It is a beautiful thing, hindsight.
When I wrote a blog entry called “Economical With The Truth” (a year ago, but only a pitiful three entries ago) I had little idea of the spectacular disaster that those then embryonic rumblings in the economy would turn into. That blog, as with most of mine, had a fair dose of idiocy, perhaps very partially counter-balanced by a mouse’s paintbrush worth of actual concrete knowledge. Even so, I have been able to glean that my outlook, even if it identified the existence of some of the balloons that subsequently burst, had the wrong focus.
There I was, trying to drum up heroic assumptions about inflation, about some infinite snowball of unutterable speed gathering, rendering all our basic foodstuffs and commodities beyond our grasp as their prices soared, and at the same time dismissing the stormtroopers of the sub-prime mortgage market as a distant and unfocussed army, the masts of their ships barely visible against the horizon. Holed up in my flat, I was unable to see the ticking numbers and jagged lines that tell of sub-prime chaos, of widening TED spreads, of indexes that betray all manner of knowledge and guidance to those in the know and those on the make. Even if I was able to, I would not (and still do not) know what the vast majority of the signals meant. Are these warning lights or fairy lights? Does that number signal prosperity or madness? Does this line on the hospital monitor signal health or a heart attack? Easier therefore to lament about the then daily reports of rises in the price of bread, or rice, or petrol. This is something graspable – that the fiver in my pocket will not stretch as it used to, even though the pain associated with earning said fiver remains the same.
But the thing that brought the dam down was a far slipper thing, some kind of cosmic eel with no head and no tail that lay draped and occasionally writhing until the whole structure gave way. I profess it was through a lack of overall understanding and an inability to see the economy for what it really is - a playground seesaw with seventy obese children scrambling all over it. About ten weeks after writing that entry, and utterly unforseen by me, Lehman Brothers collapsed and dragged the world, bloodied fingernails tearing at the edge, screaming after it.
And so here we are, deflation for the first time in some 49 years (though only in a narrow definition of the word), and all of our preconceptions, even about those gathering storm clouds last summer, turned entirely, whimsically on their heads. That a single rotten grain of rice can infect an entire barrel is not in doubt. And that folk carried away in a circus of spinning pound signs are not to be trusted to make the most rudimentary of decisions, especially when the economy of the world is at stake, is undeniable. A drunken gambler is seldom allowed to write the business plan of a casino, after all. This then is the problem – an interesting one of human nature, herd behaviour, and of the volatile spread of blind panic that underlies all things financial. But let’s save that for another time.
Like depression, or grief, there appear to be stages to the formation of such catastrophes, their aftermaths and the state of normality and its slow transformation that then occurs.
Stage One would appear to be Denial. There was a heady mix of statements of denial wafting around like the involuntary flatulence of a stood-on dog. Mostly it took the form of various commentators denying that a problem existed. In the main, the public (myself included) did not heed either the warnings nor the reassurance because we didn’t understand, and in any case the problem was so abstract as to be invisible, while the possible consequences seemed as important as the outcome of a Su Doku puzzle and there was little we on the street could do about it. Feel like handing your house back to the bank and demanding they charge you a larger down-payment on it anyone? Demand they give you a lower return on that hard-earned cash you deposit with the branch? Thought not.
Gordon Brown made hilarious (again, in hindsight) statements rebutting and patronising the venerable Vince Cable on the floor for the Commons for the latter’s seemingly relentless pessissimism. Of course, there is truth in John Kenneth Galbraith’s assertion that everyone remembers those that talked up the market before the crash, while those who banged on for years about an impending crash are never remembered as these crashes fail to happen, but Mr Cable knows of what he speaks. (A statement that I promise will not be without qualification – see book recommendation later).
Stage Two seems to be the actual Panic. At this point, computer monitors on stock exchanges show terrible images (once the porn window has been minimised), and people drop forks to the floor, stubbing into their feet which have been so numbed with terror as to have lost the ability to feel pain. From their mouths dribble the remnants of lattes and sushi or salt-loaded sandwiches as news tickers give minute-by-minute accounts of drops or rises in numbers that few of us ever understand but that all in that room realise to be Very Very Important. For the rest of us, commentators come onto news channels, some wearing their agendas down their fronts like intellectual vomit, extolling wisdom on what might happen next, while others, more honest, profess to having no idea what is going on, but isn’t it all rather dramatic, and that they hope you have been sharpening your claws so that you can fight off adversaries as you scrabble for a meal from that skip.
The newsreels are peppered with references to phrases with a Daliesque quality about them – with analogies that John Steinbeck would have been proud of, all shoehorned together in a mass conveyor belt of financial bile that portrays a scene of utter chaos and irrevocable damage without leaving any humanly image that can be wrapped up and taken home and broadcast on the inside of the eyelids when you lie in your bed. Things like “a complete evaporation of liquidity”, some kind of chemical reaction no doubt, and “Credit Crunch”, a nut-infused chocolate bar, are blurted out by people taken over by their autocues. Again, Mr Galbraith points out that it is possible to enjoy the entire spectre of human folly in this time, for “while it is a time of great tragedy, all that is being lost is money.” This crisis afforded a great amount of time on which to sit on the balcony watching the explosions, for it lurched from side-to-side on an hourly basis for the best part of six weeks like a crazed couple imbibing improbable volumes of narcotics while having continuous tantric sex on a violently yawing ship. Not only that, but there was a historical Presidential race happening in the midst of this swirling maelstrom - we were positively spoiled. But then, the chaos hadn’t personally touched most of us yet. I’ll return to the panic another time, but for now, onwards.
Stage Three appeared to be Reaction. As Vince Cable wrote, there was a realisation that “every lever had to be pulled”. The sheer scale of catastrophe, the complexity of the problems, the confluence of so many horrific forces, could only be met by a determined show of vigour, a raking of machine gun fire against an alien evil. Even as lines fell limply off charts and different combinations of those obese children fell off and climbed onto different parts of the economic seesaw, various heroes emerged in different guises – perhaps most improbably our own dour Mr Brown – and swung into action. The reactions were almost as incomprehensible to the likes of me as the panic itself. Injections of liquidity, a driving down of the LIBOR overnight rate, a slamming down of interest rates almost out of existence, and part-nationalisation of banks like RBS that once stood proud with edifices of ashlar stone and commanded unearthly positions in our psyches. Robert Peston continued portraying our outlook and the meaning and likely success of these various interventions using his Mouth of God and forecasting manias and slumps to such a specific degree that you had to wonder that he wasn’t controlling every news ticker, stock monitor and index graph from behind a curtain with levers and a loudspeaker like the Wizard of Oz.
Stage Four, which I believe us now to be in, is Holding Tight. The panic is slightly in the past, and the markets are enjoying a rally. Structural problems remain – the economy is like a building that has been hit by an earthquake. Its total collapse was just about prevented, but at the moment we are shoring up what we can with scaffolding, and dragging out survivors. The tumultuous events of last Autumn still appear fresh – there is uncertainty, but almost every week we are bombarded with the richochet of the odd errant cannonball – a bankruptcy here, an unemployment statistic there, an drop in RPI, a drop in GDP, and once in a while a true disappointment, or betrayal, such as the Budget. Our situation now is one of the long slog. We may have viewed the excitement of the explosions from the balcony before, but the ensuing fire is approaching, licking at our feet, and many already have succumbed. In a more personal way, the horror is that of the grim sceptre of being thrown out of work, and of that fiver not stretching because of far darker forces than the more relatively benign ones of inflation. And no one knows which view is over-reaction, and which is under-reaction. The ‘green shoots’ of which the papers speak may be genuine indications of a bright new turn in the road ahead, or they may be quickly yellowing weeds prising open the cracks in the concrete of a freshly-destroyed city. Nothing can be done but to hold tight, sniffing our way out of this mess but being wary of false aromas.
Stage Five is Recovery and Reflection, or R&R if you will. Shattered windows are fixed, and the circus reassembles, slowly, with less gumption than before and with new checks and balances. The folk with their hands at the lever, their knuckles now utterly white with the tension of their grip, now start to relax them a little, tentatively. The sweat still streaming through their eyes, they make bellicose speeches with the last of their breath, about how their reforms will ensure that there will never be a repeat. They stagger shakily to the edge of the stage and bow for the deliverance that they have loudly effected following the catastrophe that they silently caused. And Reflection of course courts its venomous counterpart, Blame. Do we mete out punishment to the bankers who caused this? And as is famously known and quoted from the MP's motion following the South Sea Bubble collapse, do we tie the bankers up into sacks full of poisonous snakes and hurl them into the Thames? Though in honesty I think this terribly unfair on the snakes…
And then Stage Six, many decades away, is Erosion. The slow eroding of the innovation-stifling and pesky reforms of the late 2000’s to form a much looser, spirited and wonderful era of financial wizardry, young suits with six-figure hover-boards meandering along Threadneedle Street, Bishopsgate, Canary Wharf and the newly revitalised district, now a global financial heartland, of Willesden Junction, to perform their heavenly tasks and reap rewards in both money and status. And somewhere out there, speculation in a special kind of vodka starts to go awry, and Stage One beckons. But you needn’t worry about that for now, for in the long run – as John Maynard Keynes once said - we are all dead.
There then, a personal take on what human nature might drive us to as we attempt to build a system to share out our planet’s scarce resources – for that, according to some, is the primary definition of Economics. Stages Five and Six are the “normal” states of things, but I believe that Stages One to Four will periodically occur. I’m probably wrong, and if I were to extol such a simple theory of economic convulsion beyond the single-digit readership of your this humble blog it would surely be shot down in flames like a wayward Messerschmitt over a farmhouse gun turret. Our capacity to pass on information from generation to generation appears to be weak, though, and for that reason we must be doomed to continue this cyclic pattern of disorder, be it over tulips, companies in the ‘South Seas’, land in Florida, blind speculation that afflicted a generation, the devaluation of the Thai baht, worthless mortgages, or simply the mistimed sneeze of an influential stock trader. Every generation seems, like a crawling toddler, doomed to have to repeat and learn from its own mistakes. The trick to the avoidance of catastrophe cannot be learned vicariously. And on that sage, and possibly slightly patronising note (sorry), I bid you adieu.
Though not without one small aside – to actually attempt to understand this whole situation, for you’ll get scant little sense out of me, I recommend “The Storm” by Vince Cable, written in the aftermath of the panic and yet with a measured and confident take on it all.
This week, Kiran came to terms with the fact that he is a spreadsheet jockey, and that any pretense he held to having a say in what is right and sensible, or of ever having any influence over anything work-related was truly illusory. Accordingly, he has withdrawn entirely from the “decision-making process” and will devote his time to become so indispensable in the use of transport software as to be completely unsackable. It goes without saying (though not without writing) that he is extremely grateful to have this, or any, job. He also went to Devon, bought his first hoodie, froze weirdly in the sunshine and ate his first 80 mph cream tea on the M4 while maintaining marginal control of the vehicle.
Last week he went to his first “Redundancy Drinks”, which seemed a strangely euphoric and hyperbolic affair for those concerned.
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
Monday, 20 April 2009
The Black Canvas, Part 1
Once upon a time there was a wonderful vodka, distilled from the finest potatoes in all the land. It was so potent that it made drinkers weep hopelessly in awe. The purest sensation of drunkeness could be achieved, a magical haze of inebriation so pure that in lieu of a hangover one could awaken with a rainbow on one’s lips and a song in one’s heart. Many wondered how this product could ever exist on our Earthly lands. It surely could only have been a manufacture of the heavens, brewed from well within the pinpricks of light of the telling constellations above. Crowds thronged the streets, in cobblestoned squares fountains glistened with the produce, lecherous drunks tumbling in and rising bleary eyed, arms outstretched to the heavens, sticky like the Gods of Fermentation.
In the twinkling of a maladjusted eye, as is the way of us humans, the chance of making money from such an elixir was noted. Those that owned the vodka happily sold it on wholesale, pocketing a profit that reduced their need to sell one-by-one in so demeaning a manner to the proles. Realising that their stock of golden potatoes would not last forever, and ravenous for profit, they cultivated, cheaper, weaker potatoes. Others did the same, for imitation was the purest form of flattery.
As time went on, the potatoes that were used grew more and more dubious. Specimens with strange clots on their surfaces, patches of green, coarse skins like the roughened soles of a primitive soldier, all were used. The vodka-makers subtly mixed in their cheap vodka with the pure elixir to hide their tracks. And yet, in all the euphoria around, no one noticed. Indeed the finest vodka-tasters in all the land had been invited into these spin-offs’ premises, induced with hefty bribes to slap their seal of approval onto the bottles. Even those that had started with this pure and godly liquid remixed their vodka, sold it on at higher prices, labelled as pure, which it then passed onto more and more wholesalers. The public, emboldened by the heady mix, started to hoard the vodka, they too realised its potential, they quickly shifted from consumer to speculator. They locked the vodka in their cellars, confident of its value, having a sip now and then but mainly just letting it burgeon invisibly in value, tucked away. From below, the warm glow of wealth would seem to prise itself between floorboards, and couples would give themselves knowing glances of security, of happiness, of faith that all was good and that they were only slightly plastered.
The seams of the pockets of the vodka-makers started to burst, laden with coins that pulled their pockets out of shape, endlessly expanding like the stomach of a donkey pumped full of falafel by some kind of hideous Arabic snack fetishist. Their pockets dragged behind them, driving great divets into the road, and the gilt-edged sparkle they left behind left no one in any doubt of the accumulation of riches being attained. More and more of this luscious vodka was being produced, far out-stripping any reasonable supply of golden potatoes. The vodka-makers, lusting after more money to wreck their trouser pockets, resorted to more and more dilution of the original luscious vodka, mixing all manner of ingredients, until the substance was barely recognisable. But the people saw that the vodka-tasters had endorsed it, and the other merchants saw that the labels were thus genuine, and the happy trade and bingefest carried on unabated.
The vodka was traded abroad, so that now it was not only a potent drink with which the population could gorge itself with but many riches from abroad – brilliant contraptions of the latest technology, the most sumptuous of foods – honey-infused beetles stuffed into snakes stuffed into geese stuffed into cows stuffed into elephants stuffed into a blue whale, dragged ashore using great cogs constructed from the finest steel and powered by the purest of fuels, dreamed up by alchemy, and paid for with the proceeds of the vodka.
Then one day, a bellyache occurred. It afflicted only an individual a first, but then more and more people were struck down. Their locations were so random that the only similarity that could be gleaned with any certainty was that they had all touched the vodka. Even tracing the batch was of no use, everything had been so thoroughly mixed that any barrel at any time could spread the contagion. Who could be certain that their ‘pure vodka’ had not been infected with the same incipent ingredient as that which provoked the illness? Suddenly the warm glows of wealth from beneath the floorboards turned to dark shadows. People tried to ignore their cellars, they turned away from their hoards as a source of shame. They offloaded their barrels to the highest bidder, and as time went on each bid fell and fell. The first surly hints of distress, evidenced in the simple shaking of the head of a doctor at a bedside, grew into a vortex of panic. No one trusted anyone else – for a barrel that looked as if it might yield the elixir of purest joy could yet be mixed with the foulest of belly-aching substances, joyriding mischievously within its liquid.
Soon, the barrels were being tipped down drains, into the sea. The very choppy waters which had supported vessels of trade became soiled with the stain of a nation’s shame. A currency of vodka degenerated into a fool’s gold, offloaded by all those abroad, no longer entrusted with storing value. The very money with which the vodka-sellers had rutted the roads grew worthless, poisonous even. Exasperated, no longer able to feast on dolphin imported from this or that colony, or to trade vodka for silken clothes of jaw-dropping sumptuousness, the King minted more and more coins. And as he did so, the wealth of each coin seemed to dissipate. The folk felt more laden with money than ever, and yet poorer than they could ever have conceived. Their sense of wealth dwindled by the day. Long after the vapours of vodka had finished rising from the drains and ports, the sense of doom persisted.
People stayed in their homes, those that could afford to have homes, others still made the streets their homesteads. Folk who had made an honest living, far away from the tainted glory of the vodka, found that their trade had in fact survived on overspill from the vodka orgy, from the spend-happy merchants and vodka-hoarders that had whimsically crossed their threshold, and now even these honest thousands were thrown out of work. And all around, people stood staring fixatedly on their palms as if some lost story or moral might be etched there. And still others rooted around in the waste that was left, searching for something real to cling to that might wish the invisible collapse that followed the invisible fortune away. Searching for a single pinprick of light in the burnt black canvas.
Tuesday, 10 March 2009
The Path From Neptune
It isn’t easy to immerse yourself in normal life when you’ve been abducted and deposited with all the ceremony of a cockroach’s coronation onto the surface of the icy moon of Triton. In no exaggerated sense, it’s a little like getting on a bus and finding that the seats are occupied by sentient yet intelligent liquids with the aesthetics of poorly mixed custard but the keen and introspective minds of the kind of people that describe pure mathematics as ‘elegant’.
Though perhaps I should go back a little, to last summer, when the fateful events that have plagued me these past few months commenced.
It all started when I visited my doctor, complaining of some kind of mental anguish caused by unceasing boredom. Bless the open door policy of the National Health Service. Whether you’re a soul in need of comfort and hypnotic drugs, or a superbug with a penchant for the smooth-tiled floor of a well-tended ward, all are welcome. Except of course that the latter don’t pay taxes, the thieving supergits.
But you see, the problem with boredom and banality carried to its furthest extreme is that it is always viewed as a benign thing and thus underestimated. Nothing, I grant you, could be further from the truth. While in small doses it may be no more than a minor irritant, something that prolonges time and blends your once-focussed thoughts into a kind of weak and unwholesome mixture (like Cup-A-Soup dissolved in an overly large mug), in large doses it can be utterly fatal. The brain, numbed of all rational activity, turns inwards, like an errant toenail with the personality of Stalin, and starts to feed upon itself. It mines its own gelatinous folds for signs of insecurity and devours these until any fermenting creativity or logic that once may have nested there is obliterated. It probably causes people to burn things and kill people, I kid you not. The number of horrors committed falsely in the name of some trumped-up cause or other, but whose blame could squarely be laid at boredom’s door, does not bear thinking about.
But I digress, some habits die hard. The doctor was a well-meaning, angelic type, and possessed these magical receipts that could be used in exchange for drugs. My local alchemist, Boots, furnished me with the goods, and it was at some point in the ensuing week that the abduction took place.
I had known for a long while that the gaping hole in my bedroom ceiling should be fixed. I’d stare up at it at night and wonder what kind of terrors might crawl through there. The hole had the girth of an alligator, so naturally it was towards this kind of predator that my mind was tuned. It didn’t elude me though, that a shark, radioactive six-foot caterpillar, or even some kind of mutated leg plastercast brought to life using only willpower, a vast quantity of electricity and the adoring strokes of a decadent Venetian, could have also easily fitted through that gap and smothered me in my sleep. In the event, it was none of these conventional predators, but instead a kind of long, metal club-ended pole. At first I wondered what kind of maniac would be trying to infiltrate our flat with a golf club. A solid sandstone tenement demands nothing less than a cannon, or perhaps an incendiary explosive, as any primary school child could tell you. After a few swipes of the golf club, which I feebly batted away with my outstretched palm (violence is not my strong point at 3am), it finally clouted me on the head.
In the rising vapours of the freezing moon, shapes were difficult to make out. The first sensation is of the intensely cold surface as you lie there, like a deep-chilled pumice stone being nudged into the small of your back by an over-affectionate cat. My glasses had gone, as they always do at the first sign of distress. I only buy cowardly glasses that shatter at the first sign of trouble, because I would rather be buried with them off, frankly. Why a monument to mal-sight should be welded to me like some face-hugging alien in my final hours is beyond me. I’d rather not see the combine harvester advancing towards me as I’m trapped in the quicksand if there is absolutely nothing I can do to save myself. Still, as the vapour shifted, it revealed the faces of my abductors.
Face is not quite the word, a person can have a face, a dog can have a face, even a clock can have a face, but using the word face here is to stretch the word’s meaning to the most tenuous threads of its extremities. The beings were more like semi-transparent shafts of light, with half-solid, half-vaporous tentacle forms writhing to their sides, melding with the omnisicent vapour of the moon. If peace could have a visual form, it would be encapsulated in the strange beauty staring down at me, and yet, over the coming months, I would soon find that this deceptive beauty shielded a wrath of unspeakable viciousness.
They were only capable of making one noise, a kind of ghastly squeal on the moment of death, which in itself was a ceremony visited upon them one-by-one as and when the community felt that the usefulness of that being had evaporated. It was strangely democratic yet utterly arbitrary and despicable at once. That squeal was the pent up release of all the gathered knowledge and emotion of a short life half-lived, not one of the squeals ever sounded like the dull exhalation of air that one felt would have embodied the dying gasp of a full and unregretted existence.
For the rest of the time, though, for I would not witness my first enforced death for many weeks, they communicated by their normal form – a kind of gestured telepathy (of the kind seen in enraged motorists, hurling lip-readable abuse from behind their warrior-mobile’s windows). The shafts of light would move into impossible shapes, semaphore-like, and at first it was this that was easiest to decipher. Then, it was possible to perceive of a kind of subconscious signal, one that led deeper meaning to the contrivances of the tentacles. Before long, I had grown luminescent tentacles of my own, though mine were far clumsier and unable to whisk the atmospheric vapour into the ornamental swirls and vortices that I witnessed from the others. The telepathy grew stronger too, though this had to be used with caution, as even your deepest thoughts could be unwittingly communicated, and once or twice this aroused the rage of my captors, their tentacles spinning helicopter-like. Often, they would choose to incarcerate me in a hemispherical rock cave, sculpted to perfection by one of the beings, the rounded dome resembling the smooth convex whiteness of an exposed skull. In these times, I would still be unable to think freely, and my leaking thoughts might earn me further torture. The guardians enjoyed flailing with their tentacles, and this would lend a slight burning sensation to the skin, that made it feel strangely crisp and smelling of prawns.
The landscape on Triton is nothing like the astronomy books would lead you to believe (whatever that is, I dropped my love of astronomy when regrettably young, and no one had thought to send a probe to this enchanting place at that point). No, it had more the landscape of Arizona, only without that red-auburn desert glow. The rock mushroomed into spectacular gravity-defying structures, and on some of these lofty plateaus, the beings would gather and thrust their tentacles toward the great god Neptune. Still no noise would be omitted, except of course from the victims of the executions whose wails would richochet off the statuesque rockforms.
Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the experience was that these beings took almost no interest in me. I believe I was simply a companion, one to be tortured for amusement, yes, but certainly not a kind of artefact to be learned from as in other abductions. If I were to reflect, I would surmise that in that state of banality my status was little more than that of a domestic pet. I’d reason that my abduction had been engineered so that their species may have a plaything to make them feel their superiority (as though that had not already been demonstrated by their four light-hours flight to Earth). Indeed in the advanced state of their communication, their ability to transcend space, their ability to intimate thoughts so directly to the core of an alien brain, and in their gargantuan architecture, those same semaphoric tentacles able to sear rocks into molten form in a feat of sheer wizardry, they were truly awe-inspiring. Their scale of ambition was humbling, and left the similar kind of disappointment of oneself as that felt for your own generation when reading about the exploits of the Victorians.
In fact, to them, I was probably more modest even than a furred domestic pet. Possibly more like a snowshaker – shake him and see him rattle, sear him with your tentacle and watch his nostrils flare at the pungent seafood smell. I befriended one, ogre-shaped mass, whose light had clearly dimmed over time, and who yet his peers had not yet decided to sacrifice. His tentacles transcribed the words Angil-Twan (his name) in the air, and with my still embryonic tentacles, I spent a good four hours describing my name to him. I was more than content to ‘listen’ however. The reason for my abduction was never spelt out to me, yet he told of the great plagues, famines, wars, that existed when the beings, he called them the Lyntoc (I am reminded though, of H.G. Wells’s assertion that the beasts he encountered on our own moon were a mixture of Mooncalfs and Selenites, but how did he know of their names? But please, no more enquiries), existed in their solid state.
In turns out that these Lyntoc had once been more scaly versions of themselves, far from the lofty glowing, dancing shapes they now resembled. In fact, the creatures described were more like armadillos, shuffling along, calamitously waging war on each other for merely eyeing each other up wrong. One side-effect of being so low to the ground was that there was little variation in head height, and outbreaks of skirmishes that could soon lengthen into bloody battles could be occasioned by even the most innocent meetings of eyes. In time, they evolved, though instead of gaining a more upright posture, like man, they started to court more with the gaseous state. In time, they abandoned the conflicts and sorrow of the solid world, choosing instead to court with light, vapour and excesses of temperature. Their stewardship of the solid world despite their gaseous forms had elevated them above their surroundings, and they were at last in a relative if imperfect peace. But for the whole execution business that is, though I wasn’t brave enough to pull them up on that, and with my mastery of tentacular discussion, it would have taken the best part of a fortnight by which time even the impossibly patient Angil-Twan would have flail-seared me to death and had me thrust upon the jagged spike of the traitor’s mountain as a warning to all aliens who attempt such tomfoolery.
To cut a fairly rambling account short, they finally got bored themselves. There is only so much fun you can have with a snow-shaker after all. No matter how gothic the incarcerated castle, or how lifelike the snow - and even if that falling snow strikes the sunlight as beautifully as the dandruff from an unkempt street-urchin’s head as he is shaken in some kind of industrial oscillating device for the separating of paint, at some point, you get bored of it and have to dash it with anguish against a wall and then sit on your bed with your knees tucked up against your face, rocking gently yet somehow violently while sobbing and whispering doleful gibberish about the futility of it all and of the fallacy of having snow rise from the ground and adorn an upside down castle in any case, while the glass-sharded palm of your hand trickles blood lazily onto the duvet like some half-hearted volcano’s lacklustre attempt to bury a hamlet in lava.
In the end, I went out as I came in, with a swift blow of a golf club to the head. Awaking in my bed, I threw away my pills – for no alchemy could touch the insanity of Triton, and quickly gained my senses.
Then I moved back to London, but that’s a whole different story. Life appears to have reached a more normal equilibrium now, though the grim spectre of banality with all her destructive potency stands guard at a nearby corner that I hope never to reach. I still often open jars of seafood sauce at the supermarket to gain a heady whiff of that aroma that takes me back to those strangely alluring yet torturous days. But I still miss my tentacles.
Though perhaps I should go back a little, to last summer, when the fateful events that have plagued me these past few months commenced.
It all started when I visited my doctor, complaining of some kind of mental anguish caused by unceasing boredom. Bless the open door policy of the National Health Service. Whether you’re a soul in need of comfort and hypnotic drugs, or a superbug with a penchant for the smooth-tiled floor of a well-tended ward, all are welcome. Except of course that the latter don’t pay taxes, the thieving supergits.
But you see, the problem with boredom and banality carried to its furthest extreme is that it is always viewed as a benign thing and thus underestimated. Nothing, I grant you, could be further from the truth. While in small doses it may be no more than a minor irritant, something that prolonges time and blends your once-focussed thoughts into a kind of weak and unwholesome mixture (like Cup-A-Soup dissolved in an overly large mug), in large doses it can be utterly fatal. The brain, numbed of all rational activity, turns inwards, like an errant toenail with the personality of Stalin, and starts to feed upon itself. It mines its own gelatinous folds for signs of insecurity and devours these until any fermenting creativity or logic that once may have nested there is obliterated. It probably causes people to burn things and kill people, I kid you not. The number of horrors committed falsely in the name of some trumped-up cause or other, but whose blame could squarely be laid at boredom’s door, does not bear thinking about.
But I digress, some habits die hard. The doctor was a well-meaning, angelic type, and possessed these magical receipts that could be used in exchange for drugs. My local alchemist, Boots, furnished me with the goods, and it was at some point in the ensuing week that the abduction took place.
I had known for a long while that the gaping hole in my bedroom ceiling should be fixed. I’d stare up at it at night and wonder what kind of terrors might crawl through there. The hole had the girth of an alligator, so naturally it was towards this kind of predator that my mind was tuned. It didn’t elude me though, that a shark, radioactive six-foot caterpillar, or even some kind of mutated leg plastercast brought to life using only willpower, a vast quantity of electricity and the adoring strokes of a decadent Venetian, could have also easily fitted through that gap and smothered me in my sleep. In the event, it was none of these conventional predators, but instead a kind of long, metal club-ended pole. At first I wondered what kind of maniac would be trying to infiltrate our flat with a golf club. A solid sandstone tenement demands nothing less than a cannon, or perhaps an incendiary explosive, as any primary school child could tell you. After a few swipes of the golf club, which I feebly batted away with my outstretched palm (violence is not my strong point at 3am), it finally clouted me on the head.
In the rising vapours of the freezing moon, shapes were difficult to make out. The first sensation is of the intensely cold surface as you lie there, like a deep-chilled pumice stone being nudged into the small of your back by an over-affectionate cat. My glasses had gone, as they always do at the first sign of distress. I only buy cowardly glasses that shatter at the first sign of trouble, because I would rather be buried with them off, frankly. Why a monument to mal-sight should be welded to me like some face-hugging alien in my final hours is beyond me. I’d rather not see the combine harvester advancing towards me as I’m trapped in the quicksand if there is absolutely nothing I can do to save myself. Still, as the vapour shifted, it revealed the faces of my abductors.
Face is not quite the word, a person can have a face, a dog can have a face, even a clock can have a face, but using the word face here is to stretch the word’s meaning to the most tenuous threads of its extremities. The beings were more like semi-transparent shafts of light, with half-solid, half-vaporous tentacle forms writhing to their sides, melding with the omnisicent vapour of the moon. If peace could have a visual form, it would be encapsulated in the strange beauty staring down at me, and yet, over the coming months, I would soon find that this deceptive beauty shielded a wrath of unspeakable viciousness.
They were only capable of making one noise, a kind of ghastly squeal on the moment of death, which in itself was a ceremony visited upon them one-by-one as and when the community felt that the usefulness of that being had evaporated. It was strangely democratic yet utterly arbitrary and despicable at once. That squeal was the pent up release of all the gathered knowledge and emotion of a short life half-lived, not one of the squeals ever sounded like the dull exhalation of air that one felt would have embodied the dying gasp of a full and unregretted existence.
For the rest of the time, though, for I would not witness my first enforced death for many weeks, they communicated by their normal form – a kind of gestured telepathy (of the kind seen in enraged motorists, hurling lip-readable abuse from behind their warrior-mobile’s windows). The shafts of light would move into impossible shapes, semaphore-like, and at first it was this that was easiest to decipher. Then, it was possible to perceive of a kind of subconscious signal, one that led deeper meaning to the contrivances of the tentacles. Before long, I had grown luminescent tentacles of my own, though mine were far clumsier and unable to whisk the atmospheric vapour into the ornamental swirls and vortices that I witnessed from the others. The telepathy grew stronger too, though this had to be used with caution, as even your deepest thoughts could be unwittingly communicated, and once or twice this aroused the rage of my captors, their tentacles spinning helicopter-like. Often, they would choose to incarcerate me in a hemispherical rock cave, sculpted to perfection by one of the beings, the rounded dome resembling the smooth convex whiteness of an exposed skull. In these times, I would still be unable to think freely, and my leaking thoughts might earn me further torture. The guardians enjoyed flailing with their tentacles, and this would lend a slight burning sensation to the skin, that made it feel strangely crisp and smelling of prawns.
The landscape on Triton is nothing like the astronomy books would lead you to believe (whatever that is, I dropped my love of astronomy when regrettably young, and no one had thought to send a probe to this enchanting place at that point). No, it had more the landscape of Arizona, only without that red-auburn desert glow. The rock mushroomed into spectacular gravity-defying structures, and on some of these lofty plateaus, the beings would gather and thrust their tentacles toward the great god Neptune. Still no noise would be omitted, except of course from the victims of the executions whose wails would richochet off the statuesque rockforms.
Perhaps the most refreshing thing about the experience was that these beings took almost no interest in me. I believe I was simply a companion, one to be tortured for amusement, yes, but certainly not a kind of artefact to be learned from as in other abductions. If I were to reflect, I would surmise that in that state of banality my status was little more than that of a domestic pet. I’d reason that my abduction had been engineered so that their species may have a plaything to make them feel their superiority (as though that had not already been demonstrated by their four light-hours flight to Earth). Indeed in the advanced state of their communication, their ability to transcend space, their ability to intimate thoughts so directly to the core of an alien brain, and in their gargantuan architecture, those same semaphoric tentacles able to sear rocks into molten form in a feat of sheer wizardry, they were truly awe-inspiring. Their scale of ambition was humbling, and left the similar kind of disappointment of oneself as that felt for your own generation when reading about the exploits of the Victorians.
In fact, to them, I was probably more modest even than a furred domestic pet. Possibly more like a snowshaker – shake him and see him rattle, sear him with your tentacle and watch his nostrils flare at the pungent seafood smell. I befriended one, ogre-shaped mass, whose light had clearly dimmed over time, and who yet his peers had not yet decided to sacrifice. His tentacles transcribed the words Angil-Twan (his name) in the air, and with my still embryonic tentacles, I spent a good four hours describing my name to him. I was more than content to ‘listen’ however. The reason for my abduction was never spelt out to me, yet he told of the great plagues, famines, wars, that existed when the beings, he called them the Lyntoc (I am reminded though, of H.G. Wells’s assertion that the beasts he encountered on our own moon were a mixture of Mooncalfs and Selenites, but how did he know of their names? But please, no more enquiries), existed in their solid state.
In turns out that these Lyntoc had once been more scaly versions of themselves, far from the lofty glowing, dancing shapes they now resembled. In fact, the creatures described were more like armadillos, shuffling along, calamitously waging war on each other for merely eyeing each other up wrong. One side-effect of being so low to the ground was that there was little variation in head height, and outbreaks of skirmishes that could soon lengthen into bloody battles could be occasioned by even the most innocent meetings of eyes. In time, they evolved, though instead of gaining a more upright posture, like man, they started to court more with the gaseous state. In time, they abandoned the conflicts and sorrow of the solid world, choosing instead to court with light, vapour and excesses of temperature. Their stewardship of the solid world despite their gaseous forms had elevated them above their surroundings, and they were at last in a relative if imperfect peace. But for the whole execution business that is, though I wasn’t brave enough to pull them up on that, and with my mastery of tentacular discussion, it would have taken the best part of a fortnight by which time even the impossibly patient Angil-Twan would have flail-seared me to death and had me thrust upon the jagged spike of the traitor’s mountain as a warning to all aliens who attempt such tomfoolery.
To cut a fairly rambling account short, they finally got bored themselves. There is only so much fun you can have with a snow-shaker after all. No matter how gothic the incarcerated castle, or how lifelike the snow - and even if that falling snow strikes the sunlight as beautifully as the dandruff from an unkempt street-urchin’s head as he is shaken in some kind of industrial oscillating device for the separating of paint, at some point, you get bored of it and have to dash it with anguish against a wall and then sit on your bed with your knees tucked up against your face, rocking gently yet somehow violently while sobbing and whispering doleful gibberish about the futility of it all and of the fallacy of having snow rise from the ground and adorn an upside down castle in any case, while the glass-sharded palm of your hand trickles blood lazily onto the duvet like some half-hearted volcano’s lacklustre attempt to bury a hamlet in lava.
In the end, I went out as I came in, with a swift blow of a golf club to the head. Awaking in my bed, I threw away my pills – for no alchemy could touch the insanity of Triton, and quickly gained my senses.
Then I moved back to London, but that’s a whole different story. Life appears to have reached a more normal equilibrium now, though the grim spectre of banality with all her destructive potency stands guard at a nearby corner that I hope never to reach. I still often open jars of seafood sauce at the supermarket to gain a heady whiff of that aroma that takes me back to those strangely alluring yet torturous days. But I still miss my tentacles.
Saturday, 28 June 2008
Economical With The Truth
The folk with the sandwich boards may be right. I don’t mean the folk in Oxford Street proclaiming “Golf Sale” with gigantic arrows on boards, though they are probably also right - it makes little commercial sense to lie about such things. Unless they are directing you into the knifepoint of some one-too-many-time-happy-slapped disgruntled youth trying to save enough money from hapless tourists and Chino-wearing golfers for their next fix of superglue. Incidentally, if you want to peddle golf equipment to people, I can think of better places to do it than Oxford Street where most people are listlessly pacing, chewing like drunken cattle, aimlessly spinning like tops into the path of buses in a vain effort to thrust themselves into some alternate Universe where life does not consist of supermarket queues, pickpockets and limpet-like shop assistants. Perhaps set up a golf range on Hampstead Heath with some tasteful caricatures of Gordon Brown or Wendy Alexander for the general public to aim at. Put the figures in those “Trust me, I’m not a fuckwit” poses beloved of politicians and the infuriated public will soon get into the swing of it. Groan.
Anyway, what I was referring to is those people with the “The End Is Nigh” billboards. You see, in a year’s time, that pound in your pocket – or anyone else’s – will be worth 3.3% less than it is now. Actually, it feels like things will be worse than that, perhaps the mighty Bank has been a little optimistic or perhaps that figure will be the start of a rollercoaster tumble featuring larger and larger numbers until we are lost in a whirlpool of scientific notation, lists of zeroes jamming down our throats as we hold a fuel pump pistol-like to our welcoming temples. Or perhaps not.
In an effort to find out what the fuck is happening, I went to the Bank of England Museum, which you can reach off Bartholomew Lane in The City. It was a strange mixture of Legoland and Imperial Celebration, what with springy toys demonstrating the link between inflation and interest rates, and all those 19th Century black and white sketches of wagon-loads of gold pilfered from the colonies trundling through the doors of Threadneedle Street while scantily-clad street urchins with chimney-soot faces dance endearingly to scores from Oliver with synchronized choreography.
Now, the museum is really great and all and I heartily recommend it, but it hadn’t caught up with events. In tone, it seemed self-congratulatory about how in over ten years of independence from the Government it had only failed on its inflation target in one month, information two days out of date by the time I visited. Dejected, I found another source, namely fiscal expert Lord Farquhar of Sotheby, and sent this blog’s fictional minion, Slug the Journo, to meet him at his orchard near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire to discuss exactly which shade of shite we have collectively found ourselves in this time, and whether Dulux would be able to keep their promise to produce a paint of that colour to fittingly bedeck the innards of the London Stock Exchange come autumn.
The scene is a lovingly restored orchard. Restored, of course, after the catastrophic Great Scrumping of ’04 in which many newborn apples were needlessly slaughtered by tykes on unicycles. Slug and Lord Farquhar are deep in conversation about the serious and dour-faced economical woes facing the British economy today:
Slug: Lord Farquhar, great to have someone of your esteemed stature with us on this fine day.
Lord: This is my orchard, mine I tell you. You are with me. My secretary said that you were a professional.
Slug: Indeed, humble apologies. Now, you have been dealing with the economy for a number of years. Might I ask in what capacity you have been involved?
Lord: Indeed [brushes cravat clumsily to one side, though it immediately flops back to the front].
I have been involved in a number of ways, buying and selling and that kind of thing. Mainly buying though. Things like bread, milk, croutons. Though in fairness my secretary usually deals with it all ‘front line’. I can’t stand those newsagents as they call them, their musty air plays havoc with my lungs, they have been so feeble of late.
Slug: Now you are known as something of a giant in the economy, coming in at a hefty twenty stone which is pretty bloody heavy for those of you reading in metric, indeed it took three hours for the contractor to winch you into this apple tree in which you have insisted we conduct this interview.
Lord: Yes?
Slug: Well, is there a reason that you have chosen this setting?
Lord: Indeed. Now I don’t want to labour the point, but the economy of late has been a frightful fucking mess. I had my home repossessed by the Bank two months ago. Those forty or so seagulls you can see orbiting the mansion are the new tenants.
Slug: Indeed that is fucking frightful. What would you have us believe is the reason for this?
Lord: Well in the main, all this inflation is being caused by rising fuel prices and rising food prices. I personally believe that a few speculators have been buying in vast quantities of oil and taking it off the market, which has the effect of inflating prices for the rest of us. Of course that could be mere speculation on my part!
[Finding his own joke incredibly funny, he proceeds to guffaw in a raucous manner so that the folds in his stomach can be seen to quiver from under his waistcoat. The entire tree gyrates dangerously under his heaving weight before the trunk lurches to a fifteen degree angle].
Slug: How do you think these rising prices, combined with the credit crunch and the effect on house prices is going to affect us in the near future?
Lord: Well I know for a fact that the credit rating of a few of those seagulls is pretty poor, so I don’t imagine that they are going to be able to hold on to it for long. The wider picture is that with the price of fuel rising exponentially to an estimated ten pounds a litre by next year, and perhaps ten-fold for each of the following five consecutive years, we are going to have to indulge in some very unpalatable activities.
Slug: Such as…?
Lord: Please, do have an apple, you are my guest after all. Yes, I am talking about walking. In fact it is my prediction that we will evolve to have much tougher soles on our feet, like frogs, or trainers have. The human race has an enormous ability to adapt you see. Look at how we survived the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs using the never-before tried or tested ‘duck and cover’ method. The shape of the dinosaurs’ skeletons precluded their adopting that position. That’s what evolution did for us, baby.
Slug: Quite.
Lord: Also, with the supermarket cartel tightening its grip on the public’s wallets like the thieving claws of a soap-dodging street robber, other sources of food and nourishment are going to have to be considered. Won’t you have another apple?
Slug: Thank you. And what shape might these new foodstuffs take?
Lord: Well, there are always those biofuels that people are talking about. A couple of pints of that stuff will knock you cold for several days at a time leaving you incapable of worrying about the cost of food or fuel. My dear wife Dorothy unfortunately drank a yard of biofuel for a bet shortly before her sudden and unexplained death last year, so I can vouch for its potency. Also, we might have to resort to more drastic measures, food-wise.
Slug: You mean…
Lord: Yes, cannibalism.
[At this point, Lord Farquhar looks down at my thigh. It is exposed as my trousers suffered a large gash when I tried to climb into the apple tree prior to the interview and snagged the trousers on the deliberately sharpened point of a tree limb. On that same tree limb had been skewered four squirrels in various states of decay.
Lord Farquhar licks his lips and moves his head almost imperceptibly closer to my flesh. I try to combat an urge to ditch my journalistic integrity in favour of fleeing for my life].
Slug: So, do you see any other way out of this financial crisis apart from a human society defiled by excesses of drinking biofuel and ravaging each other like deep-fried chicken drumsticks after a particularly savage night out?
Lord: None at all. In the wayward trends in our economy, however, I do not see a reason to give up hope. Rather I see an opportunity. This is merely a stage of advancement for the human race, where we ditch currency and markets and economy and all the chains and morals that bind our society into our current primitive state and move in to a freer more equal society where we can feast on each other at will, lathering each other in peanut butter before gorging ourselves on street-side banquets fit for Zeus.
Slug: Lord Farquhar, thank you for your time.
[At this point, the tree collapses, and the aforementioned tree limb skewers Lord Farquhar through the heart so that he appears inanimate, like a fifth, obese, aristocratic squirrel, pierced and motionless, waiting for his slow demise by decay, never to view the dawn of the day when society would act out his words and devolve into a cesspool of horror and fermented wheat].
===
LAST NIGHT, Kiran saw Radiohead in Glasgow Green which was so fucking fantastic that it defies words. At several moments he experienced joy so profound that he almost had a seizure. Indeed his left leg has still not fully recovered which makes using the clutch hard. Today is his last official day in Glasgow.
Experience some live Radiohead action for yourself – here is a snippet from a secret gig they played in London’s Brick Lane back in January.
Anyway, what I was referring to is those people with the “The End Is Nigh” billboards. You see, in a year’s time, that pound in your pocket – or anyone else’s – will be worth 3.3% less than it is now. Actually, it feels like things will be worse than that, perhaps the mighty Bank has been a little optimistic or perhaps that figure will be the start of a rollercoaster tumble featuring larger and larger numbers until we are lost in a whirlpool of scientific notation, lists of zeroes jamming down our throats as we hold a fuel pump pistol-like to our welcoming temples. Or perhaps not.
In an effort to find out what the fuck is happening, I went to the Bank of England Museum, which you can reach off Bartholomew Lane in The City. It was a strange mixture of Legoland and Imperial Celebration, what with springy toys demonstrating the link between inflation and interest rates, and all those 19th Century black and white sketches of wagon-loads of gold pilfered from the colonies trundling through the doors of Threadneedle Street while scantily-clad street urchins with chimney-soot faces dance endearingly to scores from Oliver with synchronized choreography.
Now, the museum is really great and all and I heartily recommend it, but it hadn’t caught up with events. In tone, it seemed self-congratulatory about how in over ten years of independence from the Government it had only failed on its inflation target in one month, information two days out of date by the time I visited. Dejected, I found another source, namely fiscal expert Lord Farquhar of Sotheby, and sent this blog’s fictional minion, Slug the Journo, to meet him at his orchard near High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire to discuss exactly which shade of shite we have collectively found ourselves in this time, and whether Dulux would be able to keep their promise to produce a paint of that colour to fittingly bedeck the innards of the London Stock Exchange come autumn.
The scene is a lovingly restored orchard. Restored, of course, after the catastrophic Great Scrumping of ’04 in which many newborn apples were needlessly slaughtered by tykes on unicycles. Slug and Lord Farquhar are deep in conversation about the serious and dour-faced economical woes facing the British economy today:
Slug: Lord Farquhar, great to have someone of your esteemed stature with us on this fine day.
Lord: This is my orchard, mine I tell you. You are with me. My secretary said that you were a professional.
Slug: Indeed, humble apologies. Now, you have been dealing with the economy for a number of years. Might I ask in what capacity you have been involved?
Lord: Indeed [brushes cravat clumsily to one side, though it immediately flops back to the front].
I have been involved in a number of ways, buying and selling and that kind of thing. Mainly buying though. Things like bread, milk, croutons. Though in fairness my secretary usually deals with it all ‘front line’. I can’t stand those newsagents as they call them, their musty air plays havoc with my lungs, they have been so feeble of late.
Slug: Now you are known as something of a giant in the economy, coming in at a hefty twenty stone which is pretty bloody heavy for those of you reading in metric, indeed it took three hours for the contractor to winch you into this apple tree in which you have insisted we conduct this interview.
Lord: Yes?
Slug: Well, is there a reason that you have chosen this setting?
Lord: Indeed. Now I don’t want to labour the point, but the economy of late has been a frightful fucking mess. I had my home repossessed by the Bank two months ago. Those forty or so seagulls you can see orbiting the mansion are the new tenants.
Slug: Indeed that is fucking frightful. What would you have us believe is the reason for this?
Lord: Well in the main, all this inflation is being caused by rising fuel prices and rising food prices. I personally believe that a few speculators have been buying in vast quantities of oil and taking it off the market, which has the effect of inflating prices for the rest of us. Of course that could be mere speculation on my part!
[Finding his own joke incredibly funny, he proceeds to guffaw in a raucous manner so that the folds in his stomach can be seen to quiver from under his waistcoat. The entire tree gyrates dangerously under his heaving weight before the trunk lurches to a fifteen degree angle].
Slug: How do you think these rising prices, combined with the credit crunch and the effect on house prices is going to affect us in the near future?
Lord: Well I know for a fact that the credit rating of a few of those seagulls is pretty poor, so I don’t imagine that they are going to be able to hold on to it for long. The wider picture is that with the price of fuel rising exponentially to an estimated ten pounds a litre by next year, and perhaps ten-fold for each of the following five consecutive years, we are going to have to indulge in some very unpalatable activities.
Slug: Such as…?
Lord: Please, do have an apple, you are my guest after all. Yes, I am talking about walking. In fact it is my prediction that we will evolve to have much tougher soles on our feet, like frogs, or trainers have. The human race has an enormous ability to adapt you see. Look at how we survived the meteorite that killed the dinosaurs using the never-before tried or tested ‘duck and cover’ method. The shape of the dinosaurs’ skeletons precluded their adopting that position. That’s what evolution did for us, baby.
Slug: Quite.
Lord: Also, with the supermarket cartel tightening its grip on the public’s wallets like the thieving claws of a soap-dodging street robber, other sources of food and nourishment are going to have to be considered. Won’t you have another apple?
Slug: Thank you. And what shape might these new foodstuffs take?
Lord: Well, there are always those biofuels that people are talking about. A couple of pints of that stuff will knock you cold for several days at a time leaving you incapable of worrying about the cost of food or fuel. My dear wife Dorothy unfortunately drank a yard of biofuel for a bet shortly before her sudden and unexplained death last year, so I can vouch for its potency. Also, we might have to resort to more drastic measures, food-wise.
Slug: You mean…
Lord: Yes, cannibalism.
[At this point, Lord Farquhar looks down at my thigh. It is exposed as my trousers suffered a large gash when I tried to climb into the apple tree prior to the interview and snagged the trousers on the deliberately sharpened point of a tree limb. On that same tree limb had been skewered four squirrels in various states of decay.
Lord Farquhar licks his lips and moves his head almost imperceptibly closer to my flesh. I try to combat an urge to ditch my journalistic integrity in favour of fleeing for my life].
Slug: So, do you see any other way out of this financial crisis apart from a human society defiled by excesses of drinking biofuel and ravaging each other like deep-fried chicken drumsticks after a particularly savage night out?
Lord: None at all. In the wayward trends in our economy, however, I do not see a reason to give up hope. Rather I see an opportunity. This is merely a stage of advancement for the human race, where we ditch currency and markets and economy and all the chains and morals that bind our society into our current primitive state and move in to a freer more equal society where we can feast on each other at will, lathering each other in peanut butter before gorging ourselves on street-side banquets fit for Zeus.
Slug: Lord Farquhar, thank you for your time.
[At this point, the tree collapses, and the aforementioned tree limb skewers Lord Farquhar through the heart so that he appears inanimate, like a fifth, obese, aristocratic squirrel, pierced and motionless, waiting for his slow demise by decay, never to view the dawn of the day when society would act out his words and devolve into a cesspool of horror and fermented wheat].
===
LAST NIGHT, Kiran saw Radiohead in Glasgow Green which was so fucking fantastic that it defies words. At several moments he experienced joy so profound that he almost had a seizure. Indeed his left leg has still not fully recovered which makes using the clutch hard. Today is his last official day in Glasgow.
Experience some live Radiohead action for yourself – here is a snippet from a secret gig they played in London’s Brick Lane back in January.
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
The Great Smokey Vortex
Four months passed. Unutterable things happened. Not all of them, I should add, interesting.
“Does it make you feel large and tragic?”, asks a character in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden about another character’s unrelenting self-pity. Perhaps that is at the root of the contented knifeless masochism we call self-pity. Whatever the cause, whatever the outcome, it had to be trampled into the ground. Wading knee-deep through the viscous surrounds that it produces is a ticket to stagnation, apathy and misery.
Glasgow seems to epitomise self-pity. Here is a city that once proudly held itself as a giant of trade and commerce, that thrust up stone into the sky as if it were feather to form gargantuan edifices and then carved ornate embellishments into the façades, treating the stone now as butter. At one point in the nineteenth century, a third of the steam locomotives in the world could claim to have been born in one district of Glasgow – Springburn. Four hundred shipyards lined the banks of the humble River Clyde, humble both in width and in trajectory. Even in its present man-modified state, it still takes a hefty depth of imagination to populate it with ships, grit and clinkers and the metallic noise of grinding industry, so peaceful and insignificant does it now appear.
Then it was all gone. The city that had weathered industrial rifts of the past - the decline of cotton, the gaining of independence in America and the resultant overnight destruction of the tobacco trade - felt unable to cope with a competition so profound that is simply curled up into a ball and died. It haemorrhaged population, diminishing from well over a million to just over half that today. All the while it faked regeneration as it tore lumps out its own torso and deposited its inner-city population, tentacular in method, to countryside ghettos. All this frenzied activity of construction was merely an exercise in disguising death. In thrusting scaffolding thirty-storeys into the sky and encasing citizens in erect cuboids of dull concrete, the city kidded itself that it was reanimating itself, renewing itself. It is damned into this spiral now.
But, I here you say, for my mind in its madness is more pervious to the whispered insecurities of the breeze: Has there not been real progress? Have there not been awards, accolades, sporting events, beautification, do people’s hearts not soar at the majestic transformation of Buchanan Street? Cosmetically, the city has burned its industrial core it is true. It has denied its past and repaved its fabric with street-performers, opera, galleries of commerce so that we can consume, consume, consume and forget that it is all falling apart not one mile from the centre. As if putting foundation, mascara and lipstick on the hopeful face of a snake would gloss over the sloughing scales and withering tail of its fermenting body. Glasgow rots from the edges in, and it renews from the centre out, and in between lies a doughnut of half-built luxury apartments that will not be graced by gentrified footsteps for many years.
I digress though, at the heart of all this, is that the mindset of Glasgow is not to be reborn. What is mistaken for regenerative zeal is probably just the words and actions of a few whose own progress relies on the perceived success of their ambitions for the city. All the while, the Graduate Graveyard plods on, like an asthmatic tortoise towards an uncertain end. Its rueful nostalgia for long-gone days of industry cannot help it. I have a great emotive connection to the city, I will schizophrenically continue to sing its praises because I will never be able to deny the profound impact that is has had on my life, on my outlook. But I should only return when my own state of mind has melded with that of the city. In practice, this should be when my blood is becoming tumourous, my bones bubbling with the onset of osteoporosis, when this embryonic daily wheeze I have gained turns into a full-pelt clamour for oxygen, and when my liver has been stained kaleidoscopically from years of abuse. It should be in the sunset of my life when I view with terror the setting blood-red orb burning slowly through its throne of cloud. Then I will be happy to lie face-down in a Glasgow puddle, but not a moment before.
Mighty feelings indeed, and undoubtedly utter bollocks – for I am too young to know anything and too old to learn anything. I have no experience to make such high-minded claims, I will turn tail a thousand times and learn nothing. I will make proclamations and extol pretensions and then throw my promises away while no one is looking. There is only one place where that frame of mind could be tolerated or subsumed. Will Self described it as “thrashing and mewling”, and whether in hatred or in awe, he was talking about London.
London, that feeling of burning behind your eyes when you have been manacled upside-down from the ankles for too long. That dark silhouette of a dagger lurking behind the shower curtain. That great smokey vortex within which you disappear from all who knew you in a theatrical whirl of fog and scuttle with such energy that all thought becomes reduced to a characterless list of items which has no end and which you will never be furnished with enough time to finish. Venture into Victoria Park and muse at the wonder of undead grass in the inner-city. Pierce a javelin through your lip and hurl yourself drunkenly across Camden High Street. Enter the ring of steel and wonder how long it will take a determined woodworm to tunnel through the Bank of England’s vault wall in Princes Street. Feast on desiccated coconut next to a police cordon at a Hare Krishna parade. Forget the terrifying thought that you might need the animation of the city to substitute for a lack of your own inherent energy and that the only way you can survive is to feed parasitically off the bustle. I’m trying to. Or go to a Somali market in Whitechapel and legally buy four bunches of hallucinogenic khat leaves to chew on if it all becomes too much.
So here I am, gluttonous traitor that I am. In six days I start work. For four days I have inhabited this flat, and in a colourful (though mainly red) daze of scene-blurring cycling and memory-blurring inebriation I have subsisted, not entirely sure what form this particular failure will take, but determined as hell to make sure that this episode is the finest drip to ever top that banal pyramid of ear-wax we call life. For I have failed again, both by my own standards and by the recessive standards of society. Though meet me and you may find that I’m the happiest failure you ever have the misfortune to shake hands with.
Back to normal after this: less of this pretentious shite, and more objectivity hopefully – though what is objectivity but the collective sum and average of a billion subjectively held opinions? Muse on that as you feed bread into your toaster. And wonder at the glory of such an invention.
“Does it make you feel large and tragic?”, asks a character in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden about another character’s unrelenting self-pity. Perhaps that is at the root of the contented knifeless masochism we call self-pity. Whatever the cause, whatever the outcome, it had to be trampled into the ground. Wading knee-deep through the viscous surrounds that it produces is a ticket to stagnation, apathy and misery.
Glasgow seems to epitomise self-pity. Here is a city that once proudly held itself as a giant of trade and commerce, that thrust up stone into the sky as if it were feather to form gargantuan edifices and then carved ornate embellishments into the façades, treating the stone now as butter. At one point in the nineteenth century, a third of the steam locomotives in the world could claim to have been born in one district of Glasgow – Springburn. Four hundred shipyards lined the banks of the humble River Clyde, humble both in width and in trajectory. Even in its present man-modified state, it still takes a hefty depth of imagination to populate it with ships, grit and clinkers and the metallic noise of grinding industry, so peaceful and insignificant does it now appear.
Then it was all gone. The city that had weathered industrial rifts of the past - the decline of cotton, the gaining of independence in America and the resultant overnight destruction of the tobacco trade - felt unable to cope with a competition so profound that is simply curled up into a ball and died. It haemorrhaged population, diminishing from well over a million to just over half that today. All the while it faked regeneration as it tore lumps out its own torso and deposited its inner-city population, tentacular in method, to countryside ghettos. All this frenzied activity of construction was merely an exercise in disguising death. In thrusting scaffolding thirty-storeys into the sky and encasing citizens in erect cuboids of dull concrete, the city kidded itself that it was reanimating itself, renewing itself. It is damned into this spiral now.
But, I here you say, for my mind in its madness is more pervious to the whispered insecurities of the breeze: Has there not been real progress? Have there not been awards, accolades, sporting events, beautification, do people’s hearts not soar at the majestic transformation of Buchanan Street? Cosmetically, the city has burned its industrial core it is true. It has denied its past and repaved its fabric with street-performers, opera, galleries of commerce so that we can consume, consume, consume and forget that it is all falling apart not one mile from the centre. As if putting foundation, mascara and lipstick on the hopeful face of a snake would gloss over the sloughing scales and withering tail of its fermenting body. Glasgow rots from the edges in, and it renews from the centre out, and in between lies a doughnut of half-built luxury apartments that will not be graced by gentrified footsteps for many years.
I digress though, at the heart of all this, is that the mindset of Glasgow is not to be reborn. What is mistaken for regenerative zeal is probably just the words and actions of a few whose own progress relies on the perceived success of their ambitions for the city. All the while, the Graduate Graveyard plods on, like an asthmatic tortoise towards an uncertain end. Its rueful nostalgia for long-gone days of industry cannot help it. I have a great emotive connection to the city, I will schizophrenically continue to sing its praises because I will never be able to deny the profound impact that is has had on my life, on my outlook. But I should only return when my own state of mind has melded with that of the city. In practice, this should be when my blood is becoming tumourous, my bones bubbling with the onset of osteoporosis, when this embryonic daily wheeze I have gained turns into a full-pelt clamour for oxygen, and when my liver has been stained kaleidoscopically from years of abuse. It should be in the sunset of my life when I view with terror the setting blood-red orb burning slowly through its throne of cloud. Then I will be happy to lie face-down in a Glasgow puddle, but not a moment before.
Mighty feelings indeed, and undoubtedly utter bollocks – for I am too young to know anything and too old to learn anything. I have no experience to make such high-minded claims, I will turn tail a thousand times and learn nothing. I will make proclamations and extol pretensions and then throw my promises away while no one is looking. There is only one place where that frame of mind could be tolerated or subsumed. Will Self described it as “thrashing and mewling”, and whether in hatred or in awe, he was talking about London.
London, that feeling of burning behind your eyes when you have been manacled upside-down from the ankles for too long. That dark silhouette of a dagger lurking behind the shower curtain. That great smokey vortex within which you disappear from all who knew you in a theatrical whirl of fog and scuttle with such energy that all thought becomes reduced to a characterless list of items which has no end and which you will never be furnished with enough time to finish. Venture into Victoria Park and muse at the wonder of undead grass in the inner-city. Pierce a javelin through your lip and hurl yourself drunkenly across Camden High Street. Enter the ring of steel and wonder how long it will take a determined woodworm to tunnel through the Bank of England’s vault wall in Princes Street. Feast on desiccated coconut next to a police cordon at a Hare Krishna parade. Forget the terrifying thought that you might need the animation of the city to substitute for a lack of your own inherent energy and that the only way you can survive is to feed parasitically off the bustle. I’m trying to. Or go to a Somali market in Whitechapel and legally buy four bunches of hallucinogenic khat leaves to chew on if it all becomes too much.
So here I am, gluttonous traitor that I am. In six days I start work. For four days I have inhabited this flat, and in a colourful (though mainly red) daze of scene-blurring cycling and memory-blurring inebriation I have subsisted, not entirely sure what form this particular failure will take, but determined as hell to make sure that this episode is the finest drip to ever top that banal pyramid of ear-wax we call life. For I have failed again, both by my own standards and by the recessive standards of society. Though meet me and you may find that I’m the happiest failure you ever have the misfortune to shake hands with.
Back to normal after this: less of this pretentious shite, and more objectivity hopefully – though what is objectivity but the collective sum and average of a billion subjectively held opinions? Muse on that as you feed bread into your toaster. And wonder at the glory of such an invention.
Wednesday, 27 February 2008
The Last Post? (Or, A Change of Tack)
Hello.
It is vastly enjoyable writing all this rubbish down time and again, and it has been wonderful to expound utter gibberish on anything that pops into my tedious head over the last 4 months.
But there are a vast number of flaws with this blog as a blog.
a) Entries too long.
b) No continuous subject.
c) Not enough links.
d) No multi-media: pictures, YouTube snippets etc.
e) Plenty else, though if I knew all of these I would be able to rectify them and improve the thing.
Anyway, it has been really heartening to find that going too long without writing something down (even if it happens to be about reading on the toilet, mouth ulcers, conflict in Kosovo or a different take on the Nativity) makes me itch to get back to it. For this reason I know it is an interest and not just a chore. But this is probably not the medium to do it and it should never have been intended as such.
Therefore the point of this blog is changing. Rather than being a distraction from what I really want to write about (as in the past), I am purely going to use it as a testing or dumping ground for entries not necessarily meant to be read, or for the public domain, but which do no harm by being there. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then perhaps blogging is the continuation of writing by other means. I need to get back to the point of the whole endeavour. I intend to set up another blog based on more rigid subject matter inspired by the happy popularity of one post in particular. Perhaps, if that goes well, I'll link it to this blog. But for now I look forward to the far warmer cloak of true anonymity.
Cheers for reading,
Kiran
It is vastly enjoyable writing all this rubbish down time and again, and it has been wonderful to expound utter gibberish on anything that pops into my tedious head over the last 4 months.
But there are a vast number of flaws with this blog as a blog.
a) Entries too long.
b) No continuous subject.
c) Not enough links.
d) No multi-media: pictures, YouTube snippets etc.
e) Plenty else, though if I knew all of these I would be able to rectify them and improve the thing.
Anyway, it has been really heartening to find that going too long without writing something down (even if it happens to be about reading on the toilet, mouth ulcers, conflict in Kosovo or a different take on the Nativity) makes me itch to get back to it. For this reason I know it is an interest and not just a chore. But this is probably not the medium to do it and it should never have been intended as such.
Therefore the point of this blog is changing. Rather than being a distraction from what I really want to write about (as in the past), I am purely going to use it as a testing or dumping ground for entries not necessarily meant to be read, or for the public domain, but which do no harm by being there. If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then perhaps blogging is the continuation of writing by other means. I need to get back to the point of the whole endeavour. I intend to set up another blog based on more rigid subject matter inspired by the happy popularity of one post in particular. Perhaps, if that goes well, I'll link it to this blog. But for now I look forward to the far warmer cloak of true anonymity.
Cheers for reading,
Kiran
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
Demons of the Mouth
I’ve been away. Not really Away, you understand, just away. But all calm now. I guess you have to change your perspective a little. Rather than standing in the fire, just use it to toast that marshmallow. And yes, I know they’re carcinogenic. Anyway, this thankfully leaves me free to think again about the more trivial things in life. Like mouth ulcers.
Mouth ulcers are like thorny stowaways, lying in wait in the cargo hold with a bomb in their shoe, fondling your belongings as they rustle up a comforting pocket away from all that nasty bunker-cold before lighting the ignition and blowing you out the sky. Or perhaps I am overstepping a little. Ulcers are more like simple hijackers, steering you away from all that meaty food that you love, forcing you to mouth over soft, supple foods as if you had prematurely lost your teeth or receded in time to become some infant, bibbed and spitting wretched ready-chewed peas and carrots onto the moulded plastic tray locked in front of you. The horror.
There are a number of ways to get one. You can order them from Argos, because you can order everything from Argos, or you can eat something unexpectedly hot that irritates a patch of your gums like cosmetics in a rabbit’s eye. You may summon one on an adversary through incantation of course. This normally involves finding a suitably heavy stick, a piece of driftwood is ideal, and then waving it theatrically at some roadkill until you invoke the Spirit of Suffering, and from there, using said wood as a receptacle, transport the Spirit into the gums of your victims, ideally while they are asleep and their lips are rippling from the snoring like loose flaps on a marquee at a windswept beach resort for retired junkies.
From personal experience though, the best way to get a mouth ulcer is undoubtedly to smack your gums with your toothbrush. This incident has all the best hallmarks of the perfect accident. It happens, of course, by surprise. It happens while you are doing something routine and mundane, a bit like how that serial killer will get you while you have your back-turned to the door while microwaving up some popcorn that you and your girlfriend can pick idly at while watching some sordid rom-com starring an affable Englishman with the charm of neutered snake. Cheap skates. That’ll learn you for shunning Odeon. People hardly ever get killed there. Also, toothbrush-ulcers are more likely to happen locally, much like minor road accidents. Though admittedly few road accidents actually happen in your bathroom. And lastly, they always happen when you take your eye off the ball for just a second.
The bastard toothbrush, in all its existence, has only a few minutes a day to really shine. It is itching to, storing up all that energy through the night waiting for that moment when it can justify itself to its owner again, and then there it is, greeting you like a happy dog. Just like a happy dog though, you can’t face it early in the morning, you just want to get after it with the rolling pin. And unlike a happy dog, you put this weapon of bristly vice into your mouth and try and manhandle it round what is really your fundamental access-point, in a half-witted state of dreamery. For perhaps a hundred consecutive times, all goes according to plan. You avoid your own reflection bleary eyed while idly gobbing a mouthful of foaming spit into the basin. You muse as it slips toward the plug hole, pulled in by the inexorable forces of Newton, emulating the lava flow from some volcano that had been used to dispose of all the detergent that had failed the Daz doorstep challenge, and then think about whether to jump from your third-floor window and risk being crippled rather than certain death, or just go to work and carry on as before because, let’s face it, no one likes change.
But then, just that one time, the toothbrush slips. Time slows down. Your dreary malaise is lifted into a heightened state of awareness, your eyes widen to detect untoward motion under some kind of predatorial instinct that kept your cave-wife Linda safe from sabre-toothed chipmunks in the prehistoric era. And then, before you even have time to regret wrong decisions and lost opportunities, collision. A numbing pain echoes through your face, and even as the neurones arc the blinding sensation across, you realise that this is nothing compared with what you will endure over the next two weeks. You retire to your room, tonguing the embryonic wound in a self-piteous manner, and then, if you are like me, set up an ad hoc schedule, cramming your favourite foods into the next two days of meals before the young ash-mound turns into a full-blown Vesuvius.
The pattern then unfolds over the next fortnight. After the heady glut of rich and sumptuous foods which you can now readily afford since your daily food spend is about to dwindle to the low double-digits of pence when the bastard really kicks in (honestly, it’s worth getting a loan to get through the first few days of opportunity, you will have no trouble paying it back having saved in the days of food-poverty that follow), you start to feel the monster glowing inside you. You tenuously peel your lip down and gaze at it in the mirror. It does not look like the hideous tent-like lump of cling-film portrayed in the adverts. If you touch it, you find it has more the texture of under-cooked sausage, lightly pink on the inside, taunting with its moist beauty yet harbouring demonically in the same breath. Of course you appreciate this more after the forty minute bout of crying in the foetal position from the shot of pain that touching the ulcer gives you is over. It does not resemble an outgrowth, like a teenage pluke, but instead looks as if some miniscule creature like a Fraggle has taken a circular saw and gouged a small, grey crater into the back of your lip. It reminds me of the disc-shaped gouge left in ceilings when drilling in roof-lights during my days helping renovate pubs as a summer job.
Today, which happens to be midway through the ulcer-fortnight, I tried the new tack of scalding it out. At hourly intervals (and in constant risk of losing my job – they do not handcuff you to the desk as they wish to betray the image of an ‘open company’, but they are always watching, WATCHING, I tell you…), I would fetch some boiling water in a mug, and force myself to drink it, bulging my bottom lip out as it cascaded its steamy torture around the vile, craterous skin-terrorist. Actually I did well not to scream out loud. The entire gum around that area is wracked with pain now, and I may well have killed the parts of my tongue that taste salt, mauve-coloured foods, and things from Korea (my tongue is more ghettoised than 1930’s Chicago). Going on the principle that it is like an unwelcome lodger, I would try throwing its belongings out the window, but unfortunately it is a Marxist mouth ulcer and has none to speak off. So instead I am going to draft it a strongly-worded legal document and use it to paper-cut it to death. If someone could pick me up from A&E in a couple of weeks time it would be much appreciated.
Anyway, after the original grief of inheriting the mouth ulcer, you start to learn to live with it. You stop tonguing it, knowing that the throbbing agony it induces down one side of your face has lost its novelty. You tilt your head to one side as you chew, summoning the food to the ‘good side’. You do not open your mouth as wide, lest you stretch the be-ulcered section with hideous consequences. You even sleep differently, trying to place your head so that the jaw lies slack off the side of your pillow. This has two results in the morning: either you have drooled an inexplicably large volume of sputum onto your mattress, it soaking it up sponge-like so that you feel as if you have been cut adrift in the North Atlantic on a punctured hovercraft; or you roll about in a state of unconsciousness, banging your ulcer gaily off your teeth so that as you rouse to consciousness in the morning your mouth is in such severe pain that you feel as if a rodent is burrowing through it on a long and convoluted trip to the secret trapdoor in your colon that leads to Narnia. Those darn rodents miss Narnia.
Eventually, it subsides. You start tonguing it again. It mutates from a grey crater back into a burgundy gentle lump, with the barely-raised geometry of those useless painted white discs on mini-roundabouts. You note with glee that you can use both sides of your mouth. You feast again, and repay the gluttony debt. The bastard, like a flea infestation, a violent pet or a suddenly unstuck baked-beans tin previously wedged under your brake pedal as you hurtled towards the back of a traffic queue, is gone in the most welcome manner possible.
I like food. I practically live for it. Getting a mouth ulcer for me is like cutting off a marathon runner’s leg and then still forcing the marathon runner to run anyway. So why, you ask – if you have got this far, which you haven’t – don’t you take some sensible precautions? Perhaps I could set aside a more awakened time of day to indulge in tooth-brushing, like during lunch perhaps, or while performing some full-attention activity like manoeuvring a light aircraft around the Outer Hebrides? Or perhaps I should avoid traditional ‘manual’ toothbrushes altogether.
Electric toothbrushes. They seem a little like overkill to me. Like using a jack-hammer to get through pie crust, a cannon to scare pigeons off your porch roof, or using a bus to run over your piggy bank to scab enough money to buy a Twix that you don’t really want, only it breaks up the boredom of a night of watching repeats of CSI and swearing at your laptop because it will not run Channel 4 On-Demand due to some trifling error that is written in hexadecimal and requires special glasses to read, and knowledge of a manual the weight of a small asteroid which nevertheless harbours lichen that could have yielded the fruit of life, to solve.
And then, say the omnipresent boffins who have the same mentality as those who stand over your shoulder, casting a shadow onto your desk, and give you tips while you play ‘Solitaire’ (it’s called ‘Solitaire’ for a reason. Now fuck off before I thrust a second javelin through your right testicle and then you can use the javelins to bollock-ski off to casualty and possibly appear in some local news item about ‘the jovial impacts of office-rage’), “Why not use Bonjela?” I’ll tell you why. While I freely admit that is has a lovely anaesthetising effect, and that indeed I would happily bathe in it and then, even as a man, give birth afterwards free from the slightest twinge of pain, the agony that results when it wears off is excruciating. And it is tasty, and you are more likely to eat it when your normal access to food has been inhibited for so long anyway. If you are trapped in a room with a bear, you should leave it alone. You should not cover it in jelly, chuck a net over it and then taunt it with a stick because it will eventually get out and then tear its way through you that makes a dark-hatted Austrian doctor performing a live autopsy seem mild-mannered.
Anyway, brush carefully. And remember to lock all your doors. (Well you ought to learn at least one good practice from reading these pages).
Mouth ulcers are like thorny stowaways, lying in wait in the cargo hold with a bomb in their shoe, fondling your belongings as they rustle up a comforting pocket away from all that nasty bunker-cold before lighting the ignition and blowing you out the sky. Or perhaps I am overstepping a little. Ulcers are more like simple hijackers, steering you away from all that meaty food that you love, forcing you to mouth over soft, supple foods as if you had prematurely lost your teeth or receded in time to become some infant, bibbed and spitting wretched ready-chewed peas and carrots onto the moulded plastic tray locked in front of you. The horror.
There are a number of ways to get one. You can order them from Argos, because you can order everything from Argos, or you can eat something unexpectedly hot that irritates a patch of your gums like cosmetics in a rabbit’s eye. You may summon one on an adversary through incantation of course. This normally involves finding a suitably heavy stick, a piece of driftwood is ideal, and then waving it theatrically at some roadkill until you invoke the Spirit of Suffering, and from there, using said wood as a receptacle, transport the Spirit into the gums of your victims, ideally while they are asleep and their lips are rippling from the snoring like loose flaps on a marquee at a windswept beach resort for retired junkies.
From personal experience though, the best way to get a mouth ulcer is undoubtedly to smack your gums with your toothbrush. This incident has all the best hallmarks of the perfect accident. It happens, of course, by surprise. It happens while you are doing something routine and mundane, a bit like how that serial killer will get you while you have your back-turned to the door while microwaving up some popcorn that you and your girlfriend can pick idly at while watching some sordid rom-com starring an affable Englishman with the charm of neutered snake. Cheap skates. That’ll learn you for shunning Odeon. People hardly ever get killed there. Also, toothbrush-ulcers are more likely to happen locally, much like minor road accidents. Though admittedly few road accidents actually happen in your bathroom. And lastly, they always happen when you take your eye off the ball for just a second.
The bastard toothbrush, in all its existence, has only a few minutes a day to really shine. It is itching to, storing up all that energy through the night waiting for that moment when it can justify itself to its owner again, and then there it is, greeting you like a happy dog. Just like a happy dog though, you can’t face it early in the morning, you just want to get after it with the rolling pin. And unlike a happy dog, you put this weapon of bristly vice into your mouth and try and manhandle it round what is really your fundamental access-point, in a half-witted state of dreamery. For perhaps a hundred consecutive times, all goes according to plan. You avoid your own reflection bleary eyed while idly gobbing a mouthful of foaming spit into the basin. You muse as it slips toward the plug hole, pulled in by the inexorable forces of Newton, emulating the lava flow from some volcano that had been used to dispose of all the detergent that had failed the Daz doorstep challenge, and then think about whether to jump from your third-floor window and risk being crippled rather than certain death, or just go to work and carry on as before because, let’s face it, no one likes change.
But then, just that one time, the toothbrush slips. Time slows down. Your dreary malaise is lifted into a heightened state of awareness, your eyes widen to detect untoward motion under some kind of predatorial instinct that kept your cave-wife Linda safe from sabre-toothed chipmunks in the prehistoric era. And then, before you even have time to regret wrong decisions and lost opportunities, collision. A numbing pain echoes through your face, and even as the neurones arc the blinding sensation across, you realise that this is nothing compared with what you will endure over the next two weeks. You retire to your room, tonguing the embryonic wound in a self-piteous manner, and then, if you are like me, set up an ad hoc schedule, cramming your favourite foods into the next two days of meals before the young ash-mound turns into a full-blown Vesuvius.
The pattern then unfolds over the next fortnight. After the heady glut of rich and sumptuous foods which you can now readily afford since your daily food spend is about to dwindle to the low double-digits of pence when the bastard really kicks in (honestly, it’s worth getting a loan to get through the first few days of opportunity, you will have no trouble paying it back having saved in the days of food-poverty that follow), you start to feel the monster glowing inside you. You tenuously peel your lip down and gaze at it in the mirror. It does not look like the hideous tent-like lump of cling-film portrayed in the adverts. If you touch it, you find it has more the texture of under-cooked sausage, lightly pink on the inside, taunting with its moist beauty yet harbouring demonically in the same breath. Of course you appreciate this more after the forty minute bout of crying in the foetal position from the shot of pain that touching the ulcer gives you is over. It does not resemble an outgrowth, like a teenage pluke, but instead looks as if some miniscule creature like a Fraggle has taken a circular saw and gouged a small, grey crater into the back of your lip. It reminds me of the disc-shaped gouge left in ceilings when drilling in roof-lights during my days helping renovate pubs as a summer job.
Today, which happens to be midway through the ulcer-fortnight, I tried the new tack of scalding it out. At hourly intervals (and in constant risk of losing my job – they do not handcuff you to the desk as they wish to betray the image of an ‘open company’, but they are always watching, WATCHING, I tell you…), I would fetch some boiling water in a mug, and force myself to drink it, bulging my bottom lip out as it cascaded its steamy torture around the vile, craterous skin-terrorist. Actually I did well not to scream out loud. The entire gum around that area is wracked with pain now, and I may well have killed the parts of my tongue that taste salt, mauve-coloured foods, and things from Korea (my tongue is more ghettoised than 1930’s Chicago). Going on the principle that it is like an unwelcome lodger, I would try throwing its belongings out the window, but unfortunately it is a Marxist mouth ulcer and has none to speak off. So instead I am going to draft it a strongly-worded legal document and use it to paper-cut it to death. If someone could pick me up from A&E in a couple of weeks time it would be much appreciated.
Anyway, after the original grief of inheriting the mouth ulcer, you start to learn to live with it. You stop tonguing it, knowing that the throbbing agony it induces down one side of your face has lost its novelty. You tilt your head to one side as you chew, summoning the food to the ‘good side’. You do not open your mouth as wide, lest you stretch the be-ulcered section with hideous consequences. You even sleep differently, trying to place your head so that the jaw lies slack off the side of your pillow. This has two results in the morning: either you have drooled an inexplicably large volume of sputum onto your mattress, it soaking it up sponge-like so that you feel as if you have been cut adrift in the North Atlantic on a punctured hovercraft; or you roll about in a state of unconsciousness, banging your ulcer gaily off your teeth so that as you rouse to consciousness in the morning your mouth is in such severe pain that you feel as if a rodent is burrowing through it on a long and convoluted trip to the secret trapdoor in your colon that leads to Narnia. Those darn rodents miss Narnia.
Eventually, it subsides. You start tonguing it again. It mutates from a grey crater back into a burgundy gentle lump, with the barely-raised geometry of those useless painted white discs on mini-roundabouts. You note with glee that you can use both sides of your mouth. You feast again, and repay the gluttony debt. The bastard, like a flea infestation, a violent pet or a suddenly unstuck baked-beans tin previously wedged under your brake pedal as you hurtled towards the back of a traffic queue, is gone in the most welcome manner possible.
I like food. I practically live for it. Getting a mouth ulcer for me is like cutting off a marathon runner’s leg and then still forcing the marathon runner to run anyway. So why, you ask – if you have got this far, which you haven’t – don’t you take some sensible precautions? Perhaps I could set aside a more awakened time of day to indulge in tooth-brushing, like during lunch perhaps, or while performing some full-attention activity like manoeuvring a light aircraft around the Outer Hebrides? Or perhaps I should avoid traditional ‘manual’ toothbrushes altogether.
Electric toothbrushes. They seem a little like overkill to me. Like using a jack-hammer to get through pie crust, a cannon to scare pigeons off your porch roof, or using a bus to run over your piggy bank to scab enough money to buy a Twix that you don’t really want, only it breaks up the boredom of a night of watching repeats of CSI and swearing at your laptop because it will not run Channel 4 On-Demand due to some trifling error that is written in hexadecimal and requires special glasses to read, and knowledge of a manual the weight of a small asteroid which nevertheless harbours lichen that could have yielded the fruit of life, to solve.
And then, say the omnipresent boffins who have the same mentality as those who stand over your shoulder, casting a shadow onto your desk, and give you tips while you play ‘Solitaire’ (it’s called ‘Solitaire’ for a reason. Now fuck off before I thrust a second javelin through your right testicle and then you can use the javelins to bollock-ski off to casualty and possibly appear in some local news item about ‘the jovial impacts of office-rage’), “Why not use Bonjela?” I’ll tell you why. While I freely admit that is has a lovely anaesthetising effect, and that indeed I would happily bathe in it and then, even as a man, give birth afterwards free from the slightest twinge of pain, the agony that results when it wears off is excruciating. And it is tasty, and you are more likely to eat it when your normal access to food has been inhibited for so long anyway. If you are trapped in a room with a bear, you should leave it alone. You should not cover it in jelly, chuck a net over it and then taunt it with a stick because it will eventually get out and then tear its way through you that makes a dark-hatted Austrian doctor performing a live autopsy seem mild-mannered.
Anyway, brush carefully. And remember to lock all your doors. (Well you ought to learn at least one good practice from reading these pages).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)