When the Community Support officer transmogrified from a policeman he was convinced it would make his life considerably easier. Although he had absolutely no idea what being a Community Support officer entailed, he likely supposed that it included a great deal of cheering, but most importantly, less time being punched or vomited on by members of the public. It was in the community spirit that the Community Support office made his decision. He was going to do absolutely nothing. Except support the community. From a distance. Next to the bakery. With the doughnuts.
CHAPTER 9
+6 Hours
The scene of any event is remembered in two ways. The first and more honest is in the same vein we remember the time Uncle Frank shat in his trousers that Christmas. It is a part shudder, a cup of regret and an unquantifiable sadness driven by the recognition that life can be an unquestionable bitch sometimes.
The other manner in which we remember an event is by attaching ourselves to it. A story is infinitely more interesting if we can personalise it and somehow give it credence in our own lives. This is why people so often talk about where they were when John F.Kennedy died, or when Princess Diana died. Perhaps it is banal to question their motivations as it is certain that unless they happened to be baking a pie at that particular time on that particular day the entire meanderings of the universe at large would likely have been different.
Journalists are paid to do both. The lower ranking the journalist, the more they recollect moments in the first vein. In the modern world of insta-news, it is more and more important to be first. It does not matter the quality of the story, or even the subject, it only matters that you catch a trending topic and be the first to report it.
The Journalist found himself in the new town at a time far too early to be considered reasonable. After he presented the idea to his editor he realised that the Non-stop Dancer had already garnered over twenty million views online. Thus he was despatched with a cameraman in tow to a town he thought he had left behind a long time ago, to report on a story that even he did not believe was newsworthy, for the simple reason that he suspected he had an extremely good shot of being first to the scene. As his cameraman set himself up, the Journalist watched the Non-stop Dancer and his sweating, red-faced disciple as they bounced and gyrated, and span and leapt, and realised they looked like fleas on the corpse of fresh roadkill.
“Are you ready?” asked the Cameraman. The Journalist nodded as he was counted in.
“For almost six hours, possibly more, this man behind me, unidentified so far has gone from nobody to somebody. An online video of him dancing has been viewed over twenty-million times in less than six hours. In this time he has not, amazingly, stopped dancing,” the Journalist tossed his head towards the Non-stop Dancer and the Cameraman followed him. The Journalist approached the Non-Stop Dancer directly. “Can you tell the viewers at home, erm, why you are dancing?” the Journalist prodded the Non-Stop Dancer with his microphone to no avail. The Non-stop Dancer had nothing to say, he merely wobbled with the breeze, his hands were glove puppets on a seesaw of destiny. “Why are you dancing?” tried the Journalist again. The Non-Stop Dancer merely smiled manically through a sweat-bathed fringe, turned with the pomp and flop of a distressed woman in a 1930s American Hollywood love story and danced off into the distance. “Fuck,” mumbled the Journalist.
CHAPTER 10
+7 hours
The morning after the night before is something that happens to some people somewhere, every, single day. It is not a particularly contrived notion. Life is cyclic in nature. It always continues. The idiotic nature of man means that many, many people forget that.
Recreational drugs have an intentionally daft name. Rationally speaking, the opposite of recreational drugs must be work time drugs. Let’s be honest, if there really was such a thing as work time drugs, there would be absolutely no unemployment in any country on earth. The danger of drugs is that boring people do not like them. The people that do try them encounter a significant disconnect from time. It is for this reason they are the primary form of escapism for millions of people.
Drugs have a habit of slowing down time itself. Two hours quickly become six.
An eight-hour sleep easily becomes a twelve-hour sleep. It is one of their most addictive qualities. On a primal level, most human beings are afraid of death, thus a narcotic that presents the illusion of an entirely different pace of life would indeed be popular as it nudges the individual’s perception towards tasting the notion that they are indeed immortal.
When the fifty-seventh notification flashed upon the screen of the Stoner’s mobile phone he briefly stirred. He had not even made it to his bedroom. When he returned home he had collapsed like fallen timber onto his sofa and fallen asleep. The living room was a battleground of lost evenings as the decaying corpses of half-eaten pizzas, discarded cigarette papers and empty beer bottles repurposed for ashtrays were scattered around, creating a striking reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica. Had the Sleeping Beauty been woken from his sleep he would have seen the message that read ‘Your video has been viewed twenty-five million times’. Such news, even containing such an extraordinary number, would have been completely irrelevant to the Stoner. Even on his soberest of days, he would have no way been able to comprehend that twenty-five million fingers had pushed a screen or clicked a mouse twenty-five million times. The vast majority of them would likely have belonged to different people and it, to a millennial, would mean absolutely bugger all.
Instead, the Sleeping Beauty slept on, completely oblivious to the fact that his video has travelled to seventy-three countries. It did not matter to the Stoner how people adjudged the video. He had never stopped to consider how it could impact anyone, not even himself. It did not matter whether the Non-stop Dancer had a wife, or children, or a job. It was merely the way the Stoner thought. It was simple, nobody had ever taught him that actions have consequences.
CHAPTER 11
+8 Hours
The most important man in a small town is most often the most important man because he often thinks that he is the most important man. Largely it is not exactly a quantifiable topic. Importance is the blurriest of yardsticks, as an infinitesimal number of things have to happen to produce a conclusion.
What if the day Newton discovered gravity he had happened to stop in Starbucks, or its predecessor ‘Warm Mud’ and been delayed by a spotty, incompetent student, who got his order wrong, wrote his name ‘Isuck’ on his thin, insufficient, paper cup, and served him a cold cup of mud. Such a catalogue of errors would have had disastrous implications for the fate of mankind as Sir Isaac would likely have become red-faced and ruddy and let forth a cannonade of swearwords in frustration, causing him to argue impetuously and impeachably, and subsequently would have been late to sit under the very tree where inspiration struck him in the form of an apple. Indeed it is correct to assume that the apple still would have fallen, only it would never have struck Sir Isaac Newton upon the head, causing man to never discover the theory of gravity, and thus continue to live in ignorance and waste vast amounts of time in vain attempts at jumping all the way to the moon. The point, as laboured and ludicrous as it really is, is quite straight forward. Importance is as useful a yardstick as a matchstick is in the hands of a blind arsonist.
The importance of an individual, or at least in the individual’s own opinion
can most easily be recognised in the very manner in which they walk. Important men walk everywhere at a speed that is only theirs. It is important as it must, as defined by Chandler’s Handbook for the Etiquettely Excellent(1846) states ‘be faster than a peasant on his way to market with a pocket full of beans and a stomach full of ardor, and slower than the richest man, back bent with pockets lined deep with gold’. Although for the untrained eye they resemble pissed gibbons swiping bottles from the bar of a public house, they are in fact the most powerful men that walk the streets of our country.
The Member of
Parliament pushed through the crowd of gathered gawkers with the authority of someone that believes they have authority. When he reached the front of the assembled throng he turned to face the people that stood before him wearing an expression which said ‘it’s me’, which would had he been in an opera house have made the desired impact, regrettably, he was at an impromptu piece of street theatre, most likely both conjured by lunacy, and spectated by lunatics, thus the only way the Member of Parliament could have appeared more invisible would have been shouting ‘ha, ha, ha, you fools, I’m invisible’. The entire issue was further confounded by the very fact that not a single throngee in the said throng had any clue who he was.
“What the devil is he doing?” mumbled the Member of Parliament, which had he purposely thought of a sentence that he could utter quietly to give an exact depiction of precisely where he saw his place in society, he quite likely would not have been able to produce something more apt. A man with a single strap bag turned to the Member of Parliament and spoke aloud. Yet all the Member of Parliament could hear was blah de blah blah blah.
“It’s just not British. It’s bloody embarrassing.” uttered the Member of Parliament. The man with the single strap bag wrote something in a notebook and scurried away, smirking the smirk of those that know that although victory is impossible, an ambush is always possible and deeply, deeply satisfying.
CHAPTER 12
+9 Hours
When confronted with crass stupidity, no religious person ever considers the fact that God is omnipotent and omnipresent. It is a considerable problem for those that look at the entire universe with eyes the size of a rat’s. By convincing yourself that the world is explained by a bearded cloud dweller and his mysterious ways you never have to face the fact that you are ignorant.
The notion that a single being is responsible for everything is extremely silly. On largesse alone, Santa Claus appears more rational than the pagan rituals. Consciousness, the poison of many a man's soul is responsible for creating a vast number of problems. Humans are driven to seek understanding and when you remove that innate drive we become little more than blobs of jelly with inexplicable pockets of unnecessary hair in places where it is most redundant. Religions seek to manipulate that drive and to utilise it to drive our money into their pockets.
People will always ask why. They will always look towards community leaders that they can ideologically identify with, in the scant hope of not a rational, but rather a believable explanation. This is why in times of the greatest of tragedies, we often send our zealots and bigots in first. It is often their job to sufficiently dilute the truth, to make it more palatable for average Joe.
The Vicar adjusted her jacket to ensure that her dog collar was visible. Her job came with few perks, and the fleeting moment of panic that appeared in people's eyes the moment they saw it could buy space in the most crowded of places, could steal people's innermost secrets and most incredibly of all, occasionally earned her a free cup of tea. As she left the betting shop she was cornered in the doorway by a member of her flock.
“Have you seen it, Vicar? Have you seen it? It’s a bloody travesty is what it is,” the question was in no shape or form a question. It was a question raised with the sole intention of continuing to speak.
“Seen what?” the Vicar asked, despite feeling certain that the answer would be forthcoming irrespective of her own engagement.
“All those people. Dancing around like a bunch of looneys. There is not even any music to dance to. In my day my parents would have given me a kick in the arse if I pulled a stunt like that,” the Vicar snuck through the doorway and headed up the High Street.
Condescension is not the name of a Spanish woman. Nor is it a characteristic becoming of a lady or man of the cloth. And yet it is rife on this particular island, as common as precipitation and as welcome as a single day without rain. The Vicar spotted a crowd ahead of her, focused on something indistinguishable. There wasn’t a sound to be heard.
The Vicar pushed through the crowd until she could get a clear view of the perpetrator. There were a number of people swaying and turning to the heady sound of silence. Some of them had even removed their shoes. Before the Vicar had any opportunity to compose herself a dictaphone was thrust under her long, and rather unbecoming, nose.
“....... Star. Any comment on the Non-Stop Dancers?” asked a spotty little man. The Vicar made a sound which once upon a time may even have been considered as a ‘harrumph’ which in reality was much more like a ‘huh’ but sounded much more sinister due to the fact that her chin was pushed down atop her collar.
“It’s. It’s. It’s. It’s just not Christian,” she muttered reluctantly into the dictaphone as she took in the sight before her. Despite the proclamations of common sense that resounded inside her she was quite sure she lacked the temerity to be incensed. In reality, at least in her reality, it was little more than, she took a moment to consider the correct collective noun, a hoard of looneys. It was moments like these when, if she was truly honest with herself, she realised that she wasn’t cut out to be a woman of the cloth. No matter how hard she tried she truly could not force a single drop of rage from her body over something so trivial.
CHAPTER 13
+10 Hours
Every single molecule in his body screamed out for him to stop, but he powered on, feeding off of the most under-utilised source of energy in the known universe, love. Around him a mass of molecules bounced in different directions, a forest of limbs, entwined like reeds in the wind, they danced and swayed to a tune that absolutely nobody could hear.
The Non-Stop Dancer smiled the smile that only a smiler can smile but not a smilee as it was a smile that was almost a smirk of a smiler that not only knew the truth but actually owned it. He raised his arms above his head and turned in an extremely slow circle, the sweat leapt from his body in a tsunami of pure love. He opened his eyes and saw that the people had followed. It was a pirouette of light, energy and completeness. It was happiness. It was love. He truly was the light.
CHAPTER 14
+11 Hours
The momentum of a moment can change as quickly as the wind. The force can increase, the direction can be renewed. It is merely the nature of the beast. The skilled amongst us, those individuals that shall be sought out by society and identified as leaders, as fashion icons and success stories are those of us that have licked our fingers, held them in the air and had both the integrity to trust our judgement, and the stomach to follow it through too.
The moments that define our society in the clearest shades of grey are those that marginalise us, that divide us into two groups and that offer a linguistic ingenuity rarely observed outside of extremely bad rap music. Defining moments create iconic words that penetrate and permeate our existence, that enrich us with a refreshing reminder that we are the captains of our own ship, that convince us once and for all that we, the human race, are the conquerors of all we encounter.
“So why do you think the Brancing resonates so widely with people here?” asked the Journalist as he pointed his microphone towards the Member of Parliament.
“The what sorry?” replied the Member of Parliament as he flicked back his mane of somewhat wild, or perhaps marginally discontented hair. “Brancing?”
“That’s what they are calling it?”
“Brancing?”
“Yes,” replied the Journalist somewhat uncertainly, “Brancing, as in British Dancing.”
In millions of homes across the Greatest of Great Britain and some of the significantly worse parts, the camera zoomed in on the face of the Minister of Parliament, penetrating every pore and sore. He was a pixelated demigod, a freeform philistine, every single facial muscle naked, in front of much of the nation. Some say it began with his left eye. It started as the tiniest of twitches, barely discernible to those poor enough to own a television smaller than thirty-eight inches in diameter. Some say it was like wa
tching a brontosaurus egg hatch. Wherever the bonafide truth lies, this is precisely what happened.
A tiny little fly. Not rebellious. Not angry either. It is worth noting, with no political affiliation whatsoever, flew directly into the Minister of Parliament’s cheek.
It was gone in the blink of an eye. The Minister squinted, his brain recognising
his actions as those of a blinker, and proceeded to release a single tear to clear his eye. Inside the Minister of Parliament’s brain, a furious calculation was taking place. On the televisions inside of people's homes the violence of a prolonged silence attacked their eardrums, before suddenly, with all the brutality of a deceased fly farting inside a bowl of cabbage soup, it happened.
The Minster of Parliament impetuously grabbed at his tie and unsuccessfully tried to unknot it. He reverted to loosening the knot before lifting it over his head and impatiently stuffing it inside his pocket. The Minister of Parliament awkwardly began stepping from side to side to an invisible beat so irregular it made jazz seem normal. He looked very much like a small child that had returned home early to find that his parents are out whilst suffering the excruciating vindictiveness of a bladder quite determined to rid itself of its contents.
The Non-stop Dancer Page 2
