The Occasional Papers

At 5:30, I’m squawked awake by an astonishingly loud seagull.

After half an hour of lying in the semi-darkness and thinking about seagulls, their being harbingers of climate crisis, their association with rubbish dumps and consequently our grubby city, and wondering why the council don’t get up off their arses and shoot them all with GUNS, I decide to just get up.

Rarely am I awake so early without also needing to catch a plane, so it’s all I can do not to start hunting around for my passport.

Not yet desirous of my cereal, I decide to get the jump on a few chores. I do the washing up, shave, place a grocery order, fold laundry, write my diary. At 8:00, I can’t believe how successful I’ve been today, and with so much time ahead of me for the squandering.

I can’t help wonder if maybe this is how things should be, and that the hup-hup-hup-with-the-lark, thousand-words-before-breafast writers were right all along. Has a noisy seagull changed my life? Christ, I hope not.

Today I walked from our home to Loch Lomond. I get these urges sometimes.

Google Maps had promised a sixteen-mile journey but I walked closer to twenty thanks to my wrong idea that I should to head to the river to get onto the route I had in mind, when I could have just walked west and saved about an hour.

I’m a little out of shape and it took everything I’d got to complete the walk. It stopped being fun around the sixteen-mile mark, and now my legs throb like a pair of throbbing things.

By the time I got to Balloch (the town on the closest shore of the loch), I was more than ready to hop onto the train and go home. But a nerd’s completionism had me walk as if possessed for an extra third of a mile down to the bonnie, bonnie banks so that I might dip my hand in the loch water.

Clearly in a weird conscious state from the too-long walk, I ran the loch water through my hair like some sort of pollution-augmented baptism. I have superpowers now, which is annoying really as I had my heart set on a quiet life of reading and writing.

The sunshine baked me for much of the way but, as you can see from this photograph of the endpoint, the moody clouds closed in, finally bursting as I got home.

At one point on the walk, I saw a future echo. And I was met at the finish line by a lovely lady:

On Monday I went in for a redo of the allergy test. A nurse applied the sticky, circular patches to my back and then on Wednesday, as instructed, I peeled them off.

Today I return to the dermatology clinic to hear the end-of-week results, though I’ve already seen in the mirror that the only reaction I had was not in response to the allergens we tested for but to the glue they used to apply the patches.

“Congratulations, you’re allergic to surgical gum!” is hardly a useful result. Why do I always confound science? In high school I spent a semester twiddling the wrong knob on a microscope and looking backwards into my eyeball.

I’d been planning to write in my diary today that “the little red circles of eczema make it look like I’ve wrestled a giant octopus.” You know, because of the suction cups on the tentacles. But now I can’t do that can I?

A neighbour knocks on the door at 9:30pm. He’s locked himself out and has no phone or wallet or anything. His flatmate is in Canada and there are no other keys in the world aside from the one held by the letting agency, which is of course closed.

I summon an emergency locksmith and we drink tea and make chitchat while we wait. He says he’s looking forward to seeing some free comedy shows at the Fringe. “Oh, you should give me some recommendations,” I say, and quickly coming to my senses, “actually… no, don’t.”

When the locksmith arrives, I buzz him in but he doesn’t speak into the intercom so I can’t be certain. It reminds me of the joke from Police Squad:

Who are you and how did you get in here?
I’m a locksmith. And I’m a locksmith.

Our favourite place to donate clothes and books at the moment is a cat-themed charity shop.

It’s not the closest charity shop to our flat, but it’s spacious and clean and pleasant to browse in. It also has some funny pictures of cats about the place. They say naff things like, “give the purrrrfect gift” and “cat’s a wrap.” Imagine if one of them just said “DOOM” and you didn’t really notice until six hours later when you were brushing your teeth.

Walking in town this morning, I notice a young man standing outside a sexual health clinic. He’s smoking a Sherlock Holmes pipe.

It’s our fifth wedding anniversary and Samara’s mum sends us a framed print of this photograph.

It was taken in Saint-Hippolyte, Quebec, in 2010. I was out of my element and nervous about being on a boat but I look strangely at ease in the photograph. I suggest we display the picture prominently at home so that guests can glimpse my heroic outdoorsmanship.

“Let’s not do that,” says Samara. “People will only ask us to go camping.”

We celebrate our five years of marriage by drinking from a coconut.

There’s a nice piece about Simon M. in today’s Times. It’s good to see the world has woken up to how lovable he is.

“Your paper reviewed me a few years ago and said I will die in a gutter with all my ideas stolen from me,” he laughs. “I studiously avoid gutters.”

Cluub Zarathustra is mentioned. As usual, I feel partly to blame.

I overhear a young Canadian telling her English boyfriend about International House of Pancakes:

“You can go there in the middle of the night if you want to. A lot of young people like it but so do old people. And you can eat pancakes, which is always a good plan. And it’s like a portal, because if you’re travelling, they’re all the exactly same. It’s like a restaurant… but for everyone.”

Some consolatory emails arrive from friends in North America re: Britain’s new PM.

I don’t really want to think about him. My feelings about the new PM are largely summed up by Gary Younge who writes:

The rise of Boris Johnson was only really ever improbable if you were under the delusion that we live in a meritocracy.

I’ve never cared for the post-millennium year names. Not only have we lost the plunky-plunky-plunk rhythm of “Nineteen ninety-nine” and “eighteen forty-two,” we also have year names that sound decidedly Star Trekish while all around us lie the ruins of civilisation. It’s too much to bear.

So! Today, after nineteen years of suffering this crap, I have devised a new calendar. Critics will draw comparisons to the years of the Chinese Zodiac and may also suggest that I’m spending too much time alone and indoors.

2019 – Year of the Aphid
2020 – Year of the Coconut Crab
2021 – Year of the Ring-Tailed Lemur
2022 – Year of the Mantis Shrimp
2023 – Year of the Globular Springtail
2024 – Year of the Orangutan
2025 – Year of the Centipede
2026 – Year of the Barreleye
2027 – Year of the Tardigrade
2028 – Year of Just Arthropods in General
2029 – Year of the Octopus
2030 – Year of the Talking Lavatory Who Sings to You and Is Alive

Unlike the Chinese Zodiac, my calendar is not cyclical. One does not return to the Year of the Aphid after New Year’s Eve of the Year of the Talking Lavatory Who Sings to You and Is Alive. No, no, no.

Additional years will be added if required.

I’ll find out if there’s a way to hack the date display of this blog to conform to the new calendar. But I’d better get a move on. We’re already halfway through the Year of the Aphid.

Or, as some will see it, four months into the Aphid-Coconut Crab Financial Year.

In the park this afternoon, a teenager heckles a cyclist. She says: “Real men ride women, not bikes!”

A morning walk to the Fossil Grove to commune with pre-history.

I’d seen the fossils once before but Samara had not and, every time we’ve tried to see them together, the bloody place has been closed.

There’s something funny about setting out to touch Deep Time only to find it closed. “The Eternal is not accessible today due to staffing shortages. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause.” Of course! The bloody council! * waves fist *

Anyway, we finally saw the fossils today and they really are something. Evidence of life on Earth some 325 million years ago. I mean, come on.

I was distracted from my sense of deep time only by the fossils’ passing resemblance to Linda Barry’s magic cephalopod. Look:

On the train, a trio of wretched-looking youths were hunched at one end of the carriage while a group of glowing young mums chatted at the other.

Samara and I sat at the centre of the carriage and, suddenly, a baby’s bottle half-filled with milk rolled speedily past us from where the healthy young mums were gathered, all the way down the aisle to the ratboys.

It landed stopped rolling at the feet of their leader who picked it up and sniffed at it. He looked gloriously bewildered for a moment before returning it to a thankful mum.

“It’s a sign,” I told him.

“Blerg,” he said, and squirted Weil’s Disease squarely into my face.

Later in the afternoon, I’d get my own sign from the babygods when, at a barbecue, a little koala-like baby dragged himself along the lawn and used my leg to pull himself unsteadily onto his feet.

I touched the back of his head in an investigatory and hopefully-affectionate way. It was like a warm cantaloupe.

I was slightly drunk and unsure of what to do about this stranger’s child potentially pulling my trousers down, but his father soon came over to rescue us both.

“Don’t you think the world is overcrowded as it is without your sexcrement running all over the place?” is precisely what I didn’t say. “And why is your face so blurry?”

At least, I don’t think I said it.

I like barbecues.

I’m looking forward to seeing this.

I agree with Stewart’s Brum-baiting remark that Birmingham “has a great history of rejecting its culture.”

As well as rejecting the King Kong statue featured in the film, another fibreglass statue–“Forward” by Raymond Mason–was never popular, on the grounds that it optimistically and apparently irreverently depicted Birmingham’s graduation from heavy industry.

It was finally incinerated by vandals 2003. A sibling sculpture survives contentedly in my other hometown of Montreal.

I like the Nightingales a lot (I treasure memories of Robert Lloyd singing loudly into my wife’s tiny face in a Glasgow pub basement) and, of course, I have much love Michael Cumming and Mr Stew.

As it happens, the last time I trod the Rotunda-shadowed streets seen in this trailer was to see Cumming’s own Oxide Ghosts at the Arena Theatre in Wolverhampton last year.

It was a deeply nostalgic trip: I’d performed at the Arena a few times as a student (most memorably as “a demon pouffe” in a daft version of Anansi Spider Stories) but Wolverhampton was also where, agog, I watched Brass Eye and bonded with others over it, and set my sights on a lifetime of nonsense.

On the same trip, I was shocked to learn of the refurbishment (the DEVASTATION!) of Mr Egg, a late-night lifesaver near to the Glee Club.

Stewart Lee has mentioned Mr Egg somewhere and, oddly enough, Richard Herring refers to the refurbishment in his podcast this very week:

“I was hanging out at Mr Egg the other day… just late-night, having a bit of an egg… the original Mr Egg was there, not the new one, the original Mr Egg, the good… the proper one.”

Anyway. Yes. I find myself earnestly hankering to see King Rocker. I email my Mum to ask if she remembers the King Kong statue from its six-month Bullring residency in 1972. She does! She also remembers it being in Edinburgh.

The ape seems oddly familiar to me (and there’s apparently a maquette in Wolverhampton Art Gallery) but, alas, I do not consciously remember it from either location, despite their significance to me as places.

Gentlemen. If you have the urge to hula-hoop in the nude, oblige it. But know that you’ll remind us all of some chewing gum caught in a ceiling fan.

To Liverpool to see my parents. They don’t live in Liverpool; I just didn’t want to go to Dudley and they didn’t want to come to Glasgow so we meet partway.

At the Walker Gallery, we see Glasgow Museums’ travelling exhibition about Charles Rennie Mackintosh. It feels a bit silly being there when Samara and I essentially live in a Mackintosh theme park, but we see plenty of archival items that aren’t typically on display in Glasgow. I think about my pals in Glasgow Museums boxing up these treasures up and loading them into the van.

I’m disappointed that Dad at no point says, “Ohhh Rennie!” with reference to ‘Allo ‘Allo. He spots a Blackadder in the list of names on a war memorial by the Mersey though so not all is lost.

In the exhibition, I’m taken with a Talwin Morris ex-libris bookplate. It reads, “There lyeth more in ye telling than in ye tale,” which I like. “Style over substance,” is a tedious criticism, isn’t it? It’s Sontag or bust for me.

We retire to a pub and talk about how Mum doesn’t like The Beatles. She keeps speaking with her mouth full. She used to tell me off for that.

Not for the first time, I feel bad that my mum saw her baby slowly transmogrified into a weird, awkward man who lives so far from home. But when I see the Kenn Dodd statue in Lime Street station, I realise it could have been worse.

Dad points out that the statue version of Doddy’s tickling stick looks like a revolving column of doner kebab meat. It does too.

Wanting to get my eczema fixed, I attend a clinic this afternoon for a long-overdue “patch test.”

This should involve having adhesive patches applied to my back, each one instilled with a common allergen: wool, polyester, dust, gorilla saliva, etc. I’d then endure them for three fun, fun, days before reporting to a dermatologist to see which materials must be expunged from my world.

In the event, my skin is too eczematic to conduct the test. It doesn’t seem particularly bad to me, but the nurse says the test wouldn’t be conclusive and I’m to come back in two weeks to try again.

The fact that my skin doesn’t feel particularly bad to me at the moment is a little troubling. Apparently I’m in state of allergic reaction so perpetual that, to me, it just seems normal.

So now I’m in a state of Allergy Catch-22 in which I’m too allergic for the test that will allow me to escape the reaction. Bloody hell.