underthechemist: The Vegan Wars

underthechemist: The Vegan Wars: It’s the middle of January, and the disappointment of Christmas has started to fade into a nostalgia of  Yule memories founded on a handfu...

The Vegan Wars

It’s the middle of January, and the disappointment of Christmas has started to fade into a nostalgia of  Yule memories founded on a handful of bearable holiday moments, as the subconscious shoves the actual reality of the grey seasonal dullness, shit TV and an endless stream of wasted, hungover days to the mental cupboard of forgetfulness.  Trees and decorations have been stashed away, presents have finally been posted for sale on Ebay, the last of the Christmas booze is losing its charm *and the daunting prospect of surviving January and February lingers on the horizon like a large mushroom shape over Hiroshima.  The third flu-cold of the season has hit, and having been forced to enter the Season of Goodwill, people are now looking to start beef over chattin’ shit, as they say down the ends.

A digital skirmish seems to have broken out between those promoting or engaging in Veganuary – which given the ongoing rush towards environmental meltdown we seem to be engaged in seems quite a sensible thing to do – and those who belong to the Anti-Snowflake Uber-Snowflakes whose mission in life is to be offended by people being offended.  Message boards are full of snides about I’m Sick of Vegans Telling Me They’re Vegan I’m Going to Eat a Lamb. Or, in other words, people sharing their dietary preferences while complaining about others who do so.

I’m very familiar with this conversation. I became a vegetarian at sixteen, troubled by the fact that I was eating dead things. It seemed at odds with my Catholic upbringing where I’d been told, in equal measure, that all life was sacred, that God was a loving God who loved all God’s creatures, and don’t be soft son, of course God wants you to kill and eat living beings. After all, Jesus fed kebabs to the disciples. **

I’d given up God long before I’d given up meat. But I’d not given up Catholicism. You can’t. It’d be like trying to give up breathing.  I firmly believe there are three states of being you can never leave: being a Catholic, being Mafiosi and being a Goth.  You might think you’ve left, but you never really do.  Even now, if I visit a Protestant Cathedral, it’s a nice building for the superstitious. If I visit a Catholic Cathedral, it’s still for the superstitious, but it’s a nice church.

What ensued following my rejection of eating corpses were years of ‘Why are you a Vegetarian’? from random strangers, work colleagues and doctors.  It’s not like I wore a badge, it’d just come in conversations like ‘ Why are you eating Quorn’? and ‘Why do you seem morally superior?’.

I’ve always found it a bit fucking bizarre.  Sometimes the conversations were prompted by genuine curiosity, but over eighty-percent of the time it was just a pre-cursor to a dissection of all of my other moral failings. If I said I didn’t like killing and eating things I’d be questioned about wearing leather shoes. I’d point out that the shoes were on my feet and that there was no immediate intention of eating them because I’m not from Stockport and can afford actual food.  If I said it was for personal preference, then I’d be subjected to a lecture about my shortcomings as a nutritional scientist.  Eventually I opted for the excuse that I hate all animals and that there’s no way I’m putting any of those disgusting little bastards in my body.  This generally stumped people, and they’d fuck off confused.  

Which, to be honest, is how I like most of my conversations with casual acquaintances to end. It saves years of unnecessary politeness. 

I’m not a vegetarian anymore. Not for any moral or health reasons, but because I like shellfish, and have no moral compass.  However, I’m pretty sure I’m doing the wrong thing and would like to wish anyone who is vegan, vegetarian or temporary engaged with these the best.  Fuck gammon-eating gammons and their dumbass questions.  I suspect they’re enraged because they know they’re wrong, or because they associate it with being young, smart, hip and sexy. ****Everything they’re not.

And finally -  for the last fucking time - gammons of the world: No -  I do not miss bacon sandwiches. I didn’t even like them when I ate meat. Corpse and ketchup sandwich, anyone? Breakfast should be a Pot Noodle, or nothing at all. 

And on that note, it’s Chicken and Mushroom Pot Goodness time…****

 * Mulled wine with an Advocaat chaser, anyone?

**I might not remember this conversation accurately.

*** I'm assuming this is the case as I was the embodiment of this quartet when I was 16. Or at least, that's how I remember it. There was a lot of booze. 

*** *Chicken and Mushroom flavour . 100% vegetarian, 100% flavour

The Kids are Alright

Dion, of and the Belmots fame, wondered why he had to be a teenager in love. He might as well have asked why he had to be teenager with spots. The two things  - teenagism and love, not love and spots – go hand in hand like young lovers  skipping delightfully through a sun-kissed summer meadow, awash with daisies, birdsong and promise.

I’ve been reminded of this classic slice of teen-angst tunage this week, as I’ve been surrounded by a herd of teenagers for four days, and the hormonal-emotional complex has been spinning and clashing around the air, dancing the dance of youthful confusion.  It’s been most amusing to watch, like a retired footballer who can enjoy the game from the sidelines. Teenage love in full throttle is a battle to behold.

There is the obvious rebuff that it’s not actually love, its puppy-love, or a chemical inkick of hormones driving the festering impulse to pair up and procreate. But I’m with Donny Osmond on this one*.  There are as many different kinds of love as there are people who exist, as there are moments in time, as there are reasons why Coldplay suck.

During my cautious teenage years, my friends and I would have degrees of romantic attachment from ‘I like you’ to ‘I’m in like with you’ and then a quantum leap to ‘I love you’ reaching perfection with ‘I’m in love with you’ and culminating in ‘If you leave me I will end the universe and everyone in it.’  It was generally understood that this last stage was a stage too far.  We’d been sold the idea of the True Love, and the quest for perfection made us cynical and reserved. Well, that and experience.

I’d like to offer a retrospective Fuck That to the lie we were sold. The idea of True Love belongs in Shrek with talking donkeys and midget princes.  The only difference between the teenage love and adult love is that the emotions tend to be less ephemeral, less unstable. And, I suppose more importantly, reciprocal.  Sometimes, anyway. Not for stalkers, obvs.

But a feeling is a feeling is a feeling. The teenage love I felt for Melody, a girl I met swimming, was no less serious to me at thirteen, than the emotions I’ve felt as an adult. Even if it lasted a couple of days before I forgot about her, and later discovered she was called Melanie, and I’d just misheard her in the five minutes of conversation against a background of squealing and splashing.  The point is the feeling was felt. It existed. It can say ‘I was’.

Similarly, the heartbreak in my later teens of being dumped in a letter ripped my universe into shreds as much as anything in my later years. The difference is that it was patched together, with only slight damage**, after a couple of weeks rather than the month/year lifespan of a dead adult relationship.

Obviously, the love we feel as adults tends to be more discriminating, and as we age, and grow, we hone our emotional focus, and the love we feel is more special because it is much more exclusive.  The primary focus of attraction is no longer proximity, but compatibility and connection.  Which is probably why it generally lasts more than a few hours. A tortoise of emotion rather than a mayfly.

And we may look back and grade our loves on a lovescale, and we may look back at our teens with a wry detachment. But those years forged our resilience, our fears, our dreams.  The elation and drives felt, the utter wretched destruction rained upon us, are no less serious for their transience.  As anyone who has taken acid will confirm, the brevity of a time period is not relative to its intensity.  And, like a drug, love fucks up the mind.

So, teenagers of the world, if you feel it, follow it.  I see your struggles, your confusion, your anger, your pain, your dreams and recognise its reality.  I’ll offer only one piece of advice. When it gets too much, listen to this, and remember, one day you’ll be twenty, and someone else will be in your place.

* And nothing else. Big-toothed, smiling moron.
**Debatable.

Flying in the Wind

There’s been a bit of a digital ding-dong on the Facebook page of my local community over the last week. Insults have been swapped, shots fired, accusations made. The normal equilibrium which suffuses the air has been sullied, poisoned even, by the battle lines which have been drawn in the virtual sand.   The whole sordid affair seems to threaten to spill over into fighting in the streets, pitchforks drawn, knuckles flexed and brains redundant.

I’d like to claim some kind of moral high ground, but I've been in there, keyboard swinging like Macbeth’s sword, verbally slashing this way and that with carefree abandon.  My feet have been firmly planted in one camp, and my oh-so-witty* barbs and snides have been tossed like grenades of intellectual annihilation at my foes.  I chose sides more to have a fight than out of conviction.  It passes the time.

The source of this conflict? Flags. Or, more specifically, flags on poles in the local cemetery. Big, fuck-off flags on big, fuck-off poles, to be more accurate. In recent months there has been a trend for the dear departed to be remembered not just by the time-tested stone marker, a bunch of flowers and the weeping mournful.  It seems that it is also de rigeur to shove a flappy flag on a pole so that anyone within fifteen miles eyeshot** can see the – most commonly – nationality of the deceased. I don’t like them.  It seems I am not alone.

I must admit a bias.  The local cemetery is dear to what remains of my heart. I spent many days in my mid teens wandering its sylvan avenues, listening to The Archers and pretending I was a dweller in a leafy Cotswold village, rather than in a flat, coffee-brown Manchester council estate.  My affair with the cemetery blossomed, and in my later teens many was the evening I could be found drunk in its enclaves, gothing around with my fellows goths.  There are also rumours that it was my venue of choice when guided by the influence of acid, but I refuse to incriminate myself.  Because I may have just thought I’d gone to cemetery when I was , in fact, supine in my room listening to Dark Side of the Moon. Again. And again. And again. 

I was so grateful when CDs came along and I didn’t have to get up to turn the record over half way through.

So, I don’t like graveyard flags.  I find they intrude on the serenity of the place.  The air of quiet, of reflection and escape becomes a carnival of fuckery. .  I don’t give a shit in a doughnut where the deceased come from, or where they've gone.  It’s not my business, and I don’t like it being made my business.

But it transpires the council also don’t like them, and as of today, they are banned.  Any flag on pole must be removed, or it will be forcibly evicted, and sent to a flag refugee camp or somesuch location.

I didn’t read the fine print.

However, there is more at play than an affront to my sense of the aesthetic.  An online petition has surfaced which claims that the council is trying to ban Irish flags.  This is clearly a steaming, moist truckload of runny horseshit.  The council wants to ban, in fact, all flags.  This petition is a low strategy.  It implies that anyone opposed to the flags is a jack-booted English Imperialist who thinks Paddy should know his place.  It’s also brought out the I Blame the Bloody Muslims brigade, who are on half-coherent rants about political correctness gone batshit crazy and how they bet THEY won’t have to take down THEIR flags.

I can almost picture these goons pointing at the horizon, stamping up and down, steam whistling from their ears as they point at the distance shouting, ‘ Them! Them!’ apoplectically.

I don’t think they’ve read even the big print.

And so the lines have been drawn.

And I chose a side.  Because of this petition. Prior to this, I had had my reservations about the flags as outlined, but I take objection to lots of things, and if people acted on my list of complaints, there’d be no end of unforeseen consequences.  I’d like to get rid of slugs, Fray Bentos pies and yellow cars, but I’m sure there are people who would rather die than see this happen. ***

I even have some sympathies.  It’s hardly equitable that if I’m rich I can build an imposing, ostentatious tomb, at a perfect height for a drunk teenager to climb up and fall off in the early hours, but if I’m not so flash for cash I must restrict my demonstration of mourning.  And while I find them annoying, they’re hardly killing anyone. 

But once the lies are out, it’s hard to maintain sympathy.  Once the raving crazies pin their flag to mast, metaphorically speaking, I’m inclined to explore the options.

And, that, Michael Gove, is why I will be voting to stay in the EU.

* I suspect this is probably how I saw it, rather than how it actually was.  Stella makes everything funnier. Without it a Michael McIntyre gig would be thousands of bewildered, sober adults puzzled at the little fat man talking about how pointless his existence is.

** Like earshot but for eyes. Obvs.

*** Apart form yellow cars. I don’t believe that anyone thinks there a good idea. Not even Bananaman.

Memories of a Cider-Fuelled Youth

When I’m feeling ill, if I want to drink I tend to engage with cider. Because it’s fruit, clearly.  It was for this reason that some time ago, at a gig with friends, I accidentally stumbled into the 1990s teenage world of snakebite.  Somewhat under the weather, I had been repairing my failing health with the magic fizzy apple juice when one of the aforementioned friends kindly returned from the bar with a can of Red Stripe. While it is Jamaica’s finest, it‘s obviously not appley-medicine. 

Luckily, however, as a teen I was a well-versed in the arts of drinking like a hobo, so made myself a shitfacing classic of yesteryear*. 

Snakebite. Fizzy filth.

I was reminded of this alchemy yesterday as the spouse of same lager-buying friend posted a pic of a pint of the same amber evil which her husband had ordered in the pub, and laid the blame squarely at my feet for re-introducing the beverage into our collective memory.  It was the second time in a week that snakebite had resurfaced into my milieu, as last week, once again in a state of physical disrepair, I ordered lager, realised I couldn’t face the taste, and summoned the serpent of fizz. It was a wise decision.

There’s a word for these states of being wherein you become aware of something – a word, a person, a tropical disease – and then it seems to be everywhere. I don’t know what the word is, but it’s out there. Look it up. No doubt once you come across it, it’ll be in every post you read, every smile of every child, every stranger’s eyes etc.  

Now, twice in a week may not seem to be a frequency which allows snakebite to fall into this category, but given that - the gig above aside – I’d not heard the words for nearly a decade, I’m making an exception. Because I can.  Besides, it’ll all tie together like a Dickens novel in the final paragraph, trust me.

As a result of last weekend’s grimness, I was very much a token gesture of a son for Mother’s Day, with my efforts limited to sniffling over to my Ma’s, dropping off a card from Asda, a painted watering can, and a promise to be a bit more the Prodigal Son this weekend.

And today, a paragon of health, I kept to my word.

When I take the old girl out for the day, I’m going to one of two places.  Upon asking where she’d like to go, I’m told Anywhere You Want or Anywhere You Want But if You Feel Like Driving to Lytham.

For those who don’t know, Lytham is a small coastal town south of Blackpool where rich old northerners go to die.  It has a special place in my mother’s heart because she was brought up there from the age of eight. And like most people in my family, she has the tiresome habit of telling the same stories again and again.  I used to think it was age, but then I realised she’s been telling the same stories for the past forty years.  My brother is also prone to the same habits.  I know every time I see him for the next two months I’m going to be fascinated to death by his detailed account of how he was sat AT THE FRONT of an Adele concert, and how IT WAS LIKE HAVING A PERSONAL gig.  It only happened a week ago, and I’ve already heard it twice.

I have caught myself indulging in the same dirty habit at times. Ever heard about the time I tried to start a fight with Graham Coxon from Blur? The time I broke my ankle playing football? How I was born in a cross-fire hurricaine AND under a wandering star? Spend more than two drinking events with me, and you will.

Back to Lytham. I’ve heard the stories of a post-war childhood in Lytham since I can remember, to the extent that, like religion, I know the verse without really thinking about the meaning.  It’s long been at the point where I nod politely, and ask the same generic questions out of courtesy.  Today, however, I actually paid attention.

The seafront at Lytham was stunning.  A sky of salmon pink infused with a wash of white-charcoal clouds; a haze which gave the air a mystical quality, almost Avalonesque; a sun straight off an Apocalypse Now poster. It was pretty lovely.  Off guard, I actually paid attention to the memories she was sharing, as she remembered being in the same spot some sixty-odd years ago where we then stood, losing half-a-crown and pissing about on Lytham Windmill**.

And I realised that my mum was talking about actual memories of actual events with actual people from when she was a very small child.  The noise became a life. To me, those details had always belonged to the Long, Long Ago, in the Beforetimes.  Now they had substance.

And this leads me back to snakebite. It is cheap, it is messy. And it fuelled many event-filled, life-developing nights in my youth.  And those memories make good tales for the teller probably more than they do the listener. But it’s easy as an adult to live on the sniff of those memories, and conveyor belt your way through adult life.  Work is a time vampire, no doubt.  But it doesn’t need to be a life vampire.  Make new memories while you can. Drink the snakebite, watch the sunset, see some overrated singer at an extortionate price.  So that when you really can’t make new memories, you have a stash to see you through to the end.  Like a Dickens novel***.

*I realise that to a lot of Antipodeans in London, Snakey is the cutting edge of alcoholic novelty. But it’s only new to you.

** They’re very proud of their windmill

***Nothing like a Dickens novel, but I did make a promise. 

Virtual Insanity

I don’t really consider myself a gamer. I play games, but I don’t cosplay, I don’t have special joypads or a customised headset. As a teenager, while my contemporaries were locked in their bedrooms, swearing at the length of time it took a ZD Spectrum to load a game,  I was throwing crab apples at buses and making dens in subway bushes.  When Sega and Nintendo happened upon the market, girls and booze and disco dancing happened upon me.  Those first big waves bypassed my formative years.

It wasn't until Uni that I first bought a console, a SNES, because it was half-price and because I had no concept of money. My hope was that it would keep me out of pubs and off the streets. It did. Unfortunately, it also took over my life like an electronic brain-devouring parasite. Months of being locked away with Mario, Chun Lee, mates and social enhancers. They may have been great times. I can’t really remember. It’s all a bit of lo-fi, primary-coloured, pixellated blur.

When the Grey Plastic Time Vampire was taken during a burglary a few months later, I looked on it as a blessing.  Its stranglehold on me was loosened, and I could now devote my time to much more worthwhile habits.  And so I did, with gusto.

A few years ago an Xbox came into my life by accident. The digital smackdown began again.  Bioshock, Call of Duty, FIFA, Skyrim, Assassins Creed.  The came into my life, and then they took it over.    

The problem is pretty simple.  It starts with a solemn promise to play for no more than half an hour. That half hour passes and you realise you've slipped into some twisted space-time continuum because, instead of being seven in the evening, it’s three in the morning, and you have to be up in four hours. There’s little more humbling than a console showing you have less willpower than a scouser in a pound shop. Apart from possibly being a Man United fan, or a Nickelback fan whose hearing aid suddenly starts working.

The second coming wasn't as all-consuming as my first foray. I wasn’t chained to screen night after night. I’d have waves where I’d be wandering the Texas desert in Red Dead Redemption looking to shoot Mexicans, as if in some Donald Trump time-travelling fantasy, and waves where I’d actually get on with my life and leave the house and shit like that.  And that’s the trick really.  People have accused me of wasting time shooting up post-apocalyptic wastelands, or stealing cars and killing cops until I get gummed down in nihilistic blaze of glory. And I probably am. But no more than watching vacuity such as Strictly or Nazi Storage Hunters or somesuch nonsense. And as long as there’s balance, then I’m like, totally Zen about it. Life is just killing time between birth and death, after all.

I’m troubled today, however, as I’ve had a massive Fallout 4 bender this week, and I feel slightly adulterated.  Every time I look at an object, I expect to be given the option to pick it up.  When someone walks past my house, my first reaction is to get my mini-nuke ready in case they’re hostile. If I’m replying to someone talking to me, I wonder which of my four conversation options will get me the most XP. Last night, instead of going to the pub, I decided to play for just another half hour. 

At five this morning I decided I should go to bed.

So I’m striking out. I’m laying down the law. Drawing a line in the sand. The ghouls can roam, the raiders can raid. The Commonwealth can rebuild itself. I’m not going to allow my life to be dictated to and distorted by digital crack. I’m through with addictive destructive interactions.

New day, new me.  Yes. I will be strong. Starting now.

I’m off the pub. Anyone fancy a pint?

Back to Black

Let’s get this out of the way before we go anywhere else. I am not a hipster. I don’t have a beard. Beards don’t smack of style to me, they reek of Action Man Adventurer, Geography teachers of Grange Hill, and men trying to hide their chins.  I did once have a beard, but that was because I’d broken my ankle and couldn’t stand up to shave.  After three weeks I was very hirsute of face. As is common to men with beards, I did not look the sine qua non of style, I just looked rough. A cross between Cat Stevens and a particularly lazy suicide bomber.  I don’t like beards, I don’t do beards.  Like Alexander the Great, I’m comfortable enough in my masculinity to not feel the need to stick it on my face like a circus sideshow.

Similarly, I have neither sleeve tattoo, German footwear nor an appetite for quinoa and locally sourced meats. I am not a hipster.

What I do have is a newly acquired acquaintance with vinyl, - the round grooved type, not the cheap, practical flooring material.  Here is where I intersect with hipsters in the Venn diagram of life.  

And, I suppose, I owe those bearded, sleeve-tattooed, craft-beer drinking wankers a debt of gratitude. While I’ve been away for the last twenty years in the easy world of digital, the Hoxton wankers insistence on being Bona Fide has kept the coma-ridden, semi-cadaverous playing of records on life support.  So, twats of the world, thank you.  Without you, there would be nothing to return to, and my collection of choice platters would be as useful as the two-hundred TDKs I buried in landfill last year.

My conversion to CD wasn’t straightforward.  As a youth, I bought a lot of records.  Obsessively so at times.  I have All About Eve singles on five formats.  I have box sets of songs I didn’t particularly like, but whose packaging lured me into purchase like a shiny fly to a stupid fish. I’ve got albums I still haven’t played, but still plan to one day*. When my peers were turning to CDs because ‘they sounded cleaner’ I stuck to my ancient ways. 

Until idleness took over.  The true advantage of CDs was that you didn’t get up halfway through to turn them over.  While this wasn’t a problem most of the time, it was a particular burn with Pink Floyd albums, for reasons I won’t spell out.  See also Jimi Hendrix, Late Beatles, Hawkwind, Screamadelica, Smokers’ Delight, You Lazy Fucker, Get a Job and Stop Laying Around and Too Stoned to Move. It was a revelation from which I did not recover for many years.

People of a certain age will remember being told that CDs were indestructible. TV shows were riddled with demos of them being smeared with jam, used as coasters, spat on and shat on**. The host would then wipe down the disc of wonder, insert it into one of those VHS player sized CD machines and –hey fucking presto – the unjammed, coffee free sounds of Dire Straits.  It was always Dire Straits, Brothering their fucking Arms.

Yes, we were told they were indestructible. The Incredible Hulk of the musical formats. We were lied to***.

I have hundreds of CDs, and mostly they skip like a schoolgirl on meth. They are less useful than the proverbial chocolate teapot, because at least a chocolate teapot can be eaten. They don’t even make particularly good Frisbees. Shiny discs of corporate theft.

So I’ve bought a record player, I’ve resurrected my collection, and can now be found wandering junk shops in search of hidden gems, elbowing beardy, sandalistas out of my way. Ebay is a new danger in a way it never has been before. Do I need This Charming Man in three different formats? No, of course I don’t, but I’ve bought them anyway. Three versions of Atoms for Peace? Yeah, why not.

 I suspect my love of vinyl is going to kill me financially.         

 

Luckily, while I was still buying vinyl in the mid-nineties, everyone was else was buying CDs. It means that all my Oasis records are now highly sought-after, as is my Aphex Twin brown vinyl and a variety of other things I’ll never listen to again. Ebay taketh away but Ebay also giveth.  I can flog old to hipsters for stupid money, and buy new.  

Wanna buy a copy of Me and my Beard by the Geography Teachers, squire? First pressing – scratch n sniff organic meats and beard oil? Yours for fifty son…

* Zodiac Mindwarp, I’m looking at you.

**Maybe not this one, lthough I could still hear traces of faecal matter, so I’m not ruling it out.

***The motto of the 20^th and 21^st Century, surely.