As Chef Made It

Twitter confirms what you have always suspected: the lives of wealthy, successful people are just as futile as your own. It’s reassuring. But it also confirms the old adage that money is wasted on the rich.

If I had serious money, I would get jobs with the sole intention of seeing how creatively I could get fired from them.

If I was a secret millionaire waiter, I would deliver plates of half-eaten food to rude customers and offer them a deadpan reply when they complained.

“That’s as Chef made it, sir.’

‘Gordon Ramsey was here last week, sir, and he responded most favourably to his half-chewed steak.’

If someone ordered a side dish, say a plate of olives, I would give them a photograph of some olives clipped to a paper plate. Then I’d add an 80 per cent service charge to their bill and ask them why they hadn’t touched their olives.

My ideal fake job would be working in a booth in an amusement arcade. Whenever someone passed me a 20 pound note and said ‘Change this for me, mate’, I would tear it in half and hand it back to them. ‘Changed!’

I might need to wear a stab vest for that one.

I would go to job interviews and light a cigarette the first time I was asked a stupid question. I would feign surprise at the ensuing outrage.

Once I’d got all that maliciousness out of my system, I’d turn to philanthropy.

I would hang out in coffee shops, waiting for someone to be unforgivably rude to a nervous, depressed barista. I would offer the barista the gift of freedom: I would slip him or her an envelope bursting with 50 pound notes, and the suggestion that they quit on the spot, and take whatever remonstrative action they deem reasonable against their obnoxious former customer.

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Comments challenge! Come up with the funniest comparison you can. For example:

• Damien Hirst is to art as a park flasher is to interpretive dance.
• Dan Brown is to literature as sewage is to raw shellfish.

What have you got? Make my eyes bleed.

Swinging Lead

If I had the balls, I’d work freelance. Three problems with that:

• Insecure income = constant fatigue and anxiety = no quality work done. Vicious circle.
• It’s tough out there unless you’ve sucked the right dicks.
• I don’t possess enough joie de vivre. If I was asked to edit a piece on ‘How to Taste Wine’, there is every danger I would reduce it to just one sentence: You pour it in your fucking mouth.

When it comes down to it, I write for pleasure and edit for money. In that effort, I am a passenger on the gravy train. Not in first class with the MPs and bank executives, but I have a reserved seat in the ‘quiet coach’ near the buffet car. Looking busy is my primary function.

In my ten weeks of employment, the desk next to mine has been unoccupied. My absent team mate has been off sick the whole time. The reason? A broken finger.

I designed a web banner for someone a couple of weeks ago. The person was a senior communications manager. He couldn’t tell me the pixel dimensions he needed, but he’d measured his computer screen with a tape measure and thought that would be enough.

In the subsequent exchange of emails, he revealed that he didn’t know the difference between width and height.

At least thirty thousand pounds a year of public money drops into the bank account of a man who does not know the difference between width and height. A happy thought to accompany your next tax bill. To quote one of the good guys I work with: ‘You have to think for them.’

Certain sectors of employment are like a kind of benefits system, except instead of dole they provide a taxed salary in return for shuffling paper around and talking about ‘providing an exemplary user experience with value for environmentally friendly money and equality while protecting the children with passion and integrity.’

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On the train from London Bridge to Gatwick:

I was sitting in my seat chatting to my sister when I saw the ticket inspector coming. She was wearing a t-shirt with ‘I taught the devil everything he knows’ on it. Her arms were covered in prison tattoos. She had short, spiky hair and multiple facial piercings. She would have benefited from losing a kilo or two.

My only thought as I handed over my ticket was that it was good of the train company to employ people of such unconventional appearance in a public-facing role. As she moved into the next carriage, I could hear her singing ‘Crazy Train’ by Ozzy Osbourne, which is his one good song.

My sister and I fell back into conversation, which was broken a moment later when I saw another ticket inspector coming towards us. He looked a lot more conventional – navy blazer, navy trousers, polished back shoes. He had a credit card machine strapped to his chest.

I had an epiphany.

“Wait a second. That woman – she wasn’t a ticket inspector! She just rides the train all day checking people’s tickets! She plays at having a shit job!’

When the official ticket inspector reached us, my sister offered him her marked ticket. He said, with a wink, ‘Ah, you’ve already had your ticket ‘checked’, haven’t you, love?’

Thick as a Plank

A question I get asked a lot: ‘What was your degree in again?’

I don’t have a degree; I’m not a graduate. I’m as thick as a plank. I did badly at school, worse at university, and dropped out as soon as I could summon the courage. Then I moved to London with two friends, a sleeping bag and a guitar and didn’t look back.

My lack of academic prowess is masked effectively by the fact that I am a compulsive reader. I read everything. I don’t remember much of it, but gradually, in the same way that cliff faces are formed by the steady assault of ocean waves, I start to do a convincing impression of an intelligent person.

It works in my favour, but it’s not the real thing. To illustrate the depth of my Homer Simpson stupidity:

The company Carex sells two types of handwash. One is a plastic container of handwash gel with a dispenser pump. The other, on the right, is a refill bottle. The refill bottle is about 50p cheaper, but has no dispenser pump.

Here’s what I did with Carex containers for most of my domesticated adult life until remarkably recently: I would buy a refill bottle, and pour the contents from the refill bottle into the old, empty container with the dispenser pump. It takes ages, handwash gel flows so slowly!

I had an epiphany just a few months ago: ‘Wait, why don’t I just screw the dispenser pump into the refill bottle?’

I’m the smartest guy you know. But I’m unedumacated. I think it’s time to put that right. I intend to get myself a degree from the Open University, in the career-accelerating discipline of English Literature. I start in February, wish me luck, I’m going to need it.

The arts – not so much a way to make a living, more a way to make a living worthwhile.

The Biscuit Game

Someone told me my boss went to boarding school when he was a child. I replied that it confirmed my suspicions: he looks like the kind of bloke long accustomed to buying biscuits in bulk. My colleague didn’t get the reference; I had to explain.

Polite and well-spoken I may be, but some of my new colleagues are beginning to suspect that many of the conversations I have in my personal life are characterized by uncultured simplicity.

If my remark about the alleged tendency of certain types of teenage boys to masturbate together in a collective effort to add to the nutritional value of a McVitie’s Digestive didn’t give me away, it was my reaction when the same colleague asked if I went to private school: I spluttered ‘You must be JOKING!’

They took me for posh. They couldn’t have imagined, say, the state of the clapped-out Vauxhall Cavalier that dropped me off at the gates of my comprehensive school.

It’s the accent, I know. Early exposure to Blackadder and Jeeves & Wooster will do that, and, well, I suppose I’m as posh as you can get if you’re from the west midlands. It’s not saying much. Wearing glasses is posh in the midlands. Imagine a brummie accent: ‘Look at that cunt, fookin’ reckons he’s something, don’t he, mister flash wants to see more than ten feet away, don’t he? I’ll fookin’ give ‘im something to look at!’

I must have been asked the ‘what are you fucking looking at?’ question a hundred times. The best answer I ever came up with – while intoxicated, in the company of a 6′5″, 16 stone friend – was ‘Your girlfriend. What’s she doing with you?’

He tried to punch me, and missed.

I couldn’t wait to move to London, where people are civilised, right? Well, no, but my self delusion was nice while it lasted. London is the place where some bloke in his 60s got kicked to death by teenage girls a couple of weeks ago, and the place where two friends of mine were followed from a gay pub and beaten up last week.

It’s a spiritual struggle to move from wanting to blast such people’s kneecaps off with a shotgun to pitying them for being such a waste of space, but I managed it.

If you’re capable of kicking the fuck out of someone for no reason other than their sexual orientation, you cannot have experienced joy or love. You cannot have a sense of humour. You don’t have empathy. You are lacking in all the qualities that make life (just about) worth living. You keep your kneecaps, you’re already missing too much.

There, I feel better.

The other thing that challenged my new era of positivity this week was all the talk of Tony Blair being the first president of the european union.

I hate the focus on ‘intelligence failures’ when talking about the invasion of Iraq and its predictable aftermath: The intelligence was fixed around the policy, it was plain to see at the time and it’s even more obvious now. Arguments that countered the American neocon narrative were ignored, supressed or discredited.

Blair has no use for reality, he ‘only knows what he believes’. His truth is whatever serves his ego. He’ll tell you that black is white, and when you protest, he’ll tell you he ‘took a different view’.

Blair as EU president? It’s not so much that I don’t think he’s suitable, it’s more that if I think about the reality of his contribution to the world for long enough, I become suicidal. So, I feel quite strongly about it. But then I understood! I’m not alone! Just look at the 650 comments on this article published on the Guardian website! It’s a red herring! We’ll all be so relieved when Blair ISN’T pronounced president of the EU that we’ll forget to take to the streets with pitchforks, in protest that no-one asked us about it in the first place.

The start of the 21st century in Europe will be remembered as the time when the ruling classes stopped even bothering to pretend they had a democratic mandate.

The Big Drop

Cage Fighters

This story caught my eye, not just because it’s heart-warming to hear of a drunken asshole getting humiliated, but also because the words ‘cage fighter’ jumped out at me.

What is it with cage fighters at the moment? I feel as if I hear about cage fighters a lot. Maybe I’m naive, but I had no idea that fighting in a cage has become such a popular activity.

I’ve seen it on tv a few times, and it’s impossible not to comment that after a couple of punches, cage fights end up on the mat, with a lot of crotch-sniffing and general substitution of violence for sex.

I think cage fighting would be better if they got rid of the macho dudes. It should be skinny intellectual guys! Fighters must be over six foot and under 11 stone! The loser’s the first guy to get his glasses broked and his book ripped up! I reckon I could be king of the ring.

TGI Friday’s WHAT?

I went to TGI Friday’s last night, or, as I named it after finishing one of their main courses, TGI Over. It’s the cage fighter’s cuisine of choice. Poached salmon and mint tea are not options.

I would advise caution towards any restaurant with laminated menus. You start to wonder about certain types of people who frequent such places. All the evidence suggests a lot of them need to be protected from themselves before they’ve even ordered a starter.

You ask yourself, ‘why is this menu laminated?’
Well, so you can rinse it under the tap. Rinse it of what, though? Also, you don’t get papercuts from laminated menus. A laminated menu is a limited liability menu.

I had the pork ribs with cold fries and cold onion rings. The ribs were ok, but the sauce? I’m not sure of the exact recipe, but this is close: take a full bottle of vinegar, empty half of it into your eye, then fill up the bottle with a bag of sugar and a tablespoon of bourbon. Stir in the collected fingernail dirt of a thousand tramps, leave it somewhere warm for a couple of days, then absolutely saturate your meat with it. Make sure the meat has absorbed so much of your sticky brew that even an internationally respected food critic couldn’t tell what type of animal your meat used to be.

Look, I’m not saying it didn’t taste good: it did. But as soon as it was sitting in my stomach, I couldn’t wait for it to get the hell out of my digestive system before it could do any permanent damage. I think I know how the pilot of the Enola Gay felt before the big drop. I feel like I ought to write my guts a note of apology on rice paper and send it down there with some steamed fish and vegetables.

That’s not to say I didn’t have a good time.

In a World….

I think the guy behind the new Dixon’s slogan – ‘The last place you want to go’ either had a nervous breakdown or a moment of clarity. It is absolutely true: Dixon’s IS the last place you’d want to go. Maybe he’s also worked on the new Gervais movie, the one that looks so awful you feel like you might give up on life forever if you saw it.

As ever, it’s the tagline that kills me: ‘In a world where everyone tells the truth, he just invented the lie!’

I mean, the concept makes me cringe enough as it is, but the lack of imagination in the ad copy! Someone got paid for that! Someone thought it was a job well done! How many fucking movies are going to be sold as ‘in a world where [parameter], one man just [parameter]!’?

It makes me think creativity only exists to be stifled. If your movie can’t be pitched using the above template, forget about it.

Here’s a few more I think we’ll see come out of Hollywood soon:

• In a world where people defecate from holes in their neck, he just bought a cashmere scarf!
• In a world where everyone’s hyper-sensitive to pain but also annoying, he just invented a remote-control cattle-prod!
• In a world where most people look, sound and act like Simon Cowell, one visionary high court judge is selling immunity from prosecution!
• In a world where everyone’s a little too dry, he just got damp!
• In a world where everyone has a camera, he just became a highly skilled but completely unnecessary draughtsman!

Any more for any more?

Lemonia

I just got paid for the first time in a year. Six weeks of backpay with a tax refund performing the role of cherry on top.

My solvency conspired with Nasreen’s birthday to present an opportunity to go to Lemonia, the fabulous Greek restaurant next to Primrose Hill. Oh, Lemonia! Champagne, stuffed vine leaves, lamb moussaka, halva, some expensive Beaujolais, some expensive brandy, very big smile. But is it expensive?

They rinse you out like an old sponge that’s been used to mop up the results of a sustained and brutal prison fight.

I recommend it.

Bent as a Five Pound Coin

Here’s something I’ve never said:
‘Honey, I’m home! And I’ve had such a great day editing web content that as soon as I’ve slipped into something more comfortable, I’m going to log into WordPress and tap out some words.’

No, instead, what has happened is what I’d hoped would happen. I’ve been drawn back towards music after a year of relative indifference. I’m sitting on a bunch of songs that I’m really excited about recording. I bet you can’t wait to hear them. Oh, I also watched The Wire a lot.

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We found a flat! It’s a tastefully decorated, wooden-floored little number in between Finchley Road and West Hampstead. The only thing I’m not thrilled about is that we don’t move in until mid November. This is the living room:

The flat is opposite Hampstead cricket club. This raises the possibility of me playing some cricket next summer. I haven’t played for about 16 years, which means that every cell in my body has replaced itself twice since I last stepped to the crease. Fuck, I think my hair might even have been blond the last time I played cricket. Maybe Hampstead will have a blind team I can join. They can send me to the boundary, and if the ball rolls in my direction I’ll do my best not to trip up on it and break my neck. It’s nice to think I’ll be making a contribution.

There’s a kind of wholesome pleasure from the simple activity of throwing and catching a ball. It nourishes your subconscious. Think about how complicated catching a ball is. You’d have a lot of trouble programming a robot to do it.

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Lemme see, what else? Er… I was recently handed a five pound note so dilapidated that it looked as if it had just emerged from a sickly mammal’s digestive system. It made me wonder why five pound coins aren’t in circulation. Life would be so much better. I feel strongly that this is an important issue worthy of a co-ordinated campaign, stopping only at systematic violence and intimidation. Who’s with me?

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One of things I’ve sworn not to do is read online newspapers when I’m slacking off at work. It makes me ratty, negative and tense. Instead, I’ve turned to the Gutenberg project, which links to dozens of literary classics that are out of copyright. When I feel like kicking back at work for twenty minutes or so, instead of troubling the servers of guardian.co.uk I read a chapter or two of a classic. This week: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain. I read this when I was a kid, thinking it was for kids. Wrong! What strikes me about it as an adult is the universality of the humour.

I suppose saying Mark Twain was a pretty funny kind of guy is like commenting on the defecatory habits of forest-dwelling doglike carnivorans, but I have to say it: I freakin’ love Mark Twain.

He must be one of the most quoted people who have ever lived, but here’s one you might not have heard. He said, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year [1910] and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet.

Guess what happened?

In the Bahamas with a Pina Colada

Pete’s excellent pizza-making blog made me think about two things:

1. Like him, I have strong associations between ‘Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles’ and pizza.

Who had the audacity to pitch the idea of mutant, talking turtles being raised by a ninja-teaching sewer rat? Why was it so popular? I am forced to concede it must have had something going for it if I can remember details about the show twenty years later. For example: it creeps me out that I know this, but Donatello’s first word was ‘pizza’.

Also, one of the weirdest things about it was the cartoon broadcast in the UK substituted the word ‘ninja’ for ‘hero’. The early 90s were more innocent times.

2. The banality of a subject is irrelevant to its value. A good writer could write about burning toast and make it hilarious and thought-provoking. I still remember a Jon Ronson article from two years ago about walking along a canal path discussing estate agents with his wife which made me laugh so hard I got dizzy. (If you click on one link, click on that one.)

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Johann Hari wrote a great piece about the twisting of the English language by those with an agenda. He quotes George Orwell decrying words ‘designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.’

Remember ’shock and awe’, to describe a sustained and comprehensive bombing campaign? ‘Enhanced interrogation’ instead of torture? I can think of a few more subtle examples. British politicians tend to talk about ‘redaction’ rather than censorship. They say it would be ‘inappropriate to comment’ on subjects for which they hold direct responsibility.

A more general case of language abuse is the merciless pounding alcohol has been getting in the press recently. A couple of doctors suggesting the banning of alcohol advertisement generated dozens of anti-intellectual columns (check out Frank Skinner’s masterpiece in the Times), all of which seem to cite the number of ‘alcohol related’ crimes, deaths and visits to casualty.

Why not call them ‘douche-bag related incidents’ instead of ‘alcohol related’, since being a douche-bag is the more fundamental of the factors in question?

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What happened to Swine Flu? The experts [sic] say it’s gone away, but it’s going to come back stronger. But where has it gone? Is it in the Bahamas, drinking a pina colada and smoking a Cuban cigar, plotting its vengeance on mankind? Or is it running up the side of a snow-capped mountain, doing push-ups and generally evoking the training montage in Rocky V? I’d like to know.

Summer of ‘69

Everyone knows that song by Bryan Adams. He still performs it. Think about that! He continues to reminisce, in verse, about a summer he lived through forty years ago. Forty years! I mean, I’m sure the summer of ‘69 was something very special, but I doubt the essential features of it warrant the level of retrospective analysis afforded to it by that song.

Some people just can’t cope with living in the present. Like the people who want to hear a band play old songs instead of new, or the douche-bags at comedy clubs who yell out references to old material.

I saw Doug Stanhope last night. I started drunk and got drunker, so this is no reflection on Doug’s splendid material, but my primary memory of his set is of one guy in the audience who kept yelling stuff out. Not heckling exactly, just making inane references to old material. It wore everyone down, it ruined the flow; it was just a bummer. Artist versus autist.

You don’t interrupt a doctor in the middle of a diagnosis, so why interrupt a comedian in the middle of a bit?

Doctor: Well, I think you are experiencing minor blockage of the aor—-
Patient: TRACHEOTOMY!
Doctor: Of the aortic valve, which me—-
Patient: CANCER!
Doctor: Which means you’ll need to have a minor surge—
Patient: DIABETES!

Right? Same thing. A guy trying to do what he’s getting paid to do, being dicked around by someone for whom a full-term abortion would have been justified.

That’s the problem with crowds. 99% of all people everywhere are ok, but that means in a crowd of 200, it’s statistically probable that you’ll have to either tolerate or kill a couple of sociopaths.

I cannot overstate the level of despair I feel when punters at gigs yell out for songs that the band have already played. At least you can drown those losers out when you start playing a (new) song. It must be a thousand times worse to be a stand-up comedian getting talked-over. For all that we supposedly live in a violent society, I’m amazed more people don’t turn to violence.

Lucifer Rising

Empty page. Lovely. For the last week, I’ve been editing and publishing text written by other people, referring to the Guardian’s excellent style guide often enough to illustrate how much I rely on charm when I’m slightly out of my depth.

It’s been good! The text I am obliged to edit, publish and promote is not uninteresting (case notes pertaining to employment law), and the remuneration for my time and effort is generous. I’m even enjoying dressing smartly for a change. This is a consequence of wearing nothing but flip-flops, linen trousers and beer t-shirts for a year.

One of my new colleagues is a guy with thick black curly forearm hair. He is going bald. I bet he wishes his forearm hair grew out of his head. I met another guy who looks and acts like Ted from Scrubs. Zoinks!

Imagine you had access to a database in which you couldn’t help but see web users’ passwords. Imagine you found out someone who worked for a fire department uses the password lucifer_rising. What if you knew a social worker’s password is helpme, or a policeman’s ganjatoker? Laugh or cry? Hypothetically, of course.

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I bought so much stuff this weekend: I got the first series of The Wire (some obscure American television show, don’t ask me…) and Christopher Brookmyre’s Pandemonium. I also picked up a second set of Sennheiser headphones (different sets for different purposes) and a bottle of single malt scotch. A shamelessly material response to completing my first week of work.

I only acquired a taste for single malt a couple of months ago, when someone gave me a bottle of The Balvenie for my birthday. My first thoughts – according to the pretentious tasting notes – should have been of cinnamon spiciness and vanilla high-notes, but were in fact: “Oh, fuck. That’s done it. I can’t drink cheap whisky any more.”

Going back to Famous Grouse after drinking The Balvenie would be like masturbating into a dirty sock after having sex with Angelina Jolie going back to your Fiat Punto after driving a Mercedes.