The Occasional Papers

A friend confesses that he used to work for Ikea.

I crack: “So that’s how you’ve always got a pencil!”

Through the haze of my hubris, my friend frowns.

“Yes,” he says, “I seem to recall you told the same joke last time I mentioned this”.

And now:

SPONGE VERSUS BRUSH

Speaking of those crafty Vikings, I’ve been duped by their seductive genius once again.

Waiting in line to pay for a plant and a lint roller, thinking to myself I sure am glad we travelled out of town for this, my eye is drawn to an opportunistically positioned boxfull of washing up brushes.

I liked. It looked as though NASA might have been involved in their development.

Surely this thing could talk to my iPod. It looked as though it had been born rather than made.

Their handles were molded into seductive ergonomic shapes with sporty go-faster-stripes running the length of each striking implement. Available in three colours: blood red, periwinkle blue or ass black.

Picking up a red one, I was positive that it was the third best thing I had ever held in my hand.

Best of all, I notice there is a sucker on the end so that I can stick it schlup to the draining board without fear of it getting into the wrong hands.

There would be no stopping me now.

At last my bid for godhood.

And all for £1.

Thank you, Sweden. Or rather tack, Sverige.

I get it home and immediately generate some washing up. Boyohboyohboy I can’t wait to get scrubbing.

Needless to say, it is a huge disappointment. Far more difficult to use than a simple brillo sponge. Food sticks to the knives and forks. Egg to spatula. Butter to pan. Day-old cornflake? Forget it.

Beware the scrubber not of woman born.

The worst thing about it is the sucker. It sticks to the draining board for all of two minutes before clattering brittle to the floor.

There’s only one real sucker in this kitchen and his name is Wringham.

I don’t think it is hyperbole to suggest all out war with Sweden.

My day job as a librarian often involves visiting other libraries and arrogantly delivering a seminar to older, more seasoned librarians who undoubtedly know better.

It’s a living.

It’s not much different to my night job: standup comedy. The crux of both is to speak with confidence and the only real difference is one of defence mechanisms. In standup, the rather cowardly defence mechanism is to offend and ridicule your audience (the ultimate achievement probably being Simon Munnery getting his I AM TV audience to wear dunces’ caps while simultaneously filming them for a video release – it was like Abu Graib) whereas in these seminars it’s to be as charming as humanly possible. I’m waiting for the day I get the two confused and accidentally call a blue-haired old lady a “cunting, cunting, cunting, cunting cunt”.

I like being charming. Perhaps some sort of comedy seminar should be arranged. I’d have to adopt some sort of benevolent dictator role.

Today I had to deliver two seminars. In order to recuperate after the first event, I sprinted away from Edinburgh University Library at lunchtime in order to partake in that rare treat: an all-day vegetarian breakfast at the Babylon Cafe.

If the Babylon Cafe’s managers were more honest they would have called the place the Babylon Caff, for its main features are bolted-down chairs and plastic squeezy ketchup bottles with blocked nozzles.

It’s also the only cafe I can think of whose breakfasts include a substantial portion of chips.

There is also a mystery sausage. Each time I’ve been to the Babylon Cafe, I’ve eaten the sausage assuming it to be one of a vegetation variety. It’s exceptionally tasty though and I concerned that it might be a meat sausage after all; put there by the cook for personal entertainment value.

I intend to bring along a friend one day who is allergic to meat; generously donate to him my sausage and see whether he requires dialysis.

The problem I am now faced with is how the hell I’m going to perform again this afternoon. The eighth commandment, “Never eat anything bigger than your head” was mercifully flounced today and now I am sure to pay the price.

I had been in the Babylon Cafe for a full twenty minutes before my eyes were drawn to an arrangement of what could possibly be Christmas baubles upon the ceiling.

Disregarding them politely in the same way that you try to disregard a Bull Mastiff with ponderously apparent testicles, I noticed that garlands of plastic holly also adorned the walls.

Gah! The place was glowing with Christmas Radiation. If only I had the foresight to bring my patented Robert Wringham Handheld Festive Geiger Counter (TM).

It’s March. I’m not sure whether the staff of the cafe have been remiss in taking down their decorations or if they’re being terribly organised by getting them up early.

I have found myself enlisted in that international army of darkness known as Facebook.

My main impetus for doing this was to promote my live performances; but a side effect is that I’ve been tracked down by a large number of people with whom I attended High School.

I suspected this would happen, of course, but each message from these former companions is received with quite a jolt when I see their greying hair and their line-strewn faces and the special devices to compensate for their ailing bladders.

Some of these people are now married and have children. Again my reaction is one of surprise. How that pimply idiot Graham Kerr can have kids is beyond me: he’s only fifteen years old if I remember correctly.

My friends with children seem happy if their Facebook profiles can be believed. I, on the other hand, am the most miserable bastard on the planet so perhaps I should contemplate putting my gametes to good use instead of flushing them down the toilet every single night.

But alas I don’t see myself being the child-rearing type. I can barely look after my cat let alone a living, thinking, talking child; especially one which consists of a fair proportion of Wringham DNA. It’s bad enough having Wringham DNA inside my body without some of it breaking off and declaring independence.

Thanks to a skin condition and a recently diagnosed latent homosexuality, I don’t actually see myself ever having sex with a woman again before I die. I don’t see it happening post-mortem either if I’m honest. I just don’t think I’m the necrophile’s type.

I think my problem with people who have children, especially all of those Facebookers who apparently couldn’t wait to leave High School in order to start sprogging off, is the unimaginative use of Eros.

That’s exactly it. Unimaginative use of Eros. A human being has a certain amount of creative energy invested in him/her by Nature or God or Whatever. Admittedly, the purpose of this Eros is probably for us to find reproduction appealing but some people also use this energy to paint or to write or to compose beautiful music or to collect and catalogue Kinder Egg toys originating between 1980 and 1990.

Using your eros simply to have children is an unimaginable waste. It’s the sort of behaviour you expect from field mice or haddock or rhesus monkeys. Not from sentient human beings. They’re so proud of it too aren’t they, these parents? “I’ve spawned,” they shriek, “I’m a daddy!”. Big deal, buddy, you’ve accomplished something a bacterium is capable of and unlike a bacterium, you needed to get someone to help you.

They cram their wallets full of photographs and decoupage their office desks with childish scribble. If I, the childless, did either of these things I’d probably be taken to jail.

Having said this, perhaps there is something to be said for expending eros in this unimaginably conventional way. I ran out to the shop today in order to buy chocolate biscuits and all I could find were astonishingly expensive chocolate biscuits packaged in a tube. “Re-sealable!” shrieked the package.

Someone’s eros was responsible for this innovation. I had no interest in resealing anything. I want to eat the entire packet like the biscuit-eating fatty that I am. But because of someone’s astonishing idea I now had to pay £1.50 for the exact same biscuits which last week cost £0.80.

I can’t help but think that if some marketing guy out there had only done what God had intended and put his penis unsheathed into a lady’s vagina and made a baby, this whole resealable tube fiasco could have been avoided.

The moral of this story? If you’re the sort of person who has ideas along the lines of resealable biscuit tubes, have yourself a baby and save the world from your rampant and useless eros. If you’re the sort of person likely to create an artistic masterpiece, tie a knot in it.

Had a conversation with some friends last night about my staunchly held theory that TV Comedy programmes have gender.

This all started a few months ago when I noticed that my flatmate only likes a certain flavour of sitcom and that the divide seems to be male/female. He likes ‘female’ sitcoms but hates ‘male’ ones. The sexist.

The gender of a sitcom doesn’t necesarily correlate with the gender of the writers or stars but rather about the subject matter. Smack the Pony, for example, is male despite being written and performed entirey by ladies.

This idea would probably fly amongst students of ‘Gender Studies’ who would surely reward me with twenty virgins and make me their mayor. But among my stupid friends I am seen as a foaming madman.

Last night, they tested my theory by throwing various comedy programmes at it.

Curb Your Enthusiasm? Male.

The Simpsons? Male.

Lead Balloon? Female.

Absolutely Fabulous? Female.

The League of Gentlemen? Transgendered but largely male.

Never Mind the Buzzcocks? Male.

Frasier? Female.

Jam?

Jam left me skuppered. I thought of Chris Morris’s terrifying opening sequences; of Mark Heap’s screaming head attached to a spinal column in a tiny bed; of Julia Davis’ damaged women; of Kevin Eldon’s Dung-Breathed Man. “Jam?” I snapped angrily, “Jam? Jam? Jam is not male or female it’s a fucking… plum. With gills.”

Coming next week: Books with Race.

George MacDonald Fraser dies at 82.

Obituary at the Beeb.

Obituary at The Guardian

Ever feel as though you’re teetering on the brink of madness but can’t pinpoint any evidence?

The doctors don’t take you seriously? The judge said your nightmares couldn’t possibly have anything to do with charismatic magician David Blaine since he was encased in ice when the so-called “abuse” took place?

Here’s a clue.

If you’ve begun incorporating Christmas decorations into your regular home decor, you’ve got a problem.

“I’m not sure if I’m going to take those down,” says my mum with reference to a festive display of artificial twigs and berries adorning part of her veranda.

Yes, yes. We have a veranda. Wanna fight about it?

In mum’s defense, the Christmas decorations she contemplated keeping up were not gaudy tinsel garlands festooned with glittery snowman penises. Instead, they had a kind of “Yule” aesthetic, the whole effect looking like something swiped from a department store cheese counter. But still, you don’t want to draw attention to the men in white coats so I advised her against it.

I once had a girlfriend whose mum did similar things. She decided that she liked her mechanical life-sized Santa which would periodically chime “Ho Ho Ho, Merry Christmas” and ring a bell so much that she would keep it up all year round.

She did weird things like that all the time though. I remember one of the first occasions I visited her house. She had scurried off to make me a cup of tea and while I sat politely in the doilied suburban living room, I noticed that among the porcelain ornaments of her mantle piece stood a twelve-inch plastic Shrek.

Sadly, I think this is a mania sweeping the nation. Why do so many girls have fairy lights in their bedrooms these days? The only possible purpose I can imagine is to delay the orgasms of their conquests. I know I find them offputting.

The real reason for global warming has nothing to do with leaving television sets on standby. It’s all to do with the fairy lights and Robo-Santas that have been invading the planet like something out of a Doctor Who Christmas Special and sucking all the juice out of the grid.

I’m wondering now whether the presence of out-of-season Christmas ornamentation is the effect of madness or the cause. I had a high school teacher who was a bit odd. All year round, there was a ruby Christmas Tree bauble collecting chalk dust on his desk. This wasn’t a deliberate fixture. It had just been found down the back of a radiator or something. I can’t help thinking that the bauble was the cause of his madness, akin to the unfortunate presence of a Plutonium Rod having something to do with one’s hair and teeth gradually falling out.

Perhaps we need some sort of Geiger Counter-style device to seek out unsolicited “Christmas Radiation” occurring before December 1st and after Twelfth Night – the period in which we are most susceptible to to its brain-rotting influence.

Once located, the offending ornament can either undergo a controlled explosion or can be put in a cardboard box in an attic where its harmful rays can’t penetrate our minds.

Sitting in the aforementioned veranda this afternoon, reading a book, I am suddenly disturbed a tinny robotic cackling akin to something from Child’s Play 5000: Chucky on Mars.

I realise that my mum has installed a plastic witch-on-a-broomstick in the veranda which for some chilling reason has ‘decided’ to activate. The cackling is accompanied by a vibrating of hips and the flashing of red L.E.D eyeballs.

I assume this is a Halloween decoration which somehow survived the taking-down process.

I’m going to put my mother in a home.

I am currently visiting my Mater and Pater for Christmas.

They hate it when I address them in Latin.

Lentus!

Whenever I come home, I am cast immediately into the worlds of my childhood and my teenage years. My old bedroom remains unchanged and the architecture of the whole building brings back extremely potent associations.

As well as walking around with a permanent adolescent bonk-on, I also experience echoes of the old depressions and anxieties of growing up as a Softie Walter in the middle of Dudley: a Black Country town famous for a meat product with the unfortunate name of the faggot.

I always tried to get into the bad boys’ good books by using humour but apparently bullies don’t like jokes about The Mikado. Some people, eh?

After everyone had gone to bed this evening, I took to reading Charlie Brooker’s excellent Dawn of the Dumb book. In it, he mentions his fear of a face at the window.

“All is quiet. It’s bedtime. You walk to the window to draw the curtains. And there it is! Face at the window! Aaaaarrgh! A scraggy-haired lunatic with googly eyes!”

I really wish he hadn’t brought that up. Now of all times!

My childhood was plagued with a nearly identical ‘Face at the Window’ anxiety. The imagined face changed over the years but the window always remained the same. It was the little window on the mezzanine level between the ground and first floors. It was inevitable that I walk past the window every night on the way to bed/my pillowy grave.

Yes, yes, we have a mezzanine. Wanna fight about it?

To make matters worse, this window was of the frosted variety like you get in bathrooms. So whatever Satanic vision should appear beyond the glass would also be distorted by wrinkles in the pane, thus doubling the horror factor.

I think the earliest ‘Face’ I imagined would appear at the window would be knife-fingered scrotum chops, Freddy Krueger. Even today when I see pictures of that comedy horror rascal, it makes me jump.

I actually just did a Google search to make sure I had spelled “Krueger” correctly (I hadn’t) and an image of a Freddy Krueger latex Halloween mask almost made me soil myself.

As I got older, the Face at the Window (which never actually appeared, of course, this was just an anticipatory fear) changed. For a while it was the porcine spectre of “The Pig Mon” – a local urban legend who wore the ripped-off face of a pig over his own and patrolled the borders of our school playing fields with a chainsaw.

Later, the Face was usually that of a curious Grey alien. Would he take me on a Ziggy Stardust voyage of intergalactic exploration? Would he bollocks. He’d open my bum with a pizza cutter and fill it with nanobots so that I’d ever be under his remote control lest I want to contract cancer.

Occasionally the Face took the form of the masked lady ghost of a scary ITV anthology series called Chiller which I really shouldn’t he watched so late and on my own (she drowned the family dog in the back garden’s reflecting pool!).

The idea of seeing the lady ghost or maybe an alien Gray at the window was more scary in that it was more realistic. A human such as the Pig Mon couldn’t possibly appear at a window so high up from the ground but a Grey or a ghost could levitate. Oh, the rationalization of it.

Needless to say, this combination of being at home and reading that stupid thing by Brooker has resulted in the Face at the Window fear returning.

What Face do I imagine will appear at the window now that I’m an adult? Why, myself of course! The real monster! Yaaaah!

Something slightly preoccupied me over the Christmas week.

Seven or eight days ago, I had popped into my local branch of co-op to buy coffee and cigars and some of the other self-destructive products required by the eternal bachelor.

“Did you do all of your Christmas shopping at Fopp?” asked the cashier.

He was referring to my atypically large Fopp-brand carrier bags, bulging with CDs and paperbacks.

Normally, I like to keep these transactions as short and non-conversational as politely possible. Any interaction with the world outside of my own head or my own carefully constructed DVD collection usually only results in anger, shame and unpredicted moisture.

Today, however, I was feeling rather chipper. As the cashier had rightly suspected, I had done all of my Christmas shopping in a single trip to the Fopp records-and-books-and-videos emporium. So as the rest of the last-minute world buzzed about me, I was feeling quite smug about this.

“Yes! Haha!” I said, holding up my fistful of Fopp carrier bags, “Or should I say Christmas Fopping?!”

The cashier groaned but laughed all the same. “That’s the worst joke I’ve heard all day,” he said.

I suspect it was the only joke he had heard all day. I doubt many comedians of my stature come into the co-op and release such wonderful humour free of charge into his unsuspecting cashier’s ears.

On the way home with the bags of sundries, I bumped into my Kentish chum, Jon Ransom. He asked me what I had been doing out in the real world with the real people.

“Oh, I’ve just been doing my Christmas shopping,” I said, “Or should I say…. my Christmas Fopping?! Ahaha!”

Jon is a curmudgeonly sort (he looks like Orson Welles in The Third Man and has the attitude of a hook-handed militant religious leader) and I could tell he was far less impressed by my festive pun than the cashier in the supermarket had been. I didn’t care though. I was in a good mood and nothing could prevent me from littering half the city with my hilarious joke.

On my street, I spotted my next-door neighbour, Dr. MacLeod. He’s a no-nonsense sort and owns his entire property – a gorgeous West End townhouse worth over a million pounds. Since I rent only the attic of the house next door to him, he treats me with some degree of suspicion. We always get along when we meet in the communal gardens but I can tell he secretly regards the people in my building as a pieces of auspicious pond life.

“Just doing some Christmas shopping!” I called to him through the dusk, “Or rather my Christmas Fopping! Haha! Ha!”

Dr. MacLeod is an old man. He doesn’t shop in cool record stores or waste his evenings on Facebook or eat sushi. He writes books about twentieth-century photography and has postal subscriptions to The Great Composers and The Economist.

He clearly had no idea what I was on about, wished me a Merry Christmas and went quickly into his front door.

I’m sure I saw his letterbox open suddenly as though Dr. MacLeod was checking I had gone and that I wasn’t still raving in his street going “Ahaha! Christmas Fopping!” and that he didn’t have to call the police. I don’t think he really did this though. I am just being paranoid and editing history to make it more comically rewarding.

The next day, I walked past Fopp on my way to work. A poster in the window read:

CHRISTMAS FOPPING OPENING HOURS: 10:00-10:00.

Bugger.

Bugger and blast. I had been running around Glasgow telling everyone my rubbish joke and all along it had already been thought of by the evil Fopp corporation and proudly displayed in their shop windows for all to see. Everyone will think I have just stolen it. Telling a stolen rubbish joke is far worse than telling an original rubbish joke.

I seriously can’t see how I can carry on living now.

This Christmas I will be found dead – face down in a pile of turkey stuffing – overdosed on sleeping pills and mulled wine.

Suicide really is the only way out of this.

They ask me: How do you do it?

“How do you do it, how do you do it, how do you do it? How does a person like you – a writer, a poet, a human being with the heart of seven pterodactyls – work with computers all day long?”

Ah, yes. A good question.

There is the assumption that computers are dull, soulless, un-scented things: logical yes/no units with the intelligence of a lightswitch and zero interest in what humans get up to.

This is not strictly true. The computers I work with – library computers – have developed lifelong fixations upon what it must be like to be human and under the right conditions are capable of implementing very human activities. After all, they have been invested with almost endless streams of metadata concerning human activity from the past n-hundred years.

Computers are quietly humming electronic spectators in our lives.

In order to demonstrate the interest in the human condition held by my computers, I asked one of them to write a poem based upon what it finds so interesting about us. After years of data entry, my computer has learned a thing or two about us. Today, this is the poem it generated. It is called “Why”:

Why?
A poem written by a library computer

Why do men rape?
Why do men starve?
Why do men suffer?
Why do Americans and Germans work different hours?
Why do people gamble?
Why do people eat?
Why do people fight wars?
Why do open economies have bigger governments?
Why do people drink alcohol?
Why do people harm animals?
Why do people hate America?
Why do I laugh or cry – and twenty other questions about the nervous system.
Why do people take drugs?
Why do people live on the street?
Why do people smoke?
Why choose structural concrete?
Why do the heathens vainly rage?
Why do sunflowers face the sun?
Why do volcanoes erupt?
Why do my feet fall asleep and other questions about the circulatory system.
Why do we?
Why do you?
Why do I?
Why do we need railways?
Why do women write more letters than they post?
Why does a good god allow suffering?
Why do the Christmas bells ring?
Why Why Why?
Why does anarchism progress so slowly?
Why does daddy hate me?
Why does it all fall down?
Why does tragedy give pleasure?
WHy does lightning strike?
Why don’t we learn from history?
Why don’t I fall up?
Why does my dog?
Why does my horse?
Why don’t you stop talking?

A new craze is sweeping the nation.

I’m talking about dabbing the end of your penis with a piece of toilet paper after a wee. Oh yes, it’s very much in vogue.

It may surprise the ladyreaders of this diary, who have probably always dabbed their ladyparts routinely after passing a ladypiss, to hear that this is a new phenomenon.

All these years, you ladies have been giving oral sex to literally millions of men while having tiny particles of urine passing across your lips unsolicited. (Still, I suppose that’s the least of your worries).

No. Historically, we just shake a few token drips off and put it away. Hence the old addage:

You can shake and you can dance but the last two drops go in your pants.

In hindsight, however, it is hard to believe we did this for so long. What beasts! Did our grandfathers get impaled in the war so we could behave so ferociously? Did Jesus die for this?

At a party recently, the topic of willy-cleaning came up.

“Oh yes,” said a fashionable toff, “I always make sure I wipe the end of my slow worm ruthlessly after passing water”.

He wouldn’t have it any other way. When another bloke confessed to never having cleaned his penis after a wee in his whole life, the toff pulled a recoiling grimace:

“Never dab your person? Oh my!”

Dissatisfied, he produced a silk handkerchief and polished the lint from his monocle.

Your humble narrator jumps in at this point. I mention that willy-dabbing surely cannot be the standard. The absence of toilet roll dispensers next to urinals is testament to this. Quod erat demonstrandum, chump.

Nonetheless, I have been doing the modern thing of late by indulging in the dab. I find it largely agreeable.

The only problem is of how to detach the sheet of toilet paper from the roll (essentially a job requiring double dexterity) while holding your fireman in the other (also a job requiring two hands – for some of us anyway.)

I suppose you could just let go of your willy in order to acquire the toilet paper but then you run the risk dripping. Which would be terrible.

The best method, of course, is to take yet another leaf from the ladies’ book of pissing tips and just sit down to pee.

Larry David on Curb Your Enthusiasm is an advocate of sitting. He likes to read the New York Times on the toilet. “While you’re pissing all over your shoes, I’m learning something!” He has a point.

Sitting is really the ultimate in toilet behaviour. You can be king of the bathroom on your Armatage throne. You can indeed read. You can stare out of the window idly. You can even do an unprecedented poo. Everyone’s a winner.

I’m thinking of investing in one of those fluffy pink toilet seat covers that your grandma uses to maximize the comfort, though I’m not sure I’d ever leave the bathroom if I had one of those. I’d just sit there all day reading magazines and doing tiny micro-wees.

It’s also terribly humbling. Removed of all pretense, you’re reduced to being a defecating biological construct sitting on the open end of a sewer. It’s humbling in a similar way to a trip to the Vatican. I’m not saying that craning your neck in the Sistine Chapel is a similar experience to having a wee but it’s food for thought.

On the subject of food, there’s something wrong about the presence of food in the bathroom isn’t there? I suppose you could maximize the fun of sitting-to-wee by keeping a bowl of mixed nuts atop of the cistern. But there’s something so un-fung-shui about that it doesn’t bare thinking about. Food in the bathroom indeed. You wouldn’t have a shave in your kitchen.

Where was I going with this? Oh, yes. Toilet etiquette. Always remember to dab, gentlemen. For the good of your country. And for Jesus.

I’ve set myself the challenge of counting the number of roads I cross on my morning journey to work.

The plain people of Cyberspace: Why, by crikey, why?

I’m getting there, I’m getting there.

The plain people of Cyberspace: And it doesn’t sound like much of a “challenge” either.

Well, that’s where you’re wrong. It’s entirely challenging. I’ve being trying to accomplish this seemingly feckless task for the past two weeks and have still not been able to do so. The problem is that I always forget I’m supposed to be doing it. After about nine roads I’ve lost interest and my mind has wondered off into sexier, more Thundercats-based territories.

I began the game initially as an idle if slightly obsessive-compulsive way to make the bleary-eyed ante meridiem journey pass more swiftly and to potentially empty my head of the borderline-suicidal “Must escape! Robbie want out!” thoughts that so frequently plague me on the way to the concentration camp, um office.

To begin with, it was the sort of activity you’d set a craphead six-year-old to do in the back of the family car while on the eternal drive to Skegness. “See how many cars you can spot with an ampersand in their numberplate.”

But I realised it was also an exercise in risk management. Work out the number of roads you cross and you might be able to alter your journey slightly in order to cross fewer roads and consequently minimize the probability of your being splatted by a car (or in my case, another car).

The fact that I was once hit by a car may be explanation enough for this odd behaviour. I remember reading about a woman who would count the number of times she chewed her food after an unfortunate shrimp incident.

Besides, I like counting things. It’s comforting. Ask me how many steps there are in my building up to my attic and I’ll know. Ask me know many bollards there are between my office and the cash machine and I’ll tell you. Go on. Test me.

But now that I can’t seem to achieve the road count, I’ve become fixated upon trying to do so.

The plain people of Cyberspace: Clearly not fixated enough or you’d know by now.

The problem lies in a short attention span. Counting is a simple exercise but when I get to about the tenth road, I have either lost count or forgotten I’m supposed to be playing and have started looking for phallic-shapes in the clouds.

But I don’t like to think my attention span is short. I don’t watch television anymore; haven’t played computer games in years and have even stopped getting newspapers. Everything entering my eyes and ears is wholesome and this should surely help in fostering a good attention span.

So in a way the road-counting exercise is also a way of combating this problem. It’s like how people with Alzheimer’s are encouraged to do puzzles.

Talking to Neil Scott in the CCA bar the other night, he mentioned that he had been reading Freakonomics. When he mentioned the chapter about black people’s child-naming conventions, I noted that I had almost entirely forgotten that whole section of the book even though I had only read it two months previously. In one eye and out the other, as it were.

We’re not really encouraged to remember stuff these days though are we? I couldn’t tell you what my mother’s phone number is – it’s in the speed dial.

This should really be fought against. What is a man but the sum of his memories? A trip to the mind gym might be in order.

Rationalization aside, I’m nuts aren’t I?

New Escapologist #1:

Identify your escape routes.

NOW AVAILABLE

The New Escapologist is a zine dedicated to the art of making hasty exits. Using humour and critical psychology as investigative tools we discuss alternative lifestyles and ways out of the rat race.

Physical Description: A4. 42 pages. Colour Cover. Mono insides.

Country of origin: HQ in Scotland but includes writers from USA, England, Scotland and Sweden.

Price: £3.00 (plus £1.50 shipping)

#1 features work by:
* Lord Whimsy (author of The Affected Provincial’s Handbook)
* Judith Levine (author of the best-selling Not Buying It)
* Alfred Armstrong (Oddbooks.co.uk)
* Robert Wringham (your humble narrator)
* Stuart Harris-Logan (author of Singing with blackbirds)
* Livejournal’s own polka-dot pterodactyl, Cap_Scaleman;
* Neil Scott and many others.

Includes material about dandyism, Easter Island, psychology, Sigmund Freud, Luke Rhinehart, Mugabe, LSD and stacks more.

To read more about this zine or to buy your own copy, check out the official website at:

www.new-escapologist.co.uk

(And you can also see us at Zine Wiki)

“We had to wait thirty years for someone to come up with an idea like this – an indie magazine about escape attempts!!! Next step: a whole Escapology Cult.” – Prof. Stanley Cohen, London School of Economics.

“You gotta help me, Doc,” I say truthfully, “The music in your waiting room is really fucking dreadful.”

Having just got back from a city break in Rome, the bad music in the Glaswegian doctors’ waiting room highlights one of the differences between UK cities and those on the continent. In Rome, they play classical music on the tube. It turns a mundane everyday micro-journey into a potentially enriching experience. In Glasgow (and on the RyanAir flight home) the music in public spaces tends to be of a quality so low it makes your mobile phone ringtone sound as though Mantovani was involved in its production. I wonder why? If you’ve got the ability to pump music into people’s ears why not make it half decent? It can’t be a money issue. Classical music is basically free.

Today in the doctors’ office, I had arrived fifteen minutes early for my appointment, eager to see my GP about [insert horrible ailment here]. Trying to read my book, I am distracted by the music on the waiting room sound system. It’s horrible. Really intrusive.

The first song was the one in which overrated simpering cock-pop band The Beach Boys (at least I think it’s them) try to encourage a consortium buyout on Bruce Forsyth’s face:

“Come all without, come all within,
Let’s all club to together for the frightening chin.”

Or maybe I’ve misunderstood the lyrics. Setting up a commune in the spacious jawbone of any popular TV personality (especially one as famous as Brucie) is a laudable cause but the song must be twenty years old now and I don’t think there has been any progress on the buyout. It would have been in the newspaper.

The next song was by a band whose name I do not know, but it is an utterly revolting number about a vain person apparently known by the singer. One of the lines goes:

“I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you, don’t you“.

Who is she talking to? Is she talking to me (the listener) or to an unseen person within the song’s narrative?

If she’s talking to me, I’m astonished at the suggestion that I might think her song was about me. The thought hadn’t entered my head until she got so vehement about it.

It’s the final “Don’t you” that scares me the most though. If I wasn’t paying attention to her song before, trying desperately to ignore it, I was certainly aware of it now. It was like being happy-slapped by a stranger. It’s a horribly aggressive and unsolicited lyric and makes you want to respond but you can’t because the person singing it is safely locked away in a recording studio somewhere in the past. But if I could reply it would be by saying “Who the hell are you? Leave me alone, you aching butthole.”

But no. Of course, she is addressing the fictional person within the song’s narrative: the vain man who has somehow wronged her. But even this doesn’t quite make sense. Why would she claim the song wasn’t about him when it was entirely directed at him?

Singer: “I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you, don’t you“.
Unseen person: “Um, yes. I do. You are saying these words to me after all. And can you stop shouting please? You spat in my eye a bit there.”

The icing on the cake of all this horrible middle-of-the-road and lyrically baffling music was that when the radio DJ chipped in he told me that the time was 11:45. But it wasn’t! It was about 5:30 in the afternoon. Some dipshit had taped this off the radio! The music would all have been forgivable if the it was just coming in on the radio. We all know DJs are stupid and just play what the record labels have told them to play. But someone at the doctors’ office had thought that this chunk of mid-morning radio it was especially good enough to tape and to bring in to work. Fuck!

According to the doctor, music is required in the waiting room so that waiting patients aren’t tempted to eavesdrop into sensitive phone calls at the reception desk. Fair enough, I decide (though now I think about it, who talks about their medical condition to the receptionist?).

Could you not put on some relaxing classical music or something instead though?

No. Apparently the young people who use the centre don’t like the classical music. They find it too formal. And you can’t upset the young people. If they stop coming in for their weekly swabs, half of Glasgow will have chlamydia before you can say “Irn Bru-soaked ratbag”.

I suggest that a long, deafening tone might be better.

The doctor worries that this would make people think they had tinnitus and she’d end up prescribing unnecessary medications.

I’m tempted to put together a mix tape of ‘suitable for everyone’ music to take in. But that’s the behaviour of an old man, isn’t it?

One of the nice things about the day job I currently occupy is that I get to float around a lot in the library world, visiting other libraries and their librarians for little purpose other than extending a professional handshake between our offices. Among other fun activities, this usually results in copeous amounts of tea being swigged.

Today I had the oportunity to visit the librarian of a local college. Having worked in some of this country’s mightiest academic biblioteques, these little repositories always strike me as being a little parochial and twee. The shabbiness of it all is magnified when the librarian inevitably comes out with something like “An absolute fortune was thrown at our fiction collection this year” when to me said fiction collection looks about as impressive and appetising as the coffee table of a dentist’s waiting room.

I don’t say anything of course. Unlike aforementioned libraries of academia which are contructed over the centuries by a thousand different librarians, these little collections are always somebody’s baby.

Today, our meeting was constantly interrupted by a nearby laser printer whirring into life. The librarian had deliberately positioned it near his office so that he could monitor what was being printed by the students.

The printer and its use seemed to be a passion of his.

Ever since the college had provided free printing to its students – the librarian tells me in detail – he has felt obliged to monitor the printed material so that the facility wouldn’t be abused. But this college, exclusively attended as it is by “sports” students and the occasional disinterested baker, the printer sees nothing but abuse.

The students, it seems, use the printer exclusively to annoy the librarian.

Today someone had decided to print an entire telephone directory.

“Right, that’s it!” he screams, “Who keeps doing this?! Ye’ll be banned for life when I get my hands on ye!”

Portly and outraged, he is the very embodiment of frustration. I can see why the kids do it.

Livid, he slams the substantial document into a nearby recycling bin, waves his fist and shouts “I mean it!”

There is more giggling. I stifle one myself.

“The worst thing of it,” he says to me back in the office, “is that I’m only here to monitor this 50% of the time. The library stays open long after I’ve gone home”.

I wonder if he lies awake at night worried about the printer output; whether his dreams are punctuated with the whirr of an imagined laserjet belching out page after infinite page of his own subconcsious.

I doubt very much that the kids abuse the system once the librarian has gone home. They clearly only do this for the sport of making him explode.

This evening I set about printing The New Escapologist. I have invested in a semi-nice laser printer for the sole purpose of doing this.

In my attic flat tonight I feel like one of the early zinesters or pamphleters – Thomas Paine or Hugo Gernsback – generating subversive material from my own “printing press” way above the masses in my drafty garret.

“They think I am mad! They say ‘what is to be done with that Robert Wringham and his unstoppable printing press?'”

I remember the printer at the college library today and wonder if those kids know what a gift such a thing is. I had to invest money in a printer and in ink and in paper to get this project going. They could have their own underground magazine running from this library – for free – if the idea entered their spotty little heads. But only after the librarian had gone home.

A pocket squared is a pocket halved.

Mooching aimlessly around Hyndland last night, I crossed paths with an older chap resembling Gay Talese. I don’t think he was though. Gay that is. Ahem.

The man was dressed rather wonderfully in a suit and wide-brimmed hat and most notably sported a midnight blue pocket square handkerchief.

Casually wondering if I could get away with wearing such a garment in Glasgow without being snottered irrevocably, my hand became drawn to my own breast pocket.

To my surprise I discovered that the pocket was still stitched up, as fresh as if I had bought it only yesterday. I did a quick sum in my head and discovered that I had owned this suit jacket for eight years.

The bloody pocket had been stitched up for eight years without my ever noticing. Eight years this recatangle of fabric had been a professional pocket impersonator.

It may as well have been painted on.

I find this more distressing that you can know. What does this say about me? Answers on a postcard and don’t be afraid to get Freudian on my ass.

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.

.

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.