Corporate

You go to Sainsbury’s, right?

Sometimes, maybe. Unless you think it’s only for middle class people. Then you’re probably being a bit of a twat. Because it’s just the same as the others. Except Waitrose. Which is definitely a middle class supermarket. Hmmm. hypocritical. It comes easy.

Anyway, the cashiers in Sainsbury’s, they talk to you.

Hello, they say. How is your day?

My day was fine until you, a stranger, thought it would be good to engage me in conversation. Now I have to say something back.

Fine. Good. You?

They’re at work. They are not having a good day. They work at Sainsbury’s.

Good thanks.

Liar.

And on the tube. The driver talked to us. He said we should stop being miserable and to enjoy our day.

I was on a tube. That was running late. Fuck off.

But you know, I went away from that tube smiling. A little smirk of cockiness I was unable to control. Women stared. Not out of lust, but at the foresight of ultimate disappointment. A man that cocky, he just can’t deliver.

And from the Sainsbury’s check out, I smiled too.Which in Hammersmith is akin to running around naked with marmalade on your genitals. As in, rare and ill advised.

Not that either makes me want to shop in Sainsbury’s more or endure any more time on the district line.

So you have to think it ultimately fails.

Oh, they’re just being nice?

Hmmm. Well, that doesn’t make you any money…

Yes, London has eaten my morality.

Ill

Sat up north in a one-bed bungalow, blanket round its legs and smile on its face. Outside the black clouds gather like an industrial mushroom as the wind rattles the rusted knocker on the thin MDF door: a throbbing repetitive dull thud.

In the sun, prancing around the southern coast like a ballerina, I only get the echoes.

But it’s enough to knock me off my pirouette.

Oh I can still function. But the knowledge, the underlying beat of recognition that something somewhere is not right, it lingers and disrupts. But never enough.

It picks up its phone and calls me sporadically. And the sweat pours, the throat aches and the head pounds. Then gone. And just the memory left. Just the puffy white trail where the aeroplane once was, a scar.

Why can’t we just get it over and done with? Stand on my doorstep, make me see you. I can take it.

It’s torture, the waiting.

Illness lingers like a forgotten relative, prodding from afar at your negligence.

Forgive me if I get my gun and issue an ultimatum. Blast me or I blast you.

It smiles.

Yeah? Two litres of orange juice and a pack of strepsils, then we’ll see who’s laughing.

Democracy and the novelist

If anything, I mumble it. I squirm and look uncomfortable. It’s like squeezing out a lie.

And I have to aggregate it. I have to slice it into portions of responsibility. It’s not just my fault.

Sorry, it seems to be the hardest word.

Not for Sebastian Faulks, clearly. He has written a book about Islam and now some Muslims are upset. He has written this rambling condescending apology in response.

Why?

Well, not because of the majority of Muslims. As he points out himself, Ajmal Masroor, an imam and spokesman for the Islamic Society for Britain, was more amused than offended. This is probably the average reaction.

But some parts of the British media mislead their readers by giving coverage to the views of the hardline minority of Muslims. Every petty claim of the BNP or that ilk are not published, rightly, but the Muslim hardline equivalents are given the ‘privilege’ of a national mouthpiece.

This gives a skewed impression of the religion. We are all not BNP supporters. All Muslims are not hardline jihad wagers.

Whether those guilty of the misconception do so for their own agenda – to create a fear about Islam – or whether it is a more innocent misjudgement that any Muslim opinion has to be given authority through fear of lack of representation, is a difficult call.

But having brought the criticism of the novel into the public domain, Faulks should not have felt the need to defend himself. If his book is written well enough, it should do that for him. His response to the criticism should have been: “Read the book.”

But if he did wish to respond, as it is likely that those hardliners would not actually read the book but their unfounded views would continue to be aired, he should not have concentrated on what he found good or bad about Islam, nor compare it to christianity. The first approach is trivial and condesending (like saying you have a black friend when when being accused of racism) and the second approach is reductive as attacking something else is not an argument, it is a diversion (like stabbing yourself in the head to stop someone kicking you in the bollocks).

Instead, he should have defended his right, as a novelist, to articulate British society. Islam is part of that society, so he is allowed to write his experience of it. If it is wrong, extreme, misguided, then no-one will buy it. The majority opinion will crush it. He will be nailed to his Christian cross. He will be pushed to the same sideline as his critics.

But if the majority find something recognisable in it, if the majority judge it valid, then it will prosper. And if it is popular and starts a debate that some find offensive, then tough shit really. It is a debate that needs to be had, clearly.

That is the nature of democracy.

If Faulks has lost confidence in that democracy, or does that not believe in it, then he shouldn’t be writing a novel that tests it.

Richmond

It’s hot, so of course the river side is full of aging stock brokers in sun hats pushing Bugaboo pushchairs while their wives, so close to menopause you can almost feel the heat of a hot flush, pout and stomp behind.

They parade up and down the 200-yard dash between the bridge and the pub, past the green verge on which the vast majority are sprawled in various stages of undress.

They want you to watch them. Look, we’ve had a baby in our forties, we told you we could have a career AND a family. But instead you find yourself looking around for a doctor carrying a test tube and looking simultaneously parental and smug as he sits in his IVF-paid-for Bentley.

And it is difficult to watch them anyway, as on the boat that doubles for a restaurant and sits on the river in direct eye line are a menagerie of hats and summer dresses guffawing and sipping red wine. And it occurs to you that far from sitting and watching the river, the unwashed of the verge are sat watching posh people eat. Me and Jade, we’re watching them eat too. And those on the boat, they’re watching us.

Not all of them, some of them are genuinely there to eat. But some, the white linen army, they are there to present. They sit on the near side barrier. They choose their knives and forks with the audience in mind. They lift a morsel, pause, turn to the crowd, and slip it into their mouthes. Let’s educate them. This is fine dining. You can’t have it. That water that sits between us is a metaphor born out of reality.

And past the boat cycle families of bicycles, a teetering procession of family pretence, terrorising the old money geriatrics who remember when it was all so different. Girls row their boyfriends into the current and the boyfriends row them back, ice creams fall off cones into laps, a toddler chases a pigeon into the river and the nervous thrity-something males talent-spot from behind the security of a fizzing pint of stella, trying to persuade themselves that the lone girl on the steps reading a novel would love to be interupted and told what sort of house a 60k annual income could provide.

It all seems so unreal. A Richard Curtis London. But the script has been left hanging, unfinished. And no-one really knows what to do. So they sit by the river and act out life how they think it should be, without ever knowing if they are right.

House Red

It’s gladiatorial. It’s unspoken violence. It’s intellectual war fare.

It’s the pub quiz.

The sleazy master of quiz stepped up supporting a sizeable belly and psycho spectacles that proved a telling indicator of future perverse practice.

It cost us a pound so the couples, two of them, conferred and joined to create a single side.

That left five teams.

The questions queried as the master quipped – badly – an irritating habit that quelled the ambience and quickly got old.

People whispered, people quarelled, someone shouted something stupid and everybody laughed. Heads bowed as if religious and pens scratching strands of paper.

Half time.

A girl who had spent most of the evening trying to see our answers went to the toilet. The quiz master salivated. He told her she could hear his voice in the toilet. Then he commentated on what she was doing downstairs. In the toilet. While winking. And, in his head, probably wanking. Worrying.

And then the second half galloped to the finishing gate with the hurdles laid out flat where we had failed to jump and ploughed on perrilously past without picking up a point.

Swap answers. Shit. I told you it was Tori Spelling. And I told you it was elephant. No matter, it’s only two points.

We came third by one point.

No prize for third.

We supped airless pints and considered what might have been. A bottle of house red.

It mattered, somehow.

Inflation

“Have got a load of my mates going too so quite a few creatives in one place.

All either in Publishing, Music or Advertising.

Defintely an inspiring crowd.”

That pretty much sums up London, don’t you think? The vacuous drivel of a self-inflated and massively mis-led ego.

Impressive none the less, that he manages to sum up the entire culture of a city in three sentences.

What do we know?

Oh, he has LOADS of friends.Don’t think he is lonely. And they are all going. So, you know, mates yeah?

He considers himself a “creative”. This is word only wankers and Alan Yentob uses. And Alan Yentob is a wanker too. If you were a ‘creative’ you would think that you would be creative enough to avoid such a cliché as the word creative and call yourself something original and more accurate. Like a cunt.

He believes that Publishing, Music or Advertising (all capped up to demonstrate their importance) are the definition of the ‘creative’ and that you need this explaining to you – hence you are clearly not one of them. He is excluding you while inviting you to something. It is truly the skill of the arsehole. And clearly in the creative sphere there is no place for the artist, but there is a place for the two professions that are frothing with bullshit: Advertising and Publishing. And two professions who, far from being creative themsevles, exploit the creative to make vast amoutns of dosh. I fail to see where the artisan is in that equation? But typical choices all the same.

He says the crowd will be “inspiring”. As fi they are to be looked up to. That means he is inspiring. He, and his mates, are that crowd, remember? He is basically telling you to come stare at him. Watch him. Learn from him. It is difficult to comprehend the type of person deluded enough to think like that.

And notice how he has not actually mentioned the event to which you are being invited. The event is not the point. The point is the creativeness of his friends. The point is that he is going. The point is that he knows full well you won’t turn up but he wasn’t really inviting you anyway. He just wanted to show you that he was going to some wanky arts centre to watch a shit film bigged up and put on a pedestel by people who use it only to make themselves look alternative and “in a scene”.`He is hoping to prove to you that he belongs to that Shoreditch crowd, he can understand the nuances of Art. That in some way this makes him BETTER than you.

It is all so sad.

But all so typical.

This city runs on that shit. It’s the pretence, the inflation and the demonstration. The peacock and his feathers. And behind it, nothing. It’s worthless. The majority ignore it, those who indulge it only do so to be indulged in return in the ancient pact of twatishness.

I have no bother with it, in principle, if they keep it to themselves. But they can’t. The empty adoration of each other is not enough. They want to make you feel small, to show you you are not part of it. So they send an email like the one above.

And it is just so contrived, and just so depressing.

Clones

What would Freud say? It’s not really worth thinking about, unless you really want to upset yourself. (And what would Freud say about you willingly upsetting yourself over an avoidable thing – probably that you had cock envy or something).

But the issue at hand, well, it perhaps needs some consideration.

Jade is turning into her mother. I don’t mean looks wise. But in terms of habit, or personality, or… I don’t know, somewhere between the two. She doesn’t listen in the same way as her mum and the belief that only she can do something properly is slowly asserting itself, like the first nudge of a tidal wave.

Jade’s Mum is great, though, don’t get me wrong. But I don’t want to go out with her (so all of you attracted to this blog by the tags of Freud, mother, girlfriend and sex stop reading now, this isn’t some sort of sordid MILF fetish website – move along).

But then it makes you look at yourself and you realise that, for fuck’s sake, you are turning into your Dad. I have the same mannerisms, the same posture. And I am pretty sure Jade doesn’t want to go out with my Dad (though she has seen him naked – a titbit there for the perves who kept reading – God bless you, my stat counter thanks you).

And I look around at friends and family and I realise that, in many ways, we are all turning into our parents. Whether it is environmental or genetic conditioning, or both, I don’t know. But it seems inevitable.

The question, then, is does it matter?

Well, we will remain different enough, individual enough, not to be a clone of those who bred us, so it is not as if we will slowly get ourselves into a position where we are fucking a reproduction of the in laws. For that, I think we are all gratefeul. Unless you live in some parts of America, where that revelation may well ruin your libido.

But looking at the in laws in a purely non-sexual way, in a habit and personality way, well we can get some clues as to what our partner will be like.

And that may put you off.

Luckily, I like Jade’s mum. So if Jade turned out to be like her, well, so be it. The not listening and the OCD thing? Well, I’ve noticed my Dad is a dab hand at dealing with those traits with my own Mum, so I reckon I may well develop the skills to cope.

In the meantime,  every time she slips into June Lord mode, I shall call her June. It irritates her beyond comprehension – which is a skill, by the way, irritating her beyond comprehension I mean, that neither my Mum nor Dad can take credit for. That one’s all me.

Celebrity

Yes, I do know the film Notting Hill relatively well. I went with two friends when it was on at the cinema. Two male friends. The assembled middle-aged woman cooed at our apparent homosexual menage a trois. But it was ignorance, not the precursor to an orgy. We hadn’t read the film description. Sorry girls, no chippendale sex fest today.

And I have seen it a few times since. I bought Jade the DVD. I was feeling imaginative.

So when wandering through real life Notting Hill (where were the hordes of tourists, loud-mouth market sellers and anyone of ethnic origin other than Hugh Grant-posh in Richard Curtis’ film?) I admit to a murmur of excitement on seeing the travel bookshop.

We went in. obviously, and pretended to give two shits about travel books with the other fifty or so ‘customers’ taking surreptitious photos of the interior of a shop that was on telly once. (We have reached the stage where a bookshop can claim celebrity). And as I was looking at a pocket guide to a city I could not pronounce the strangled strains of a female voice punctured the murmurs.

“He’d better hurry up as we will be in the country he is buying the book on in six hours.”

And the little man in question saunters over to the desk and the shop assistant asks him to sign a book.

Hmmmm. My celebrity radar has picked up an anonymous blip. I sidle over and take a look.

Well well, if it isn’t the old jungle drugs dope fiend himself Bruce Parry of Tribe fame. And he is really really small. And he has a really really red face. And it’s quite a surprise to see him in a city and not half naked getting the shit kicked out of him in a jungle.

And he is just smiling like he’s still in the Amazon with some half-dressed witch doctor with whom he is sharing yet another bowl of hallucinogenic liquid. The tall ragged woman continues to warble along like an air raid siren about, mainly, shit alongside him but he floats around the shop like a happily senile pensioner ignoring her.

We, the four of us, watch him. A famous man in a famous bookshop. Wow.

Except the bookshop didn’t really look like the one in Notting Hill and, well, it didn’t feel famous. It felt very normal. It was a bit boring.

And Bruce Parry didn’t really look like Bruce Parry. He was small and he didn’t talk. He was robbed of his charm by the absence of a flattering camera angle and a subject that, on its own, would have been interesting enough without him.

And so you are left to reflect on the fact that celebrity is really only an inflation of importance that in reality is very hollow. A bookshop is just a bookshop, Bruce Parry just a man, and Notting Hill itself, well, it’s pretty much a shit hole.

All that’s left is to commend Amanda Holden on her stirling work of keeping it real and not succumbing to the web of lies, not projecting a false impression of herself. She both looks like a cunt and appears to be one.

Past Passed

Or is it just the past? Those flowers, that gate,
These misty parks and motors, lacerate
Simply by being you; you
Contract my heart by looking out of date
Phillip Larkin

Christ, they’re all coming out of the woodwork. I half expect to see my childhood friend, Chris Burchill, with whom I shot pellets from an actual gun at a water bottle in his garden. That was when Health and Safety didn’t exist and pellet guns were put in the hands of eight year olds. We didn’t kill anyone. But then we’re not American.

It was uni friend Mike on Wednesday. “Jon!” he shouted. We were outside Jade’s work. Last time I saw him it was three years ago. Last time he saw me it was a year ago. (There’s a reason for that). I probably wouldn’t have recognised him. I’m not good with faces. By that I mean I probably would walk past you in the street. I could blame my eyes but, in reality, I’m just self-absorbed.

Anyway, we had a proper catch up. He lives in Ealing. He’s engaged. He has a job that sounds better than mine. It’s awkward for a bit. I get jealous. But we pretty much stay in the present. Nostalgia was cordoned off by mutual cynicism about the past and recollections. We are such good little English students. At the forefront of modernist thought. Yeah.

Inside Jade’s work. I see an old colleague. He looks stoned. I’m pretty sure he wasn’t but still, he was more tripped out than Michael Palin (Geddit?). It was a bit awkward. Random, again. People I know keep popping up. Weird.

Then Thursday I go to meet some friends I don’t see often. And an old school friend, he’s there too. And I’m starting to feel like Bill Murray, revisiting my past. But I can’t remember being a bastard. Or horrible. So I don’t think I’m scrooge. I don’t think the ghost of Christmas past is justified. So I put it down to God taking the piss. Much more likely.

But, well, ya know, there is only so much a man can take. We’re walking up our road where our flat lives and opposite a curly haired girl calls my name and I’m thinking what if it’s a drunk mugger (they live here, even female ones) but it’s actually just my friend from school I don’t recognise anymore. But she recognises me. In the dark from 50 yards. I say just my friend as if, oh that’s ok then, not weird at all. But actually it is weird. My friend I haven’t seen in six years or something is outside my flat.

And I am properly pissed off. Because I thought I had changed. But apparently I am the same. Spottable from 50 yards in the dark. Spottable outside a building in obscure north london amid a hive of people. I haven’t changed a bit.

I have grown a beard thing and everything. But no, it’s me alright.

It’s tough to escape the past. It’s like you’re running around with a million threads trailing off your back like a cloak and you’re some less cool version of superman. And on the end of every strand is a person you met once. And you always run the risk of one of those people catching up with you. And attached to them is a halo of satellite detritus. Memories.

And you’re standing there with this person holding a strand of your past and this halo of detritus is circling unseen around them and you are thinking “Do I go there?” and sometimes they reach up and grab something and soon you are under an avalanche of comfortable and uncomfortable nostalgia.

But I like the ones who leave it all floating. You know its there. Both of you. And you can’t hide it. But life moves on. You want to make new strands. And floating detritus brought down to earth gets in the way.

And I have got all very metaphorical and wanky but I’ve been on memory lane, and it’s brought it all back. I was an English student.

But, hell, I’ll placate you and get back to gritty realism. You’re all cunts.

There. Good.

Care

I went to Moorfields Eye Hospital yesterday. It was a check-my-eyes-haven’t-imploded-and-turned-me-into-Stevie-Wonder day.

And despite it being written on my notes and plainly obvious that I can see about three lines down, I still have to do an eye chart test with the nurse before the big wigs, the consultants, will see me.

“Yonafarn Seavaaars”

Me? Is that meant to be me? Is that black Dawn Franch talking to me? Ok, I’ll go with it. Yonafarn. Sounds Jewish. Fuck it, it’s an hour since I was meant to have my appointment, an hour spent listening to old people grumble about how long they have been waiting, so I may as well take a gamble Yonafarn, yeah that’s me.

We sit down. Another nurse comes in with my notes and sits at the desk. She talks without looking at me.

“Lenses”

Is that a statement? Oh, you want me to answer. Yes I have some and yes they are in my eyes.

A slow look.

“I have glasses as well. To go on top for the refraction”

A giggle from Dawn French to my left. Blankness from the nurse in front of me. I can see her brain moving. It is struggling.

She points to air. What can I see? Is that what she means?

I can see a wall, a mirror and the eye chart in the opposite cubicle.

“You want me to read the eye chart over there?”

She blinks slowly, like an eclipse. No hint of a smile.

“In da mirror.”

The mirror. Right. Oh yeah, I can see the corner of an eye chart. Oh, it’s behind me, I see, I’m meant to look at its reflection. But the chair’s too high. So I can’t see the reflection.

“I can’t see it…. I mean, the board… I mean, as in, the reflection is too low. The seat is too high”

Dawn French giggles. The nurse in front of me, she looks like the magic man in The Green Mile, you know, out of Sin City as well, she gives me a glare.

“What can ya see?”

Right. Like that. The seat’s not going down then. Looks like I am. I slope down the seat so my arse is right off it and my head is at arse height. I find that the board is also too far right. I look at Dawn. She looks at me. Grinning. I Look at Green Mile nurse. She isn’t smiling. God, she looks like she just fucking loves her job.

I concede and move my head sideways so most of the letters are in my field of vision. To anyone watching, I look like I am sleeping off 10 pints.

Green Mile nurse tells me to cover my left eye. I can see two lines.

“Anything else?”

Clearly not, or I would tell you. This isn’t Call My Bluff. It’s my fucking eyes. I’m not going to start hiding the truth. “Oh had you going there, my eyes actually aren’t crippled, I’m 20:20 and ready for the fucking RAF.”

I cover my right eye. The vision’s better. She grunts. Dawn giggles.

“Go sit down”

She doesn’t look up. Dawn looks sad to see me go.

I’m not sad. I’m fucking livid.

I have no problem with the NHS. It’s awesome and my treatment in the hard stuff is always of the highest standard.

But shitty little episodes like this when dealing with the simpler jobs are too common. People go to hospital because they are ill, or have something wrong with them. Chances are they are going to be slightly self-conscious about it. All it would take to make someone feel human is a bit of compassion, interaction and efficiency.

If you are a nurse and you can’t offer that, fuck off and do something else. Better to be short staffed and wait longer rather than humiliated.