverhampton town centre, but sudden biddy appearance is a spooky thing when you’re on holiday somewhere like the Avebury Circle or the Ring of Brodgar, the mists swirling.

Stomping around Pagan Britain with your Mum and Dad is all well and good until supernatural harridans are summoned.

We weren’t stupid. When spectral hags popped up, we knew what to do.

We acted casual.

I idly kicked at an imaginary bit of thing and whistled the melody from the theme tune of Rolf’s Cartoon Club.

My sister sunk her hands into the pockets of her Ivy the Terrible dungarees and rocked cutely from side to side.

The crones meanwhile fixed us with glowing white eyes before continuing on their way, pretending to admire the Henge or whatever it was.

“There are a lot pigeons around here,” said the first old woman airily.

She said it to her sister but clearly meant for us to hear her.

“Yes,” said the second old woman, “And one or two pigeon bullies too.”

Yaaaaah! She was talking about us. We were pigeon bullies.

We weren’t stupid. When you’re passively-chided by gay-for-pigeons elderly sisters in the presence of the dolmen of Trethevy Quoit or the cairn-circle of Moel ty Uchaf, we knew what to do.

My sister blew a very loud raspberry in their direction and I made a farty gesture with my arse and we ran away.

We did not look behind us in case the old women had vanished or we’d angered them into revealing their true batrachian forms.

It would be a modest day’s work for them to magically stop the hearts of a couple of tiny and perfectly innocent pigeon bullies.

The wickedest thing I ever did was convince my little sister that the orange hippo was the hungriest one.

Aged 9 and 7, we sat on the living room carpet playing the game. I’d just won my eighth “campaign” when it all kicked off.

I know this for certain because it’s all recorded for posterity in my hand-decorated Hungry Hungry Hippos log book.

“WHY ARE YOU ALWAYS WINNING?!” she snapped.

My sister isn’t a bad loser by nature but I’m certainly not the best winner and, looking back on it, my celebratory dancing and waggling of my posterior in her face could have been taken as provocative.

The subsequent cocky posturing can’t have helped either.

“In life, Katherine,” I said, striding around with the swaggering self-importance reserved for firstborns, “there are winners and there are big fat smelly losers.”

“AAAAAAEEEEEEEEEE!” she said and made a lunge for me over the game board, scattering marbles hither and–to some extent–thither.

“Okay, okay,” I said, not wanting to get cooties all over my “Bedrock Olympics” tee-shirt depicting Wilma and Betty throwing stalactite javelins, and Fred and Barney attempting to play soccer but finding that the ball has been mistaken for an egg by a broody Dino, much to the amusement of Bamm-Bamm and Pebbles.

“If you start behaving in a civilised fashion,” I said outrageously, “I will let you in on my strategy.”

“How can you have a strategy?”, she spat, “This isn’t chess. It’s Hungry Hippos.”

“Hungry Hungry Hippos,” I corrected her.

“IT DOESN’T MATTER! There’s no strategy! You just mash away at the levers and the luckiest person wins.”

“Tsk, tsk,” I said, pushing my luck further than luck has ever been pushed before or since.

I’d seen Tsk Tsk printed in an Enid Blyton book but I didn’t yet know it was supposed to represent a tutting noise and so I pronounced it outright as “Tusk, Tusk”. Even so, it was deliciously derisory.

“Tsk Tsk, Katherine. If you were more attentive you’d know that one of the hippos is hungrier than the others.”

She mulled it over.

“The orange one?” she said, observing correctly that I’d selected the orange hippo. I always selected the orange hippo. I was playing the long game.

What she had not observed is that I also made a point of sitting with my back to the fireplace, taking advantage of the fact that the living room floor was ever so slightly sloped in that direction.

“Yes,” I said, “The orange hippo is the hungriest of all four hippos. A wise old man once told me…”

“THE ORANGE HIPPO IS NOT HUNGRIER! IT IS THE SAME AS ALL THE OTHERS! MUM! MUUUUM!”

I nipped a toke from an imaginary pipe in what I imagined was a professorial manner.

“Not so,” I said, sinisterly adding, “And don’t cry to mother. I assure you that she cannot hear you.”

“WAAAAAH!”

“The Orange Hippo appears hungrier,” I said, “because of it’s unusual hue. You see, it’s the only hippo not painted in a primary colour.”

This was a lie. One of the hippos was green.

“Orange, being a mixture of red and yellow, has twice the gravitational pull and so the white marbles are attracted to it like a magnet. Here, you try it,” I said.

We swapped places so she could witness first-hand that the orange hippo was the hungriest. The slope in the floor served its purpose and for once my sister won the game.

She was convinced. I really had her believing that the orange Hungry Hungry Hippo was hungrier than the others.

A few days later, she came along proposing we play a certain game involving a quartet of semi-amphibious pachyderms, one of whom, she thought, had a bigger appetite than the others.

“Yes, I suppose I could come out of retirement,” I said, cracking my hippo-slamming fingers.

“But I want to be the orange hippo,” she said.

“Naturally,” I said.

We set up the board as usual on the living room carpet, I sitting in my usual spot with my back to the fireplace but my sister proudly with the orange hippo before her, leaving me with the yellow hippo.

Needless to say, another eight victories were added to my log book in an overly-deliberate, even pantomime, fashion. She was furious.

★

Katy got her own back on me a few years later. We were driving, as a family, along the motorway to Rhyl. It was raining and our father was impressing us with his ability to predict when the rain would intermittently stop.

Needless to say, the rain only stopped when we happened to drive beneath a footbridge. My sister caught on very quickly and was soon joining in on predicted the stops. “Stop!” she’d say and the rain would momentarily stop.

“You must have worked it out by now,” said Dad, laughing.

I mulled it over.

“Holes in the clouds?”

☁️

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 acts of evil.

Why must it always come back to sport? Why can’t the world love me for what I’m naturally good at?

“Honey we’ve been through this,” says Samara, “people just don’t give medals out for swearing.”

It’s a bastarding oversight if you ask me.

As an immigrant to Canada, the easiest way for me to integrate seems to be to take an interest in hockey. After all, I’ve already eaten my body weight twice over in poutines and nobody seems interested.

It has not been so easy though. I’ve never been a sports fan. It took me three “hockeys” to stop referring to the game periods as “movements” or “acts”.

But I’m sincere! A month ago, at the dawn of the Stanley Cup playoffs, I officially adopted the Montreal Canadiens (“the Habs”) as my team by placing a modest wager for them to win the cup. Every two days now, I go along to a pub or to my in-laws’ house and marvel at the Habs on the television as if they were exotic sea horses in a tank.

I’m happy to say there’s far more to the Canadian national sport than one might imagine. There’s genuine peril. The referees for instance wear water wings in case the ice should melt and they plunge fifty fathoms.

Excitement is also heightened by Hockey Voodoo: a complicated system of rituals and superstitions surrounding the game. Otherwise sensible Montrealers go around alphabetizing their shirts for luck and pirouetting over pavement cracks.

“Don’t say we’re going to win!” they say, “You’ll jinx it!”

“We’re definitely going to win,” I say, and then they have to go and stand in a corner to quickly recite the seven-times-table while stroking a horse shoe to neutralize the jinx.

You can even, it turns out, directly control the players with your mind.

“Focus!” my father-in-law shouts when one of our players takes a shot. And I do it. I do it for Canada.

When I hold my mind in just the right way, that puck is in the back of the net. I just have to be careful not to direct my psychic energy too hard in case I accidentally shit myself.

So far, the gentle guidance of my psychic command has won eight games for us out of twelve. I challenge any skeptic to argue with those statistics.

I don’t think it’s hyperbole to suggest I am the Fifth Beatle of the Montreal Canadiens. For the remainder of the playoffs, the Canadian military, if they have any sense, should organise their troops around protecting my magic brain.

The Habs are something of a national favourite and nobody can quite believe how well they’re doing at the moment. Since they’re ahead, the whole country is holding its breath. It’s a bit like that scene at the end of The Italian Job. Nobody move a muscle. It could upset the balance. “Hang on a minute lads, I’ve got a great idea.”

For the rest of the season, we should leave all our clothes unwashed in case some microorganism living in them has had something to do with the team’s success.

Nobody should get a haircut either, on the off chance that your magic locks are the reason the team are winning.

Woe betide anyone who takes up chewing on the right side of their mouth instead of the left.

Thinking about it now, my hair will be a half millimeter longer now than in the last game. I’d better get a trim.

“Could you take half a millimeter off my hair please?” I’ll gingerly ask the barber.

“Hockey Voodoo,” he’ll say, nodding sagely. He’ll tap the side of his nose enigmatically and not charge me lest he be responsible for my modified bank balance forming an unlucky number.

As a final precaution, I suggest we precisely recreate the circumstances in which the Habs won the Stanley Cup in 1993. We must all wear stonewashed jeans, X Files t-shirts, and too much gel in our hair. I for one will be doing my bit by playing Pogs and stinking of lynx antiperspirant.

Of course, my writing about the situation today has probably jinxed everything. If the Habs lose their next game, you’ll know why. Everyone flick their light switches to the rhythm of the national anthem or we’re doomed.

If I had known sport to be so OCD-friendly, I’d have become a fan ages ago.

I have a horror finger.

“It’s a consumption-related medical condition,” I tell my girlfriend when she asks about it.

“It’s a cheese-related medical condition,” she says.

And she’s right. I only get eczema when I eat cheese. It’s a shamefully bourgeois condition. I’m poorly because I can’t stop eating Roquefort.

My eczema is one of a wider family of cheese-related medical conditions, the more familiar siblings being nightmares, obesity, and happiness.

The case of my horror finger is a curious one though. Not only have I not been eating cheese at all this week, but it’s also very odd for eczema to attack a single finger.

For some reason, my right-hand pinkie finger is all blotchy and red. It looks like it’s going to rot off and then creep around of its own volition like something from Return of the Living Dead.

I really hope that doesn’t happen. I’ll never be able to “pinkie swear” again, or count to five, or slightly irritate people by doing that Dr. Evil gesture.

What would I hold aloft when drinking a cup of tea? Don’t answer that. It would be very difficult to appear dainty.

I’d be shunned by society, forced to dwell in the sewers with just three fingers, like a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle or someone who’s upset the Japanese mafia.

Yet there it is, my horror finger, revoltingly swollen like an unsavory part of the Michelin Man.

My sensible side wants to heal the finger and make it well again, but there’s a Mr Hyde part of me which wants to see how hideous it can possibly get.

I’m genuinely tempted to abstain from washing it so that it gets all stinky and untended. A nuisance perhaps, but it would be worth it to see what a human finger looks like when left to go wild. It would be my contribution to science: the world’s first and only savage pinkie.

Needless to say, I’m willing to eat a whole wheel of brie for this cause. I could even grow the fingernail ghoulishly long and varnish it a bilious shade of green and people could pay a penny to see it at the end of a godforsaken pier.

Maybe I could get some newspaper coverage as the man whose finger went monsterish, or an entry into the Guinness Book of World Records for the Western hemisphere’s scariest finger.

If anyone crossed me, I could take off my protective mitten, revealing the horror finger, and they’d go “No, no, no! I’m sorry I crossed you, Mr Wringham! Here, take my hat, my keys, anything, just spare me the horror of the horror finger!”

Of course, I will not do any of these things. The finger is monsterish but I am not. I’m actively nice. I will abstain from cheese and nurse the haunted digit back to health.

Even so, I’ll play it safe and not trust it lest it turns out to be possessed by the pinkie finger of a serial killer.

Precisely what harm or mischief could be wrought by a murderer’s pinkie finger, I’m uncertain. If he or she had been more sensible and taken possession of my index finger or thumb instead, they’d have been able to wreak all manner of beyond-the-grave havoc, dialling premium-rate telephone numbers and hitch-hitching.

But the pinkie finger? What kind of impractical demonic possession is that?

Keep an eye on the newspapers. If you hear about a man killed by his own pinkie finger–fish-hooked to death presumably–you’ll know it was me.

“House salad and a sea bass,” I said.

“And I’ll just have the soup,” said Spencer, closing the menu.

The waiter raised an eyebrow expertly before he went away.

“Just the soup,” I said, “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” said Spencer, “I’m just not very hungry.”

“How can you not be hungry?” I said, “It’s dinnertime on the dot. You’re being cheap.”

Spencer was clearly offended. To refute my comment, he pulled out his wallet, relieved it of a five-dollar bill and tore it in half.

“You’re perfectly deranged, you know,” I said.

The two halves lay forlornly on the table. Blue-faced Wilfrid Laurier looked if he’d never seen the Canada Arm before, and it had been there all along, right behind him like a pantomime cow.

“I don’t know what came over me,” said Spencer, and was clearly embarrassed.

To try and make him feel better, I found my wallet, took out a fiver and, just as he had done, I tore it in half.

I slapped the wasted pieces on top of his own halved banknote.

To destroy money, it turned out, was exhilarating. Well worth the five dollars it had cost me.

I casually wondered if the money still existed. If a banknote is not money, merely a representation of it, where was that money now? Were there five dollars of pure money sitting around in a vault somewhere, trapped forever? In Ottawa.

“What do you think you’re doing?” said Spencer.

He pulled out his wallet again, procured a note and demonstrated, rather ostentatiously, that it was a ten-dollar bill.

He had, it seemed, mistaken my act of solidarity as a reassertion that he was a cheapskate.

It was clear what he intended to do but I couldn’t stop him. More money deducted from the GNP.

Before I knew it, I was reaching for my own wallet again, producing a hard-earned tenner and tearing it in half, John A. Macdonald and The Canadian passenger train together at last.

Incensed, Spencer did the same with a twenty and the Queen took at trip to the Vimy Memorial.

This was getting expensive.

I didn’t have any cash left so I took out my debit card and bent it in half. No matter how many times I bent it back and fourth, I couldn’t get it to snap, so I melted a hole in it against the candle on the table.

By now, we were getting an audience.

Spencer pulled from his wallet a picture of his wife and children. He tore it up. He ate the pieces.

I showed him my library card. Access to every book ever written in the course of human history. I pierced it cleanly with the fish knife.

The waiter came over. He asked us to leave.

Out on the street, Spencer took out a penknife and slashed the tires of his own car.

Neither of us had any money for the bus, so we turned our backs on each other and walked home.

The next morning, I was eating breakfast in my apartment and mulling over the strange events of the previous evening. I didn’t know quite what to do about it.

There came a knock at the door. I answered it to see Spencer standing on the mat. He looked wild and excited. He handed me something which looked like the remote control for a model airplane: a little black box with a single button and a wire aerial sticking out of one end. I took it.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Press it,” he said.

I pressed the button.

“Quick,” he said, pushing past me. He pointed out of the window and said, “Look.”

I looked. An almighty explosion on the horizon. Sirens.

“Was that…” I stammered, “Was that your house?”

“Yes,” he said, proudly.

“Okay,” I said, “I take it back. You’re not a cheapskate. You’ve literally got money to burn. Or explode.”

“Thank you,” said Spencer, “Mind if I sleep on your couch tonight?”

Needless to say, absolutely none of this happened.

One of my neighbours is an opera singer.

It’s nice to hear him practicing when I’m cooking spaghetti or having a shower. It adds an air of sophistication to any old domestic thing. Scrambling an egg becomes part of an opera.

Needless to say, if he happened to be a gangsta rapper or a Heavy Metal guitarist, I’d be the first one waving a telephone receiver around the room so that the residents’ association can hear what I’m complaining about.

That’s the kind of hypocrite I am. I tolerate highbrow noise pollution.

Sometimes he does simple scales and sometimes he sings a recognisable bit of Rigoletto. Sometimes, he’s accompanied by a female opera singer too. It’s really rather nice and gives the effect of living above the Teatro alla Scala or something.

So far as I’m aware, I’ve never physically seen the opera singer. But this is because I assume he looks like the insurance-selling corporate mascot, Geo Compario, when, for all I know he’s a tall, thin twelve-year-old and I’ve stood next to him in the elevator loads of times.

I also imagine he wears a full tuxedo at home, big French cuffs flapping about as he scrubs his crepe pan or brushes his teeth.

If his girlfriend is over, I think it’s natural for me to assume she’s dressed in full Brunhilde regalia, knocking things off the shelves with her pointy metal boobs.

Doing some delicate work on my book this afternoon, the male opera singer started up. As I say, I usually enjoy his through-the-wall operatic excursions, but on this occasion found it extremely irritating. I’m working on a chapter of heart-breaking genius about bellybutton fluff and it’s hard to concentrate with a lusty baritone bellowing through the ducts.

When a neighbour plays music too loudly, I’m lead to believe, the traditional response is to turn your own music up. Since I wasn’t playing music, I decided to sing back.

Belting out an inexpert scale, I was alarmed by the sound that came out of me. It was terrifying.

My neighbour, likewise, had been stunned into silence. He hadn’t been expecting that. It was like when you bark at a dog. He doesn’t know what’s going on.

Satisfied, I returned to my work.

But then he started up again, dare I suggest it, with added verve.

So I sang back. Unfortunately, I don’t know any opera lyrics so I could only make an inexpert opera-sounding noise. LAAAAAAAAAAAR!

He stopped for a moment but came back, this time undoubtedly louder. It was fucking war.

I belted out an improvised song, calculated to wound, to the tune of the famous bit in Carmen:

My wife is sexy,
My wife is fair,
Your wife’s a harridan
With purple hair.

Silence. I pictured him standing on his pretentious hearthrug, dumbfounded. Of course, I knew he’d come back. He was just getting his shit together.

As predicted, the opera singer retorted with something unaltered from Madame Butterfly. Hah. He may have been the superior singer but his ad-lib skills were nothing on mine.

I cleared my throat, rolled up my sleeves up and to the Carmen tune again, I sang:

Life is delicious,
And life is nice,
When Alain de Botton,
Gives you good advice.

I have no idea why those words came to me. I think the human brain contains a valve, which, for some reason, I’ve been blessed with the ability to loosen.

There was momentary silence as my neighbour doubtless came to terms with the fact that I’d handed him his arse.

But then he was off again. With a fucking aria.

My knowledge of opera is sorely limited. Back in 2012, however, I wrote a book in which a comedian would “deploy the opera device” as a way of dealing with hecklers. He’d bring a Valkyrie on from the wings and, a mezzo-soprano, she’d sing things like “You’re a cunting, cunting, cunting, cunting CUNT!” and “You remind meeeee of chemotherapiiiiiee.”

So that’s what I did. I did my best impression of Lore Lixenberg and sang, “Please shut up, shut up, shutupshutupshutUP! ShutyourholeorI’lldoyouwithaspachelor!”

It was around this time, I see now, that I lost any moral high ground I might have had.

There came a knock at the door.

Needless to say, I am writing this from under the bed.

Mauling the goods in a stationery shop this morning, I happened to notice a glistening steel engineer’s ruler. It reminded me of a long-forgotten episode from high school, which I’d be pleased to bore you with.

The Bishop, a skinny boy with manky teeth, was a bully. He became a bully because he didn’t have much else going for him. He also wore an impressive orthodontic brace, which had the combined effect of making him look rather menacing and pissing him off through perpetual dental agony.

Snot Rag, on the other hand, was a victim because he had a head like a giant watermelon, tragic 1970s sideburns, an unsightly monobrow, flared horse-like nostrils, bigger boobs than any girl in our year group, and he was constantly blowing his nose on the lengths of ragged toilet paper with which he filled his pockets.

This charismatic toilet paper behaviour, in case you’re wondering, was how Snot Rag got his nickname.

I’m not sure how The Bishop got his nickname. He sometimes came to school wearing a bejeweled mitre but that was an effect of his nickname more than the cause of it. (I’m lying. He never did this).

One day, in mathematics class, I was lucky enough to share a table with Snot Rag and The Bishop.

Snot Rag was famous for his wretched accumulation of stationery. His pen was a chewed-up bic, the plastic barrel of which was halfway-filled with saliva. His pencil was one of those rubbish miniature ones you’d pilfer from Ikea. He never had a ruler, just a grotty-looking 180° protractor. All of this was stuffed into a filthy purse-like pencil case along with numerous shriveled steamers of his famous toilet paper.

The Bishop, on the other hand, was the proud owner a fancy mechanical pencil, a gold-plated Parker I.M. pen, and a steel engineer’s ruler.

The engineer’s ruler provided his signature bullying technique. The threat was that he might smash the ruler’s razor-sharp, steel edge down on your knuckles, with an impressive wham!

He rarely acted on this sadistic little fantasy, but he did so often enough for us to know it was not a bluff.

It was ingenious as a bullying device. The menacing ruler could sit in plain sight of the teachers and prefects and everyone else. He had no need to catch you at the bike sheds or behind the gym if he wanted to intimidate you. All he had to do was get the ruler out and leave it on the desk.

That day, in the mathematics class, I was looking at the ruler and it crossed my mind that someone really aught to teach The Bishop a lesson and take his ruler away.

Just as I was building up the courage to do precisely that, The Bishop made a startlingly similar move and confiscated Snot Rag’s pencil.

Our maths teacher, Mr Tomlinson, enforced a weird rule about our not using ink in his classroom. Only pencils were allowed. I once found myself without a pencil in his class and when I asked to borrow one, he made me write “I must always bring a suitable writing implement to every mathematics lesson” one hundred times on a sheet of paper, which he then tore up and binned.

It was stunts like that which gave Mr Tomlinson his nickname, Darth Tomlinson. He was horrible. It had recently been announced in the school newspaper that Darth Tomlinson was engaged to marry the impossibly-attractive young French teacher, Miss Tilly, which made us detest him all the more.

Poor Snot Rag, with no pencil, would now have face the bizarre wrath of Darth Tomlinson. Why did The Bishop have to be such a horrible dick?

In a strange mood, I gave Snotters my own pencil, raised my hand and said “Mr Tomlinson, Sir. The Bishop has taken my pencil.”

Darth Tomlinson came over to our table, put his hands on his hips, glared at me and then glared at The Bishop. The Bishop’s face went pale. I knew exactly what he’d seen because I’d seen it too: the tiny blue flames deep in Tomlinson’s eyes.

Tomlinson snatched Snot Rag’s Ikea pencil from the groove in The Bishop’s ruler and handed it back to me, all without releasing The Bishop from his death glare.

“This is yours?” he asked me, holding Snot Rag’s abhorrent little pencil.

“Yes,” I lied.

“Just get on with your work, please, gentlemen,” he said, handing me the pencil.

It was a tad vexing that The Bishop wasn’t forced to write “I must not steal stationery from more handsome students and generally behave like a horrible douche” a hundred times over, but it had still been fun to see the colour drain from The Bishop’s face.

For twenty minutes or so, The Bishop kept his head down, seething with rage but feigning intense interest in his algebra. When he eventually surfaced for air, he looked at me and made the universally-understood throat-slitting gesture.

I didn’t care. It had been wonderful to set Darth Tomlinson at The Bishop. I hated them both. I’d be only too happy to pay for it with a knuckle-rapping.

Twenty years have passed and I live in a different country now, but seeing a similar ruler today reminded me that I’m still owed a knuckle-rapping.

I tip my chapeau to anyone who successfully masters a second language. I for one have given up.

Surprise-Surprise, you’re probably thinking, the lazy hipster dipstick didn’t commit. It’s those piano lessons and Judo classes all over again.

But hear me out. You haven’t heard my defense yet. When you do, I think you’ll agree that I’ve done the right thing.

You see, it turns out that learning French is really, really hard.

To learn a second language as an adult is like trying to complete a cross-country run in a pair of tap shoes. You’re trying to master something you can vaguely remember disliking at school, using equipment unfit for purpose.

At first, you think it’s going to be an ambitious but conceivably-achievable matter of replacing each known word in your brain with another one (“house” with “maison”, for example) but it’s not like that at all! AT ALL.

The grammar is completely different for starters. Saying “Ou est la table pour mon reservation?” (literally, “where is the table for my reservation?”) is meaningless to the point of incomprehension. You may as well waltz on up and say “Trousers! Shindig for trousers, yes?”

To my own ear, I sound like Charles de Gaul himself but when I put my new-found phrases into practice, a post office clerk will look at me if I’ve walked in and insisted on administering a rectal thermometer.

The complaint that the grammar is radically different doesn’t even account for advanced things like nuance. My entire admittedly-microbial success in life so far can be attributed to having a nuanced command of the English language. It’s how I get jobs. It’s how I convince people to go to bed with me. If it weren’t for my ability to say things with implied italics or inverted quotation marks–almost all without wiggling my eyebrows–I’d still be an eczematic virgin stacking corned beef at a KwikSave in Dudley.

If I worked hard at it–using the 100%-success-guaranteed “Parlez Vous!” tapes and conjugating verbs with refugees at a YMCA evening class–I concede that, one day, a decade or so from now, I might conceivably have a good enough grip on French to convey basic meaning.

But to charm an interview panel in French? Or bribe a nightclub bouncer? Or deliver a clever bon-mot? No. It will never happen.

I know people do it all the time, but I also know that people went into space and installed the Canadarm (which may sound like a brand of anti-fungal foot powder, but is pants-down incredible).

Audiences used to give standing ovations to “The Armless Wonder”, a vaudeville sideshow act in which a tragically de-armed fellow in a tuxedo would show off his ability to light a cigarette or whip up a Spanish omelette using only his feet.

As accomplishments go, that’s nothing compared to a thirty-year-old British person–armless or otherwise–successfully learning French. But you never see a chinless Brit standing on a soapbox in Coney Island saying “Voici mon perfect Francais! Ces’t formidable, non?”

But you should.

French, by the way, is a language fairly similar to English in many ways. How any English speaker learns something really different like Japanese or Javascript is nothing short of miraculous. It must be like trying to build a house using only a spoon.

I’m sure that learning French is valuable if you enjoy the process somehow or if you’re training to be a diplomat or a professional show-off. But to my ends, as an immigrant, I was basically only doing it to be polite.

Yes. To be polite. And because I’m English and my default mode is crippling politeness, it took me a while to realise it.

So stick it, Quebec, right up ta collective derriere. Learn French indeed. What kind of imposition is that to put on a guest? I wouldn’t mind leaving my shoes at the door or refraining from swearing when your grandma’s around, but learn a whole new language? Sacré bleu.

Besides, isn’t eighty per cent of communication is body language? Is it not true that even when you don’t speak his language, a waiter knows precisely how much spit to put in your soup?

So what I do now, when I need to speak to someone in another language, is use my own language, but louder.

When that fails, there’s always the noble art of the frantic gesture.

“Sorry brain, back in the freezer.”

This is what I say when it’s time to go out in the Montreal winter. At -30°C, you become aware that your physical brain might not be having a terrific time.

That’s not really acceptable in the civilized world, is it? You should never be put in a situation where you’re moved to apologise to your brain.

When my brain didn’t complain about the cold today, I felt genuine concern. Had it died? Had Quebec murdered my brain?

No. Something was different. The snow was melting. Green buds had appeared on the trees. All around, I could hear the rumbling tummies of a million defrosted tardigrades.

Were we above zero? Spring! Spring was here!

“Spring is here, old woman!” I said to an old woman.

“Va chier,” she said (or in English: “Rejoice, rose-cheeked young sirrah!”)

“Spring is here, bedraggled pigeon!”

“Coo,” said the pigeon, perched on a plastic owl.

“Spring is here, plastic owl!”

The plastic owl looked pissed off.

A small man with a bushy beard and a red cycle helmet was standing and stinking on the street corner with a can of something called Pabst Blue Ribbon.

On seeing him, I stopped dead in my tracks. Scrotters? It was Scrotters! His presence was as surprising and wonderful as the spring itself.

My instinct was to plant a big wet kiss on his mouth and say “Spring is here, Scrotters, old friend, and–what’s more–I love you!” but kissing a tramp is inadvisable even if you’re a tramp yourself.

Besides, “Scrotters” is probably not his real name, merely the one I’ve rather offensively given him in the privacy of my head.

If only there were some way to learn his real name. But there’s not.

I’d been worried about Scrotters and it was a relief to see him after such a long time. He’d disappeared from his corner four months earlier, mysteriously replaced by a far-stinkier and more aggressive tramp. The new tramp’s secret name was Lion Man because he looked like a lion and ate raw meat.

Lion Man, I imagined, had frightened Scrotters away and stolen his lucrative corner.

I didn’t think the battle for the corner had been too bloody, just that Scrotters had been forced to move along by a trampier tramp. After all, Scrotters had that helmet. He was indestructible.

All the same, I didn’t like Lion Man. When I didn’t give him money, I got the impression he was silently hating me. Scrotters, under the same circumstances, would always growl and call me a shit owl, but there was never any malice in it.

Before his disappearance, Scrotters rarely if ever left his corner, which provided our neighbourhood with a welcome sense of certainty. Lion Man, on the other hand, spent half of his time on the opposite side of the street, spreadeagle on the ground, catching snowflakes.

You never knew what to expect with Lion Man. It was chaos.

Before the tramp replacement, we’d always been able to see Scrotters from our kitchen window. Every morning, his helmet would catch the bleary eye across the granola.

Each day, one of us would remark to the other something along the lines of “Oh look, someone’s bought Scrotters a massive pizza,” or “Oh look, Scrotters is wearing his cross-country skis.”

When I arrived back home today, I was very excited to report to my girlfriend that our favourite tramp was safely back on his corner of choice.

“Scrotters is back!” I said.

“Scrotters?” she said, “Where do you suppose he’s been?”

For a brief moment I wondered if his triumphant return was actually a tragedy. What if Lion Man had been nothing to do with his absence and Scrotters had actually been living in a luxuriously-carpeted house for four months but he’d lost it all again and wound up back on the corner.

“He must be the summer tramp,” I said, dismissing the rags-to-riches-and-back-to-rags-again story I’d witnessed in my head like Captain Picard in The Inner Light, “Lion Man must be the winter tramp.”

“Of course,” she said sarcastically, “Lion Man can withstand the winter because of his glorious mane. Scrotters probably goes down to Florida. He’s a snowbird.”

“See for yourself,” I said pointing out of the window, “One Scrotters.”

There he was. Standing on the corner, as was his way, like a stranded astronaut. A harbinger of spring. Skinny with his red cycle helmet, from this distance he looked like a safety match.

“Are you sure it’s him? Lion Man didn’t nick his helmet?”

“Nah, it’s Scrotters,” I said. “He’s unmistakable.”

“Aw. Prince of Tramps,” she said, finally getting into the spirit of things.

“The Original and Best,” I said.

“Captain Corner,” she said.

“The Pedigree Chum,” I said.

“Can we stop talking about Scrotters now?” she said.

“Okay, I said.”

I was glad he came back though. From now on, I’m going to give him a coin every single time I pass him. I’m also going to pretend I’m a wealthy country gent and that Scrotters is my personal hermit. “Look,” I’ll say to visitors, “look at my hermit.”

And there he’ll be.

School assembly, circa 1991. Age 9. We all sat on the floor in rows.

Our headmaster, Mr Noakes, addressed his audience, doubtless amazing us with a wildly apocryphal Biblical story for children, probably involving some normally-adversarial animals learning to cooperate on Noah’s Ark.

Suddenly, Mr Noakes singled me out of the crowd.

“You there,” he said, “Don’t be so silly.”

He must be talking to someone else, I thought. I hadn’t done anything silly. I looked down at my pumps.

“Don’t ignore me,” he said, “you there, in the blue tee-shirt.”

I was wearing a blue tee-shirt. Did he mean me? I hadn’t done anything silly. I didn’t know what he was talking about.

“That’s it,” he said, “Get out and wait for me in my office.”

Being sent to the headmaster’s office was the most-feared disciplinary action in our little school. It was usually a last-resort threat from an exasperated teacher. I’d never seen the headmaster himself send anyone to his own office. This was serious. Someone was in trouble. Not me though, because I’d not done anything silly.

“YOU!” he shouted, “OUT!”

I chanced a glance at Mr Noakes. We made eye-contact. His were blazing with headmasterly rage.

It felt like he was talking to me. But he couldn’t have been. I hadn’t done anything silly.

“Am I talking to myself?” he asked the room, and I was beginning to think quite desperately that maybe he wasn’t. He was almost certainly talking to me.

I felt sick. Children in the front rows were starting to look around behind them to get a look at the idiot or rebel who was disrupting everything. I was keeping them from knowing whether Noah would be able to teach the spider and the fly to be friends.

I pointed at my chest and silently mouthed the word, “Me?”

“Yes! You!” said Mr Noakes, “If you can’t act appropriately in an assembly, you’ll have to leave.”

Blimey, he really was talking to me. But I’d not done anything silly at all. I hadn’t even been aware of anything silly happening in my vacinity.

I looked around for signs that maybe someone else was being silly and I’d been caught in the crossfire.

“Don’t look around!” he commanded, “You know who I’m talking to. You. You!”

“Me?” I said again, pointing at my solar plexus, “Me-Me?”

“Yes!”

Nah, I thought, he can’t be talking to me. I hadn’t done anything silly at all. I wasn’t even sitting with my friends, vital accessories in the pursuit of silliness. Who on Earth could he be talking to?

“I’m not going to say it again. You. You! In the blue tee-shirt. Leave!”

Cujo spume frothed in the corners of his mouth.

My refusal to believe he was talking to me was reinforced by the fact that Mr Noakes knew my name but wasn’t using it. I was famous at school. Everyone knew me, especially Mr Noakes. He’d personally approved my second and third entries into the school talent show. He’d spent hours in his office talking to Mum and Dad about my allergies and my persistent refusal to do a forward roll.

Why didn’t he say “Robert Wringham” instead of “You there, you in the blue tee-shirt”? He knew who I was. And he knew I wasn’t a trouble-maker.

Not a deliberate one anyway. Maybe he was picking on me as some kind of revenge because I was too afraid of heights to climb the gym rope or because I’d caused him extra work by suggesting our school participate in the Blue Peter can drive.

By now, the other children were getting restless. They were all looking around and asking each other “who is it, who is it?” They were desperate to know whether Noah could unite the lion and the antelope in a rare example of predatory-prey harmony.

“Who, me?” I asked again.

“YOOUU!” he whined childishly. I thought he was going to tear some of his hair out. It was getting really bizarre.

There was no way I was making the walk of shame and leaving the assembly hall when I’d done nothing wrong, especially as I’d held fast for so long. One of us would come out of this looking like a complete idiot and it wasn’t going to be me. So I did the only thing I could think to do. I tucked my head between my knees and acted like a balled-up hedgehog.

Eventually, he lost interest. Wise birds, hedgehogs. He must have sensed that he’d completely derailed his own assembly and that the other children were dying to know whether Noah would be successful in getting red and grey squirrels to put aside years of bitter sectarianism and sign a mutually-beneficial non-aggression pact.

“Who do you suppose he was talking to?” I asked a friend once the assembly was over. I still wasn’t convinced it had been me. It couldn’t have been. I wasn’t being silly.

“Dunno,” he shrugged, “wanna trade some Pogs?”

I did! I did want to trade some Pogs. And in doing so I forgot all about the strange assembly episode until today. Seriously, what the fuck was that about? Had he really been talking to me? I’ve a good mind fly back to England right this minute, drag him out of retirement and straighten this all out.

“Be careful when you open the fridge,” I said, “there’s a loose egg rolling around in the door.”

My girlfriend laughed. “You should start one of your blogs with that,” she said.

“With what?”

“With that. That there’s a loose egg rolling around in the fridge door.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s funny,” she said, “a loose egg.”

“Is it?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Why?”

“A loose egg,” she said, “it’s just an aesthetically-pleasing combination of words. The two ohs. The two gees. The gloopiness of ‘loose’ and the suddenness of ‘egg’. And the word ‘egg’ doesn’t often follow the word ‘loose’ so it’s unpredictable too.”

I was impressed by this level of comic analysis. Good value, my girlfriend.

“Loose,” I wrote in my notebook, “Egg.” And then because it didn’t seem like enough, “Unpredictable.”

“Honey,” she said, this time less sure of herself.

“Yes,” I said.

“Why is there a loose egg rolling around in the fridge door?”

I explained.

“Because,” I said, “we have new eggs.”

We’d done the groceries that morning and I’d done the unpacking.

“Why do new eggs mean a booby-trapped fridge?” she asked, reasonable.

I’d gone to put the new eggs in the fridge to find the old box still there, still containing a single egg.

I couldn’t bear to leave it there, the old guard occupying an otherwise empty box, surrounded by eleven empty spaces once occupied by now-eaten fellow eggs.

To put the fresh box containing twelve new eggs–twelve promises–next to last week’s lone survivor felt cruel.

I binned the old box and nested the lone egg carefully in the top compartment of the fridge door, vowing to have it for breakfast tomorrow. It would be safe in there for one night and it would never have to meet the newbies.

Our fridge, for reasons best known to the good people at Benelux Electronics, does not have one of those molded plastic compartments for eggs. Don’t go thinking it’s got one of those. The egg just rolled about loose in the door.

I gently wedged the egg in place with two bars of fancy chocolate, but wasn’t convinced it would stay put. This is why I mentioned it to my girlfriend. To be on the lookout for it.

“A loose egg,” she said, “in the door.”

“Yes,” I said, “because of the new eggs.”

There was a pause.

“New eggs,” I said, “Is that funny too?”

“No,” she said, “Because it’s plural.”

“Correct,” I said, “Just testing.”

I looked down at my notebook. It said, “Loose Egg. Unpredictable.” It was exactly the kind of note that would haunt me in a few weeks’ time when I tried to work out what on Earth it meant.

To help its meaning stay in my memory, I showed the note to Samara.

“Are you going to remember what that’s about?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said decisively, “I will”.

“What do those other notes mean?”

Further up the page, my handwriting showed that I’d once been excited about “False Tales” and “Stoat:Hospital”.

Intriguing colon, that. Possible ratio.

“I don’t know,” I admitted, “But I’ll definitely remember this time. The loose egg, I mean.”

“A loose egg,” she corrected me.

“Yes,” I said.

It had been a productive morning.

A little later on, I went to the fridge for some orange juice. I opened the door gently and looked for the egg. Samara had cut a single cardboard eggcup out of the old box and, in it, the egg now sat like a little ovoid king.

“The egg,” I said.

“I made it a little holster,” she said, “you know, because of the new eggs.”

We closed the door slowly and watched the fridge light blink out.

*

If you’ve been enjoying this strange weekly blog, perhaps you’d consider backing my book at Unbound.co.uk.

As a repulsive hipster with an exaggerated sense of self importance, I sometimes place convenience over safety when crossing the road.

Even though I’ve committed to various fitness regimes with an eye to living a long and healthy life, I’m perfectly happy to launch myself into oncoming traffic given the slightest opportunity of saving a few seconds.

Reckless, I know, but the real problem is when other pedestrians follow my lead. They must mistake my impulsiveness and impatience for some kind of magic knowledge. Perhaps they think I’ve noticed that the oncoming truck is actually just a trick of the light, incapable of reducing them to a mound of twisted gristle.

It’s the dangers of conformity. Follow and be damned.

This being said, I’m a terrible conformist myself. I even conform when I sneeze.

By nature, my sneezes don’t sound like sneezes at all. They’re like something between a cough and a cry for help. They go BLASH!

I find myself deliberately altering them to more closely resemble the normal human sneeze. I put a vocal spin on them. My manufactured sneezes go Choo!

It’s not so ill-founded. Do you think Beethoven had such pathetic sneezes as mine? Was Moses’ flight from Egypt punctuated with such ill-defined nasal expulsions? Not on your nelly. By conforming, I can sneeze like the greats.

And then there are accents. I’m especially suggestible when it comes to accents. If I’m in the company of someone with a particularly alluring accent–if they’re from New York, say, or Ireland–I gravitate unconsciously toward it. If I stand between two people with different but equally alluring accents I risk being mistaken for, say, a Brooklyn Leprechaun.

Mannerism reproduction is something I’m prone to as well. Sometimes, in the company of people I like, I find myself mirroring the way they sit, speak, laugh, and generally position themselves. I’ve always seen this as friendly rapport more than conformity but what’s chilling is how I sometimes use my friends’ mannerisms when the originator isn’t even present. “I’m inclined to agree” is something my friend Johnston says and I’ve inadvertently added it to my lexicon wholesale. I’ve got laughs borrowed from other people too, particularly a kind of dry wheeze lifted from my friend James.

That’s not normal is it? And if it is, to what extent are we ourselves? What if James took his dry wheeze laugh from someone else? A third-hand laugh. I want don’t want a laugh with that many miles on the clock.

And then there’s rucksack straps. At school, we’d use rucksacks to carry our books from class to class. For some reason, it was universally agreed that to carry a rucksack using both of its straps was a dorky way to carry a rucksack, even though they were clearly designed to be worn that way. Instead, we’d carry our rucksacks with a single strap over one shoulder. Casual. Nobody was strong enough to be the only one to wear a rucksack with both straps, so we all grew up wonky, spines distorted into nightmare treble clefs. The behaviour is so ingrained that, even as an adult, I think twice before strapping myself fully and symmetrically into a rucksack.

This could cause a problem if I ever go parachuting, but it’s a risk I’m willing to take. I’d rather plummet to my death than go around looking like a two-strap dork.

So there we go. A modest bestiary of minor conformities. I don’t think they matter in the grand scheme of things. Unless you think they do, of course, in which case I’ll probably modify my opinion to coincide with yours.