Pilates

Being a ‘new man’, one unafraid to watch The Restaurant or listen to Marvin Gaye’s Sexual Healing because I like it rather than because I want to persuade a woman to have sex with me, it should come as no surprise to you that I occasionally partake in a spot of Pilates.

Yes, we stick on the DVD Jade got off Amazon and clear the furniture out of the way. She’s Australian, Pilates woman is, and she has incredibly pert breasts. I cannot confirm whether this is because of Pilates or not, but she’s ugly so I can’t really be bothered to look into it. But yes, girls out there, there is the possibility that Pilates will give you pert breasts.

We lie down and she tells us to activate our fingers. I’m not sure what this is but I gamely try to activate them as best I can by sort of tensing a bit. It doesn’t seem to do much other than making me go red and is not conducive to the breathing exercises she has got us doing.

Oh yes, Pilates is a very breathy sport.

So we’re tensing and breathing and activating and she runs us through a series of toning tasks. There’s the crab and the lotus and all sorts of things, all of them designed to exert the maximum amount of pain.

Me and Jade in the crab screaming in pain and breathing heavily as the Australian woman tells us to take it deeper and rotate. What must the neighbours think? I’ve had nightmares about knocks at the door.

“Where’s the Australian dominatrix” My trembling finger points to the DVD.

My hamstrings are not supple. They are tight. Like concrete. My toes are on the horizon, unattainable. And Australian woman is not happy. She throws her legs out and tells me to follow. I can’t. I’m weeping as they tear. She tells me to go deeper. I hear them stretch and pop and rip.

And relax, she says, mocking me.

I crumple.

But no time to crumple. She is sat upright, her legs out before her. Finally. She says. Grab your ankles. So we’re sat upright holding our ankles swaying as the balance tries to find us. She looks at us. Hmmm. Extend out the right leg. Extend out the left leg. She’s still sat upright and her legs are by her ears. FUCK OFF. That’s not possible. She looks like an upturned stool. Her arse must be flat. How else is it possible? I’m swaying backwards with my legs at 30 degrees and behind me Jade screams as her legs hit 65 degrees.

Australian lady smirks. And her breasts sit like two monuments.

“Boob job” says Jade.

Yeah, bitch, I say.

We put the DVD away and spend the next two days hobbling around feeling inadequate.

And what is more manly than hobbling around feeling inadequate?

Pilates, my male friends, will reaffirm your masculinity, give licence to it. Get yourself a DVD. Push away the furniture. Make your hamstrings burn and your stomach muscles explode. Let the bitch bully you. You will never feel more like a man.

 

 

 

3D

There is nothing so current, surely, as wearing 3D glasses on your head as an accessory. Channel 4 are, of course, running there 3D season currently, and the next year promises as 3D revolution with the release of Avatar, a mainstream 3D film.

Except, looking at him, well, it would be kind to think he had any of that in mind. For this is fashion, darlings. And while those at its centre, those that work at and learn from it, are no doubt attuned to this sort of cultural relevance, those on the outside, fashion’s shrapnel, are not. The 3D glasses zeitgeist are probably coincidence.

For the orbiting moons of planet fashion, it is not about clothes or accessories or designers or trends. It is about a single all encompassing entity – themselves. They want you to look at them. They want you to believe that they are part of it, that they belong, that chic coolness is them, emanates from them.

Regular readers may remember a blog post I once wrote about fashion. My friend Rachel and her friend Jodie broke down my argument and academicised it with incisions and observations so sharp it changed my whole view of the industry. Suddenly there was so much depth, so much beyond Shoreditch. It wasn’t “look at me” it was look at how much influence this has. It is poetry and fiction, art and sculpture, business and money.

And that makes it so infuriating that those on the outskirts, those in the suburbs of fashion, demand such a central place in the overall picture. For they are such an unrepresentative faction. Unwilling to work to understand fashion, they instead try to be fashion – both through the ridiculous things they wear to grab attention and the vacuous, shallow things they choose to say. Every cell in their body is trying to prove that they are fashion, completely missing the fact that to be something you must understand it.

They wear the clothes, but what do they actually know about why that material was used, who brought it into prominence for clothing, what it’s provenance is, how it crossed into casual wear, how it got to the high street, what the cultural significance of it is?

I say ask them. What’s the 3D glasses about mate?

Tenner says the answer is “Caus I thought it looked really cool.”

Twat.

Adult

“Because you have beard.”

Four little words. So much joy.

Pride. Once it was a broken shadow of growth, sunlight through a trellace – all patchy and misshapen.

I would tentatively grow it. Just to see. And the upper lip furred, the rest like left over spaghetti. Single hairs strewn sparsely across a battlefield of acne. Casualties.

Push through it. Keep it our little secret. Cat and mouse. Ah, you see it multiply? I see it. And the hairs tumble into the bin to allow new to grow.

“Cut it and it grows faster”

Twenty-three years old. It’s become a feature. Stubble. But not. Too soft still, there’s no aggravation.

I flirt. A week with. A week without. It passes without comment.

For nearly two years now, though, permanent. Part of the package. I = beard.

And now. 26 years old. The barber has the close trimmer in his hand and he looks. Stops.

“No line?”

He’s staring at the point between my beard and my hair, the neighbour of the ear and the eye.

“I’m sorry?”

He tries again.

“No line, yes. Because you have beard.”

Oh! Yes! Definitely! No line. Because I have a beard!

I have a beard. The barber said so. It’s official.

Goodbye puberty. It was nice. For a while.

Twelve inches

Wow. Just, well, amazing. So amazing I momentarily left my Weetabix unguarded and the milk got a head of itself. Soggy Weetabix. On top of everything. What a morning.

Bill, well he usually doesn’t get flustered, but, my God, he was nearly shouting. He was possessed by shouty shouty Vanessa Feltz (you’ve seen her on the London local news, well those of you in London have, shouting, great entertainment is shouty shouty Feltz – IS FAT REALLY FAT OR IS IT PEOPLE’S IMAGINATION – TUNE IN FROM NIIIIIIINE!!!!!).

Poor Sian just looked flustered. She’d never seen 12 inches. She didn’t think it was possible. The largest ever recorded and here she was, looking at it’s after affects. She closes her eyes and wonders what it would have felt like to have been there when those 12 inches came.

They go live to the Cumbria correspondent who is stood in the dark talking over dark pictures and getting vaguely hysterical, in the dark.“You can see the damage,” she witters.

I think you’ll find we can’t. It’s dark. We can’t see anything. Except your eager hopeful face that just screams “Prime time baby. This is my ticket back to big time. Thankyou rain God.”

I doubt it darling. You haven’t even found us a weeping person. Or there must be some bastard in a blow up boat rowing around smugly following the TV cameras so he gets on telly. Or even I could find a woman standing in some water saying it’s Gordon Brown’s fault and that she can’t wait for the postman to get on his jet ski to deliver the mail because then she can ring The Sun up and say he got her son’s name wrong. She hasn’t got a son. But, you know, that’s not the point is it. Brown you bastard.

We’re back in the studio and Bill just looks tired. Sian’s still dreaming of those twelve inches.

“Twelve inches!” says Bill. Sian smiles. Catches herself.

“It’s horrific,” she says. Nice save. She congratulates herself.

And, well, what more can you say, really. Twelve inches of rain, it’s quite a lot of rain. It’s wet, isn’t it? And the rivers, they don’t like it too wet. So pernickety. And 200 people got a ride in a helicopter.

You could say it was a tad ridiculous in a country where it pretty much rains every year at around the same time, where it pretty much always causes flooding, and where it pretty much always results in people saying it will never happen again, and where it then pretty much always does happen again, that we can’t cope with a downpour, even now.

Other countries must be puzzled. Poor Holland, it thought it had a monopoly on water-based danger, what with it being flat. But us Brits, we’re plucky. Given the chance, we can fuck pretty much anything up.

 

*Written before the death of PC Bill Barker was confirmed. Condolences go out to his family.

Eat

A big pot of noodles swimming around with balls of pork, little testicles of meat entwined in slippery tentacles. I felt like the victim of a gold digger.

Some fluorescent veg and salad is having a peak at the shoreline, but it’s really not for mixing. There’s a party in there and it’s invite only.

I prod with two short chop sticks and can’t help noticing that such a fluid dinner surely requires more than two sticks for consumption. Asian food is just not cut out for chop sticks. British food, sausages and steak, big hunks of meat, yeah sure, the sticks would be fine. But slippery strands of rice and cumbersome balls of meat prove more elusive than Jordan’s integrity.

I had asked for spicy, and I got a moderate burn but we’re not talking super hot here. On the scale of hotness we were definitely at the Babestation girls level, the gap-eyed hanging mouth bunch who were liberated from the local park by a sleazy agent in a secondhand BMW who told them they would be famous if they put down the white lightning amd sucked his cock. Hot is was not.

But tasty it was, in a sort of unfamiliar way. It was a stumble into a new beginning and trying to find your bearings but quite enjoying the disorientation. It’s the feeling when you learn to drive and you realise that you could drive where you wanted when you wanted and the weight of possibility crushed your consciousness so much you had your first crash. (I will take this moment to apologise to the person who’s wing mirror I took off with my wing mirror. And I apologise for driving off quickly.)

I finished it and dabbed my mouth. Vietnam. I have eaten you. And I didn’t mind it.

For me, that is a high compliment.

Lost

Black girl, brown apartment, yellow washing basket. Open door. Low-level lighting. Captured, not well, but it’s documentary, I think, it shows…

Oh, wait, it tells me…

It symbolises the importance of every day chores.

Really? it does?

And it says she’s an actress.

The picture, framed, in the uncouth sense of the word. It’s a fix-up, yeah?

And I thought I was at a serious cultural place. I thought this stuff was meant to matter, be above, be beyond, be untouched.

Cowell, you bastard. You’ve got to us all. The commoditisation of emotions. Everything. EVERYTHING must have a back story. Why are you here? Who died to get you here? I’m sure I can find a relative with something…

Each photograph we stand before leaves us with nothing but contrived emptiness. Yeah, how do you contrive emptiness? Not to worry, these people are on the ball. They can fill baths with emptiness. They can fill churches. Empty, enough for you?

And for something about pictures, it is all about words. There’s something wrong there.  There is skill, somewhere. But in each picture you see the lens. You can feel it there. And it’s exploiting. Them. You. Us. There’s no shared experience. Nothing is being said.

Empty.

Three photos. I could show you them. Maybe four.

There’s a dark architect. Five whales in speedos, bronzed. A goggle-eyed kid. And… well, you know I can’t remember! Just them stay out of what, 40? 50? More?

I used to think the National Photographic Portrait Prize meant something, acknolwedged something, was something.

Sorry, that’s the Taylor Wessing National Photographic Portrait Prize. Someone called a lawyer.

Death

Johnny Cash sings ‘”I shot a man in Reno/just to watch him die”. Not very nice, eh? But hey, you’re curious. What’s it like, watching someone die?

And AA Gill, he shot a monkey, just to feel what it was like to kill. Not very nice either. But somewhere in you, your curious too, aren’t you?

Not that we’d ever act on either. We are civilised people. We don’t do killing. We don’t do watching, really – though the scene of an accident can become a macabre piece of theatre for any passing motorists and you can’t blame the “What if it was me?” mentality. It just doesn’t cut it. You want to see the gore. Admit it.

Head over to America, though, and “Hey Presto”, take a trip down death row and you get all the death watching you like. Queue up for a ticket. Watch his eyes roll back. Watch the light go off.

John Allen Muhammad, the Washington sniper, was executed yesterday, despite arguments that he was mentally disturbed. The families crowded around to watch him go. They said watching him die brought them closure. A little odd, a death for a death – or in this case one death for 13 deaths. Did it really give them pleasure to watch him die? And in what way is killing someone right? A life for a life, the Bible says, but should we be listening? The lesson of capital punishment is revenge, not correction.

Death is tricky.

Which brings us to Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the US Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people in a shooting rampage at a military base in Texas. He was shot, obviously, in the attempts to stop his “rampage” and was very ill indeed. But they duly fought to save his life. They bullied him back to health. And soon, no doubt, this being electric chair Texas, they will kill him. While the families of the deceased sit down and watch.

That’s a lot of money spent to kill someone who would have died anyway. Could they not have invited the families to the hospital to watch in the aftermath of the incident?

But why do they want to watch? Does watching a man die bring back their loved ones, justify their deaths? No.

Does watching him die bring some comfort in that they are watching the man who has made them suffer, suffer himself? Probably. But death is a short comfort, the killer does not suffer in the beyond.

But that is the problem, in religious America the belief is that he will suffer in the after life, that God will do the correcting. Ad so the state should not attempt correction, or punishment. Killing him is right.

And so they must bring him back to life. To cure him. And they must then watch him die. They must give him the chance to repent before he goes.

Which just shows how intertwined religion is in the American political and judicial systems. The death penalty is Old Testament. The decision to revive and then kill Major Nidal Malik Hasan New Testament – it is forgiveness and repentence, get ready to meet your maker.

The army will argue they revived him for answers. And well they should. They don’t want it to happen again. But to kill him after, which they will do? That’s not sense. That’s religious America still holding court in an area where it should not belong.

 

B&B

There’s a couple in the room next door, we originally thought they were brother and sister, who have enjoyed after-breakfast sex each morning we have been here. We come to the top of the stairs to hear the frantic yelps of a woman in orgasm, vocalising passion like an asthmatic deer laughing. And they do laugh too, those two, a lot. They giggle. He looks about 12. She 20. She has a ring. An engagement ring. And they are in a B&B in a tiny village in the Peak District. And they like having sex on a full stomach. I’m praying their isn;t some seedy vomit thing going on.

And they don’t go out. They are always in when we get back. Giggling. And having sex, Brief sex. Like, two minute sex. It became a soundtrack. Giggle giggle – deer time – giggle giggle. Maybe they’re tantric and spreading it out, taking a coffee break. Or maybe they are lucky enough to climax quickly. Or maybe they’re shit at it. But whatever the reason, it doesn’t last. But what does? Consumerism, we want it quickly.

I’m on the phone to my grandma and she is lecturing me on the fact I didn’t ring to say thank you for a birthday card they sent to the wrong address and I never received and Jade’s face drops and my face drops and through the wall the giggle giggle. Shit. Here we go. I run to the side of the room, but too late. The first yelp reaches us like an air raid siren. Grandma pauses. The second yelp, in perfect rhythm.

“We’re in the countryside Grandma. Deers everywhere.”

We’re packing up to check out and the giggle giggle – deer time – giggle giggle starts up. We share a smile.

We’re almost nostalgic for it already. So quiet without.

Quite what a brother and sister were doing having sex in a quite expensively priced B&B in a tiny villgae in a valley in Derbyshire, we still don’t know.

But fair play to them. They should enjoy themselves until the deformed babies arrive.

Remember

Down from the church where etched names had faded to leave numbers.

Two years old. Six months old. Twelve years old.

The valley spread out before them as was and will be. Nothing here has moved. Nothing is moving still.

And the cars are lined up at the bottom of the hill, passengers bowed and the engines muffled. Surrounding what is, ridiculously, a roundabout. What was, before, and is, somehow, a monument. A lone pillar. And a circle of us. Watching.

Names here etched and not faded. Not in stone and not in memory. Each syllable on the lips of the blue blazers, with red poppies and a row of shined metal.

And the bugler blows as the signal for it to begin. Silence, then. And still nothing moves.

School children in yellow jumpers hold flags and know that something happened, but the generation has slipped. It’s not Grandad now. And it’s an ask to make them understand it. You can see that, you can see there are less each time.

But there is enough, today. Ironed. Pressed. Combed. Each year to relive what was. It is a shared burden. It is a kind of death, still.

And the church bells ring as those chosen lay wreaths at the foot of concrete to remember.

And then the army major screams his order and the drum beats the march and the procession turns and marches up the hill.

The church waits, as it always does. It’s doors always open to receive those who always will end up there. Names that soon too, will fade to leave numbers.

Hero

They walked up the stairs of the bus and stared at us like they were the police. If it wasn’t for the big, ugly TFL badges on their coats I would have expected them to pounce on an innocent member of the public and shoot them several times on suspicion of being a terrorist. As it was, they were here to check tickets.

Not that that lessened their own sense of self-importance in any way. They checked tickets like immigration papers in Australia or religious persuasion in Nazi Germany. You half expected them to pull out some chalk and plaster star of davids on the back of offending ticket-jumpers’ seats.

As it was, they didn’t get a ‘hit’ until they reached the man opposite. The smile on their faces, it was evil. The misguided sense of power, edible it was so apparent.

I’ll be brief: the passenger’s student bus pass was out of date. He explained that this was due to the Royal Mail strike preventing delivery of his new card. The TFL website, he explained, said old student passes could be used for seven days after expiry due to the Royal Mail problems.

Fair enough, right?

Wrong, apparently. The inspectors, showing an amazing degree of intelligence, said: “Well we haven’t got the internet have we, so we can’t prove if that’s true.”

The they said they were going to charge him £150.

He argued, obviously. So they rang base. And were told that the website said nothing about student cards. They argued some more.

Then they took him to the back of the bus for correction from where we heard the screams of indignation and torture.

Jade demanded I come to the rescue and, like a modern day Schindler, I got on the mobile internet to the tfl website.

Guess what?

Within three clicks there was a big banner saying how expired student cards were valid because of the Royal Mails trike. How did ‘base’ miss that I wonder?

Trembling, I walked to the back of the bus. They saw me coming. They saw something was up. I knelt down and handed my phone to the passenger.

“Is this what you read on the site?”

Jubilation. Yes, I was a hero. I didn’t want applause but God I deserved it. He was in shock, the experience had been traumatic. But he was grateful. Yes, I was a hero.

The inspectors poured over it. They looked for trickery and counterfeit. They were lost. They had lost. We smiled. We smiled and were happy. I hid my trembling hand. No weakness. NO WEAKNESS.

I walked back proud and largely ignored by the rest of the bus. We heard the inspectors giving the passenger his name and address back. And them apologise for the next twenty minutes, babbling about following wrong orders.

England is full of little Hitlers. The receptionist at the doctor’s surgery, the shop manager, the community support officer, the traffic warden, the underperforming line manager, the health and safety officer… and pretty much all of TFL.

Stand up to them England. Your hand may tremble, but you could be a hero.