The Occasional Papers

After leaving the home of Mr. Neil Scott and Miss Laura Gonzalez in the tiniest possible hours of this morning, I decided to take a walk back to my flat rather than flagging a cab. It was a still, cool evening and the alcohol in my bloodstream would protect me from muggers.

Once I hit the West End, I realised that most every building I passed was invested with a poignant memory from the two years I’ve lived here. This was the coffee house I worked at over the summer and autumn. This was the bar where I first went out with staff from work. This was the street I marched with Dave and Siggi, late for the Daniel Kitson gig. This was the studio where I was drawn in the buff. This was the massive chimney next to the hospital, which we theorise is connected to the aborted-baby incinerator. Et Cetera.

Laura had been telling me not hours previously about how at home she felt in Glasgow. I’m inclined to agree: there’s just something about the city – particularly the leafy, bohemian west end – that makes it more habitable than most.

It was a nice evening and I felt for the first time in ages, comfortable with the way things are shaping up.

Suddenly, a small red car (a vectra?) pulled over and a slightly neddish guy stuck his head out of the passenger window to ask for directions. “How do you get onto Argyle Street, Pal?” he asked.

“You’re on it, mate,” said your humble narrator.

Suddenly the guy and his mates erupted with laughter. “Sure!” he nodded and they sped off.

It occurred to me suddenly that Argyle Street was in actuality the next street over. But why did that constitute a joke? I’ve had the piss taken out of me for various things in the past but never has my poor sense of direction been the source of comedy, even to myself.

Why was this funny? It wasn’t even as if I was miles off the mark. Argyle Street and this one ran parallel.

Some people are weird.

Someone told me last night that the city-centre purveyors of delicious organic smoothies and dairy-free sandwiches, Pret a Manger, is actually a McDonald’s in disguise.

A quick Google search revealed that this is absolutely true. I’m shocked. Not that I ever really ate at Pret but because I’m aware that it’s seen by many people to be a healthy and, by extension, an ethical and down-to-Earth alternative to fast food shit like McDonald’s.

Here’s an item from the Guardian business pages which explains the history of Pret and how it became an annex of the corporation that brought you Grimace.

They say that McDonald’s don’t have any input on the food side of things. But as I see it, if you’re boycotting McDonald’s you’ve got to cut off funding to their niche market units too.

Don’t eat there anymore, kids. Don’t even look at it – you’ll get cancer and die.

I have so much work to do right now. The deadlines, both writerly and library-related, are bleeding out of my eyes. Things are not helped by the fact that I’m re-reading the excellent and uber-subversive Walden. I can’t help but consider the merits of ‘doing a Thoreau’ but figure I should give this respectable career idea a fair shot first. And anyway, it’d probably take a cod-handed chimp like me at least six months just to sand down the timber.

The theme of escape continued last night with a trip to the Tramway Theatre on the south side to see Simon Bent’s acclaimed play, The Escapologist.

It is too literal, I think. A straitjacket is surely a hackneyed symbol of entrapment. I can’t help feeling that the show would have been better as a black comedy, possibly involving iron lungs like wot I cleverly did back in 2000.

Most reviews of the show make reference to the idea that we all share a desire to escape. Is that what this play signifies? Are we really all so desperately unhappy and unfulfilled that the desire to escape is constantly present? Do we all feel as though we’re failing to keep up?

I’m reminded of the ‘bird man’ pictographs etched into the rocks during the last days of Easter Island – thought by many to be articulations of the islanders’ inability to take flight after their raw materials had been expended on irrational statue-building. Is The Escapologist a modern incarnation of the bird man? Do we all long to flee the mess we’ve made of things?

Waiting at the train station in the dismal suburban town of Barrhead (the birthplace of Armitage Shanks piss pots) this evening, I noticed a dump-bin display unit for the free Metro commuter newspaper. "Help Yourself" it offered. Since the last copy had been taken, a second message was displayed: "You’ve Got to Be Quick".

If I were a more superstitious individual I might have taken this to be a personal message from a higher being or perhaps a clever piece of programming from my real-world trapped-in-an-artificial-reality-booth self.

“Help Yourself. You’ve Got to Be Quick.”

It was like a subliminal message planted by Darren Brown and his funny-shaped head.

Your humble narrator has been a little down in the dumps, you see. The feeling of ensnarement and the desire to escape have been seldom far from my consciousness of late. I’m four days into a five-week placement with East Renfrewshire Community Libraries. I really don’t want to do it but it’s a requirement of my MSc librarianship course. The fact that I’ve been working in libraries for years now does not call for my exemption from this exercise. So I’m having to do the job I’ve been doing for years, only for no wages (for minus wages in fact given that it’s an expensive train journey for me to get there each day) and for more intolerable hours. It’s really quite awful.

So the opportune sighting of the message, “Help Yourself. You’ve Got to Be Quick” almost pushed me over the edge. It was kinda like that old episode of The X Files in which people start receiving messages (usually along the lines of “Kill ‘Em. Kill ‘Em All!”) from digital clocks.

“Yeah”, I thought, “I really do have to be quick. I’ve only got a few years of youth left. I shall join a commune and paint my nails immediately.”

But I didn’t, of course. Because I’m a pussy. And such spontaneous Dice Man decisions are seldom made by pussies.

Tonight, I repair to The Tron to witness the acclaimed The Escapologist. Quite Appropriate, I’m sure.

I was unlucky enough to catch some of The Weakest Link this afterlunch.

The contestants are forced to vote each other off at certain stages of the game until only one of them remains. When this happens, Anne Robinson likes to enquire as to the contestant’s decision-making process: “So why did you nominate Graham?”

Usually they will respond with something vaguely justified like “Aw, Graham’s supposed to be a medical student and he got that question about genital herpes wrong”.

If I was on the show and Anne asked me why I’d chosen a particular guy, I’d say, “Because he’s black”.

Even if he wasn’t.

To the new house of Miss Stephanie Clark to celebrate the end of one arbitrary unit of temporal measurement and the start of a new one. It was a nice evening. We played a pop-music DVD quiz (which I wasn’t much help on because the only pop music I understand is that of the White Stripes and Morrissey and there weren’t any questions on either) and ate vegetable samosas.

Among the guests of our little party were the parents of Steph’s new housemate, Adele. It seemed that I’d been introduced to them and everyone else beforehand and that Steph had positioned me as ‘the funny one’: part librarian and part stand-up comedian or something. I’m such a ball of irony.

This was actually nice and left me feeling rather un-self-conscious for the first time in ages. There was much uproarious laughter at my stupid and mostly off-the-cuff one-man dialogues to the extent that the situation reminded me of that episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation where Data trains to become a stand-up comedian but all of his audience is holographic and programmed to laugh at anything he does. You’d think this would be a bad thing. But it was great. Because I’m a shallow, shallow boy who likes attention.

I assumed that Adele’s parents – being middle-aged and from the Black Country and all – would be a bit conservative so I had endeavoured to watch my potty-mouth. But before I knew it, a great big cancer joke toppled out of my gob like an ugly, dislodged homunculus.

But it was okay. They liked the cancer. I had been completely prejudiced in my assumptions about them.

Maybe everyone finds cancer funny and it’s not really an edgy or controversial subject matter at all. Which is weird. I doubt there is a person in the world over 20 who has not been affected by cancer in one way or another. Why is it funny? You’re all sick. Sick and wrong. Stop touching yourself! I can see you, you know.

As usual though, faux-pas would raise its hilarious head. Steph passed an atypically maternal comment about her 19-year-old ‘little brother’ and I said something like “Oh, Steph, he’s old enough to have had a wank. In fact, he’s probably wanking right now.”

For some reason this one didn’t go down well. Why is cancer okay to laugh at but wanking isn’t? I’ll probably never understand comedy at all.

As Polly Toynbee points out today, it’s quite fashionable to be a curmudgeonly old fucker. This is quite fortuitous for me, as I’ve been miserable ever since I developed sentience*. At last I am in vogue.

Ms. Toynbee proposes that we give up this grumpiness on the grounds that we live in a "golden age" – a golden age in which iPods, the Internet and mobile phones have revolutionised the way we live and have made everything free and accessible. She goes on to ridicule people who object to "mass culture" and those who search for "authenticity". She even goes on to describe the "cornucopia of affordable pleasures" involved in leisure-shopping.

Has Polly gone stark raving bonkers? I’m a big fan but as a member of the British Humanist Association I’m sure she once wrote something along the lines of "when you’re a humanist, even buying a bunch of grapes becomes an ethical consideration." I may have got her confused with someone else, but she’s definitely a member of the group and this is really one of the founding principals.

The problem with leisure-shopping is that it’s a form of unnecessary consumption. People have to stop buying shit they don’t need. Doing so just makes a place for mind-numbing, underpaid jobs. Most things in the mall are made partly or entirely of plastic: every time you buy something you stimulate further demand for oil and consequentially the demand for war. That’s what’s wrong with it, Polly.

And have iPods and the likes made anything better? Have they made us happier? Can they indeed? Not me. Sadly, it’s really all shit. As a librarian, I know how devoid of good stuff and full of dangerously misleading shit the Internet is. Take my blog for example. As for MP3 Players, I‘ve got through three different models in as many weeks because they are cheap and shit. It’s not made me happy: it’s merely justified my grumpiness.

It’s important not to be anti-progress but it’s difficult to enjoy this "golden age" when all the new technology is ever used for is making plastic-looking dinosaurs in the appalling new King Kong. Toynbee has a go at nostalgia and young people pining for a past that they never experienced, but it’s more complex than that. Directors of films in, say, the 1950s, had honed their craft: they’d perfected the various arts involved in black and white filmstock. When you look at the new King Kong or Sky Captain or something else heavy with GCI, you just think "what on Earth are they doing?”

Having said all of this, ‘grumpo chic’ is undeniably an unhealthy fashion to follow. It can be justified, I think, with John Stuart Mill’s famous maxim "it’s better to be an unhappy Socrates than a happy pig", but even then it must be bad for your health. Be happy if you can, sure, but it’s important not to go around in a daze of retail therapy and constant iPoddery. I almost got run over the other day for doing just that.

I feel like such a prick for criticising Polly Toynbee. I love her! But I don’t know what she was on about today.

 

*< size="1">It happened at 1:23pm on December 15th 2001. I was spiral-binding scripts for a play I’d written for an amateur theatre group and it suddenly occurred to me that I’d wasted my youth.

I got called a twat today by a barmaid in Stourbridge. It was one of those unanticipated, out-of-proportion responses that you occasionally get from terminally baffled people or people who are pissed off about something before you even get there.

“YOU TWAT!” she shouted “CAN’T YOU READ, YOU FUCKING TWAT? THERE’S SIGNS UP EVERYWHERE!”

Confused at first, I realised that I’d put my pint down on the wooden part of the pool table and that there was a hand-written sign on the wall asking you not to do this.

“Christ,” I said, “I’m sorry, really. I didn’t see any sign.”

And I hadn’t seen it. My friend and I had literally been in the pub for five minutes. We’d picked up our drinks from the bar and carried them into the next room, in which I spotted a guy I knew and hadn’t seen for a couple of years (He used to be in a band I episodically hung out with, which he informed me today had split up due to their lead guitar guy being poached by a bigger, undoubtedly better band) and so I naturally put my pint down on the nearest surface so that I could shake his hand.

She snatched my pint from the pool table to put it up on a ledge and then gestured to a beery ring mark left by my glass.

I wanted to tell here that there wouldn’t have been a beery ring mark if she had not snatched it up so violently but decided it was best not to go in this direction and instead to just apologise again. If this had been her reaction to a ‘misplaced’ beer glass in a public house, then only Christ knew how she would have reacted to my arguing with her: she’d have probably produced an old Winchester from behind the bar and shot the place up.

“Really, I’m sorry. I only just got in the door and I’ve never even been here before.”

“TWAT!”

The weirdest thing about all of this was that no one so much as battered an eyelid at all the shouting. As soon as she’d gone, my friend just continued in our conversation as though it hadn’t even been interrupted. Perhaps the barmaid going ape-shit is a commonplace thing there, though it made me wonder if the whole thing had even happened at all and it wasn’t just a sort of
Spaced-esq moment of unreality.

Now that my postgraduate course is slowing down for Christmas, I get to spend a greater number of daylight hours doing productive things like working on my book, writing articles, spending time with friends and family and watching terrible, terrible, bad, terrible daytime television.

Particularly of interest is a show I’ve found myself watching on no less than four occasions called Make Me Rich in which a TV Money Guru goes round to people’s houses and shows them how to save literally pence a year (actually, it does usually equate to several thousand pounds) by cutting back in certain areas.

The principal of the show seems quite commendable at first: Mr. TV Guru Man says things like “I want to tackle those big companies who rip you off and put the money back in your hands”. The website says:

“This series isn’t about cutting back – it’s about enabling people to take on companies, find the top deals, and play the system helping them to potentially release thousands of pounds each year.“

I like this. It is good. He’s literally sticking it to the man. He’s like a human version of anarchist fox, Robin Hood. ITV are being quite brave here by airing such radical anti-establishment programming so early in the day: the mums of the nation will soon be forming NIMBY groups against the biggest multinationals.

The money-saving starts with quite sensible things that scrape surprising amounts of money back from The Corporation such as ‘giving up smoking’ so that the evil tobacco people are robbed of up to £10,000 of working-class money per year.

But then it all goes quite mad. They start cutting back on things like food or having haircuts or bathing. They cancel their gym memberships. They have their pets exterminated in order to save on vet bills. All of this is obvious: the key to becoming rich it seems is not to spend or do anything.

In the end they have saved around twenty grand but at what cost? They are now long-haired, seldom-bathed freaks with no friends, shivering from nicotine withdrawal and staying at home every night with all the lights turned off.

It’s great TV.