The Occasional Papers

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.

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.