Dances in the Gutter of Envy

Many things have outlived their usefulness and linger around like the smell of rotting flesh. Every so often something fails to notice they died long ago...existing now as something weird and profane, lying somewhere between the respective handiwork of Baron Samedi and Rod Hull. Death does not stop them moving and indeed breeding...the awards ceremony is a case in point.

Despite their appeal shrinking like a salted snail over the years, the increasing number of the things is overwhelming. The gene pool of these things is now the size of the puddle...the chin is receding, the balls are shrinking and the teeth are bucking like a whore’s legs. Soon they will give birth to a small sack of ceremonial organs with no head or limbs and we will still be subjected to pictures of Liz Hurley getting out of a car and almost flashing her knickers. Generally on the front page of the Telegraph.

Some ceremonies, of course, are a little more venerable than the Daily Express Cute Kids In Wheelchairs Saving Distressed Kitties Bravery Awards. Last night we had the grandaddy of them all and once again the world took notice.

But the Oscars is a perpetual cycle of money rewarding money and is less relevant to everyday film-making than ever. It is Chelsea FC being gifted a bottomless well of money and then expecting warm admiration from all concerned when they win the inevitable silverware. It is the class of philosophy students who, upon graduation, discover the only job they can get is philosophy lecturer to the next generation of students. They get on with their business and we get on with ours. There is no connection with the outside world. And when people turn up at the cinema, the fun they have has nothing to do with the number of golden statues on the director’s mantelpiece.

The films that win were all pitched with the Oscar in mind and this immediately sets them aside. Think of a director crying on the desk of a Hollywood producer as he puts forward the heartbreaking concept of a child with a fashionable disability beating the odds to become President of the United States of America. Sounds terrible...but also jolly Important. So long as it sounds worthy enough it will be welcomed with open arms and then Oscar’d ‘til it bleeds.

The pitch has become a curse and many good films do not exist because they could not be summed up in a few words. Similarly, many bad films have been made because the idea of crossing thrilling film X with voguish genre film Y made a manager wet somewhere down the line. The quality of writing, characterisation and acting is irrelevant; the deal only goes down if the concept itself is saleable. But we cannot judge the what-ifs of the industry because alternate histories are entirely unpredictable. All we have are the end results -- the films dogged enough to make it over the tortuous obstacle course -- to use as a stick to beat the industry.

Wait a moment, though...good films have won Oscars and it would be idiotic to say that only low-budget independent films are worthy of our consideration. What we must realise is that the satisfaction we get from a film is barely connected to whether it wins the Oscar. There is no film in existence that everybody would agree is the most wonderful film of all time...so the award winning films are voted in by a compromising committee and this is never going to be of interest to the genuine film buff.

Damn it. I cannot quite get this right. What the hell am I trying to say here? Perhaps that the Oscar does indeed tend to go to the Good Film and the Good Actor, but the concept is capsized by the emphasis on the themes and genres that have always won Oscars before...a bad situation in which the conservatism of previous years feeds on itself and ends up throwing po-faced banality around like a misfiring muckspreader. A kind of self-imposed straightjacket.

And conservative it has been and conservative it remains, despite Hollywood being seen as some kind of evil liberal haven...a charge that would be comical if it didn’t offer a horrifying glimpse into the conservative mind. Anything they cannot control and censor and use to spread their dubious morality is labelled unnatural and therefore a target for destruction...ah, to hell with this. This kind of political mush writes itself and contributes nothing.

Well, whatever. I have little reason to jabber on about this anyway... I do not really give a damn about the Oscars for the reason I gave in an earlier paragraph; that they’re irrelevant to film-making. Why do I need to care that only Oscary films win Oscars? These are generally not the films I watch...not always, but I certainly do not need some kind of spurious stamp of approval from a bunch of Hollywood numpties before I watch a film or not.

So why even watch the ceremony if we do not choose to watch films based on whether or not they won an award? Camp value? What a pile of shit. People kidding themselves that, because they are told it has camp appeal, they are automatically going to enjoy watching it. That is Trying Too Hard and they know it. In reality the ceremony is nothing more than inane peacocking and PR masturbation in bad outfits.

In fact the whole celebrity fixation we have in this country smacks of something we have been shepherded into, rather than something we each independently decided was most fascinating... waking up one day with a sudden thought...my god! I cannot live without seeing a picture of someone who is on television in a dress that poorly emphasises part of her body! We have been force-fed more gossip-based shite than we know what to do with and we now believe that digesting uninteresting celebrity facts and pictures is as natural as breathing in and out.

Unless...the desire for seeing our supposed betters being laid low is innate...why wouldn’t you be pleased to see the King of England caught in a threesome with the Queens of Spain and France if you are a 12th century peasant downtrodden by some bastardised version of feudalism? A combination of jealously and...well, that appears to be it. Jealousy. Especially if there is a sense of unfairness about it. A king because his father was king? How unfair is that! Millionaire Beckham being paid further millions for whoring himself in some insipid cola advert? Let’s stone the fucker!

Which is only natural. Celebrities are now our betters... ubiquity has become interchangeable with status. We crave their omnipresence and then we are told they are so over and that we should start throwing the rocks. And as we chuckle into our copies of Heat we must realise that if we are happy to obsess over the downfall of others then we must have something to offer ourselves. But we prefer to force people to join us dancing in the gutter than stepping out onto the pavement.

A Wreckage of Tiny Truths

Hmm. The words are coming out rotten today no matter what I try to write...the delete key is throbbing with overuse. So...Friday it is and Friday it remains...and the day has been dusted with snow and little events of curious magnitude. Yet something is keeping me from expressing them on a computer screen. Some of this is clear; there is a limit to the amount of self-regarding nonsense in which I am willing to indulge. This prevents any stupid words being wasted about most of what I learnt today. Hell, who cares what I learnt? I am not here to throw pages of some hastily written diary in the spotty face of the Internet.

Sometimes all you can rescue from the wreckage is a pile of unconnected and modest truths that are naked when seen out of context. So finding a thread that runs through them is a noble goal and may even lead to a point being made...the least we can expect, surely?

Well...this is not always true. We buy books of miscellaneous facts by the basket, mostly as presents for miscellaneous friends. There is no satisfaction in these books except for a watered-down firework effect...we sit there going “ooh” and “aah” as each successive fact explodes before us, more out of duty than interest, and once they have disappeared, the night is just as dark and all we have left is a hole in our wallets.

Christ! What an absurd swamp of metaphors! And there was another. Ye gods. Rotten words... Ah, but we were going somewhere with this, and this was to assemble our pile of random facts into some kind of a round up. A news ticker in which news is replaced by unimportance...like Heat magazine, only not completely lousy.

Right...so here we go. There was a bomb scare today. This almost saw our office evacuated; it happened when a bag containing strange and fearsome electronics was found abandoned. It later proved to be a hoax. And here's the thing...a programme was broadcast last night about vigilance against terrorism and we wonder if this whole thing happening the next day is not a coincidence. Perhaps the result of someone being fed bad ideas by another production company in love with juicy scare tactics. These programmes do cause more trouble than anything...the same turmoil caused by the typical medical show where, inevitably, hundreds of viewers switch off and immediately develop all the symptoms of whatever disease is being profiled. People are horribly suggestible and prone to panic...uneducated people seeing the door opened slightly for them and not being able to process the sight of what lies beyond without having some kind of brain spasm.

Perhaps that is snobbery, but if what I said is true then what the hell. We have a great deal of sensationalist media to contend with every day and so long as this keeps translating to good sales we are stuck with it. It is one step on the ladder below outright lying, and a great many steps above psychological manipulation.

Enough of that. Today I discovered that talcum powder comes from a mine, and in effect so does kitty litter...or at least the one single mineral that can be used in the stuff does, anyway. There are few situations in which this information would be useful, but this is the case for most of what we learn...especially at school where trigonometry and oxbow lakes replace genuinely useful pieces of education such as how long you can leave paying a bill before it becomes an Issue, how much you can fiddle a tax return whilst staying under the radar, and where the hell do you buy sticky hooks for kitchen towels? Seriously, this last one has me stumped. And to think I wasted two years on fripperies such as German, Ceramics and IT.

Later I was in the supermarket and was surprised to hear a burst of stirring orchestral music. It was the disconcerting sound of a Great British prom that had become detached from the shore of summer and had floated off down the river into the fag end of February. The music became louder and I realised this was not a public address system malfunction...there was someone, something coming towards me, some kind of hideous vehicle. This fearsome buggy was covered in Union Flags and controlled by the kind of man who wouldn't think twice about twatting an asylum seeker around the chops with his Ruffian-Begone stick. He swooshed past, music blazing, almost knocking the wine from my hands.

"Up yours, Grandad!" I bellowed, tossing the wine overarm towards the old idiot. The bottle landed inches before his cruel machines, causing him to swerve desperately. He span the wheel round and round, but the skid was unstoppable...soon the wheels gave up beneath his frail form and the buggy struck a pyramid of baked bean tins, flipped over and burst into flames. The old man crawled out, only to find me standing on his hands and looking triumphant. Then I blew a raspberry at him and ran for it.

Well, maybe. I still have no idea why this twisted freak had been allowed in the supermarket and why he was pimping his patriotism on a bunch of weary shoppers, most of whom were uninterested commuters searching for some crappy jar of pasta sauce. Did he have a message, a point to impart? Was he wallowing in some kind of last-ditch pride in his autumn years? Or was he fucking nuts? I shrugged and left to find some cheap beefburgers.

By the time I got home I noticed a couple of young women in a nearby garden were filming some kind of weird ballet dance, but by then the day seemed too irregular to cope with...so I closed the curtains and defrosted some chicken.

Ah, we have crept into the bad realm of the hastily written diary. With the amount of people giving a damn about what meat I had for dinner reaching a staggering zero figure number, it is probably a good time to end this thing.

The Wheels Have Fallen Off the Wagon

A crisis breaks...since 7.30 this morning Clapham Junction station has been without electricity and they have blundered their way through the snow and cold in a weird approximation of customer service. I work elsewhere but the echoes are loud and are sending our managers into a panic. The emergency power has failed and the electrician came with further bad news...the problem will not be fixed until tomorrow morning. Jesus!

It is now 3.00pm in the afternoon and our side of the earth is slowly and surely turning away from the sun...there is no way such a station can run in the dark. It would be dangerous and farcical. So now a bell begins to toll and will reach its crescendo in one hour’s time when thousands of desperate commuters will discover Clapham Junction is completely, utterly and totally shut. An announcement is ready to go out over the public address system here any moment and we are poised to hear the collective moan of despair from the public. Clapham Junction is, of course, Britain’s busiest station. This will cause chaos...

3.15pm, and the idea of replacement buses has been discarded. It would send the evening rush hour into murderous freefall; nothing would be able to move on the roads. So what the hell is going to happen?

Well...we’re not responsible, so all we have to worry about is the operational side of the crisis. It was not our decision to close the station...the blame will fall elsewhere.

And this is a managerial problem. All I can do is shrug and continue staring at a computer screen, waiting for the working day to end. With everybody else having either gone home or tied up with the current crisis, I am at a loose end...I have already wasted enough time reading the papers today...and the news outside our bubble is no better than the stuff within.

In particular, Hunter S. Thompson has shot himself in the head and his body was found at his home in Woody Creek yesterday...now everywhere in the world there are conservatives feeling just that little bit safer in their beds. God only knows why he did it and I do not wish to know either...anyone who finds any kind of doomed romance or gonzo spirit in this thing are deluding themselves. It is not a good death and certainly does not serve his memory well.

But what the hell. It was his choice, after all. He had his reasons and we only show ourselves up by slavering over the grisly details like rabid dogs in a butcher’s shop. And his unexpected and violent end can only breed a thousand unwanted conspiracy theories. This is a pity and does not feel Right.

In a strange way his death is not shocking. Tragic, indeed, but the fact he survived this long is something way beyond medical logic. His work, his writing that exploded like fireworks of acid over each and every page, is a piece of history and has felt like that for many years now. So his death feels like the final inevitable station on a journey he began long ago; he bought the ticket and took the ride, whilst everyone else ran alongside the train trying to keep up.

And now he’s gone. So now who the hell do we plagiarise?

3.40pm. The wheels of process are rolling...London Underground are accepting tickets of affected overland services, and the buses will soon be equally complicit. But the question that is being asked, in a particularly peeved tone, is simple. Why the hell we were warned just one hour before the station was due to close? Are the communication channels really that bad? But there are a hundred companies involved here, and each one contributes more and more noise to the signal. If you put your ear to the cable all you hear is crazed static...bad snatches of panic and failed connections.

3.55pm, and the last train to stop at Clapham Junction will soon be departing. Posters have been created and emailed out to stick up around the network, but we can do little to prevent the upcoming turmoil...we simply have to manage the roughest edges. Our goal is to appear to be doing everything we can, to stop this from becoming a PR nightmare. And, of course, to keep the public from blaming the wrong people...i.e. us. This is unlikely and there will be enough public anger to go round.

Ah, well. This will blow over soon enough. Every day a million commuters find themselves yielding a sigh at some fresh hell on London Transport, and this is no different. I am willing to put any amount of money that tonight, for instance, the East London line will be walking with a slight limp, as it is every day on my way home.

4.05pm. Mother of shitty death! The last train to leave Clapham Junction, due to leave a minute before four, has just collapsed in a wheezing heap. The damn thing has failed in the station and a million windows in London have just shattered under the stress of a train full of screaming passengers. Oh dear...the situation is bizarre and the station manager is juggling several phone calls at once trying to work out what the hell is going on.

Now he tosses the phones aside and heads through the door. “It’s all fun and games here today,” he says to nobody in particular, before giggling madly and rushing off to find a radio.

Hmm...well. Seems like the right time to bail on this situation, wipe my mind of the thing and head home. I am just grateful I am heading east, preferably as far away from Clapham Junction as I can go...

4.20pm. Ye gods! Last second reprieve...now things have turned on their head...with everything having been set up for an impending disaster, there is a strange rumour that the power will be operational within ten minutes. But the trains are still not going to stop...what the hell is going on?

Ah, fuck it. I give up.

Narrate, Friend, and Enter

Sometimes you watch an entire programme without realising than an actor you like was in the thing. The credits roll, the mist clears and your jaw drops. My God! Him? Really? Thingy from that programme you used to watch? Good Lord. Hasn’t he aged...he’s got bigger jowls than you nowadays. This happened to me the other day. I watched Shogun Assassin and was surprised to see Sandra Bernhard in the credits. What the hell?

This can also happen during a documentary, narrated by somebody famous whom you fail to recognise until the credits. You sit on the sofa, idly scratching your ear with a Dorito, letting the television wash over you. Then the Last Line is spoken – the narrator pauses momentarily, his voice becomes deeper and more meaningful, and then he states the bleeding obvious with the utmost gravity. “The lion cubs... pause... have lived another day... pause... to be part of the endless cycle of life... pause... on the glorious plains of the Serengeti.” Or... ”The penguins have once again... pause... survived the winter... pause...to live another day... pause... in the frozen wastes... pause... of this most majestic... pause... of frozen wastes... pause... on another day...” etc etc. At this point the programme ends and if you listen carefully you can hear a wad of money changing hands, a high-pitched whoop of joy and a cartoon sound effect of someone taking off at high speed and vanishing over the horizon.

The music swells...generally something Enya picked out of her arse with a toasting fork. Nice. You find yourself coming out of your daydream as the credits appear. Then you realise that, all along, you have been listening to the voice of Bernard Cribbins, or Manuel from Fawlty Towers, or perhaps Martin Clunes. Startled at this, you try and recall a single line from the programme. You fail utterly. And you can’t even remember what the narrator sounded like. Or, indeed, what the hell you just watched. Welcome to Sunday.

But it is now Monday and it is snowing over London tonight. If it continues then tomorrow will Not Be Much Fun. Tomorrow? Hmm...only a few minutes away now...

There are more words to go with these cowering thoughts but I cannot pursue that tonight... I must sleep now. Goodnight everybody.

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Exhibitions of Insanity and Shame

The days have been cold of late. Even Michael Jackson has the flu, manifesting itself shortly before he was due in court yesterday. A strange turn of events among many...the word is that he will be calling Elizabeth Taylor as a witness during the trial and nobody is quite sure why. Never mind your surprise witnesses...this is an unexpected electric shock to the genitals from behind witness. But we will have to wait until next week to find out what she is going to tell the court, leaving us with nothing to do but speculate.

Well...unless our Cleopatra delivers a startling eyewitness account that it was the busy hands of Bubbles the Monkey all along, this only leaves two possibilities. Either she will be Michael’s alibi or his character witness. In the first case she would provide a testimony that Michael was round her house on the nights in question buffing up her Oscar. This may ask more questions than it answers. In the second case...ye gods! Hour upon hour about how Michael is the most beautiful man in the world and how his soul is purer than an angel and how they are all being so beastly to him and should hang their heads in shame for trying to blacken the name of the bestest man in all the world.

The answer to that will come in due course. Right now Michael is sitting at home in a sterile glass cube, surrounded by hundreds of specialists in radiation suits dabbing his forehead with cotton wool held on the end of long tongs, reminding him how much he means to his fans. He knows these accusations are false because he is Michael Jackson and he is beyond this world’s petty concerns. People are jealous of his beautiful face and always seek to put him down for caring too much. The spiteful beasts! And so he sits on his silk hammock, unscrewing and screwing his nose absent-mindedly, lost in reverie about how much the world owes him a great debt of love and beauty and respect and must not ever question him, damn them.

He pities us. Are our lives even worth living as we sit here in this broken world of shattered dreams and spiteful lies?

Oh yes. Shattered dreams are a speciality down here amongst the ordinary people. We all swim against strong currents and only the select few ever make it upstream. Otherwise half the world would be astronauts by now.

Hmm...I am in danger of swapping my shirt and tie for a black polo neck here. We shall leave behind such cod-Sartre gibberish and instead take a look at how different channels have been covering the story.

Last night Channel 4 pushed the story deep into the running order, concentrating instead on the latest echoes of the McDonalds libel trial. Five approached the story with much more gusto. They opened in a quite frightening manner by sitting the presenter in front of four enormous screens, each showing a slow-motion video of Michael Jackson gurning into the camera, each one out of sync with the others. This was terrifying and lacked only a caption reading “FREAK” flashing on and off to complete the effect. Sky News, meanwhile, stunned their viewers by observing in all seriousness how Michael Jackson currently looked “thin and pale”. Whereas before the trial he was a dead ringer for Missy Elliot, of course.

As I was saying, the days have been cold of late. The weekend was particularly cold; it hailed on Saturday whilst I was at the bear enclosure at London Zoo. The bears looked forlorn and I felt little better.

Indeed...London Zoo does not look good on a freezing February afternoon. Pale sunlight filtered through storm clouds and cast onto muddy concrete is a depressing sight...the whole place seemed down-at-heel and unkempt.

But on the whole it was worth the visit. I have been to tourist attractions far worse than that before, the worst being a place that was billed as a museum in Salem, Massachusetts. From the outside it looked quite impressive, an imposing church with lurid promises of the excitement within plastered across the doors. Once we paid the sizeable entrance fee we were herded into a dark room. The door was locked and bolted behind us and we soon found out why. We were trapped in this place for about quarter of an hour, during which a procession of small glass display cases lining the walls lit up, some mechanical models of men chopping wood wheezed to life, and an inaudible narration was pumped in through tinny speakers. Our jaws collectively dropped. Was the whole museum going to be as fantastically bad as this?

The truth began to dawn on us that this wasn’t the introduction to the main exhibition but was, in fact, the entire museum. So we decided to cut our losses and leave early. But the makers were one step ahead...they had constructed a room so fiendish and disorientating it was like something out of the Avengers. We were going nowhere until the show was over... It was bizarre. You would approach a door only for it to melt into the wall and reappear on the opposite side of the room. And the soundproofed walls smothered all attempts at screaming for help.

On the way out, none of the staff would look us in the eye.

But for bizarre museum experiences I still relish the memory of a science museum in Ohio that I wandered around for two hours without realising the place was closed. Nobody challenged me, nobody asked for any money, and I only noticed my mistake when I headed back to the entrance to find the place now staffed and letting in hundreds of children. None of the staff batted an eyelid at my appearance. Well, if they will leave side doors open, they deserve to have people like me helping themselves to free science. It’s the perfect crime!

Small Beer on Self Pity Street

Well, I don’t know. I have a bad cold that does not appear to be developing into anything worse...not enough to squeeze me out of the rat race but enough to expose the rest of the office to rotten germs. Given that I am surrounded by the discarded wrappers of lozenges and cold remedy capsules with silly macho names, as well as heaps of tissues and a pile of filing a mile high....at what point is it best to choose to stay at home?

The work is light today, after the chaos of last week. If I feel any worse tomorrow I will stay at home and not feel guilty.

This is not a common problem for me. I am rarely ill and have not had a day off work for this reason for many years. There is little incentive to fake it since sick days are taken from my holiday entitlement. One of the many pokes in the eye you expect when working for an temping agency.

When I was very young I was at the beck and call of tonsilitis, but this passed as I grew older. And for years at school I contracted something mysterious and flemmy every single December, which took a couple of days to clear up...it was a clockwork illness that began to chime, without fail, on the twelfth of the month.

I always took the opportunity to sprawl out in front of Richard and Judy whilst writing my Christmas cards, occasionally looking up to see a feature about this year's most fashionable Christmas tree...which would turn out to be a useless silver tree with ultra-violet lighting and no decorations. Then a weatherman named Fred would leap around a floating weather map in a repulsive cardigan, spending a frantic ten minutes to tell us that the weather across Britain in the depths of winter was going to be cold, actually. Finally, Richard would say something inappropriate about Judy’s menstrual cycle, a celebrity chef would cook some “alternative” Christmas fayre in which turkey was shoehorned into a summery Mediterranean dish, and then the credits would roll. At this point I would shrug and double my medication.

But that was then. Now Richard and Judy are on when I arrive home from work. I switched on early for The Simpsons the other day to find Cherie Blair phoning the show about how her husband never buys her flowers. After seeing this important piece of television I tried phoning Today with Des and Mel to complain about an ingrowing toenail, but for some reason they wouldn’t put me on the air. The twisted hypocritical scum! One rule for the celebrities, another for the rest of us...although I did get a call from UK Living offering me a chatshow about the draft that comes in through the bathroom window, but I do have standards.

Richard and Judy, of course, managed to trump themselves by having Tony Blair as a guest last week. It being a hard-hitting political show, Tony fitted right in and it proved to be an important use of his time...but then this is the man who took time out of the recent Iraq invasion to record a voice for the Simpsons. Next week, look out for Tony’s debut on Naked News, an interview in Smash Hits about his fave boy band, and a ribbon-cutting at the opening of a new Aldi. Anything to come across as one of the little people.

Where was I? Illness. Hmm. There were rumblings last week about having to come in to work at seven a.m. this Thursday and Friday...whereupon I would have to stand on a freezing cold platform to monitor train arrivals. Jesus. I would fight tooth and nail to avoid this terrible fate anyway, but now I feel like shit there is no way in hell I will agree to this. And if they force the matter I will take a deep breath...then expel the entire contents of my lungs over them in a mucus-tinged cascade of revenge. Or just stick a pair of scissors between their eyes and cut out their brains. Either will suffice.

And on that happy threat of good old-fashioned violence, it must be time for another lozenge.

Di Another Day

The Daily Express yesterday reacted to Prince Charles proposal to Camilla with the front page headline “What would Diana Say?”

What? Who cares? She’s been dead for years and Charles has no reason to contemplate some kind of weird undead what-if scenario. But the Express believe that the Diana nostalgia well has not yet run dry and they feel it is their patriotic duty to crank out one more wildly emotional pile of pompous gibberish maquerading as some kind of morality tale. They are idiots and must be trampled to death by elephants at the earliest opportunity, but until then we can only be grateful for one thing...they aren’t the Daily Mail.

Meanwhile, we crank up the time machine and go back to two nights ago, and Express proprieter Richard Desmond is stalking the office, throwing copies of Asian Babes and Slutty Corpses at unlucky sub-editors.

RD: Fucking hell, there must be a story here about how Charles is a heartless bastard...I mean, what if Diana were still alive?
Sub: But she isn’t, she’s dead.
RD: But what would she say?
Sub: Nothing, she’s dead.
RD: But would she approve if she were alive?
Sub: But she isn’t alive, she’s dead.
RD: Perhaps you’re right. Ah, but what if she weren’t? How bad would Charles look then?
Sub: But she’s dead! Who cares?
RD: I do! The readers do! If Charles has committed an immoral act they wish to know!
Sub: But he hasn’t committed an immoral act. She’s dead.
RD: You’re fired! And take this collection of porn with you!
Sub: Er, actually it’s your collection...you own the company, remember? You broadcast this filth on Pay TV whilst putting out a newspaper brimming with moral outrage at everything and everyone.
RD: Ye gods, you’re right, I’m a hypocritical violent obnoxious little pornographer, aren’t I? I shall sell all my interests in pornography immediately.
Sub: Good idea.
RD: What? It was a fucking joke, you talentless hack! You’re fired! Why is this country full of Nazis? Mein Herr! Mein Herr! Now come here and let me punch you in the face. You’re fired!

At this point Desmond starts goose-stepping towards the sub whilst drooling and waving his fists. The sub rolls his eyes and goes back to work, checking through a piece in which Express staff contact Diana’s ghost with the help of Jackie Stallone and David Beckham. So we step back into the time machine and return to the present, which is now a post-apocalyptic wasteland because you stepped on a butterfly in the past.

Honestly.You daft bugger.

Exit Music Played Through Tired Speakers

The news recently has been full of endings, near-endings and everything after...the main story on many fronts has been the end of Ellen MacArthur’s round the world trip and how the media have reacted to her victory. The navy has been lavishing strange honours on her, whilst some newspapers have been sniffing haughtily, rolling their eyes and complaining she didn’t have a hard enough time because she didn’t circumnavigate the world in a leaky barrel, or whatever. But overall the response has implied that we are celebrating this because we are short of better things to celebrate.

Much of that is media waffle, stories by Phil Space and Philippa Column...the curse of finding an angle no matter what. Meanwhile, the few people in this country who haven’t got a newspaper column are offering restrained applause and are not being shackled by hours of useless discussion regarding her motives for sailing round the world. I don’t care, personally, what she does and why she did it, but that does not mean she did not do something of which she can be proud. And hell...she was attacked by whales, for god’s sake.

Elsewhere, nobody stood watching from the shore as the IRA steered their boats away from dry land at the last minute, bypassing an ending and circling back into the bad waters of shitty chest-beating, taking offence at whatever tiny insult has been levelled at them recently. We are used to this situation and there is little wonder the IRA thinned their lips and complained nobody was taking their statements seriously. As if they expected the world to collectively spit out their tea and scream “surely nobody could have predicted such a thing!” in abject surprise when they heard the statement.

Also...the Israel / Palestine agreement...it may be an ending but whether it has any practical importance or not will not be proven for many months. There is still a lot of story to play out here, as we all well know.

There are few endings from my perspective at the moment. One thing that remains perpetually buzzing around my little world is a series of strange conversations that I feel are foreshadowing some kind of imminent doom. These conversations happen every few days.

Well...it happened again yesterday. This time whilst I was eating lunch in the office.

“So where do you live?” the manager asked.

“New Cross Gate,” I said.

“Oh my god.”

Indeed. His answer was brutal in its scalpel-like precision and I decided to change the subject to something less ominous. But I brooded on this conversation, and the many others along the same lines, for the rest of the day. In the evening I walked to the shops, and outside electrical retailer Curry’s my path was crossed by a man in a blue coat. I considered greeting him, but noticed he was too busy being bundled into the back of a police van by an unsmiling copper to respond to pleasantries. The van roared away from Curry’s...I peered in the window, but there was already no trace of whatever bad noise had gone down. Jesus. So is this damn area safe or not? My flatmate would say not, of course.

Curry’s...Curry’s...hmm. A strange shop with weird advertisements. At present they are running a promotion whereby they knock out “last season’s stock” at reduced prices, which puzzles me. Do washing machines, therefore, go out of fashion? Is Jean Paul Gautier weeping into his sarong because the white goods in my flat are no longer in Heat magazine’s “what’s hot” column? Perhaps this seasons’s washing machines have the “new black” programmed into their circuits so they can shred the clothes into whatever style the most fashionable new guitar band is wearing.

Jesus...honestly. Either a washing machine gets your clothes clean or it doesn’t, but this is a screamingly obvious statement that advertisers would give their grannies a rim job to make people forget. It is the same with any product. New is better. Remember the washing powder we launched last year that promised to get rid of 100% stains with its 3-in-1 cleaning action? Bollocks. This year we’re up to 105% with a 5-in-1 powerball that tells you your future whilst sucking you off. And you won’t even have to wait until next year’s even better washing powder because we confidently expect it to be clever enough to travel back through time.

Then reality comes crashing back in. No matter how much you buy into the commercials, that suspect stain on your shirt lapel just ain’t coming out.

Another ending I noticed last night was the snapping of the last thread that held up the idea that international friendlies are of any interest. The game was England vs Holland at Villa Park, a game that finished goalless, and a game that was in Danny Baker’s words this morning “the dullest football game in history, official.”

Quite so...I wasted an entire can of Generic Lager on that game. Both sides were solidly unspectacular; Michael Owen continued his game plan of spending 90 minutes sitting under a dark blanket and muttering to himself about how he could score if given the chance, Beckham scratched his arse as he waited for a chance to take the inevitable curling free kick, whilst Rooney looked as happy as a long distance lorry driver with piles in his new position. Hmm...we do seem keen on players that sparkle like an expensive firework for a year or so before landing on a field nearby and lying there uselessly in the darkness for the next ten years.

So in this match, nothing happened with surprising frequency. The only moment where the game was shot with electricity was in the first half where Holland hit the post. Neither team could finish anything. Eriksson wasted his opportunity to try out several new players. What a waste of time.

Ah, but there are enough reports out there to cover those ninety minutes without my two cents in the meter. All I can do now is calm down and conclude this thing. After all, to shy away from an ending in a post about endings would be...well, absurd.

So...what makes a good ending. A sunset? A postmodern false ending? A neat reflection of the beginning of the story?

I am most fond of the ending that happens without any ceremony at the precise moment you know the story has been told. Keep it concise, let no slack word escape the knife...the Lord of the Rings forgot this and meandered on forever...whilst conversely the Neverending Story didn’t. A grand, puffed-up ending feels false and, whilst perhaps feeling more rewarding at the time, is never quite as enduring on reflection as something a little more natural that resonates with real life. The much-lauded “down” ending is often no better than the Hollywood ending. Both can feel just as artificial and smug as each other...although on this score the Empire Strikes Back got it right. But then it did have the luxury of knowing there was a third film to bring forth the toe-curling victory scenes.

Of course, some people write entire films, or indeed books, that could be classified as “down”, and this can result in some great storytelling. Clark Ashton Smith wrote a whole pile of fantasy short stories in the first half of the twentieth century in which the mortality rate frequently hit 100%, and in one notorious story managed 200%. (The latter case was a merry yarn in which the entire cast drowned before being raised from the dead on an island by a necromancer, only for them to all die again at the end. You don’t get that in a Mills and Boon.)

Some films end for practical reasons...the abrupt termination of Monty Python and the Holy Grail came seemingly at random not through some characteristic silliness but because they ran out of money at the crucial moment.

Casino Royale meanwhile (a film I have discussed previously), ended by throwing the entire cast into a room and then blowing it up, which under the circumstances was probably the most humane thing to do. But Casino Royale shall return...the front page of the Guardian last week reported that the twenty first Bond film, yet to be shot, will be...er...Casino Royale. Surely the first time a film spoof manages to predate the film itself by about twenty years...

Ye gods, I am ignoring my own advice about timely endings. There are bad rumblings coming from the next office...the boss is fed up and about to leave...a hundred stories seem on the verge of beginning, but this little story, for now at least, is going to end...right about now, in fact.

Hill of Nails

The air stirred only momentarily as Joey strode through the dregs of the afternoon rush and honed in on the small, curved bar. The barman looked up from his crossword. When he saw who it was he brushed the newspaper aside and took an interest in the bottles behind him.

Joey slammed the sluggish, 2 foot long snake on the bar. Its eyes boggled briefly on impact.

“What’s that,” said the barman with an evident lack of interest.

“Snake,” said Joey, watching the barman carefully.

The barman shrugged, spat on a dirty cloth and began to clean a patch of dead insects from the wooden upright.

“Bastard got in the dunny again,” said Joey. An acidic emphasis of words and a raised eyebrow turned the statement into an accusation.

“Yeah. Snake’ll do that.”

“It will,” snorted Joey, leaning over the bar and grabbing the barman by the lapel, “if some stupid bastard puts it there.”

Quick as a flash, the barman jerked his head backwards and then brought it smartly forward, connecting with Joey’s left temple. The noise this made, not unlike a cork being yanked from a wine bottle, made the adjacent barflies wince.

As Joey slipped to the floor in short melodramatic instalments, the customers returned to their reveries. They were the sort of involuntary daydreams that bubble up quite unheeded from such a stifling, airless environment, ones that are washed away with each swig of cool beer only to return seconds later to drown the mind in desperate thoughts of other places.

And into these reveries came the Customer. Overdressed and sweating, she entered with evident caution, keeping herself from making eye contact and provoking some kind of scene she did not have the energy to deal with.

Funny thing, really, the barman thought afterwards. The Customer was not a native – her outfit looked more the kind of thing you would wear when you did not know whether you would end up in the searing heat or the freezing cold, and could only pick the one outfit. But the Customer had a sliver of steel in her manner that said she had nothing to fear.

Then the Customer surveyed the room in a few seconds, looked momentarily dejected, and walked back out through the entrance without a word.

The barman stood silently in contemplation until the snake bit him in the bum.

***

There was a photograph, and it was thrown down in the middle of the elegant white table...four pairs of eyes stared hungrily at the picture, and nobody liked what they saw.

“Impossible!” said the first.

“Ridiculous” said the second.

“The very idea!” said the third.

The fourth remained silent and sat back, suddenly amused.

“But we must face the fact that it has been stolen,” said the Cat. “And you four are the only ones in town this cool Autumn afternoon. I came here for an answer and I will not leave until one of you tells me who stole it.”

A hint of menace. Nothing overbearing, nothing obvious...just a collective understanding that the Cat did not just pop by for a friendly chat about the world of international art theft. One way or another, his business would be concluded today, as would the career of anyone who stood in his way.

“Whilst we all think this over,” said the Cat, “we would all feel better for a drop of whiskey.”

Three of them exchanged suspicious glances as the Cat called the waitress over and ordered them all a drink. The fourth examined his fingernails and began locating invisible specks of dust on his tailored jacket.

Soon enough, the waitress returned and distributed the glasses, each containing two fingers of whiskey.

“May I propose a toast,” said the Cat.

“Hmmf. Go on.”

“To the redistribution of the people’s art back to the people!” he said, raising his glass.

“To international art theft,” said the fourth. The Cat glowered.

“Excuse me,” came a female voice in halting French. “But I am looking for a man.”

“Then you’re in good company,” said the Cat, glancing at his photograph of the portrait of the Merry Monk and hoping one of the others would pick up on this and laugh. Nobody did.

“I am looking for this man,” said the Customer, holding out a photograph. The Cat took it and circulated it amongst the others, who shook their heads in turn.

“Sorry, lady,” said the Cat. “And besides, we have our own problems.”

The Customer smiled slightly and wandered away toward the entrance of the cafe-bar, leaving them to their own matters.

The Cat rubbed his hands together. “Well, gentleman,” he said, breezily. “I leave town tomorrow morning and I just know I’ll have my answer by then. One of you knows to do the right thing. See you all soon, my friends.”

The Cat stood up, put on his jacket and walked out.

As he did so, three of the men at the table began to snigger...they had just seen, taped to the back of the Cat’s jacket, the infamous portrait of the Merry Monk in all its glory, defaced with the words “How’s My Thieving?” written on in black marker pen.

As one they turned to the fourth, who was whistling a happy tune as he quickdialled the police on his mobile.

***

Professor Goddard was whistling a happy tune, but he felt like shit. Every breath he took left the fur lining on his thick, cream-coloured coat that little bit wetter.

“Goddamn it,” he said, taking off his gloves and blowing into his hands. “Paul got frostbite again. Took two of his toes this time before the jackass would see sense.”

“Calm down, Professor,” said Commander Paddy. “He may be an idiot but he’s braver than a whole bag full of balls.”

“I don’t disagree, Commander, but we can’t afford to lose man hours this late in the season. We still need a shitload of data from the mountain of samples we took, and if Paul keeps going around shedding toes like this we’re fucked. The plane arrives a week on Tuesday, damn it.”

“I hear you loud and clear, but it’s Commander Johnson you should talk to. Medical background. Has a list of scare stories a mile long...maybe it’ll do some good on our Texan friend, eh? Say, have you tried some of the vodka yet?”

“Vodka? What Vodka?” said Goddard.

“You haven’t heard? Jesus Christ," said Paddy. "A whole heap of stuff came over on the boat last week along with the science supplies. I suspect base control want us to finish the season with a smile on our faces. An entire crate of spirits, optics and cocktail glasses...and the vodka is damn good. Here, I’ll pour you a glass.”

"But why now?"

“Jesus, enough questions!” said Paddy, with obvious exasperation. “Just accept the damn thing as a present for a job well done.”

“Or not, if Paul can't keep his toes to himself,” muttered Goddard, rummaging through the crate to find a glass.

Paddy smiled and picked up a bottle of vodka from between two large drums.

“I now declare Bar Subzero open,” he said, raising the bottle in mock salute.

The wind roared, and a blanket of snow swirled in through the door for a moment. The door closed again and the noise died away.

A figure dressed in white, face covered, walked over to Goddard and Paddy.

“Mary?” said Paddy. “Aren’t you supposed to be out with Johnson?”

The figure did not respond, except to untie the ties around its neck, allowing the figure to push its hood back.

“Hello,” said the Customer. “I believe this is Bar Subzero. I’m looking for a man who may be here. He's a no-good lousy drunk, but he has a heart of gold.”

Professor Goddard and Commander Johnson stared at one another with open mouths.

***

The Customer glanced around her as she walked into the bar. This was not the nicest area of town by a long way, and her constitution was a little twisted since the last place; she was nearly mugged for want of a kiss.

She was tired. Very tired. This had been going on for too long now, far too long. She had been all round the world several times to no avail. She had seen the inside of a thousand bars, maybe ten thousand. Failure after failure haunted her. The seas of faces, the hopeless despair, the broken promises and failed affairs...it was the stuff of nightmares rolled up and stuck in a bottle before being thrown into an ocean of misery.

Ah well. A little focus, that was what was required. A little belief.

The piano player was scarcely bothering the keys, and the atmosphere was dead with yesterday's smoke. She gathered her resolve around her like a cloak and set forth.

“Excuse me,” she said, tapping a fat man at the bar on the back. “I’m looking for a man.”

She held out the photograph. It was bent, criumpled, stained, faded and torn, but the face in the picture was still clear.

“Yes, I know him...I believe that’s the man you’re looking for,” he said, sweating in the heat of the afternoon. He raised a pudgy digit into the air. “Over there.”

She took his words lightly, assuming it was another false alarm. Then she followed the fat man’s finger and gasped. In the gloom was a familiar face, half-turned from her as he slouched over a drink.

Good God! Could it be true? She scarcely dare go over...but this was the end of the tunnel and she would not stop now.

She approached the man and tapped him on the shoulder. The man turned round and almost dropped his drink.

“Of all the gin joints in all the world, you had to walk into mine,” he said.

“Yeah,” she said. “Talk about coincidence.”

No Lies, No Deception, No Chance...

Robert Kilroy-Silk is not a Good person. He is rotten to the core. An obvious statement, but one that explains every part of his career to date. Here is a man who sees himself as a political messiah, believing that it is his immaculate ideas and the backing of the Great British public that has cast him in the limelight. It does not occur to him that he is merely a twisted and crazed attention seeker who used to be on the telly.

Indeed, he is a vain little fraud, a rabble-rousing speech on legs, a hypocritical piece of sewage who refuses to acknowledge that he, and he alone, is the cause of all his problems. He blames the world for his own mistakes. His speeches are useless, poisonous and devoid of reason, and it is only his hard-learned understanding of mob mentality and how to tell people what they want to hear that allows these acidic ramblings to be heard.

Ah, the traditional anti-Kilroy rant. Still, we all need to let off steam occasionally. So plump up a cushion, sit back and chant along with the gratuitous abuse. It’s nothing you haven’t thought yourself.

So this is a man who with ran a tawdry morning chatshow in which he held himself up as a beacon of truth and beauty against the ugliness of the ordinary person. It didn’t matter to him how vile, rude and offensive he was because he had long ago decided anything he said was uncontestably Right. He is James Goldsmith and Enoch Powell rolled into one... Journalists love him as a news story because he is weird and frustrating and massively self-obsessed, and is so easy to write about the stories write themselves. Kilroy knows all this and rides this wave right into the front rooms of Britain without validation or welcome. His weapon is rhetoric, and he is seriously armed.

Let us examine this last point further... his main tactic is the same as the likes of Richard Littlejohn – ignore the complexities, logic and reasoning behind an issue and simply build columns of seductive rhetoric that takes small parts of that issue and blows it up into the whole argument. In this way the word “bogus” can attach itself permanently to “asylum seekers”, the concept of being pro-Europe can be swamped by Brussels hysteria, and multiculturalism is magically reinterpreted by Kilroy as the art of ditching anything to do with English history.

And which of the following do you think is more successful?

“The issue of immigration is a massively complex one involving ethics of behaviour that call on the work of philosophers such as Kant and...”

...or: “You are being lied to! Now is the time for you to claim what is rightfully yours! Lots of glittering prizes can be yours if you vote for me! Here’s £200 right now if you promise to...”

The small scale success of the British National Party...whilst remaining minute in the scheme of politics... proves that an opinion leader can easily let fly with streams of fucked up lies that appeal to one horrible truth: that most people will lap up anything that directly benefits them, even at the expense of others. Tax cuts...public sector spending...new hospitals...fair enough. These do not directly harm others. But shipping people back to their deaths to allow the English to feel comfortable that the people next door to them remain white to the end of time...this is worrying.

Frequently, the problem does not lie with the voters themselves. The foulest views are allowed to be aired because they are dressed up by the speaker in strange clothing to disguise an amoral core. Not even the BNP would be stupid enough to say they wish to restrict immigration because they think that non-whites are stupid monkeys with invasive customs and a weird smell. Rather, they concentrate on the idea that the white male population of England are being persecuted daily.

Eh? That sound you hear, folks, is the sound of your mind boggling at a thousand rpm. There are even journalists on national papers who fill up their columns with choice morsels along the lines of: “the white middle class of England are the only people nowadays that it is acceptable and even encouraged to persecute and abuse...”

Oh, really? Been tortured, abused and forced at gunpoint to accept other people’s customs recently, eh? What rotten luck.

Well...yes, Kilroy is a soft target. This much is clear. Particularly because he reacts badly to criticism, blaming the media from all directions for being against him. He tends to ignore the fact that any discussion, no matter how disinterested, will always conclude that he is a watery-headed buffoon with no real talent beyond image manipulation.

But Kilroy remains a soft target because the arguments against him are made by city living people of reasonable intelligence, an immediate mistake in the arena of rabble rousing. And he is a soft target not because he has a comical tan or a certain way of talking; no, it is because he is a mad, jabbering whore who should have been ripped apart by wolves years ago. Because he is clearly wrong. He is a liar. He is a LIAR. Fuck him.

Or make your own mind up. Your choice.

Sidestreets and Shadows

February is a cruel month and nobody knows what it is for. This year, the bad noise began on the ‘b’ of the bang, in the earliest hours of the first of the month.

Indeed...a drop of acid has been added to our sleepy well of complacency. On Tuesday night two large men attempted to mug my flatmate. He was walking home from the tube station just after midnight, and they struck half way up our road. These opportunist thugs were after his rucksack...but he has been practicing martial arts for many years and fought them off whilst, in his own words, “going off like a car alarm”, shouting for help. They ran off down a sidestreet empty-handed. Shaken, my flatmate sought help from the nearest house.

“Sorry we’re not much use,” said the first guy. “I’m afraid we’ve just smoked a gigantic spliff.”

“Yeah,” added the second.

They called the police...and I do not envy them having to do whilst twisted on something so conductive to paranoid thoughts...a bad case of turkeys voting for Christmas.

“Hello...er...is this the police people?” one would say.

“Yes sir, this is them. What is your emergency?”

He tries not to giggle. “Somewhere here’s been attacked on our doorstep.”

“Right, stay calm. Could you give me your address, sir?”

“Ooh, good question,” he says. The line goes quiet as the other feeds him the address, holding back laughter. With difficulty he repeats the address to the disembodied voice on the end of the line, who acknowledges each line with a curt “mm”.

“Right, stay there, we’re on our way.”

There is a pregnant pause.

“I’m not on drugs! You can’t prove a thing!”

“Sir? Could you repeat that, sir?”

Click, brrr.

Soon enough the police arrived and brought him home. From the subsequent discussion he found out that this area is a hotspot for this kind of crime...and this is information that you never find out about an area unless it happens to someone you know. Never mind your Internet discussion boards and your personal recommendations, the police are the ones with the meat.

This strange episode should worry me more than it does. I do not regard the area any differently to what I did before since I never held any illusions about the possibility of local crime. But I now feel justified in the caution I have taken in recent weeks when out at night on the moonlit streets. As my flatmate said, “it’s a wake-up call.”

Even after talking about this with him I am unsure as to how he is reacting internally to this. My own encounter with an attempted mugging many years ago in Sheffield was similiar in a way. Briefly, a burly guy took a fancy to my four quid watch in a failed attempt at impressing the two girls he was with. The memory of this helps me to understand Tuesday’s attack to some extent, but something he said to me was a little surprising. Since he was able to back off a little and find space to use his martial art skills, he was genuinely pissed off when the attackers ran off and he didn’t get a chance at a counterattack that would have inflicted some serious damage on them.

No, strike that. I can understand entirely...it is a more immediate version of the revenge fantasy, the looping tape in the head that replays false versions of the past that grant us the victory. Most of us would in respect imagine what the encounter would have been like if only they had the skills and had beaten them to shit. Here we are only concerned with the latter part.

In some small way we all do this. When the curtains are drawn and the lights are off and the air is stuffy on a midsummer’s night...we lie on our beds and pick apart old arguments, coming up with great responses that we wish we had said at the time, ones that would make us undisputed champion of verbal sparring. This assumes there is victory in argument, but there is normally nothing but bitter failure on both sides, and to hell with who got the last word. The real enemy is the anger the encounter rouses. So long as this resentfulness over the argument remains -- a mental blockage that is frequently impossible to clear -- well, you lose, buddy.

Even a genuine victory in argument...a rare fish indeed...can feel false and guilt-ridden, and this is so whenever you know your opponent. Only the mouthy stranger on the train whom you beat like a gong with your grace and wit can make you feel unreservedly elated. Which offers us, bizarrely, a cunning trick that is worth remembering when deep in the mire of argument. This is the total retraction and admittance of defeat that, nevertheless, paints you as an oasis of conciliatory wisdom, and also allows that most devious of subtle counterattacks...something along the lines of “...and I presume you are enough of a gentleman to accept my apology.” This is most effective in front of an audience. Remember that your aim is not to admit that you were wrong but to appear above such petty bickering. Besides...you’re not wrong here, are you? It’s them. After all, other people never argue the facts, they just use clever little tricks packed with hidden fallacies...a subject we have been over before.

My immediate boss was talking about these tricks the other day, relating to the previous day in which he was called to the stand during a work tribunal. He said how the barrister used the trick of missing information...the out of context question to which you are only allowed to answer “Yes” or “No.”

To paraphrase his point using my own example:

Barrister: Is it true that you never tried to kill Hitler?”
Witness: Don’t be ridiculous, that was 60 years ago, I wasn’t even ali...
Barrister: Yes or No?
Witness: Yes.
Barrister: A-ha!

Now, if martial arts were allowed in the courtroom, then we may begin to believe in justice again.

Well, I have no idea what that means, but what the hell. I have never seen the inside of a courtroom for myself and hope I never do. Most arguments and indeed physical attacks can be avoided with a certain vigilance of word and deed...this is the price of peace, as has been pointed out by many people through the ages. Provided we learn the lessons and learn them well whenever they come along...well, we may not be completely safe, but the percentages will not be stacked so overwhelmingly against us in future.

Or we could all carry knives and guns, of course. And what a peaceful world this would then be...