Bec's Plan B

Are You There, Earth? It’s Me, Ophiuchus

2011-02-23T14:25:00.000-08:00

I've taken two months off from the world to stare into the abyss, by which I mean my abnormally large navel. The problem with this is that when you do eventually poke your head above the parapet of your self-absorption, you discover that a ton of shit has gone down. I’m sure that so much stuff didn’t used to happen when I was growing up. This is the point at which someone better than me would insert an edifying McLuhan-shaped discussion of the mutually-constitutive relationship between news and 24-hour news channels, but, y’know, zzzz!

Just today, for instance, just an averagely boring Wednesday, they found both a new dinosaur and a missing Enid Blyton novel. Which leads me to suspect that I am really not putting my back into tracking down my driver's license somewhere in my top drawer.

I don’t know anything about anything any more. Like Rip van Winkle, I have awoken to an entirely unfamiliar world. At the point when I checked out, the shark terrorising Sharm el-Sheikh was the most interesting thing to happen to Egypt since the curse of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and Gadaffi was just a hilarious sex-addict with big shades, like Michael Jackson with political aspirations, or Silvio Berlusconi with epaulettes.

I am the first to admit that everything I know about modern Egypt I learnt from reading Death on the Nile, and Libya is very easily confused with Liberia, don’t you find? But one of the many things that I fail to understand about recent developments in that part of the world is how Yemen is not yet burning. I always thought Yemen was the real basket-case of that gang. Terrorists are always from Yemen. They have ten-year old divorcees in Yemen. Yemen needs to sort its shit out, yo.

Anyway, I have been reading with fascination about this new universe I inhabit. And I mean ‘a new universe’ quite literally: I still cannot believe, for instance, that nobody bothered to inform me that they changed the star signs.

My friends Alex and Anna mentioned this to me the other night with a heavy helping of blasé and a side-portion of yawn, as if it were no big deal. As if after almost 29 years of life as a proud, fiery Aries, it meant nothing that I was to be unceremoniously demoted to Pisces! Fucking insipid, watery Pisces! (No offence.) The only positive aspect I can discern in this is that Adolf Hitler and I no longer share a star-sign, but say what you like about Adolf Hitler, at least he was a bit of a self-starter.

Upon arriving home, I burst through the door to confront my housemate Adam with this news.

“They changed the star signs!” I yelled accusingly.

He laid down his pen. “Who is ‘they’?” he asked calmly.

I paused. “Them!”’ I said, realising that I was sounding like Julian Assange again, but powerless to stop myself. “Astrologers! Astronomers! Astronauts!”

Let me take a step back and explain, in case you too have unfathomably allowed this news to pass you by.

To put it in terms the layman will understand, and I am drastically simplifying my own advanced grasp on the astrophysics that underpin this, the earth wobbled and all the star signs got fucked up. I’m not saying this is because I haven’t been blogging, but the timing is suspicious.

As a result, there are now new star constellations in the sky that didn’t exist when star signs were ‘introduced’. (‘Introduced’ in this context is polite newspaper-speak for ‘dreamt up by the Babylonians after a few too many spliffs and a desperate yearning for some ontological anchor because Christianity hadn’t been invented yet’.)

Consequently, there is a new star sign, Ophiuchus, and good luck pronouncing that one when you’re speed-dating. It is also known as ‘the serpent holder’, which coincidentally enough is also what Gaddafi calls his female bodyguard. Because of bloody Ophiuchus, the rest of us have been shifted reluctantly along the star chart, like sulky Londoners pissed about having to move down the tube carriage at rush-hour.

As you can imagine, the response from the internet has been vastly unimpressed.

‘Cat’, for instance, had this to say: ‘I have been a taurus from birth and I have all the qualities of a taurus and I act and believe and do things LIKE a taurus… NOT an aries. What I’m supposed to just SUDDENYL change my way of thinking and point of view just because someone says I will? BS. Man I am who I am! ‘

Not since God answered Moses’s question about His name with those same concluding words (Exodus 3:14) has a sentiment rung out so powerfully. I stand with you, ‘Cat’, although I must point out your grotesque ingratitude in OBJECTING to being transferred to Aries. It’s kinda like a Yemeni being all grumpy about being handed a green card.

Like the majority of the internet-reading world, I am choosing to process the star sign information by simply ignoring it. For god’s sake, if I gave two shits about what science had to say about any given matter, I would also have to support funding for stem-cell research and believe that HIV causes AIDS and a whole bunch of other stuff that amounts to a big fat heap of buzzkill.

You know what they say, after all.

Denial: not just a river into which Hosni Mubarak threw suitcases stuffed with gold in the hope of creeping back to retrieve it once things have calmed down.

Is This A Startling New Cultural Moment?

2010-12-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

I feel like Julian Assange and I have quite a lot in common. Due to recent upheavals in my personal circumstances, I have been living a life not unlike that of an international fugitive: spending a night here, a night there, existing out of a backpack, always with one eye on the door for a CIA smash-through. From one person-of-no-fixed-address to another, my major piece of advice to Assange would be to invest in multiple toothbrushes.

Also, I’ve decided to launch an online venture called Bekileaks. Each day I will release the full email correspondence between me and one of my closest pals. It will cause absolute chaos among my friend group when everyone realises the full extent of how freely we disseminate supposedly secret gossip, but it’s time to break the global stranglehold on information control. Everyone must know everything! YOU’RE a bad drunk, and HIS fixed eye-contact makes me feel weird, and SHE totally texted your boyfriend once. Take that, The Man!

The Wikileaks issue is rendered complicated, for me, by the fact that I generally view information as a burden rather than a gift. There’s tons of stuff I’d rather not know. I have no desire to be made aware how perilous our global security really is. I am already an anxious person, and if I had to allow myself to really think hard about the LOLtastic vignette that fourteen tons of weapons-grade uranium were left chillin’ on a Libyan runway while Gadaffi got a blowie from his curvy blonde minder – well, I’d have to start on the whiskey even earlier in the day. Additionally, the fact that the world’s top diplomats communicate like teenage bitches passing notes in Maths class is knowledge I can do without, although it has led me to consider that I may be ideally suited for an ambassadorial post.

So that’s Wikileaks dealt with. Now I’d like to move on to more important matters, namely the American troubadour and child-bride Katy Perry.

Ms Perry recently performed her new single, Firework, live on the X Factor. Stripped of studio gimmickry, her voice had such a strained, hysterical quality that I began to suspect that someone was actually standing behind her pressing a gun into her lower back. This is, of course, far from unfeasible in a Simon Cowell production.

But it is the song itself which interests me, because it fits into a zeitgeisty new cultural genre I would like to term Marginalisation Porn.

Firework's theme is, roughly put, that even though you are a social no-hoper, Katy loves you. “You're original, cannot be replaced,” she screeches consolingly. “After a hurricane comes a rainbow”, which will be news to the residents of New Orleans, but we’ll let it go.

In the accompanying video, Katy is dressed as Ophelia in an am-dram production of Hamlet, and stands on a balcony to deliver her inspiring message Evita-style. She appears to be girdled by an extraordinary pyrotechnic brassiere, which shoots fireworks into the night sky on command. Yes, fireworks come out of her tits. You can see why Russell Brand wanted to put a ring on it.

The bits that don’t show Katy squirting roman candles from her areolae show society’s outcasts achieving self-actualisation. A gay teenager lunges his male friend. A fat girl suddenly finds the confidence to rip off her clothes and dive-bomb into a swimming pool, an act that proves both the affirming power of Katy’s fireworks and the Archimedes Principle.

Pause on that one for a second, and let’s take a quick look at the latest offering from Pink.

As a slight tangent, I’ve been thinking lately how very annoying Pink must be to hang out with. You just know that she’d be all like ‘I’m MAD, me! I’m properly mental! I’m wearing a cowboy hat!’ the whole time, and you’d be rolling your eyes going ‘Give it a rest, Pink, we get it,’ and she’d be all like ‘Shots! Who wants shots?’ and you’d be like ‘For fuck’s sake Pink, it’s ten a.m. At a funeral’, and then she’d careen off to hump someone’s leg. You know what I mean?

Anyway, Pink’s newest release is a ditty called Raise Your Glass, in which she proposes a toast to all those who are “wrong in all the right ways”, the “nitty gritty, dirty little freaks” who are “too school for cool”. Lest these descriptions seem a little vague, the video helpfully identifies the kind of folks she means. They include: fat chicks again, gays again, women with dreadlocks, men with long hair, black people who wear knitted hats, and skateboarders.

So here we have two major recording artists choosing to appeal specifically to nerds, freaks, and social rejects; any human being who isn’t about to get laid any time soon. In some ways this is doubtless a canny commercial decision, as this precise demographic probably has money to burn on iTunes downloads since they have zero socialising/contraceptive expenses. On the other hand, what has happened to rock ‘n roll? Popular music is not supposed to be about these people! Popular music is supposed to be a glimpse into a room where impossibly sexy people are getting it on with other impossibly sexy people, and you’re not invited.

As with so much else in my life, I blame Glee and Lady Gaga.

Glee has fetishised marginalised high-school students to the point where for all I know, all conventional social hierarchies in secondary education have been conclusively overturned and your only hope of making Prom Queen is if you have some unsightly orthodontic apparatus and/or a spinal injury.

As for Lady Gaga, she started this nonsense. Her entire performance discourse is built around the notion of what it means to ‘be a freak’. And whatever Lady Gaga does, everyone else has to follow or risk seeming passé. This is presumably why poor Christina Aguilera is with visible desperation trying to implausibly relaunch herself as a burlesque vamp when puhleeze, we all know about her days on the Mickey Mouse Club. It is also why the next time you see Pink, she will probably be wearing a pant-suit made out of bacon rolls.

But it is perhaps unsurprising that in this topsy-turvy new social order, the hottest person in the world right now is a hacker with greasy white hair.

Here endeth today’s lesson.

Word.

2010-11-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

I’ve started working for the dictionary.

Which dictionary, I hear you ask? The dictionary. The English one in Oxford. The Big Pimpin’ Mack Daddy, as we call it in lexicography circles, and after we drop that bomb we get laid, like, fast.

Let me take your questions one at a time, please.

Q: If you look up ‘awesome’ in the dictionary now, what does it say?

A: Bec. Just ‘Bec’.

Q: Can I get a word into the dictionary for you?

A: Yes, if you send me £100 in unmarked bills and five usages in different print sources spanning a hundred-year period. And don’t bother doing that shit where you write something on a bit of notepad and then take a lighter and burn the edges to make it look like a piece of parchment from 1600. I don’t fall for that any more.

Q: Am I drunk on power?

A: Partly, and the rest is Blossom Hill Chardonnay.

The truth is, although I have painstakingly cultivated the portrait of myself through this blog as a fast-living, hell-raising rock-‘n-roller, someone who routinely sticks a knife into the toaster to retrieve the bread, just for the hell of it – well, at heart, I’m just a big, fat, nerd.

As such, working at the dictionary makes me feel a little like I’ve just won Gold at the Nerd Olympics.

Previously, I spent my entire life giving people unsolicited, unwelcome and deeply-resented advice on word meaning, usage and spelling. I literally could not help myself.

“Ahem,” I’d say, with the giddy rush of mixed exhilaration and shame that accompanies the performance of any compulsive behaviour, “I think you’ll find that ‘disinterested’ means something quite different from the sense you intend there.”

It’s like a sickness.

Now that I’m in Word HQ, it’s been very freeing for me. It means that I feel I can occasionally let the odd slip-up from my interlocutor pass without comment.

You don’t HAVE to tell them what ‘ambivalent’ actually means, I whisper to myself, digging my fingernails tightly enough into my palms to draw blood. Tomorrow, you’ll just amend the dictionary entry to read: ‘Anyone who doesn’t use it in exactly this way will DIE SOON, By Order, God’.

It’s a good thing the dictionary doesn’t know that I would happily work for free, because I would. As it is, I don’t have time to spend all the elf-gold they pay me in. I do know that if I save it all up for a year I can redeem the little coins for a special pencil in the dictionary shop, and that will be a magical day.

I get anxious about the words. I want to do the best I can for them. I’m their advocate, their bridge between illegitimacy and the big time. Sometimes I think of myself as a one-woman X Factor judging panel for words hoping to make it.

"And who do we have here, then?" I murmur, as I pick a long-forgotten word-slip from the vault of words.

“Subsexual,” one whispers back. “I’m Subsexual.”

“Subsexual, hey?” I muse, studying it. “Saucy little thing, aren’t you? And what’s your story?”

“It’s always been my dream,” Subsexual shrugs. Or maybe that’s just my fingers tweaking the slip. “My friend Hypersexual made it in, and my cousin Asexual, and my aunt-who-used-to-be-my-uncle Transsexual…”

“Touching journey,” I nod. “But when it comes down to it, Subsexual, do you have the full package? I can’t help but feel that you lack substance.”

“Please,” Subsexual whimpers, crumpling. “It’s my dream.”

“We’ve all got a dream, kid,” I say, tucking Subsexual away in the Not Heading For The Dictionary Any Time Soon pile. “And I’m living mine.”

Putting the 'Pro' into 'Protest'

2010-09-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

I went to protest against the Pope last weekend. I felt deeply conflicted about it, because the official campaign was called Protest The Pope. When did ‘protest’ become a transitive verb? I worried. Then I looked it up in the dictionary, and buried down in the sub-senses I found that you can use ‘protest’ transitively, but that it’s chiefly an Americanism. I guess that’s okay then, I thought uneasily, but for the sake of consistency I do hope all the placards make reference to ‘pedophiles’ and ‘secularization’.

I hadn’t had any plans to protest against the Pope, but my friends Steve and Richard were going and I didn’t have anything else on. Also, in fairness, I’m South African. Protesting is our number one favourite thing to do other than viewing the world through a racialised lens. We’re basically a country of 49 million Berkeley undergrads.

I have no beef with Catholicism, just to be clear. In fact, a month ago, while holidaying in Italy, I travelled to the holy shrine of Loreto, which has a cathedral in which is situated the house where Mary was chillin’ when the angels came and told her she would give birth to Jesus. They transported the bricks of the house from Nazareth to Italy during the Crusades, fearing for its safety, and rebuilt it in the middle of the cathedral in Loreto. While mindful of the need for religious sensitivity in the current climate, I must report that it was a tiny bit weird. There were a lot of people with their eyes closed ecstatically rubbing themselves against the bricks. The last time I saw those kinds of scenes, I was in the dark-room at a gay club. Nonetheless, being a bit of an opportunist, I took advantage of the chance to indulge in a little light frottage of my own.

What was cool, however, was that there was some Jesus-era graffiti carved into the bricks, which translates loosely from the Aramaic as ‘Nobody talk to Judas OK’. Or something like that.

Anyway, I made up my mind that I would be going on the march to protest about one specific issue, namely the Vatican’s anti-condom stance and its deleterious impact on rates of HIV/AIDS in Africa. If only I’d expressed it that smoothly when approached by a BBC journalist on the march, and not fallen prey to a paralysing seizure of vox-pop anxiety. ‘C-condoms,’ I stammered, when he asked what I’d come to protest about. ‘Um, condoms, and AIDS and stuff.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘How interesting,’ and walked away, ostentatiously not writing anything on his notepad.

Everyone going on the march had been asked to make their own mock Pope’s hats out of red cardboard. I hadn’t done my homework, but Steve and Richard had made two.

‘Put them on!’ I urged when we got to Hyde Park Corner and surveyed the sea of red cardboard mitres.

They seemed oddly reluctant. ‘You know what, you can have mine,’ said Richard, handing it to me.

I looked at it. It wasn’t that it was bad, exactly, it was just that it looked like a hat you’d find on the head of a garden gnome rather than the head of the head of the Catholic Church.

‘Thanks,’ I said. It would have been too churlish to back out, so I tugged it on to my head. It didn’t really fit. To make it stay on, I had to walk with my head bent forwards like someone staring at their feet out of embarrassment. But that was okay, because I was embarrassed.

Scrabbling in my bag, I found a black pen. ‘The Pope’s anti-condom stance costs lives!!!’ I scrawled in angry capitals on my gnome hat. Then I felt better, because it looked less like I had fallen out of the Magic Faraway Tree wearing it.

It was a very English protest. ‘No Sects Please, We’re British,’ read one placard. I saw at least three quoting the Father Ted joke, ‘Down With This Sort Of Thing’.

We chanted, but no-one really raised their voice above a polite, conversational tone.

‘What do we want?’ we inquired, en masse. ‘Rational thought! When do we want it? Now!’ I’m sure I heard a few people murmuring ‘Unless that’s not convenient’.

One of Steve’s friends, who hadn’t heard the answer, turned to me. ‘What do we want?’ he asked. ‘Rational thought,’ I explained.

He rolled his eyes. ‘Personally, I want a caramel frappuccino,’ he said.

There’s only so long that you can repeat ‘What do we want? Rational thought!’ without starting to feel like a bit of a twat, I find.

Soon we moved on to the gentle exhortation, ‘Pope go home!’

‘Pope go to hell!’ shouted a dissenter behind me.

‘Oh Max, you’re such a radical!’ drawled his companion.

We were supposed to march all the way to Downing Street, where Richard Dawkins was waiting to whip us into an aggressively secular frenzy. But after an hour Steve and I started to steal anxious glances at our watches.

‘It’s just that we have to be at that dinner party at 7.30,’ he said, looking at me guiltily.

‘And we did say it would be nice to fit in a glass of wine beforehand…’ I confirmed.

‘And, I mean, we’ve done our bit, really, haven’t we?’ he said, starting to edge out of the march on to the pavement.

‘Oh absolutely,’ I agreed, following him. ‘I really feel we’ve done something important here today.’

Later, I was forced to leave my hat in a bar in Earlsfield. It wouldn’t fit in my handbag, and I didn’t want to offend people on the Tube.

After all, I’m an activist, not a fundamentalist.

Big in Japan

2010-09-02T14:59:00.000-07:00

Have you heard the story of Beckii Cruel?

That sounds like the opening line to a Country & Western song, or the subtitle of my soon-to-be published autobiography, but it’s actually a genuine query.

Beckii Cruel was brought to my attention a few nights ago by a friend who expressed shock that I didn’t know who she was, since “it seems like the kind of thing you spend all day frantically googling”. She was absolutely correct, of course: ever since I began my forensic investigation into Beckii Cruel I have been thoroughly immersed in her curious world.

If you look up Beckii Cruel on Wikipedia, you will be informed that she is a ‘Manx pop dancer’, a description you may have to take several minutes to think about. For the benefit of ignorant Africans like myself, ‘Manx’ is the term for an inhabitant of the Isle of Man, and – turns out – not simply the name of those creepy cats without tails (please see exhibit above).

A ‘pop dancer’ is apparently someone who dances around to other people’s pop songs. The phrase is, I grant you, entirely semantically transparent. I was simply unaware that something I do in the mirror as foreplay to a lengthy self-pleasuring session constituted a prized form of artistic expression. Heigh ho.

Beckii Cruel is currently 15 years old, but the section of her personal narrative which concerns us begins when she was 13. From a young age Ms Cruel – at that stage still known by her birth name, Rebecca Flint – developed an interest in Japanese anime, a subject I know literally nothing about and do not feel much inclined to explore. It’s Japanesey cartoons, innit?

The question of why a pre-teen on the Isle of Man would find this subculture so engrossing is one that I suspect requires a trip to the Isle of Man during winter to satisfactorily resolve. However it happened, young Beckii got well into anime, and in particular into ‘cosplay’, which – as if I had to remind you – stands for ‘costume roleplay’. Wikipedia has a long explanation of cosplay using fancy and erotic words like “anthropomorphic” and “gender”, but however you try and sex it up, it’s still a bunch of geeks in Star Wars outfits to me.

So there’s young Beckii, coming of age on the Isle of Man, and her absolute favourite thing to do – bless her – is dress up in anime outfits and dance around to Japanese pop songs. Weird, I know, but probably better for her in the long run than binge-drinking White Lightning and having sex with tree-stumps, which is how other Manx adolescents get their jollies. Of course, she videos it all – because if it’s not on the internet, how do you know it ever really happened?

It’s the ultimate modern-day fairy-tale: the videos get picked up in Japan and promptly go viral. The Japanese, it seems, simply cannot get enough of this Manx teenager bopping away in her bedroom. She is a huge fucking star. 14 million people have watched her videos. She has released chart-topping albums (she had to learn to sing first, obv) and a DVD. She gets sent extravagant gifts from her fans. One of them posted her a bass guitar for her 15^th birthday. A great many of her admirers appear to be, er, elderly gentlemen, but I am confident that their feelings towards her are appropriately avuncular.

Here’s the thing: having seen her vids, I have to say that objectively speaking she’s rubbish. She can’t sing, her dancing is weak, and her outfits look like a last-minute Little Red Riding Hood costume you might throw together in a moment of desperation for a Halloween party. I am, of course, being hideously enthnocentric , and it may be that my cultural insensitivity is blinding me to the complex semiotic layers of “anthropomorphism” and “gender” lurking beneath her amateurish pantomime.

The key to Beckii’s popularity is said to be the fact that she physically resembles an anime character: small face, large eyes, slender limbs. Based on this logic, when aliens eventually make contact with Earth, I am guaranteed to be a sensation in the outer galaxy. This is because I share many of the corporeal features commonly associated with the appearance of space-people: thin, snaking arms; an enormous forehead; I could go on. NASA better hurry up with that mission to Mars, so that my Martian fans can get busy sending me millions and millions of Mars bars.

Not all Japanese response to Beckii has been adulatory, however. Comments on her Youtube channel frequently accuse her of being a ‘Weeaboo’, a word which I would find upsetting to have yelled at me at close range. I could explain the folk etymology of ‘Weeaboo’, but your comprehension would be predicated on familiarity with at least three other internet memes, and our days on this planet are few and dwindling. Suffice it to say that it is a synonym for ‘Wapanese’, or wannabe Japanese.

I think that I, like my namesake Beckii Cruel, might be Wapanese. After all, what’s not to love about the culture which produced my favourite website of all time: Cat Prin, “the tailor for a cat you know”?

When I am monstrously rich from the proceeds of my intergalactic fame, I shall travel to Japan, armed with a small cat for whom I wish to purchase bespoke outfits. In the meantime, I believe the Isle of Man is lovely this time of year.

Death: What Is It Good For?

2010-08-23T16:28:00.000-07:00

September’s coming. I have a sense for these things. They call me ‘The Human Almanac’ in various online role-playing games I participate in.

Between you and me, I hate September. As the great singer-songwriter TS Eliot once trilled: ‘September is the cruellest month/ What with it getting a bit nippier at night/ And you having to find a sort of transitional jacket that’s halfway between a cardigan and your heavy winter coat.’

I feel like by the time you hit September, the year’s basically over. The bartender’s collecting up the glasses, the lights are coming on and you’re standing there blinking, going ‘Wait, that’s it? That was 2010?’

All the early promise of the year, the dreams and aspirations, the vows and fervent resolutions of change and progress – that’s all gone now.

The year is shorn of its fairy-dust now, stripped away and exposed; much like the pre-digital touch-up photos of Jennifer Aniston published this weekend, which reveal her to have a certain amount of epidermal sun-damage and also something weird going on with her eyes, almost like she’s completely empty inside.

Once September hits, you’re just left with a melancholic procession of days drearily trudging to a New Year’s Eve party you’ll end up at with people you hardly know because as usual you forgot to book something in time even though you swore this year would be different.

I read an article almost exactly three years ago which has haunted me ever since. It was about how time seems to speed up as we get older. Of course, time isn’t really speeding up; but since your subjective experience of time passing is all you’ve got, it is. The phenomenon is so powerful that when you hit 30 – assuming you live to be 80 – your life is 60% over, in experiential terms.

Look, don’t shoot the messenger, okay? Here’s a video of a kitten who eats with a fork.

The fork has clearly been tied to its paw by its owner, but if you close your eyes a bit and squint, it’s easy to just surrender to the magic.

Where was I? Oh yes, how we’re all practically dead already.

Obviously this isn’t good news per se. Especially if, like me, you’re 28 years old and the most valuable thing you own is a pair of hair-straighteners which your sister passed on to you because they don’t heat up so good any more.

Clearly I have a lot of work to do, and frankly I need more time. At my current rate of progress, I’ll be 75 before I’m able to buy my own printer.

In the interests of extending my personal mortality deadline, I just googled ‘How to become immortal’.

Turns out it all seems perfectly possible, which is tremendous news! Don’t we feel a little foolish now? We conventional squares keep on plodding away at our three-score-years-and-ten, unaware that whole communities on the internet have already got this shit totally sewn up!

An expert called Marty Ettington writes on the subject:

One of the most fascinating things I found out in my research was that there are numerous people recorded in history who have lived to over 150 years.

This was very unexpected [VERY!] because most government record keeping and the Guinness Book of world records only record people living up to about 123 years. [WELL THEY WOULD SAY THAT, WOULDN’T THEY?]

Records from the Bible also show a lot of people who lived to over 900 years old. [ALSO GOD IS QUITE OLD, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY MENTION THAT TOO.]

I even found other books and blogs which referred to a person living today who is 2800 years old, and an Enlightened Immortal who is over 9000 years old. [IS IT KEITH RICHARDS? I BET IT’S KEITH RICHARDS.]

People on the internet are a tough audience, though. One feisty little sceptic has noted in response:

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How can people live for over 9000 years if its only 2009 right now?

Ooh, Marty, he’s got you there!

Unfortunately to unlock Marty’s secrets of immortality you have to buy his book for $35, and the whole point, Marty, is that I need those extra 8972 years to make that $35.

Still, there’s always cryogenics, which I just discovered is actually called cryonics when it relates to freezing dead humans.

But Jesus, $155 000 just for a stab at eternal life? Pull the other one, American Cryonics Society. Also, they don't even guarantee you'll wake up in one piece. For all their excited chatter about how awesome ‘Reanimation Day’ will be, they only go as far as committing to: ‘The suspension team is charged with delivering the subject to future medical people in as good a shape as is possible.’

Well, you know what? There are some occasions in life when ‘we’ll do our best, promise’ just isn’t good enough. Also, I’m no expert, but I suspect the technical term for ‘medical people’ may be ‘doctors’. And finally, if you really want people to take you seriously, maybe you shouldn’t title your downloadable fact-sheet ‘Freeze A Jolly Good Fellow’.

It’s all looking pretty bleak.

But as Noah once said: ‘Better to light a candle than sit around bitching about the darkness and how obviously you don’t know how to rewire a fusebox because you’re not a freaking electrician.’

Accordingly, I’m going to start researching New Year’s Eve events today.

This year will be different.

Things I Learned Last Week

2010-08-02T14:41:00.000-07:00

Practically everything I read in the last fortnight seemed to be about Facebook, except for those dull but worthy Guardian pieces about the fact that people in Niger are so hungry they’re eating their own feet. They will soon run out of feet, so please consider sending them one of yours, although make sure you have a foot left to put down when they ask you for more. ‘Give them a foot and they take a leg,’ as we say in South Africa.

With the social responsibility element of today’s discussion thus dispensed with, let’s turn back to Facebook, which recently recorded its 500 millionth user. I was at a digital marketing workshop a week ago where the convenor explained gravely: ‘That means that if Facebook were a country, it would be the third biggest country in the world.’

I find that there’s something vastly unimpressive about framing its size in that way. When you think about the fact that if every single Facebooker in the world lined up next to India, India would basically just point and laugh and then speed away in the shiny new Tata motorcar that they bought for three rupees – well, it makes the whole Facebook Reich seem a bit silly.

However, I’m all in favour of thinking about Facebook as a country, as long as we get to put the squeeze on it in the way that other countries face. I’d like to see Facebook making gigantic contributions to global aid, for a start. I would particularly like to see a system rolled out whereby for every Farmville update you are exposed to on your Newsfeed, Facebook has to donate one dollar towards real-world agricultural subsidies.

Anyway, congratulations to Facebook, and I hope Mark Zuckerberg marked the occasion by using some of his estimated personal fortune of $4 billion to buy himself a business suit. I am sick and tired of seeing that little dork address technology conferences in his Gap hoodie. It’s like he’s rubbing all our noses in it. Dress like you have some goddamn respect for us.

As a result of the 500 million-milestone, Facebook has been all over the world news, and not in a good way. Articles like this one were marked by a tone suggesting that each new Friend Request happening right now somewhere in the world essentially inches humanity one step further along the inexorable path to the apocalypse. I don’t necessarily disagree, but maybe we could just get a fucking shred of perspective here? After all, there are plenty of other, more urgent signs that The Reckoning is imminent. (Like the fact that strident 8-year-old feminist Lisa Simpson got married this weekend. But to balance it out, I see that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston have called off their engagement, so perhaps the great circle of life spins peacefully once more.)

Newsweek, for instance, published the hilariously alarmist yet apparently straightfaced 10 Ways Facebook Can Ruin Your Life. It includes scenarios like the possibility that you use the site to track down long-lost family members and then discover that you are one of the 50% of such people that experience an unstoppable Genetic Sexual Attraction to your own kin.

LOL, I hate it when that happens.

But the most interesting of all the space devoted to hand-wringing over Facebook was a piece in the New York Times entitled As Facebook Users Die, Ghosts Reach Out. Facebook is increasingly plagued by the fact that its pesky users keep dying, you see. How dare they? Don’t they realise we have a thousand-year empire to run here?

The way it works currently is that when someone dies, a family member can fill out a form to have their profile page transformed into a ‘Memorial Tribute Page’ for all eternity.

The problem is, in Facebook’s view, that not many people are aware this option is available; or, in my view, that the bereaved are too concerned with the trivialities of burying the dead and mourning them appropriately to give a rat’s ass about what’s happening on Facebook.

As a result, Facebook often struggles to determine who’s dead and who’s not, which is a predicament I can relate to, as I often travel on the London Underground in the early morning.

I’m sure we have all encountered the situation of Facebook kindly urging us to ‘Reconnect’ with a recently-dead Facebook friend, as if offering a sinister portal into the afterlife. The people the NY Times interviewed about this found this experience to be jolly helpful:

Ms. Purvin, a 36-year-old teacher living in Plano, Tex., said that after she got over the initial jolt of seeing her [dead] friend’s face, she was happy for the reminder.

Well, yes. There is that, I suppose. I can’t say I feel similarly, but I suspect that I am simply better than Ms. Purvin, and consequently capable of accessing memories and emotional responses without being prompted by a social networking site.

Anyway, the article reveals that Facebook is working on an algorithm which will automatically scan all users’ profile pages for phrases like ‘Miss you’, and ‘Rest in peace’, and diagnose death accordingly. If this technology takes off, the potential for its expansion and development is mindblowingly exciting. By 2020 I hope to have replaced myself altogether with an iPhone App which scans people’s facial expressions for clues as to mood and makes appropriate chit-chat accordingly.

When I wasn’t reading about Facebook, I was busy mourning Spain’s decision to ban bullfighting. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for animal rights. Animals are welcome to as many rights as they’d like. As long as they don’t interfere with my rights to eat them between two wodges of mayonnaise-slathered white bread, or watch them spectacularly haemorrhaging blood all over a stadium in Barcelona on a sunny afternoon with a pint in my hand.

When it comes to animals lately, however, I have been witnessing what I can only describe as a rights culture gone mad, innit. It may have escaped your attention, for instance, that in March Switzerland held a national referendum to determine whether animals should have lawyers. Switzerland in fact already boasts one dedicated animal lawyer, a man called Antoine Goetschel, whose last client was a pike.

I am happy to say that a small scrap of collective sanity prevailed in the country which has already made 2010 an annus douchebaggus by banning minarets, letting Sepp Blatter continue to live, and giving Roman Polanski a giant high-five. They voted against it. But not before having a big national conversation about it all.

Fine, I say: let’s let animals have lawyers. On the condition that they can only have other animals acting as their lawyers. Then we’ll see who wins.

The Swiss debate happened just a month before a ‘leading academic’ came forward to claim that wildlife documentaries are an unacceptable invasion of animal privacy. Over to Dr Brett Mills:

“Animals, just like humans, have a basic right not to have their most intimate moments – such as mating, giving birth and dying – broadcast to an audience of millions.”

Hmmm, hmmm, yes, I see what you’re saying there, Brett – except for the one enormous flaw at the very heart of your argument: they’re animals.

Anyway, with that as background, it was with a sombre spirit that I read that Spain would pull the plug on bullfighting. I watched a bullfight in Barcelona two years ago and, to be honest, it was pretty much the best afternoon of my life.

It was riveting. I know a lot of romantic shite is written by Hemingwayesque wankers about the majestic pageantry of it all, the brutal yet magnificent theatre of death – but let me tell you, it’s all true. When that jaunty oompah band strikes up and they sloooooowly drag the bull out of the stadium, oozing life, while the matador parades around brandishing its sawn-off ear and all the senoritas throw their panties at him – well, you’d have to be some kind of crazy Swiss person not to be stirred by it all.

And lest you think me utterly heartless, I should mention that 12 bulls were on the menu for slaughter that day, but we left after only 6. Any more seemed a bit greedy.

Also, two of my companions were sobbing uncontrollably.

Get a grip, I seethed in my head. They’re only bulls. Not people in Niger eating their own feet.

Things I Learned This Week

2010-07-16T17:54:00.001-07:00

1. You will have read by now that French politicians have voted to ban the wearing of the niqab in public. I have nothing intelligent to add to this debate, so I thought I’d add something puerile but satisfying to the debate instead.

Here is a small graphic I made to remind us of France’s rollercoaster what’s-hot-and-what’s-not social index. Click on it to educate yourself accordingly:

It has been less widely reported, however, that a Tory backbencher in the UK, Phillip Hollobone, has tabled a motion for the UK to follow France’s example. You can read the steaming pile of horse-manure that passes for his ‘argument’ here, but allow me to save you the trouble by extracting the money-quote:

Part of the joy of living in our country is that we pass people every day in the street, exchange a friendly greeting, wave, smile and say hello.

Oh, pardon me: I just laughed so hard I did a little wee. I believe I have mentioned the occasion last year when a complete stranger walked up to me on the street and punched me. I did not observe his unprovoked assault being accompanied by a friendly greeting, wave, smile, or ‘hello!’, but I apologise if I overlooked it on account of being doubled up in agony emitting small whimpers. But even at the time I did take a moment to reflect on how jolly, jolly glad I was that I wasn’t wearing a niqab, because that would make me an oppressed tool of the patriarchy.

2. On a similar note, the Daily Express announced on Tuesday that an “explosive report” predicts that 1 in 5 Britons “will be ethnics” by 2050. Because Daily Express readers don’t normally bother with article text, they made sure to spell it out quite clearly on their front page:

I for one am terrified. What will the other four be? If they won’t have any ethnicity, maybe they won’t have ARMS OR LEGS either? MAYBE THEY WON’T HAVE ANY HEADS?

But in the meantime, let’s remind ourselves how to spot Ethnics on a busy London street.

3. With a sigh of relief, let us turn now to South Africa, where politicians comport themselves with dignity and gravitas and racial tensions are so pre-World Cup. Today I learnt that ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema has a son!

In a TV interview on Wednesday he revealed that his personal sexual philosophy is “one man, one woman, using a condom”. Except, apparently, when the man in question is Julius himself - since he segued effortlessly into the news that he has a three-year old son.

I am deeply torn by this revelation. On the one hand, all I can say is: Awwwwwww! Imagine how cute and fat mini-Juju must be? I yearn to tickle his chubby little sides and strap a tiny replica of Daddy’s Breitling watch to his chubby little wrist.

On the other hand, did we learn nothing from The Boys From Brazil? If this initial spawning turns out to be just the beginning of a plot to seize total control of South Africa using nothing more than the potency of his loins, I want you to remember that you read it here first.

4. Old Spice took over the internet this week. Yes, the World Wide Web was colonised by a deodorant. Their initial web adverts, featuring former American football player Isaiah Mustafa giving advice to men on how to "be a man, man" became the most successful online media ad campaign in history. This week, Mustafa recorded 180 personalised ads in response to tweets and messages, including a marriage proposal.

Why do I mention this? Because the Old Spice ads are funny and clever, and thoroughly contradict the hitherto accepted wisdom that online ads should be as rubbish as possible.

Online ads up to now have fallen into two categories. Firstly, the MAYDAY MAYDAY EPILEPTIC SEIZURE visual-assault group, where an ad explodes uninvited upon your screen, showering it with neon faeces and nightmarishly animated emoticons.

Secondly, the I WOULDN’T CLICK ON THAT EVEN IF IT WAS A BUTTON TO DISARM NORTH KOREA category: the static ones that look like a kid with learning difficulties cut out a bunch of letters from a ransom note and stuck them back together with their own spit.

This taxonomy may not be exhaustive, but you get the point.

No-one wants either of these. Online advertising has just been one huge wasted opportunity up to now, because let’s not kid: people on the internet will watch almost anything. People on the internet are the least discerning human beings in evolutionary history, other than Peter Hollobone MP’s constituents. I count myself proudly among the former group.

Things I will happily watch on the internet include but are not limited to: anything funny; anything sad; anything pretty and magical; anything revolting; anything with small animals or animals wearing any form of clothing; anything featuring people with bizarre disabilities; anything with people falling off things or getting things thrown at them.

That’s quite a lot to work with. Get busy, online advertisers: I want top-hatted mice selling me toothpaste, and I want it now.

5. Congratulations to India! No, silly, not because this week saw the launch of a Facebook app by Vaseline which enables Indian Facebookers to lighten their skin in their profile pics.

Though that also happened.

No, because India got themselves a nice new currency sign for the Rupee. Whoopee! I think it’s great. It looks like an R that means business. An R pictured on the run, dashing off to where it’s needed. An R so busy and important that it forgot to put on its initial downward stroke this morning, but who cares? This R has places to go! It has over a billion wallets to fill! It can’t be hanging around waiting for its | !

The motivation for the re-design was “a desire to give its currency a unique identity”. I felt a bit jealous when I saw the Rupee’s new unique identity. Why shouldn’t the good old Rand treat itself to a new unique identity, I thought. Just a little makeover. Something to set it apart from the Iranian Rial and the Malaysian Ringgit.

So I took the liberty of designing it myself. You’re welcome, South African Reserve Bank.

The World Forgetting, By The World Forgot

2010-07-13T11:42:00.000-07:00

My parents haven’t had friends since 1994. They claim to be better off as a result.

I think my mum might be weaker than my dad in this respect, though, because sometimes she defies the terms of their house-arrest and invites the American neighbours around for drinks. My father permits this because the American neighbours are only in residence for four months of the year, so there’s no risk of this entente developing into something dangerous.

I suspect my mother might sometimes want more with the American neighbours. She has expressed a degree of positivity about them that I haven’t heard from her lips in well over a decade. "Very sophisticated people, my dear," she told me when they moved in, which I think means they have a bookshelf.

But my father is a harder nut to crack. I asked him his opinion on the couple in question. "He is a strange, fey little creature," he responded; "and she talks too much," accompanying the latter with a mouth-flapping hand gesture.

My father is not strictly to be trusted on such matters, however, as his unsociability is to a degree that makes Harper Lee seem like Paris Hilton. If he met Helen Keller he’d probably declare her "a bit yappy".

His hermitage seems to be gathering exciting momentum as we speed through the 21st century. I’m not sure where exactly it’s going, but I wouldn’t rule out a scenario which sees him end his days peering through the letter-box with a sawn-off shotgun and a knee-length beard.

Still, the signs have been there all along. One morning about 15 years ago he was driving me and my sister to school when he got stuck behind a car at the school gates that he considered to be going unacceptably slowly. Flying into a rage, he commenced a multipronged offensive: vuvuzela-style beeping, obscene hand gestures, and winding down his window to deliver the time-honoured Irish salutation of "GET YER FINGER OUT YER ARSE YER FECKIN’ EEJIT".

We made it into the school grounds relatively unperturbed, as this was entirely standard behaviour. I skipped merrily off to class only to receive an immediate summons to proceed straight to my extremely frightening English teacher, who was about 108 and had never had sex ever.

"Sit down," she commanded me coldly as I entered her empty classroom. I sat, bemused. I thought perhaps she had wanted to call me in to commend me on my use of the word ‘corpulent’ in my latest essay, but her manner seemed frosty.

"I have a message for you to deliver to your father," she hissed. I blinked. Perhaps she and my father were having an affair? If so, she was clearly about to end it. She was quivering with anger.

"Tell your father," she spat, actual bits of saliva flecking her mouth, "that I’m SORRY I drive so SLOWLY, and that I’m SORRY he finds me so terribly, infuriatingly STUPID, but I have a SERIOUS CATARACT PROBLEM in my right eye that means it is IMPOSSIBLE for me to drive at the RECKLESS PACE HE MIGHT PREFER when the sun is shining DIRECTLY IN MY FACE."

I emerged teary and trembling. At home that evening, I told my father the story with all the breathless judgement and blame and self-pity that only a 12-year old can muster.

He snorted. "She should go to a bloody optometrist then, to get those cataracts seen to," he said, and turned back to his newspaper with a small smile of triumph.

I mention my parents today because, in that terrifying alchemy wrought by the passage of time, I appear to be turning into them a little more every day.

And apparently this process is entirely visible to others. A woman I had never met before turned to me at a dinner party on Saturday night and said, "I’m getting the sense that you don’t enjoy company very much." In fairness, directly beforehand I had been discussing the most convincing kinds of lies to tell in order to escape social engagements, so it’s not like she had some creepy Paul-the-Psychic-Octopus powers.

The major manifestation of my retreat from society thus far is the fact that I am now three weeks Facebook-free . This wasn’t an easy decision to make, because I happen to be really really good at Facebook. I have, over the past four years, invested heavily in my Facebook presence. I built it up from nothing, you know, working away solidly with my bare hands, often putting in two or three hours a day.

We’ve had some good times, me and Facebook. Like the time I tried to sell all my Facebook Friends on the Facebook Marketplace. ‘Diverse portfolio, wide spread of ethnicities and political views,’ I wrote, practically vomiting with laughter. ‘Make me an offer.’ No-one did.

Or that glorious day when Katie Price, aka Jordan, aka pneumatic equestrienne and ‘glamour-model’, accepted my friend request. Oh, the belly-aching chuckles that her status updates reliably induced. Fortunately I archived some of them to return to now in low moments:

Katie Price Children who think they're ugly, I think you need to wait a few years and see how you are, because I wasn't the person I am now.. people say I look better now, than I ever have. So just wait, nothing to rush into, lets face it, If I was a man, i'd love to wake up next to me every morning ha ha.

Katie, what I’d give to wake up next to you every morning ha ha.

But in order to explain why I so suddenly and rashly erased my Facebook account, I’d like to turn to Berlin for a moment. Berlin, as you no doubt remember, is the home of Knut, the world’s cutest polar bear.

Knut, it seems, is in a spot of bother. Knut is not a well bear. In a typical display of the tabloid press’s nuanced understanding of mental health, I have seen the little guy variously described of late as “bipolar”, “psychopathic”, and the folksy old “crazy”. Oddly, I have yet to see Knut termed ‘knuts’, so I wish to place a life-copyright on that description, which the Sun may purchase from me at a reasonable price.

Yes, a lifetime in captivity is turning Knut madder than a box of frogs. He paces obsessively round his pen. He is desperately addicted to an audience of gurning, waving, sugared bun-proffering humans. Here’s the quote from his keeper:

‘He cries out or whimpers if he sees that there is not a spectator outside his enclosure ready to ooh and aah at him.’

I think you see where I’m going with this. Because really, isn’t everyone on Facebook a bit like Knut?

Or is it just me? Maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, good thing the blogosphere is so different from Facebook’s endless vanity-parade. This right here is art for art’s sake, just so we’re clear.

But just in case it isn’t, I’d be obliged if you could send me some sugared buns.

We’re Not In Blantyre Any More, Toto

2010-06-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

It was weird about those Malawian gays, hey? One minute they’re all prepared to rot in jail for love, then you blink and one of them fucks off with a woman. I feel so cheated. After all we did for them!

In fairness, I can’t take all the credit for their freedom, because I never got round to signing any of the online petitions. Don’t look at me like that: I figured I’d have loads of time. And I did ‘like’ someone else’s Facebook status expressing outrage, and every now and then I would think about the whole affair and shake my head sadly. One of these days when my diary clears up a bit I’ll get working on Aung San Suu Kyi in the same way.

I felt a kinship with Steven and Tiwonge, you know. I myself am both a practising homo and was born and raised in Malawi, under the benevolent dictatorship of Hastings Banda. Or, to grant him his full title, His Excellency The Life President, Ngwazi Doctor Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

In the pantheon of African dictators Banda lacked the full psychotic flair and inventive dress-sense to take him to the top of the league-table of crazy. To put it in terms political analysts will understand, he was Xtina Aguilera to Mobutu Sese Seko’s Lady Gaga. But he did have some adorable little quirks. Every time he drove through the city all educating would cease, as we lined the roads to dutifully wave to him. We’d wait for hours in the sun for his cavalcade to swish by, with the great man languidly fluttering his trademark fly-whisk. I blame these regular gaps in my schooling for the fact that I can’t do long division, but at least I can wave really well.

I could discuss Banda all day, but I want to get back to Steven and Tiwonge, the now-estranged gay couple. My girlfriend keeps saying ‘We all saw it coming.’ Did we? I didn’t. But then again, I’m notorious for taking things at face-value. I still believe Michael Jackson had a skin condition.

Gay rights campaigners say that homophobia drove them apart. Fair enough. My own relationship can barely withstand the internal fissures caused by my continuing refusals to allow my girlfriend to pluck my eyebrows. If I had an entire country threatening to kill me on top of that, we probably wouldn’t last long.

My friend Cristina, who grew up in a tiny Greek village and thus has a unique villager’s perspective on the situation, finds the most perplexing aspect to be the fact that, in this claustrophobic rural community, a woman has now agreed to enter a relationship with the surely irrevocably-tainted Steven. ‘What is she thinking?’ she says. ‘That shit WILL NOT FLY in the village.’ And Cristina should know: she once pulled a bloke in the dim lighting of her local bouzouki and then realised it was her cousin.

The courageous Malawian woman in question, one Dorothy Gulo, is on record as explaining her motivations as: "I'd heard about men getting involved in a sexual relationship. I was curious so I accepted him." Call me a hardened old cynic, but that ain’t exactly the stuff of Air Supply ballads.

The whole episode is rendered more complex by the under-reported fact that Tiwonge identifies as a woman. Some would say this means there was no ‘gay’ relationship to start with: just two people living as man and wife, in the way that God and Sarah Palin intended. In this sense, Steven’s flight to the arms of Dorothy isn’t some kind of seismic shift in sexual identity at all. I eat Judith Butler for breakfast, but sometimes I miss the good old days when you could assess someone’s gender by pulling their pants down when they weren’t expecting it.

The issue of homophobia in Africa, to get serious for a moment, has more layers than Hastings Banda’s three-piece silk suits. (And I’m assuming, for the sake of this metaphor, that those had loads of layers.) For every Museveni claiming that homosexuality is ‘un-African’, you get a leftie anthropologist earnestly pointing out that young Zulu men have been practising ukusoma (thigh-sex) with each other for centuries. Both points may have kernels of truth, but neither is strictly germane to a coherent discussion.

Personally, I wish Steven and Dorothy every happiness, and hope that Tiwonge finds a hot piece of man-flesh to make Steven steaming jealous.

And if you’d like a take-away thought, I point you to the words of one of the last century’s greatest thinkers, Juice Newton, in her underrated tract ‘Angel Of The Morning’: ‘If morning’s echo says we’ve sinned, well, it was what we wanted now.’

This Is Not About The World Cup

2010-06-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning feeling dirty, inside and out.

I have given up drinking, you see, and replaced it with jogging and being smug.

For two glorious weeks not a drop of the devil’s tears has passed my lips. But this weekend, as an act of solidarity with the World Cup’s host nation, I threw myself with unseemly vigour off the wagon, and sustained some psychic bruising in the process.

As a result, I had quite specific requirements for the café where I would slake my hungover thirst and hunger today. Not for me the well-lit Americanised neutrality of a Starbucks or a Café Nero. This would not be a simple act of refuelling, but an exercise in penance. I would search for the café I deserved.

As soon as I walked in I knew that I had found it.

It was less a ‘coffee shop’, in the traditional sense, than a cathedral to gloom. It was dark. Shabby little booths were upholstered with torn and scuffed velvet. Attempts at decoration appeared to have stopped with an uneven line of loudly-ticking clocks affixed to one peeling wall. Their melancholic time-keeping provided the only sound other than that of the octogenarian proprietor dolefully mopping the floor. Shuffle, slop, shuffle, slop; with the kind of dignified misery it takes a lifetime to perfect. He looked like he might just whip out a knife and kill himself at any point. Maybe just saw his own head off right then and there.

I requested a vat of coffee and his greasiest breakfast in a tone of weary sadness which seemed appropriate to the setting, and settled into a booth near the back with a newspaper. I avoided eye-contact with the only other customer, a pony-tailed man in his seventies completing a Sudoku in a depressed sort of way.

Over the course of the next hour, the place gradually filled up a bit. But, absorbed in my reading, I didn’t pay much attention.

Then, putting my newspaper down to eavesdrop on a conversation and observe my co-patrons a little closer, I realised with a sudden start that everyone was insane.

An old Jamaican man in front of me talked to himself unceasingly for 40 minutes, punctuating his monologue with wheezy chuckles, sighs and head-shakes.

A younger guy walked in and was greeted with ‘Good morning.’ He spun to face the speaker. ‘What’s good about it?’ he demanded, but with a strange, frenzied ferocity, as if he had wagered his life-savings in a bet on the response.

A woman interrupted him: ‘What’s wrong with your eye?’ There was nothing visibly wrong with his eye. He swung round to her. ‘Ssssssh!’ he whispered, in a panicky sort of way, his eyes darting around the room, pressing his index finger to his lips.

Another woman stumbled in. Her hands were black with dirt. She had scraped her hair up into a kind of bouffant Amy Winehouse effect, using what appeared to be a pair of old underpants. She wore wild eyeliner and holey tights. She was the maddest one of all.

She turned to the one normal person in the café, an ostensibly sane woman having coffee with her mother.

‘Allo,’ croaked the madwoman.

‘Hello,’ replied the sane woman, with some hesitation, but quite courteously.

‘Aven’t seen you for a while,’ slurred the madwoman. It seemed to me profoundly unlikely that they would ever have had cause to meet socially before, but the normal one seemed not to want to offend.

‘No,’ she said, with an awkward half-laugh. Then, clearly striving desperately for something appropriate to say, added: ‘You look good.’

YOU LOOK GOOD!

I mean, she really didn’t look good. She looked like she was coming down off a twenty-five-year-long heroin bender. She looked like she had recently been scrabbling on her hands and knees in a ditch for fag-ends. She looked like someone dressed up as a mad drug addict for a play. She did not look good.

‘Fanks,’ she mumbled.

The normal woman, perhaps feeling she had to expand on her rash compliment, pressed on. ‘I like… what you’ve done with your hair,’ she said cautiously.

I believe I have already mentioned the fact that her barnet consisted of a scraggly beehive held together with a pair of torn knickers. It was essentially the hairdo equivalent of wearing a t-shirt proclaiming ‘I AM OFF MY FUCKING HEAD’.

‘It looks almost… African,’ the normal one elaborated.

A shadow passed across the madwoman’s face. She didn’t like this idea one little bit.

‘No,’ she growled, shaking her head defiantly.

‘Yeah, a bit like an African…turban,’ the normal one said, clicking her fingers with the satisfaction of someone hitting on a phrase that perfectly captures what’s in their head.

‘NO!’ snarled the madwoman, turning her back on her interlocutor furiously and continuing to shake her head in a frenzy of non-cooperation.

I ducked behind my newspaper hastily, terrified that I would be called upon to referee the dispute.

I wondered how all the crazies knew which café to meet at. Perhaps, I considered, they have community-mobilising resources we don’t know about. And if so, isn’t that a bit unnerving?

Walking home, I was struck by an even more frightening possibility: what if they thought I was one of them?

Havana Good Time

2010-05-25T17:03:00.000-07:00

I went to Cuba last week. I felt guilty because the whole time I was there I was secretly hoping that Fidel Castro would die. I kept thinking what a wicked anecdote it would make. ‘Politics? Don’t talk to me about politics. I was in Havana when Castro kicked it, you know.’ Then I’d lean back in my chair and light a cigarette with a far-away, world-weary expression, as if I’d seen things I couldn’t possibly discuss in polite company.

Every time I saw the slightest sign of an animated group of people talking together, I felt sure the moment had come. My guidebook told me that Cubans don’t like to use Castro’s name in conversation - as has been the case throughout history with other feared dictators, like Voldemort. Instead, they make the sign of a beard, or tap two fingers on their shoulders, to represent his military epaulettes. I scrutinised their every gesture hungrily but I never saw anyone do that.

I was burning to discuss Castro and everything else with real-life Cubans. ‘Hola, señor,’ I wanted to say, casually approaching someone with a mojito. ‘So how’s that whole communist vibe working out for ya?’

But we were hamstrung by our lack of Spanish and I was afraid of being thrown into a gulag by an undercover policeman. Or, worse still, tapping my shoulder with two fingers while making meaningful eye-contact and having people think I was wiping away dandruff or something.

But in our taxi on the way to the airport, we had an unusually loquacious, English-speaking driver. We passed by an official-looking building. He gestured towards it. ‘That is where Fidel lives now,’ he said, just tossing the name out there without so much as bothering to make the sign of the beard. ‘They make hospital for him in there.’

‘Ooooh,’ we breathed, noses pressed to the window.

‘Sometimes he come out,’ he continued. ‘He crazy, sometimes he come out and walk around naked waving his arms wah-wah-wah.’

‘Really?’ we squealed, eyes wide as saucers, willing Fidel to do exactly that as we cruised by. Imagine the Facebook photos!

‘No,’ he said abruptly and unsmilingly.

We shrunk back into our seats, ashamed.

Since Cubans have no financial incentive to work hard, they’re expected to do so largely on the basis of inspiration from the propaganda billboards which line the streets in the places where commercial advertising features in other countries. One popular poster proclaims ‘Vamos bien!’: ‘We’re doing well!’

I mean, it’s not great, is it. ‘You’re doing well!’ It’s the kind of exhortation a mother shouts pleadingly at her fat kid as he shuffles in last place around the track at Sports Day. It’s not exactly Churchillian in its rhetorical force. If I was slogging away with my machete on the sugarcane field and I saw a poster saying ‘You’re doing well!’, I’d mutter ‘Glad you think so’, and stuff a bit more pilfered sugarcane into my backpack to sell on the black market, and then take a long nap between the furrows.

You can understand how people get a little down, and take it out on innocent, angel-faced tourists.

One steaming hot afternoon, I was standing in an alley outside the casa where we were staying, having a smoke before I joined the others inside. A man approached me. He gestured at my cigarette packet and said ‘You give me cigarette.’

‘No,’ I replied.

He stopped.

‘Why?’ he asked, perfectly reasonably.

‘Because I only have four left,’ I replied, with equally rational logic. Up to this point, the exchange had the civilised thrust-and-parry of a debate in the Oxford Union.

He stepped close to me and stabbed his finger in my face. “Choo are a fuckeeng muddafucka,’ he hissed.

Then he walked away, before turning around again from about two metres. ‘A fuckeeng muddafucka!’ he yelled, to make sure there were no misunderstandings.

That hurt my feelings a bit. For Christ’s sake, there was only a lousy Marlboro Light at stake. It wasn’t like I had dragged his mum into the road by her hair and forced her to submit to humiliating sexual acts.

Then I considered the fact that maybe he’d have been able to barter the smoke for a chicken, or a house, and I felt a bit bad.

But I’m giving a distorted view here, because most Cubans were perfectly friendly to us. This nice bartender in Varadero, a beach resort, asked my sister repeatedly if she’d go swimming alone with him at night. Awww! Now that’s hospitality.

Every time he suggested it to her, she said ‘Maybe later,’ with an airy gesture intended to indicate somewhere around ten-past-never.

To capitalise on his affections, when I went up to get a round of drinks, I beckoned him over and confided: ‘I’m Rachel’s sister,’ in the hope of jumping the queue.

He looked at me with pity.

‘I’m very sorry,’ he said gently, with the air of someone declining a date with a deranged admirer, ‘But I have already spoken with Rachel.’

I was pretty crushed, I can tell you. There’s nothing like being turned down for sex you haven’t even offered to make you feel rubbish.

Conversationally, the Cubans were a distinct cut above the French-Canadians that swarmed all over Varadero like gravy and cheese over a big plate of poutine. They were invariably astonished to hear we were South African. ‘Buut…’ they’d say, their faces screwed up with confusion, jabbing at their forearms, ‘not black?’

‘I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Apartheid,’ I’d begin my patient lecture on the evidence for the existence of white South Africans. ‘But the whole point…’

At the swimming pool we met one très genial man from Montreal, Edmond, who worked for a beer company. Struggling for conversation, having already mined all possible resources from the discussion of poutine, I asked him if he had ever been to Caya Largo, another Cuban beach resort famed for its beauty.

‘Uuuurgh,’ he spat with revulsion: ‘Non! Non! Caya Largo eez fifi!”

‘What does fifi mean?’ I asked, thinking that maybe it meant, you know, a bit twee.

‘Zere are all ze men, and zey go swimmeeng like zis,’ he said, and stood up to perform a grotesque pantomime of a man going for a dip with his penis waving about freely.

‘Tu comprends?’ he enquired earnestly. To help illuminate matters, he pulled a nearby male friend close, puckered up his face for a kiss and then pushed him away rather more roughly than was strictly necessary. ‘Eeeeeeeuwwwwwww!’ he yelled merrily, chuckling wildly at the hilarity of it all.

‘Back in Montreal,’ he continued, composing himself, ‘I have one friend who is fifi! I cannot have two fifis! Or three fifis! One fifi, eet eez enough!’

‘That’s funny, I also have a fifi friend,’ began my travel-companion Theo, until I kicked her savagely under the water and she fell silent.

But that’s the problem with opening up your country to tourists. All you get are prissy bitches who won’t share their cigarettes, stuck-up cows who won’t go swimming with you late at night, and a whole bunch of fifis.

The Beautiful Game

2010-05-02T10:19:00.000-07:00

I have been resident in the UK for just over 4 years. I exhibit most of the classic behavioural tendencies of immigrants: I am hardworking, ambitious, hate other immigrants and run a small corner-shop. Well, I did run a small corner-shop until the recession hit and people didn’t want to buy corners any more, so I had to close up. The financial crisis has also meant that I’ve had to cut back on being hardworking and ambitious, so I basically just hate other immigrants full-time now.

Another thing I’ve started doing that immigrants are really into is attending public meetings. This week, for instance, I went to my area’s public election hustings. I was told that was where people got to grill the election candidates, so I brought along a pair of barbecue tongs and a six-pack of Fosters. I came home hungry and disappointed.

This week I also had a run-in with about 60 of my old colonial masters, in another public meeting. I was asked to sit on a panel to address members of the England Football Supporters Association about the upcoming World Cup in South Africa. Turns out the famously shy-and-retiring wickle flowers who follow the England team around the world yelling ‘Oggy Oggy Oggy’ and bashing other fans’ heads in with beer bottles were feeling a wickle scared about braving the dark continent. Bless ‘em.

I had assumed that the event would be held in some kind of hall, but I discovered upon arrival that they’d hired out a pub. In retrospect, duhhh. Research has shown that if England football fans are removed from their natural environment of bacon-flavoured crisps and kegs of lager, they will wither and die within ten minutes. The organisers weren’t taking any chances. The audience was already set up with foaming beer-glasses, and entry-rights had been restricted to individuals wearing St George’s flags emblazoned on their ample midriffs. Some of the women sported St George’s crosses in a diamante-studded effect, which Vogue informs me is the dernier cri in forward-looking fashion for this season’s sartorially-minded football yob.

The meeting’s setting also ensured that the pearls of reassuring wisdom dropping from our chiselled South African lips were regularly interrupted by the emergence of the pub’s cook, bearing steaming plates of deep-fried dinner, shrieking “SAUSAGES AND CHIPS? WHO ORDERED SAUSAGES AND CHIPS?” I bet Mandela never had to put up with that at the UN.

There were four of us on the panel, and 60 of them, so I instantly calculated that in hand-to-hand combat we’d be outnumbered 15 to 1. And, of course, they’d have St George on their side. Despite my apprehensions, however, things started off perfectly amicably. We painted the picture of a dreamy utopian society where the sun always shines, the three-quid wine flows like water, and the friendly natives are standing by to take stranded English fans into their homes in time of accommodation need, and ferry them by piggyback from Bloemfontein to Rustenburg if they miss their flight connections.

Then things suddenly took a turn for the worse. A large gentleman lumbered to his feet and announced: “Your national airways, Souf African Airways, has just released a report predicting that seventy fousand pieces of luggage will be stolen, not lost, stolen, by baggage-handlers during the World Cup. What d’you ‘ave to say about that?"

I choked back what I actually ‘ad to say about that, which was that he would be pleased to hear that the freebase cocaine he so clearly indulges in is also cheaply available in South Africa. A secondary preferred response might have been ‘You do the legacy of St George a disservice when you lie like that,’ and yet a third could have been ‘Well, that figure should set your minds at ease, since a report in December last year showed that 2.1 million pieces of baggage go missing at English airports every year’.

(Unfortunately I didn’t have that latter factoid to hand at the time – it’s the fruits of my post-event rage-fuelled googling. Which also failed to bring up any trace, unsurprisingly, of this alleged own-goal PR masterstroke on SAA’s part – the “report” promising to steal fliers’ luggage.)

We spoke instead of South Africa’s new space-age airports, of the Orwellian surveillance systems, of baggage-handlers who were so congenitally honest that they wouldn’t even be able to bring themselves to pull a sickie when they were less than terminally ill…but to no avail. The ubuntu spell had been broken. Low-level mutterings of disapproval began to hum and build. Lager was downed with renewed ferocity.

Then things kicked off in earnest: the AWB menace was apparently keeping them up at night. Would they be hacked to bits by machetes in the race war?

"Machetes?" said my co-panellist Audrey. "No. Criminals in South Africa use guns."

How we laughed! When I say ‘we’, I mean the four of us on the panel. No-one else laughed.

"Also, with regards to the AWB threat," Audrey continued (in for a penny, in for a pound), "It’s my understanding that white supremacists don’t tend to kill white people."

How I clutched my aching sides! How they didn’t.

I tried to appeal to our shared common-man status, to convince them I wasn’t a government apparatchik feeding them lies.

“As an ordinary South African,” I began, “I can tell you that the AWB is a laughably insignificant political force in South Africa.” (I had been planning to draw a parallel between the position occupied by the AWB in the South African popular imagination and that of the BNP in the UK. Then I looked around at the sea of St George’s flags and rapidly thought better of it.)

"That’s not true!" they shouted, brandishing their pint-glasses. "We read about them all the time in the newspapers here!"

"Well, certainly up until Eugene Terreblanche’s murder, they hadn’t received any media coverage in South Africa for years," I said. ["MASH AND BEANS, ANYONE? WHO ORDERED MASH AND BEANS?"]

"South Africa doesn’t have any newspapers!" someone yelled in a sudden stroke of inspiration.

"Yes they do!" I shouted back fretfully.

"Well, no-one reads newspapers in South Africa!" the same genius cried, practically orgasming at his own cleverness.

["SAUTEED IMMIGRANT? I HAVE ONE PORTION OF SAUTEED IMMIGRANT?"]

"Anyway, what about that Julius Malema?" someone else shouted. "That bloke who goes around saying he wants to kill all the white people!"

Audrey again fearlessly stepped up to the challenge. "Technically he only wants to kill farmers," she kindly explained. Again, this went down like a… like a confident black woman making a joke at the expense of a bunch of white football fans. (Personally, I think we could have done more with this comedic opportunity by exploiting the homophone of ‘boer’ vs ‘boor’, but, y’know, je ne regrette rien.)

"Start treating us with some integrity!" someone cried.

The High Commission’s representative attempted to pour some diplomatic oil. "Look, I’ll be interested to hear what you guys say about this all when you get back from South Africa," he said.

"IF we come back from South Africa!" came the response, which may or may not have been accompanied by some high-fiving.

The fun just carried right on. "The UK is playing the USA in Rustenburg. This is the perfect opportunity for a terrorist attack. What guarantees can you give us that such a terror attack won't take place?"

Answer: none, other than the certainty that a million virgins waiting for suicide bombers in the Islamic afterlife are not sufficient recompense for losing your life in Rustenburg.

And on, and on, until the panel’s convenor drew things to a merciful close. "I think we’ve all really learned a lot tonight," he said brightly. "Now I’m sure you’d all like to buy our panellists a drink."

I didn’t see a lot of people enthusiastically assenting to this proposition, but I may have missed them in my frenzied sprint for the door. If there’s one thing we immigrants know, it’s when you’ve overstayed your welcome.

Speaking Out On Behalf Of The Blind

2010-04-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven’t blogged for a while. It was cos of the volcano.

I have so little respect for you that I can’t even be bothered to make up a better excuse. What does that say about you? You need to have a good, hard think about where you’re going wrong.

It may interest you to learn that I work from home. It may interest you to learn that I work, for that matter, but I’m not prepared to discuss that.

Anyway, as a result, it’s, what, 11.29, on a perfectly serviceable Wednesday morning, and I am literally lying in bed. That’s not a figure of speech; I’m typing this (with slight discomfort) from an almost totally supine position. Although I am tightly swaddled in blankets, I am wearing a thick blue dressing gown, for added cosy-factor. I have not showered, which is also not on my any-time-soon to-do list; and I may or may not have recently concluded breakfasting on a packet of jelly-tots.

Can you please stop thinking about how goddamn sexy I am and focus on the actual content of what I’m saying?

Thank you.

I am not idle, just to clarify: I am still conducting business from this position. It gives me a body-convulsing frisson of excitement to be sending important and professional emails from my Outlook account while essentially wallowing in my own filth and intermittently shovelling great fistfuls of sweeties into my mouth. Sometimes I even take important and professional phonecalls, which necessitates the hurried oral ejection of half-masticated bonbons.

‘Oral ejection’ sounds really pervy, but it’s actually not.

Basically, if freedom really is just another word for nothing left to lose, as the great Kris Kristofferson once suggested, then I count myself joyfully, wildly, inspiringly dispossessed.

Why this kind of emancipation is so awesome is because it allows you to pursue your own interests during work-breaks in a way you might feel uncomfortable about in an open-plan office.

I have many interests, and a recent addition is porn for the blind.

Perhaps you, in your usual uncaring, fully-sighted selfishness, have never even stopped for a moment to consider ‘Hey! I wonder how people who can’t see have a wank.’ You disgust me.

Because I am better than you, I have contemplated this, and now I have the answer. Two answers, in fact.

The first is that an enterprising lady has just brought out a porn book for the blind, ‘Tactile Minds’. Check it out, you know you want to. Go on, I’ll still be here when you get back.

It’s rubbish, right? Can you believe that shit retails for $225? I mean, why doesn’t she just go up to blind people on the street and grab their wallets and run away?

Also, is this woman on crack? She appears to have extremely bizarre notions about what constitutes mainstream eroticism for the visually-impaired. I don’t actually know any blind straight men – I realise this makes it sound as if, by contrast, I have a vast personal retinue of blind gay men, which is sadly not the case either – but I’m willing to bet that no-one on God’s good earth is aroused at the prospect of:

A tactile picture of a woman dressed as a pink elephant. She wears a cardboard & paper mask, a chest plate with holes for her breasts, and paper "feet" tie around her wrists with ribbon. Her vagina is shaved, and her pregnant belly is small.

It’s just insulting. If I was blind I’d write a strongly-worded letter to the UN. Or dictate a strongly-worded letter to the UN to my carer.

Or, perhaps, I would take up my other option for solo erotic stimulation: by listening to transcripts of porn films narrated by helpful volunteers. Yes, friends and creepy strangers, I am about to induct you into a whole new universe of fun:http://pornfortheblind.org/. You’re welcome.

Actually, don’t thank me yet. Particularly if you’re blind and, y'know, really depend on this stuff.

For a start, they insist on laboriously spelling out the URLs of the dodgy sites they’ve accessed the free 30-second porn clips from, forward-slash after agonising forward-slash. It takes about a minute on its own. Why bother? These people will not be returning to the site on their own to see the action for themselves.

Secondly, the people they have roped in to do the commentary are ludicrously bad. In the interests of research, I have listened to a number that are narrated by what seems to be a dorm-room of giggling frat-boys, who make no effort to restrain their shrieks and yelps of juvenile hilarity as they talk you through the action. Pull it together, chaps! Someone out there is earnestly trying to masturbate to this! Have some fucking respect.

The creepiest one I’ve heard has got to be ‘Girl fucking Barbie’. It is disturbing partly because it appears to be voiced by a bored 14-year-old girl killing time between Facebook and homework. She almost audibly yawns as she drones her way through deeply unsettling lines like ‘The whore is inserting the Barbie’s legs now’.

I don’t mean to be churlish about this public-spirited project, but there’s also a weirdly racist slant to many of the clip titles, which I think we all agree demeans the reputation of our blind masturbating friends. After all, some of my best blind masturbating friends are black.

In short, 10/10 for charitable intentions, 0/10 for execution.

I’d like to know whether the blind community is as outraged about the paucity of high-quality pornographic resources for them as they have every right to be. And how heartbreaking if the reason they're blind in the first place is from over-masturbation!

If nothing else, my foray into the world of porn for the disabled has conclusively answered that old question of whether you’d rather be blind or deaf. Because the specialised pornographic offerings for the Deaf – c’mon, I had to! – are loads better. Basically you get hot blondes in bunny-costumes painstakingly using sign language to inform the audience of exactly which filthy thing they’re about to do next. Which is really nice of them.

It seems odd that porn for the deaf even exists. Surely no-one watches pornos for the dialogue? And as far as I understand, plot structures tend to be of the kind that don’t really require verbal elaboration.

But that still leaves the blind community high and dry. I shall be contacting my MP directly.

The Naked Class-Traitor

2010-04-08T12:54:00.000-07:00

Jamie Oliver. What an arse.

Yes, you heard me. Chubby-cheeked cheeky-chappie Jamie, all tooth-gap, glottal stops and dimples, “drizzle this”, “bish bosh that”. Can't stand him.

But this week I was heartened to discover I have allies in the citizens of Huntingdon, West Virginia, who took umbrage with his attempt to peddle his noxious dietary fascism around the States in a kind of sinister second-wave colonising exercise.

I'm referring to his latest culinary-missionary endeavour, 'Food Revolutions', the TV show where he trundles about America telling everyone they're a bit 'mouse and rat' (fat) and should eat more 'lyrical ballad' (salad). Those are not real pieces of Cockney rhyming slang, I just 'laid them cups' (made them ups) like he does.

The jolly burghers of Huntingdon were just about to crack into their peaceful daily brekkie of supersized Hawaiian pizzas washed down with vats of chocolate milkshake, when who should burst in but Jamie, oozing laddish judgement.

The Huntingdonians didn't like his attitude one little bit. They unpicked the pieces of pineapple off their pizza and threw them at him, since they didn't want those bits anyway.

Then they rubbed 'im up and down with a lovely little piece of rosemary, drizzled 'im with just a splash of balsamic vinegar, stuck 'im on a great big skewer and ate a delicious Jamie kebab. And it only took five minutes' preparation, tops.

Not really. They actually just formed an enormous phalanx, distended belly to distended belly, and waddled him out of town.

"We don't want to sit around eating lettuce all day!” yelled one local DJ after him.

It was all too much for wickle Jamie, and he ended up in tears, wailing “They don't understand me”.

Well, I would like it known that I stand (or sprawl, rather) in complete solidarity with the citizens of Huntingdon, West Virginia.

Partly, this is because in my own life my girlfriend plays Jamie Oliver to my heart-disease-ridden Huntingdonian.

As a result, I know how it breaks one's spirit to be continually told that “chicken nuggets aren't a breakfast food”, and “it's unnecessary to put salt on your teacakes”, and “cereal is made to be eaten with milk, not Sprite”. You know what I mean? It gets a gal down. For heaven's sake, I don't want to sit around eating lettuce all day! I am not a 'nun's habit'!

But the other reason I'm with the Huntingdon folk is that Jamie Oliver is a big fat class-ist. I had it out with my girlfriend about this the other day.

“You know what? Jamie Oliver is a big fat class-ist,” I said to her.

Lowering her newspaper and eyeing me with her customary thinly-veiled disgust, she said: “Do you really need that extra butter on your icecream?”

“Yes, actually, I do,” I responded, with the dignified defiance which is the signature of my relationship behaviour.

“Fine,” she said, with the weary resignation which is the signature of her relationship behaviour. “Why is Jamie Oliver a big fat class-ist?”

"Because,” I began, “he only goes after poor working-class communities. It's like poverty porn.”

I could see she was a bit impressed by the phrase 'poverty porn', so I continued.

“He goes in and is all paternalistic and, like, stop feeding your kids KFC and have some of this lovely-jubbly basil pesto, and all the middle-class people watching are all sniggering 'look at those chavs eating KFC for breakfast, don't they know anything', and the poor people are like 'Oh fanks very much Jamie, we're only gonna eat basil pesto forever now innit' while rolling their eyes at each other behind his back, and the minute the camera's off they tuck straight back into their KFC cos it's ￡1.99 for 25 chicken nuggets – which are fucking delicious I might add – as opposed to ￡17 to amass the raw ingredients for basil pesto, oh, and also, they don't have time to go to Fresh & Wild to pick up some fucking pinenuts because they've been down the mine all day.”

I was quietly pleased with my cogent and incisive analysis, and waited, head bowed modestly, for her appreciation.

“Um,” she said, “But the reason he targets poor working-class communities is because they tend to have the most unhealthy diets.”

"Ho really?” I blustered, caught off guard. “Really? Do they? DO THEY?”

"Yes,” she replied, and turned back to her newspaper.

I thought really hard, panicking slightly, for several minutes. Then I had it.

“Ho, well, what I want to know,” I said, mentally high-fiving myself, “what I want to know is, what about the super super rich people who subsist off very very enormously unhealthy diets of, like, cream-soaked guinea-fowl stuffed inside butter-drowned pigs?”

Boo-yah.

“Um...” she said, with a look I couldn't quite interpret, so I chose to take as imminent surrender to my superior point. I could smell victory.

"You know what you never see?” I said, warming rapidly to my theme. “You never see him going into, like, CASTLES, and to Oxford college High Tables, and being like, 'Oi mate, that cream-soaked guinea-fowl's gonna do yer heart in, you should get the cook to make some of this scrummy basil pesto'.”

She sighed, a long, fatigued deflation. “I don't think guinea fowl's actually that unhealthy,” she said. “And anyway, I don't think rich people really eat like that all the time.”

“I bet they bloody do, you know,” I said, darkly. “I bet they bloody do. When they're not feasting off the flesh of POOR PEOPLE.”

"You know what?” she said. “You look hot with buttered icecream all over your lower face. Let's have sex.”

And due to the raw, unabashed carnality into which the discussion descended, I never even got to make my killer point.

Which is: if Jamie Oliver's so goddamn healthy and all, how come his face is so puffy and pasty? If I saw him in my local pub I'd assume he sat around all day stuffing his chubby cheeks with crisps and sausage rolls.

Ooh, crisps and sausage rolls: that'll do nicely for dinner. Bish bosh.

In It To Win It

2010-03-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

I play the lottery.

Actually, I reject the verb ‘play’, because that implies an element of frivolity which is entirely lacking from my engagement with the lottery. To say that I ‘work’ the lottery is perhaps more appropriate. I invest in the lottery, even better, as this accommodates the sense of guaranteed returns.

People like you look down on people like me. Because you don’t play the lottery, do you? Ho no. “Fools’ tax, innit,” you sneer. “Designed to keep the untermenschen in their place by ensuring they spend all their disposable income on gambling.”

Well, this just isn’t true. On the latter point, the proletariat don’t spend all their income gambling, they also spend quite a bit of it on cider, fags, and X Factor text-votes. On the first point, who exactly is going to be the fool out of you and me when I am the one carrying a giant oversized cheque for £40 million?

That’s right. It will be you.

The lottery has been on my mind for a while because of my growing disapproval of the behaviour of lottery winners: a charmed group which, up to this point, does not yet include me.

Unless you count the time a few months ago when I got an email telling me that “Camelot has some very exciting news about your Euromillions ticket! Please log on to your online account.”

(Like most serious, professional lottery players, I conduct my business online, rather than in the grubby ‘two Creme Eggs and a Euromillions lucky-dip strip please’ corner-store of yesteryear.)

In the twenty seconds it took me to exit my email and access my online account, that 40 million quid was as good as spent.

‘I’ve gone and done it,’ I thought, without much surprise, just the satisfaction of someone finally receiving their due. ‘I’ve only gone and won the bloody lottery.’

‘Congratulations!’ flashed the message on the screen, just as I’d always pictured it in my financial forecasting sessions.

‘You have won £5.’

‘5 quid?’ I thought, wrestling with the cognitive dissonance that accompanies the reduction of your expectations by 39 million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five pounds. ‘That’s not very much. Still, it’ll cover half the cost of my tickets for next week.’

But to return to my gripe: I have long been disappointed by lottery winners.

It seems practically de rigueur, these days, to win about fifty million pounds and then frame your plans for the money and its attendant celebrations in the most dreary way imaginable.

I’ve seen it at least a dozen times recently. ‘John Smith, you’ve just won FIFTY MILLION POUNDS!’ shrieks the journalist. ‘How will you celebrate?’

‘Well,’ sighs the winner, as if the sheer ennui of it all is just too draining to contemplate, ‘me and the missus might go down the kebab van later and get some chips and gravy, and since it’s a special occasion, maybe beans on top as well.’

‘And the money? Any immediate plans?’ hyperventilates the hack.

‘We’ve been saving up for new grouting for the bathroom, so I reckon we’ll finish that off first,’ he’ll yawn. ‘I’ve had my eye on a nice little piece of lineoleum from B &Q for the front hallway. We’ll be able to get that now, of course, maybe even a couple of square metres extra, and not have to worry about it.’

‘And don’t forget the kids,’ drones his wife. ‘There’ll be a packet of crisps for each of them, and a family-pack of KitKats to share in front of the telly later.’

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

Anyone who has the temerity to express such rubbish plans for the money should be instantly stripped of it. The lottery is the theatre of dreams! Jealousy, avarice, gluttony, lust, and madness: these are the passionate and worthy emotional states which should play out across the lottery’s glittering stage. Not modesty, caution, prudence, humility, and good sense. Where’s the fun in that? If that’s what I was into, I’d put my weekly lottery spend into a “savings account”, which I believe is a special piggy-bank for people devoid of imagination or hope.

Lottery winners betray all of us with their leaden aspirations.

If I won the lottery, I know exactly what I’d say, because the scene rehearses itself in my head quite regularly.

‘Bec Davis, you’ve just won FIFTY MILLION POUNDS!’ screams the journo. ‘How will you spend the money?’

‘I shall build a castle made entirely from cheese,’ I will explain, with quiet confidence and poise. ‘The biggest castle the world has ever seen, and there will be a moat of Fanta, which will flow in orange radiance around its stinky perimeter. In the grounds I shall maintain my own zoo, and keep a pygmy elephant , who will wear a waistcoat of saffron, and serve me great goblets of Veuve Cliquot from a tray around its neck.

'There will be a cat as big as a pony, on which I shall ride around the castle, reeling drunk, with a sack of cream crackers on my back, snacking on the turrets and battlements. I will never wear grotty human fabrics on my skin any more, but only materials spun from gossamer and starlight. A troupe of dwarf troubadours will accompany me wherever I ride, serenading me with numbers from the back catalogue of Dusty Springfield. '

If this is all sounding a tad Michael Jackson-ish, then let me remind you: say what you like about the man, but if there’s one thing he never lacked, it was class. Our current crop of lotto millionaires would do well to take a few lessons.

The final straw for me was reading last week’s reports on lottery-winner Kevin Halstead, whose £2.2 million win happened the day after his divorce was finalised.

The comment from his ex-wife of one day? “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.”

No murderous envy, no seething rage, just an apparently sincere pat on the back. “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.” As if he’d just been made Employee Of The Month at Iceland.

I’d be so much better at winning the lottery than the people currently entrusted with the job. They should really let me have a bash at it. Any day now, I expect.

Bec Davis And The Metaphor of the Shabako Stone

2010-03-15T16:17:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend and I spent Saturday afternoon at the British Museum.

‘How do you do it?’ I hear you sigh. ‘How do you maintain your relentless rock ’n’ roll lifestyle?’

I dunno, honestly. We were still pretty worn out from the previous Saturday at Ikea in Milton Keynes, but those Benin bronzes weren’t going to thoughtfully examine themselves.

Actually, we were there to see the Nigerian sculpture exhibition, which should be compulsory viewing.

The exhibition is a fitting reminder that the average West African in 12 AD had a daily diary which looked something like: ‘Wake up. Stretch limbs on hand-carved throne-bed. Eat feast. Create highly sophisticated terracotta full-face mask to wear in complex spiritual ceremony later. Engage in multi-layered abstract thought. Sculpt naturalistic representation of wood-god from burnished copper and polished jewels. Eat feast. Debate creation myths,” and so on.

While most of the rest of the world, at this time, were ticking off their two solitary quotidian ‘to-do’s of ‘sit in own faeces’ and ‘root for grubs’.

In your face, Nick Griffin.

I hadn’t been to the British Museum for a while and I’d forgotten just how awesome it is.

Well, bits of it, anyway. I’ll be honest, the Chinese Ceramics have never done much for me, and I’m too scared to approach them after the whole Fitzwilliam Museum porcelain vase debacle. Remember that? When a visitor to the Cambridge museum in 2006 slipped on his shoelace, fell down the stairs, lurched into an exhibit, and smashed two priceless 300-year-old Qing vases into tiny, heartbreaking shards on the floor. I really felt for that guy. I think we all know it could have been any of us. The banality of vandalism, and all that.

But far and away the grooviest part of the British Museum has always been its Ancient Egypt holdings, or ‘thefts’, as I like to call them. (On that point: the Museum really needs to be more honest about its exhibits’ provenance. I suggest that appended to each item’s notes, where it currently says ‘Sudan, 14 AD,’ they should be forced to recount in full the circumstances of its robbery. ‘Lord Dewsberry distracted the Khartoum palace guards with a tap-dance routine while Morton Stanley-Livingstone jimmied off the ivory panels with a Swiss army knife.’)

Back to Ancient Egypt: that shit is wild. At the risk of sounding like an over-sugared fifth-grader writing up a report on a school trip, did you know they used to mummify animals as well as humans? And not just cats. Crocodiles too! And eels! Eels! What were you thinking, Rameses? Eels are the most rubbish creatures ever to mummify! They end up looking exactly like sausages in batter! And no-one wants that, unless you’re hungry and from Newcastle.

My favourite item in the British Museum, though, is the Shabako Stone. Here’s a picture of it. The Shabako Stone is a 710 BC slab on to which an ancient scholar carved sixty vertical columns of hieroglyphs recording the ‘Memphite Theology’: the story of how the god Ptah brought all things into creation.

So far, so impressive.

Until someone found it lying around a few centuries later and decided it would make a simply ripping millstone.

Let’s take a moment to give this the attention it so richly deserves. You spend the best part of your adult life painstakingly, agonizingly, chiselling away at a piece of rock, in order that the origins of the universe – the origins of the universe - not be forgotten.

Only for some halfwit to come along and think ‘hey, that’s flat and solid – I’m gonna grind me some corn on that sucker.’

As you’ll see from the picture, this ancient and holy tablet now has a whopping great hole in the middle, and huge troughs scarring it from where this numbskull sawed away, humming blithely, never once stopping to consider ‘Golly! In a world where a written alphabet is pretty novel, I’ll bet these weird inscriptions could mean something jolly important!’

Isn’t this the ultimate illustration of the futility of human endeavour? It’s pretty much the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m the world expert on depressing things, after spending three days dressed up as a Christmas elf in a Swindon shopping centre.

Let’s save future generations the time by burning down the libraries now. If any hardback dust-jackets survive the flames, we can saw them into bits and use them for coasters.

I could do with some extra coasters.

Feeling Lonely? Don't Rule Out Roulette

2010-03-08T15:54:00.000-08:00

You know those mornings when you wake up and think ‘Shit, I’d love to watch a stranger masturbating into a webcam today?’

No? If not, you’re on your own, at least if the spiralling popularity of Chat Roulette is anything to go by.

Chat Roulette, for those of you who inhabit a blissfully oblivious universe of lofty culture and highbrow political debate, is the latest craze to sweep the western world’s interwebs. (I specify the western world because I believe Chat Roulette is unavailable to South African internet users, in possibly the most egregious example to date of wanton discrimination against the global south.)

Chat Roulette is the brainchild of some Russian teenager who got bored with only Skyping his friends. And who can blame him? Winters in Tomsk can be slow; and haven’t we all, at times, railed against the petty social conventions which keep us from exchanging close-ups of our genitalia with strangers, unless the two participants in question are a loon on a London bus and me.

When you log on to chatroulette.com, you are only a click away from being connected to a webcam chat with a complete stranger. Should their appearance or conversational repertoire not meet your exacting standards, you simply press ‘next’ and another would-be chatter will replace them. It’s like speed-dating for people whose parole terms prevent them from leaving their bedrooms.

First things first. Yes, there are a lot of men wanking into their cameras. I read an article suggesting the approximate proportion was 1 in 10 users: from my experience, I’d put the figure substantially higher. Maybe that estimate wasn’t counting the dudes who have yet to get their wang all the way out, and initially confine themselves to groping within their underpants in a considerate way.

Fittingly, however, given that this month marks the 40^th anniversary of the Women’s Rights movement, there are also a small but heartening amount of women who are similarly happy to flash their woo-woos for the fans.

Conversation, which is mainly text-based, is somewhat less erudite than you may hope. An indication of the average age-range and dominant concerns of the participants is found in the fact that the number one chat-starter of choice appears to be: ‘have u ever had sex yet’.

A second common topic is dudes complaining about other dudes waving their schlongs around. To quote one of my male interlocutors (approx age: 15), ‘Im fead up’.

‘Why?’ I responded kindly.

‘All the dicks on here,” he answered. Then, to helpfully clarify his expectations: ‘I wanna see chicks pissing on the carpet.’

Like most of the content on the internet, Chat Roulette is simultaneously vein-severingly depressing and frighteningly addictive, in a kind of dead-inside way. Getting a glimpse into the lives of the Chat Roulette participants will confirm everything you have ever bleakly suspected about just how dark and miserable the human condition really is.

In my brief foray into this murky world, I did not witness any women performing sex acts on household pets, but apparently this is not uncommon. I did see a few things which chilled me to my core, though. Like a man standing completely still, wearing a black mask which concealed his whole face except his eyes, a black top hat and only a black waistcoat. If this doesn’t sound that creepy, picture that staring straight at the camera, straight at you, unmoving except for a slight nodding motion, silent, seeming to peer deep within your soul, even though you know rationally this is impossible because you don’t have a soul. Oh, and because you haven’t enabled a webcam, so he can’t see you back.

I also couldn’t shake my fear that every ‘next’ click was bringing me one click closer to witnessing a glimpse of some terrible crime: someone violently torturing an old lady who mutely mouths ‘help’ at the webcam before the image is whisked away to be replaced by another masturbator. Or a suicide: mark my words, blogosphere, someone is gonna top themselves live on Chat Roulette at some point soon, and then we’ll all be sorry.

Now I shall have a nice warm mug of cocoa and retire to bed. Sweet dreams.

This Blog Is By Appointment to Her Majesty

2010-02-27T01:58:00.000-08:00

~~The funniest thing happened to me on Tuesday night round the Queen’s place~~

~~Tuesday night? Oh, nothing much, just spent the evening with a few close friends and Elizabeth II~~

How does one casually drop into conversation that one spent one’s Tuesday evening at Buckingham Palace with the Queen?

I have thus far had only one opportunity to do so: namely, Wednesday morning, when I stumbled in a bleary haze out of my bedroom only to run into one of the many strangers who seem to wander around my new dwellings at any given time.

“Hello,” I croaked, trying to unglue my eyelids enough for it to seem like I was making eye-contact like a normal person.

“Hello,” she said, eyeing me with visible concern.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered hoarsely, gripping the staircase for support. “I’m just so terribly hungover.”

“Oh, I see!” she said brightly. “Why, where were you last night?”

The universe stood still for a moment. I felt as if I were teetering at the aeroplane’s entrance before an almighty skydive, and then I jumped.

“Buckingham Palace,” I said, trying to seem offhand while also focusing on not vomiting. “The Queen had a … thing.”

“Riiiight,” she said, in a tone I instantly recognized, because it was exactly the same one I used when that man on the bus told me he invented bungee jumping. “Anyway, nice to meet you.”

I stared after her, helpless, as she walked into the lounge. She thinks I’m a liar, I thought. She thinks I’m deranged, or pathologically dishonest, and that this is my crazy lie for today, but that by tomorrow I’ll have moved on to claim that Lindsay Lohan is my first cousin, or that my dad invented the fax machine, or something.

Maybe I should go after her, I thought. Maybe I should follow her into that room and convince her I am telling the truth by showing her my namebadge with the royal insignia on it. Or my invitation, on thick, embossed, ivory card. Or I could ask her to smell my hand, to see if there isn’t maybe the tiniest whiff of powdered glove on it.

I did nothing of the kind, though, because I felt too unwell.

Allow me to clarify a point which may have you confused: I doubt that the Queen was similarly indisposed on Wednesday morning. I did not receive any text messages from her, for instance, saying ‘Am sooooooo hungover LOL wtf did we do last nite???? Don’t u dare tag me in any pix on Facebook u biatch!’

Her Majesty did not hand around flaming sambucas, or lead us in a round of ‘how low can you go’, or dare people to see if they could down their drink quicker than her.

In fact, I did not see a drop of alcohol slip down her royal throat, which is obviously a bit irksome to contemplate now, like when your self-righteous teetotaller friend invites you round for dinner and you end up getting wa-hasted out of boredom and then she phones you the next morning, poison dripping from every syllable, to say ‘How’s the head?’

In fairness, it was not at the Palace itself that the descent into inebriation occurred, but afterwards. Afterwards, when we spilled like laughing children out into the rainy London evening, euphoric with reflected glory, sprinkled with the fairydust of proximity to ancient power, our heads filled with marvelling and wonder – it was then that we decided it might be nice to round off the evening with fourteen pints at the closest dive-bar. It only seemed fitting.

At Bucky P itself – which is how we regular visitors refer to it, or sometimes just as ‘Liz’s pad’ – behaviour was exemplary. I found myself experiencing a rush of unexpected affection for the short, hunched, white-haired lady whose hand I was so desperate not to squeeze (a devastating no-no, apparently) that I laid my sweaty palm in her glove with the softest of touches and withdrew it immediately, almost like a ‘Too slow’ high-five that you then stroke your hair mockingly with.

To compensate I went on to crunch Prince Philip’s hand as if we were engaged in an arm-wrestling competition, and then lingered in the hope that he would deliver some racist non-sequitur to me that I could then sell to the papers. Something like “South African, eh? And yet not a blackie. Extraordinary.” Instead of which he beamed at me perfectly benevolently and politically-correctly, and I felt ashamed.

The interior of Bucky P, I can report, is almost embarrassingly kitsch in places. In particular, the matching his-‘n’-hers pink thrones – hers embroidered with the ERII heraldry, his with a simple ‘P’ – would not be out of place in Paris Hilton’s boudoir.

The Palace toilet-paper is not, contrary to what you may have thought, embossed with any royal logo. Just as well, or whole rolls of it would have ended up in my borrowed handbag. You need to steal something with logo, my friend Cristina informed me sternly in advance of my visit. Anything with logo. But there was nothing with logo, other than the thrones, which would have presented logistical difficulties to smuggle out.

I could tell you the tales of my brief yet shudderingly erotic encounters ‘neath the Palace roof with the likes of Annie Lennox, but I’m saving those for the many, many moments of casual chat over the next four decades where I shall name-drop my soiree chez Windsors. In the process I shall no doubt shed friends by the dozen, until I am old, incontinent and alone, rocking back and forth in my chair, murmuring ‘Did I mention that I met the Queen?' And it’ll still be worth it.

For now I will confine myself to mentioning a chat I had at the boozy tail-end of the evening with the Management Accountant of the Royal Household, an Afrikaans woman from the Klein Karoo with an accent so thick and warm I wanted to spread it on my toast. She has weekly one-on-ones with the Queen, she told me, where the Queen pours over the figures for all her properties with steely vigilance, alert to sudden upturns in the quantity of dishwashing liquid purchased for Balmoral, or the amount of lamb-chunks for the corgis they’re going through at Windsor.

“And you know the thing about the Queen?” she said earnestly. “She don’t take shit, hey.”

With those words echoing, her colleague gently but firmly began to usher us towards the Palace doors.

Tea Cake Or Not Tea Cake?

2010-02-14T17:01:00.000-08:00

Happy V-Day!

V stands, in this instance, for Victory over the dark horsemen of solitude and sadness. On this 14^th of February, year of our Lord 2010, I am a winner!

My girlfriend thinks she is the real winner. She tricked me today by giving me a present after we had explicitly agreed not to exchange gifts. And then she said sweetly, ‘This means I won Valentine’s Day, right?’

As if Valentine’s Day were the egg-and-spoon race at the school fête, instead of one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar!

We celebrated in modest but appropriate style, by engaging in some low-key sexual intercoursing, and then going to see A Single Man, the perfect Valentine’s date movie if you will stop at nothing to ensure that your date exits the cinema affixed to your person like a limpet, sobbing “please don’t end our illicit gay relationship by dying in a car accident on the icy roads or I’ll have to kill myself like a somewhat wobbly-jowled Colin Firth”.

Colin Firth did quite a good job of acting like a professional homosexual. He even had to kiss one dude with tongue, and achieved it without any visible on-camera retching.

I’ve never understood why straight women are so crazy for Colin Firth. I suppose it’s because he played that wedge of emotionally-retarded masculinity, Darcy. Well, hopefully the millions of chicks whose panties moisten when his wobbly-jowled English face arrives on screen won’t be put off by seeing him pop a chubbie over naked pics of his dead boyfriend.

V-Day comes at the end of a week where I came down with a nasty cold, discovered that my computer had been taken over by a malicious virus, contemplated the crushing emptiness at my existential core, and realized that I have an inordinate fondness for tea-cakes.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking that tea-cakes are muffin or scone-type confections, right? Little baked goods. Wrong, amigos, dead wrong. Tea-cakes begin with a layer of biscuit, atop which is perched a large mess of soft marshmallow, and the whole fiendish creation then enrobed in cheap chocolate. They are, in a word, yumbles.

Yesterday I ate eight of them in a row. I’m not even embarrassed, seriously, even though you have to unwrap them individually, which you’d think would act as some kind of mental firewall. Not for me. I’m like one of Charlie Bucket’s breadline-dwelling elderly relatives.

Of all the ills that beset me this week, my computer getting hijacked by the Paladin virus was by far the most disruptive. It has made its presence felt by splattering porn all over my desktop, whimsically shutting down my computer whenever it so chooses, posting inane Facebook statuses in my name, and spamming most of my email contacts with unbewieeeeevabwy cute photos of tiny hedgehogs nibbling on biscuit crumbs.

Okay, fine, the last two were me acting alone.

But I can’t possibly take it to a computer shop to get fixed, because then I’d have to confess that I picked up the virus on a dirty torrent site after watching episodes of Glee till 4am on Monday night while robotically stuffing tea-cakes in my fat cheeks.

It’s just not a pretty picture, is it?

In other news, I’ve moved house, which presents me with a devastating ethical dilemma.

It’s the sort of etiquette problem that people write to The Times’s ‘Modern Manners’ column about.

I love that column. People always write in with shit like, Dear Sir, I’ve invited the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka to supper at mine tomorrow night, but I only have one ruby-encrusted gold throne… I think you see the problem.

Anyway, I need to write in. I’ll say, Dear Sir, What is the precise length of time one must allow to elapse before one can start talking some serious smack about new housemates in a public, blog-based forum?

It’s a bit tricky. I like them all very much, but we’re still in that delicate mutual-courtship phase where they might not take a bit of light character-assassination in the jolly spirit in which it would be intended.

I must muse upon it, blogosphere. Perhaps I can purchase their consent with tea-cakes.

I'm With Crazy

2010-01-31T16:59:00.000-08:00

About a year ago I sat next to the man who invented bungee-jumping.

It was on a bus, so when he shared this conversational nugget with me naturally I assumed he was lying or demented. So I just smiled and nodded and murmured, ‘Of course you did, you clever thing you!’ But at the end of the journey he pressed his name and email address upon me, and I went home and checked it out on Wikipedia.

Huh. Turns out he invented bungee-jumping.

Well, technically the Aztecs invented bungee-jumping, but the crazy bus guy was the first proper white dude to do it, so that counts for more.

Although he turned out to be telling the truth about that, all that hurtling face-forward towards the ground at terminal velocity had clearly taken a vicious toll on his noggin. I pretended to be droolingly asleep when he initially sat down next to me to avoid conversation, but then my mobile rang and I blew my own cover by answering it, because I’m a bit thick like that.

He pounced instantly. ‘Do you mind if I talk to you?’ he asked.

I must interrupt the anecdote here to share with you a deeply private little factoid about myself.

That is, I am one of a tiny proportion of humans born entirely lacking any vertebral column. This congenital deficit has made life wearisome for me for almost three decades. I often muse on how differently things could’ve turned out if God had granted me a structurally-intact endosekeleton.

I pine for a spine, in short. I am so ‘spine-less’, to coin a word, that it is a miracle I am able to walk upright unassisted.

As a result of this unfortunate cartilaginal deficiency, I have for 28 years running been voted Person I Dream Nightly Of Being Seated Next To On Public Transport by the readers of Loonies Weekly.

And so, when the crackpot bungee-jump pioneer enquired if I would be open to a 90-minute diatribe on his past, present and future, my response was such an enthusiastic assent as to basically amount to a sloppy tongue-kiss.

Then, for the millionth time in my life, I sat back, braced myself for the verbal torrent of insanity, and silently thanked God that he hadn’t asked for a blowjob.

His life story turned out to be characterized by a bewilderingly rapid succession of euphoric highs and crushing lows, like a narrative analogue of the bungee-jumping that turned his cerebrum to mush. Consequently, it proved hard to twist my features into appropriate facial expressions in time to match each bizarre new episode.

Fondly reflecting on the uncommon beauty of his first love, for instance, he mused: "Making love to her for the first time was the deepest tenderness I have ever experienced."

I barely had time to adjust my visage to read ‘Well, isn’t that nice’ before the abrupt appendix: “She died in my arms two weeks later calling out my name.”

I found being the sole audience to his bi-polar memoirs so unspeakably stressful that by the time he disembarked, leaving a lingering hand-kiss and the paper serviette on which his details were scrawled, I had soaked through three layers of clothing with terrified sweat.

You would think that experiences like this – and believe me, this is one of umpteen – would have trained me to project a frosty unavailability to thwart the conversational advances of strangers.

Not so.

A mere two weeks ago, I was having a drink by myself at a quayside bar in Cape Town while catching up on some email. And clearly the only frosty thing about me was the lager I was quaffing, because it took approximately 8 minutes for the nearest lunatic to descend.

"Do you mind if I join you?" he asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down while he spoke.

My boneless flesh oozed out of the slats in my seat, unsupported by any osseous framework, as I shook my head in mute misery.

"I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a guy called Nostradamus," he began.

Happy Gnu Year!

2010-01-26T14:58:00.000-08:00

Ladles and jellyspoons, I give you 2010!

Twenty-Ten! I mean, Ground Control to Major Tom: futuristic enough for ya?

I have also heard this promising new annum referred to as ‘Twenty-Zen’ by hipsters, but personally I prefer to call it ‘Plenty-Yen’, as 2010 is the year I intend to become very, very big in Beijing.

I have marked the turn of the decade by pole-vaulting into the modern era, circa 2001, via the purchase of an i-pod. I realize this is the equivalent of boasting about your hot new donkey-cart around the time of the arrival of the BMW Z3, but nuts to all of you.

And the i-pod is only the start, my friends. I have high hopes for 2010. As I walked home from a party early on New Year’s morning, the snow began to fall in big white flakes upon my face, and it tasted like hope and redemption. Hope and redemption and frozen water with a slight smack of petroleum, but basically the heady cocktail of dreams come true.

Other things on my to-do list this year include:

- finally perform a citizen’s arrest;

- launch own fragrance range, Dishevellée, par Bec;

- submit tender for re-building of Haitian motorways;

- start up lucrative social-networking sites for stationery enthusiasts - ‘MySpacecase’ – and wildebeest aficionados – ‘Gnu-Tube’

- dance as if nobody’s looking, by dint of throwing hand-grenade in opposite direction in crowded nightclub;

- test hippie hypothesis that when all the trees and fish are gone, you won’t be able to eat money;

- create life-form in petri dish and rule over it firmly but fairly;

- run for office (necessitated by consistently missing tube/bus in the morning)

- blog more.

Who’s with me?

Suffer the little children

2009-12-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

I had to babysit a ten-year-old and an eight-year-old last week. My girlfriend offered to look after them while their mother did some last-minute Christmas shopping. She’s nice like that, my girlfriend.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I was a bit scared before their visit. After all, the last time I spoke to a ten year-old, I was one myself. I felt deeply unprepared. What are ten-year-olds like? I wondered. What kind of developmental milestones have they reached by that stage? Can you have conversations with them? Or do you just stick a crayon in their chubby fists and wipe away their drool occasionally?

They arrived. Firstly, I was surprised by how seemingly capable they were. They were able to do things by themselves, and they wore little coats and everything, almost like bonsai versions of normally-sized people.

The older one even shook my hand, which was weird, like having a pixie’s hand in yours.

‘I’m Beatrice,’ she piped.

‘Nice to meet you, Beatrice,’ I said shyly, pumping her pixie hand. The younger one hadn’t learnt how to shake hands yet. So I just held up my hand open-palmed to him, to show him I meant him no harm, and smiled in a way which was supposed to be kind of reassuringly aunt-like but probably made me seem like a lascivious paedo welcoming new prey.

My girlfriend spoke to them a bit like how she talks to me, sort of loudly and slowly and including lots of orders. It seemed to work well. But then she took the older one out of the room, leaving me sitting opposite the eight-year-old in deafening silence.

My palms started sweating.

‘So, Henry,’ I commenced, clearing my throat, ‘what are you doing for New Year’s Eve?’

He looked at me blankly and remained silent.

Fool! I mentally chided myself. He probably doesn’t know what New Year’s Eve is! Anyway, he’s eight! He doesn’t have New Year’s Eve plans! It’s not like he’s about to announce he’s pre-booked VIP entrance at Mahiki with champagne and nibbles!

‘So you’re on holiday at the moment?’ I tried again, while furiously texting my friend Tarry ‘topics of conversation for 8-yr-olds asap pls urgent’.

‘Yeah,’ he mumbled, not troubling to hide his boredom.

Ask them what they want for Christmas, Tarry texted back.

‘Is that a Blackberry?’ asked Henry, with a grudging flicker of interest.

‘It is indeed!’ I cried enthusiastically. ‘You can hold it if you like!’

I slipped the phone into his hands with exaggerated care to emphasise its fragility and specialness.

He inspected it for about three seconds and handed it back, bored. ‘My dad’s has a touchscreen.’

With that he got up and exited the room, repulsed by the conversational tedium. Almost instantly the ten-year-old took his place.

‘What do you want for Christmas, Beatrice?’ I asked brightly. She observed me dispassionately for a moment.

‘You do know my father’s just had a stroke,’ she said, with the air of someone pityingly dispensing information to a social inferior.

‘Yes,’ I said in a neutral yet resolute manner, determined not to show weakness.

‘Well, so I haven’t had a lot of time to go shopping,’ she continued, with the frazzled, world-weary air of an overworked investment banker reduced to buying last-minute gifts off Amazon. ‘But I’ve made Henry a present.’

She beckoned me closer so she could whisper what it was. ‘You know the story of King John?’ she hissed.

‘Yes,’ I lied firmly. I cannot afford to reveal ignorance in front of this freakish little prodigy, I thought. I will have to pretend to know everything in the world.

‘I’ve copied it out in my best handwriting, and drawn pictures at the bottom. That’s what I’m giving Henry.’

‘I’m sure he’ll love that,’ I said unconvincingly. What a crap present! I thought. I’d be pissed if someone gave me that.

‘Ooh, look!’ Beatrice squealed, her attention diverted by a comic figurine on the mantelpiece. ‘A bobble-head Jesus!’

‘Yes,’ I said sententiously. ‘Do you know about Jesus, Beatrice?’

Beatrice rolled her eyes in an unnecessarily exaggerated, theatrical style. ‘I’m an atheist,’ she drawled. ‘That’s how much I hate Jesus.’

Gosh! I thought, taken aback. That’s a bit harsh!

Mini-Richard Dawkins launched into a complex explanation about the lack of empirical rigour characterising the arguments of those responsible for spreading theological doctrine, but we were mercifully interrupted by the return of my girlfriend and Henry, the former bearing a bowl of biscuits and various icing implements.

We’d baked the biscuits the night before. We weren’t able to find any Christmassy cookie-cutters in the shop, so most of them were in the shape of spindly giraffes.

‘Giraffes!’ chuckled Beatrice, inspecting one of them. ‘I love it! Giraffes have absolutely nothing to do with Christmas – but, y’know, it’s so wrong, it’s right!’

I stared at her in disbelief.

No! I countered furiously in my head. What’s wrong is ten-year-olds delivering knowing little aperçus about confectional incongruity, in the manner of a wry Nigella Lawson! What’s wrong is the fact that you are almost certainly cleverer and generally more capable than me, 17 years your senior! And finally, what’s wrong is that despite your general precociousness, you keep licking the cookies to fine-tune your icing designs!

Kids today, eh. They may look just like scaled-down versions of ourselves, but they’re not like us at all. Trust me.

Say whaaaaaaaaaaaa'?

2009-11-14T02:54:00.000-08:00

Every now and then a news story comes along which is obviously more interesting than all the other media preoccupations du jour, but oddly not treated as such.

So it was in September, for instance, where the news didn’t so much ‘break’ as ‘softly crumble’ that liposuction fat can be easily converted into stem cells. Why aren’t people more excited about this? Here we have a chance to cure leukemia and America’s obesity problem in one fell swoop! And yet the response from those who set conventional news agendas appears to have been one big yawn. Bizarro.

And a similar thing is happening right now. Drifting off to sleep last night, I found this story tucked away in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it corner of yesterday’s Guardian. Allow me to summarise: a landmark judgement has ruled that the media will be allowed to attend the hearings of a secretive court about whether “a young man with an international reputation should have decisions made for him by others”.

The ruling is being hailed by media wonks as a victory for transparency and journalistic access and…oh, pardon me, I appear to have nodded off.

It is bleeding obvious that the most fascinating aspect of this report is: WHO IS IT???

He is described in the judgement as “famous”, but the public is unaware that he is suffering from a condition that makes him “unable to manage his own affairs”. WHO IS IT??

Can everyone please stop tweeting about the head of the BBC claiming tuppeny-ha’penny on expenses for a watering-can and focus on this infinitely more interesting issue? And yes, yes, it is obviously grotesquely insensitive and repugnant to speculate on this unfortunate young man’s identity, so if that sort of thing turns your stomach, kindly look away now.

Does anyone else think it might be Prince Harry?

Cry Me A River

2009-11-06T17:47:00.000-08:00

There is water sluicing through the roof as I type. It is dripping in a slow but methodical fashion from a rather discouraging gash in my ceiling which has opened up in the last few days and now seems to be steadily widening.

At first I attempted to control the leak by placing a rubbish bin under it. But the drip slyly changes direction approximately once every two minutes, evading capture. After half an hour of scuttling back and forth, bin in hand, eyeing the ceiling with a crazily fixed intensity in order to plot and thwart its leaking arc, I abandoned my Sisyphyean efforts.

The sound of the water hitting my carpet, in huge, despondent plops, is not a joyful one. It is a bit as if the flat itself is weeping. And who can blame it? I would also have a serious case of the cries if my ladybits were being excavated to house a soon-to-open late-night shisha bar, as is the unfortunate case on the ground floor below, but that’s a story for another night.

I’m not asking for your pity: I’m saving those supplications for my elderly Chinese landlady. (Although the last time she was called to the party, to rescue us from an overflowing toilet, she opined that it would do us good to pick up the basics of plumbing as necessary preparation for “housewife job”, so I am not holding out a great deal of hope. No doubt she will see this as a golden opportunity for me to learn the ropes of a bit of light structural engineering.)

I merely wish to make the observation that my life is not one of undiluted glamour.

This fairly obvious point struck me with thunderous intensity as I was trudging home from the cinema tonight, shortly after another Damascus-style revelation. The first was that the taxi-driver who ferried me home late last Wednesday night overcharged me by something in the region of 200%. But then I recalled the possibility that he may have levied what one might delicately term a “vomit surcharge”, and so I shall charitably call us even.

But the second epiphany – that my life is not one in which, say, Anna Wintour might find herself comfortably at home – was rendered starker by tonight’s cinematic offering, which in a heroic act of steely will I maintained wakefulness throughout. The film in question was An Education, which tells the story of a young girl’s battle to choose between the hedonistic abandonment of a love affair with a glamorous older man, and the possibility of winning a place at Oxford if she just buckles down and gets to grips with her pesky Latin conjugation. I believe this is the point at which a more considerate blogger would insert some sort of flashing spoiler alert, since I can inform you that she chooses the man, loses everything, and then gets it all back. On Her Own Terms.

Bravo and jolly well done to her! I was, of course, rooting for the pedagogic path throughout. I nodded furiously when her various ever-so-slightly-lesbianic teacher/mentors extolled the peerless virtues of higher education. I punched my little fist in the air when the protagonist dutifully spelled out her hard-earned conclusion, that “there’s no shortcut to the life I want”. It was all I could do not to leap to my feet and deliver a standing ovation during the concluding scenes of her cycling amidst the dreaming spires with implausibly shiny hair and a pleasingly weighty book-bag. As the credits rolled, I was filled with contentment for a narrative satisfyingly resolved in everyone’s best interests, with Hedonistic Evil firmly subjugated to Educational Good’s superior might, and everything just peachy with the world.

It was only as the lights went on and I began to deposit the punters’ discarded ice-cream pots and smuggled-in sticky beer cans in a black rubbish sack that it slowly began to dawn on me that something might not be quite right. This feeling of stirring unease stayed with me as I locked up the toilets, exchanged farewells with my co-usher, an Eritrean refugee, and signed out my time-sheet to register a solid 5 hours’ toil remunerated on the minimum-wage pay-scale.

Only in the course of my walk home did these sentiments cohere into something approaching crystallisation. And when they did, boy, was I pissed.

“I’ve been duped!” I cried out to no-one in particular, or I would have, if I were a character in a 50’s caper-movie.

I was seized by an urgent desire to run back to the cinema, clutching a megaphone, and re-broadcast the film with an accompanying soundtrack of my screeching “Don’t do it! Choose the rich dude! The only life that your Oxford education provides a shortcut to is one that involves a roof with a hole in it!”

But I didn’t, of course, because access to the projection-room is far beyond my professional remit. Also, the abundance of late-night shisha bars gracing Kilburn’s High Road do not offer megaphone rentals as part of their utility package, although I have reason to believe that they are open to discussions about contract-killings, so it seems an arbitrary point at which to draw your service boundaries.

Instead I came home to assess the spread of my bedroom’s new lake, and started googling ‘dry-stone-walling for beginners’.

After all, they do say that knowledge is power.