The Occasional Papers

Hello, clever people of blogland.

Does anyone have a single clever word for “war criminal”? Perhaps a Japanese/Russian/German loanword? I need it for a book review in which I want to look like a smartarse.

Thants in advants, ants.

Ants.

We must have learned a lesson or two from the three-hectare health-based caveats that come affixed to cigarette packets by now.

The obvious lesson is that smoking makes you dead. The other is that government health warnings can be applied to a product as economically lucrative and politically powerful as tobacco, signaling a small triumph of the moral over the profitable.

My friends David and Siglinde came over last night for dinner and with them they brought a trendy brand of cigarette called American Spirit, the packet of which promotes the fact that they are chemical-free and made from ‘all-natural tobacco’. If it weren’t for the “Smoking will harm your unborn baby” sticker, you’d think that these cigarettes were positively good for you!

But it got me thinking. Why is it only tobacco products get these warnings? Why don’t McDonalds food products come with warnings that declare, “This product is composed of the lowest-grade meat imaginable and your purchasing of it will be instrumental in the decline of Brazilian rainforests and the continuing economic rape of several third-world countries”?

But no. In the food world, it is far easier to put stickers on products that are actually half-ethical. “This product is fair trade” my coffee boasts. Well, it should be shouldn’t it? I don’t go around declaring the fact that I’ve never killed anyone. It’s as given.

What a fucked up world we live in.

Of all products that warrant health warnings, I reckon cars warrant them most of all. Here are a few suggested health warnings that I think should be displayed in the windows of showrooms:

* “Cars cause lung cancer, asthma and heart disease”.

* “Car accidents cause 1.2 million deaths worldwide each year” *

* “Car accidents injure 50 million people worldwide each year and will increase to over 65% over the next twenty years”. *

* Cars promote the notion that individualism must be attained at the expense of others” *

* “Infrastructure associated with cars damage the water cycle”.

* “Communities with greater number of cars experience greater degrees of personal alienation”. *

* “Cars depend upon oil. Oil is a primary motivator for war”.

* “Cars are unsightly, noisy, dangerous machines developed in the name of convenience, marketed in the name of the autonomous self, instrumental in war and conductive to the ongoing collapse of our environment”.

Wow. What a preachy post. Cars suck is all I’m saying. If you don’t believe me, just remind yourself of this pile of crap.

The houses in my street are all old-fashioned Glaswegian manor houses. In light of the city’s shift from heavy industry and tobacco lording to the production of pop stars, novellists, comedians and badge makers, pretty much all of these manor houses have been broken up into apartments to cater for the influx in time-wasting, tofu-munching English bobos such as myself.

The house across the street from me has somehow managed to avoid this “apartmentising” process and still exists as a single home. However, the old lady who lives there only seems to operate in two tiny rooms, the rest of them being filled with lumber, old furniture and garbage.

When I first moved in here, the letting agent mentioned that the old lady lives alone on one level of the house and periodically refuses offers from his company and others to buy the house for a million quid, probably making her house the most expensive rubbish dump on the entire planet.

From my attic apartment, I can see down into her living room window at night and enjoy watching her eccentric old-lady behaviour. As I’m much higher up than she is, I don’t think she can see me. If she can see me, she’s certainly not letting on about it.

The catalogue of eccentric old lady behaviour includes eating a pork chop in an astonishingly feral fashion and spending almost forty minutes spraying water on a single pot plant. Her roof is covered with randomly positioned, long-abandoned ladders. Days can pass without a single light going on, suggesting that she either stays with friends periodically or else just sits there alone in the darkness (probably in order to get some privacy from her nosy neighbours). She’s great.

The past three nights however, have seen a change in regular patters of activity. Lights stay on for long stretches into the night and instead of the old lady, I see as many as three younger people going through drawers and sitting on the couch making phone calls.

Do we think she’s dead, dear readers? Any other theories would be vastly appreciated.

I hope she’s not dead. She’s become a sort of eccentric, elderly, female version of that ‘ugly naked guy’ on Friends to me.

Whenever a long term resident dies on this street, a memorial bench is added by the residents’ association to the communal garden. I’ll keep watching out for new benches and for any further activity from the intact manor house so that I might let you know which of my neighbours are dead and which of them who aren’t.

Dearest reader, you should really check out the livejournal blog of Rob Rabiee over at . It’s funny and clever and better than yours.

That is all.

x

Received my first ever rejection letter from an academic journal this week.

This is not to say that I’ve ever had a piece accepted by an academic journal but rather that I’d never submitted to anything like one before. In hindsight, I suppose I was aiming somewhat above my station but I had a few ideas and I wanted to send them somewhere.

It was an Art History journal called Konsthistorik Todskrift and my article was a short hypothesis concerning Augustus Egg’s painting, The Travelling Companions (above). It’s a pre-Rapahelite thing housed in the Birmingham City Art Gallery – the best gallery of its type that was once local to me (of course, now living in Glasgow I have far more choice).

Hardly anything has been written about the painting and it is often described as being ’cryptic’. To me, however (after much research into fictional doppelgängers for a book) its meaning was plain to see:

”Doppelgänger motifs and other representations of the multi-faceted (or at least dualistic) model of the self are quite frequently explored in modern and postmodern visual art. Douglas Gordon’s video installation pieces, Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1995) and Through a Looking Glass (1999), for example, examine the Apollonian / Dionysian divide that some believe exist in human nature.” Augustus Egg’s The Travelling Companions: a literary interpretation.

By Robert Wringham

Doppelgänger motifs and other representations of the multi-faceted (or at least dualistic) model of the self are quite frequently explored in modern and postmodern visual art. Douglas Gordon’s video installation pieces, Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1995) and Through a Looking Glass (1999), for example, examine the Apollonian / Dionysian divide that some believe exist in human nature. It is the Freudian battle of id versus superego: logic’s war with primitive animalism. As with many aspects of postmodern works, the central concept of human duality is something of a found piece, it having roots as far back as the Ancient East. The postmodern understanding of dualism draws from ancient Eastern trickster or morality fables; the literary work of German pre-romantics such as Jean-Paul Richter and E. T. A. Hoffman and that of later British writers such as Oscar Wilde, James Hogg, Mary Shelley and Robert Louis Stephenson. Indeed, Douglas Gordon’s pieces, as their titles suggest, are intrinsically connected to literature. The doppelgänger today has been cast mostly into the realms of cliché but thankfully not before the production of such artistic feature films as The Student of Prague (1913) and John S. Robertson’s memorable version of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1920).

Predating much of this, however, is The Travelling Companions by Augustus Leopold Egg. There is a woeful dearth of literature concerning Egg’s painting, which seems strange given the significance of this piece in the artist’s career (it lead to his fascination with non-anecdotal art) and the subtleties involved in the image’s discourse. While other doppelgänger-themed paintings, such as How they met themselves by Dante Gabrielle Rosetti (1854) have been celebrated quite widely, Egg’s illustration of human duality – as decency and vulgarity being two sides of the same illustrious coin – seems to have gone unrecognised as such.

Painted in 1862, The Travelling Companions depicts two young women as passengers in the carriage of a train. The first thing that strikes the viewer, perhaps, is the painting’s symmetry. Not only do the women, facing each other, appear to be identical but each substantial object (the hat; the fruit and flowers; the women’s clothes) seems to have a counterpart or alter-ego mapped onto the opposite side. The basket of fruit in the universe of the first girl is represented as a floral bouquet in that of the second. Egg has mastered here the art of visual alliteration.

Though the women are aesthetically identical, it is clear that one is not an exact mirror image or screen-printed copy of the other (as in Andy Warhol’s Double Elvis of 1964) for one of them is sleeping while the other is awake. Moreover, the panorama visible from out of the carriage window (it is of Mentone in the South of France) unites the travelling companions within the same image: whatever duplicating event may be occurring in the painting is most certainly contained within the carriage itself and not without in the world at large.

Is it as simple as this? Is one of Egg’s girls the ontological copy of the other? Meditating on The Travelling Companions and remembering the folkloric idea of a doppelgänger being the harbinger of impending doom, one might imagine that the waking woman in the train carriage is the ghostly double of the other one; slouched not in sleep but in death.

Our interpretation is strengthened when we remember that Augustus Egg was constantly inspired by literature. On good terms with Charles Dickens (they together formed The Guild of Literature and Art, a philanthropic organisation in support of starving artists), Egg would often render images of Dickens’ work, most notably a triptych painting called Past and Present (1858). He also created a number of pieces based upon the plays of Shakespeare including The Taming of the Shrew (1860) and The Winter’s Tale (1845) and a piece based upon Thakeray’s Esmond1 in 1848. With this in mind, it would not be unreasonable to theorise that Egg might have come across the work of Hoffman or Richter and been inspired by doppelgänger allegory or imagery. Indeed, Shakespeare’s work, with which we know Egg was familiar, featured hints of the doppelgänger in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and A Comedy of Errors.

A curious coincidence concerning Augustus Egg and the fathers of Western doppelgänger literature is that he suffered in his youth from a respiratory disease not unlike the one suffered by Robert Louis Stephenson, whose symptoms and medication was said to inspire the nightmare which lead him to write the most famous doppelgänger story of them all: [The] Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde2. (Occultist, Dion Fortune later popularised the notion that respiratory-related diseases are connected with the supernatural).

Of the panorama visible from the carriage window, we can see the beautiful twilight setting of Mentone. But there is more than that. Half of the view is land while half is water: perhaps symbolic of the liminality in the doppelgänger dimension and the difference in corporeality between the two siblings.

A further idea follows. Given that one of the women is sleeping while the other is awake, perhaps the waking woman is the product of the sleeping one: that she is the dreamed projection of the other. Such duplication qualifies as a doppelgänger motif in itself but extra poignancy is brought to the equation when you consider that the girl is both the dreamer and the dream. Edgar Allan Poe (also a celebrated writer of doppelgänger fiction with William Wilson and Fall of the House of Usher) expresses this concept in poetic form: “is all that we see or seem / but a dream within a dream?”3 Indeed, the work of Poe could very well have served as inspiration in the formulating of The Travelling Companions. Moreover, Lewis Carroll wrote occasionally of a state of consciousness he referred to as ‘the Eerie state’4: a level of consciousness between sleep and wake in which one was both aware of reality but also ‘aware of fairies’.

On the other hand, perhaps the sleeping woman is the product of the waking woman’s imagination: we don’t after all know what she is reading in that book (which itself may be an indication of Egg’s literary inspirations). It may not be a case of the dreamer and the dream but rather the reader and the read. Such ambiguity in explanation is truly the stuff that doppelgänger fantasies are made of.

Anyway, I managed to convince a secretary to send me the feedback report. The editor makes it clear that my article is not suitable for the journal but is largely very kind:

“The article is interesting and put forward some possible interpretations of a motive by the painter Augustus Egg. The presentation of the painting and the painter is a bit short as well as the discussion. But this may be the intention; the article has character of an essay. This comment is not necessary meant as a critique.”

Konsthistorisk Tidskrift
Referee report

Manuscript title: August Leopold Egg’s The Travelling Companions: a literary interpretation
Manuscript number: 435/2006/01

Referee’s comments:

The article is interesting and put forward some possible interpretations of a motive by the painter Augustus Egg. The presentation of the painting and the painter is a bit short as well as the discussion. But this may be the intention; the article has character of an essay. This comment is not necessary meant as a critique.

The material presented is the painting and the literary references but no theoretical literature is referred to. The interpretation is more of a hypothetic discussion than of a scientific one. But it has its points.

I find the parentheses a symptom of the author’s want to comprise a lot and not to write too much. It is definitely better to bring the argument or the information into its full extension and exclude the parentheses.

One of my many golden rules for blogging is that the blogger should never open an entry by apologising for a recent absence of entries. A blogger doesn’t owe his reader anything of the sort and starting in such a fashion is akin to posting a moronic meme or a recounting of a boring but apparently “random” nightmare involving toothfall. Besides, a readership probably doesn’t even notice a blogger’s non-presence given that there are so bloody many other things on the net to be getting on with. Besides, I’d like to get away from the ephemeral ‘rolling now’ nature of blogging, which brings me on to another golden rule: write not just for the watchers of the rolling now but also for readers of the archive. After all, I get almost as many comments and emails about my electronic writings from people who’ve chanced across old entries through Google than from actual registered and recognised livejournalers.

So no apologies for my two-week absence, fuckers. How’d you like them apples?

The reason, however, for my absence concerns a shifted interest: a retroactive paradigm shift to the non-digital world. I love digital with all my heart of course and there seems to be something lacking in life without the constant flow of information running two-way through my laptop. Nonetheless, I’ve been enjoying the analogue world of late and I’d like to tell you all about it!

It all started when my friend David and I took a trip to Pollock Park on the south side of Glasgow. He’d brought his non-digital SLR camera along and was courteous enough to let me play around with it. Lemme tellyas, dudes: some of the photographs I came out with on that sunny afternoon were some of the best I’ve come out with in years! The reason? Permanence. Once the shutter has done its business, you can’t alter the image. Every shot has to count. With digital you can take the shot again and again until it’s perfect. With analogue, you gotta get it right first time unless you want an entire spool of twenty-four exact-same pictures only with altering degrees of blur and perspective.

Since then I’ve been on a bit of an analogue trip. I bought a mechanical typewriter on which to chunk out a few experimental words. It’s terrific fun. Thinking that if every letter typed had to matter – if deletion or modification would cause more aggravation and mess than correctitude – then the final piece would be more thoughtful, more ideas-filled, more reasoned.

I’ve also been looking at art work for The Escapologist – the magazine I am enjoying editing. It’s all real art work from the textural universe of pens and paper rather than the textual universe of pixels and paintshop. Canadian artist, Anna Oster can do great things with typefaces.

The newly reopened Kelvingrove museum and art gallery in Glasgow is also sucking up quite a bit of my leisure time of late, as did the Edinburgh [comedy and book] Festivals. I’ve had a ball at each of these things and I don’t think there’s anything particularly digital about either of them.

A slight lie. I noticed at Edinburgh an influx of shows dedicated in some way to blogging. I planned to blog about this fact and offer a few interpretations of it but, alas, my non-digital binge was somewhat distracting.

Don’t worry though, dear reader. I’m not going to abandon the blog in favour of some dusty diary stashed between bedsheets. I’m far to vane and audience-seeking for that sort of malarkey. Besides, I love my blog and my self-imposed form of blogging rather spectacularly. I’ve also landed a rather peculiar job reviewing bars and restaurants for 5pm.co.uk, which will require the passing around of information online for the next few weeks and I surely will not be able to resist the super-procrasto temptation of writing plenty in these pages instead.

What do you look for in a piece of fiction, dear reader? I’m asking partly out of interest and partly as a half-hearted piece of market research in preparation for writing some of my own.

It was while reading Patrick Süskind’s celebrated and entirely disappointing 1985 novel, Perfume this week that I finally realised exactly what I personally look for.

Ideas.

I think that novels (and short stories, novellas etc) should have a strong conceptual element and that anything else – plot, character development, use of language – are all elements of artistry, which, while vital, should really just be part of the machinery and second to this conceptual element.

Would you rather read a vital and original work by a clumsy genius with Asperger’s Syndrome or a soulless and linear trek through convention by a completely articulate wordsmith?

The obvious and most middleground answer is probably the former written by the latter (though as a fan of Beefheart and Vonnegut, I’d probably still be tempted to go for the raw mania of a monkey pumped full of dopamine).

A novel should build up an environment complete with characters in which an idea or ideas can be played out. This was where Perfume failed for me. It’s just a story which goes and-then-and-then-and-then-and-then-and-then: a linear chronology in which Act Three barely relates to Act One other than that it succeeds it.

I think this is why I like 1950s science fiction so much. Writers like Harlan Ellison, Ray Bradbury and Theodore Sturgeon are conceptual machine guns firing out amazing ideas in rapid succession: ideas that, if not potentially and entirely life-changing, are just fascinatingly new and peculiar. Yet this stuff can’t really be looked at as “literature” in that it was such a mass-produced medium only brought about due to the marketing of personal type writers. Ellison alone wrote something like two-hundred thousand short stories: none of which have much merit in terms of literary poise but which serve as flabbergasting philosophical experiments – the “what ifs?” and the “why nots?”.

Perfume is almost completely conceptually dead. Süskind does stupid things like painting scenes and then having them collapse into the river to make way for the next chapter without any kind of event being staged in them. He also hops from point of view to point of view too often: how am I supposed to give a shit about Granuille (the anti-protagonist) if I’m spending so much time in the head of characters that don’t matter (A perfumer called Baldini who dies in the first act and a paranoid villager called Richis in the last act who is likeable but pointless)?

Characters should exist as embodiments of ideas. The guy in Haruki Murakami’s The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, for example, is a representation of passivity, naivety, ‘new man’-ness and the modern condition. The characters in Perfume however, are merely characters: pieces being moved around on a board completely convincingly but without any reason to do so.

So, reader, what do you look for?

Every now and again I go through a period of thinking I might have finally found the chutzpa to go into performing proper standup comedy. Sometimes I even go through with actually doing a bit but find that I’m so nervous on stage that the rewards are hardly worth the sweat, shaking, the stress-induced eczema or the number of runny poos.

More often than not, however, I put together the material and then something so horrendously confidence-shattering takes place or I become so disillusioned with what I am (or comedy in general is) trying to achieve, that I can’t take it any further.

I went through to Edinburgh yesterday to meet my old friend Adele who’d come up from London to do festival things. Naturally we took in a couple of shows: the OK Wilson Dixon at the Babybelly and the ever-charming Boothby Graffoe at The Stand. That both gigs took place in the early evening and in small, intimate venues meant that the audiences were small, middle-class, quite forgiving and had not yet been given the opportunity to get very drunk.

So I found myself thinking “Yeah, I could deal with an audience like this. This would be okay”. I also noticed that Boothby Graffoe, when doing his act, appeared very nervous – was literally trembling – in spite of his decade or so doing stand-up. When I see other nervous but industrious comics like this (Simon Munnery sometimes sweats like a piece of toast and is easily thrown by heckles. Similarly, Richard Herring recently wrote about having to do as many as five poos before going on stage) I can only conclude that my nerves are normal and I should just get on with it.

But the real clincher in yesterday’s initiation of my latest ‘chuztpa period’ was that the best joke of the evening with the biggest laugh came not from either of the acts but from your humble narrator:

We were waiting outside the doors of The Stand, with a fairly long queue trailing behind us when a frail old lady with a walking stick painfully made her way down the stairs. Everyone waiting in the stairwell noticed how astonishingly frail she was, resulting in an odd hush. When she got to the bottom she (as many people do) said “Ooh, my goodness. Is this a queue?”

“Yeah, but you have to buy your tickets here first,” I explained.

“I already have my ticket,” she said.

Suddenly possessed by the the ghost of Peter Cook I sternly said: “Well get to the back then”.

Everyone around us laughed and I even got a clap from one bloke. The very idea that anyone could be so cruel and principal-driven to ask this sweet old lady to climb the stairs to go to the back of the queue was simply hilarious.

Thankfully the old lady realised I was joking. I think.

Of course, that joke would never work in a routine because you’d have to set up the scene, which in itself isn’t funny. It was the combined facts that it had been a real-life situation and that I’d heartlessly referred to everyone else’s preoccupation with her astonishing frailty. The thing about it that makes me think about doing stand-up again is that it was a good example of thinking on one’s feet, which you have to do in order to deal spontaneously with hecklers and other things happening in the room.

On this subject, I saw Simon Munnery the other night in Glasgow. His hat set on fire while it was laying on a table too close to a candle. It resulted in about ten minutes of improv about the audience being kind enough to tell him about it and about how it might have been a double bluff. A lesser comedian would probably have just been annoyed at the interruption.

It’s a bit of a shit Fringe this year to be honest and there’s very little I feel passionate about. Go see Munnery, Zaltzman, Graffoe, Kevin McAleer and the Book Club though. They’re all good. Failing that, just look out for me and I’ll subject you to some amazing off-the-cuff granny-bashing.

You are sentenced to travel backwards in time to the year 1900 with no possible hope of return. Bizarrely, you are permitted to take along one modern object or device. What do you opt to take?

One of the main reasons I don’t particularly like mixing groups of friends is probably the same reason as most people don’t like their ex-partners exchanging notes: it’s all down to the idea that sooner or later I’ll get ‘found out’.

I’ll be the first to admit it: I can be a Janus-faced phony and it’s difficult to keep track of all the white lies I’ve told people. When social groups mix, they’ll assuredly discover the truth about me: that I’m a lazy, self-satisfied, underachieving, inconsistent, fraudulent sub-bourgeois.

Most of the lies I tell people are far from outrageous: merely half-true anecdotes to make them laugh, to psychophilanthropically stroke their egos or to hide the fact that I think they are assholes (my fear of confrontation means that I never tell anyone I dislike them). But there are other times I come out with things that are simply by way of making me look cool or to amuse myself. I even once, during a rather naff party, told a guy that I was a magician before wowing him a couple of rudimentary card tricks. I’d be an excellent confidence trickster but alas my lying is a fairly ethical one designed only for making people comfortable in my presence rather than allowing them to suffer full brunt of the intrinsic perversions and untruths and infidelities and mundanities.

As a follow-up to Thursday’s post concerning livejournal interests lists, I shall today move for further discussion on the topic of online identity. How do people want to be perceived online? Is displaying an online facia through avatars and signatures and interests lists much different to my own personal real-world bullshittery? Is it what calls “peacock feathers” or is it a symptom of modern life’s tendency to produce alienated, self-conscious, easily bruised idiots?

A good way of looking at how people want themselves to be perceived is by doing a quick search on flickr for images tagged with “me” or “self portrait”. What you get is a massive stream of digital photographs of average-looking people trying to portay themselves in a superior light or trying to conceal their various dirty truths: their vulnerability, the averageness, their wrong-headedness, the fact that they never buy a decent newspaper.

There are loads of types of self portrait on flickr and very few of them are “honest”. They all present people who are more interesting, sexy, intelligent, mysterious that the person taking the photograph. Either they are partially hiding their faces, being photographed through some other object so as to distort the final image, or they have ‘adjusted themselves’ in post-production by making themselves black-and-white or adding layers of psychedelic colour.

Maybe the reason for all of these cloaking techniques lies in the media-specific: that there is still some trepidation over the Internet; that it is the realm of perverts and paedophiles and nerds and lonely people who will wank off to your photograph. Or worse!

Or perhaps its down to the fact that people are complex cocktails of conflicting desires and paradoxical beliefs and if TV teaches us anything it’s that people should be 2D – that there should be a “Billness” of Bill or a “Lucyness” of Lucy – and that the inconsistent personality should be kept under wraps.

When I was studying the sociology of blogging earlier this year, I found that one of the more common criticisms of befriending people through LiveJournal relates to our interests lists. Questions are asked along the lines of: how do these interests really explain who the user is? And how does having a few interests in common justify a befriending?

To half-agree with the point raised by the first question, I don’t think I’m personally represented by my interests. To start with, I’m a fan of the TV sitcom, Red Dwarf and it is included in my interests list. But if you visit any message board dedicated to discussion on this topic, you’ll be confronted with barely legible scrawlings of morons and children with signatures longer then their posts. You get topics along the lines of “iz rimma a smeg head”. I’m not one of those guys am I? Am I??.

An oddity I’ve noticed concerning our interests lists is that we hardly ever discuss the topics, items or people included on them. Our tags seldom correlate with our self-proclaimed interests. In way of rectifying this, I have decided to spend today’s entry talking about one of the more obscure items on my list: umbrellas.

* I like to carry a gentleman’s umbrella. That is a full-length black one with a curved wooden handle. His name is Enrique Henriques Bestiville. I am a firm believer in the fact that, as Leslie S. Klinger puts it in my version of the complete Sherlock Holmes, “all gentlemen carry a cane or else its doppelganger, a tightly wrapped umbrella”. Yes, I am John Steed.

* It doesn’t even matter if its sunny. An umbrella is the ultimate accessory and can be used to poke at dead things or to rattle along railings.

* When it’s up, I like to rest the stem upon my shoulder and spin it around. Doing this allows me to pretend I am a time machine.

* Umbrellas always seem to be used as examples of how words fail us in postmodern texts. There is no word for a broken umbrella in that it ceases to be an umbrella when it can no longer keep off the rain. I think the character, Peter Stillman in Paul Auster’s City of Glass talks about that.

* Wikipedia harbours an insanely comprehensive history of umbrellas. It tells me that “Brolly is a slang word for umbrella, used often in Britain; “bumbershoot” is another.”

* I’m not the only person to have named an umbrella. The protagonist of Stephen Fry’s The Liar has a brolly called (I think) Justin.

* When I see someone else with a lengthy Enrique-like umbrella, we exchange knowing expressions as if to confirm our shared knowledge that superior people carry umbrellas in spite of the absence of rain.

* There is a book called Umbrellas and their history. It’s even available for free online.

* Enrique has directly caused women to flirt with me literally twice.

My version of a trip to Disneyland is probably a trip to a wind farm. I’m sure you can tell this from the photograph on the left in which I am standing at the foot of one of the turbines grinning like an unusually hairy cancer kid on space mountain. I am special.

Constantly denied the opportunity of getting a decent photograph of the ones I pass semi-regularly on the M6, I vowed to make a deliberate trip to a wind farm. I had been planning to visit the one at Dun Law after being kindly pointed in the right direction by but as chance would have it a friend and I passed an entirely different one this week on the road to Ardrossan. We parked the car, hopped a few gates and made a longer-than-anticipated dirtpath trek up to the turbines.

Anyone who has up close to a wind turbine usually makes the same report: that they are overwhelmingly huge. My reaction to this has always been that my imagination and canny sense of scale would allow me to have a good idea of how big they must be and I would surely be underwhelmed by the predictable size once I got there. I was wrong of course. They are fucking massive.

Pretty soon the horizontal rain kicked up and we got very wet indeed. Oh yes. Also, we discovered that wind turbines have the amazing ability not only to collect wind but to simultaneously generate it. When in the wake of a turbine it is very bloody windy indeed. Am I the only one to consider the manufacturing of smaller turbines to position behind a regular turbine in order to collect the wind coming off it? And then you could have a smaller one behind that and so on.

The sound of the turbines is also incredible. “Do they hum?” my mum asked when I called her later. They don’t. The main sound you notice is the noise of the blades slicing though the air. Occasionally you also hear a metal squeak comparable to the cry of that massive phone-eating dinosaur on Jurassic Park 3: the sound of the heads rotating into the wind.

Each one has a door at the bottom for maintenance guys to get inside. I wonder if inside there is a spiral staircase or just a ladder going up the side.

Anyway, I managed to fulfill my childish ambition and get a few good photographs, some of which can be viewed here.

Every so often, I receive news from home. This week, I learn that my old headmaster has been arrested for kerb crawling. Hoo!

The story is reported here and here but word came my way via an email from my mum. She writes: “Jeff Williams has been arrested for kerb crawling. He didn’t have to do that. He was such a nice man. He could have had plenty of girlfriends”.

You know when a dog manages to get into a school playground, someone yells “Dog!” and all chaos ensues? Well that was the exact same type of excitement that fizzed up in my guts after reading the news. “Brilliant!!” I thought, my inner child demanding that I squeal girlishly and wave my arms around. I just couldn’t control myself. I almost did some wee.

But then I remembered that, not only had he been arrested and forced to leave his job, but his wife died a couple of years ago. How much bad luck can one fella have? So now his Apollonian and untarnished forty-year career has ended with an episode of lonely shame. Even I find that a bit of a kick in the balls.

My one decent memory of Jeff (or as the locals are undoubtedly calling him, ‘that old perv’) as head master involves him shouting at me from his office window during my first week of school:

I was coming out of the filthy sports hall that passed as the ‘dining room’ when I spotted a couple of boys from my form – Richard and Wesley – standing just outside the main doors. Riich and Wes would later evolve into the closest things a Midlands ex-grammar school had to Jocks and I would eventually become one of the crowd that would be the closest thing we had to nerds. They and I were destined to become natural enemies but it was early days and such roles had not yet been established.

Wanting to make new friends and perhaps curry favour with some of the harder kids, I went outside to talk to them. It was raining torrentially and they were taking shelter under the canopy outside of the main doors.

I started up conversation with them, quite unassumingly, about how the first few days had been going for them, but then they alerted my attentions to a cascade of water running from a broken drainpipe and over the top of the canopy into a rapidly expanding pool on the potholed tarmac of the playground. One of the boys asked me to hypothesise whether it would be possible to run though the weir without getting wet? Of course it wouldn’t, I said. But if you went through quick enough you could probably remain reasonably dry.

So they dared me to go through it.

I said I would if one of them went through first. While I wanted to look cool to the tough kids a la Bart Simpson in that episode where he cuts off the head of the town founder’s statue to win favour with Jimbo Jones and his pals, I didn’t want to be the butt of their joke by being the only one to get wet. I wasn’t stupid, you know.

(Though perhaps I was a little naive. While I didn’t really identify the fact that they were naughty types destined to jockdom, they clearly recognised my position as a natural born goodboy with a desire to show off. In primary school I had been friends with most everyone in the year-group and something of a class clown: high school would beat all of that out of me though and, worldly-wise, Rich and Wes had foreseen it).

Against my expectations, they agreed to run through the waterfall before I did. I’d noticed that they had been a bit wet when I had started talking to them in the first place so maybe they’d already mastered the stunt and the joke lay in the fact that they were hustling me.

So after they had run through the water, getting hardly wet at all, I did the same. But as I did so, the headmaster suddenly shouted from his office window “You stupid boy! You’ll be wet through! Get into my office right now!”

In a strange act of part-cowardice and part-bravado, I pretended not to have heard him and continued in running across the playground and out of sight.

The rest of the day was spent worrying whether or not the headmaster would catch up with me. Surely he would have asked Rich and Wes my name and come to get me during the tutor period. But nothing else came of it so either the two boys stuck up for me by saying they didn’t know who I was, or the headmaster had let it drop.

The event had scared the shit out of me though. I’d never really been shouted at by any teacher in the past and here I was being angrily ordered to the headmaster’s office on one of my very first days in this intimidating new school.

Looking back on it though, I wonder why the headmaster chose to make it any of his business at all. Surely, it was my lookout if I wanted to run through the waterfall and get wet and nothing to do with him. My actions would not affect anyone other than myself. Besides, the point of the exercise was to NOT get wet, which he could surely have worked out by the speed at which I had run through it. And moreover, the whole thing was partly his fault: had his crappy school been maintained properly there would have been no broken drainpipe to cause such silliness in the first place.

(Story recycled from an old blog experiment).

But now his wife is dead and his career lies in ruins. So at least I had the last laugh.

I don’t suppose any of you kids have access to a video of Boris Johnson’s 2003 appearance on Room 101? I ask this with the prospect that you might upload some of it to Youtube or send me a tape/dvd through the post.

Apparently Boris committed Smoking Bans to the eponymous dimension of rubbish things. With a potential comedy-writing project relating to smoking bans I’d love to hear what he said.

Even if anyone just remembers this segment, I’d be chuffed to bits if you could relate to me the gist of it.

TQ!

STAR TREK VOYAGER‘S ROBERT PICARDO FOUND PRESERVED IN SOME SORT OF CRYSTAL. “Shittest piece of tat ever uncovered” declares top archaeologist.

“CARPE, the Central Alliance of Robert Picardo Enthusiasts, is offering Crystal Bob for a special price of $149.00, which is a great deal — and I’ll tell you why. First, Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas is selling these for $245.00. Second, 20% of the proceeds from the sale of these crystal sculptures benefits the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. So you can purchase a beautiful artwork, benefit children with AIDS, and acquire an impressive holiday gift for the Picardo-Phile in your life — or for yourself!”

It’s all very well declaring Sunday a day of rest, but today for me has taken the biscuit. Instead of working on my MSc Dissertation or writing one of the many articles I’ve promised to people, I’ve been discovering pointless sub-stuff like like this on the interweb.

Today’s hyper-explorations also lead me to some Youtube clips of Peter Cook submitting the British Countryside to Room 101; one of Tori Amos being interviewed by Zig and Zag on The Big Breakfast; and this inexplicable piece of miscellaneous crap.

Ah, TV. We hardly knew ya.

In other news, a picture I took appears on .

It occurred to me this afternoon that I’ve never seen a dead body. Is that weird?

I’ve never been to an open casket funeral; never been in or near a serious road accident; never discovered a recently deceased old relative; and never been witness to a murder, a drug overdose or a heart attack. I’m like a sort-of reverse Ishmael, who in Moby Dick is plagued by the presence of death. If anything I’ve been plagued by the presence of life, or rather non-death. “Call me leamhsI.”

The realisation of my corpseless life occurred to me after reading a few excellent and moreish chapters of Mr. Gray’s corpse-related 1992 novel, Poor Things, in which a woman is brought back from the dead, Frankenstein fashion. As a bookmark for this novel, I employ a Christian propaganda pamphlet headed with the rather odd question of “Are you Dead or Alive?”

Even horse-faced Harry and William have had the pleasure. I’m sure most of my peers and relatives have seen bodies by now as well. My friend, Adele, grew up around corpses, being the daughter of an undertaker. My sister (a podiatrist) has had elderly patients die in the chair as she’s operated on their feet and has even dissected dead human feet as part of her education. My mother as a nurse saw a million dead bodies. In the war, my grandad saw his share. My constant companion and best friend Stu, as a Catholic, has been to open casket funerals on countless occasions. It seems that everyone has seen a cadaver but your humble narrator.

I’ve never even been to a funeral. I suppose I should consider myself lucky.

I can’t help but think that this inexperience has allowed me to become quite flippant about death. When George A. Romero films and Stephen King novels are the closest you come to seeing dead people, it kinda trivialises the whole prospect. I do make a lot of cancer jokes.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have a morbid fascination with corpses. A necrophiliac, I am not. If anything I’m a necrophobe: by nature quite squeamish about such things. But I feel somewhat left out.

Have you seen corpses, dear reader? Did it provide you with perspective? Was it beautiful? Frightening? Awe-inspiring? Or just gross?

TWO ANECDOTES FROM A MOTORWAY SERVICE STATION. (OR: NEW ADVENTURES IN TRANSITIONAL SPACE).

With Edward Hopper paintings.

Returning from visiting my parents, my friend Stuart and I stopped off for a much needed break at a motorway service station. When you’ve been sitting down for such a long time in a car, it is sometimes nice to get out and do some more sitting down.

When I saw that the service station’s cafe was a Cafe Ritazza (a franchise apparently unique to transitional spaces such as railways stations, airports and motorway service stations), I remembered that the guy at the Cafe Ritazza in Glasgow’s Central Station, a month or so back, had given me one of those rubber-stamp loyalty cards.

I handed my loyalty card to the server but he’d never seen such a thing. In fact he freaked out a little bit at the recognition of his cafe’s logo on an alien document as though it were an artifact from some doppelganger-populated parallel universe.

Of course, loyalty cards and things of that ilk often don’t work at the service station versions of cafes or shops. But Cafe Ritazza is ONLY a service station franchise. It doesn’t exist in town centres! So where am I supposed to use this thing? I suppose I might only be able to use it at the branch I got it from but considering it’s based in a train station and gets its entire custom from commuters who may never tread foot there again, a loyalty card seems like an odd thing to issue.

But perhaps that’s the plan. By giving a loyalty card out that can only be used at the Glasgow branch, one will have to go out of one’s way to travel to Glasgow to use it. The chances are, a commuter coming from London or Birmingham will have to change trains at Preston or Crewe. Of course you may as well buy a coffee from a Cafe Ritazza while you’re there, making them the victors.

Given that such a trip would cost around £60, you would be excused for thinking that a Cafe Ritazza loyalty card may rely upon a false economy.

Fortunately for me, I live in Glasgow. I also kept my receipt from this service station branch and will force them to reward my loyalty upon my return to Glasgow. Pretty soon, the pleasure of gratis coffee will be mine. All I have to do is sacrifice having coffee at one of my favourite comfortable west end cafes in favour of drinking Cafe Ritazza machine-brewed swill from a paper cup beneath the hard lighting and indecipherable tannoy announcements of Central Station. After nine trips like this, I’ll get a free one. Cashback.

We moved over to the comfy brown leather arm chairs to innocently enjoy our coffees and contemplate my unstamped loyalty card.

No sooner had we sat down, an old man approached us from the next table over where his wife watched on patiently.

“Excuse me,” he politely said to us, “but is it compulsory to eat one of those?”

He was referring to the giant chocolate muffins we had bought to go with our coffees.

“No,” I laughed, slightly confused, “it’s just that they’re so good.”

It occurred to me that I was quasi-quoting Vincent Vega from Pulp Fiction – the bit where he is asked by his hitman colleague why he eats pork.

It seemed to satisfy him and he went back to his table where his patient wife rolled her eyes, suggesting that the old man’s antagonising of young people were a regular occurrence.

“What the hell was that about?” asked Stuart, modishly offended by the intrusion.

The old man, of course, was pointing out the absurdity of our situation. Here we were in the middle of nowhere: a strange little bubble of humanity at the side of a motorway where no life has the right to thrive and we were sitting on leather comfy chairs with a pint of black coffee each and our ludicrous chocolate muffins. We may as well have been adrift in outer space, in orbit around Saturn while enjoying a jacuzzi.

Not only did I suddenly feel like a fashionable McSheep, I also felt out on a limb like an Edward Hopper character floating in an uninhabitable abyss absurdly nurturing a grande Americano.

Service Stations are weird places.

With my Masters Degree course drawing to a close, I have begun wondering which city I’d most like to live in and consequently work [as a librarian]. New York, Tokyo, Glasgow and Birmingham all have things going for them (though I have wimpy apprehensions about moving abroad) and I’ve recently begun to think about Oxford too. Currently visiting with my parents in Dudley, we took a trip to the not-far-away city of Oxford for a bit of a look around.

My parents are somwhat Apollonian individuals so today began at the improbably early hour of 7.00am. After a hurried breakfast, we piled into a pre-packed car and set off for Oxford, arriving there before anything of note had had chance to open. I took this opportunity to stroll around the high street area. Remembering ‘s analysis of New York magazine kiosks (“[to] see what kind of glimpse they provide into the American soul”) I idly and in a somewhat unsystematic fashion tried a similar thing with Oxford’s store fronts.

A Starbucks; a Woolworths; a McDonnalds; a Pret a Manger; a WHSmith; an Edinburgh Woolen Mill. What was the point? It has just the same brand name stores as any other city in the country. There was no insight into the Oxford soul here. If I was looking for a city with difference – for something exotic or less blase – I’d probably have to uproot entirely and live abroad. My first superficial glance at things resulted in false impressions of course: an Oxford shopping street does have a few differences to those of London or Glasgow or Birmingham: everything has become kinda “integrated” into Oxford culture. Everything has adopted a slightly-less-vulgar-than-usual tone. The McDonalds for example is wooden-fronted rather than smacky plastic yellow. While the same evil exists here as anywhere else, it has had to adopt a slightly different aesthetic tactic to the other cities I’m familiar with. The semiotics of brandname outlets and tastefully appropriate aesthetics oppose each other somewhat but speak volumes.

We found a Cafe Nero that had opened early and I ordered a round of coffee. When I handed over my Switch card, the Barrista apologised and told me that they took no plastic. I was surprised as much as embarrassed about my having to run out for cash: every Cafe Nero I’ve been to in Glasgow readily accepts payments by Switch. How strangely unprogressive of Oxford. Perhaps another window into its soul had been discovered.

After delivering the coffee safely to the table at which Mum and Dad were patiently seated, I looked for a copy of The Observer at the news rack. The only piece of it that remained was the “Review” (art/culture) section so I took that as well as a News of the World. I realised that the only copy of The Observer had been dispersed between the patrons of the cafe: one guy had the sports supplement, another fellow had the news, I had the review, a grey-haired lady had something else and the Barristas were arguing over the free fold-out poster (depicting various types of freshwater fish – I have the butterfly version they did a couple of weeks ago) that had come with it. The tabloids were piled up in the stand without being touched aside from my News of the World. It’s as though trash culture is trying its best to infiltrate Oxford but the studious population are just not having it.

After our coffee, we looked at the city from above. I can’t remember what it was called (I was too sleepy and suffer mildly from a fear of heights) but money was paid to climb up to what was allegedly Oxford’s highest point – some sort of bell tower (pictured). It was something of a crappy tourist trap and I exclaimed that my work at the University library in Glasgow has me working and studying (for free) at higher altitudes than this but the view of the city’s spires was nonetheless quite pleasant.

There was much walking around the university and its museums to be had and much photographing of Gargoyles and sculptures on behalf of my snap-happy mother (the photos in this entry are all hers). I thought about how universities are intrinsically connected to research and consequently to the military and the government and I wondered about how Oxford’s tidiness and tastefully put together buildings might be funded.

The clash of the ancient and the modern is something that occurs in many cities (Edinburgh and Glasgow spring to mind, as do Prague and Amsterdam and Paris) but often in separate ‘quarters’. In Oxford, however, the ancient and the modern clash throughout like something from an episode of Sliders in which a modern San Francisco is occupied by Wizards. In spite of Oxford’s central institutes being at the cutting edge (The Bodders for instance is one of the best libraries in the country and the world), bicycles assuredly outnumber cars and the classical aestheic is everywhere.

It’s nice. Are there any Occasional Papers readers who live or work in Oxford? Perhaps you can give me an insider’s perspective or at least tell me that my observations are as ill-conceived as they most certainly are.

Whenever I return to the old birthing grounds of Dudley in the West Midlands, things usually feel familiar yet oddly different around my mum and dad’s house. Sometimes this is because things really are a little different to how I last saw the place in that new ornaments or fixtures have been bought while old ones have been put away or thrown out. Other times things just seem unfamiliar in a completely untangible way due to my not living here any more, returning only once every few months for the sake of familial adherence.

Late this evening, while reading my late Great Uncle George’s copy of Under the Greenwood Tree in my old bedroom with the window open, I heard a noise from outside which sounded exactly like the noise a child’s bicycle might make when coming to a halt down in the street. It was the sort of dull squeak of breaks unique to those making contact rubber tubes of a junior Raleigh. I don’t know if I’ve ever actually heard the sound of a child’s bike coming to a stop from this room before but that was the answer brought forward after a superfast consultation with my brain’s acoustic database.

The sound, of course, could not have been a child’s bike. The time, after all, was drawing up to 2am. No one would be out cycling at this hour let alone a kidiwink. No. When the sound occurred a second time, I realised that it had in fact originated from the weather vane.

The weather vane has been mounted in that same place – on the kitchen chimney outside my bedroom window – since I was about eight years old. It is in the shape of a witch riding upon a broomstick and was made by my grandfather. For the last ten years or so the vane has squeaked. So why now did I not recognise what was once a strikingly everyday occurence, confusing it insead for something I’d probably never heard of in my life?

My Honours Degree in Psychology invests me with the authority to declare: “The human brain is weird”.

On occasion, I travel by car (rather than by rail) in order to visit my parents. Whenever I do this, I pass a massive and beautiful wind farm just off the M6. I always try to take a photograph of it only to have my plans thwarted every time. It is never visible for very long and so whenever I get the camera out, the pesky thing sinks out of existence behind the hills.

Today I was confounded once again but managed nonetheless to get the best picture I have of it so far, partly due to having a better camera this time with a better optical zoom and what I suspect might be described as a faster shutter. But alas even this picture is rubbish; only the heads of these graceful giants were captured.

One of these days I will make a special trip to the wind farm to get some decent photographs. Either that or I’ll plan to have my camera poised and ready so as not to miss the tiny window of opportunity.

A quick Google search for “M6 wind farm” brings up several similar images, blurred and framed with bits of dashboard and fluffy dice. One day I shall put them all to shame.

Each thing I do I rush through so I can do
something else. In such a way do the days pass–
a blend of stock car racing and the never
ending building of a gothic cathedral.
Through the windows of my speeding car, I see
all that I love falling away: books unread,
jokes untold, landscapes unvisited . . .
– From “Pursuit” by Stephen Dobyns (published in the compilation, Cemetery Nights).

I find that I sometimes think in two rather dangerous or at least undesirable ways. I don’t think in these fashions too often, nor are they are representative of my usual mindset but I’d like to train myself out of them if possible. I wonder if any readers of my Occasional Papers can empathise?

I don’t like to ‘shape’ the way I think usually, favouring instead to engage with peculiar, perverse, impractical or deviant ideas rather than block them out. I think that’s healthy. But in these cases I’d make an exception.

The first concerns the constant feeling that there is something better to be working towards – a new stepping stone in life – and that once this thing has happened, the “real living” can begin. Fun can be put off for another day until this project has been completed. Does anyone else suffer from this? It’s a total fallacy of course. Nothing will change or be much more comfortable if one’s bank account is out of the red. Similarly, nothing will happen once you’ve moved into a better flat or secured a more desirable job. You’ll still be the same dimwitted person wondering about the next selfish existential target might be met and never really reaching the proverbial carrot of “the real living”. There will always be a more desirable job/attractive partner/fashionable flat to move on to and presumably no satisfaction for this desire.

The second dangerous way of thinking, is never 100% enjoying the thing presently happening to me due to the everpresent distraction of anticipating the next. While reading a novel, I’m wondering about what the next novel might involve. It’s true to say that this may seem like a reiteration of the first problem, but I’d argue that, while similar, it’s a definably different problem but may or may not have its origins in the same place.

Both problems are stupid and make me feel a total prick when coming out with them in this fashion. They are the very antithesis of Stoicism and an enemy to anyone who has them.

Regarding the Stephen Dobyns poem, I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve not actually read Cemetery Nights or anything else by Mr. Dobyns and that I came across the quote in a horrible Stephen King novel a year or so back. Nonetheless, it resonated with me and helped to articulate those weird thoughts. It sounds like a really good compilation though. Wikipedia’s entry on Dobyns describes another poem from Cemetery Nights (‘Missed chances’) in which “the nameless speaker wanders through a metaphorical city in which those who missed their big opportunities futilely rehearse for when that moment will next arrive”.

I find myself going through cycles of wanting to consume different sorts of art in a similar way to how other people get culinary cravings. Sometimes I could want to read so much that I feel I could literally eat pages from my books: just tear the softer pages from their bindings, scrunch them up and shove them into my foaming gob. It’s as though the conventional way of sucking symbols up through the eyes isn’t quite efficient enough a process to satisfy the desire: only primitive devouring and digestion will do the trick.

I’ve never actually tried to eat a book though, you understand. Just imagine the paper cuts.

It sounds weird, I know. But in my defense, William Wordsworth said something similar about nature; that he sometimes loved the Lake District so much that he had the desire to eat vast fistfulls of grass and soil so that nature could exist inside as well as out. I wonder if Wordsworth had been a creature of the suburbs instead of the countryside, he would have felt as passionately about concrete, space raiders and dog muck.

At the moment I’m acoustically fixated: I’m in the mood for music and I know exactly what I want to listen to at given moments. Mostly working from home right now, I have the freedom to do this but I find some of my choices of what to listen to as peculiar as the foods chosen by pregnant women: Tom Waits followed by Art Tatum / Liquorice Allsorts followed by raw onions.

Today I put on a ‘best of’ CD of The Animals. In particular I was interested in listening to ‘House of the Rising Sun’ and ‘Roadrunners’. Why? Beats me. I’m not a fan of the animals. I like Rock n’ Roll just fine but at the end of the day, I’m a jazz fan. But whatever the personal preference, today I wanted to hear The Animals. It’s playing right now as I type this (which is in itself, somewhat uncharacteristic).

So I wonder why artistic cravings take place at all. With food, cravings occur when your body is lacking in whatever vitamin or mineral you crave. But your body doesn’t require art does it? Perhaps it’s some kind of psychological/socially constructed imitation of food cravings: the constructed and natural words getting their wavelengths crossed (like how urban birds are reported to immitate popular mobile phone ring tones).

Does anyone else in my immediate blogosphere have similar cycles and unpredictable intrusions from bands or authors or directors with whom you wouldn’t normally concern yourself?

Listening to Dave Brubeck’s supremely cool Time Out always makes me think of Otto Lilenthal/Leonardo Da Vinci style flying machines. The second track on the record is called ‘Strange Meadow Lark’ so a flock of flying machines might not be such a terribly disconnected image.

As a result of this, I found a great website called FlyingMachines.org which I heartily recommend checking out if you’re into Victoriana or science or eccentricity or just weird stuff.

I’m sure it’s quite unnatural for humans to fly: whenever I come off an airplane I find that my lips are unimaginably chapped and every muscle tired as though my body, when evolving, simply didn’t take into account that it might infrequently find itself being projected through the sky at a squillion miles per second in a metal tube.

But then, what does ‘natural’ mean? Everything ultimately is a product of nature. From shrinkwrapped lettuces to complex MP3 players, everything began in the Earth and was converted into a usable object via whatever form of alchemy neccessary. I suppose when people are looking for ‘natural’ products, they’re looking for goods with as little of this alchemical process invested in them as possible.

Why do we suppose Lilenthal et al and the Wright Brothers became so obsessed with flying machines? Why is it so important that humans compete with birds? Assuming that there is a psychological, evolutionary or cultural truth to be found buried within any one piece of technology (a plug socket, a pair of shoes, an alar[u]m clock, an iPod), what does the human fixation upon flight tell us?

I’d argue that it’s down to the innate/gradually cultivated desire to escape. Escape! Escape! Escape the humdrum and the benal, the dangerous and the ill-suited in favour of the green grass of some other side.

I think I could get an article out of this for The Escapologist perhaps also with a nod toward the Bird Men of Easter Island. Trouble is, I already have two items plus an editorial in this magazine and I don’t want it to be too Wringham-heavy so if anyone else is interested enough in this area of speculation, I’d be very willing to let them/you take a crack at it.

There is a little cafe in the arse end of Hyndland that I pass on occasion, usually when making a trip to the supermarket. It looks nice enough with its indoor plants and comfortable-looking patio area but the name of the cafe and the typeface in which the name is spelled out above the door reveals that it is being run by and frequented by morons.

For ages I could only imagine that the place was called the “Pustule Cafe”. The ‘brush script’ typeface makes the name of the cafe very difficult to read.

Today I realised that it is actually called “Pasta le Cafe”. To be honest, I think I preferred the pustule variation. The proprietors have clearly tried to convey a continental flavour through the name of their cafe but not done a very good job of it.

Whenever something like this happens, I wonder how it actually gets from the idea stage to being actualised. Everyone they run the idea by – including the sign maker who must surely have some basic knowledge of typefaces, language and grammar and the executives of some kind of professional funding body – must say “Oh, that’s super. There’s no way that’s a bad idea.”

My first exposure to this year’s Big Brother televisual extravaganza occurred tonight: entirely by accident on the nineteenth day of the run. Is it just me or has there been far less media chatter about BB events this summer compared to those of previous years? Admittedly, I’ve not been in the vicinity of much tabloid press of late so it’s entirely possible that my egocentric world has missed out on it due to simple circumstance. (I did, however, stumble across a massive and notably intrusive ‘eye’ poster after staggering out of a Merchant City bar a couple of weeks back. Deciding that a semiotics-based blog entry might be inspired by its peculiar wordlessness, I took the photo you can see on the right).

An odd-looking blonde girl looked vacantly through me from her bubble world. She was sitting in a radically blinged-up incarnation of the perennially regenerating diary room chair, which made me feel as though I was Captain Kirk on the bridge of the Enterprise and I was looking through the viewscreen at some allegorical alien princess, third daughter of Emperor Boobjob of the Planet Peroxide IX.

The alien princess was dishing the dirt on one of her housemates. She doesn’t like some guy or other because of his being overly “superficial”.

Putting aside the fact that this was probably a textbook reification of a parable involving a noir-tinted coffee pot and a similarly afflicted kettle, what is wrong precisely with being superficial?

Superficiality is used increasingly often as a derogatory adjective isn’t it? A put-down. A garden variety criticism. “He’s just so superficial,” they say, “so 2D”. To be honest, I’d like to spend a little more time with some interestingly superficial people: people without too many secrets or complicated desires. Everybody’s gotta be someone, say something interesting, market themselves as having “layers”, as having so many hidden sides that elevate themselves above the simple skill of ‘being’ that everyone else has. What’s wrong with just being an aesthetic?

Everysoften, I am taken off guard by someone I have known for a long time. My mother, my father, old friends. They decide to do things entirely out of keeping with what I had always perceived to be their character yet they don’t seem to make a big deal out of it. In these situations, one realises that one can live with an individual for such a long degree of time and never really know them. I mean, how easy is it to know everything about a person? How can one ever believe that one has found one’s “soulmate”? Surely it’s easier to achieve this in the case of Mr. or Ms. Superficial. Why can’t we just ‘be’ together instead of spending years figuring each other’s guts out only to realise too late in the game that we don’t like what we find in there.

I like superficial people. I do. Their personalities are not filled with labyrinthine tracts so difficult to navigate and impossible to ever really understand. Instead, they are humble aesthetics who can provide comfortable familiarity and honest company without the conceited fictions that we attribute to “personalities”. Whatever one of those might be.