The Occasional Papers

Minimalism is Anorexia projected outwards.

That’s an entry for The Quotable Wringham, I reckon. Here’s another, which I plagiarised from a tee shirt my girlfriend saw in a mall:

I love Asceticism. I can’t get enough of it.

The Plain People of Cyberspace: Stop, our sides are splitting.

But seriously. What if my silly quip – Anorexia projected outwards – is true? What if my ongoing career in simplification is a form of mental illness?

If sanity is statistical, then I am a raving loon. Most other human beings tend to snowball through life, accumulating more and more and more. I do not. The only thing about me that expands, is my definition of “enough”, and so I constantly offload things from those days when I occasionally acquired.

When I tell people that I didn’t watch The Apprentice because I have no television; or that they cannot “text me” because I have no mobile phone, they either think I’m insane or lying. The BBC constantly warns me that “officers may call” unless I pay my television licence. They find it very difficult to accept that someone today wouldn’t own a television.

Perhaps eventually, I will live in a Japanese capsule hotel, owning just a handheld computer and an all-in-one bodysock, each day burning but a single calorie.

You might see such a vision as some kind of satire but for me it is a perfectly feasible future.

Where does it end? Cut to a future in which I’m soliciting for illegal medical operations: “I’ll keep one arm for now, to see how it goes.”

Sane minimalism stops at Body Bonsai.

But it might be an ever-advancing rationale. Perhaps when I am armless (“But I can give you a nasty suck”) and legless (“How dare you? I’m as sober as a judge!”) and shaved bald; and my spleen and appendix have been removed on account of their superfluity I will still insist that I am sane. Perhaps I will say, “Only when I’m a brain in a jar, will I accept the diagnosis of my mania”.

And then when I am a brain in a jar (“Is this spinal cord strictly necessary?”) I will still refute the possibility that I’m mad, drawing the line only at the point of voluntarily downloading my consciousness into a computer.

And then when I am but a digital soul on a server somewhere, tutting at the surplus data in the world recycling bin, I will accept that maybe I have gone too far and would there be any chance of downloading my girlfriend for some cyberloving?

Will it ever be possible to reduce oneself to an odour?

An evaluation: Minimalism is not Anorexia projected outwards. To have modest surroundings will only nourish, never starve: a maxim that won’t make it into The Quotable Wringham on account of it being true and not a stupid verbal handstand.

“Home baking!” she chimed.

The cakes were a bit sweaty-looking and the dye from the hundreds-and-thousands had begun to diffuse into the icing. I decided to have one out of politeness.

“Mm, lovely,” I said, selecting a small one.

Listen:

In my time, I have put some pretty questionable things into my mouth. I speak with authority when I say that this unassuming fairy cake was pretty bad.

The putrid morsel still in my mouth, my inner writer questioned whether “the worst thing I’ve ever eaten” would be hyperbole, but couldn’t think of anything comparably bad. At least not in this lifetime.

Flashback to a disturbingly alive smoked mackerel. Not as bad as the cake. Flashback to octopus sushi, to jellied eel, to various schoolboy dares. None were as bad as this cake. This was noteworthy.

It wasn’t just a bad attempt at a cake, but a thoroughly obnoxious perversion of food. This wasn’t food. It was some sort of military experiment.

The first thing I noticed was the texture. It may have mystified a less orally-fixated man but I knew precisely how this texture compared: it was exactly like Silly Putty.

It didn’t have the resistance of blue tack and at the same time, it was a lot less edible than bubble gum. Silly Putty was this cake’s textural twin.

The taste came in right after texture, in something of a photo finish. The almighty taste of it. A dirty slap of citrus akin to drinking the sweat from the wellington boot of a lemon who was down on his luck.

The experience of eating this cake transcended the culinary and into the existential. H. P. Lovecraft would write a book about this cake.

“They’re weight watchers!” she said, not so much as an explanation, but with pride.

The ingredients were carrot and orange. I had no need to worry, apparently, as each foot-tasting mouthful had a Weight-Watchers sin-value of less than a point each. I’m a living skeleton: I do not need to worry about “points” other, perhaps, than how to increase them.

How the hell was I going to get out of this one? It was too putrid a thing to finish but I was too polite not to eat at least half of it. I had only just managed a quarter and I was already gagging.

The tea would be my saviour. After fortifying my consciousness, I would put the next quarter in my mouth (any more in one go would be suicide) and saturate it with tea.

No good. It was still disgusting. The next piece, I tried to swallow whole, to trick my tongue into not sensing it. Who knew taste buds went back so far?

The final quarter was not going in my mouth. I mashed it up up with my fingers and folded the paper case around it, hoping that it wouldn’t be spotted as leftovers. When I left the meeting room an hour later, the mashed-up quarter cake remained behind, next to a centilitre of tepid tea.

I didn’t look back.

My dad has a maxim for every occasion. The same man who said “Education is no carriage” in a pub called The Kangaroo in 1990 also said, “Nobody likes a smart arse” over breakfast in our kitchen in 1991.

I pointed out over half a Florida grapefruit, that Aristotle said it was unbecoming for young men to utter maxims, which is why my dad could get away with it.

“Again,” said my dad, “Nobody likes a smart arse”.

It was shortly after this breakfast that I decided to cultivate the smartest arse of all.

Here follows in reverse chronological order the four most clever things I can remember saying or doing.

In a physics class in 1998, our teacher asks me to identify the strongest force in the universe. I tell him, “Peer Pressure”.

In a sex education class in 1996, my teacher asks how one could catch an STD. I tell her, “In a clap trap”.

When the National Lottery began in Britain in 1994, my parents were excited to buy tickets. I told them it was all well and good but they could only defy the odds so many times.

In a department store cafe in 1992, I proposed that if the non-smokers were so upset by smokers, they should all move to the tables in the smoking section. That way, there wouldn’t be anywhere for smokers to sit.

Perhaps not the wittiest things ever said, but my legacy none the less. If you’re not impressed, speak to my assistant and she’ll ensure you get a full refund.

I am never sure which is the worst part of a haircut: the verb or the noun.

The verb, the actual process of the haircut, is always terrible. “What would you like done?” is always, not unfairly, their first question. Immediately, your hair naivety clashes with the knowledge of the hair expert. I once heard my dad laugh this off and say, “Reduce the volume”. Try that in certain quarters and end up bald.

The noun, the stylised thing that adorns your head, will attract remarks and opinions for at least the next fortnight. Cries of “Happy New Haircut” will be hurled at you from the mouths friends, from passing cars and from the insides of wheelie bins.

You could eliminate the agony of “Happy New Haircut” by having a covert trim every week so that nobody notices. But that would increase your exposure to “What would you like done?” more than is strictly healthy. It truly is a matter of noun versus verb.

Since my verb last Friday, I have had the shortest noun of my adult life. It’s a tufty little Mohawk like what someone’s receptionist or a trendy stockbroker might have. At first I thought that it made me look a bit gay but, after a few hours of mirror torment, I realised it’s my clothes, face, voice and latent homosexuality that make me look a bit gay and not the haircut at all. It’s a perfectly good haircut.

I choose my hairdressers very carefully. Since last July, I have used a Turkish barber. His English isn’t very good, which is precisely why I use him. The worst thing about getting a haircut is that you have to make smalltalk for the duration. I don’t know anything about sport or current television or celebrities and have difficulty faking it while someone is cutting small parts off my body. I have nothing to say so I choose a barber who also has nothing to say. It’s ace.

On Friday, looking forward to forty minutes of silently staring at my own face and occasionally saying “shorter”, I was surprised to see that Mr. Barber has employed a young blonde lady assistant. Lucky Mr. Barber. My heart sank as she patted my shoulders and asked in perfect Glaswegian what I would like done.

“Reduce the volume?” I suggested pathetically.

I think this quote should be added to the pull chord doll they will eventually make of my dad. It’s not as oft said as “use your bloody indicators” and “it’s not racist, it’s an observation” but it is similarly ineffective.

The new non-Turkish ladybarber suggested I get rid of my Adolph Hitler side parting and that she “cut it forward” instead so I would like a bit like that David Tennant.

Two years ago, I had long and unkempt hair like some kind of hoodlum. When I first had it all cut off, a colleague said on the cusp of sadness, “You just don’t look like Rob any more”.

Well, now I really don’t. But my girlfriend prefers short hair to long. When you start doing that thing she does, we can talk haircuts.

The gradual reduction of hair from that to this, however, has generated many comments along the lines of “you’ll be bald next time, hahaha, hur-hur-hur”.

But I won’t. Because I’m never getting a haircut again. I can’t face it any more. Either that or I’ll become one of those people who cuts their own hair and ends up looking like Keith Flint. Not that there’s anything wrong with looking like Keith Flint.

Once, when my girlfriend was little, she went along to work with her dad. While he went about his business, he gave her some highlighter pens to draw with.

Highlighter pens are not the best kind of pens for drawing. But this was an office after all and she was only little.

Hearing this story reminded me of the time I went to work with my dad. My gifts included a free spin on a fax machine and a small plastic G-clamp.

When I was very small, my dad drove a truck. There are photographs of me and my mum and my dad standing proudly in front of the house with my dad’s truck. It was shiny and blue.

Dad was an excellent truck-driver. He had an HGV lisence and liked truckstop breakfasts. It was hard work and long hours and he didn’t like to have the sunrise shining in his eyes in the morning and the sunset shining in his eyes in the evening. He now works as a highschool teacher where sunrise and sunset do not trouble him.

I once went out in my dad’s truck on a night time mission. We were kept company along the motorway by cat’s eyes. My dad explained that cat’s eyes are tiny glass balls that reflect the beams of car headlights and that they were invented by a man who had seen torchlight reflecting in the eyes of a cat.

We did not have to worry about damaging the cat’s eyes with our wheels because the glass balls are set in rubber.

I remember this very well because I was impressed at the cleverness of cat’s eyes. They light your way along the roads but they don’t use any extra electricity. Once they are set into the road, they will reflect light forever. You never have to worry about changing the batteries.

When we got to our location, a factory, my dad talked to an overalls-wearing man in an office and the man fed some details of their transaction into a fax machine.

“That’s gone all the way to France, that has,” the man explained to me.

Come again?

“To France,” said my dad, “that piece of paper is now in France”.

While I was smart enough to understand that the piece of paper had not been physically transported to France, I couldn’t work out how the machine had done what it had done. I was very impressed. What an age we lived in.

The man asked if I wanted to send anything to France so I drew a picture on some special fax machine paper of a frog with the phrase, “no more smelly socks” and the man sent it to France for me.

I realise now that sending specifically that image and that phrase specifically to France could have been misinterpreted. I hope it didn’t cause an international incident.

In the meantime, my dad had loaded his truck with whatever cargo he had come to collect and it was time to leave. My fax-sending friend gave me a small plastic G-Clamp from his overalls as a parting gift.

My girlfriend went on to become an illustrator and I went on to become an email jockey, frequently sending things to France. If ever you take your kids to work with you, remember to give them something to play with. It could be formative.

I don’t know where the small plastic G-Clamp is today but I imagine it is still in my dad’s shed with the other G-Clamps.

“You’re obsessed with bums, you are,” my grandmother once told me. I was five years old and she said it with a hint of outrage and a soupçon of portent.

To solicit this reaction, I had proudly revealed to her the naked arse of a Micky Mouse doll. She was correct, of course. I was obsessed with bums and would continue to be obsessed with bums in various ways for the rest of my life.

Not just bums, of course. I was also obsessed with willies and fannies and boobs. As a child, any extremity or orifice usually covered by an undergarment was my mental and conversational bread and butter. It is a pity I had not grown up in an Islamic culture where everything was left to the imagination. It is fun to think of a knee or an earlobe having the same comedy substance or horn value as a tit.

In spite of being perfectly clueless about the actual mechanics and vocabulary of sex until an educational encounter at Dudley Zoo on my thirteenth birthday, I knew there was something brilliant, exciting and frequently amusing about those saucy parts of the human body. I’m pretty certain that my fondest ambition at the age of five or six was to see a “lady’s part”: a distinctly different thing, I was aware, to my little sister’s one, which was completely gratuitous seen as it was every single week during her elaborate escapes from Sunday bathtimes.

The obsession with sex was realised from a very early age in the form of imaginative doodles in every spare margin of my childhood and teenage diaries. Ask me about this some time: I have a crayloa sketch from 1986 that would make your eyes water.

Long before I had even heard of pornography, let alone seen any, I had in my mind a collection of what I called “rude photos”. It had become a reflex reaction to press record on the old brainbox whenever I saw something vaguely sexy in reality or on television. I had, to all intents and purposes, a photographic memory. Oddly enough, the photographic memory could never be cajoled into helping me out in exams.

Even though I couldn’t understand them, I delighted in rude jokes. I remember reading the ‘fun fact’ off a penguin biscuit wrapper to my dad: “What is the British nation’s favourite sport?”, I quizzed him. My dad must have taken leave of his senses or forgotten to whom he was talking because he responded with, “Bonking”.

I didn’t know quite what “bonking” was but I knew from Russ Abbot’s Mad House that it was a rude word and it shouldn’t really be coming out my dad’s mouth: the mouth that usually spouted sobering parables about the importance of conserving sandpaper.

(He was dead into sandpaper, my dad. He had a great big bucket of the stuff in his shed, every sheet as smooth a pickup line).

My parents were not terribly good at talking about sex. I distinctly remember asking them word-perfect “where babies come from”. My dad suddenly discovered how to pass into the fifth dimension and my mum, not one to forsake parental duties but bashful nonetheless, actually used the phrase “special cuddles”.

This became quite a popular euphemism. I once asked why Popeye was acting in such an eccentric way around Olive Oyl only to receive a jaded “special cuddle” explanation over basting a half chicken.

Learning the mechanics of things was of course myth-shattering. I remember acquiring a book in the How my body works series about reproduction. My parents were happy that I would finally learn the facts of matters. I remember showing it to my better-educated friend, Tom, one day in my bedroom who found the cartoony approach the book took too childish until we got to a pretty biological illustration of a male gamete. “That is Rude,” my friend exclaimed, pointing at the page, “That is a Sperm!”

And he was right. It was rude. It was a sperm.

I went to bed that night confused about sex for the first time ever. The feelings of excitement I used to get when thinking about people undressing had been pretty straightforward. But now I had taken a nibble from the apple of knowledge, I had somehow to connect those feelings with this grim, biological portrait of spermatozoa and ova and an illustration of the female reproductive system that no longer resembled the cute and mysterious anemone I held in my imagination but now a pastel-coloured cross-section of something that looked like an ant’s head, ovary receptors bouncing from the end of fallopian tube antennae.

And so the death of innocence came in the form of a manual presented by Charlie and Samantha bloodclot.

I still like bums though. Haha. I said bums.

Talking to my mother on the phone last night, the conversation unavoidably arrived at the weather. The weather in Glasgow? Cold and snowy. The weather in Dudley? Cold and snowy with the smell of turpentine on the breeze.

My dad, suddenly revealing himself to be on the other line in his signature telephone ‘creep upon’, bellows his concern about whether my apartment is warm enough for the winter.

The truth is, it isn’t. I feel somewhat conned by the promises of this ugly modern building, which I chose over a handsome West End tenement with a thought to the cold and snowy (but mercifully unturpentiney) Scottish winters.

So I told my dad matter-of-factly that when the heaters are not on, the place can be a little chilly. His advice? Keep the heaters on.

I shall take his advice. A knowledge of heating and heaters is one of my dad’s superpowers. He can sense a draft at twenty paces.

Suddenly worried, my mum asked, “what happened to the heater we got for you?”

For a moment I didn’t know what she was talking about but after trawling through the milky grot of memory I remembered that my parents had bought me a pair of three-bar halogen heaters about four years ago.

Remembering these heaters made me oddly angry and defensive. It had reminded me of the shit-ass poverty I stoically tolerated during my year as a student and my further year of semi-employment. I usually look upon that period as a two-year Halcyon Day of idle reading and late breakfasts but my flatmate and I lived in pretty appalling conditions.

A converted Victorian loft, the wind would howl through the porous walls and up through the floorboards. To see the vapour of our breath was not unusual. We lived out a whole summer with a wasp nest in the eves: too strapped for cash to call an exterminator and too many storeys high for the council. The plumbing was a major problem: bolts of air would blast water from the kitchen tap hard enough to break glass tumblers. There were bugs, there were icecold showers, there were low ceilings and high taxes.

And there was a bloody ghost. Who you gonna call? Nobody. We didn’t have the wedge.

We survived on love, Stoicism and the knowledge that we were sharing the Bohemian dream. Also a lot of canned goods.

A tear came to my eye as I thought of those halogen heaters. Without their orange glow I doubt we could even have outstayed our rental agreement. They left my life along with the haunted loft conversion. I think my former flatmate still has one in storage and I gave the other to a neighbour. One of them, I remember clearly, had a dead wasp cooking gradually in the bottom of the grill.

But I was also annoyed that my mum thought I still needed them. Halogen heaters are usually used by outdoor market traders, retirement homes and corner shops. In the last four years I’ve worked hard, come a long way and have become pretty successful in the various things that I do. I have money. I’m doing really well. I sure as hell don’t need a halogen heater. Bah.

And so we see how a person’s success can be measured in a chronology of his heating appliances. My next place, I hope, will have underfloor heating and a condensing boiler. And the house itself will be a solid gold kok – just to make sure my parents know how great I am.

Sometimes I like to draw. Not a lot of people know that. It is a secret talent.

Recently, however, my illustrations have received some unusual attention. Firstly from the facilities manager from my office and secondly from some illustration professors at a trade school in Ontario.

My stupid drawings started off as a way of combating dayjob fatigue. (Not my fatigue. I am perfectly satisfied by the predictable sterility of open-plan life. I do these to entertain jaded colleagues).

I would quickly sketch a little cartoon and pass it over the divide to one of my pod pals. I love the way they always accept them graciously and pin them up next to the photos of their children.

I think they think I am proud of this rubbish. Soon all of my colleagues will have my “work” displayed in their line of vision. This I am proud of. There’s an unlimited supply of these too: I have a mind like a roulette wheel and coming up with something pretty random is easy and impulsive. These drawings (as you may be able to tell!) are the work of moments. I think that’s what I like most about them: they are almost like automatic writing.

Later, when staying in a Toronto hotel with my illustrator girlfriend, we had a draw-off. Who could draw the most things and how fast?

It was me, obviously. My girlfriend is an actual illustrator and will put time into making a beautiful piece of art. I, on the other hand, am a stupid boob with a machine-gun tendency to externalise my most immediate ideas with no sense of shame and no patience for refinement.

Also, I cheated. I recreated some of the office-worker favourites. Among their number were such classics as “John and Margaret Lungs” and “Billy Seamine Head”.

Billy is probably my personal favourite. He just wants a friend! But thanks to the honking great sea mine he has for a head, no one in their right mind will go near him. He lives in a tragic world of people leaping out of his path in horror.

I often draw Billy Seaminehead in the margins of notepads and sudoku pages too. He usually has something hanging dangerously (often a bra or an English flag) from one of his detonator rods. His catchphrase is always the same: “Friend?”

Poor Billy. He has an acid battery for a brain.

It was Billy Seammine Head that the facilities manager of my office recently spotted, thankfully while I was out of the office. Apparently she was amused. I bet I will still receive a memo ordering me to take them down though. I am already getting away with a pair of false teeth on my desk, an inflatable Father Christmas and a piss-takingly large plant called Philip Nostrum.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, my girlfriend has my drawings tacked to the walls of her illustration cubicle (I do not know the correct term for these work stations. Inky Boxes?). She is studying a one-year comic book illustration course at a trade school and two of her professors are fans. Well, one of them is a fan. The other thinks my stupid rubbish is her work and sympathetically gives her advice on how she can improve her game. Haha!

Apparently John and Margaret Lungs have attracted the most attention. I admit they are bizarre. One of the profs apparently asked which was John and which was Margaret. I have decided that Margaret is the smiling one: John thinks he has won their latest argument but Margaret is not letting on that she has done a wee in John’s alveoli.

Other favourites include a very good drawing of a pencil with the caption, “I drew this with this pencil”; and a friendly snail with the caption, “Ian Henderson. 442, Chartwell Close”.

I am exactly like Tony Hart. (I think this entry is a fitting tribute).

Another brilliant OMG! in the bag (covered nicely by cohort and fellow reader, Neil Scott).

Probably because of the apocalyptic Glasgow weather, there was a lower audience turnout than usual: a stark comparison to November’s standing-room-only gig. At first, Fergus (the organiser/compare) and I were worried that we wouldn’t be able to whip up the usual energy in the room but we shouldn’t have worried. The audience here is appreciative of the format, familiar with the regular performers and, with no alcohol to mess up the proceedings (the venue is a coffee shop) the atmosphere is always warm and supportive.

For my opening set I related my childhood obsession with A very first poetry book: an anthology containing the charming likes of Roald Dahl and Spike Milligan and the always-popular Anon.

It amazes me even today at how diverse Anon’s works can be.

One of my favourite of Anon’s poems from this particular book was about Humpty Dumpty embarking on a disastrous mission to Lunar Mare. It went (from memory) like this:

Humpty Dumpty went to the moon
on a supersonic spoon
he took some porridge and a tent
but when he landed the spoon got bent
Humpty said he didn’t care
and for all I know he’s still up there.

I think the poem captured my imagination because (a) it was brave enough to fill in some blanks about the egg’s interesting career prior to his suicide and (b) presents the absurdly impossible image of something as fragile as an egg doing something as dangerous as space travel.

In a way it also explains why the entire military (“all the king’s horses and all the king’s men”) were dispatched upon hearing the news of Dumpty’s fatal accident. As an astronaut egg, he probably qualifies as the world’s only celebrity ovum. Only he had been triumphant in the great egg spacerace.

As a nine-year-old child I clearly enjoyed the idea of an egg-based space-travel epic poem because in one of my early diaries I had set out to put Humpty Dumpty into the high poetic echelons of Beowulf by writing said epic.

My first attempt at a sequel to Anon’s poem went thusly:

Humpty Dumpty went to Mars
All he ate were chocolate bars
He took a telescope to look at stars
Humpty Dumpty went to Mars.

You might dismiss my poem as childish rubbish because the last line is the same as the first. But I’ve just finished editing an article about Edward Lear and it turns out that Lear would often end his poems with the same line as he began with. I am the same as Edward Lear.

There are some other nice touches too. I like that Humpty’s only provision were chocolate bars. This stanza is a clear nod to the “porridge and a tent” of the original poem. It was funny that Humpty was so ill-prepared to visit the moon and it is hilarious that he was equally unprepared for his second interplanetary voyage. You would imagine that the time he spent marooned alone on that godless rock with only porridge to eat would have taught him a valuable lesson about preparation. But no. Humpty would never learn.

My poem doesn’t explain how Humpty got back from the moon in order to reach Mars. How could he return to Earth? We know from the original poem that his spacecraft was rendered inoperable on landing on the lunar surface. I guess some facts about the incredible career of this space travelling egg will have to remain a secret.

Things are made even more exciting with a third installment of the epic:

Humpty Dumpty went to venus

(I left a pause here when reading it live. The OMG! audience have learned that my readings almost always dissolve into a shameful monologue about cocks. I had lured them into a false sense of security by reading from such an early diary. Now they delighted at the possibility that even my nine-year-old self was obsessed with penises).

On a great big giant penis!!!

Exclamation mark, exclamation mark, exclamation mark.

Alas there is no more. My nine-year-old self had bitten off more than he could chew. He just wasn’t committed enough to convert a simple poem into an epic space opera format. I imagine the same was true of Anon. He wrote a brilliant prequel to a classic nursery rhyme but never got around to fully documenting Humpty’s interplanetary sojourns. Maybe further texts will one day emerge: perhaps even Dumpty’s own ‘Captain’s Log’. But until that time we can only speculate.

ADDENDUM: I just looked at A very first poetry book in the library. ‘Humpty’ wasn’t, it turns out, written by Anon at all. It was by the great Michael Rosen. Sorry, Michael. You are even better than the legendary Anon.

In front of me right now is a supermarket carrier bag containing a pair of woolen gloves, an interesting book about landmines and two large cartons of a soya-based milk substitute.

The bag (rather than its contents) is an alien artifact, accidental souvenir and polyethylene stowaway from New York City. It is a reminder that I was in New York City five days ago: a fact I have trouble coming to terms with. My time there now seems like something that happened in previous lifetime.

The bag is yellow and it advertises “GRISTEDE’S NEW YORK MEGA STORES”. On it there is a picture of the Manhattan skyline including the twin towers. At first I thought the bag design might just be a bit out of date (why compromise a logo for the sake of currency?) but next to the image of the towers it says:

“Always on our minds. Forever in our Hearts. Never Forget What They Did”.

I assume this is a touching, if slightly mawkish, memorial to 9/11. It’s about time someone paid memorial to that.

But I wonder exactly which element of 9/11 it refers to. Who are the “they” to which the tribute alludes? It seems too sympathetic a tribute for the buildings themselves. No matter how fond you may have been of the NY skyline, I don’t think you would ever consider the memory of any two concrete structures to be “in your heart”.

Nobody is about to forget what the buildings did either. They were offices for accountants. God preserve them, they never heard the phrase “credit crunch”. They never heard the phrase “Post-9/11” either for that matter. So out of touch. That must be the worst thing about being dead.

There was a nice restaurant at the Trade Centre too and an observation deck at the top of each tower. I will never forget. Those top-notch Port Authority facilities will always be on my mind and forever in my heart.

Presumably, then, the carrier bag refers to the people who died in the event. But then the “Never Forget What They Did” clause seems a bit weird. They didn’t DO anything. They died. I don’t think I’m being cruel. But no one did anything particularly heroic or amazing other than get hit in the face by a plane. They weren’t soldiers offering their lives for the good of their country. They were bystanders. I don’t think I’m being glib. It’s a weird thing to write is what I think.

Statistically, several office workers would have been on the toilet when the first plane hit. Think about that for a second.

“September 11. It happened on the toilet.”

I salute those heroic poopers. I will never forget what they did.

I suppose the phrase on the bag could refer to the heroic fire fighters and police officers who helped in the aftermath but those are pretty much all still alive. The tribute seems a bit too memorial-like so it can’t refer to them.

Whatever. The sentiment is nice and a grocery store carrier bag is a good a way as any to lament the pending end of western civilisation and (especially) “100 YEARS QUALITY-VALUE-SERVICE”.

I think I speak for everyone who died in the World Trade Centre when I emplore you all (if you have one of these bags) to return it to a participating store for re-use.

And for goodness sake, keep it out of reach of babies and small children. This 9/11 memorial is a suffocation hazzard.

Flying, I think, will always be exhilarating to me. I love the liberation of the take-off, the scary landing and the fact that you are essentially forced to do nothing for such a long time. I love doing nothing. It is my second favourite activity in the whole world.

I don’t even care about the carbon footprint it leaves behind. I have always been an epic recyler, re-user and campaigner. I do not consume much, I buy second-hand, I don’t eat meat and I have never so much as sat in the driving seat of a car. I think the environment owes me this one pleasure. I love flight. There is no adequate substitute.

Over the last couple of weeks I have been on no less than eight commercial airplanes as I enjoyed a mini world tour taking in Birmingham, Amsterdam, Montreal, Detroit and New York City before finally returning to Glasgow. I figured I would become jaded of airplanes, eating what can only be compared to 1950s TV dinners or astronaut food with tiny Tyrannosaurus Rex arms and watching stupid inflight movies. But no. I enjoyed every last minute I spent in each of those airtight metal tubes.

One of my favourite moments on my world tour happened when leaving Amsterdam for Glasgow. Unusually, I had been given a window seat and we were flying during daylight. As the plane circled on the tarmac I was treated to a momentary glimpse of the runway up ahead of us. I never expected a runway to be a small thing but the way it stretched into infinity surprised me and I was excited to know that we would be traversing it in a matter of seconds.

It was like seeing at close range the instruments that the dentist is about to put in your mouth, or being allowed to meet the animal you are about to eat in burger form: a rare glimpse of the methodology behind the pending misadventure.

The flight between Birmingham (where I visited my parents for Christmas) and Montreal (where I visited my girlfriend for Chanukah) was less relaxed but certainly equally exhilarating. That’s if by exhilarating, one means paranoia-inducing. And one does.

Eating breakfast in Birmingham airport, I was treated to Sky News images of the Israeli attacks upon Hamas. On screen, clouds of brown smoke erupt into the Gaza skies. The press have clearly screened the more impressive plumes so that mushroom clouds are brought to mind but in reality are far more low-tech and less devastating. The imagery nonetheless brings about an end-of-the-world feeling in my gut. Nobody would want to be on an airplane during such a highly charged political period. I had little choice now though. I would just stay away from news channels while flicking through the on-board entertainment system. If I don’t think about it, it can’t happen.

The images unsettled me and so everywhere I looked I saw potential terrorism. A woman’s lunchbag became a sachet of Anthrax. A stuttering man at customs became an obvious terrorist. My breakfast bagel became a big ball of Avian flu. What do you call a Muslim in a cockpit? A pilot, you racist.

It’s possible that other people had been unsettled too or maybe it was just my stupid imagination. The guys at customs seemed to be more thorough than useful. All shoes off. All laptops out. They even asked me to remove my hat, forcing me to reveal my marmalade sandwiches.

One of the pleasures of a KLM in-flight meal is that real cutlery is used rather than crappy plastic knives and forks. Normally I rejoice at such a detail but today I could only think of the potential security risk posed by such “sharps”. Designed for spooning up curry it may have been, but that spoon could end up lodged by a terrorist into a steward’s bum.

I was definitely not the only paranoid person on the flight. A New Scientist-reading Japanese lady next to me was wearing a facemask. I think she may have put it on to protect herself from possible germs. I had been sneezing when I boarded the flight and I had some recollection that Japanese people don’t like that. I assured her than my sneezing had been the result of an alergy rather than a virus but she wasn’t taking any chances. She removed it periodically to eat and to speak to the stewards though so she couldn’t have been much of a scientist.

Her mask just made me feel more paranoid though. Seeing an Asian person in a facemask just reminded me of the Sars outbreak a few years ago. Another image from the news to put the shit up me.

Later on the flight, a pretty young pregnant woman in a floral dress, radiating the beauty that only pretty young pregnant women can, passed by. I couldn’t help but look at her. She was hot. But I got uncomfortably paranoid that she had seen me looking so I decided to return to my other paranoid practices: casual misophobia and checking the undersides of coffee cups for terrorists.

Over a man’s shoulder I read the travel edition of the Wall Street Journal. “EVERYTHING GOES TO HELL,” the headline screamed, “DOLLAR WORTH LESS THAN LINT”.

We were going to die, weren’t we? We were going to die on this plane: me, the beautiful pregnant girl, the Sars lady. We would all be blown up by some bomb-wielding lunatic. Maybe there was still time to engrave my last will and testament into my arm with my duty-free scalpel.

I wouldn’t need much space. All my will consists of is “Give nothing to Dan!”

And then we landed. A smooth Montreal landing where my excellent girlfriend would be waiting with her boobs. I was right to suspect she would bring them along. She knows I like them.

How could I be so paranoid to think that I would die? I had almost forgotten that I am the focus of a secret Truman Show-type reality series. The producers would never let me die. Duh.

Working late at the office, I witnessed a postman collecting our mail.

Seeing the mail being collected was a bit like catching your parents snogging: vaguely frightening but weird that you had never seen it happen before.

This postman, to the eye, was a brute. As wide as he was tall, his DayGlo orange tabard had been custom-made: stitched up the middle from two regular-sized tabards. The fist with which he clutched the mailbag was like a joint of cured ham and the other fist was even bigger. His bald head was as big and white and shining as something from a planetarium.

And yet he had a friendly manner to him; a manner which suggested that in the past he had tried to turn his massive hand to something gentle. Lepidoptery, he would have tried, or cross-stitch or, perhaps most appropriately for a postman, the philatelic arts. His efforts, however, would have resulted in nothing but rage at the undextrous snozcumbers of his fingers, his big bald head covered in stamp hinges.

If he had been born in 1950s Hollywood he would definitely have been touted around the studios by his mother where eventually he would get a job being whipped by Bella Lugosi and saying “Friend?” to beautiful women.

But he wasn’t. He was born in 1978 to Alfred and Agnes Cox and now he lugs parcels around for Royal Mail. One day he will die and there won’t be a coffin big enough for him so he will have to be buried in a barrel or minced.

The postman had been coming up the stairs when I saw him so by the time he was on the landing he was behind me. The institutional carpet before me became eclipsed by his hunched and mighty shadow. I could hear his breathing.

I turned to go into the bathroom and it crossed my mind that he could perfectly easily follow me inside and bum me in the cubicle if the desire so took him.

And it surely would take him. Postmen love gay sex. They do it all day at the depot. Bum, bum, bum. This is where we get the phrase “letterboxing.”

What would I do in this event? Logic would dictate calling the police or maybe asking my mum to have some very stern words with the Postmaster General. But in truth, because I am English, I probably wouldn’t say anything because I wouldn’t want to cause a fuss.

I never imagined I would be a suffer-in-silence type. Looks like I am.

Needless to say, I remained unmolested. But for half a second it seemed highly plausible: the fact that he could overpower me so easily combined with his frustrated gentleness made me think that it was definitely going to happen.

But instead of doing a rape, the postman went about his business of collecting the mail and dreaming of a better world.

The lovable knucklehead.

Good news, everyone. I am fifteenth on the International waiting list for a venue at the Montreal Fringe Festival.

This means that if fifteen of the other artists cancel their performances or myteriously die in the night, I will be a shoo-in.

I had really wanted to play the Fringe because I think the clean-living, roof-partying, high-IQ, sex-loving Montrealians would be the perfect audience for The Crinkle-Cut Man and also because my girlfriend lives there so I would be able to visit her while cleverly writing off the trip as a tax expense.

Oh well. At least this teaches me that fraud is not a cornerstone of a romantic relationship.

Getting onto the waiting list is no kind of achievement other than doing well in a game of chance. The artists are not picked on merit of a proposal but rather randomly via a lottery.

I still did well though. Hundreds of artists would have applied. Take that, random chance! I am the best at chance!

Well, the thirtieth best.

Out of those who entered.

It’s a very disappointing result, actually. If I had been fourth or fifth on the waiting list, I would at least have some significant hope of getting in. If I had been sixteenth (i.e. not on the list) I would have got my investment money back. Instead, I’ll have to wait until June to see that again.

Of course, I could be proactive about helping the other acts pull out. I could murder my way into the Fringe like a Macbeth.

Some might argue that cleverly murdering fifteen people from around the globe would be more of an achievement than simply having my name pulled out of a hat. But others may argue that it would be the act of a psychopath. Who to listen to?

Yes, I have decided to become a murderer. It is the only way I can see of fulfilling my lifelong ambition of being the Thane of Cordor.

Just when you thought the laziest comedian was Jasper Carrot from off of Golden Balls and All about me (take that, Carrot), I myself was caught asleep on the job, head resting on the mic.

“Shhh, don’t wake him,” a heckler says, “or he might do more of that rubbish about paperclips”.

Thanks to my time-wasting associate Dan Godsil for this. (Original image by Fergus Mitchell).

Discombobulation is it?

You enjoy saying the word (especially the ‘bobule’ bit in the middle) but you don’t know what it means until you’re standing barefoot in the shagpile of a parallel universe, the smell of curried potatoes wafting though your nose.

I run up the stairs of my building, my daddy long legs assassinating three risers with each stride, thrust the key into my apartment door and blast into my familiar hallway. “I’m home!” I shout through the apartment into the tiny earholes of my oblivious goldfish. At last the weekend was here.

Absently, I abandon my keys atop of the bookcase by the door, kick off my shoes, shed my socks and dance into the living room where I find an alarmed Asian man in front of the television.

Many of you will that I do not own a television, favouring instead to fill my leisure time with books, sex and amateur taxidermy. The big three.

Many of you will remember that I don’t own an alarmed Asian man either.

Marge, Homer, Lisa, Bart and Maggie rush home each day to find someone out of place sitting on their sofa. I, however, am not used to this.

After a moment of discombobulation (there is is) I realise I am in the wrong apartment.

How could this happen?

I have entertained the possibility before. On several occasions I have been ready to thrust my key into the door of 801, only noticing at the last nanosecond that I’ve a further flight of stairs to ascend. I had never really thought I would end up on the other side of the wrong door though, shoes off and hollering to a goldfish who, in actuality, was a good three meters above my head.

They say a problem with city living is that you never get to know your neighbours. I know one of them now. I know that his name is Mr. Lee (or maybe just Lee), that he watches Eastenders, that he cooks curried potatoes and he has the same door key as I do.

Yes, it appears our keys will unlock each other’s doors. If I ever come home to discover “Bowie” before “Bolan” in the CD rack, I will know who is to blame.

Lee.

That’s who.

I wonder briefly whether everyone in the building has the same key but this is too horrible to contemplate for long.

Worse yet, maybe everyone in the whole world has the same key. Ever tried your door key in someone else’s lock? Me neither. Until today. To me, there is more evidence in favour of all keys being identical than there is evidence for them being unique. It’s all a massive scam and we live under conditions of a false sense of security.

The inside of Lee’s apartment is practically identical to mine. Whoever kitted out the building must have bought the furniture in bulk. We have the same sofas, the same lampshades, the same carpet and (weirdly) the same opinions on woolen head gear (it may keep your head warm but it looks silly and messes up your hair).

Due to someone’s laziness, Lee and I find ourselves living in parallel universes to each other.

My apartment is slightly personalised. I have introduced some bookcases of my own, a goldfish bowl and, as a finishing touch, a ten-by-ten portrait of myself.

The absence of these things in Lee’s place is eerie. In the hope of rectifying this, I offer him a print of my giant portrait but the tasteless fool declines.

I shake hands with my downstairs Asian counterpart and complement him upon his doppelganger sofa and table lamps. It is a very cordial parting but, still worried that he may abuse the sameness of our keys, I leave him with this message:

“Maybe I’ll come and watch you sleeping one night!” and then I laugh slightly too much: “Ha! Ha! Ha!”

When leaving Lee’s apartment, the poor chap’s face is as white as a filleted cod.

Fear is a good way of keeping him out of my stuff but I’ll booby-trap my collection of lower-mammal taxidermy just in case.

This time last week I was in Canada, visiting my new girlfriend: an illustrator and inventor of superheroes called Samara Leiberwitz. There is a cutesy picture of us on the left in the event that you would like to induce vomiting.

The trip concluded with Thanksgiving Dinner. Yes, it appears that Canadians celebrate Thanksgiving too. In fact, my Canadian friends were surprised when I explained that we have no equivalent in the UK. “We’re very, very ungrateful,” I told them truthfully.

I don’t know how accurate a representation of Thanksgiving this was, being Canadian, Jewish and at least partially vegetarian but I enjoyed it tremendously nevertheless. I had been a little nervous beforehand. I had never met Samara’s parents before let alone the twenty-three members of her family who would be present at the dinner. That’s a lot of Leiberwitz.

After dinner, I stood smoking on the patio with Samara, her dad and various uncles.

Looking skyward, I noticed that there was a wooden balcony on the side of the house, from which a wall-mounted ladder extended onto the building’s flat roof. I had heard before of the legendary rooftop parties of Montreal and had been substantially titillated by the idea. Imagine that. A party on a roof. Whatever next? A barbaqueue under the sea? A square dance on the moon? Crazy.

Momentarily forgetting that I was supposed to be acting like a responsible adult in order to temper the unavoidable fact that I’d crossed an ocean in order to ravish Mr. Leiberwitz’s favourite daughter, I said, “Wow, I’d love to go onto your roof.”

To my surprise the idea was seconded and an away-team quickly established.

We were going to the roof.

Eventually, sense was seen by various uncles and only Samara and I were to venture roofward. Samara may be my girlfriend but she’s new to the job and has not yet adopted the role of “the one who reigns him in”.*

(*I don’t see this ever happening.)

We played it safe. We each took a battery-powered torch and each donned an upturned colander, as is customary in exploration scenarios. I didn’t tell Samara this, because I didn’t want to alarm her, but I also secreted a small spatula in my sock. Better safe than sorry.

In order to get to the balcony, we first had to cross Mr. and Mrs. Leiberwitz’s bedroom. Parents’ bedrooms, as anyone knows, are the last places in the world a kid is supposed to be. Especially other people’s parent’s bedrooms. I was told that we had permission to be there but the butterflies still did the hokey-pokey in my tum. When in parents’ bedrooms, anything is possible: Let’s make a bomb! We can’t. No time. The roof awaits.

From the balcony we see that grandma has joined the various uncles on the patio below. “What are you doing in your mum and dad’s bedroom!” she shouts, “No kinky business! You’ve got your own room for hanky-panky!”

Hanky-Panky, on this very rare occasion, was the last thing on my mind. I had a colander on my head and was suffering from the sense of exhilaration which can only be found by trespassing in the lion’s den of a parents’ bedroom. I was also busy remembering the fact that I am significantly afraid of heights. Such mortal terror is not conducive to either hanky or panky. Not to me anyway.

Samara takes to the ladder first. As I watch her unthinkingly ascend, lemurlike, I realise there is no turning back now. In Canada, I suddenly remember, I have no medical insurance.

Torch in hand, I follow her. Looking down, the patio seems to rotate. Faces of various uncles now look like a roulette wheel in which the ball is my head for heights and at which the croupier, deranged and thanotistic, is my own stupid sense of adventure. The croupier and I would be having serious words if we were to survive this.

Once on the roof, we are treated to a secret world of protruding pipes, one of them belching laundry-scented steam into the Montreal night. Giddy I go to sit on a joist. “Don’t sit there!” says Samara, “You’ll get your suit dirty”. I had almost forgotten I was wearing a suit. I must be the city’s best dressed rooftop explorer.

It would make sense to sit down for a while before attempting to descend the ladder. Just until the stars stopped spinning. But casting the torch around the roof I see that there is nowhere to perch. Some kind of party! I muse that it’s much like any other party I’ve been to: while everyone else is content to dance, I am far more concerned about whether there will be a seating area. When people ask me to come to their parties, the first question I ask is whether its a “dancy party” or a “sitty party”.

The novelty of being on the roof and among the pipes soon wore off, just as, I imagined, did the novelty of unpopulated Canada to those French and Catholic pilgrims all those years ago. But by then it was too late to turn back.

But turn back we did. As I backed down the ladder, I held two handed onto the railings (was my trembling visible?). In something of a Proustian rush, I was taken back to swimming lessons, Age 10. Our ghastly instructor, Mrs Saunders (who, if born in a different era would surely have been one of Goebbels’ Schutzstaffel) would have us leap into the water: something for which I never found the confidence and instead backed down, gingerly, as I was doing now.

When we were back in the company of various uncles I felt relieved.

This morning, back in Old Blighty, I get an email from Samara. She says that the balcony outside Mr. and Mrs. Leiberwitz’ bedroom collapsed in the night. All of the supports had rotted through. Uncles Various say its a miracle we did not die that night.

A cutesy adventure so nearly became our woody, splintery death.

Of course, we can laugh about it now.

The new academic year officially began on Saturday. I can only take this to be an anti-semitic gesture on behalf of the state. On this occasion I shall let it pass.

As dewy-eyed undergraduates molest the West End, I am reminded of a beautiful occurrence almost exactly twelve Judeo-Christian calendar months ago today:

I had gone along with a student friend to the freshman fair so that we could investigate the clubs and societies available to young clever types.

As an employee of the university – honorary chair of fluff studies – I am entitled to join these student societies but had never really considered doing so before.

But what to join?

There’s the chess club for losers; the Pythagorian Society for other losers; the football team for the biggest losers of them all; and the ironically named ‘Loser Club’ (“Where Everyone’s a Wiener”) but I’m no elitist.

In front of me in the queue for general club enrollment was a cripplingly beautiful girl clutching an old-fashioned legal pad. Much like that pad, she was at once unusual, chic and spiralbound.

She was older than the other students in the room but I didn’t recognise her from the staff either. Perhaps a new PhD candidate? In any event, I suspected she had the right flavour of stuff to join my illegal underground army so I approached her, affecting the most remarkable nonchalance.

“Hi there,” I said, trite as a pestle pathetically accommodating a mortar, “What club and/or society are you here to join?”

She rolled her eyes and sighed, disinterested.

“Oh, you must be here for the superior indifference club,” I tried.

“No.”

“The standoffish mysterious harlot society?”

“Guess again.”

“The easily bored society for detached young women?”

“No.”

“I give up then. What are you here for?”

“I’m Jewish,” she said.

To another man this remark may have been received as non-sequitur but Hemi-Hebrew myself I instantly recognised it as by way of an explanation. Why join a club when she’s already a part of God’s chosen people?

Me? I’m half in, half out.

I have many clever jokes about being Semi-Semitic (see?). My favourite is “So I’m not a complete prick”. But I resisted the opportunity to show off and tried to remain casual, coblike.

“I’m similarly awkward,” I confessed.

My student friend, silent until now, began to get restless as if asking for an introduction. “Don’t mind the shiska, I told the chic girl. She is neither girlfriend or wife. I just keep her around in case I ever need a human shield”.

Now feigning an interest, the girl said: “And what do you do?”

“At the moment I write comedy”.

The next morning:

“You’d never slept with a Jewish girl before had you?”
“No. But that’s not why I did, you silly racist.”
“Cool. And I’m not doing this because you’re a comedy writer”.
“I… what?”

I didn’t realise writing comedy was even currency. Surely that’s akin to sleeping with someone because they assemble Kinder Egg toys for a living.

I never saw the girl again. It was one of those whirlwind romances. I don’t even have her telephone number. This is all well and good but one year later I find myself thinking:

If she wasn’t joining a club, why the hell was she in that queue?

There is a class of men who make their living by standing near doors.

I’m talking about doormen, obviously. And within said class of men there are various sub-classes: strata of doorman society. At the top of the pyramid is the hotel doorman who receives tips, has his own union and gets to hang out with celebrities. At the middle there is the ‘concierge’ whose charge is to lurk near the door of a corporate or residential building, occasionally grunting at people who pass by. At the bottom of the pile is the lowly ‘bouncer’. Bouncers are born in vats and have painted-on suits.

Standing near doors may look like an easy job to you, dear and sophisticated reader, but you try standing near a constantly opening and closing door. You could catch your death. The doorman, however, laughs in the face of death because he knows that when he finally succumbs to the inevitable fate of pneumonia, he will be be rewarded in the doorman afterlife with a reception area of seventy virgins.

The first person the doorman meets in heaven is Saint Peter, the longest-serving doorman of them all.

The deceased doorman will have to wait a few minutes while Saint Peter finishes talking to the FedEx guy and then then the doorman will have to pass the test he has been waiting all of his life to pass.

Saint Peter: Greetings doorman. When is a door not a door?
Doorman: I have prepared to answer that conundrum all of my life, Saint Peter. It is a riddle with which I am entirely familiar and I am looking forward to answering it. A door, my lord, fails significantly to be a door, my lord, when it, if I may venture, is ajar.

And then he goes through the pearly revolving door where he meets his maker: Janus, the god of gates and doors.

We have a new doorman in my office building. He’s a lovely guy, is very well dressed and is seemingly played by Captain Birdseye. Either he’s fresh out of doorman academy and still idealistic about the profession or he really loves doormanship and has taken it up as a sort of hobby.

Every morning the new doorman holds the door for me, says good morning and calls me Sir. At first I naturally assumed he was kowtowing exclusively to me, as is my god-given right, but it turns out he does this for everyone.

Alas such matinal felatio grows tiresome. I find myself missing our old, grumpy doorman (may he rest in peace) who never held the door for anyone, never said good morning and spent most of his time unapologetically watching football mishaps on YouTube.

The problem is that I cross paths with the doorman on a bare minimum of four times a day. Once when arriving in the morning; twice when leaving for and returning from lunch; and once again at the end of the day. That’s an awful lot of pleasantry.

I’m trying to identify alternative ways into and out of the building. The laundry shoot is a promising option.

It’s trying for me and I’m sure it’s trying for him. How can he be so nice to so many people? It can’t go on forever. He’s sure to lose his marbles sooner or later and bash everyone’s brains in with a doorstop before eventually hanging himself with a draft excluder.

This morning the nice doorman wasn’t in his booth. He was probably off tending to an injured puppy or finding families for some orphans or something. It felt very fortunate that he was absent. To start the day without having to say hello and be friendly was an almost obscene luxury. I was able to slouch up to my desk without so much as having to clear my throat.

It suddenly occurs to me that the doorman is often the first person I speak to on the average day. If an ‘in order of appearance’ credits went go up before my eyes the end of each day, the friendly doorman would usually be the first person on it:

YOU HAVE BEEN WATCHING:
(in order of appearance)

Friendly doorman…………Captain Birdseye
Robert Wringham………….Himself
Man in Toilet 1………….Fulton McKay
Man in Toilet 2………….Ben Kingsley

(I used to secretly suspect that my life was a Truman Show-style television programme orchestrated by Nazi occultists and some of my ex-girlfriends. But I’ve finally concluded it would be too big an operation even for them.)

The first thing I do after making my way through the doorman’s slalom of salutations and shoe-kissing is have a wee and/or a poo in the office bathroom. Why shouldn’t I? I’m only human. Stop staring at me.

Who should I see in the bathroom this morning but the friendly doorman. It gave me the shock of my life. How dare he present himself out of context so early in the morning?

“Get back to your booth, doorman!” I commanded. He quickly put away his urinating todger and, spinning on his heels, turned in on himself in the fashion of a revolving door and vanished into thin air.

Adjusting our anthropological lens, let us now move onto the lower class doorman: the bouncer.

After enjoying some cheap pitchers of pissy local brew last night, my friends and I decided to cheekily vacate the pub via the fire escape. I think I had objected to the “Fire Door Only” posters which had been plastered all over it. Laughing in the streaky face of dot-matrix authority, I hit the escape bar and we ran giggling into the night.

“See, you!” said one of the bouncers, his words a heavy pile of cured Scottish ham, “That’s a fire door only”.

I deliberately pretended to mishear him and said “Sorry, I’m not a puff” before scarpering and leaving him with his outrage and a flapping fire escape door.

My silly friends enjoyed this because (a) it was clearly unacceptable behaviour and (b) I actually am a puff.

“Well, you certainly stuck it to a man there,” said one of my pals.

And I had. I had stuck it to a door man.

“Hello there,” I said, trite as a thanksgiving turkey, “I’m calling from Scotland and I’m hoping to spend a few nights in your hotel next month.”

The girl at the front desk of the Toronto Renaissance seemed very excited to receive a call from Scotland. You would think that an international transitional space such as a hotel front desk would allow for such exchanges quite frequently but the girl said, “Oh wow!”

“Say, what time is it in Toronto?”
“Eight thirty in the morning.”
“Oh yes. You’re five hours in the past. Don’t worry. I won’t spoil anything.”

I could hear her blushing down the phone.

Alas I was destined to disappoint. I am not Scottish.

In fact, I was affecting an English accent so astonishingly Attenborough that the girl could surely smell the crumpets over the line.

Why the affectation? Stay with me.

Every so often, I like to book myself a suite in a five-star hotel. Why shouldn’t I? I can both afford it and deserve it. Unlike some people, eh, fatso? Don’t complain. You should have worked harder.

Much like any other ghastly pleb, I make the most of the facilities while I’m there. I’ll order an entire wedding cake from room service at 4am and eat it in the bath while punching a solid gold prostitute.

Nonetheless, such decadence always results in a liberal guilt kicking in. Like a nagging child it pulls at my pinafore strings, mysteriously even on those rare occasions I’ve neglected to wear a pinafore.

You know how it is. Phantom pinafore string syndrome.

I feel like a horrible fraud when I’m talking to the staff at these places and I become paranoid that the receptionist will sense from my bad teeth a working class childhood and immediately sound the alarm.

“Intruder! There’s an intruder amongst us!”. An army of bellhops will wrestle me to the ground and a doorman will escort me to an awaiting windowless van which will drive me off to a forced labour camp before I’ve even had chance to pocket the complementary soap.

It is out of this fear that I always find myself wearing my best suit when on the phone to these people and affecting a ludicrous Hugh Grant voice.

I knew that “calling from Scotland” would be the key to getting the receptionist on my side today. An expert fraudster, it was all part of my ploy for getting her to love me and to not sound the Phony Alarm.

Canadians love Scotland. Canadian scientists even tried to clone Scotland under lab conditions, in the highly controversial Nova Scotia project. Alas they failed to recreate deep-fried mars bars to an authentic standard and simply no one would believe in the cloned Scotland. “Ontologically identical” was their claim but the proof was in the pudding.

Nobody wants to wear a Canadian tartan either: it’s certainly patriotic incorporating a maple leaf or a moose head into the weave but nobody’s going to wear it.

Why such kinship between our two peoples? It is because Canada is America’s Scotland: both are substantial northern chunks of continents but both are overlooked by arrogant southerners who all too willingly dismiss an entire nation of people as their own country’s fancy hat.

Maybe our tourist boards should sort that out. Next time they want to come up with a promotional tagline for the country they should consider:

“Scotland: it’s England’s hat”.

Surely like many other arrogant idiots, I used to quietly believe that I was the subject of an on-going Truman Show-style conspiracy in which all of my friends were actors and events were orchestrated entirely by a director in the sky.

I even imagined what the marketing campaign for The Robert Wringham Television Programme might be like in the real world. Billboard effigies of my face surely loomed over cities. Interviews with the actors who play my friends would appear in magazines. Longterm characters such as my parents would be A-List celebrities while images of new friends would feature on the sides of busses with taglines like “Will she be the one to steal his heart? Tune in at 8pm for a crushing season finale.“

My mother’s anti-natal screenings would have been the first broadcasts. Years later, people would tune in to watch the ongoing decay of my festering corpse. Bill Oddey would present this part from the Springwatch hut but live webcam footage would be available online too.

I imagined the scriptwriters gathered in their meeting room, devising new plots, introducing cool new angles (“a monkey sidekick!”) and snuffing out unpopular characters (“People are getting tired of Dan Godsil. Let’s kill him off.”).

But then I came to the conclusion:

It’s just too big an operation isn’t it?

It wouldn’t just be about engineering situations immediately around me. All local radio would have to be fabricated; they would have to censor any movies that refer to my TV show or realworld events; and they would need to have created an entire artificial Internet for me to play around on. It would be a simply gargantuan task for very little reward. Who would want to watch 24-hour coverage of my life on television? I spend most of my time gawping out of airplane windows, picking my bum.

It’s just too big an operation isn’t it?

This may seem obvious now but with an ego like mine and with such photogenic friends it was difficult not to at least suspect this to be the truth.

Now I am free of such paranoia. (Either that or the continuity department of the production company have succeeded in selling me their deception but it’s best not to think about that).

I also used to fear triple-lidded manhole covers. This came about as the result of playground folklore. The kids at school liked to imagine that stepping on a triple manhole cover would result in bad luck. For some reason the idea stayed with me (while others did not – I’ve never cared about stepping on pavement cracks or opening crisp packets upside down) and until recently I have avoided them at all costs, dodging or pirouetting over them.

Not any more though. I have converted a negative into a positive. Instead of avoiding triple-lidded manhole covers I actively try to step on them. I’ve convinced myself that they bring good luck instead of cause cancer.

It’s all about perspective.

There was a time when I would flick the light switch six times before entering the bathroom. Just in case. What if I stopped and then an spoon-wielding madman hacked my family up? I would never forgive myself. But I have stopped and my family remain unhacked.

I am rapidly becoming a poster boy for the well-adjusted. If you don’t believe me, just use your iPod to listen in to my thoughts like that guy did on the subway yesterday.

I’m not a nut. I’m a legume.

Recently I moved from my lovely Hyndland attic to a sterile and expensive little cubicle in Yorkhill. The scent from the incinerators at the local abortion clinic is stifling.

Anneliese fondly refers to my new home as ‘the shit hole’, resulting in lots of delightful bon-mots such as “I can see your shit hole from here” and “You sure do keep your shit hole clean”.

And I do. My shit hole is immaculate.

The saving grace of the new abode is the location. While the apartment itself has all the charm of a parking attendant’s booth, it was built upon a layline of cool (or an ancient Indian burrial ground of awesomeness – you decide).

From my window I can see the laminated futurwolt of the Glasgow Science Centre, the Spanish Baroque turrets of the Kelvingrove Art Gallery, the Medieval-looking Glasgow Steiner School, a pyramidal protestant church, two hospital buildings and the premises of a small company called Richlay Eggs.

When I see the sign for Richlay Eggs, I always think to myself, “They certainly do”.

In the far distance, there is an ever-advancing army of energy-generating windmills. Quixotic, I will one day set about them.

I can also see the new BBC Scotland building. The front of the building has “BBC Scotland” written in big letters on it. This is how I know.

One day I will walk down to the BBC Scotland building, enter the main foyer pretending to be a bicycle courier and blow myself up.

I suspect this would be Yorkhill’s first suicide bomb but I might be wrong about this.

To understand my wrath, you only have to look at this week’s TV comedy listings.

Speaking of such things, I’m writing a sitcom pilot for Channel Four with the charming Fergus Mitchell. Exciting.

I met with Fergus this week and he told me about a Saturday morning TV show called Hider in the House in which children need to smuggle a minor celebrity into their house and keep him hidden without their parents finding out.

Apparently Chris Akabusi spent seven weeks under a bed in Devonshire.

Chris was thought to be the series’ finest hider until the bones of Bubble from Big Brother were found in a Romford airing cupboard.

It’s only since I began dating a coffee shop manager that I’ve come to appreciate how instrumental coffee is to the romancing process.

This is why Starbucks and Durex always have the same stock market value.

“Would you like to come out for coffee?” is the universally-acknowledged code for “Would you like to have sex?”

Similarly, “Would you like to come up for coffee?” is code for “Would you like to have sex immediately?”

Try not to confuse your ‘out’ with your ‘up’. Doing so can only lead to a slap in the chops.

(Adjust accordingly. ‘Up’ only works if you live above ground level. Use ‘In’ if you live in the suburbs or ‘Down’ if you have a trendy undersea bubble house.)

There’s just so much secret language. For this reason, and one other, dating is very much like being a Freemason.

The Plain People of Cyberspace: What’s the other reason?

You know. All that bloody dancing.

Dating a coffee shop manager has forced me to abandon the classic caffeine-orientated code words. If I ask her out or up for coffee she’s likely to roll her eyes and say, “That’s the last thing I want”.

When asking her out, I am forced into being either creative or blatant.

Creative:

“Would you like to come out to that new ice rink?”.

Blatant:

“Intercourse? 8pm?”

With the former option, one runs the risk of actually having to visit an ice rink. With the latter, one once again risks a slap in the chops.

Going to an ice rink as a pretense for sex is a ridiculous game. You won’t realise this, of course, until you’re strapping on your boots.

When I say “going to an ice rink”, I also extend this warning to paint balling, ten-pin bowling, laser quest and badger-baiting.

Two cups of decaf: £2.90
Ice Skate Rental: £14.75

Only in exceptional circumstances will you be asked to do “a figure eight” in a Cafe Nero.

There’s a reason why the coffee invite is a classic. If you decide to abort the mission halfway through, you can just pretend the date was a perfectly innocent coffee all along. You will end the night in the usual, perfectly agreeable way: TV Dinner and a maintenance wank.

Nothing lost.

If you’re at the rink, however, you’ve already gone to so much trouble. Mission abortion is not an option. You will have to have sex now, even if it’s under duress and awkward for both of you.

Tonight: Discombobulate. Stand-Up comedy and author readings featuring Robert Wringham, Arnold Brown, Magi Gibson, Alan Bissett and more. Hosted by Ian Macpherson. Glasgow CCA. 8:30.

September 7th: OMG. Fauxkward diary-readings from Glasgow’s schmitteratti. Offshore Cafe, Gibson Street, Glasgow. This will be excellent.