Just Dandy

It’s going to be a little quiet around here for a few weeks while I start a new job and look for a flat. I’ll be a Website Manager in Farringdon, and when I’m not doing that, I’ll be looking for a 2-bedroom flat in West Hampstead for around £250 £300 a week. Bear with me. I’ll be back with lucid asininity soon. Maybe you should subscribe to the RSS feed.

I’ve barely been near the internet for two weeks. Since I accepted a job offer I’ve been busy as hell. I have, as I’d hoped, started to value my time again. I’ve been back from Asia for nearly three months. I cannot believe how little I’ve accomplished in that time. I learnt to sail. I watched major sporting events. I applied for about fifty jobs. That’s it.

I’ve been in stasis, with no money to buy anything or go anywhere, and nothing on my to-do list beyond ‘get a good job’. I should have filled my time with creative projects, but when you have enough time to do anything you want, I find you want to do nothing.

Well, I bought some grown-up clothes. Ain’t I just dandy?

I’m sure I’ll make a good impression, which is worrying. I’ll have to manage my new employer’s expectations in a downwards direction somehow.

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I’ve been playing around with SoundCloud. It sells itself as the audio version of Flickr. I don’t know about that, but I like their media player. I’ve added some permanent sample tracks to the music page.

Speaking of music, Guy and I have sketched out a rough plan for recording a follow-up to Hidden In Plain View, the online album that was downloaded in sufficient numbers to make us about as well-known as the recipe for Coca-Cola.

I’m hoping the next one will:

a) sound cohesive
b) sound amazing
c) make us at least as well-known as the preparation method for Fugu.
d) justify the purchase of a 24-inch iMac, a Neumann U87 and a VW Polo.

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Finally: I hesitate to bring this subject up for two reasons. One, I find it hard to describe. Two, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you might think I’m more nuts than I actually am. Nevertheless, I want to get to the bottom of it, and it’s not easy to search the internet for. Here goes:

If I talk to someone face-to-face and maintain eye-contact for an extended period, my perception of perspective goes awry: it’s as if everything goes miniature. The head of the person I’m talking to seems to shrink to Lego-size. This lasts until I glance rapidly between things in the middle-distance and things right in front of me.

Does anyone reading this
a) know what the hell I’m talking about?
b) have any experience of it?
c) know what causes it?

Catchphrase

I’m always exaggerating. OK, not always, but most of the time. One of the habitual exaggerations I make is saying something is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen. I say that so often I irritate myself.

But it made me wonder: what is the funniest thing I’ve ever seen? I drew up a shortlist, and this came out on top. It’s the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.

Flu Friend

My sister might have Swine Flu. I am her ‘Flu Friend’. This is what the NHS says you are if you’re nominated to pick up someone else’s Tamiflu medication.

You can get a prescription for Tamiflu over the phone, and nominate someone to pick it up for you. To avoid the hoarding of Tamiflu, they give you an astonishingly complicated reference number. It’s complicated enough to allow every particle in the known universe to be assigned one without the risk of running out of permutations.

And so I schlepped to the nominated health centre. As I walked through the clinic door, I noticed a temporary ‘Flu Friend’ reception desk had been set up. They took my details, and directed me to a waiting room. The sign on the door said ‘Flu Friend Waiting Area’. Then someone called my name out and I was invited into the ‘Flu Friend Consultation Room’. That was when I started to feel a bit special.

Once the boxes had been ticked, I marched out of the clinic holding a packet of Tamiflu proudly above my head, its talismanic power unleashed.

The tube back to West Hampstead from Baker Street was packed. I noticed a pregnant woman in a priority seat. I cleared my throat and stared at her. She pretended not to notice me. I turned my body in her direction so she could see the packet of Tamiflu sticking out of my breast pocket. She refused to notice me! Aggrieved, I cleared my throat once more and said, with a polite smile, ‘Excuse me. I’m a Flu Friend… would you mind?’ Abashed, she apologised profusely and vacated the seat.

A few other passengers saw what had happened and offered their belated apologies: ‘Sorry mate, if I’d seen you were a Flu Friend I’d have got up straight away,’ said one guy. ‘I come to this country to take English job, not seat from Flu Friend’, said another. I modestly accepted these conciliatory gestures, happy that justice had been done. Social etiquette is not always easy to uphold when you’re kind of a big deal.

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Disclaimer: Those last two paragraphs do not entirely correspond with my or anyone else’s reality.

Eat Fresh, Believe in Better

My headphones died. They survived six years of sickening abuse before succumbing to the ephemeral nature of all things on a train from Eastbourne to London.

I bought some Sennheiser HD218s to replace them. The main thing I’m excited about listening to on them is the Wildhearts album Chutzpah which is released at the end of this month. The day I stop loving that band is the day I walk into the North Sea in the middle of winter.

Amazon.de is streaming clips from every track on the album, but you can buy the digital single The Only One here. It’s classic Wildhearts in the sense that it is at once crushingly heavy and very melodic, but also a departure in that it’s written and sung by Scott Sorry (formerly of Amen) adding a dose of America to the sound. It’s also slickly produced, which makes a pleasant change for Ginger-related projects if I’m honest.

Also, full marks to them for deploying a great Yiddish word like Chutzpah. The best definition I’ve heard is of a guy who kills his parents and then begs for leniency on account of being an orphan.

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I’ve resigned myself to accepting August as a dead month as far as jobs go. There’s so little out there worth applying for. I should perhaps broaden my approach, but I dread ending up as an advertising copywriter or something like that.

I know exactly how modern slogans work – verb adjective. That’s all there is to it. Common examples:

Subway – Eat Fresh
Peugeot – Drive Sexy
Sky TV – Believe in Better
Lipton Infusions – Drink Gorgeous

Meaningless drivel. Here are some suggestions for any desperate soul-destroyers searching for ideas on Google. You’re welcome!

Match.com – Destroy Lonely
Pets At Home – Demand Furry
Ryanair – Fly Angry
Apple – Compute Expensive
Volvo – Park Shittily

Please feel free to add your own slogans in the comments box.

Scared For Life

I just got back from Eastbourne. Forgive me for saying this, but I don’t think I’ve ever been anywhere with a denser concentration of people in poor health. Eastbourne seems to be the place to be if you’re physically or mentally incapacitated.

I’d been in Sussex for all of three hours before my friend-on-crutches and I schlepped over to a country pub in Kent for a poker tournament. I won! Well, I actually came second, but once there was only two of us left at the final table we agreed to split the winnings, a bird in the hand being worth two in the bush.

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Needless to say, I met some odd characters. My favourite was a big hard biker who is in the process of opening a tattoo studio. We chatted about tattoos for long enough for him to give me his business card.

Scarred for life, you say?

Then I took a closer look at his t-shirt: he’d had a couple of hundred made to promote his tattoo shop. The tag-line read, ‘Of cource it hurts!’

You bet it does.

He showed me a tattoo he’d done to himself. It was unbelievably bad. The patchy shading went over the outline. The colour scheme was horrible. The design was reminiscent of what you used to sketch on the front of your notebooks at school.

(I’m talking about the imaginative end of the school-jotter sketch genre… y’know, trible designs, not crude pictures of an ejaculating penis, although everyone loves the classic spurting bell-end, don’t they?)

Out of hope more than anything, I asked him who would be doing the actual tattooing while he was taking care of day-to-day business. Well… he’s going to be a sole trader.

I began to wonder if I should warn him of how many lives he was going to ruin, but I’m a bookish weakling who tends towards diplomacy, so my next and final question was whether you need a license to be a tattooist.

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Now: given what you know about this man’s level of literacy, how much money would it take for you to enter his shop and ask him for a freehand tattoo of a boy floating down a river on a raft, with the legend Huckleberry Finn navigates the Mississippi River underneath?

I’d consider it for £50k. It couldn’t be worse than the worst tattoo ever, right?

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Finally, I would like to note with some delight than when you search Google for bell end cartoon, it comes back with pictures of Tony Blair. Of cource!

An Unmistakable Bitch

There is a new dog in our household. She is called Lola. Since she arrived, I have not been able to get that Kinks song out of my head. You know the one? Lo-la ah-ah-lo-la. There, it’s in your head now, too. The song is about nearly accidentally having sex with a transvestite. Our Lola, however, is an unmistakable bitch.

She has a rejuvenating effect on all who meet her, in that we suddenly find ourselves spending half our lives running around after the mutt, yelling ‘No’, ‘Stop that!’, and ‘Drop it!’

She puked on a remote control the other day. Advice I am now qualified to give: Don’t pick up a remote control without looking at it first.

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A portent of doom: As time has not proved to be a significant factor in recent days, I walked from Primrose Hill to Soho this morning to meet a friend for lunch. Distance: three miles. Result: My knee is fucked. When did I get so old?

I know how it happened. I used to drive a van with a heavy clutch, sitting in a seat which didn’t adjust to the optimum position for my height. I was asking for trouble! Of course, back then, if someone had warned me that I would have trouble with my knees, I would have lit a cigarette, said ‘not if cancer gets me first’ and blown smoke in their face.

Ok, I wouldn’t have done that, but I’m trying to make the point that I never think about consequences. Who does, really? I keep hearing stuff about my generation not putting any money towards a pension for our old age. It’s true. Hands up if you have a pension fund? Me neither.

I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it. Or more likely I’ll hobble across it, impeded by bad knees, cirrhosis of the liver and cancer of the everything.

Nickers in a Not

Or… Stuff I’m sick of #1,874: writing covering letters.

I am still without a job. It’s tough out there! The last time there was a proper recession, I thought that kissing girls was a revolting idea, and that Def Leppard were wicked. Economic conditions aside, I am being selective about which jobs I apply for. As I am not facing imminent starvation, I have the luxury of carefully applying for jobs I want rather than carelessly applying for jobs I don’t.

This, for me, means spending a couple of hours researching the company I’m applying to, then spending a couple more hours writing a covering letter that corresponds with the impression I get of the company. I try to imagine the kind of person who will open my email, and tailor my prose accordingly.

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‘I saw ur ad 4 a job and i want it, lol!!!’ might have cut it in the dot.com boom years, but in leaner times a carefully targeted introduction is called for. Covering letters are awful propositions. You must present yourself confidently without arrogance. You must sound professional, but not stuffy. You must be clear and concise, but not superficial. You must avoid cliché, but it is impractical not to draw upon a few stock phrases.

This is particularly difficult when you consider the subjectivity of these things. One man’s confidence is another man’s arrogance. One man’s brevity is another man’s reticence. But there is one important rule which applies to all covering letters, no matter who the intended audience: It must be grammatical.

Now, I am often told I write well. And I do. I drive well, too. But I don’t really know how an engine works. When I’ve finished a difficult sentence in a covering letter and read it back analytically, everything I thought I knew about my mother tongue goes out the window.

I was not taught formal grammar at school; I am of the generation that was expected to infer grammar from reading. The same goes for punctuation – have I used semicolons and dashes correctly in this paragraph? Are my tenses consistent? For me, it’s more a matter of instinct than reasoning.

English grammar is a hideous, repellant subject. I feel nauseous nauseated thinking about it. Should it be ‘The couple were drinking Martinis’, or ‘The couple was drinking Martinis’? Are you sure? Is it writer’s block, or writers’ block? If you have writer’s block, it’s just you. You are the writer with the block. But if all writers get writer’s block, then surely it’s writers’ block. Wait, writers writing together have writers’ block. Right? Where am I going wrong? Seriously, tell me!

Sometimes people screw up their faces when they hear Alan Sugar asking a potential apprentice, “Why wasn’t you out there selling?” when of course he should have asked, “Why WEREN’T you out there selling?”. But wait! ‘I was’, ‘He was’, ‘She was’, so why not ‘You was’, if speaking of a singular ‘you’? It doesn’t make sense! There is no explanation. Well, there IS an explanation, but it requires so many technical terms as to make it nonsensical to a layman. And I always say, if you can’t explain the gist of something without using jargon, it’s probably bollocks.

Some people gasp with horror when they realise most people don’t know the difference between a verb and a noun. ‘A Verb is a doing word; a noun a naming word,’ they tell you. But what about this?

(i) I am suffering terribly.
(ii) My suffering is terrible.

In the first example, ’suffering’ is a verb; in the second, a noun. But the information conveyed is identical! Do my skills match with the job description, or are they a perfect match for it? A man could go mad thinking about it / thinking of it / thinking on it.

The Whole Internet

I was scanning a bookshelf at my parents’ house when my eyes fell on a hefty volume entitled ‘The Whole Internet – User’s Guide and Catalog’. Imagining this to be a work of satire, I pulled it from the shelf.

Satire, no. It was published in 1992. One chapter is titled ‘What If I Don’t Know Unix?’; another, ‘What Is Allowed on the Internet?’ It is at once hilarious and heartbreaking to flick through. But what is quite astonishing is the second half of the book, the catalogue. Consider this: In 1992, it seemed a reasonable idea to catalogue in print the internet. Were those the days? I can’t decide.

Beat Him Round The Head With An Oily Kipper

I spent the last week on a boat, learning to sail. It was far more physically demanding – and I was far better at it – than I expected. Pictures here.

The thing that struck me was the astonishing number of nautical terms which have entered common parlance. To illustrate:

I was literally at the helm, looking for tell-tale signs. I was constantly checking that everything was above board. If, while adrift, I spotted another yacht, I would remain aloof, perhaps hoping to be allowed a little leeway. Although the sea was sometimes rough, there was never any need to batten down the hatches or bail out the bilge – I simply changed tack. I turned a blind eye to the poor behaviour of my shipmates, never allowing the cat out of the bag. Indeed, we started a clean slate each morning after an evening of tapping the admiral for grog. I liked the cut of my jib, which kept me out the doldrums.

I could go on forever. I won’t. You get the idea, right? One thing I didn’t get to the bottom of was whether or not the question of what should be done with a drunken sailor was ever satisfactorily answered.

One Thing Becomes Another

‘Your problem,’ I said to my friend, ‘is that you live in a state of constant emergency.’

I said that to and about him a few months ago, a smart-arsed observation about his endless battles with unpaid bills, unauthorised overdrafts and problems at work, but it could apply to any victim of the information age. Everyone I know is acutely distracted.

I was lying in bed reading a book about someone trying to write a book about DH Lawrence when my mobile phone beeped. A text message! Conscious of the irony of being distracted from a book about endless distraction, I resolved to finish the page I was on before picking up my phone, but when I got to the end of the page I realised I hadn’t absorbed a word.

With a gun to my head, I couldn’t have told you what I had just read. What I had really been doing, of course, was thinking about the text message – who it was from, what the person wanted… all that. I knew it was unlikely to be a message announcing the return of the messiah, but the fact that it was unassimilated information, un-consumed media, was enough to dislodge my serenity.

My conscious effort to continue reading was over-ruled; my subconscious had declared a state of emergency. It speculated that the message was most likely to be from my sister, confirming our arrangements for tomorrow night, or my girlfriend telling me she was nearly home and could I put the kettle on? I hoped it wasn’t an automated message from O2.

There was nothing for it but to check the message. It wasn’t from O2. I thumbed a suitable response. I was free to return to my book with a sense of anti-climax. But now that I was upright, instead of returning to my book I felt compelled to wake my sleeping computer and click on the Mail icon.

The mail software showed me the usual unsolicited offerings of pharmaceutical products to help me sustain an erection, along with a few Facebook notifications, a personal email which demanded logistical considerations, and three job possibilities. While I clicked through these e-mails, I had iTunes shuffle dutifully through a playlist.

I was unsettled. Should I respond to these e-mails straight away, or flag them for future consideration? Obviously the latter; it was Sunday evening. I don’t like to consider complicated logistics or apply for jobs on Sunday evenings. On Sunday evenings I like to watch TV.

That reminded me – Top Gear was on. I went straight to it. Jeremy Clarkson made several references to Lady Chatterley’s Lover throughout the episode, making a lot out of the fact that ‘crisis’ was used in the book as a euphemism for orgasm.

Lady Chatterley’s Lover was, of course, written by the same DH Lawrence that inspired the book I was distracted from reading by the phone, then the computer, then the TV, so the circle of distraction was complete.

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Get this: I happened to look up ‘Messiah’ in my computer’s dictionary. Look at the example in the second definition.

Jesus Christ!

Considering the Messiah is the promised deliverer of the Jewish nation, I cannot think of a more tasteless example of a less literal use of the word. Hats off to Apple’s Dictionary Corner.