The Occasional Papers

As any office drones who read this blog are fully aware, most companies offer to their staff a choice of ‘early’ lunch slot and ‘late’ lunch slot: the former occurring at noon and the latter at 1pm.

Whenever I’m engaged day-job work, I almost always opt for the ‘late lunch’ option since I’m a fan of the ‘pacing yourself’ model of surviving the tedious office day. Aside from this reason, I also have an idea about ‘delayed gratification’: the longer you can wait out some horrible discomfort (in this case, crippling hunger) the more pleasurable the ultimate reward will be. It’s true.

Today, however, I experimented with the art of the early lunch. suggested to me over a beer in a seedy but cosy pub the other night that the ‘pace yourself’ model is fallacious. The hungry hour between noon and 1pm, he argues, will be uncomfortable and slow while an early lunch can only result in a more pleasant, motivated and speedy afternoon.

I wasn’t 100% convinced. While I saw the logic to his hypothesis, I also see the logic to most of Carl Pilkinton‘s ideas. (“Issac Newton did not contribute much to human civilization as discovering gravity did not affect us as it had always been there. Had everyone been floating about then he would rightfully deserve the amount of credit he receives.”) The best manias are universally convincing.

The findings of the early lunch experiment are conclusive: it is better.

The first advantage concerns what I now call a ‘Reverse Auschwitz Soup Line Effect’. In the History Channel’s favourite death camp, a top-notch survival skill was to assume a position at the back of the soup line. The chunks of meat in the soup would apparently always sink to the bottom of the soup vat and consequently the first thirty or so bowls of soup doled out would be pure liquid. The prisoners who realised this kept it quiet and ate meat each day (though I doubt very much that it was Kosher). The prisoners who failed to notice this all died.

In the modern urban lunchtime eatery, the exact opposite is true – hence the ‘Reverse Auschwitz Soup Line Effect’. This has gone largely unnoticed due to the lack of television documentaries about sandwich bars – something I hope one day to rectify when I’m instated as the rightful king of everything. I advise all officially afflicted people out there not to wait out the early lunch slot but to rush out as soon as the clock strikes midday and to laugh arrogantly at those poor, foolish colleagues who instad choose to gawp at their spreadsheets with rumbling tummies.

Today, I was the first person in line at the sandwich shop and I was rewarded with a tuna roll overflowing with tunafish and salad. Normally, it the tuna is spread pretty meagerly as though it were a patte.

Of course, this could be avoided if the sandwich lady would just dole out the tuna in respectable and consistent quantities. I suspect involvement of The Wanko himself somewhere along the lines. He owns this town.

The second advantage is that Neil’s reasoning is spot on. No longer do I feel sluggish and suicidal. I can concentrate! The hours will certainly zoom by.

In other news, look out for a Wringham article in the forthcoming edition of the excellent Meat magazine. Available in Borders bookshops and some other places. Also two online interviews: one with the infamous Jo Bloggs and one with the bonkers Cap_Scaleman. Hurrah!

“[There] is a sort of defeated moralism. If you are only slightly peculiar, there is the possibility that a shouting at will save you and bring you back to the straight and narrow. But, if you are too far gone in any direction, there is no hope; either there is nothing that even a shouting at can do for you or you are simply pitiable.” – Reggie C. King.

If last night’s events are anything to go by, it seems that a new craze has descended upon the city like a fat, three-arsed spider.

I’m talking, of course, about drive-by insults. American cities have proper crime with drive-by shootings but here in Little Britain we have this other form of abuse-in-motion, which I postulate might someday be known as “Tit!”-and-run driving.

“Fags!” shouted the first of the evening.

“Nice Hat!” bawled the second.

“Fudd!” spat the third, particularly aggressively.

A fudd, for the non-Glaswegian among you is a finely-crafted synonym referring to what is more cordially known as a “lady’s tuppence”.

Each of their insults fell victim to the doppler effect. Defied by simple GCSE physics.

It’s astonishing what small and insignificant things can antagonise some people to the extent that they feel obliged to shout abuse at a stranger from the window of their car.

All I had done was wear a hat.

Yet it made my friend and I the objects of three aggressive drive-by insults. It wasn’t even a particularly extravagant hat: just a black porkpie which is in entirely good proportion and I don’t think makes me look strange or gay.

I don’t think your dress sense has to be particularly extravagant to attract such attention any more though. This afternoon, I received another derisive attire-based comment from a stranger but this one was perhaps the oddest. A slightly chavvy schoolgirl took the briefest of glances at me before squawking, “Hah! Can I borrow your suit?!”. Since the girl had at least been brave enough not to deliver her insult from a speeding vehicle, I was able to retort. I said: “I don’t think so. Such an exercise would be uncomfortable for both of us” .

But why had she found a man in a suit so worthy of comment? I was clearly walking back from work. Don’t most people wear suits to work? It’s quite funny really. I suddenly remember that Fast Show sketch in which Mark Williams, seemingly disgusted with every single person he sees, shouts from his car window with impossibly increasing shrillness, “Brick Layer! Carpet Fitter?! Milk Man!!! Shop Keeper?! PAPER BOY??!“

It does make me wonder though how genuinely different people get by. What of dandies, punks, ethnic minorities, goths, people with missing limbs, baldies, fatties, transexuals, the aged? What of the tattooed, the birthmarked, the deformed, the limping? How do they walk down the street without being showered by the spittle of passing drivers?

There is a rather strange man who patrols my street in a massive cowboy hat, constantly swearing at himself and spitting on his own shoes. You’d imagine that such an individual would take away the attention from marginally different people such as myself in a similar fashion to the how planet Jupiter protects the Earth from so many asteroids. But alas it seems not to happen.

Perhaps it is the very fact that I occupy a grey area between ‘sane’ and ‘bonkers’ that bothers people so much. Maybe they are fine with those individuals who are clearly properly mad but when a fairly regular bloke decides to wear a hat, it has the tendency to confuse and upset.

Let that be a lesson to you, dear reader. Society only understands extremes – the sane and the crazy; the totally ascetic and the utterly greedy. I am proud to announce that this blog and all my subsequent works will now represent a voice for the new minority: the marginally peculiar and the vaguely odd. Unite, slightly strange brothers and sisters!

“Never talk about religion or politics,” the cliche-generators always say. Better not mention the Scottish Christian party then. Oops. I just did.

The Scottish Christian Party, for those not in the know, are a slightly right-wing political party aiming to mix Christian “morals” with government. Their very existence, if it weren’t so absurdly hopeless, should literally put the fear of God into us. They are very ambitious though and were the first party to display their promotional signage around Glasgow, followed shortly by the Greens. In fact, they displayed their signage even before the election were declared – which is illegal!

By voting for the SCP, you are essentially voting for God.

The other parties have got their work cut out for them then. How can they possibly compete with that? The only hope Labour has now is to get James Bond or Gandalf on their side. Son of Kong for the Green Party? Batman for Solidarity? Of course, the Lib Dems already have Lembit Öpik.

Now its established that fictional devices may enter into the political arena in times of crisis, I should like to propose a new party: the Democratic Telepathy Party.

At the core of my party’s manifesto is the belief that true democracy cannot be achieved without the aid of telepathic technologies. My party will divert all of its funding and energies into developing the technology (or stealing it from aliens) in order to enable the entire population of Scotland, nay, Britain, to to ‘plug in’ to a gestalt collective consciousness.

It will be the ultimate leveller. At last men and women will understand each other. Rich and poor will understand how the other side lives. There will be no more race hate, fattism or verbal abuse toward those who have taken it upon themselves to wear elaborate hats.

I imagine that when the collective consciousness (sponsored by Virgin) kicks in for the first time; knowledge will flow suddenly between all heads and everyone will become aware of everything that has ever been known by anyone in a single nanosecond. There will be a sudden revelation in which every man, woman, ladyman and child will say “Huh. So that’s what it’s all about”.

It will be the dawn of mass realisation on all fronts at how shitty we have always been to each other.

Sir Alan Sugar from TV’s The Apprentice will have a million voices reverberate through his mind saying, “You’re Fired!” And he will say, “Whoa. That’s horrible. Is that what I’ve been doing to people? I mean, I’ll survive, but ouch.”

Vote Telepath for a glorious, single-minded future!

I have developed a strange new mannerism.

Every now and again, I will blow air forcefully from between my pursed lips. It is my new ‘sigh’. I don’t know where it came from.

In the good old days, my sighs were rumbustious and horsey, causing my slack lips to billow rudely like a couple of wind socks. I was very proud of that particular sigh. It was emotive and I think the perfect physical manifestation of the emotions behind it. It would say “This job is a tedium and I have persisted but soon I shall go and do something else”.

The new sigh is less emotive, I feel, and unnecessarily polite. It is small and twee and makes it look as though I am playing an invisible flute.

I seem to do it more frequently than my big old horse-faced sigh too. It sometimes arrives entirely unprovoked as I walk innocently down the street. It is quite disconcerning to be pounced upon by a rogue sigh – especially when it’s not even your own.

Does anyone remember that episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation in which Mr. Data had a facial tick imposed upon him by his twitchy evil twin, Mr. Lore? Lore used a strange little gadget to remove his own facial tick and transfer it on to the chops of his brother. We never did see that gadget again did we? I wonder what it was called? I call it a “twitch relocator”.

Anyway, either the same thing has happened to me and I have been visited by my doppelganger with the intent of swapping sighs or I’ve picked it up from somone else like a social disease.

Behaviour is learned, my friends, but I don’t know where this could have come from. Who might I have observed sighing in this fashion? A disenfranchised penny-whistle player perhaps? In order to counter the damage, I plan on watching endless Arthur Smith Grumpy Old Men monologues and interviews with depressed horses at the Grand National. Perhaps then I will get my old sigh back.

But learn from this, dear reader. Take precautions when laughing it up with chums. The last thing you want is a confusing new mannerism on your already overly-animated face.

There was a twenty-second item on the breakfast news this morning. The writer Kurt Vonnegut is dead, it said. He was very influential, it said. He had opinions.

And then they went back to the usual stuff about Londoners killing each other in domestic disputes and school children eating badly.

It would be remiss of me not to say something about Kurt Vonnegut. Yeah, everyone else on the Internet is lamenting his death and I doubt I can add anything to this swansong but I feel like I want to note his death so that when future historians look specifically to my blog as an historical resource, they will get a nice big boner at this reference to a real and corroborated event.

He was without a doubt my favourite writer. Maybe there is someone’s work which I have not yet read and happens to be funnier, smarter, scarier and more prophetic than Papa Kurt’s stuff but I find that increasingly unlikely.

A few moments after watching the news clip this morning, I realised that this would be one of those “you’ll always remember where you were” moments. When I mentioned this to my friend David today he said that the same thing happened to him when Syd Barrett died. For some reason, I struggled to remember who Syd Barrett was despite the fact that I have one of his CDs and have always liked Pink Floyd (Dark Side of the Moon was the first album I ever listened to). The only face that would come to mind was that of Sid James. My three years studying psychology qualifies me to say “It’s funny how the brain works”.

It was Vonnegut’s brain that failed him in the end too. Apparently, he failed to recover from an incident a few weeks ago when he fell on his head. It’s a blackly trivial end for such a great man. I had expected he would have been zapped off by a Tralfamadorian spaceship or something. The anti-climax of it is almost akin to the splattering of Walt Whitman’s brain.

I don’t know why this has upset me so much. Kurt had a fair innings and had, after all, tried to commit suicide on occasion so he was probably fairly used to the idea of dying. I’m fairly positive he had written all he was going to write – Timequake officially being his final novel succeeded only by a book of laundry lists and political musings in 2005 – so it wasn’t one of those tragic died-so-young Nick Drake affairs.

Today I carried around a battered copy of God Bless you, Mr. Rosewater and told people I met that the writer had died today.

You can see me holding the book in this photograph.

“All persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental, and should not be construed.”

I recently acquired a nifty little musical instrument called a Jew’s Harp. It was a gift from my grandad who tells me that he can no longer play it since all of his teeth have fallen out.

Given that the harp generates its mournful song by vibrating against the player’s incisors and using his skull as a resonance chamber, I can’t help but wonder whether it was playing this instrument that caused grandad’s teeth to escape their dribbly prison.

So far I have enjoyed playing the Jew’s Harp tremendously. It’s a delightfully easy instrument to play: a bit more complicated than a kazoo but infinitely simpler than a harmonica. All you have to do is find the best position for it against your teeth and control the notes and pitch using a combination of vowel-shapes and intakes of air. It’s as simple as a whore’s tit.

I plan to use it in a stand-up set at some point and most probably on my forthcoming podcast (though it will pale in comparison to the podcast’s excellent theme music composed by LiveJournal’s very own eccentric elephant, ).

Nonetheless, I am worried about the damage it might end up doing to my teeth. My grandad’s mouth – as ever – serves as a woeful parable and my teeth are pretty horrible as they are: yellowed mementos of oh so many toffees.

The biggest mistake I have made in a long time was falling out with my dentist. I can’t go back after what I said to him (no sir-ee-bob) and it’s proving impossible to find another one since any NHS dentist these days has a waiting list longer than the complaints desk queue of the average Tesco Metro. So it’s important that my teeth don’t fall out any time soon or I’ll be in an awkward oral situation. I’d better start enjoying soup.

I suspect it might be prudent for me to keep grandad’s harp for posterity but to acquire a new one. Grandad’s one is over seventy years old so I’d have no one to sue should actually end up gummy.

I am visiting my parents right now in Dudley: a town famous for unleashing Lenny Henry upon the world and for manufacturing the only still-functioning part of the Titanic – the anchor.

As usual, when I arrived in my old room last night, I was greeted with a pile of new socks and boxer shorts. I think my mum buys so many socks on my behalf due to the fact that every time I visit, I take off my shoes at the front door (as is the law in parental households – and don’t even think about touching any walls) to reveal a gaping hole in the big toe of each sock, the toes themselves protruding pinkly.

This seems to bother my mum substantially. She can tolerate my constant career failures, strange romances, televisual obsessions and existential crises but sock holes is where she draws the line. Dad owns a pair of fingerless gloves, I argue, to which there is little difference in principle. How am I supposed to open bananas with my feet if they are all wrapped up in sock?

I’m not particularly ashamed of my inability to own a single sock that doesn’t resemble cartoon swiss cheese: Einstein had the same problem. He said, “When I was young I found out that the big toe always ends up making a hole in a sock. So I stopped wearing socks.” See also: this.

It’s nice that my mum buys me so many socks. I mean, you have to use them and they can be pretty expensive so I’m grateful of course. You’re never far from a makeshift puppet show in my house. So many of my socks at Dudley does however mean that I have to bring either a spare empty bag down from Glasgow in order to carry them all back or else bring only one bag filled with things I can jettison or leave behind in Dudley for the next time I visit.

The same goes for pants: you’ve got to have them. My mum has a good eye for pants and I’m happy to let her do my pant shopping. This does not make me a weird nerd (although on those rare – I mean numerous – occasions that I “make it with a girl” it is strange to get down to my boxer shorts and to think albeit briefly – pun intended – of my mother. I do hope this is not her intent. She is so old and warty).

It is perhaps strange to travel half the length of the country with a single bag filled exclusively with new socks and underpants. I like how it is such a huge thing to carry yet entirely light in weight. I also like the idea of accidentally abandoning it in a train station somewhere and for the bomb squad to do a controlled explosion on it only to be showered with fragments of pant.

The nights are getting shorter and the sunshiney walk home from work can be a pleasant thing. Mine takes me through Kelvingrove Park: a walk marred only by increasingly numerous games of football. Oftentimes the football pitch is occupied by a disorganized kick-about between uneven teams of young children (“What’s the score? 45-11!”) but more frequently it is a proper game between adult players. They have a referee and linesmen and everything.

My worry is that their ball will come hurtling in my direction at a speed only possible when propelled from the leather-clad foot of an adult Glaswegian male. The goals do not have nets attached to them so in the event of a goal being scored when I’m walking past, I could become more than a fleeting spectator. In the event of a ball coming in my direction I can foresee only four possible outcomes:

(a) One of the players will shout “Kick the ball back, mate?”. I will attempt to kick the ball back to him only to have my shoe fly off and enter a low Earth orbit. There will be much amusement.

(b) One of the players will shout “Kick the ball back, mate?”. I will attempt to do so only to have the ball fly off in the opposite direction and into a passing grandma.

(c) One of the players will shout “Kick the ball back, mate?” and I will run away emu-like out of the fear of Situations (a) or (b). Whenever I run, it can only be described as emu-like.

(d) The ball will hit my already twice-fractured arm and it will be in plaster for a further two months.

I just can’t bring myself to like football. The very sound of a boot hitting a leather ball is aggressive and I wince when I hear it. I’d love to think of a professional football match as something other than the goading of a thousand yobs.

I’d love to be able to engage with my working class roots (honest, gov’) by embracing the beautiful game. But whenever I contemplate it, I feel a nausea like no other. Professional football just seems like another commercial instrument in the oppression of working class people: have you seen how much a season ticket costs lately?

It would also make me feel less awkward around a large section of the population: being able to say “Looks like Celtic are through to the finals” should more than compensate for my poofter hairstyle. So I’ve been meaning for a long while to attend a Partick Thistle football match – surely the most working class and least commercially driven (or just less commercially successful?) footballing event Glasgow has to offer. I am still committed to doing this (I’ve just not found the time or courage or a tough-looking escort yet) and I’ll assuredly write about the experience in these electronic pages when I do so.

Football is bizarre. Why does it get a special section on the news? I’m sure lots of people like football but there’s no ‘shopping’ section or ‘arts’ section. I also like it when you try to talk about something non-footy during a football-based situation: they hate it! If you liken a player or an event to something from a movie or a novel or real life it just confuses and infuriates.

Something that makes me feel a bit better about footy is this:

I’ve been doing a bit of temping lately which means a lot of work in offices. I’ve come to notice something about the soundtrack in these places. While they all vary depending upon the number of telephones and computers and proximity of the office to the public, there is one aspect of the office soundtrack which is surely present in all offices across the globe.

I refer of course to rumbling tummies. Every office I’ve ever worked in would have a consistent soundtrack of gastrological gurgling.

Presumably this is because “office people” have to commute a long way for the privilage of working in these soulless little rooms and seldom have time for something as decadent as breakfast. Important people are always in a hurry: important people don’t eat breakfast. Worse still, the most ‘important’ of them will forsake their lunch breaks as well.

One can’t help but think of the rumbling of so many tummies as a symbol: something of an acoustic representation of a hunger like no other. Biologically they lack food but the rumbling tummy also represents a longing for other nutrients: freedom, human interaction, colour. In famine-ravaged countries there is no food but in the office there is no anything. It’s just a room full of staplers and inboxes and hungry people pretending to be busy.

Homo-Officious does eat occasionally of course (the corporation is a slow killer – we’re engaged in a tedious Day of the Triffids-style apocalypse in which humanity must slowly starve with no sudden asteroid or superflu to put us out of our misery). Every office has food in it, usually positioned in a specially designated ‘grub corner’ and stored in plastic Tupperware boxes that the workers have brought in from home to help salve their colleagues’ misery. The food is usually cake or sweets: comfort food. The way these ‘happy tubs’ are positioned in one corner of the office remind me of the way food is placed inside the cage of a hamster or gerbil: a corner for eating; a corner for shitting and a corner to slowly die in.

I visited an office today situated away from the city centre in a strange nowhere place called ‘central key’ where everything seems to revolve around a company called M Computing in a sinister fashion akin to how everything revolves around a cannibalistic butcher in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Delicatessen. (Their slogan is “making new opportunities” despite the fact that their HQ is in an actual wasteland). It was just an office block in the middle of an urban desert. The view from the east windows: a motorway. The view from the west windows: (appropriately) the ruins of an old bakery.

There was no where to eat! The nearest café must have been about a mile’s walk. The company seemed to have tried to counter this by providing a ‘canteen’ in which no food is actually prepared on the premises but rather shrinkwrapped sandwiches are delivered from somewhere else and all of the coffee is of the instant just-add-water variety. How space age! Actually, ‘how concentration camp’ might be a better expression. Arbeit macht frei: work brings freedom apparently so explain how I drink good coffee and eat good food only when I’m unemployed.

Tubs of cake indeed. And instant coffee. I can’t imagine that the “dystopian” vision of a workforce hooked up to a system of intravenous drips would be any worse. At least in such a workforce people wouldn’t have rumbling tummies.

Those of you who enjoyed my recent story about Derek Gray may be amused to know that the nail-biting office functionary is now a published writer. In fact, he wrote the main feature in the books pages of this month’s edition of The Skinny. Who knew he had it in him?

Here’s what happened:

I took the bait of writing the feature this month. I had never been asked to do a feature at this magazine before – only reviews. It was a seemingly tricky project which no one else would touch: 850 words on a local bookshop. At The Skinny you normally only get space for about 200 words in which to do a proper book review. This thing was a full-length feature and it was about a retail space of all things. It had the potential to be pretty boring and unrewarding.

But in need of brownie points as ever, I checked out the bookshop (which turned out to be more of a toyshop for mods than anything) and wrote an 850-word Barthes-style reflective mini-essay on contemporary British “magazine” culture making reference to the likes of Rick Poyner, Momus and Nathan Barley. In the end I was perversely happy with it: I’d turned something potentially pointless into something affected and personal. Normally The Skinny don’t like critical stuff but I figured that since they really needed something to fill the space and we were so far past the deadline anyway that they’d just take it anyway.

But they didn’t. Obviously. Why did I think I could coerce them into doing so? The piece didn’t even get past the section editor let alone the sub-editor. To make matters worse, I had been told the wrong word count! They didn’t have space for 850 words: all they could manage was 400.

I had put the effort in for nothing! My work got cut down to half of its original content. All of the clever stuff I’d put in had to be removed until all that remained was a blah-blah description of a not-very-good city center shop. We were back to “Boring and unrewarding” again.

“Can you put it under a pseudonym?” I groaned when I heard the news. The guy was way ahead of me though. He’d read this blog and had plumped for ‘Derek Gray’ as a suitable publication name.

A cafe should not really feel like transitional space – it is not a meta-place akin to a subway cart or an elevator. Instead it should be a place in which important business is enjoyed, specifically the business of drinking a cappuccino or a big cup of tea deliberately and with plenty of time. It’s a way of ‘being with’ strangers: to observe them all and to observe them observing each other. It’s like an intellectual version of dogging.

Sadly, in the world of the nine-to-five in which I am currently entrenched (it’s anthropology, I tell myself) this is not always so. A queue winds its way around the cafe; a snake eating its own tail while it waits for something more nutritious. There are only two tables and a bar to choose from. One cannot help but feel self conscious as twenty or thirty people watch you eat your messy tunafish bagel.

The cafe I speak of is called The Patio and it’s in a strange nowhere part of the city where the Bohemian West meets the bustling city center.

As I sat in there today I tried to read the copy of Philip Roth’s The Breast which I had picked up at the library but too many eyes were upon me for me to be able to get past the first page without squirming in my skin.

So instead I just ate my sandwich and looked around at the efficient surroundings. I noticed that the typeface in which the menu and cafe logo are written is exactly the same as that employed by the Beanscene coffee chain. Why would they do that? Do they think people will see the font and assume it is part of the same chain without actually reading the words “THE PATIO”. Odd.

Upon the counter is a framed photograph of a man. I had noticed this before and had wondered before why such a photograph would be there, facing the public. The enframed man is young, bespectacled, perhaps a tad too respectable. I assume he is the owner of the cafe.

Today I noticed that someone had stuck a notice beneath his image. For a long time I thought it said “Wanko”. This tickled me terribly.

But then I realised something else was written beneath “Wanko”. It read “Dead or Alive”. Oh, I get it. “Wanted Dead or Alive”. How amazingly witty. Beats Philip Roth any day.

Disappointed, I headed back to the office, unfulfilled by my luncheon in a transitional space where guerrilla artistry turns out just to be some moron flirting with the boss.

I’ve not worn a watch in a good year or so. There is something preferable about being a ‘timeless person’. Of course, you still live in the world of minutes and hours along with everyone else but it’s liberating to ditch the symbol of it from your personal attire and you certainly do get out of the habit of clock-watching when you’re no longer carrying a clock around with you.

A watch is something that creatures of time carry around with them in the fashion of an air-breathing scuba diver would take a tank of air with him on a trip underwater. Away from clocks, you carry a watch. In fact, you wear one anyway. Imagine that scuba diver wearing his scuba goggles and air tank while sitting at home. That, sir, is obsessive.

My current excuse for not wearing watches is that “I’m allergic to them”. After a while they do in fact cause me to sweat and after a further while causes a little patch of eczema. There is a medical reason for my lack of punctuality. Take that, society. The laws of time don’t apply to me – I got a note from my mummy.

This was all well and good two months ago when meeting people usually consisted of meeting my own chums and other bohemian layabouts in cafes. I used to live like a character from an Haruki Maurakami novel, that is, in fairly luxurious and self-inflicted unemployment. But needs must as the devil drives et cetera and I am now working as an office-bound librarian of sorts. The world of work is one of meetings and lunch hours and cigarette breaks and deadlines and flexitime and agendas and minutes and all manner of other time-related ideas.

I’m still determined not to wear a watch though. Me = Anarchist.

While actually working this problem is taken care of by the fact that my laptop has an everpresent clock on the screen: further testament to the fact that no one really wants to think about time other than the drearily employed.

Lunchbreak can be problematic though. I can usually guess within five minutes but getting back to the office five minutes late never looks good even if you frequently counter the occurrence by arriving five minutes early. So I’ve started lunching in the park at the back of the office building. It is within earshot (and ‘eyeshot’ too!) of the University bell tower, which chimes politely and unobtrusively every fifteen minutes.

If only all clocks were ‘public’ and infrequent rather than ‘privatised’ and on every wrist and screen. I feel sorry for time locked up in watches just as I feel sorry for air locked up in bubblewrap. How demeaning for it.

All this thinking about time is due to my reading Faster: the acceleration of nearly everything by James Gleik. I’ve just discovered that there is a nice website to accompany the book. As a massive fan of “short range vertical transport” vehicles (I have written about them here on occasion), I was very happy to see a chapter in this book about elevator behaviour (relating in particular to the door-close button).

The chapter kicks off with this quote from Douglas Coupland’s Eleanor Rigby (have you read that one, ?):

““In the elevator industry, a door close button is called a pacifier button. They’re installed simply to give the illusion of control to your elevator ride. They’re almost never hooked up to a real switch.”

Apparently (as I have frequently suspected) the button does nothing. It is as good as a placebo. In Japan, according to the book, elevator designers noticed that door-close buttons in Toyko have been jabbed so many times that the paint frequently flakes off them. So they installed other calming “placebos” including screens with peaceful images of blooming cherry blossoms. What powerful cultural signifiers! The image of a melting door-close button could almost be an emblem of the Tokyo business scene – Hell, Japanese society at large.

I have a theory about people’s impatience at the elevator doors seemingly not closing fast enough. Despite the fact that most elevator doors are defaulted to close after a tiny five seconds, people go nuts with impatience. It takes place, I reckon because elevators (and some other forms of transitional space) are “time traps”. Because of the way our behaviour is shaped by these environments – the close proximity to other people, the transient nature of it all – time seems to slow down, or rather we become more aware of its passing. It’s a phenomenon akin to the fact that you’re advised by dentists to brush your teeth for three minutes but only ever manage about 30 seconds: it’s not because you want to cut short this activity but because one’s gob is such a sensory organ it is difficult to perceive exactly how much time has passed.

Time to sign off, I think. Going to listen to Jon Ronson talking with his mouth at the Mitchell Library tonight.

He’s been the elephant in the room for long enough, dear readers. It’s about time we talked about the fire escape guy.

I refer of course to that little green man, oft seen fleeing offices and other public buildings with a roaring fire licking at his two-dimensional heels.

We should probably sidestep the most obvious observation that he is in fact an arsonist and that he causes all of these fires himself (he is probably the same little green vandal that appears in this marvelous nonsense joke) in favour of remembering the fact that he is a symbol and like his friends the cross-the-road man and the alien abduction guys he lives in a universe of pure symbols.

Escape Guy represents the modern urbanite’s tendency to desire escape. Are we not all looking for our own existential fire exit?

For a while I assumed that the little green man would be a logo or some sort of mascot for my escape-themed magazine project, The Escapologist. But it’s too obvious innit? Plus he has negative associations: the health and safety officers of our workplaces like to hang effigies of the little green man all over our offices in order to remind us that we are physically able to escape at any time but fail to do so because of Sartrian Bad Faith. We are stupid and the little green man has been put there to mock us.

The other reason I’ve rejected him as a logo is that he’s just not cool enough. I’m sure I’ve seen a version of the emergency exit man wearing a rather dapper trilby-style hat. This was possibly in Prague but I may be wrong as I can’t see a photograph of it online (though there are plenty of the behatted German road crossing guy, Ampleman. If anyone would like to funk the standard emergency exit man up in photoshop or something, I’m pretty sure he’d make it into the magazine and probably the website too.

I wonder what is outside that door toward which he always sprints so nimbly? I fancy it is a world of solid offices for him to burn down and from which to subsequently flee. The little anarchist. (Suddenly he becomes an appealing mascot again). One thing is certain about what lies behind that door: the grass out there certainly isn’t any greener than anywhere else. He subverts that cliche by living in a monochromatic universe in which there is only one colour green and he is it.

So kiss his swee’ green ass.

As many of my meatworld chums and subscribers to the exclusive (i.e. extra-rubbish) entries are aware, I recently discovered what it is like to be run over by a car. Needless to say it was tremendous fun and that I’d reccomend it to anyone.

Unfortunately the experience resulted in a broken arm and a wounded leg and consequently I have spent much time away from blogging and other things I like to do. But now I am back. Sort of. The arm is still in a cast and typing one-handed is a bugger. This my slight return.

I’m sure I’ll write in time about the accident itself and about being ill and hospital anecdotes and stuff. But in the meantime, I am eager to get back into the world of The Occasional Papers (that’s the title of this diary, you monkey): the world of social faux-pas, silly theories, and nhilistic adventures in transitional spaces:

On the Edinburgh-Glasgow train this evening, a man sat down immediately opposite me. He wore a white shirt with a black suit jacket, and a laminated ID displaying the name ‘Derek Gray’.

I couldn’t tell whether ‘Derek Gray’ was his own name or the name of the company he worked for but I hope he was called Derek Gray because that’s exactly the sort name this man would have: soulless old Derek Gray in his shirt and tie, commuting vast distances every day from his loveless marriage to his pointless managerial job. I’d been hoping for a nice, leg-roomy journey characterised by nothing other than the lazy staring out of the window at the Scottish sunset but instead I would have to put up with anti-charismatic Derek Gray dominating my eyeline and cancelling out all of my coolness like a doppelganger from a negative universe. I’m being cruel but that was the story I composed for him as I sat there, trying not to meet his grey gaze.

Derek would prove to be a far more irritating travelling companion than I had first imagined. Not content with being an ambassador of dull, he constantly coughed at me. It wasn’t even the interesting, characterful coughing of a bronchial disease but more the clearing-the-throat sort of non-cough you’d do if you were trying to get someone’s attention.

“Ahem!” he would say, “Ahem!” and sometimes a more phlegmmy “Aaghhem!”

It was most annoying. I didn’t have any music with which to drown out the ahemming, nor had I thought to bring along my kosh.

Perhaps he actually was trying to get my attention, presumably for some wheezy asphyxiation sex in the train toilet – that’s the sort of thing Derek Gray is into – but you’d think after three or for ‘Ahem!’s he might give up or try nudging me or something.

After a while, Derek Gray began to chew his nails. I had known he was a nail-biter already, of course. That’s the kind of thing Derek Gray does when he’s not writing reports about his staff’s unnaturally disproportionate paperclip expenditure.

But it wasn’t a simple trimming-of-the-talons kind of nail biting that Derek Gray was engaged in. It was the deep-into-the-cuticle sort of nail biting that transcends nail biting and crosses into autocannibalism.

He only did it when he thought I wasn’t looking, so naturally I made a game of it. I’d meet his gaze infrequently and he’d self-consciously fold his hands into his lap. Caught again, Derek Gray.

Eventually it all became too much. I’d been holding back a bladderful of wee in anticipation of using the station’s amenities instead of the smelly, wobbly ones of the train but I decided in the end to kill two birds with one stone by going for my wee and returning to a different seat.

After leaving the lav, I saw that no one was sitting in the vestibule disabled person’s seat. The windows here were larger and cleaner and offered a better sunset. My arm, broken and in a sling meant I could legitimately occupy the disabled chair. I’d give it up for someone with broken legs but no one else would challenge my right to sit there.

So I did. And the view was great. There were some noisy sk8er bois in the next carriage but at least their naughtiness was a sign of life rather than the sign of death offered by Derek Gray.

After a few minutes, who should show up but Derek himself. He too was in need of a wee. He was very quick in the bathroom so there was no autoasphyxiation for him this time but certainly no hand washing either. I don’t suppose you need to worry about penis germs though if you don’t have any fingernails for them to hide beneath.

Derek spotted me sitting in the vestibule and gave me an odd look. Clearly he knew that I’d moved because of him.

I had won. The combo of my watching him chew his fingers and eventually moving seats had alerted him to his own grotesqueness. Perhaps now he will learn how to use his coughing more appropriately and to leave his fingernails alone. It’s all in his best interests of course: he will at least be able to find the end of a role of sellotape now instead of fumbling hopelessly with his rubbery, uriney fingertips.

On the tube the other day, a blind gentleman chose to sit in the seat directly opposite to my friend and I. His guide dog curled up obediently at his feet and consequently also at the feet of your humble narrator.

I knew that this would eventually pose a problem for me as the sizeable hound was blocking my my path to the doors. Even if I maintained a polite silence with this dog at my feet for the duration of the journey, I would have to trouble the man sooner or later in order to get past. At the same time, however, I didn’t want to question the guy’s sense of space by saying “there’s a man sitting here” in the clumsy fashion of The League of Gentlemen’s Mr. Foot.

A blind girl once told me that she was annoyed at how “the world is constantly leaping out of [her] way”. So with this in mind I decided to engage in friendly discourse with the guy on the tube by stroking his dog. Surely this would simultaneously alert his attention to my existence and start a friendly conversation.

But he didn’t notice I was there until he too went to stroke the dog and ended up stroking the back of my hand.

“Oh!” exclaimed Senior Wringham and immediately apologised.

“Do you mind not stroking my dog please,” said he sotto-vox.

Behaviour is learned, my friends. I have seen plenty of people stroking guide dogs in the past. When I worked in a public library, a partially-sighted reader would frequently come in and revel in the kids and librarians petting his dog. On another occasion, a man on the Glasgow-Renfewshire train seemed quite happy for passersby to stroke his dog. When I was a kid, a blind lady actually visited our scout hut periodically with the sole intention of letting us pet her dog.

Yet I still suspected I had committed a horrible and unforgivable social faux-pas.

“Does my scent interfere with him doing his job?”

“You shouldn’t stroke working dogs,” said my travelling companion.

I had never heard the term ‘working dog’ before so accepted that I must be out of the etiquette loop on this particular issue. (Is ‘working dog’ a new job title for guide dogs in the same way that librarians are now ‘information professionals’ or does the term apply to sniffer dogs or beer-carrying Saint Bernard dogs or indeed to any canine engaged in legitimate employment? Personally I think the new title makes them sound like dog whores who hang around on street corners until a randy businessman approaches with a glint in his eye and a bag full of Bonio.)

“It’s just that when you think about it, he is my eyes”.

This crushing blow forced me to apologise again and accept my mistake for a third time. But I felt annoyed at his closing statement. He was basically suggesting that I didn’t know what a guide dog does at all and that I wouldn’t have stroked it if I did. What I should have said is: “Well fucking hell, pal! I had no idea! I mean I’ve seen blind people with dogs before but I never realised there was a correlation”.

I wasn’t touching his eyes. I stroked his dog. Touching his eyes would have been unpleasant for both of us.

The event shook me up so much (in that I pride myself on being a thoroughly moral person but was unable to tell whether I had been in the wrong or not) that the walk from the tube station to the train station bizarrely turned into a walk from the tube station to another tube station. I was so distracted by what had happened that I’d walked to the entirely wrong part of town. Suddenly the moral of the story appeared, “Who is the real blind man?”

Enjoying a coffee after the event, my friend Stef (who always seems to be involved in these escapades – she is the Boswell to my Johnson except for the twin facts that I chronicle my own adventures and have sex only with myself) pointed out that at least this would make a good episode for my diary. She added the caveat, however, that while good blog fodder, the event would also provide hours of mental torture. How right she was.

This diary entry is not available in large print or braille.

The Internet is something I’m rather fond of. It’s given me a platform from which to address the world; to watch obscure cartoons and to commune with strangers in Iraq and Canada and Japan.

I also enjoy my DVD player. It allows me to watch all my favourite funnies without the nuisance of scheduling or ad-breaks (I mean, really. An ad-break in The Simpsons? It’s only twenty-minutes long).

But aside from these two devices, I’m a bit of a Luddite really. By choice. Technology tends to complicate things and it breaks and it insulates you from doing real things with real people and with real results.

While plugged as being liberating or time saving, technology is actually (as Dylan Moran opines in his Monster show) a horrible, horrible trap. It just turns you into a button-pushing slob. Back to the Medieval age, says I. Those Guilds knew what to do with slobs.

But today I was thinking about technology and the future after reading an article about digital radio in The New Statesman. When people think of a technology-driven utopia, they think of one main thing: a robot maid who wakes you up with a cup of tea. Don’t try and deny it: it’s what you think of.

But it is a civilised idea, isn’t it?. A robot maid like the one in The Jetsons could wake me up with tea not so far in the future. Come on, inventors. You gave us iPods and penicillin, now follow through.

Much like Mrs. Doyle I actually enjoy the ceremony of making tea properly so I wouldn’t want a dumb old machine to take that pleasure away from me. But the Robomaid 4000 would only be making that first cup of tea. There’d be plenty of time to enjoy brewing tea at other intervals in the day.

But of course, as with all robots, my tea-brewing Jetsons maid would eventually tire of her over simplistic raison d’etre and go on a rampage of Cylon-style rebellion. I’d wake one morning to a steaming cup of my own guts.

And rightly so. Just because she’s a machine doesn’t mean she’s not a person. She has needs! What we need is some kind of non-sentient device to simply wake you up with tea. What’s that? There is one? It’s called a Teasmade and it was invented over a hundred years ago? It’s a fucking alarm clock that makes tea! My idea of a sophisticated technological solution dates back to 1891.

Does anyone know why the teasmade gets such bad press? It’s seen as being a bit old-hat or geriatric, like slippers or a hotwater bottle, or a colostomy bag. But it’s surely the level of sophistication that our stoneage ancestors dreamed of when developing the first tools. Today: a stick with a rock tied to the end. Tomorrow: a robot that makes the tea.

Returned yesterday from ATP’s Nightmare Before Christmas music festival. It was great. Obviously. But also weird.

I had never been to an ATP event before and while I knew prior to the event that it consisted of a rock festival within the tacky confines of a Butlins holiday camp in December, it was difficult not to notice the semiotic clash. While bearded goths, tattooed punks and tweed-clad dandies wondered around the complex with their rolled up Six Organs of Admittance posters under their arms, a giant plastic red-coat oversaw them all like some garish overlord. While cocaine was being publicly shoveled up every quivering nostril, it was still possible to win a Super Mario doll on the grabbers. It was Cool meets Kitsch. It was Chic meets Shabby. It was Summer meets Winter. It was Boogie Nights meets Phoenix Nights. It was… well, you get the idea. Good Morning, Motherfucking Campers.

“Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked my chums as I spotted the taxidermy-like display of stuffed Christmas reindeer suspended from the ceiling of the reception lobby.

Event highlights included double drumming from The Melvins and interesting stuff by Deerhoof, Dinosaur Jr. and Nurse With Wound.

Above all perhaps, Iggy and The Stooges were fucking incredible. Their set resulted in the removal of many garments, their being saturated entirely in what I assume was sweat. Don’t look at me so accusingly, dear reader, everyone was doing it.

I’m reluctant to write any more about this as it would just be a huge stream of ‘this was good’ and ‘that was great’. I’m no music reviewer and I’d make an arse out of myself if I were to even attempt to become critical on the matter. Besides, who gives a shit about anyone’s opinions on music? Music is a primal artform which probably shouldn’t be engaged with on too intellectual a level. Yes. Take that, Momus.

A final story, however, involves one of those mechanical ‘Whack the Croc’ arcade machines at which you pay 30p to smack plastic crocodiles on their heads with a padded mallet. It appears that a virtual version can be played here if you are a nerd or if you live in the East End of Glasgow and are understandably scared to leave your house. I’d been bursting to have a go on the machine all weekend and on Monday afternoon I finally made the time. But when I got to the machine there was no mallet to be found. The fucking thing must’ve been stolen by some drunken holiday camp yobbo. Not wanting to be bested, I payed my money and rather than using the hammer, I just punched them! With my naked fist! It hurt like sweet fuck but it was worth it. And the ladies came crowding around. At last I was a man. I was Paul Hogan. I was Steve Irwin.

When I’d finally finished punching, the machine vomited four tickets out onto the floor which could presumably be exchanged for a prize at the arcade kiosk. I gave them to one of the spectating babes. Smooth.

I think this is what music festivals are all about. Sure, you can make new friends and dance to music; have sex with strangers and take a bunch of drugs. But for me, they are about punching plastic crocodiles with your fist.

You can look at some of my rubbish photographs from the event here though this guy’s pictures are far more impressive.

Dear Blogosphere Amigos,

I got a few questions for you, the members of my beloved ‘flist’. They are all of a wholly different nature to one another so pay attention and read them all. Just because the first one doesn’t apply to you (“Yuck! Technical?”), doesn’t mean that the rest won’t. You may be able to assist me in a number of capacities.

1) How the hell do you adjust the background of a MySpace page? Seriously. I’m at a loss.

2) Is anyone in my immediate blogosphere going to be attending the All Tomorrow’s Parties event in Minehead this weekend? If so, me too. Let us meet up.

3) Is anyone interested in producing a series of instrumentals to accompany a humourous/absurdist podcast series written (and possibly voiced) by yours truly?

3.5) Would anyone with a beautiful or interesting accent fancy narrating said postcast?

4) Does anyone remember those speech-bubbles in The Beano originating from outside of the frame with the words “Reader’s Voice” next to it? How weird was that? Was this the only children’s comic to break the fourth wall so literally, frequently oddly?

5) I finally sold out and got a MySpace page. You may have guessed this from Question One. You can view my page here. So far it’s just a ‘best-of’ this blog and a little profile. Do befriend though. There will be some proper opinions on MySpace in the blog soon.

6) Does anyone feel overly self-conscious when using a proper digital camera to take photographs of what might be considered by the general public to be non-events or non-objects? If so, do you think that the purchase of a nice camera phone might help to alleviate said awkwardness (in that everyone seems to take photos of anything and everything with their mobile phone without being harassed).

That is all.

Wringham.

Standing on the sixth floor of a twelve-storey building the other day and seeing that no one was around to judge my odd behaviour with their harsh city-people’s eyes, I decided to summon the elevator using my foot.

Am I not a scream, Madam?

But my foot was not the right tool for precision button-pressing, being akin to the elongated shoe of a clown. Too much surface area, you see. Inevitably both buttons were pressed rather than just the desired ‘down’ one. Why had I defied convention? What was wrong with using my finger like a normal person? I would surely pay for this non-conformist silliness.

In accordance with Dr. Sod’s first law (or perhaps something to do with the Gamow/Stern Elevator Paradox) the first lift to arrive was not the one I wanted but rather the ascending ‘up’ carriage.

Seeing that there were people in this elevator and that they might be annoyed at my wasting their time, I stepped slightly to the side and tried to look innocent by regarding my reflection in a glass-fronted notice board and adjusting my non-existent tie.

As kids, we used to pass a house on the way back from school, which had an irresistibly prominent doorbell. It simply screamed “press me!”. So we did. Constantly. When we did so, we would run hell for leather down the street in case the owner came out and rightly smacked the shit out of us. Over the course of this five-year period of bell-pressing, we probably turned a perfectly innocent old man into a Son Of Sam type killer. “Ding Dong!” he would sing while hacking his kid victims into bitesize pieces.

In the lift lobby, I suddenly remembered those days of running away from Mr. Doorbell man. I inched toward the stairwell in something of a Pavlovian panic.

One of the lift passengers – a dizzy young student with pom-poms hanging from her rucksack – stepped out of the lift momentarily before saying “Oh, haha, level six! No, six!” to her friend and going back in like a demented cuckoo retreating into her clock.

I wondered how my foolish foot/button action might have affected this girl’s future in the fashion of Sliding Doors or those Alan Davies adverts for the Abbey National. By delaying her progress to whatever floor she was looking for, I could have inadvertently modified her entire life. Rather than meeting the man of her dreams on the eighth floor, she probably missed him and will end up being raped by a rottweiler round the back of The Garage on a cold Saturday night. Qué será, será.

Lately I’ve been wearing a hat. It’s a porkpie hat with a slight pinched effect going on at the front much akin to a Fedora or a Trilby.

Putting something on one’s head is a universal gesture of having a good time isn’t it? This is why I acquired it: to show people that for the first time in my life, I’m existentially having a laugh. When you’re a kid, the height of hilarity is to put something on your head or to put something on someone else’s head. I distinctly remember laughing at an episode of Rainbow in which Zippy tried to balance a ball on his head hilariously to no avail.

When it’s your own head, it’s fun because you know something is there but you cannot see it. So there’s a certain egocentric amusement to be had in trusting that something exists within your sphere of consciousness in spite of being wholly unobservable.

When it’s someone else’s head, it’s funny because (a) you know what they’re going through or (b) they DON’T know it is there and they accidentally walked into a hanging beehive to hilarious honey-coated effect.

This is why there are so many “What do you call a bloke with a [blank] on his head” jokes and why the Fat Chicks in Party Hats website is so cruelly funny.

It’s amazing how few people understand the semiotics of my hat though. It’s a porkpie hat: to be associated with jazz, blues and ska music and skinhead culture. It took me a long time in my head to justify getting one: while I’m a fan of all these types of music, I can’t actually play any of it and perhaps wearing one might be an affront to those who can legitimately wear it. I went through a similar phase a few years ago of wanting dreadlocks but decided that I would not be able to live up to their semiotic and historical associations.

My porkpie is NOT a cowboy hat like some moron thought yesterday. “Yee Haw, Hello Cowboy” he said. Moreover, it is NOT an H&M-purchased, machine-made affair like another kid thought the other day when he jumped off a bus to tell me that we had “the same hat”. Silly boy. Nonetheless, it was fun to unite with a total stranger for a few seconds over ornate pieces of felt balanced haphazardly upon our heads.

Much like an Emperor Penguin, I periodically visit the old hatching grounds.

This time, I took the opportunity of photographing my austere little room at my mum and dad’s house. As you can see, it is full of 1950s science fiction novels, old VHS tapes, model robots and effigies of Frank Sinatra. Oddly, this spread makes my room look like a busy, information-rich enclave but the truth is that it’s very functional and more akin to a submarine’s sleeping quarters than a teenager’s bedroom in the suburban Midlands.

Note the fact that there is no bed.

There are lots of Livejournalists who take pretty good photographs. Of this we are all aware. This is why I’m running a Livejournal-based Photography Competition in the hopes of harvesting some visual delight for indie magazine, The Escapologist.

The theme?

“Escape”. The theme is deliberately vague, but here are a few suggestions as to what your photographs might be about:

* a hobby or interest that provides an escape route from rubbish modern life
* incarceration, entrapment or claustrophobia
* freedom or liberation
* a place you seek to escape from – an office or other workplace
* a place you’d like to escape to – a seaside resort or distant space station
* idle dreams or fantasies to which one might escape
* escapological vices: drugs, alcohol, sex or Star Trek

Go nuts. Be imaginative.

The prize?

* All good pictures will be published along with your name (or pseudonym if you prefer) in the magazine.
* The best five will receive free copies of the magazine when we go to press.
* The very best one will make it onto the cover of Issue Two.

Good Luck!

Either post your pictures in the comments thread of this entry or email them to info[at]the-escapologist.co.uk

A trip to the bank to meet with a ‘Business Relationships Manager’ so that I might get my shabby and ill-maintained accounts in order.

The manager struck me as a nice bloke but he had a distractingly effeminate voice. Despite the fact that I had known in advance that I’d be meeting with someone called Samuel, I had still concluded from our telephone arrangements that I would be meeting a woman. The existence of a woman with a man’s name seemed far more plausible than the existence of a man with a voice so effeminate. That’s how effeminate it was.

For this reason alone, he would never make it onto Team Wringham. We could do some business together but I wouldn’t want him to come and play snooker with me afterward. I am shallow and callus.

Sam’s effeminate voice is not, however, the object of this post. The opening passages were red herrings but perhaps now you will now appreciate how distracting his voice was now that you have knowledge of it.

Part way through the session, Samuel disappeared into the next room so that he might photocopy some of the documentation I had brought along.

About thirty seconds had elapsed when I heard a polite knocking coming from somewhere nearby.

I assumed the knocking had come from the door between our office and the public part of the bank and that someone must have been wanting to speak to the manager. I ignored it at first, thinking that since this was a bank and I was just a client without the authority to go letting people in to the back offices.

A few more seconds elapsed and I heard someone pressing at the door code buttons and then knocking again. Again, I ignored it as it seemed like the proper thing to do.

Soon, a third knocking came from the door. Thinking it churlish to ignore three knocks (what if the person eventually got in only to see me sitting there innocently – they would wonder why I had ignored their percussive pleas) I stuck my head out into the corridor with the intention of answering the door.

But alas there were three doors out there and due to my poor sense of direction, I couldn’t remember which one we had come through. I didn’t want to open the wrong door only to be confronted with piles of other people’s cash and for an alarm to begin its irrational screaming. My life is composed entirely of such events so I can detect them when they are looming.

So I ignored the knocking for a third time.

A fouth knock. Slightly more desperate. This time, a clerk emerged from the main section of the bank (so it was that door!) and said “Who’s knocking?”

“I thought it was someone on your side,” I explained, “and didn’t feel responsible enough to let them in”.

If you’ve not worked it out yet, dear reader, the knocking had been coming from Sam – the bank manager.

He’d locked himself in the basement.

Yesterday afternoon, I auditioned to be on Mastermind. That’s right. Be impressed.

I bet you were expecting a far more uninteresting diary entry today about how I sat on my big fat arse all day or maybe one of those cheating ones in which I discuss a thought or a dream rather than something that actually happened. But no! Today was composed of events!

At about 3:30 in the afternoon, I got a call from a friend who declared that there’d be auditions at the student union and that I might like to go along. He was challenging me in an almost mocking fashion since he knows what a massive fat head I am and that I enjoy playing along with the quiz show at home and that it was about time I put my money where my mouth was – and for that matter is.

“But I’ve just brewed a pot of coffee,” I grumbled in all sincerity. I’d intended on having a quiet hour in my dressing gown with a book before I had to leave for work.

“Well it’s up to you,” said he, “but you’re always saying that you’ll go on it one day”.

He was right of course. And suddenly, coffee cooling, I was riddled with doubt. I’m constantly having people tell me that they saw me in the audience on the Stewart Lee DVD (repeated ad nauseum on the Paramount comedy channel) and the last thing I want is a similar level of attention concerning the extraordinary number of times I said “Pass” on the country’s most famous quiz show ever.

But I was getting ahead of myself. The audition would be fun and I’d get no further anyway so the problems of being televised would be moot. So I headed off to the union to see what was what.

“I’m here for the Mastermind auditions,” I mumbled, slightly ashamed of myself. What kind of self-aggrandising bastard actually thinks he has the stomach and the nous to go on Mastermind? Clearly I was full of myself. The fact that the show is called Mastermind made it a hugely awkward thing to ask about. It might as well be called The I’m clever and great show, which would be more honest really.

The guy at the reception desk – a cheerful bearded former-roadie or something – seemed confused at first and then wildly amused. Apparently he’d not heard of any such thing taking place in his union and the entire concept of a Mastermind Audition was funny to him. He was right of course: it is funny. I suspect, however, that this is his reaction to everything he gets asked: I once bought tickets for The Vagina Monologues from this chap – it must have been the hundredth time he’d been asked for such tickets but he had still found the concept of a show about fannies hilarious. Next time I do standup, I shall certainly give him free tickets so that he can fill the place with his infectious laughter-at-not-very-funny-things.

“The TV Show? Haha! Pass!”

“Yes, the TV Show. They sent a flier around our offices this morning apparently, asking us to pop along?”

“What’s your specialist subject going to be?”

“I’m not telling you. It’s too embarrassing”. In truth there is nothing embarrassing about my proposed specialist subject but I was worried that the proud declaration of “the novels of Kurt Vonnegut” would make me look even more pretentious and alone than I did already.

I was beginning to think that the whole thing was a joke. Had I been tricked by my own arrogance? I had wondered previously that a student union seemed an unlikely place to stage such an event: everyone in attendance would be a student and yet most Mastermind contestants tend to be middle-aged geeks. Perhaps my pal had been winding me up. I remembered my coffee sitting at home, abandoned next to the pile of “to read” books. If I was on the receiving end of a practical joke I would be very annoyed at the substantial loss of dressing-gown time.

The bouncer guy made a few calls and it transpired that I was in the wrong union building. Of course! Glasgow has two unions: I was in the QMU when in fact I had to be in the GUU. Beard-o wished me luck and I continued on my way.

Eventually I found the place but only after spotting a poster on a student notice board detailing the exact location.

I was introduced to a ‘panel’ of two ladies from the BBC, one of whom seemed to be a producer and dealt with TV-related things and one of whom seemed to be a professional smartypants and would ask me about such things as specialist subjects. She nodded knowingly after each of my suggestions and liked the idea of doing Kurt Vonnegut. My two other suggestions, however, (Red Dwarf and Sherlock Holmes) had been the focus of specialist subjects in the recent past so I had to quickly make up two more. I foolishly chose ‘the work of Stewart Lee’ and – because I must have panicked – David Lynch’s Twin Peaks series which I’ve not even seen in its entirety.

The producer seemed extremely excited at the mention of Twin Peaks. Just my luck. I’ll probably end up being quizzed on that now and I can’t even watch it all in preparation due to the famous non-release of season two. I’m basically fucked.

Time for my general knowledge audition. Smartypants fired twenty GK questions in my direction, apparently collating correct answers, educated wrong answers, and passes. Out of 20, I scored four passes and sixteen educated answers, seven of which were correct. I’m quietly pleased with this score given that most of my passes were on sports questions, which I am proud not to have known.

So assuming I am asked back and assuming I can do Kurt Vonnegut rather than Twin Peaks, I should do alright.

Producer lady took a photograph of me, which I assume is completely normal and done for all audition people, and I left feeling vaguely ashamed and in need of a poo.

I have found myself thinking about age quite a bit recently.

Perhaps it’s been on my mind because of the ‘thanks but no thanks’ letters I’ve been receiving in response to my recent ungallantly youthful interview performances. Perhaps it’s because of Momus’s recent entry about sixtysomethings or because of my nostalgic re-watching of Fraggle Rock (which, by the way, is a show entirely wasted on kids). Perhaps it’s because I recently saw the ‘aging pool’ episode of Futurama or perhaps it’s because my twenty-fourth birthday is on the horizon and it doesn’t seem like five minutes since I was eighteen.

There are probably two main things about aging that so put the wind up people: the idea that you are inching your way closer to death (to nothingness! – the ultimate elephant in any room) with every passing moment, coupled with the fact that your youthful good looks are rapidly diminishing in a fashion akin to that uneaten peach in the fruit bowl. You’re gonna be wrinkled and dried up and no one’s gonna want to fuck you anymore.

Neither of these things really bother me. As something of an absurdist, I’ve come to terms with death and dying and I’m fairly confident that I’ll embrace them when I come to them. And as far as a withering complexion is concerned, I find that it pales when compared to all of the things I actually like about old people: the “wisdom, compassion, cynicism [and] self-knowledge” of which Momus spake. Surely these are the attributes everyone should have or aspire to have. When you’re old, it’s a case of ‘mission accomplished’ and you can finally get on with living instead of developing.

Here’s the thing. I am pretty sure I was born old. Or rather I was born with elderly aspirations. I’ve always liked prune juice, for example. When I’m old, I won’t have to go to work. I’ll just spend the days writing memoirs and digging the garden. This is of course assuming that I don’t become horribly physically crippled between now and then or somehow lose my mind so that the writing of memoirs becomes a constant relating of the mashed potatoes I ate on January 2nd 1996.

There was a Tom Waits feature in The Observer magazine a couple of weeks ago (I’m sure it was titled ‘Songs in the Key of Life’ which I thought was a great title but is for some reason called ‘Off Beat’ in the online edition). In it, Sean O’Hagan writes:

“Waits talks like he sings, in a rasping drawl and with an old-timer’s wealth of received wisdom. It’s as if, in late middle-age, he has grown into the person he always wanted to be. His tales are often tall, and his metaphors and similes tend towards the surreal.”

It’s a paragraph that has stuck with me simply because I’m so convinced that it will apply to me. By the time I’m in that Autumn of my life, I don’t think I’ll be cursing myself for a wasted youth but rather getting comfortable in my new older guy’s face.

People dispair at the idea of how they will look when they get old. I recently received a sample pack of Oil of Olay in the post presumably because Mr. Corporation assumes I’m a quarter of the way through my life and surely anxious about reversing those first wrinkles. But I want to look like Tom Waits or Samuel Beckett. I’m working on it: Willy Mason’s advice on aging oneself is to smoke cigarettes and read Dostoevsky – both things I am partial to on occasion. Old is handsome in my book. I want to have stories to tell; I want retrospect and hindsight, to be a leathery ball of received wisdom. I don’t need Oil of Olay. Bring it on, says I!

Walking to work yesterday evening, I was stopped not once, not twice, but three times by strangers. This was inevitable of course, the evening being dark and rainy and your humble narrator being in a hurry to get to work on time. On occasion I have felt lonely and purposeless in this city but no one took the liberty of pouncing on me during those times. Only on this day when I am unable and unwilling to stop did people take an interest. The bastards.

The first stop-and-chat occurred when some kind of people carrier (I’m not good with naming cars – I only recognise people carriers, limos, minis and hearses) pulled up behind me and beeped it’s horn. What the fuck? This surely wasn’t someone I wanted to talk to: very few of my friends have cars let alone a great fuel-guzzling leviathan such as this one.

The window opened to reveal a middle-aged Chinese woman, with a child in the passenger seat beside her. “WHERE IS VICTORIA DRIVE?” she shouted. “DO YOU KNOW WHERE IS VICTORIA DRIVE?”

I didn’t. If she read this blog, she would of course know how terrible I am at giving directions. Speaking in my best English accent, I told her my usual lie of not being from this area. I find this is the best approach to giving directions now as I’ve certainly sent people in entirely the wrong direction before now and not realised until they’ve sped away. Moreover, I once told a couple of youngish blokes in search of the Kelvingrove area to look out for the “Spanish Baroque” architecture of the museum, resulting in initial bewilderment followed by much (understandable) chiding laughter.

The Chinese lady threw up her hands in what I would normally take to be comedy disbelief, but in this case was perfectly sincere.

I continued on my way only to be stopped by a second car – some kind of jeep. The window opened to reveal a Scottish woman looking for some Rugby club or other.

“I don’t know of any rugby clubs around here,” I said. No need for porky-pies this time.

“It’s by a pub called The Rock,” she said helpfully. Now, The Rock is a pub I am familiar with. It’s technically my local, though I seldom frequent it due to it’s shameful lack of Spanish Baroque architecture.

Yet for some reason I found it very difficult to direct her to it from our present position. Perhaps the fact that I do not drive is the reason for my inability to give directions to even the most familiar locations: I usually just meander à pied in vaguely the right direction, pigeon-like down alleys and byways and without the encumbrances of speed traps or one-way systems.

I gave the woman some very poor directions (“That Way”) and told her that The Rock was a local landmark and that someone else would certainly be able to direct her to the rugby club once she got a little closer.

I managed to get down to Byer’s Road uninterrupted save for the torrential rain hammering down upon my umbrella. But just as I was about to walk up Great George Street, known colloquially to locals as “That fucking big hill” (and on which I frequently cross paths with fellow livejournalist, but am usually too shagged out from the climb to say much more than “Hi!”), I got stopped by the most attractive chugger I’ve been stopped by. She looked like a young Sarah Jessica Parker but with a glimmer of sentience in her eyes rather than the cold dark glassiness that anyone who has watched season six of Sex and the City knows only too well.

“Sorry, I’m in a massive hurry,” said I, knowing full well that most people she’d talked to that afternoon would certainly have spoken the exact same words and not meant them even half as much as I had.

“Please!” begged the chugger, “I need you!”

I’m sure she used similar statements of sexy submissiveness on many other men that day but, drenched in rain and cloaked with premature winter darkness, I knew that this time she meant it. She did need me in order to get her last subscription so that she might go home. This was indeed a romance of sincerity. But I was late for work and really couldn’t afford the ten minutes required for chugger chat.

“Well, that’s all very nice and sexy,” I complimented, “but it won’t work on me, young lady. I’m a gay, you see.”

She half-laughed and let me continue on my way. What she should have said was “I’ve never heard real homosexual use the word ‘gay’ as a noun. Something is not quite right here”. But she didn’t so I won.

Amazingly, I got to work on time.

Recieved an email today from the people at 5pm.co.uk requesting that I send them an invoice for some restaurant reviews I wrote for them about three months ago. In fact I have sent them a grand total of three invoices and in the absence of a receipt let alone payment had written off the gig as a failure. It’s annoying that they are so ill-organised and my payment has been so delayed but since I had written the whole thing off I was glad that they had made contact again and agreed to pay me some money. Nonetheless, I will believe it when the money is in my account.

As a footnote, I should like to recommend a doppelganger story by the great Reggie C. King. I do so partly because the story is good but mainly because I am honoured to be quoted in it.