My first bit of holiday reading was a book called Risk by the journalist Dan Gardner, about all the scary things in the world and what degree of hazard they actually pose. I was secretly hoping it’d frighten the shit out of me. It did the opposite. It patiently explains that there’s never been a better time to be alive. It even makes potentially horrifying future threats such as nuclear terrorism seem less inevitably ominous and more soothingly unlikely. It cheered me up immensely. I almost hurled it in the pool in disgust.
In summary, try as I might, for the time being I’ve managed to successfully get away from it all. And that’s just not me. It makes me feel like an optical illusion in my own mind’s eye. Which is why, as I said at the start, I’m not really here. At least I can think of all those delicious worries I can tuck into on my return. That’s the only thing keeping me going through this current ordeal.
The worm that turned? [1 June 2009]
Women – why aren’t you running the world yet? Frankly I’m disappointed in you. Men are still far too dominant for their own good, and consequently we’ve made a testosterone-sodden pig’s ear of just about everything: politics, the economy, religion, the environment … you name it, it’s in a gigantic man-wrought mess. The world’s been one big dick-swinging contest, and we’ve caught our collective glans in a nearby desk fan. By rights we should be squealing for your help, but we’re not, because we’re too damn stupid and too damn proud. We swagger convincingly, and that’s about it. And swaggering’s fine for scraping by in primitive times, but the world we’ve built is altogether more complex now. We’ve got stock exchanges and nuclear warheads. It’s too easy to swagger your way into big trouble without even realising. Well, we’ve had our turn. It’s time for the Rise of the Ladies.
We don’t need a few women in conspicuous positions of power scattered here and there – we need a 10-year prohibition on all forms of male power. Seriously: a decade in which men don’t get to control anything, from the remote control upwards. Imagine the consequences. For one thing, there would be an instant and massive reduction in armed conflict around the globe. Sure, nations would routinely bitch about each other in secret (and with a new, hair-curling viciousness), but there’d be fewer intercontinental punch-ups and a far smaller bodycount.
The economy should clearly be run by women. City boys are dicks, plain and simple. Look at them. Listen to them. Consider the carnage of the past 10 years. What the hell were these idiots thinking? Even now they’re still at it. In any sane world they’d all be herded into a shed and blasted with hoses until they promised to stop. Everything they say, think, do, watch, read and fill up their iPods with is awful. Even their girlfriends are awful. Straight women, reading this: if your partner is a City boy, leave him. Leave him now. Dump him with a text message, right this very second. It’ll hurt for about six days, then your life will improve beyond measure. Sod that little number-swapping dick who dares call himself a man. Lob him in the shed with the other squeaking fakes and train the cold jets on the bastards. Shut the door and let them shiver.
Men love machines, because machines remind them of themselves. As a result, men quickly became very very good at building machines and then driving them round rather too quickly, shouting ‘Toot toot! Look at me in my brilliant car!’ This was cute for a while, but the novelty’s worn off now that the planet’s teetering on the brink of becoming an inhospitable cinder. Please, women, for all our sakes: just lock us in a room with some Lego or something. I’m sorry, but we’re just too bloody stupid to save the planet. Looks like you’ll have to clean up our mess once again. Mankind’s depending on you.
‘This is all very well, but none too realistic,’ thinks the female reader. ‘Men aren’t just going to hand over the reins that easily. I know what men are like. They’re self-righteous and stubborn – just like women, but worse.’
Oh, you. Pretty, silly you. We’ve got you brainwashed. See, that’s what our incessant, ruinous swaggering was all about: pretending to be more complex and dangerous than we actually are. In truth your suspicions are correct: we’re very, very simple. We’re lazy and we like blowjobs. That’s all there is to us. Literally: that’s it. From Sir John Betjeman to Barack Obama, from Copernicus to Liam Gallagher. The core software we run on could fit in the memory of a digital watch circa 1985 without even scraping the sides.
And you know this, you women. You know this of course, but it’s so dazzlingly obvious you actually doubt it’s true. Most of my friends are women. I often find myself counselling them as they agonise for hours, trying to fathom what men are thinking, what men want. Yet no matter who they’re talking about, or what the circumstance, from my perspective the answer always seems so glaringly basic it could be scratched on the back of a button. This one wants a shag. That one wants a biscuit. Every time: the butler did it.
The only mistake women make is crediting men with far more mystery than they’re capable of. We’re impulsive yet thuddingly predictable, and you’d better learn to love us for it because that’s just about all we can muster. That’s why we bollocksed the planet up. We didn’t mean to. We’re men, that’s all.
And now, surely now, it’s time for you to shunt us off the podium and take charge for a decade. If only as an experiment to see what happens. I for one welcome our titted overlords. Give us our toys and our daily bread and permit us to lie on the sofa for 10 whole years, like snoozy, spluttering pigs. We get to loll around contentedly, you get to save the world. Sound good? Do we have a deal? Well do we, you wonderful bitches?
Aural contraceptive [8 June 2009]
Apologies if I sound like a fusty old colonel randomly dribbling memories on his way to the graveyard, but I remember the days when carefully compiling a C90 cassette of personally selected tunes for a friend was a key bonding moment in almost any relationship.
You’d assemble a collection of your favourite tunes (interspersed with a few ironic flourishes or comedy tracks), then spend an hour painstakingly inking the titles and artist names on the inlay card, which never had enough room on it unless you scratched away in tiny capitals, as though manually typesetting a newspaper aimed at squinty-faced ants in a dollhouse. It took effort and patience. It was a tailored gift. It showed you cared.
Making a compilation for a friend was one thing. Assembling a tape for someone you wanted to see naked was something else entirely; a real high-wire act. Open with something earnestly romantic and you’d mark yourself out as a sexless drip. Go the other way, spicing up the playlist with an explicit rap in which the protagonist lists 5,000 assorted and sobering tricks he can perform with his penis, and you’d fail twice as quickly. And if you somehow avoided sex entirely, and concentrated instead on showcasing how eclectic your musical tastes were by segueing from the Jackson Five into a self-consciously difficult 19-minute electronic epic which sounded like someone hitting a gigantic metal pig with a damp phonebook while a broken synthesizer slowly asks for directions to the kettle factory, you’d alienate them completely.
Nonetheless, compilation tapes were a joy. The best had a quirky theme, such as Surprising Lyrics, or Appalling Covers, or Music to Slay Co-Workers By. That last one opened with ‘Xanadu’ by ELO, which works better than you’d think.
But then progress jiggered it all up. First CDs smothered cassettes. Then 50% of 18-to-34-year-olds started running their own DJ night, which was just like compiling a tape minus the faffing around with the inlay card, except you had to take it more seriously and pretend you were cool.
Boring. And then finally everyone got iPods, effectively granting their existing musical collection a monopoly over their own ears. Compilation tapes were dead.
Or not. The other week I was tinkering around with a bit of software called Spotify. If you’re not familiar with it, it’s effectively a cross between iTunes and a customisable online radio station. I’d heard people raving about it and didn’t grasp why, until suddenly I realised you could compile a playlist, then generate a URL for it that others can cl
ick on. It’s like being able to mass-produce a compilation tape in minutes. OK, so it’s broken up with irritating adverts now and then, but hey, it’s easy to use and it seems to work.
What this means is I’m suddenly in a position to offer you, dear reader, a free compilation tape. But rather than any old tape, I’ve rustled up a specialist challenge.
Summer’s here. Consequently many of you will be embarking upon thrilling new romances. Others will be cementing existing ones. But passion can be fleeting.
Today’s heart-fluttering sexpot is tomorrow’s irritant. How can you be sure the pair of you really like each other? By trying to have sex while listening to a deliberately off-putting musical playlist, of course. After all, in moments like that, what goes in your ears makes a big difference. Once, in my early 20s, I was enjoying an impromptu eruption of mid-afternoon ‘adult fun’ with a girlfriend while a radio blasted away merrily in the background. Suddenly the music was replaced with a news bulletin – specifically a live police press conference in which two parents tearfully begged for the return of their missing son. As mood-killers go, it was on a par with looking down to discover your own genitals had suddenly and impossibly sprouted the face of Alan Titchmarsh, and he was looking back up at you and licking his lips and grinning and reciting limericks in a high-pitched voice. We broke up five years later. I blame the radio.
My playlist, while tasteless in parts, doesn’t contain anything quite that horrifying, but it should prove one heck of an obstacle course. All you have to do is download and install Spotify, then go to this URL: tinyurl.com/moodkill. Click around a bit and it should open the compilation. Don’t read the tracklisting, it’ll spoil it (that’s why I’m not divulging it here). Beckon over your beloved. Dim the lights. Get yourselves in the mood, press play, and prepare to test your ardour to its very limits. The first couple to successfully slog their way through the entire list wins a trophy or something. It’s a hefty running time, so don’t expect to conquer it all on your first go. There’s no set order; you can put it on shuffle if you like. And you’re allowed tackle it in chunks over the course of a few weeks if need be. But no declaring victory until you’ve managed the lot. If that’s too much, total respect will still be accorded to anyone who manages to kiss with earnest animal passion for the entire duration of the St Christopher Ensemble’s Gregorian Chant version of ‘I Guess That’s Why They Call it the Blues’, then upload the evidence to YouTube.
It won’t be easy. But if you make it to the end, then congratulations: you’ve proved your love will abide through the ages. Oh, and as a bonus, pick one of the entries for a wedding song. Then watch all your guests throw up.
Heavy petting [15 June 2009]
Sorry to brag, sorry to lord it over you like this, but I’ve got a cat flap. Yeah. A little feline-sized door-within-a-door for a cat to walk through. A cat flap! Beat that. I didn’t even have to install it. It came with the flat, courtesy of the previous owners. As a child I never dared to dream that one day I’d own my own cat flap, and even now that I do, I sometimes have to pinch myself and remember that yes: this is real. This is my cat flap. And it lives in my door. I don’t have a cat though.
I don’t have any pets. Yet people keep telling me to get one, just like they keep telling me to get a wife. (Incidentally, before Alison Donnell from the department of English and American literature at the University of Reading writes another impenetrable article for Comment is Free in which she humourlessly over-analyses one of my throwaway sentences, I should perhaps point out that I’m not equating wives with pets. For one thing, you can’t bury a wife in a shoebox. In several shoeboxes, sliced thinly, maybe – but not one. I should also clarify that when I mention ‘burying a wife in a shoebox’ I’m not making light of murder or anything like that; I’m talking about a hypothetical wife who died of natural causes – and that furthermore, said hypothetical wife was a postoperative transsexual who’d been born a man, and that her dying wish was to be sliced thinly and lovingly placed in a series of shoeboxes. Finally, I’d like to point out that in her will, she bequeathed everything she owned to an institute of gender studies run by a team of hermaphrodites. It’s actually a bloody inspiring story, OK?)
Anyway, back to pets, and people telling me to get one. Assuming the stone’s being thrown by a powerful robot, I live a stone’s throw from Battersea Dogs and Cats Home, a building full of lonely-looking furry creatures with gigantic pleading eyes. I could go in there and walk out with armfuls of puppies and kittens. But I won’t. Or rather can’t. I just can’t. Why?
Because animals die, that’s why. And they die too soon. They’ve got short lifespans. I had a cat once. And I loved that cat. But eventually the cat died, and I don’t know if I want to go through that again. Literally every time I stroke someone else’s cat or dog, all I can think is, ‘Yes, it’s lovely, but it’ll die’. Every time I envisage myself owning a pet, my mind immediately floods with preemptive grief. What if it got run over? Or it choked on something? What if I tripped and fell and dropped a Yellow Pages on its head? I just couldn’t bear it.
Yes, I know humans die too, and usually leave even sharper grief in their wake when they do so. But you can’t go through life without becoming at least vaguely attached to at least one or two humans in some form or another. The pain they’ll cause is unavoidable. Whereas pets seem easier to cut out.
I know, pet lovers, I know. The joy your pets give while alive far outweighs the grief of their passing. You might even argue that foreknowledge of your pet’s future death actually lends your delight in their comparatively fleeting existence even more resonance. That’s all very well. I still don’t want to come home one night to find a dead cat on the floor.
When I asked the internet whether I should get a pet, I got a variety of responses. One person suggested buying something dangerous, like a scorpion or a tiger. That way, rather than worrying about its death, I’d be worrying about my own. Our day-today existence would turn into a nail-biting contest in which only one of us would make it out alive. But I live in London. My stress levels peaked some time ago, thanks.
Someone else suggested a virtual pet, like a Tamagotchi. I had one of those years ago: accidentally put it through the washing machine in a jeans pocket and felt like a murderer. Taxidermy also got a mention. True, a stuffed pet wouldn’t die. But it would stand around in a glass box, advertising death. And that’s what I see when I look in the mirror. I see death. The ageing process and death. And a mop. The mop’s often propped up against that wall at the back I can see from the mirror. It’s not relevant to the discussion. I just threw it in to lighten the mood.
I suppose what I’m getting at here is I’m just too damn angsty to own a pet. Which is a pity because, like I say, I’ve got a cat flap. And whenever people see it they go, ‘Ooh, have you got a cat?’ and I have to explain that I don’t, because of death and everything, and it’s a bit of a conversation-killer to be honest. And it’s happened so many times now that every time I see the cat flap, I think about the cat I don’t have, and how much I’d like one if only it wouldn’t die, and then I realise I’m mourning a theoretical cat, which in turn leads me to contemplate how little time I have in my own life, and how I shouldn’t really waste it in morbid mental cul-de-sacs, and that makes me sad. The cat flap makes me sad.
Which is why I’m going to stop typing now and brick the bastard up. Who’s laughing now, cat flap? WHO’S LAUGHING NOW?
Hobby or not hobby? [22 June 2009]
I’m a jammy little bastard, because as time’s gone by I’ve somehow managed to convert each of my interests into a job. There’s been a chain of good fortune. As a child I idly doodled cartoons; as a teenager I drew comic strips for a kids’ comic. Since cartooning was now my job, I needed a new hobby. Luckily I had one: videogames. In my 20s I began reviewing games for a living. That put food on the table, but in my spare time, for a laugh, I built a website taking the piss out of TV shows. This led to a column in the Guardian Guide and so o
n and so forth and blah de blah. Lucky, lucky, lucky all the way.
The only trouble is that when your hobby becomes your job, it immediately ceases, by default, to be your hobby any more. And now I’ve run out of hobbies. I’m not into theatre or chess or steam trains or any of that. Films are too similar to TV shows to really offer relaxation, and there’s no way I’m taking up a sport. Spare time is dead time. What I really need is to develop a deep interest in a subject deep enough to absorb decades of my life.
Take history. You can read thousands of books about it, or go to museums, or form little local societies where you all go on organised excursions to Sutton Hoo or whatever. I wish I was into history, but I’m not. Besides robbing me of hours of potential hobby time, this lack of historical interest leaves me feeling guilty and uninformed. Those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it, after all. What if I accidentally kickstart the First World War all over again through sheer ignorance? That wouldn’t look good on anyone’s CV.
And interest can’t be faked. Every now and then I’ll try to force myself to suddenly find history fascinating. I’ll buy a popular history paperback peppered with glowing review quotes, open it up and stare earnestly at the words within. It’s like dangling a toy in front of an uninterested cat. My eyes may be locked on the page, but my brain simply glanced with mock curiosity for the first 10 minutes before wandering off somewhere else. And there’s nothing I can do to tempt it back.
The Hell of it All Page 37
