The Occasional Papers

Enjoying some time in bed with the sniffles, I decide to sign up to Netflix — or “Net Flicks” as I naively thought it was called until today. When did I get so old? Why can’t we live forever?

A universally popular TV-streaming service, I think, probably beats staring at the formation of cracks in our ceiling that some say looks like Sir Roger Moore and others say looks like a knackered bedroom ceiling.

Besides, I must admit to harboring a degree of curiosity about this thing everyone’s talking about. First time for everything, I suppose.

I’ve resisted Netflix for some time, in part because it’s one of the things contributing to the BBC’s redundancy and I hate to think of Messrs Attenburgh, Castle and Blobby not having anything to do anymore.

But it’s a tad hypocritical to worry so much about the Beeb when I don’t actually give them any money, isn’t it? The TV license, you may not know, can be avoided when you exploit the simple loophole of slinging the telly out of the window. Just make sure it’s not going to fall through the roof of a detector van before you push it off the ledge.

Anyway, what strikes me first and foremost about Netflix is its uncannny resemblance to the in-flight entertainment systems you get on airplanes.

The main comparison lies in how, despite there being a bewildering range of programming on offer, it never has quite what you want — presumably because the aim of whomever curates programming for each of these cloud-based services is to mollify a bored, anxious, probably grounded, international audience.

The effect is that you sit in your own stench, contemplating the likelihood of a pending fiery death, wile fingering a just-about-responsive interface composed of colourful, twerp-proof Whytech buttons. Yes, it feels very much like something that should be stuck in the back of another passenger’s reclined, dandruffy head.

You ask it to show you The X Files which can’t be done but, God bless it for trying, you can have any one of seventeen other things with David Duchovney instead.

You try to browse the comedy section but you end up viewing the first 13 seconds of something called Mindhunter thanks to a slow-loading banner ad.

Beyond a huge number of expensive-looking superhero- and monarchy-based exclusives is what can only be described as “an abyss of tat.” Firmly in this category is an awful lot of old BBC content. Obviously Netflix will have paid the BBC some money to show these programmes but I wonder if the The Big British Castle also receive royalties after a certain number of viewings? I don’t know for sure, but this is what happens with books — you get a certain amount up front and then a percentage after selling, say, 10,000 copies. Or so my publishers assure me.

This gives me an idea. Could we not rescue the BBC from its funding crisis by leaving old episodes of Blackadder playing from beginning to end when we all go out to work? You’d leave in the morning with Brian Blessed on the screen and come home in the evening to the fate of Speckled Jim. Meanwhile you’ve made 20p for the BBC. If everyone did this, Aunty would be rolling in pence.

Better still, we should choose to play old episodes of Bottom, just so the campaign can be called “Bottoming”. That is, #Bottoming.

Part way through an episode of an alienating, joyless cash-in called Star Trek: Discovery, I find myself wondering which is the button that will tell me the time remaining until our destination.

Might go back to staring at those ceiling cracks.

Friday night and my arm is worn out. Not for the reason you’re thinking of (honestly, madam, where do you get it from?) but because I’ve been writing a letter.

Yes, a proper, long-form letter with an old-fashioned pen and paper. Two sides of A4 if you must know (and you must).

A friend wants to keep in touch by writing letters and who am I to deny him this archaic pleasure? If it weren’t for the distraction, he’d only roam the halls of his family seat, bellowing in his pantaloons and wistfully playing the lute.

Besides, letter-writing turns out to be good clean fun and I certainly hope to continue the practice for a while. I mean, it took me so long to find a pen, I’m invested now.

The pen turned out to be hiding in some sort of “case” along with a few coloured pencils, a half-moon-shaped piece of plastic, and one of those devices for stabbing other children in the back of the hand. It’s amazing to think that schools once asked us to maintain such kits of bizarre and sadistic gadgetry but there must have been some reason for it all.

Acceptable writing paper took time to excavate too. I genuinely considered tearing up a cereal packet into squares. Alas, we don’t have an empty one at the moment, and having to eat six bowls of Sugar Puffs in order to write a letter quickly put paid to the idea. Besides, my friend had already set a high standard by writing to me on such nice-quality paper with his home address embossed along the top that it did not seem adequate to reply using a jigsaw puzzle of the Honey Monster’s face.

I eventually found — between some fossilized layers of gas bill — a single sheet of A4 printer paper, probably half-inched from some office job of yore. Come to think of it, what do people steal from work these days to make it worth going in? Bandwidth?

When it finally came to writing the letter, I’ve not had so much physical activity in years. Up and down the pen-strokes go, across and around, dotting and looping. You must avoid the temptation to put down so many exclamation marks, just because the motions inspired by their shape is so appealing. It’s worth reserving such punctuation for phrases like “send help!” or “trapped in a drain!” if you want them to have conviction.

And then you have to tear it all up and start again because you’ve drifted off and written “cockholes” instead of “dear friend” or because you’ve crossed out too many misfires and the pen has leaked and you’ve knocked your glass of water over it.

But just six hours and two small fires later, and you have a beautiful, hand-written letter replete with meaning and personal confidence. It’s a shame the diagonal slant promoted by sitting at a table for once makes everything radiate from the top left-hand corner like an upside-down version of the explosive symbol.

It takes you back, writing a letter. You remember all manner of things — checking the dictionary before committing a word to print; putting the address in the “correct” corner; taking letters dictated by parents and teachers, mischievously including the interjections of passing strangers and pets.

Remember all of the rules like the requisite number of blank lines between date and address, and ending with “Yours Faithfully” if you began with “Dear Sir”? Today, as you know, it’s perfectly acceptable to start an email to a parent or employer with “Alright, Cunt?!?!”

And now, as I seal my masterpiece into the envelope — what better way to end a respectful epistle than with the application of saliva? — my arm is like that of the false Rod Hull. I’ve always had skinny, string-like arms but after writing the letter I fear my limbs will now only move again with the application of Kermit the Frog-style rods.

Off I go now to the Post Box. Hey, remember when we had to put one of those sticky “Queen’s head” things onto the envelope before posting it? Crazy days!

Every now and then, something from my working-class childhood floats up in memory to give me a shudder. The Nit Nurse, for example, or a scene glimpsed through a Blackpool window in 1993.

And then there’s Athlete’s Foot. Whatever happened to it? The 1980s was a golden age for Athlete’s Foot, a festive dusting of Tinaderm on the rim of every toilet bowl. Today? It is gone. I’m reminded of Richard Dawkins saying that “to allow a species to fall into extinction is to will the destruction of a masterpiece.”

Admittedly, Dickie may not have been thinking of Athlete’s Foot when he said that, if indeed he ever said it at all (which he didn’t), but it would be disingenuous for a biologist of his stature to so adore, say, the mountain gorilla and not our old friend tinea pedis, as I’d call it in said working class childhood.

“My tinea pedis, mater,” I’d exclaim in a broad Dudley accent, aggressively rubbing my de-socked feet against the rough edges of the Dudley skirting boards, “Ubi dolor, ibi digitus,” to which mother would inevitably respond “I’ll give you ubi dolor, ibi digitus ’round the head in a minute.”

But Athlete’s Foot is not what I sat down to tell you about today, loyal reader. No! That particular blast of nostalgia was merely the warm-up. What I’d meant to raise today is the strange case of the washed neck.

What was the grownups’ obsession in our childhoods with washing our necks? “Go to the bathroom,” they’d say, “and wash your neck.” I was forever being sent to the bathroom to wash my neck. The hours lost to it are probably why I never took the piano beyond Three Blind Mice.

Why the neck? Why not a traditionally smelly area like the armpit or, in my strange case, the arnus? Why not the hands, forever touching grubby surfaces and coving orifices as they do? Why not the fungus-addled feet? Or why not, simply, one’s whole self?

It was a long time ago, I suppose. Perhaps in those days they thought a clean neck kept draclias away (draclias being what we called Vampires in the British Midlands — not to be confused with Dracula who was simply a draclia who happened to be in the public eye). But if that was the case, why not pop a little clove oil behind each earlobe while you’re at it? And surely a clean neck could only make you more tempting to creatures of the night. Perhaps, then, it was a courtesy to the draclias. We knew our place.

Perhaps neck-washing was a sacred ritual to the British working classes and its significance was never explained to me. The human neck, if I remember my anatomy lessons correctly, is what keeps the human body attached to the human head (or your head attached to your body if you’re a pessimist, or your head attached to someone else’s body if you’re a surrealist, etc.) but beyond that I’m not sure of the significance of frequent localized neck cleansing.

Perhaps “wash your neck” was an aspirational expression, borrowed from a more arisocratic class who’d be understandably proud of a highly-buffed neck — a comforting, almost satirical superstition developed through their residual fear of the chopping block.

On the other hand, maybe it was a euphemism I failed to pick up on. Did “wash your neck” somehow mean “have a shit” or “tap one out”? Or! Perhaps it was a secret code between parents — a bit of predetermined patoir for “let’s get rid of the kid so we can get it on (i.e. neck)” perhaps?

Wait. I think I’ve got it. If we recall that “neck” sometimes meant “a brazen attitude” as in “a brass neck” or “the neck of hell,” perhaps “wash your neck” simply meant “reign it in, lad,” in a similar way to how “wash your mouth out with soap and water” was a response to swearing. If this is the case, then I spent far too much time in the bathroom taking the request literally. My poor parents. That poor, bald flannel.

I found myself thinking today about Luke.

You remember Luke. He was the chap who, when I was on work experience at the council, occupied a corner office designed to segregate him from the others lest he distract them with his exquisite beauty.

He was the one who taught me how to skive by playing Minesweeper with some invoices beside me in case someone came in.

Anyway, for the first few days of my work experience week, I thought Luke was it. We had a connection, I thought. He’d give me knowing winks. He once had me in hysterics when he breezed through the main office, singing “have a banana.”

For all this admiration, I knew we were very, very different. He was a man’s man. I was a boy. And not even a boy’s one.

He once said “Hello Fruity,” to one of the receptionists and she seemed genuinely charmed by it. I’d never be able to say “Hello Fruity.”

If I ever said “Hello Fruity,” my name would be taken down. Rightly.

It was 1998 and one of the things Luke and I both loved was South Park. South Park was huge and I had a squishy plastic Kenny on my key chain. Luke was thrilled when he saw it. He unfastened his suit jacket and showed me his Mr Garrison necktie. It was brilliant.

During my work experience, the long-awaited second series had just started to air. I watched it at home one night and came dashing into work, excited to see Luke. “Did you see it?” I asked him, panting.

“Yeah!” he said with shared enthusiasm, “the baby went up in her head! Ew!”

And we laughed.

But something was wrong. The baby hadn’t “gone up in her head,” it was a conjoined twin. That was the whole point. Conjoined Twin Myslexia. It was practically a catch phrase, repeated and repeated throughout the whole episode. I can still remember it, eighteen years later. Conjoined Twin Myslexia!

He hadn’t understood it. I’d met my first grown-up idiot.

I mean, I already knew my parents were cultural philistines but all that meant was they weren’t interested in South Park so they didn’t watch it. This was “stupid” but I’m certain they’d have understood what they were watching had they done so. There was a difference. Luke had sat on a sofa beneath three homely wall-mounted flying ducks, watching his favourite television programme, not understanding it. But he’d laughed.

So that’s why he had the corner office.

On my last day, I went with Luke on a routine inspection of council houses. In one, the tenant had blu-tacked some pages from a pornographic magazine onto the walls.

“Oy-oy,” said Luke, and made an obnoxious vaginal suction-sound between his tongue and lower lip.

I occasionally make that noise when I think nobody’s there to hear it.

The customs officers at JFK do not take kindly to flouncers, flaneurs or fops.

If you ask me, they’ve had it in for us since Wilde’s “nothing to declare” jibe, or “Geniusgate” as they call it now.

Back 2009, I was rather full of myself. I’d been recognised a couple of times as a comedian, I was flying around in Europe and North America simply for fun, and I was sleeping with people with full sets of teeth for the first time in my life. I thought I was it.

None of this held any weight at JFK Security.

“Hello!” I said.

I’d flown in from Montreal where I’d been romancing the lady who’d eventually become my wife and was now off to New York to romance someone else entirely. It was, as they say, the business.

“What is your business in New York City?” said the customs official.

“Well,” I said. “I suppose you could say I’m here for pleasure.”

“Pleasure?” she growled.

“Yes,” I said, wiggling my eyebrows left, right and impossibly centre.

“What is your profession please?” she said.

“A bit of this,” I said, “a bit of that.”

“Some kind of comedian, sir?”

“Yes!” I said, delighted, “though between you and me I’d be more happily placed in the feuilletons of a decent broadsheet than the stage.”

She eyeballed me over the top of her glasses in exactly the way as a careers adviser would.

“What is your address in New York City?”

“I don’t have an address in New York City,” I said, fingering the unicorn on the passport, “I live in Great Britain.”

“Yes,” she said, “I can see that. But what at what address will you be residing while in New York City.”

“Gosh,” I said, “I have no idea. I’m just meeting my friend at Grand Central in about forty minutes from now. At an Oyster Bar apparently. You don’t happen to know it do you?”

The officer stood up. She was short but impressively wide.

I noticed for the first time that we were both wearing blue gloves, mine alpaca and hers rubber, but almost certainly for different reasons. Well, not entirely different reasons and we’d both probably end up thinking of England. But it all comes down to motivation.

“Sir,” she said, “You must have an address if you’re to enter New York City.”

Today, of course, I’m a far wiser traveller. I always know the address of where I’m staying and, if for some reason I don’t, I could make one up. I could simply have said “I’m staying at the Waldorf Astoria” and slipped unhindered through the barriers like a swamp adder through the bedroom duct of an unwanted heir.

“Well,” I said, “I don’t have the exact address with me. I’m staying in the Bronx, I think. Is Chinatown in the Bronx?”

“That’s no good. What if we need to contact you?” she said.

“What if who needs to contact me?” I asked.

“The TSA,” she said.

“Who’s that?” I said.

“That’s us,” she said tapping the insignia on her breast pocket, “the Transportation and Security Administration.”

“Frankly,” I said in all innocence, “that eventuality had never occurred to me.”

Ah yes. I’d got her on the ropes alright. This is probably why she huffily prodded some computer keys and said, “I’m putting a note on your record. Make sure you have an address next time.”

I suspect this was bluff as no customs officer in the meantime has referred to this “note” on my “record”. But it’s quite exciting to think that the TSA care so much about staying in touch.

I unhooked Enrique, my umbrella, from her Plexiglas sneeze guard-thing and settled back into the mood for oysters.

A few weeks ago, in downtown Montreal, we noticed a large truck emblazoned with the festive colours and corporate iconography of Planters Nuts.

I wouldn’t like to describe it here as “a truckload of peanuts” because I have no idea. For all I know, there was just one single, highly pampered, peanut inside or maybe Planters were transporting office supplies to their workers in a truck that looked like it might contain peanuts. Perhaps the truck wasn’t anything to do with Planters at all and the friendly “Mr Peanut” logo was being used to disguise a far-darker cargo. Pringles perhaps. I don’t know. It’s something of a Schrödinger’s Peanut situation, and I think we’re getting off the point.

Look. The side of the truck displayed a picture of smiling Mr Peanut, who looks more and more like Clive Anderson with every redesign. And next to his beaming portrait were the words: MR. PEANUT (MD).

MD? I was at once delighted by the idea that Mr Peanut might be a Medical Doctor and angry at myself for not realising it before. Of course Mr Peanut was a medical doctor. It made complete and total sense.

Clearly, a successful medical practice is how he affords such fine accouterments: the top hat, the monocle, the ebony cane, the spats.

How else? You didn’t think he made his fortune as a peanut magnate did you? For crying out loud, he is a peanut. He’s hardly likely to sell his brothers and sisters to be rolled in salt and casually scoffed in pubs and airplanes. That would be downright sick.

Also, there are a lot of people out there who are deathly allergic to Mr Peanut and his kind. It must be very difficult for Mr Peanut to walk down the street or go to the cinema without making a lot of people nervous. At least this way, should his very presence accidentally trigger an anaphylactic shock in a passing stranger, he’s able to be useful and to make repairs.

“Is there a doctor in the house!?”

“Yes!”

In such a situation, Mr. Peanut is at once curse and cure. That’s what he keeps beneath the top hat: an EpiPen. He never leaves home without one.

My wife pointed out that the “MD” after his name was the French equivalent of “TM” in English. The MD was simply pointing out that Mr. Peanut is a registered trademark.

Oh!

Of course he wasn’t a medical doctor. He’s known far and wide as Mr. Peanut, not Dr. Peanut. Someone who wears a top hat and a monocle would never choose the more humble of those honorifics. Frankly, I’m surprised he’s not going around calling himself Dr. Prof. Rev. Peanut (MD) even without the medical degree.

I had been a fool. And my wife was laughing at me.

The strangest thing about all this is that, weeks later, part of me still thinks that Mr. Peanut is a medical doctor.

I saw some Planters Nuts in the supermarket today and something in me said “Mr. Peanut can write prescriptions.”

Even though it never made sense to begin with, and even after Samara filled me in on what the MD really signified, I’m still slave to my first, wholly mistaken, impression.

When I’m old and senile, I will almost certainly tell the nurses that Mr. Peanut is one of the finest doctors in the land and that might want to consult him about my quinapril doses.

This really could end badly. I myself have a peanut allergy. If I should ever have the misfortune to sit next to Mr. Peanut in the cinema, I’ll incorrectly assume he’ll be the one to help reduce the swelling.

Worst of all, nobody will shout “Is there a doctor in the house?!” because nobody else on the planet sees Mr. Peanut and thinks “Medical Doctor”.

And in the cinema specifically, they’re far more likely to be shouting “Down in Front!” because of his fucking top hat.

From now on, to be safe, I will only go to IMAX cinemas. They don’t tend to screen the kind of medical dramas that would attract Mr. Peanut and the 3D doesn’t work if you have a monocle.

Montreal! Where albino squirrels run amok, Mr Peanut is an MD, the hockey team can be controlled with the mind; and (soon) my blimp will patrol the skies.

Down in the parks: topless men, bottomless drinks, bits of stadium, visible panty lines.

Out on the streets: beret-wearing women riding side-saddle with cigarettes, peg-legged pirates, cross-eyed babies, puking Torontonians unaccustomed to the fun.

At any one time, half of Montreal’s population is underground. I refer not to “the underground city” that the tourists are always looking for (any day now, they’ll find it), but to the perpetual state of digging the streets up. Either there’s a year-round treasure hunt that nobody’s told me about or the mayor has lost his keys.

The women and men of Montreal could all work as models if they wanted to. The women could model high fashion, the men could model anything from gravel to grit.

I don’t mean to patronize Montreal’s women by suggesting they’re all beautiful or to insult Montreal’s men by suggesting they’re all hideous (so very hideous), but nowhere else in the world have I so frequently been moved to say the words “I’m sorry Madam, but is this man upsetting you?” only to discover he’s the husband of twenty years.

Montrealers are generally prepared to get from A to B by any means necessary. Boulevard Saint-Laurent looks like the Wacky Races. In a single day last week I saw a home-made motor-trike; an ersatz batmobile; some sk8er bois old enough to know better; a procession of Hell’s Angels, the leader of which wore bunny ears; a hipster with Icarus wings; Leonard Cohen and PK Suban on a tandem Bixi; and a dwarf on a pogo stick.

At first I assumed they were after me, but it may have been chucking out time at Cirque du Soleil Anonymous.

Jerusalem was built on seven hills, as were Rome, Paris, Budapest, Byzantium and Edinburgh. Efficient Montreal did it in one. But it’s not a hill, dammit, it’s a mountain.

There are no truly high-rise buildings due to a bylaw about structures not exceeding the height of Mount Royal itself. Presumably the City Council are afraid of angering the Volcano Gods.

Further credence is lent to Volcano Gods theory when you consider “The Tams”. It’s supposed to take place on Sunday, but there’s always at least one drummer sitting in the shade of that statue thrubbing along on his own. Why? Because if the drumming were to stop, the Volcano God would awake. Those crusties are in the pay of the City Council and we should all be glad of it.

That Earthquake last year? A warning shot. The on-duty drummer must have been distracted by one of those model women or a pogo dwarf.

There’s a giant orange on the side of the Décarie Expressway. I’ve been there. There’s a hotdog stand in the bottom. I asked a lady working there what they keep in the rest of the orange. She said “Nothing”. Suss.

Montreal, as David Cronenberg knows, is the ideal place to hide from the supernatural. That towering cross on Mount Royal (though its main function is a massive key to wind up the town each morning) sends out a clear message to vampires: “you may be welcome in the rest of Canada, but Montreal’s not having it. We’ve got quite enough pale young men with top hats and pierced nipples, merci.”

Zombies meanwhile will never breach our city, thanks to a convenient flap on the Jacques Cartier bridge. At least I assume that’s what all the seemingly-functionless light switches in Plateau apartments are connected to. One flick of the wrist and Johnny Deadfellow is in the Saint Lawrence. We’ll lose the odd Boston rideshare that way, but it’s something to chat about in the lavatory at Expozine.

Speaking of Cartier, he and his posse must have must have arrived here in the summer. “Zut Alores!” they must have said, “Is zis not a paradise, yesno? We will settle down ‘ow-you-say tout-sweet.” And by the time winter came along, they’d already built a whole city and it was too late to move a few degrees south.

Dogs, cats, gerbils: all socially-acceptable fauna to share a home with.

There aren’t many people who have pet silverfish.

In fact, the only reason I’m able to pick out a silverfish in a lineup is that we used to get them in our outbuildings when I was little and Dad always insisted they be given the back of the shoe. Yes, snuffed out with the traditional method reserved for minibeasts: squishing.

Being a ridiculous greenie today and having far too much empathy for my own good, I’m reluctant to do anything about the silverfish currently occupying our bathroom.

It’s not like they’re using up all the hot water or leaving hairs on the soap.

Indeed, they don’t seem to be doing any harm at all. Silverfish, as I understand it, consume paper and while this would be an obvious threat to precious things like books or papier-mâché hats, the ones in our bathroom seem to be subsisting on the tissue-paper dust that snows down onto their home in the ventilator when somebody tears off a piece of toilet roll.

It’s a rather charming little ecosystem.

Not ones for venturing out during daylight hours (something I can very much relate to), the silverfish and I only cross paths in the event of a midnight pee.

Even then, they largely ignore the gigantic vertebrate in their midst (that’s me) and swim quite playfully around my bare feet (moving in a way evocative glistening little fish, hence their name).

If there are high-flying ladies out there paying good money for goldfish pedicures, I don’t see why I should be turning down silverfish pedicures for free.

Silverfish pedicures: the poor man’s indulgence.

Silver is only second prize, after all. I’m willing to accept that.

To tell you the truth, dear reader (and why wouldn’t I? I’ve already confessed to my shameful bathroom infestation), the silverfish are actually rather cute. The baby ones are the size of eraser rubbings. How can such a tiny form contain anything like a mind? It seems impossible, but there they are.

Yes, reader, there are baby ones. There were originally only two silverfish. We called them Silvia and Silvio on the rather heteronormative presumption that they were a male-female couple. Hasty, yes, but soon proven accurate, as their numbers began to increase.

You may be thinking: Kill them! Kill them now before it’s too late! and I agree it may be possible that the infestation is getting out of hand. But there’s the Montreal Agreement to consider.

You see, the silverfish and I have an unspoken agreement. If they stay in the bathroom, they can continue to live and to thrive.

After all, who am I so snuff our their tiny lives for no good reason? I’m no beastly Titan, you know.

But if I see one elsewhere in the apartment, I’ve given myself license to thwack it. Until that day, I’d allow them to live in peace rather than, as the case would be, pieces.

That day arrived today. I found a silverfish in the bedroom.

When I squashed the rogue animal with the spine of How to Be Idle (sorry Tom, it just happened to be to hand — it’s a testament to the book that it’s always so close by) it reduced to a barely-identifiable smudge, like a smattering of ash.

Needless to say, I felt terrible about this. A life smudged out. But them’s the rules, silverfish. You saw the agreement on the table. I must protect my books and any house guests who happen to wear papier-mâché hats.

I’m now thrown into a moral quandary. Do I make a preemptive strike by exterminating all of the silverfish–innocent babies and all–as they sleep? Or do you think they’ll get the message when none of their scouts ever seem to return from beyond the bathroom door?

Strike in advance to protect my books? Or punish only the offending parties? I don’t think it’s hyperbole to suggest that this must be exactly how President Obama feels about ISIS.

While I was idling in the hammock today, an airship passed overhead. Next door’s pug and I were equally delighted.

It was a lovely thing to see on a quiet autumn day, drifting proudly across a backdrop of cirrus clouds.

Oddly enough, we recently enjoyed a curious BBC documentary programme called Cloud Lab about a team of scientists flying around in a custom-made airship discovering things about clouds.

Not for the first time this week then, I was struck by how grand it would be to actually have an airship to ride around in.

What does it cost to have an airship, I wondered. Far too much, surely. About a hundred thousand dollars perhaps, or even more.

And then it struck me. That actually wasn’t very much. It’s more money than I have, obviously, because I’m an indolent wastrel, but it’s the kind of money that fairly ordinary people spend on things like houses and cars and all the rest of junk they think they need.

An airship was no more ridiculous that those things, dammit! I could have an airship if I wanted one.

My mind began to race. I loved the idea of an airship, perhaps permanently moored above the city, like how the HMS Belfast is moored in London.

I wouldn’t need an address any more. When people asked where I live or work, I could just proudly say “oh, I live in the blimp” and gesture up into the sky.

“You live in the blimp?!” they’d say.

And I’d say “Yes. Yes. I live in the blimp.”

The HMS Belfast is a tourist attraction in London, as is the permanently moored Tall Ship in Glasgow. I can only assume that the City of Montreal would be delighted by my plan. The blimp would attract people from far and wide–Ottawa even–and if they paid enough money I could take them for rides, maybe even drop them off at home.

I’d fulfill my ambition of being able to take a rope ladder to work. I’d be the only person higher than the crane operators. Their necks would creak as vertebrae groaned with the unfamiliar sensation of looking upwards. “Sweet Jesus,” they’ll say, “Someone found a way.”

It wouldn’t be very nice for the people who lived in the shadow of the blimp, I suppose. They’d never get any sunlight. The value of their property, now permanently eclipsed into a state of permanent night by my blimp, would plummet. The plants in their window boxes would shrivel and they’d all complain of a D-Vitamin deficiency. To them, I say: sorry.

This is the kind of revelry that comes to mind in a hammock, of course. There’s no practical application to any of this, of course. And even if there was, it would be highly unethical to plunge so many people into a state of permanent twilight. Of course.

But. Ah, but.

I got onto Google and searched “how much does it cost to buy a blimp?”

According to the first result on WikiAnswers, “A lot of money, but don’t worry. Keep smoking your crack pipe and I’m sure you’ll find one.”

Another answer: “It costs a quarter of a million dollars to rent the Budweiser Blimp for two hours.”

Yet another: “The Goodyear Blimp cost them three million dollars. And you’d need a special hangar to keep it in, which would also cost millions.”

Hangar. Pfft. Hadn’t they thought of a permanent mooring? Leaving it floating in the sky eternally would be free, the idiots. No one has thought this through except me.

And my blimp wouldn’t need to be as ostentatious as the Goodyear or Budweiser blimps. Mine wouldn’t be decked out in flashing lights to amuse the painted yobbos at Molson Stadium. The very thought.

I bet I could find someone willing to sell me a more humble blimp, perhaps one that I could deck out in the New Escapologist masthead colours or even a likeness of my own face like some kind of Batman villain might do.

And that’s when I found www.personalblimp.com

It costs “between $100,000 and $200,000”. That’s perfectly affordable and I’m sure my bank manager (who has been trying to get me into a mortgage for years) will be delighted to stump up the cash.

The personal blimp website also says something about FAA certification and needing permission to fly an airship around above a city, but I’m sure that’s all just legalese and nothing to worry about. I think I can confidently say that I’ll be flying (driving? piloting? plenty of time to learn the specifics) my own blimp pretty soon.

Look up, Montreal, and maybe you’ll see my new home office.

I awoke prematurely this morning from a nightmare inspired by the hit anime series Attack on Titan.

It was 10am. Early enough for me, but Samara had been long awake and was sitting right next to me, showered and coffeed, reading a book and generally firing on all cylinders.

Anyway. Attack on Titan is about hostile, skinless, eerily-grimacing giants who routinely break through the defenses of a walled city to eat the humans within.

It’s terrifying. It’s also horribly nihilistic since the Titans don’t actually need to eat. They don’t digest anything. They just chomp the humans up and swallow them down for no clear reason whatsoever. Well that’s just plain naughty.

“If I were a Titan,” I said sleepily to Samara, “I wouldn’t eat you.”

It was just my dreamy, morning way of saying “I love you”.

“That’s kind of you,” she said.

“I’d keep you safe from the other Titans,” I said, “in a little house inside my big Titan house and I’d just look in at you through the windows.”

“Would you be all skinless and grimacing?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m not at all certain that I’d enjoy that.”

“But I wouldn’t be able to help the skinlessness and the grimacing,” I said, “That’s just how I’d look.”

“Well, I suppose that’s okay then,” she said.

She saw me laughing and she knew what would be coming next. I always say the same thing when we’re talking about giants looking through windows, a surprisingly common occurrence.

“Would you be wanking?” she said in that tone of voice suggesting she’s heard all of this before.

“Yes,” I said.

“I thought so,” she said, “And crying at the same time, I suppose?”

“Yes,” I said.

There is nothing funny about mentally-ill giants, looking in windows and wanking and crying at the same time.

She was reading An Edible History of Humanity by Tom Standage, which I thought was a bit of a creepy coincidence.

“I’d make sure you were comfortable,” I said, “and that you’d be spared from the Titan rampage.”

Sensing that this somehow wasn’t enough of a proposal, I added, “and I’d make you a sandwich every day.”

“A nice tofu sandwich?”

“Yes. But it’d be difficult to make it with my massive Titan hands, so I’d have to keep a puny human chef around on retainer.”

“He’d live with me?”

“No,” I said, “he’d have his own tiny house.”

I thought about this a little more.

“And,” I said, “I’d have to keep some farmers around to grow the beans required to make the tofu.”

The ramifications of this sandwich promise began to dawn on me. I’d need to spare some human farmers to grow the wheat to make the bread for the sandwich. I’d need bakers to bake it, other farmers to grow any seeds to add to the bread, and further farmers to grow any salads or other vegetables my tiny human wife might want in her daily sandwich.

“Oh, the whole thing’s too complicated,” I said.

Before I knew it, I’d end up with a whole human village in my Titan house. Where I come from, that’s called an infestation.

“Why can’t you just eat Titan food like I do?”

“Titans don’t eat, remember.”

“Oh yeah.”

I didn’t have a solution to any of this. Before I knew it, the entire human race would be safe and uneaten in my house. That wouldn’t be any good at all. I’d be the laughing stock of the Titans.

“I wouldn’t eat you,” I said again, perhaps a little too defensively.

“Okay,” she said, “Thank you.”

“I probably would eat you, actually.”

“But you just said that you wouldn’t eat me.”

“Yes,” I said, “I feel that way now, but I’d be a Titan. It would be in my nature to eat you.”

“Well, that doesn’t sound very fair to me,” she said.

“You’re just saying that because you’re a puny human. If you were a Titan, you’d understand. I’d just have to eat you up. I’d pop your head right off. Om. Nom. Nom.”

I mimed what this would look like, in case it wasn’t clear.

I patted my stomach and pretended to burp.

“Quite tasty,” I said, “Not delicious. But quite tasty.”

I got up and stretched and went off to cook our breakfast of non-human vegetable matter.

An old Doctor Who today reminded me not only of a fondness for jelly babies but also the memory of the holy grail of mischief.

Pursued a masked assailant, Tom Baker was cornered against a bubbling swamp. For just a moment, it looked as if he was going to cross the swamp by submerging himself and using a corncob pipe as a snorkel.

He doesn’t do it.

Instead, he decides to take out the assailant with a hastily-fashioned blowpipe and dart. And I understand why. It’s easier.

When I was little, I believed it my life’s ambition to march unflinchingly into the local duck pond, to walk along the bottom–corncob pipe remaining above the surface like a tiny periscope–and emerge on the other side a few moments later. I’d be soaked through–algae hanging from my ears and a mallard under one arm–but with full composure as if there were nothing impractical or strange about marching through a duck pond like the T1000.

Ideally, it would be done in full view of some respectable onlookers–preferably the vicar, some gossipy mums, and the mayor.

It’s too difficult though. Perhaps even impossible. You can only really pull it off if you happen to be Popeye the Sailor Man.

I wanted to do this quite badly but got no further than caber-tossing my mother’s clothesline prop irretrievably into the duck pond, trying to gauge its depth.

I was perfectly serious about this and it occupied my mind for a long time. This is part of why I couldn’t be bothered with things like being kind to my sister or doing school work. There was the impossible stunt to solve.

There were diagrams. There were also diagrams, of course, of my robot, whose body would–quite simply–be made from off-brand Tupperware containers and whose mind would be made from a complex tangle of coat hangers. Diagrams do not guarantee execution.

The way I saw it, there were three major problems:

1. That the depth of the pond might by more than my 4.2-foot natural height plus two inches of corncob pipe.

2. That the corncob pipe wouldn’t allow for enough air.

3. That I didn’t actually have a corncob pipe.

But there were also three solutions: the finding of a pond with the perfect depth (deep enough for full submersion but shallow enough not to fill the pipe and condemn me to a premature watery grave); the acquisition of a corncob pipe; and that I traverse the duck pond quickly enough so as not to run out of air.

I found that I could hold it for 28 seconds. That would be enough time to cross the floor of a duck pond. Probably.

Of course, holding one’s breath instead of breathing through the pipe reduced the corncob to pure decoration. But essential decoration, so why dwell on it?

Getting a pipe would still be tricky though. I didn’t know anyone who smoked a pipe from whom I could borrow one and I suspected that Abdullah, our newsagent, would be reluctant to sell a pipe to a ten-year-old boy, even if he promised only to use it as a duck pond snorkel-cum-periscope.

I’d have to consult the one person intelligent enough and with enough time on his hands to help me solve these problems.

“Dad, can I ask your advice about something?”

Without looking up from the fiddly work he was doing with the cables on his scale model of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, he said, “Crossing a duck pond with a corncob pipe snorkel, I suppose?”

“Yes!” I said.

“Can’t be done,” he said, “You won’t be able to see.”

I hadn’t thought of that. A duck pond wasn’t like a public swimming baths, clear and limpid. It would be black with silt and duck droppings and the regal business of swans. I had to assume complete duck pond darkness.

I opened my mouth to speak but before I could offer my solution, Dad said:

“Forget it. It’ll spoil the illusion.”

He was right. Once you were into the realm of goggles, you might as well get hold of some proper snorkeling equipment and maybe even a wet suit. Such levels of preparation would completely ruin the effect. This had to be done sans sporting equipment, with only a corncob pipe for breathing through and (ideally) a three-piece suit and a bowler hat (for the later uncovering of a croaking frog).

It couldn’t be done. I was defeated, just as Tom Baker had been.

I told this story to my wife today, expecting bemusement. Without looking up from her embroidery she said:

“Pop a length of rubber tubing in the duck pond the night before. Use it to extend the range of the pipe. Rig the pipe in advance to facilitate maximum airflow.”

Samara Leibowitz. Smarter than a Time Lord. Smarter than my Dad. Smarter than me, certainly.

There’s really no reason not to do this now is there?

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.