The Occasional Papers

Some further recollections concerning the burgeoning greengrocer band, Cauliflower Ear.

Instead of a bass guitar, a hollowed-out pumpkin had been employed and strands of lemongrass were being used for strings. The result was a highly organic sound.

The drum kit was an elaborate system of butternut squash and aubergines, though the high hat cymbal was simply a regular high hat cymbal. I suppose it must be difficult to replicate the sound of a cymbal using only vegetable produce, though I must say this shattered the illusion somewhat.

One guy didn’t do much. He just stood about shaking a coconut filled with dry pulses and occasionally ringing a bell pepper.

The highlight of the evening was surely the marvelous solo on tuber.

This weekend I spent an evening in my favourite pub. As a point of fact it’s not actually a pub at all – it’s a private club. I’m not a member though so I don’t have one of the magic keys required to get in. Instead I hang around the doorstep with the smokers until someone opens the door. Taking my cue, I dash inside faster than an oiled-up chimp.

My nom-de-plume is written a hundred times in the guest book. Take that, society.

On the upper floor, some sort of live musical event was going on and after some drinks, a librarian friend and I decided to go up to see what was indeed what. Apparently she knew the guy vending the tickets and he would let us in for a few minutes for free. This night, it seemed, was all about subterfuge.

Once in, I noticed a chap standing stock still on the dance floor, drinking beer on his own. He wasn’t part of the band but he appeared to know them and to me he seemed very familiar.

After a short while it occurred to me that he works in my local fruit and veg shop. It’s quite a sobering experience to spot your greengrocer on a Friday night. When a drunken superman, you don’t want to be reminded of how, during civil hours, you pretend to weigh up the benefits between varieties of lemongrass but don’t in truth have the foggiest idea what the difference might be.

“Hello,” I said, “You work in the fuit shop”.

“Hello,” he said, “You shop in the fruit shop. You and your broken arm.”

After a while it occurred to me that he was not the only greengrocer in my vicinity. The guy on bass guitar was a greengrocer and the guy in the ticket booth was also a greengrocer. The place was swarming with the blighters. I had found the nest.

The girl on keyboards also seemed familiar and I had concluded that I recognized her from my work at the university library but now I think about it, she too was a greengrocer. A she-grocer. She had once undercharged me for some basil pesto.

This was a bit awkward. In truth, the head greengrocer and I had seen each other in pubs and on the street before but we had always ignored each other. Acknowledging each other’s existence outside of the world of vegetables would violate the patron/greengrocer code of social conduct.

“Well,” I said, I shall see you around. Next time I want a pineapple I’ll come and say Hi”.

My librarian friend and I went back downstairs to our fellows. That’s how it works at this place. Librarians downstairs, greengrocers in the attic. It’s got a very high gini coeficient for a single premises.

Later in the evening, I was having a wee in one of the toilets, the cubicle door hanging open in a carefree manner. That’s the kind of party animal I am.

Suddenly, someone starts talking to me.

It is the head greengrocer, washing his hands at the sink. It is encouraging to see him doing so, I think, as he has responsibilty for handling my mushrooms. I can’t hear what he’s saying though so I wonder over to him.

“This had better be good,” I say, tipsy, “I put my willy away for this”.

He tells me about the greengrocer band. He’s not in the one I had witnessed upstairs (“Electronica? Pah!”) but rather he is in an entirely separate greengrocer band which plays heavy metal.

I suggest to him a few fruit-and-veg band names he could use. The Vegetables. The fruits. The Smashing Pumpkins. Cauliflower Ear. My personal favourite is ‘Part Zucchini’ but he doesn’t like any of them.

I tell him he’s actually a bit of a local celebrity – the fanciable greengrocer – but that I think people get carried away when they’re in such close proximity to so many courgettes.

His friend, the bass player, is at the urinal and he asks if people fancy him too. I say “No, you’re known as the grosser grocer”.

On this note, I go back to doing my wee.

In the park today, a sycamore leaf came detached from its shackles, spiraled down through the air and landed neatly upon my head.

It was a moment of simple and unexpected loveliness. Rather than bat it away squeamishly I let it lie on my bonce until it chose to leave of its own accord and join its festering fellows on the wet ground.

In hindsight though, I’m not sure I like the fact that a leaf can fall on my head in such an unsolicited fashion. For a leaf to land on my head defies the odds. And one can only defy the odds so many times in life. To do otherwise defies the odds.

If I’m going to go around defying odds I’d rather it would be for a more interesting end than having an autumn leaf momentarily touch my cranium. I’d be happy winning the lottery for example or getting into the record books for the largest number of sweetcorn niblets jammed up a single nostril.

This trespass of nature was only the first reportable event to take place in the park this evening. And I was only there for ten minutes.

Sometimes a walk in the park is anything but a walk in the park. I’ll leave it to you to mix your own metaphors. It’s a piece of cake.

Of course, we’ve seen this proven several times in the past. The park is a hazardous place, filled with footballers and lonely drunks.

It’s also full of dogs and bees. “When the dog bights,” sings Julie Andrews, “When the bee stings, when I’m feeling low, I simply remember my favourite things.”

Well I certainly didn’t think of my favourite things when these happened to me. Quite the opposite.

Next, I am accosted by drunk children. “Either of you two got a light?” one of them asks. I am only dimly aware of his request since my attentions are focussed upon a pair of dogs wildly circulating the park. I’m not very fond of dogs (jumpy, growly excitable things) and I couldn’t see the humans who should have been attached to them.

There’s actually a local horror story about a man who takes pleasure in his horse-sized rottweiler jumping up at people in Kelvingrove park. The words “He’s only playing” fill me cold dread.

“Hoy! Either of you two got a light?” asked the kid again, annoyed at being ignored. I feel that the question is being aimed at me but what does he mean “you two”? Have I become so duplicitous that he can see both of me?

And then I realised that a studious looking girl had become caught up in my orbit. Listening to her iPod though she didn’t seem aware of me or the drunk and hooded nedspawn.

I told the kids I didn’t have a light but their leader continued to shout their request at the iPod girl.

“I don’t think she can hear you,” I said, “She’s listening to music”.

“Wha-?”

The kid didn’t seem to get it at all. I found this odd since he himself had iPod wires dangling from his shoulders.

The pre-Copurnican girl continued on her way oblivious to the world outside her head.

What a lovely way to live. I’m going to invest in a pair of builder’s protective earmuffs so I can ignore everyone. No more overheard train conversations for me.

I don’t know how this story ends so we’ll assume it involves a pterodactyl.

Trite observations is it?

The plain people of Cyberspace: Is it just me or does Christmas get earlier and earlier every single year?! This year, I saw an Argos Christmas advert in October! OCTOBER, mind!

Is it just me or does everyone say the same thing every year? And earlier and earlier at that? Pah!

There may be some truth in this. I bought a box of “Christmas Mince Pies” today for a spot of premature festivity behind closed doors. The sell-by date was November 12th.

I look forward to seeing Hanukkah in March; Halloween in April and Dinner for Breakfast.

Everybody loves shopping and your humble narrator is no exception. Today I donned my special shopping clothes, did my special pre-shopping stretching exercises and entered into the world of acquisition bliss.

I have bought 100 sick bags.

They really are a steal at just 12p. You don’t get much for 12p in today’s economic climate. The best things in life really are [almost] free.

Clicking ‘confirm’ at FirstAidWarehouse.co.uk brought about one of those rare existential moments of total self awareness. “What am I doing?” I laughed. “I’m buying 100 sick bags is what”.

The Plain People of Cyberspace: But why? Please tell us why. We’re dying to know.

Of course, I don’t plan to be sick one-hundred times (unless I find myself accidentally watching The Catherine Tate Show again). To explain: I’m going to print logos onto them and give them away as free gifts with the first one hundred copies of The New Escapologist, the rough-and-ready underground magazine of which I am the editor.

I’m hoping the complementary sick bag will sway those ‘maybe someday’ customers. I think I’m on to something.

The main problem with being an autodidact is that you never know how to pronounce anything properly. Books are all well and good but it’s difficult to detect from them the silent “t” in “Paolozzi” or where the emphasis lies in “Dalí” (which I only recently discovered last week while in Barcelona).

I hope this flaw didn’t betray my informal education too crudely in the job interview I attended today.

Many twentieth century artists were discussed.

The job? Librarian of Edinburgh’s Dean Gallery. I am not holding my breath over this. I think things went well in the the interview itself (though I may have jabbered a little too excitedly when we got around to discussion of modern art) but the competition is assuredly rather steep and I am frankly very proud to have even been invited to interview.

If I get the job I will be as happy as a bag of pickled pigs. I do not exaggerate when I say that it has everything I could want from a job: seclusion, nutritious surroundings, copious quantities of seriously great twentieth century art, green space, the perfect subject matter, seemingly lovely colleagues, great espresso at the in-house cafe. There is even a giant robot to keep me company, for goodness sake.

It would be entirely my element. Needless to say I wore my waistcoat today.

Walking around the grounds prior to the main event, I pause while a man takes photographs of some impressive statuary. “Come along!” he sings, as camp as Hi-de-hi, “you’d only enhance the photograph anyway!”

This is the sort of punter I would serve every single day.

The more I think I’ve probably not got it. It was a style-over-substance interview – a crime for any champion of the postmodern – and personality in such contexts only goes so far. But no counting robot chickens before they’re hatched.

My question to the panel: “Does it ever get boring, working in paradise?”

More photos taken today here.

Seated opposite a large-headed man on an Edinburgh-bound train this morning, I remarked internally at how corn-like his hair was.

It was cropped short and blunt. Well, I mused, it is harvest time.

For the duration of the journey, I idly fantazised as to what it would be like to fashion crop circles upon his massive head.

It would be a quite singular experience I think and would undoubtedly involve a tiny scythe and a spirograph.

As I left the train (how did I not see this before?) I noticed that his noggin was leaping with field mice.

Returned this week from Barcelona where I witnessed first-hand the super-odd Antoni Gaudi architecture. A few snaps can be viewed here.

I’ve noticed that most people’s holiday snaps of Barcelona (especially those of the Casa Milà and the Sagrada Família) look exactly the same. An explanation: it’s very difficult to get photographs of the large and up-close Gaudi buildings and so everyone either finds the one perfect position to take it from or plumps for a huge lens-filling shot of wobbly windows. I think my rooftop shots might save my set from total conformity though.

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While staying in the fabulous Hotel de Catalunya, I noticed that a complementary foil-wrapped chocolate had been placed on my bedside table, the poop of a candy rat, after the first night.

After the second night, two chocolates had been left.

I wonder how far the hotel staff take this cumulative chocolate delivery system? If one has been there for three nights, is one rewarded with the appropriate number of chocolates or is there an upper limit to their praline generosity? If not, and the number of complementary chocolates is always proportionate to the number of nights stayed by the guest, the long term residents would have serious problems with door-opening.

I can imagine trying to go to bed after three weeks in the same room and having to sweep the chocolates off the bed covers and hearing them rumble across the wooden floor.

If you didn’t like chocolate for whatever reason or if you were perhaps lactose intolerant, you might find this whole thing rather invasive, even frightening. Since you weren’t eating the chocolates to begin with, you would accumulate them even faster than the long term guests. Slowly and surely they would come to your room, like zombies to a boarded-up farm house, until every last cubic centimeter of space is taken up with walnut whirl. And yet they will still come. The robotic maids understand no limits. Death by chocolate etc.

Back in reality, I don’t know what the idea behind this cumulative complementary confectionery (CCC) arrangement might be. It’s no incentive really. To the guest, it would be a highly expensive and indirect way of acquiring chocolate.

As I was only staying for two nights we shall never ever know the nuts and bolts of this reward system. I’ve failed once again on the investigative journalism front haven’t I?

The voice was both monstrous and fey.

It asked: “Do you want anything from the trolley?”

Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do. You. Want. Anything. From the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Doyouwantanythingfromthetrolley? Do you want anything from the trolley. Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley?! Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley, do you want anything from the trolley do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley?

The voice was asking us if we wanted anything from the trolley. It and the trolley were attached to a fat middle-aged man.

Not a single passenger in Coach F of the 16:42 from Aberdeen to Glasgow wanted anything from the trolley.

There was only about twenty-five minutes of the journey left. Humans can survive without sustenance for that long. Food was not required by anyone. He may as well have been selling scuba gear: there was no market here for egg sandwiches.

There was something disconcerting about seeing a middle-aged Ricky-Tomlinson-looking fat man selling sandwiches for ScotRail. Why was he in this situation? Like many of my father’s post-war dad-generation, he resembled one of those instant disguises you can buy in joke shops: a pair of lensless spectacles with a strawberry nose and a plastic moustache attached.

Rotund, gasping, largely extinguished; how had he got to be fifty-something without figuring out how to avoid jobs like this one? He should have been at home with a pipe and a dachshund or at the very worst, shuffling paperwork for an air conditioning company.

How did he even get this job?

Train Company guy: I don’t know, Mister Creosote. We normally only hire healthy young women for this role.
Fat Guy: Please. I’m at the end of my tether. A lifetime career in the yogurt industry has come tumbling around my ears. Everyone wants that actimel stuff now. We can’t manufacture probiotics!
Train Company guy: Hmm. Maybe we can come to some arrangement. [Produces an oversized baby romper and bonnet]. Put these on for me and dance.

I expect the interview went something like that.

He was too fat to comfortably move down the gangway. He looked like he might get stuck. The father of a kid sitting opposite me had stowed a skateboard in the overhead luggage rack. In an emergency, could we use it as a shoe horn?

As he trudged along, hips unavoidably rubbing against our shoulders (“Do you want anything from the trolley? Do you want anything from the trolley?”), I noticed something hanging by a string from his arse.

Looking closely, I saw that it was the plastic packaging rings from a six-pack of canned lager. It dangled pointlessly, a limp tail, from his pinafore strings.

It was the finishing touch on a spectre of shame. It was the jaunty hat grudgingly worn by teenage workers in a fast food kitchen. It was the insulting tip left to a Starbucks server. It was the wise-ass alligator puppet with whom the Shakespearian actor is forced to work after his stumble into television presenting.

I’d like to make it clear that I’m not taking the piss out of this unfortunate character. I filled with love for him and wanted more than anything to invite him to work in the easy-going and well-paid capacity as my personal assistant for life. But I don’t have the money. A year ago I was pouring coffee myself.

For the rest of the journey, he stood in the vestibule with a drunk woman, sharing her bottle of Budweiser. Complaining he said, “I’ve been doing this job since Birth”.

Or maybe he said “Perth”.

***

On our arrival into Central, the boy sitting opposite me began exploring the undersides of the seats. “Dad, where’s my skateboard?”

The boy’s dad, a handsome young Samuel Beckett who had been reading a lengthy article about Captain Beefheart in a music magazine for the duration of the journey, began looking around similarly low locations.

“I think I saw you put it up top,” I said helpfully to Beckett.

Beckett looked at me with dagger-eyes. “Oh, did you?” he said.

His tone trod a border between suspicion and irritation. I think he had tried to lose the skateboard and I’d ruined his plan. I sure hope it wasn’t the bane of his existence or anything.

Loath as I am to be the boring git at the cocktail party, allow me report upon the dream I had last night.

I should point out first of all that this event is notable in that Robert Wringham DOES NOT DREAM. Or if he does dream, he seldom remembers doing so. I assume it’s something to do with being a fictional person. If real people dream up bizarre fictions between the sheets, a pixie such as myself would probably dream factual events. We can’t have any more bridges connecting the realms of the real and the not real. I already have several paranoid theories about how my actions are to blame for causing 9/11.*

The dream begins on Edinburgh’s High Street: a place I know very well having spent large portions of my life there. I walk down one of the sloped alleyways to where (in reality) there is a popular pub called the Jolly Judge but now (in the dream) is a strange medieval tavern.

As I open the door, smoke fills out into the alley. I note the strangeness of this. There is supposed to be a smoking ban. (Not even my dreams are safe from the legislation of the superego).

To my horror, a Queen tribute band is coming to the end of their set on a slightly raised platform of a stage. I don’t know much about Queen but they are doing that dreadful number which starts “one dream, one love, one tired decision” or something.

A bouncer tells me that it is their second encore and that they will be leaving shortly.

“A Queen Tribute band?” I spit angrily, “what were you thinking, dick head?”

Apparently my dream self knows the bouncer to be the organiser of the event. It seems we have a history. He does not appear perturbed at being called a dick head.

The reason for my anger? I am here to perform my own one-man Queen tribute band. I can’t believe how inappropriate this scheduling is.

Equipped only with a snare drum and a stick-on Freddy Mercury mustache, I don’t know how I am supposed to succeed in this task but my dream self doesn’t seem to mind. It’s comedy apparently.

The four-piece band don’t seem to have made any effort with their costumes either. There’s not a Brian May wig in sight and the denim-clad lead singer looks more like Tommy Saxondale than Freddy Mercury. I don’t think a single one of them is gay either. But their music is good. They sound exactly like Queen and the audience love it.

The sense of trepidation sets in. I could feel dream butterflies in my dream stomach. Oh, for a dream lepidopterist with a dream endoscope. How can I follow these talented musicians with my Early-Learning-Centre drum and my joke shop tache?

The Plain people of Cyberspace: Maybe it will work. Maybe it will be so embarrassing and you will look so wretched that it will be brilliant. You could be the next Tommy Cooper or Ted Chippington.

Me: That’s what I hoped for too. But the crowd had come for music and they were drunk on whatever medieval drinks the bar staff were serving in those tankards and animal skulls and I really wasn’t sure I would cope with this.

It seems there is to be a five-minute intermission between acts. An MC in a lime green suit and a string of French onions about his neck boards the stage and tells them that “if you liked that, you’ll love our next act”.

The drummer of the Queen band comes over to talk to me. He asks me what he thinks I’m doing, doing a Queen tribute. He looks like a young Bill Oddey with a sweaty fringe combed down over half of his face. He is annoyed.

“We’re the only Queen tribute band at the festival this year,”. I can tell he is irritated. The last thing I want is to get involved with an 80s tribute band mafia.

“Don’t worry,” I say, “This is just a one-man comedy thing. I’m covering for Mitch Benn. It’s nothing like yours and he’s been doing this for years.”

I love how my sleeping mind dropped in this piece of rationale to help explain why I had embarked upon this odd project. I was friends with musical comedian Mitch Benn in this dream and the Queen gig was a favour for him.

In reality, I once met Mitch Benn at a gig above the Wolverhampton Varsity. He sold me one of his ‘Radioface’ CDs for half the sales price. Perhaps stepping in for him at the Queen gig (in reality he doesn’t do this, I don’t think) was recompense for this. Still, this seems like a high payment for a £5 CD discount from five years ago.

Back in the waking world, I’m still annoyed at Mitch Benn for putting me in this position. If anyone sees him, kick his ass for me. And then pretend that you thought he was Bill Baily. He’ll hate that.

I wish I could conclude this description with an explanation of how the dream ended, but alas, my mind wondered before I could perform my one-man tribute to AIDs and I swam into a far more disturbing scenario with some dancing bears. My mind is a disgusting place to be.

The meaning behind this dream? In March 2008 I will have my very own one-man comedy show at the Glasgow Panopticon. Among other things I will be reading entries from this blog and improvising a diary entry live on stage. There will be a snare drum involved (but no mustache that I can think of). I guess the dream is a symptom of feeling slightly unprepared for this and of relying on other people (theatre managers, technicians, musicians, promoters) for the first time in a long while. I know it will all be fine and that I’ve got an entire six months to sort things out but when I think about it too carefully I do a runny poo.

* “… theories about how I am to blame for 9/11”. Yes indeed. The main one concerns how I failed to flick the bathroom light switches 27 times on the evening of 9/10. Another involves a punishment for touching myself during Her Majesty’s Christmas speech in 1997.

The word “remarkable” is probably meaningless if you’re the sort of person who remarks upon everything. Maybe you would reserve the word for truly remarkable things – extraterrestrial visitations, for example, or a faulty KitKat with no wafer in it – but I doubt you can distinguish between levels of remarkability if you’re the type of person who finds polystyrene exciting.

I think this as I sit on a Glasgow-bound train from Dundee and the man behind me, in a constant monologue to a silent friend, relates the most mundane things imaginable with the verve of a seasoned Jackanory presenter.

Everything is remarkable to him: every last non-event is a piece of hilarious and endlessly reportable news. His life is a story in which every last sentence ends with an exclamation mark. He knows nothing of the world of the fullstop.

His voice is that of a Shakespearian performer and so everyone in the carriage must share his cardboard news. He makes the private public. He is a living weblog. Possessing the unusual combination of being both loud and dull, if he worked for the Samaritans switchboard, every last one of his callers would wind up as deaf suicides.

I know a few people with unusually quiet voices akin to that of William Wilson’s evil twin or the ‘before guy’ on a Strepsils advert. The universe must somehow balance out this unruly segment, hence, the Brian Blesseds of this world.

Much to the mortification of an old woman to my left, old Big Gob also swore a lot. Everything was “fucking” to him. Laughing, he said “At half time I ate a fucking orange!”

Bah.

Irritated, I turn around in the fashion of a ten-year-old in a school assembly when the head teacher has singled out “you at the back” for chewing gum or looking a bit gay. I simply cannot help myself. With the vested interest of a freakshow spectator, I want to see what sort of idiot has a voice like this, swears so frequently and thinks that his one-day-late free gift from PC World is worth talking about so fervently or at all.

The voice belongs to a giant, well moisturised, amateur Nazi. He is young, Aryan, and despite a down-to-the-floorboards shaven head and fists like pigs’ heads is oddly handsome. He looks a bit like a Mitchell Brother but without the sphincter for lips.

The fact that he transpired to be this gentleman thug is the only reason I refrained from smacking him about the chops, pulling back his waistband and pouring my ScotRail coffee into the expanse of his trousers.

That and the fact that I am not Bugs Bunny.

If I had assaulted the noisy man, I would have been outed as being a librarian and the Metro newspaper would report the incident with a comedy skew.

It soon becomes transparent to those of us in Coach F (the designated quiet coach, by the way) that Big Gob and his friend work for the Navy. He has a few stories about being on Manoeuvres in the “Bristol Fucking Channel”.

You might imagine that this would make for at least semi-interesting eavesdropping but even his Navy stories were dull. Highlights included discussion of a “fucking spanner” which proved particularly effective on some tight nuts and memories of a former commanding officer who would address the men each morning with the phrase “Good morning, men”.

He found the latter story particularly funny. “Fucking funny” in fact. I suppose we could give old Big Gob the benefit of the doubt and assume that “Good morning, men” is unusually camp or cheerful for a commanding officer – akin to a vampire saying “hello, chaps” as he comes to suck your blood or a mass nuclear bombing being preceded with informative leaflets apologising for the inconvenience. But I doubt it. He was just a boring man. A boring, Mitchell Brother-faced DVD commentary-speaking Chubby Brown-tongued wally.

The thought occurs that some poor bugger might one day have to share a U Boat with him.

Click here to biggerize.

Walking through the park this evening on the way back from work, a most unusual sight struck my roving peepers.

A guy in a shop-mobility scooter was ambling along the uneven grass and suddenly became stranded upon a raised manhole cover.

Naturally your humble narrator resolved to help him out of the tricky situation.

Right hemisphere: Ignore him. Look at those seventies trousers. He’ll be a total nutter.

Left hemisphere: Shame on you, my conjoined friend. “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing”. Edmund Burke.

Always come armed with a quote when wrestling with yourself internally.

I went over to help the guy.

Having learned from an incident with a guide dog earlier in the year, I knew that some tact must be employed before getting tactile.

“Do you need some help?” I asked.

“Aye,” he rumbled gutturally, rear wheels spinning pointlessly. He was a beetle on its back, mandibles flailing.

I gave him a push and he bumped soundly over the protruding piece of metal. A good day’s work. I would probably get to meet Esther Ranson now.

He extended his hand for shaking purposes. Trite, I shook it.

“My name’s Roy,” he growled, “What’s yours?”

He said this drunkenly through yellowed teeth. Just great. He was one of those lonely nutjobs to whom you show one iota of affection and you become their spunky valentine for life.

Right hemisphere: Now look what you’ve done. You’ve engaged with a handicapped drunk. You’re in deep trouble now. You’ll have to write a terrible blog entry about being a “nutter magnet”.

Left hemisphere: What was I supposed to do? Ignore him? He was capsized.

Right hemisphere: You should have left him. He was clearly a drunk. He’s probably come all the way on that thing from the East end.

Left hemisphere: You leave the East end out of this. You’re always having a bash at the East end. It’s not that bad there. They have a cathedral. The Irn Bru factory is out there.

Right hemisphere: They have a plague pit as well. The streets are paved vomit and dog poo. And they like it like that. Vomit and dog poo is sweet ambrosia to an Eastender.

Left hemisphere: This is all academic. What are we supposed to do now? He’s still shaking my hand and asking for my name. Shall I tell him it’s Graham?

Right hemisphere: Just smile and pretend you hadn’t heard.

I smiled and pretended I hadn’t heard. If only I had listened to my inner Daily Mail in the first place and I wouldn’t be in this mess. “Nice to meet you, pal.” Jovial. “Have a lovely day.”

I began to walk in a westerly direction. Walk/Sprint, whatever.

“Come back,” I heard Roy say in desperation. I wonder now if I imagined this but I don’t think I did.

Left hemisphere: God, did you hear that? He’s desperate for friendship.

Right hemisphere: Of course he is! He probably ran over than manhole deliberately. Don’t you see? It’s a trap!

Left hemisphere: Christ, you’re probably right. Better not look back.

On this, I hear the sound of urgent tires approaching.

Right hemisphere: Shit, he’s coming after you. Act like Doctor Who and find some stairs.

Left hemisphere: I’m scared.

Right hemisphere: Humourize him. Give him an hilarious nickname.

Left hemisphere: Okay. Um. Rolling Roy.

Right hemisphere: That’s the stuff. Nothing to be scared of. He’s not one of the Wheelers from Return to Oz. He’s just a harmless old man.

Left hemisphere: You’re right. I could have taken him in a fight.

Right hemisphere: You da man. You could take anyone in a fight.

Left hemisphere: I could have punched him in the face and taken his wallet.

Right hemisphere: Whoa, too far.

The sound of wheels transpires to be that of a bicycle courier. I afford a look back and see that Roy is still where I left him. He is talking to a tree. I am safe.

Allow me to recall the time your humble narrator phoned a supposedly sexy chat line.

The plain people of cyberspace: “I’ve never called a chat line, sexy or otherwise and you are worse than Hitler for having done so.”

Me: “It was for research, okay?”

Lonely, horny research.

For those of you too decent to ever try calling a sexy chat line, this entry may be of especial interest to you. For instance, let me explain who these things normally run:

You are invariably presented with two main options: you can engage in live chat with a floozy of your choozy; or you can listen to a pre-recorded story about what Tart A got up to with the window cleaner or what Tart B did with the greengrocer.

Tart B’s story is markedly distracting. One is left wondering about the poor old lady who ended up purchasing that cucumber.

On this occasion, I decided to listen to a story. I imagined that talking live would leave me in an awkward position of saying things like “Yes, I would like to see your dirty pillows” or “Yes, my sausage is twenty-two inches long” and feeling like a bit of a wazzok. Also, I remember hearing something on the radio about call centre girls feeling offended when the callers abruptly hang up at the end of the conversation. But I imagine it must be difficult to sign off non-chalant when you’re scrabbling around in desperate need of a tissue and the queue for the phone box is getting longer and longer.

So I dialled ‘2’ for stories.

I was presented with a plethora of options for what sort of monkey business I should like to hear about:

“If you’re the sort of gentleman who likes Bristols as big as yer noggin, dial ‘1’ now,”

Well, who doesn’t like Bristols as big as yer noggin? I’m sure I could plump for something more adventurous though so I waited for further options.

“If you’re the sort of gentleman who likes men’s bottoms, dial ‘2’ now,”

Now, I like men’s bottoms as much as the next man but a chat line story about them might denigrate into depths I have little interest in. Poopy depths. So I held the line.

“If you’re the sort of gentleman who likes to be spanked on the gulliver with a wet haddock, dial ‘3’ now,”

Everything is sexy for someone. I have no interest in being spanked in the gulliver or anywhere else with a wet haddock. Only a nice petit sardine would hold my attentions. I’m not a pervert.

“If you’re the sort of gentleman who likes to hide in the credenza and watch John and Caitlin kissing by the rubber plant, press ‘4’ now,”

Strangely specific, this one wasn’t really for me. I didn’t know who John and Caitlin were and I don’t have a credenza. It also struck me though that the sort of person who would normally phone a sexy chat line would be precisely the sort of person who likes to hide in a credenza and watch other people kissing. They would have done well to make this Option 1. A woeful lack of respect for the caller’s time.

But of course they keep you on the line for as long as possible, don’t they? They want your money. I’d been on the line for two minutes already at a cost of five euros a minute and I’d still not been taken through to the good stuff. I was still in the reception area. Whatever the next option, I would have to go for it.

“If you’re the sort of gentleman who likes kissing ladies’ front bottoms, dial ‘5’ now,”

Yes! Who doesn’t enjoy kissing ladies’ front bottoms?

I dialled ‘5’.

What followed was a strange narrative from a girl who apparently got the horn from talking to “intelligent brainboxes” like me.

This was all well and good but I’d phoned up to hear rude words, not to be complemented on having two science degrees.

It continued in this vain for quite a time. She kept going on about how nothing floats her boat like brainy, clever boys like me and that nothing put dew on her daisy like boys who liked hanging out in libraries and had read a lot of books.

A childhood friend once told me that he’d phoned an utterly vanilla chat line once and had been put through to a woman who wanted to do a wee on him.

I began to suspect that a similar mistake had been made today. I’d wanted to hear about kissing ladies’ front bottoms: not to be plunged into a fit of hubris.

On the other hand, perhaps the psychological profile of the man who likes to “venture south” is one of an intelligent, affected person who cares about other people’s pleasure as much as he does his own. Perhaps this wasn’t a confusion but rather a highly responsive means of giving the caller precisely what he wanted to hear without his even knowing it.

Only the deep sea diver would want to forgo complements on his superior trouser snake in favour of complements on his superior intelligence.

Ooh, the telephone sirens. This was going to cost me a fortune.

Perhaps a more honest service could be set up where people respond to advertisements placed in ‘Psychology Today’ or ‘Genius Gazette’ or ‘Reader’s Reader’ or some other egghead magazine in order to be given ego puff points.

“You are so clever, I just know you could calculate Pi to at least thirty places!”

“Talk Latin to me, big boy!”

“110001000111101100111001110!”

“Memor impetro bill payer’s permission pro vos planto is dico.”

I think I’d have an excellent career as an agoraphobic. I’ve been thinking about going into it for some time but as with any horizontal career move, I’m waiting for the appropriate moment. I don’t have any formal qualifications but with a history of general obsession/compulsion and of various complex fetishes and phobias, I’m sure I’d make an excellent candidate.

The fact of the matter is that agoraphobia is a growth industry. It’s in the interests of the government and the pharmaceutical giants to keep you off the streets and popping the ho-ho pills. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could get some sort of subsidiary for it. Yes. “Benefits,” I think they’re called.

It’s the way forward. Whenever I imagine ‘happiness’ I see myself idly playing the trumpet in the bath, with a fruity-looking cocktail on the side. You couldn’t do that in the outside world, no matter how laizez-fair your office environment.

I bring up this subject because I enjoyed a few days away from work last week. The thought of waiting workload is unappealing but far more unappealing is the idea of ‘going outside’ to get there. Outside is for wasps and weather. Inside is for towels and tobacco.

It’s always amused me when people have said, “Well, at least it gets you out of the house”.

What on Earth are they talking about? They’ll usually say it in response to the declaration that you’ve been at work that day; or at the hairdressers/fishmonger/bottle bank/public library/brothel/hardware store; or some other uninspiring everyday place.

Me: “I’ve just been standing in the street, shaking my lad at the pretty lay-dees”.

The plain people of cyberspace*: “Well, at least it gets you out of the house”.

What’s wrong with these people’s houses?

Why is labouring in an office or a factory better than being at home with your books and your microwave pizzas? Why is shopping at Tesco a higher state of activity than watching television in the warmth of your pajamas?

Those people are weird.

I imagine that being an agoraphobic “in this day and age” is far easier and potentially lucrative than being an agoraphobic in the nineteenth century or even the modern world as it were fifteen years ago.

We have the Internet now after all so we can do our shopping and trading and monitoring of business from our home computers. This isn’t even seen as being eccentric anymore.

You don’t need college or school when you have true, reliable, seldom-biased Wikipedia.

You wouldn’t starve to death. All of your food could be bought via the net and and books or videos or other consumables could be acquired likewise. You could even adopt a circular metabolism by selling the stuff on eBay once done with it. Not your food, obviously, but your books et cetera – the gods of eBay froun upon poopoo being listed for international auction (yet they encourage the listing of Dan Brown novels – there is no consistency in this world).

Imagine if everyone was agorobobic. Our carbon footprint would be smaller for one thing. I imagine the fashion supplement of the newspaper would be less interested in designer duffle-coats and would give promience to the latest pyjama and dressing-gown combinations. The showbiz pages would feature the latest photographs of celebrity stay-at-homes with oversized beards and kleenex boxes upon their feet. The new sports would be origami, sex and chess. The new motoring supplement would focus exclusively upon model railways and Scalextrick.

There would have to be a brave few who would deliver the mail and keep the electricity flowing and the crops in production. In fact the more I think about it, the more I recognise the importance of “non-agros” to my vision – or “Norms” or “Mundies”, if you will. Heck, let’s not beat about the bush. We shall call them “Morlocks”. Only the bin men can take our smelly garbage to an appropriate resting place far, far away.

OK – the agorophobes would have to be a new social class. We would sit at the top of the class system, god-like monarchs who stay at home, pushing our money around electronically and nodding approvingly from afar. Noble, we at once the the consumer market, the royal family and the government.

Me (Calling down to the quiet street from a high window): You there! There’s been no mail delivery and my pants must be sent to the laundrette post-haste! What day is this?

Bin man: Why, its Christmas day, mistah.

Ah, so easily we lost track. Our pipes and slippers seemed the heith of it all but at what cost, dear reader, at what cost?

< size="1">*The plain people of cyberspace. This is a reference to the excellent Myles Na Gopaleen – a humourist whose works I am developing an obsession with, largely thanks to . In his newspaper columns he will frequently publish imagined conversations between himself and ‘The plain people of Ireland’. I might continue to rip him off… um… homage him in this way for a while.

Sauntering along Edinburgh’s Royal Mile, seeing what might be what and who might be whom, I chanced across a strange scene.

The Royal Mile during the Festival is, of course, a metric kilometer of patently strange events but this one seemed a tad too domestic for performance purposes. Consequently, it became “strange” in this context by its very kitchen-sinkness. Several people had gathered to watch.

It seemed to me that a dispute had resulted in a young girl breaking the finger of an older man with a beard. She stood at the steps of her flat. He stood just outside of the door. The police had been called in. The bearded man was showing his finger to one of the officers who was trying to ascertain whether or not it was actually broken.

The young girl was very pretty. She had nice hair and a red dress. The older man was drunk and had food in his beard. What had happened?

Above the muttering ruminations of the crowd, my attention was snagged by the discourse of street sweepers.

One street sweeper, leaning casually on her broom, said to her colleague: “You see, I used to want to be in the police. But I couldn’t deal with that.”

That she had once abandoned the idea of being a police officer in favour of being a street sweeper was interesting. I wonder what made her change her mind?

Perhaps she took the phrase “clean up the streets” a trifle too literally and from there it was a downward spiral.

Not one for adding to the publicity of other people’s affairs, however, I continued on my way.

Whenever I read celebrity interviews in the Guardian‘s saturday supplement, I always think about how I would answer the same questions if it were me being framed as an object of curiosity by the major national newspaper.

You do the same, dear reader. Do not try and deny it. We all think we are special. But we are not. It is only celebrities who are special. And possibly me.

Obviously I’d be very mysterious and interesting about it all because I’m a very mysterious and interesting person. Each answer would be an imparting of advise to the public, who are desperate to be shown how to live by the various figureheads of gliteratti, literatti and cliterati.

Today’s interview was with Regina Spektor, with whom I am in love. She’s the interesting Jewish New York jazz singer babe that Amy Winehouse never became. Do you hear that, Winehouse? You failed us all. I don’t want you anymore. You are nothing to me now. Regina and I have a beautiful thing going on and next summer we’re going to cycle around Oxford on a tandem and smoke exotic cigarettes on a Balkan midnight. In my mind.

When I read these interviews though I fall at the first hurdle. Perhaps reading too much into the questions, I hardly ever know what the interviewer is on about. To me, many of the questions are like the cryptic bit at the bottom of an email personality questionnaire which always asks “Who is the least likely to respond?”

To what?

A case in point:

The first thing asked of Ms. Spektor was, “When were you happiest?”

As much as I’d like to subvert the trite and saccharine question by adopting the role of some horrid character (“When I watched my mother dying. It’s a real pleasure to visualize her even now sinking into the abyss”) I feel that I aught to give a more truthful response. The public wants to know all about me after all and not some horrible character lurking in the corners of my mind or perched gargoyle-like at the tip of my tongue waiting silently like a bound-and-gagged Tourettes homunculus to leap out suddenly at a job interview or a funeral and irrevocably sabotage my life.

No. The problem is that I don’t understand a lot of these aparently popular human emotions that get bandied around as though there were no alternative. I don’t know what happiness is exactly. When I imagine happiness, I visualise myself reading novels in my pajamas upon some soft cushions. But is that happiness? Contentedness really. Or comfort or something.

A guy in the “Are you happy” column of the same magazine writes that he “can be dark, bleak, pessimistic but that doesn’t mean [he is] unhappy”.

I can understand pleasure. I enjoy eating, smoking, drinking coffee, chewing pens. I enjoy books, comics, Charlie Chaplin films, jazz music and those things made of pins which mould to the shape of your hand but while these are pleasure-giving commodities or sensations. They don’t make me conclude that I am “happy”.

Perhaps happiness was invented by Epicureans: the school of philosophy that saw life as absurd and aimless other than the aim to minimize pain and to maximize pleasure. Perhaps this maximization of pleasure is happiness.

When I have more jobs in my outbox than my inbox: the cat is combed, the kitchen sparkles and the notepad bursts with new ideas. I feel something alright. Happiness? I’d call it satisfaction.

And it goes on like this. I don’t understand what people mean by “Forgiveness” either. If one is wronged and asked to forgive, what does one have to do? Forget it happened? How can one consciously erase a memory? Even if you just ignore the fact, you’ll always know that your chum fed all of your favourite ice cream to the dog. I don’t really understand “anger”. I can feel frustrated or wronged but I get over it.

It’s a good job I don’t get interviewed in newspaper supplements. I’m far too neurotic. But I doubt anyone else has decent answers to the above either and that the celebrities just humour the magazine by saying things like “playing conkers, aged nine” or “eating a sandwich bigger than my head”. I don’t see myself as some cold non-human anthropologist like Spock or Mr Data from Star Trek because if challenged I don’t think anyone really knows what they are talking about when it comes to emotions or the mind. As psychotherapist Albert Ellis used to say (I learned this from today’s magazine too), “all human beings are out of their fucking minds”.

Before I attended the Glastonbury music festival in 2005, I would always say “I go to Edinburgh every year” when other hairy people asked me if I’d ever been to a festival.

I’d know they wouldn’t be happy with this response of course: they meant music festival – and specifically in the one-weekend, sensory-overload, drug-fueled, covered in mud sort of way but my reply about Edinburgh was my punishment to them for being overly presumptive.

If you’re not going to include literature, comedy, theatre or film festivals under your schema of ‘festivals’ then don’t speak to me. You’re prejudiced against squares, you are. Why aren’t you at home listening to music by faux-squares like the Kaiser Chiefs or something?

I’d like to come up with a retort for the similarly presumptive “Who do you support?” question which doesn’t involve football or the supporting of one’s legs in return for their supporting of one.

The best I can come up with is: “Who? Who? I think you mean WHOM! Arsenal!”

The fans of footy don’t like this sort of banter though and pointing out grammatical inaccuracies to them is a good way of finding yourself reduced to your component molecules.

Last week resulted in multiple sojourns to Edinburgh to soak up the foamy suds of the now-in-full-swing Festival. Now that I’m there with plenty of real music festival experience to compare it too, I realize that the two sorts of festival are remarkably similar experiences. Both involve lots of slow walking about in orderly lines.

Saturday in particular involved a lot of this sort of shuffling but was otherwise great and summed up everything I love about festival Edinburgh. I spent most of the time hanging out in the marquee of Luke Wright’s Poetry Party, drinking cheap beer and listening to the UKs best poets (Tim Turnbull, Martin Newall, John Hegley among others) for free, surrounded by wonderful friends.

After that, a quick trip to see Simon Munnery doing Phone Book Live and then himself again with Miles Jupp in the brilliant Johnson and Boswell: Late But Live.

My strangest Fringe experience of the year (so far) took place while poking around the market at Grass Market. A man was selling peculiar and slightly grotesque objects – which might have appealed to Lord Whimsy in a particularly peculiar mood. The salesman beckoned theatrically at a large Aleister Crowley-looking goth who had come up to his table to browse and directed him to the boot of his car.

I overheard him saying to the bald, six-foot goth in floor-length leather jacket, “Come and have a look at this skeleton”.

From the boot of the car a box not much bigger than a shoe box (but not yet a shoe box!) was revealed and presented to the goth in a carefully balanced fashion. The way it was handled by the salesman suggested that the contents must have been highly fragile.

The goth looked at it carefully but unemotionally. I recall specifically that he held his head at a slanted angle akin to a curious emu investigating a hedgehog turd.

Apparently unimpressed, the goth floated away, leathers swishing behind him. I swear I heard a crack of thunder.

The salesman shrugged and put the box away.

I suppose I could have gone and investigated this peculiarity for myself but it was raining and I needed a wee.

But I wonder now what sort of skeleton could have been in the box. A human baby? A small animal? A single skull? I prefer to imagine that it was some sort of carnival grotesquery – a Fiji Mermaid or an Angel or an extra-terrestrial.

Due to my temporary lack of investigative spirit, the readers of this blog will have to remain unsatisfied. Sorry about that. No closure to this anecdote, fatty.

Back in my theatre days (oh yes), we used to play a warm-up game called “What’s in the box?”, devised by yours truly. An empty box was passed around the characters of the play (who had collectively decided beforehand on the imaginary contents); each of them would react in away according to their character and a single onlooker would have to hazard a guess. Of course, it was usually a severed cock.

I motion that we, the livejournal community, play a little game of “what’s in the box?” right now by utilising the limited data of the goth’s expression. We are cheating, I suppose, by having knowledge of the boney truth: the box contained a skeleton. But what kind, you schlub, What kind?

Most people reminisce about sexual encounters, holidays in Spain or the general ‘good old days’. Not me. I apparently reminisce about old cartoons. And if they happen to be really bad straight-to-video releases then so much the better.

Today, seemingly for no reason, I remembered an animated series called Sylvanian Families. Now, Sylvanian Families were primarily a range of crappy doll house-type toys for girls involving various ‘families’ of woodland animals (oddly including bears). I played with my sister’s toys endlessly as a kid and usually made them all have sex in a big pile in the living room of the deluxe cottage. They liked it, the animal slags.

I guess the manufacturers of these toys tried to emulate the successful toy/cartoon partnership done so well by He-Man and the Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers. Sadly, their cartoon was a load of bollocks so it never really got shown on TV and no one ever gave a shit. The wikipedia page doesn’t seem to know whether Sylvanian Families were a line of toys or a cartoon. I guess I’m the only person who knows. Que sera sera.

The one episode of the Sylvanian Families cartoon I can distinctively remember is one in which the Families’ common enemy, ‘Pack Bat’, decides to pull a bank heist. Yeah, hardcore. The kids watching the cartoon must have suddenly felt out of their depth: their happy animated toy-spin-off series about tree-dwelling woodland families had turned into Oceans Eleven.

At some point in the episode it was revealed that the standard unit of currency in the Sylvanian Families world is that of the leaf. That’s right – they use leaves for money.

Not the leaves from some magic tree owned by the Sylvanian bank, mind you. Not the leaves from the only Oak Tree in the Sylvanian Forest. Just leaves. The urban equivalent of this madness is a Londoner giving up on cash and taking up a barter system with a currency of carbon monoxide or pigeons.

And this is what Pack Bat wants to steal from the Sylvanian Bank? I’m pretty sure that at the time of watching it (aged eight) I realized that Pack Bat was a moron and that leaves would never have any financial value in a woodland economy. The Sylvanian Families (and Pack Bat) live in what you might call a Forest Democracy, but I say that they’ve made such a mockery of the concept of money that they might as well just ‘fess up to being communists right now.

I’m reminded now of Star Trek‘s similar attitude to money. Our main Star Trek guys have no need for money: they have replicators so that all of their food and material objects are free and so going to work is either (a) a total waste of their time and symptomatic of an ingrained slave mentality or (b) the result of a desire to improve the world they live in through working hard. They’re communists! They might look like little Utopian Americans going around the vastness of space, policing the galaxy in spandex pants but when you think about it they’re actually communists made good.

When our main Star Trek guys are forced to trade with civilizations who still have money on their home planets, they INVENT money to trade with. It’s hilarious.

“Still working for the old kablingy, eh? Well, no matter. Here is some precious money for you (haha) in the form of Federation Credits. We printed it this morning just for you.”

Why would any business-minded alien accept that crap? Seems to me that Star Trek‘s ‘Federation Credits’ have about the same value as Sylvanian Families‘ ‘Leaves’.

The phrase ‘Money doesn’t grow on trees’ must have never developed in the Sylvanian Forest. Or maybe their insistence on using leaves as currency was originally a response to the old adage. Who knows?

*

Everyone should visit Wolverhampton. Just once. Visit it in the same exploratory way that you might visit Easter Island or Hollywood or Hell. It’s a highly life-affirming town in that it reminds you that there are places in the world far more bleak and frightening than your own poorly mind.

Circa 2001, a friend and I sit giggling at our usual table of the Wolverhampton Costa coffee shop. We are students. We are high on caffeine and Socrates.

Across from our table sits a lonely looking bald man, impeccably dressed and indefinably handsome, poking absently something white and frothy with a long-handled spoon.

“Hey, look at that guy,” I mutter to my chum sotto-vox, “I didn’t know Malkovich was in town”.

Back in 2001, anyone in our field of vision who happened to be bald and at all rugged would be John Malkovich. I think we had developed something of a fixation with Spike Jonze’s movie, Being John Malkovich or more specifically with the acoustically pleasing words “John Malkovich” or, even better, “Malkovich Malkovich”.

In this case, however, the man in the coffee shop really did look bit like the actor in question. When I try to remember the situation I actually see John Malkovich himself in the role of his lookalike.

This was all too much for my silly friend so he decided to turn around, attract the attention of the Malkotype (“Excuse me, sir”) and inform him articulately that:

“My friend and I were just your startling resemblance to the actor, John Malkovich.”

“And that your pastry looks suspiciously like a horse’s willy,” I whispered.

“And that your pastry looks suspiciously like a horse’s willy.”

How the guy responded to this purile double-whammy I have no recollection but the two of us spent the next few minutes laughing like idiots presumably before being distracted by something else; perhaps a barista vaguely resembling John Cusack or a sticky bun in the shape of a donkey’s bottom.

We really were a pair of morons. The bleakness of Wolverhampton truly brought out the worst in us.

Weeks passed. It was a Tuesday. We were to attend a seminar on Information Literacy: someone would come from the university library to demonstrate the ins and outs of how to search for books in the library catalogue etc. That person, as I’m sure you’ve guessed, was the very same man we had once likened to John Malkovich in a Costa coffee shop.

John Malkovich, it transpired, was the head of university library services. Knowing that I had interests becoming a librarian after graduation, we joked that our cruel Malkovich/Horse’s Willy routine would irrevocably mar any career I had in libraries.

Well, what goes around comes around. Six years later I live over three hundred miles away in the city of Glasgow and am invited by the University of Wolverhampton to attend a job interview for a very well paid and comfortable position in their library.

If Malkovich is on the panel, I am fucked.

My main priority today is to work on growing my hair. To do this I adopt a thoughtful stance and meditate upon as many follicle-stimulating notions as is cognitively possible. I imagine spider plants growing in fast-forward; earthworms evacuating a moist lawn; a portly diner slurping spaghetti in reverse. That sort of thing.

The most useful image I have so far summoned to the inner eye is that of a Play-Doh Fuzzy Pumper Crazy Cutz play set. Trust Tomy.

I suppose you are wondering why your humble narrator is engaged in such an activity. The answer, dear reader, is simple. It has been cut far too short. Far too!

At least I have nobody to blame but myself. Less fond of having my hair cut than most people are of going to the dentist, I decided this time to make the most of it. If I were to have an extra inch taken off I would be able to procrastinate for a few weeks longer than usual from having it cut again. So that’s just what I did. But now I regret it.

My new hairdresser is a most jovial fellow though. Most hairdressers, as I am sure you have observed, will ask about football and holidays. I don’t want to talk about either. I don’t know enough about either topic to pretend to be interested and if I were to truthfully declare in the barber’s seat that “football is little more than the repulsive goading of yobs”, I would find surely myself standing in Great Western Road with half a haircut and an ear in my hand.

Hairdressers also ask you what you do for a living. I can either say “I am a comedian” which isn’t quite true but beats having to explain what a humourist does or “I’m a librarian” which can prove similarly awkward. I am here to have bits of my body professionally removed: telling jokes or discussing library etiquette are not something I want to do in such a situation.

There is nowhere to go with this line of conversation is there? In the real world, such would be a two-way exchange of ideas. In the hairdressers I can’t ask him what he does in return because I know full well what he does: he cuts hair and makes small talk.

The chap responsible for removing my cranial surplus today, however, was of a very different breed. Far from the usual shaven-headed thug or screaming freak I’m used to, this guy was a lovely big gentle bear – an artist who only came to cut my locks once his assistant had washed and conditioned me and made us both some tea. His conversation was more amusing than the average smalltalk too. “Most hairdressers talk about football or holidays,” I told him, “but today we’ve talked about nuclear bombs and being buried alive”.

He laughed a proper laugh from the belly. It was true. He’d told me about a dream he had in which he witnessed a mushroom cloud in the desert. Later, we’d talked about the Kill Bill movies and that his favourite bit was the buried alive sequence.

The staff of this particular salon were apparently disappointed with the recent terrorist bungles. Far from being afraid of the idea of terrorism coming to Glasgow, they chose to dwell upon the ineptitude of the bombers and how they (hairdressers!) would have done it.

“If it were me,” he said, “I’d go out to the middle of Paisley with a bomb in a briefcase. BANG! Hundreds of people dead.”

A particularly good one was:

“I’d just nuke everyone. Middle of Glasgow. BANG! Everyone would be dead. That includes you, Delores and Shantelle. Dead. You’d not have to worry about getting a good tan anymore, Shantelle. You’d have a lovely tan for a split second right before all of your skin melted off.”

I am definitely going back. Once my hair returns.

I went this lunchtime to the convenience sandwichery run by The Wanko.

I have been going there a lot lately as they have the most adventurous soups on offer in the whole of Glasgow. I’m not talking about your average creams of tomatoes or your potatoes and leaks here: I’m talking about ‘Carrot and Dinosaur’ or ‘Chunky Vegetable and Mr. Benn’. They’re very imaginative. Today, for example, I enjoyed a hot bowl of ‘Parsnip and Atom’ bisque. Spicy.

But I don’t just buy their soup. No! For they have a wonderful soup-and-a-sandwich deal. No hunger for you, sir.

While the soups appear to be the product of a pan-dimensional time-travelling specialty chef, the choice of sandwiches is a tad conservative. Six out of the eight options are entirely meat-based (even the bread is meat) leaving only cheese or tuna to choose from. I avoid cheese because I’m slightly allergic to dairy products, so I have tuna every single time. Yes, readers, every single time.

This, of course, is a bit of a cheat on my behalf. While I grant myself fish “on occasion”, this rapid influx of tuna really does call my vegetarian status into question. If I keep this up, I’ll probably not be allowed to use the special parking spaces anymore.

Far worse than any betrayal to one’s personal ethics, however, is the awkwardness of asking for the same sandwich filling every day. The women in the shop recognise me as a regular customer now and they must have noticed the fact that I have tunafish every single day. I bet they call me ‘Mr. Tunafish’ behind my back.

I don’t want to be Mr. Tunafish.

How would you like to be Mr. Tunafish, reader? You wouldn’t, huh? Not nice is it?

The day that one of them says, “Tunafish today?” in anticipation of my order will be the day I shriek, “No! Why would I want tunafish! I’m not obsessed with tunafish. I don’t even like tunafish. I’m not a deviant!”

They will find me the following morning hanging from a joist, the suicide note written in tuna mayonnaise.

The truth, I tell myself, is that no one has noticed my dietary habits and that I am, as ever, being a paranoid imbecile. No one is interested. While I’m sure the women are vaguely familiar with the fact that a long-haired sharp-suited man visits the sandwich bar on most days, I doubt very much that they’ve noticed his tuna problem. Perhaps my opting for a different soup every day throws them a curve ball and makes them forget. And anyway, they serve a large number of people. Their queue often backs out onto the street: teams of local workers desperate for their daily juxtaposition of bland meat sandwich and magical soup from outer space.

Every day, they ask me if I would prefer white bread or brown bread for my [tuna] sandwich. Every day I say that “I’ll go either way”. This is my signature catchprase: it at once voices my bread apathy and declares my rampant bisexuality. They know what I mean. The fact, however, that the joke is new to them every day suggests that they won’t remember my penchant for tunafish sandwiches either.

But what if I’m the only person they ask this to? What if my little joke has stayed with them and now they’re taking the piss? What if no one else gets the white/brown choice? I bet they only really have one colour.

Now I come to think of it, the bread never seems to be particularly brown or white: it’s kinda seedy.

What if they see me coming and they say “Oh here comes bisexual old Mr. Tunafish. He’ll have sex with anything! He’ll have sex with a fish!”

Well, ladies, I wouldn’t have sex with a fish. Just to clear that up.

Maybe tomorrow I’ll just have cheese.

*

If you take a chimpanzee and put him in a soldier costume, what do you have? Monkey in a soldier suit? Think again, Sir. You got yourself a willing supporter of your cause!

Why do I bring this up? Partly to tickle your fancy (teehee, monkeys) and partly to make a very good point but I’ll come back to this in a moment.

Walking home from work today I saw a fat man sitting in a bus shelter reading a Rob Grant novel. Haha, what a nerd I said to myself. What book am I reading? Only Steppenwolf. I win. Idiot.

The later half of the thought was pure comedy to amuse myself but the initial Haha, what a nerd was a genuine response the portly visual stimulus.

This is far worse than any regular value judgment though, because I myself travel around on busses and I have in fact read everything by Rob Grant. So it’s a self-loathing value judgment. In a way, it’s more honest because I know what it’s like to be a dufus but at the same time it seems oddly hypocritical to be having a go at other dufi (albeit privately in my head and now in this top secret diary).

A bit further along on my journey, I got stuck behind two elderly Asian ladies. They were extremely slow moving and walked side by side so as to take up the width of the entire pavement. Unable to sidestep them due to a wall being on one side and a row of parked cars on the other, I had to fart along at their speed until we sluggishly reached the end of the street, a frustrated tripartite Hydra.

Get a move on, you old biddies I telepathically roasted them before feeling slightly ashamed of myself. But it was the follow up thought that was the most neurotic. I noticed that I had first thought of them as “biddies” rather than make any internal reference to their ethnicity. This, sir, means I am genuinely unracist. Score.

But this is stupid! Being unracist isn’t anything to be proud of. It should be the moral standard. It’s like those irritating people who declare their liberalism in MySpace profiles by putting ‘fascism’ and ‘bigots’ into their ‘dislikes’ column. Well, obviously. Then again, they put Fair Trade icons on food packets if the company behind the product successfully made the effort to not economically rape a small African community. Maybe someone should take the effort to print up some ‘unracist’ teeshirts for people like me.

But nonetheless, it was a value judgment. Followed by some thoughts about the value judgments I didn’t make. What is going on in my head?

Going for a tidy hat trick in the wrong thoughts stakes, a third one occurred after a twentysomething sped by on a skateboard. He was longhaired and wearing teeshirt.

Scruffy Sod I said to myself. This was the one that shocked me the most! I look like this guy most of the time! I wear teeshirts and have long hair – hair longer than this chap’s in fact. Just because I was wearing a suit when I bumped into this fellow doesn’t mean I’m any better than him.

But there we have it. I was wearing a suit.This was the cause of all my evil [unracist] bigotry.

I was the monkey soldier.

Remember the experiment where Zimbardo dressed a bunch of students up as zookeepers and monkeys? It wasn’t long before the “Keepers” were covered in poop flung by the “Chimps”.

As Papa Kurt himself tells us, we are who we pretend to be so we must be careful who we pretend to be.

As an aside, is it “Monkey Soldier” or “Soldier Monkey”?

I had been hit by a car. Not just any car but a black cab: the sort of vehicle that boasts its zinc-coated titanium body so that the passenger can know that he’s “in safe hands”. If you have one thrown at you however, it is akin to being hit by a small military tank.

My forearm was broken in two places. A once straight bone now resembled a lightning bolt. They had to cut my glove off with scissors. The fracture didn’t hurt per se but all was numb and my fingers wouldn’t move properly. The room spun around me, rotascope, as though seen through the eyes of a sitcom drunk.

This shouldn’t be happening to me, I thought. I’m a gentle person. I was never a tree climber as a kid: I stayed indoors to read books and make my sister’s Barbie dolls kiss each other’s un-nippled boobies. They liked it, the tarts.

Yet here I was; sat silently on a lumpy hospital bed in the Accident and Emergency department of Glasgow’s Western Infirmary and had been administered my first of many shots of morphine.

Nurses asked me questions: was I allergic to anything? Yes! Nuts and Penicillin. Who was my next of kin? I don’t know, probably my mother but she lives in Birmingham. What was my blood type?

Blood type? Do people actually know what their blood type is? This never struck me as something that people should know but now I was in a situation where it was surely vital. I was worried principally about why they needed to know: I didn’t feel as though I had lost any blood. I didn’t need a transfusion did I? It would explain the spinning room and the shortness of breath.

No. Just for the files. I felt as though I might be sick into my own hat but at least I was able to help the NHS keep its paperwork tidy.

I had no idea of my blood type but I became aware, in this state of total discombobulation that I did know someone else’s blood type: someone very close to me. My mother? My best friend from school? My first love? Nope. Try Star Trek‘s Mr. Spock.

It was one of those moments of total self-awareness. One of those defining episodes where you see yourself in the third person for a second, take a good long look at yourself and realize who you actually are.

I, apparently, am the sort of person who doesn’t know a potentially vital piece of information such as his own blood type but does have a wealth of mental detritus concerning 1960s television science fiction series to the extent that he knows about the chemistry of what flows through one of the character’s circulatory systems.

I’m a bit of a nerd, aren’t I?

In case you are wondering (either out of perverse curiosity or out of a genuine medical concern for the chief science officer of the USS Enterprise), it is Type M.

You’re probably dashing off to Google right now to check on this. Sadly, all you will find is “T Negative”, which is wrong! T Negative was the blood type of Spock’s father, Sarek. Spock, being part human, is a unique Type M.

I am a bigger nerd than the Internet itself – a system of talking computers built by nerds for nerds in a world of nerds and I still don’t know my own blood type. If only “Wringham blood type” would bring something up on Google. But it doesn’t. Odd that.

I have spent the past week in Dublin. Well, I say Dublin but the working farm on which we stayed was more specifically located about thirty miles out of the city in a rural district called Kiltale. Oddly enough we stayed in the loftspace of a converted farm building. That’s how bohemian I am, folks. I spend all of my regular city hours living in an attic only to stay in another attic when I go on holiday. I can’t live in normal houses. Being three floors up in a space originally designed for the storage of timber is the only way I can sleep.

There was of course a difference of view. In Glasgow the view from my window is of Hyndland’s crumbling townscape. In Kiltale the view was this:

Dublin was great. It had a far more European feeling than I had anticipated. Yeah, I know the Republic of Ireland is a proper part of Europe and everything but in my mind’s eye Dublin was going to be a fairly British-feeling city and I did not believe that the tiny plane journey from Glasgow (barely a takeoff and a landing than any kind of ‘flight’) would qualify this as a real trip ‘abroad’. But in fact Dublin does have that wonderfully disorientating foreign feeling to it.

Having said this, it also feels in some ways like a parallel universe version of London: one that you might see on that old sci-fi show, Sliders or in a Philip K. Dick novel. There is the same sense of ‘bigness’ that London has plus a common lingo, yet everything has a deliberately Irish flavour. The postboxes, for example, are the exact same style as our UK ones except that they are green! Since our red postboxes are so iconic that’s a pretty substantial inversion (just like, I may venture, on the episode of the aforementioned Sliders in which the Golden Gate Bridge was blue). As documented by Dickon Edwards recently, the pedestrian crossings of Dublin are far more lovely than ours in Britain. Where ours leave the pedestrian anxiously awaiting his turn, these ones give him priority. While ours make a squealing ‘hurry or die!’ racket, the ones in Dublin me a far more friendly ‘pukk pukka’ noise akin to Pacman gobbling ghosts. Much better.

While Glasgow’s statuary is of the likes of Donald Dewar; Dublin has a large number of immortalised Bishops. And writers, of course. One of the first statues I recognised was of James Joyce. Dublin is a city that idolises its writers (again, much like in an episode of Sliders in which intellectuals are given celebrity status rather than sportsmen or models). I read somewhere that writers don’t have to pay income tax here.

I’ll not bore you much more, dear reader, with what I got up to in Dublin. The Occasional Papers was never intended to be a travelogue. Besides, whenever I go on holiday I seem to do the exact same things as I do at home: sit around in cafes and look at museums and libraries.

The museums of Dublin, like those of Prague, have a highly conservative approach to curatorship. A sign on the wall at the Museum of Natural History informs the visitor that photography is forbidden as are mobile phones. This is a stark contrast to the museums of Glasgow where everything is very hands-on and stuff like photography are encouraged. As a mark of cheeky rebellion, I took a photograph here anyway (see above – it’s a bit wonky because I hurried my taking of it while the security guard wasn’t looking).

Personally, I’m rather old school when it comes to museums. I get annoyed at the happy-clappy “themepark-ization” of the ones here in Glasgow and would rather have a somber, contemplative experience in them than a fun-packed multimedia ‘journey’. When the subject matter in hand is of dinosaur bones and flint axes, the flash animation installations seem a tacky semiotic clash. On the other hand, the spectacularly dull Dublin Writers Museum holds a bronze-looking sculpture of Oscar Wilde’s head, which is half-obscured by a cardboard ‘no photography’ sign: here the administration literally gets in the way of the exhibits and it makes you think that the hands-on approach to curatorship might not be such a bad thing after all. If only someone would develop a happy medium.