The Occasional Papers

Once, in London, I stopped to briefly look at the houses of parliament. An American tourist was squinting up at the clock tower with a strange look on his face so I asked him what he thought of it. “It’s not very big,” he said.

I’d never thought of “bigness” as a quality the clock tower was supposed to possess, but later it occurred to me that “Big Ben” might in fact promise bigness.

It left me wondering if tourists come from all over the world to visit what I see as a symbol of democracy or Imperialism, expecting to see “a big clock.”

I’m working on a travel book at the moment, part of which involves transcribing and learning from the travel journals of a friend, Wentworth, who has been to all manner of places including Myanmar, Iran, and North Korea. From Washington DC he writes:

I have read complaints that the White House is underwhelmingly small but I found it to be a rare example of restraint in the USA.

There it is again! The tourist expectation of bigness. I now wonder if an assumption of bigness comes from a reverence for powerful institutions (since my sample concerns only UK and US government buildings) or if a sense of awe comes, like an optical illusion, from sheer distance or the promise of pilgrimage.

Answers on a postcard.

Poking around in the University gift shop with Alan today, he hands me a leather key fob and asks that I decipher the embossed text on the back of it. “Is it a name?” he asks.

I squint at it and read it aloud:

GENUINE HIDE LEATHER, it says, MADE IN SCOTLAND.

“That’s what it says on your arse isn’t it?” I say.

Well, one of us had to. It was hanging there in space. Like Alan’s arse.

I learn today from All Killa No Filla that Patrick Mackay’s nickname was “The Psychopath.”

Well, that’s hardly good enough is it?

Usually, a serial killer’s nickname is location-based (e.g. “The Beast of Legoland”) or it comes from their victim demographic (“The Drycleaner Murders”), murder method (“The Fuzzy Felt Killer”), or origin story (“Son of Scrabble”).

I know serial killers don’t line up to register their name at some sort of Companies House of Murder, but calling yourself “The Psychopath” is like going around as “The Killer Man” or something. Just Rubbish. Note to all serial killers: the nickname should distinguish you against the other serial killers, not the general public.

Hey, if your thing was strangling tourists at Loch Ness, would you be called “The Loch Ness Monster” or would you run into trouble with the Companies House of Cryptids? Genuine Question.

An email pops into my inbox concerning “medical tattoos.”

At first I can’t parse what a medical tattoo is most likely be. The two concepts aren’t at odds exactly, but one rarely sees them side by side. Are people having Grays Anatomy-style heart diagrams in place of the traditional love hearts now? Are stethoscopes the new horseshoes?

The email is not spam. It’s from the Ectodermal Dysplasia Society (I have ED and I’m on their mailing list) and they’re asking for research participants. Medical Tattooing seems to be geared towards the correction of burns or scars or skin discolouration.

I have some mild eczema scarring on my back and I vainly consider having it dealt with through tattoos. Before I know it though, I’m considering the merits of just getting the full Red Dragon and being done with it.

If nothing else, I’d be the first person sporting that particular tattoo to also use the phrase, “in for a penny, in for a pound.”

On the way home, some cops are bundling a drunk into their van. It’s a struggle and one of them shouts, “DO NOT ATTEMPT TO BITE A POLICEMAN! DO NOT ATTEMPT TO BITE A POLICEMAN!”

The clear, officious language of “attempt” and his deploying of the third person contrasts endearingly against his use of the word the “policeman.”

“Police officer” would have been a better fit. “Policeman” is what a seven-year-old wants to be when he grows up.

I find myself wondering if now would be the ideal opportunity or the worst possible moment to try and steal a helmet.

To a double bill of The Omen and Omen II at L & G’s house. I’m happy to find my ideal film-watching scenario ready and waiting:

I recognise the lead actor in Omen II (1978) as William Holden from Network (1976). I spend the rest of the film wondering about the choices that led him so quickly from working with Faye Dunaway in a high-quality Oscar-winning satire to flinching at crows in a clumsy horror sequel.

I read later that he’d been considered for the Gregory Peck role in the original film but he’d turned it down because he “did not want to star in a picture about the devil.” You can imagine him throwing his morals in the bin after witnessing the success of the first movie and signing up for the sequel even though it didn’t have the original screenwriter or director or any of the original cast on board. It’s a wonderful “lose-lose” decision. It’s like watching someone pay money to eat snot.

After the screening, we chat about comparable sequels, Exorcist II and Look What’s Happened to Rosemary’s Baby. Not everyone in the room has heard of the Rosemary’s Baby one but they accept its unlikely existence at face value. I see if I can get them to believe in Don’t Look Now Too: Look Who’s Not Looking Now but it doesn’t fly.

“Flat Inspection,” says a note on our calendar for today.

I really do prefer to rent a place instead of own one. What would we do with a house? Paint it, I suppose. Insure it, probably. Big deal. And yet there’s the odd moment I curse being a tenant, Inspection Day being one of them.

The inspection itself is little trouble. It can be done in ten minutes and really just involves an inspector looking for signs of damp or subsidence, and marking a few things off on a clipboard.

What’s tricky is how the inspector never sees fit to buzz the street-level intercom like any other contractor. He lets himself into the building using the letting agency’s keys, and knocks on the door of the flat, which doesn’t give one a lot of time to pull one’s trousers on [one].

Taking a nap or drawing a bath are obviously out of the question on Inspection Day. You have to sit around in presentable clothes, not masturbating, and longing for his knock so you can get it all over with.

And–get this–if you don’t answer the door quickly enough, he’ll let himself right into the flat. Once, while Shanti was visiting us from Canada, he unlocked the storm door and stood peering through the stained glass of the interior door, providing poor Shanti with more nightmare fuel than she’s probably allowed to take back on the plane. None of us had heard his knock.

Why can’t he buzz like anyone else or, if he must insist on entering the building like a big-shot, how about ringing our doorbell? Or knocking loud enough for the human ear to detect?

There’s four of these intrusions a year and, since we’ve lived here for three years, our letting agency has visited us no fewer than twelve times, which is probably more times than any one of our friends has ever visited.

The inspector tends to turn up in the morning, presumably operating on the principle of a dawn raid, but today, for some reason, this is not the case and I’m left on the edge of my seat, unable to concentrate on my work or to take a bath, for fear of his bursting in with an airhorn.

So where is this guy?

At 3pm, I check the letter from the agency to make sure the date on the calendar is correct. “09/08,” it says, “/2017.”

Ah.

I must have looked at an old letter when updating the calendar.

He’s not due for another month.

Well, it’s nice to have something to look forward to, isn’t it?

To a hipster barbershop where, while trying to ignore on-the-nose jukebox classics, I’m given what is probably the best haircut I’ve ever had.

It’s incredible. They’ve made me look like a young Humphrey Bogart. I walked home along the backs of the swooned.

“Good news” you might say, but, as I look in the mirror, I understand with a sudden jolt that every time I’ve been on stage, every time I’ve been photographed for an interview or a book jacket, every time I’ve dressed up for a wedding or an important meeting, every time I’ve tried to look nonchalant while signing a proffered Loose Egg, and even that time I auditioned for Mastermind, I’ve looked like a shit-haired twat.

Mum calls and mentions some app-based frustrations. Microsoft Outlook is asking for an update but, when she goes to allow it, she’s prompted to delete Facebook and a bird-watching app.

“That doesn’t sound right,” I say, and I suggest uninstalling Outlook and re-downloading it from the app store, fresh.

She’s not keen on this plan as it’s likely to mean re-entering her password.

“It’s the dark side of the web,” she says.

“No it isn’t,” I say.

“It. Is,” she says.

I was a little tired yesterday and didn’t feel like going to our Monday-night pub quiz, so I suggested that Samara go along without me.

It’s rare for one of us to attend the quiz without the other. Last time, it was I who went alone and, when people asked after my wife, I told them we’d got a divorce and that she was never coming back. Jonny immediately asked me for her phone number.

Last night, I suggested that Samara play the divorce joke again and that, this time, she should immediately give Jonny my phone number.

In the event, she just told them I was feeling cranky after being startled by a seagull.

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.