Not Only Happy When it Rains

Picture this: it’s raining, the heavy nail-ended stuff that batters down with a stuttering rapid rattle, smacking you in the face like a barrage of punches from a mini-me Muhammed Ali. Or an angry Tinkerbell. You get the idea. Like small frequent punches. But wet. Okay -- I admit it – the analogy’s not great, but it’s all you’re getting, so live with it. FFS.

As I was saying, before I was so abruptly interrupted: it’s raining. And there’s lots of it.  The sky is that gun-metal Grey of Doom which features so prevalently in the rooftop scene of Ghostbusters, or a John Martin painting*. All the air a solemn blackness holds, there is a sudden crack of thunder, and a fast flash of lightning dances and claws its path across the overhanging firmament. 

There, along the Great North Road, two solitary figures scurry over pavements and puddles, coats pulled in tight, hunched, packed-close against the relentless deluge.  And one of those figures is me, with my friend Dave, explaining that:

a)      I didn’t believe in God AT ALL.  

And

 b) I really wanted to get to the pub before I became one with the elemental force of water.

Dave seems skeptical,  insists that I must have some slither of doubt, must entertain the possibility, however feint, that there is something beyond this mortal coil.

To illustrate my point, I slow down, and grab a metal pole (I have no idea where this came from. I suspect it was bit of broken fence lying on the floor. I may have been carrying it already, although this seems unlikely, because it would suggest I was some kind of pole-carrying nutter, which I’m not.  It’s not really important anyway, but in case you were wondering, it came from somewhere, but where that where was, I don’t recall.) So, I grab said Pole of Unending Mystery. Then, Thor-like, hold my prize aloft, pointing towards the heavens, and shout enthusiastically:

‘Come on God, you bastard. Cumanavago if you think yerard enough.’

It turns out he wasn’t hard enough, and I dropped the pole, wetly smug in my scientific demonstration of the absence of a divine being**.

The point of this is that I am not in any way a person prone to harbouring superstitious thoughts, or beliefs in any kind of Sky-magic.

But, last week, I wanted to write about the approach to the last game of the English football season, about Manchester City’s approach to their first Premiership title in my lifetime, about my approach to that weekend, festering with trepidation and excitement.  But I couldn’t  Although I was prepared to take on God, and risk my life, I wasn’t prepared to tempt the Lares of football, and watch the team I support possibly not win a game of football.

There are people who would point to these two details as evidence of all that is wrong with a modern attitude towards religion, or the over-importance we place on such trivia as professional football.

However, these people are either Theists of some kind, or they don’t support Manchester City, so they can fuck right off.  God didn’t kill me, City won the Premiership. All is well with the world.

Champions.

*This John Martin, not this John Martyn.

**I appreciate the scientific flaws of the demonstration, before any feels compelled to point them out

Mini-rant #1

I had to go to Harrod's today. The place drips money, like a treacly semen stain on golden undies. It also oozes class in much the same way as the bridal wear does in My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding.

We parked around the corner, where there was a pretty little park.  We tried to cut through same park, only to find it was locked, as it was for residents only. For me, this symbolises everything that is wrong with Harrod's, wrong with the man driving the shiny black gigantathonic Maybach in front of me, and wrong with the uber-snotty desk-monkey manning the Watch Service Centre.

Key-holding residents of Hans Place, Knightsbrige: It's a pissy little patch of grass.  It's not picturesque enough to warrant anything other than a cursory glance. You've only locked it up to show how privileged you are.  I'm coming back with a spade.

Dear Mr Li:  Thank you for sharing your name with me via the means of your number plate.  You too ooze class.  Just for the record, my name is not M799 TCW.  And, even though I was in Micra, I managed to sneak it into a tiny parking space. I bet you're still driving around looking for bay capable of taking your massive, but frankly quite ridiculous, motor vehicle.

And finally, Watch Man: whose wrinkled lip and sneer of cold disdain demonstrated clearly enough that he didn't appreciate the fact that I had chosen not to spend £360 on a watch service because, quite frankly, that's the most fucking ridiculous thing I have EVER heard. Trust me, I've spoken to Spurs fans who thought they might win the title, so I know ridiculous.  I'm at home now, drinking coffee and playing with my toys. You're still at work.  In the basement of a department store.  Handing watches to people. I can only feel pity for you.  Pity, my friend. Unadulterated, pure-blooded pity.

The Best Laid Plans

Growing up, my experiences of narrative were formed by Enid Blyton, as I voraciously ate my way through the Famous Five series, then the Secret Seven, the Mystery books, and the lesser know Super Six and Fab Four* collections.

Consequently, when I first read The Catcher in the Rye at the age of fifteen, I thought I knew how books worked. So, when Holden Caulfiled mentions ‘this madman stuff that happened that last summer’ on page one, I was set up for adventure. The twisted exhilaration that followed was, however, thwarted by the failure of Holden to be kidnapped, assaulted, abused, shot at, hit, spat at or even spoken to gently and kindly, even in passing, by any kind of psychologically deranged male.  I had to re-read the opening to make sure I hadn’t imagined the madmanness, and then feel puzzled that it was written, but it had failed to materialise. 

Sometime later I realised that ‘madman’ was slang for ‘somewhat interesting’, and possibly also a subconscious manifestation of Holden’s own precarious mental state.  At the time, though, I thought J.D. Salinger's sloppy editor had just fucked up.

All of which leads, in a prestidigious segue of Merlinesque proportions,to Fiji, where I am now sitting by a pool under the pacific blue**.  I arrived a few days ago, but actually should have been here over a week ago. However,  due to a Fiji-centred cyclone, I ended up ‘stuck’ in Sydney for a week, in transit.  Obviously, when I learned of this forced delay,  the humanitarian plight of the locals preyed on my mind, but mostly I was pissed off that my planned holiday had been curtailed. Not least because I seem to have a travel curse, which often causes my plans to be thwarted.

Several years ago I was in Lyon for New Year’s Eve***, and while all that was lovely and wonderful and other uppy-adjectives, on preparing to come home I realised that I had booked my flight a day later than my girlfriend’s flight, and the planned day of rest before my imminent return to work was now to be a day of solitude in Lyon. Not the biggest grievance, but I was really looking forward to a long Sunday lie-in, a bath and some hot chocolate. It’s the little things which make the difference in life.

My girlfriend’s flight took off without hitch (probably because I wasn't on it), and I was resigned to making the most of my situation. The very, very heavy snowfall which started as I stared out of the bus window back the hostel was seemingly a bonus, as it meant I would experience the city afresh, with its new snowy coat, the following day.

Cut to the airport, twenty four hours later.  I’d made the proverbial lemonade from my lemons of time, and had wandered around the old city lost in a wistful romanticism as the snow fell heavily, covering the town in a sea of soft icy whiteness.  I’d taken the opportunity to visit the University at which Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, had overseen the deportation of French Jews to concentration camps, and experienced that guilty mix of horror, revulsion and touristic voyeurism that comes from going to such places.  But mostly, I’d done everything I wanted to do in Lyon, and now wanted to get back to London,  to that bath and, particularly, to that hot chocolate.

Fucking Easyjet. Four hours in departures before they confimed that the plane could not take off because of the constant snowfall. Another two hours before I was told it would be four days before there would be another flight. Another two seconds before a gush of sweary invective about the piss-poorness of the service and information. This annoyance continued throughout the bus journey to the hotel they provided, during the meal, and right up until the words ‘free bar’ were mentioned, at which point my mood and the evening took on a new complexion.

Which, once again, segues nicely into my aborted attempt to get to Fiji. Because, although I couldn’t get to Fiji, I did get stuck in Sydney, which is not the worst place in the world for an unexpected holiday****. Especially when it is technically a ‘Delayed Journey’, and the insurance company is paying for all your food and booze. This time, sipping beer under the Sydney sun, eating oysters and watching the life of the harbor pass me by, I quickly got over my sense of thwarted disappointment, and my sympathy for the flooded Fijians wasn’t perpetually overshadowed by a sense of petty unfulfillment. Sunshine and magnanimity make good bedfellows. Your journey, literally and metaphorically, might not take you where expect, but sometimes,the destination can wait*****. 

Because, since that initial Salinger-induced confusion, I’ve learned this: if you spend your life waiting to meet the madman, you lose the plot. In the immortal words of Noel Gallagher: Be here now******.  Let tomorrow be.

*I may be confusing this with watching the films Help and A Hard Days Night

** I know, sometimes it’s a hard, hard struggle.

*** I mean, it’s a sometime a really, really hard life

****Although it is riddled with Australians

***** Especially if it's flooded

******Yes, I know it's somebody else's phrase. I just can't be arsed looking it up. 

What Kind of Times are These?

Sometimes, when faced with the taunting white of a blank screen, I relish the challenge of inflaming the page with my sage ideas, and I plunge headlong into the world of words, chasing every passage of ideas, every alley of thought, as the shifting flashes of my mind become a moment of creation. 

Then I read what I have written, feel the grey dawn of despair and fall into a hollow reverie where I contemplate the futility of being. It is a powerful effect of my writing, but never the intended one. 

I write mostly to stop the noise, and stay this side of sane*.  If the words are out, they’re not dancing round my head like an army of drunken pixies.  But sometimes, I need to comment on something not utterly fatuous. 

Cameron and Osborne – what the fuck is all that about? I lived under Thatcher, and when that era of division was over I felt, like many others I know, that the world was a lighter place, a patchwork sky of  colour and light.  Ironically so, given that her passing was followed by the rise of The Grey Man, John Major.  I suppose that, in contrast to the previous death-black years of Central Hell, the washed-out grey seemed a sprightly shade of being.

However, with the advent of these two current clowns, I feel that we’re past the grey zone of the spectrum and into something much more of a spectral blackening.  It’s quite insidious, though.  Although they are quite clearly cut from a cloth of unpleasant, there is more than something of the imbecile about them. Thatcher was a diamond-cut madder.  With a majority I found unfathomable.  It was many years before I could be persuaded that anyone who voted for the Wicked Witch of Dulwich wasn’t fabricated from liquid evil. Many, many years.

I’ve not really taken Eton’s own Bert and Ernie too seriously.  Obviously I’ve held them in the contempt that this calibre of vacuous slugshit should be held, but I’ve not felt the imminent danger that was palpable in The Eighties.  I think partly because whenever they’ve posited one of their ludicrous ideas, I’ve hoped that the Lib Dems would never allow it to pass.

Clearly, I am much more optimistic than people assume. And probably much more stupid than I realise.  Because whatever mumbling comes from the MOR footsoldiers of the Yellowers,  they are clearly going to keep rubber-stamping whatever they’re presented with, secretly hoping that the Tories will one day reciprocate, and maybe give them a reach around while aggressively shedding their sticky political load.

Given this, I’d like to think that with the right words  - and not just mine but every dissenting voice – that we can erect barricades to the sustained assault on society which these two goonthugs are imposing.  That a thrusting phrase, a slash of words – aim for the eyes! – a stab of language will not just dissipate into the ether, but will have some real tangible effect.

Because these fuckers are clowns, but much more in the mould of Chucky than Krusty.  They are the shitstain on the white underpants of life, the haemorrhoid bursting the arseveins of society. And they must be stopped.

So, if you ever voted Lib Dem, drop the Judas Brigade a mail and show your displeasure.

And if you voted Tory? You stopped reading a long time ago, didn’t you? You scrotal-faced weaslebuckets.

And if your hands are clean of this mess and you voted for neither, keep up the pressure. Protest, bitch, moan and whinge. You’ve earned the right, my friend. Let your words ring out, and keep ringing. We told them so. We told them so.

*I think I know which side I’m on.  I won’t be so presumptuous as to make an absolute claim.

Waiting for the Sun to Set

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is the greatest television progamme ever made*, and when it came to a close in 2003, I was rather lost, although I felt it had not only Jumped the Shark, but rode the back of, spat at and defecated in the eye of the same sea beastie.

The show ended not because the producers realised they were developing a walking corpse that wouldn’t play dead, but because Sarah Michelle Gellar decided she wanted to move onto bigger and better things.  By which she meant become a film star and make a shitload of cash.  

I discovered last week that Gellar is a Republican, and it left a bitter nastiness in my metaphorical mouth.  I love Buffy because, behind the mask of inanity, there was a programme which was quite progressive for a mainstream American show.  I considered it be an Ideas Smuggler – surreptitiously provoking Americans into thinking while they thought they were watching a programme about a blonde cheerleader killing vampires.  Obviously, they were watching a programme about a blonde cheerleader killing vampires, but it was oh-so-much more.

To discover that the hero of this modern masterpiece is playing, politically speaking, for the other side meant that my sturdy walls of perception came tumbling down, as if a fog had been lifted from my eyes, like a cubic zirconia bullet right through my forehead.  It was up there with the time I realised that God didn’t exist, and the realisation at the age of ten that, despite my claims to the contrary, Manchester City were not better than Manchester United, and weren’t the greatest team in the world***.

Consequently, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that there is a Buffy comic which takes up the story from the end of the final season and it’s actually quite good.  More importantly, because it’s a comic, SMG isn’t actually required, and doesn’t profit, and I am not forced to deal with the dichotomy of reality vs.fiction.

The moral of this tale is that sometimes it can be a good thing to dig up the rotting corpses of popular media and re-animate the cadaver, slap on a bit of lippy and give it a new haircut, and send it back into the world.

However, some corpses should remain buried. Buried forever.

This forthcoming Sunday the Crown Prince of Corporeal Evil, Rupert Murdoch, will attempt to insult an entire nation with the relaunch of his cesspit of a rag, The News of the World, under the guise of The Sun of Sunday.  After his performance at the select committee hearing in which he claimed to be living the humblest day of his life in a manner which was, tellingly, very fucking far from humble, I hoped that he would least have the sense to accept that the hacking of a murdered child’s phone was so far below any kind of accepted civilisation as to  understand that he might as well dance up and down on Milly Downer’s grave as try to bring back a Sunday paper.  I underestimated him.

To my mind, this is a little like Hitler claiming he’d seen the error of his ways in trying to wipe an entire group of people of the face of the earth, and he felt humble because he’d had an epiphany, rather than because he’d been busted. And while he was at it, would anyone be interested in reading the new edition of his book, which would no longer be known as Mein Kampf, but would now bear the moniker How to Kill Friends and Liquidate people. A little like this.

The comparisons might be a bit extreme, I admit, but the principle’s the same.  

I am hopeful, however, that the target demograph for The Sun, the kind of people who attacked a paediatrician believing she was a paedophile****, aren’t quite so forgiving or forgetful as Rupert the Human Cancer would believe.  In fact, given The Sun’s history of moral outrage, I fully expected the weekday Sun to run a campaign against The Sun on Sunday. I’ll even give them their headline for free.

Humble hacker in Pseudo Sorry Sunday Sun shocker.

Or, preferably, Murdoch Falls in Mincer: Nation Rejoices.

Please don’t buy this piece of shit.  You can make a difference.

*I’m serious**

**No, really, I am.  Closely followed by Battlestar Galactica (The new one, obviously), and Duckula.  

***Both these problems have now been addressed

****I shit you not

Sicknote

As icy days close in, and the previously absent winter has a go at reminding us it still exists, out come the unused Christmas hats and gloves, breakfast porridge makes its annual appearance, and up pops the duvet safety of sick days.  

It’s at this stage of the season that petty sickness creeps apace, winding its way round the workplace like a sulphuric fart in a small lift, leaving no corner unfouled. People drop off the work radar for a couple of days, followed out, on their return, by another shivering sniffler, like a hibernal game of contagiously diseased dominoes. I had my turn last week.

The problem with sick days, for me, is that finding myself with a whole day I’d otherwise be sacrificing to the gods of work, I don’t want to waste my opportunity to get stuff done, go places I’d normally never see and do stuff I’d normally never do.  There’s a plethora of art galleries and museums I heartily neglect, a world of books I intend to read which perch on my To Be Read shelf.  (In truth, this is more like my To Be Read shelves, and is on the brink of becoming my To Be Read bookcase.  I estimate it will be a To Be Read library by the time I retire. I really ought to buy shares in Waterstone’s).

Unfortunately the nature of sickdays, is that I’m, not to put too fine a point on it, sick. Well, usually.  Or sometimes, at least.

 I may want to fill my time with worth, but the sad truth is I’m more likely to sleep until midday, wake for a Lemsip and then spend the day dozing in and out of consciousness whilst listening to some play on Radio 4 about a bunch of middle class people uncovering the secrets of their grandparents’ abuse of servants in India during the Raj, or some other offering from the Radio 4 write-by-numbers drama factory. By the time I feel anywhere near rested enough to do something, it’s pretty much the time I’d be getting home anyway.

Johnny Rotten, before he became the face of whatever dairy product it is he advertises, once asked ‘ Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?’ . Yes, Mr Rotten, I have. Every time I waste a sick day on actually being sick. 

What is more annoying than this is when the sickness pounces and it is not a work day.  There is no greater injustice in this world* than arriving home on a Friday to discover that your body has developed a malfunction which results in being bed bound and incapable of doing anything beyond groaning and making Mr Kleenex rich**.

The real shit-smeared nail in the coffin of life here is that, no matter how extraordinarily unwell you are, you will always have recovered by Monday, and have no legitimate excuse to take a sick day. This, along with the existence of the parasitic wasp and Alex Ferguson, is the keystone on which I base my unshakeable belief that there is no God.

And, on that theological bombshell, I’m withdrawing back under the covers because I’m feeling slighty queasy. And, unbelievably, I’m on holiday. Today I planned to do those things I neglect – play guitar, read a book, leave the house.  Curse you, lack of God.   So, instead, I’m off to have that same fitful dream in which a thousand gloomy towers of unread books loom over me, berating me in thunderous tones for depriving them of their destiny while a billion tiny pixies adorned in Waterstone’s T-shirts dance gleefully on piles of burning money.  It’s a recurring highly vivid dream.

If only I knew what it meant.

*This is obviously a lie.

**From blasting snot out of your nose, you filthy minded guttersnipe.

Let's re-invent time

I’ve been procrastinating writing for a few weeks now, for the same reason I’ve been procrastinating scanning photographs, doing dishes and tidying the house. It’s January, and I’ve got post-Christmas comedown, A.K.A. New Year Blues A.K.A. Not Another Fucking Year Already A.K.A. Blearrrghghh.  If I could get away with not washing or brushing my teeth, I probably would.  If I could get away with not getting out bed, I undoubtedly would. January sucks.

T.S. Eliot famously wrote that April is the cruelest month, but that’s clearly bollocks because for wretched evil misery nothing beats the gateway to the year.  Christmas is over, and all the build up and festive sleigh ride rapidly turns into a festive train wreck and then, abruptly, into a post-festive lemming-dive off the cliff of New Year’s Eve into the grey wet plains of Back to Work You Shitty Little Peasants, Fun’s Over.

Not all Januaries have been dismal, admittedly. The crash has sometimes been softened by the cushion of Christmas presents, whether the Millennium Falcon of childhood, or the Walkman and booze of late teens, to the lovely acoustic guitar I got two years ago.  Quite often the social imbibing in January ups itself a notch as people wrestle with the impact, which is an aspect I’ve also previously appreciated.  Sometimes, a Christmas Romance blossoms into a Winter Girlfriend. It might not last, but it takes the edge off the cold.  At worst, there’s usually a bit of snow to re-ignite the smouldering Yuletide embers.

This year, no such.  While I appreciate all the presents I received from my nearest and dearest, a throttle box for my Micra isn’t a game-changer. I love my new Adidas Star Wars Rebel Force trainers, but a particularly expensive December has left me in a financial quagmire, and I can’t go out and about looking fly in them.

I did, however, plan for this month of doom, and asked for two X-Box games, which is pretty much my January, between getting home from work and slinking off to bed.  And while these digital distractions are fun (with a slice of WTF? everytime I get beat 6-0 on FIFA 12), the fact that I not only planned for a month indoors, but did so by sacrificing the option of a new guitar pedal for something that deep down I think I probably should’ve given up many, many, many years ago, leaves me with a feeling of bemused depression.  Although, it being January, I could’ve been given games, pedals, the Palaces of Shangri-La and the moon on a diamond-encrusted stick, and I’d still find something to complain about.

The fundamental problem isn’t that I’m a neurotic whinger, but that if humans were meant to do January, we’d be made of Gore-Tex and Fur, with torches for eyes.  There are few feelings more groan-inducing than the realisation of existence when an alarm goes off at seven a.m. on a January morning and you realise you’ve got to get up from the warm oblivion of sleep and go out into the frosty darkness to spend the day with a bunch of people who feel equally resentful about work, life and the existence of other people.

January is the cruelest month, not April. April isn’t frosty, in April nighttime doesn’t masquerade as the morning, and in April Christmas is a fond distant memory, just as you can look fondly on a past relationship years later, even though in the immediate aftermath you were a drunken wreck of despair and failure.

January is the raw break up from our relationship with Christmas. Either full of a profound sense of loss, or the needling regret that it never quite lived up to the promise it, well, promised.

So I’m starting it now. We have a year to do it.  I’m suggesting a radical rethinking of the calendar. Next year, I want two Decembers, then February.  It’ll be my Christmas gift to the world. 

Death to January.