I did promise a horoscope in this post, but I’ll leave it until later. There are more pressing matters at hand, namely, Christmas.
Enough people hate Christmas that I would be doing no one a favour by adding my own cynical and probably hastily concocted rant to the orgy of writing that has already been done on the subject. It would be hard to parallel the spleen-venting exhibited by Will Self in “Grumpy Old Men”, with words along the lines of: stuffing yourself to the point of death, toppling over while emitting a burst of flatulence and lying there with your slippered feet twitching in the fetid air. So let’s take a different tack, as a homesick sailor with a minor cannonball wound in his right side might say.
We all know the story of Christmas and the nativity, or we think we do. But in a triumph of investigative journalism, I have uncovered a more accurate version of events. Caution: This is heavily blasphemous, and is intended in jest. Religious folk of sensitive sensibilities press "Back" now.
The Story of the Nativity
As recounted by Jesus Christ, Superstar, to Martin Bashar, with their heads tipped at a slightly doleful 45 degree angle:
Some time ago, there was a woman called Mary, who took pride in the trimming of her privet hedge, loyally devoting her time between chores and trips to the Nazareth branch of Homebase to the leading of a fulfilling and pious life, austere but faithful, moral and humble. One time she had scarcely unloaded the shopping onto the kitchen floor, when out of the corner of her eye, that tell-tale red light from the answer machine caught her hypnotically. Her first ever message. She had often looked at the machine in the past, puzzled, musing on how great it would be if someone would invent the telephone so that the answer machine could finally have a use. But here, paradoxically, that red glinting light betrayed that some great event had unfolded.
Gingerly, she tiptoed over the strewn shopping bags and pressed the dust-covered button of the machine. It was the Angel Gabriel, and he told unto her that she would give birth to a beautiful bouncing baby that was the son of the Holy Bearded One, without having ever bumped uglies, and to fear not, for Joseph her husband would also be informed, so that he would not have to send an inept Relationship Detective stalking after her, culminating in the usual guilty verdict and the inevitable dispatching of a sniper in her direction as was fashionable at the time. Mary was much shocked by the news, as it would mean having to give up smoking, but she conceded that perhaps an event of this scale was more important than fulfilling the daily nicotine high. In any case, a shepherd wandering about the hills had discovered a substance secreted by sheep on their point of climax that turned out to be a suitable substitute for nicotine. It’s lonely in them hills.
At this point, the Israeli government, which presided over Nazareth and other nearby towns in its ‘territory’, ordered that families return to the town of the bread-winners birth to pay taxes to that most ordered and merciful government which had looked after their interests with such gusto and with only a minimum of artillery fire. In one of those anomalies caused by intense bureaucracy and bloody-mindedness, the town of Nazareth was under curfew, with soldiers shooting people indulging in the wicked activity of transport. Thus people had to make their way under cover of stealth to their birth-towns to pay their taxes to said government and avoid the ritual punishment of dunking for being in arrears. The journey was only 70 miles, but as their donkey did not have an Israeli number plate, they were stopped at several checkpoints, where they had to plead and perform small dances. To make matters worse, they were further delayed when their donkey broke an axle, and they had to be taken onward by a friendly passing taxi driver – “I wouldn’t normally, but as you’re pregnant and, well, it is Christmas…”
When they got to the outskirts of Bethlehem, Joseph’s place of birth, they found a group of power-hungry soldiers who were barely out of their cots jeering and poking their gun barrels at the hapless taxi driver, refusing to let them through. An argument ensued in which shots were fired, but luckily there were only superficial injuries. In time, and after serious bribery, they were allowed on their way, by which point Mary was heavily in labour. They arrived in Bethlehem to the sound of heavy shelling. The IDF was midway through an operation to clear the area of militants, later declaring the mission successful after they announced the killing of the ring-leader, a four year-old girl, and her second-in-command, a blind orphan. Every hotel that the taxi went to was full of journalists from BBC News 24, Sky and Al Jazeera, and so in desperation they retired to a barn after evicting the poultry which provided target practice for the assembled soldiers.
The virgin birth, like many events supposedly ordained from the heavens - such as the horrific earthquake in 18th century Lisbon, tsunamis that drown hundreds of thousands and cataclysmic volcanic eruptions in Indonesia that cause global weather effects that persist for years - was not entirely palatable in the aesthetic sense. Now, audiences at this time had not yet been inured to scenes of graphic gore by such events as the Alien Trilogy, The Seven Years War or various Japanese gameshows as over-dubbed by a mirthful and slightly-too-nonchalant Chris Tarrant, so the outright horror provoked shock in the assembled. Accordingly, one of the onlookers exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” as the vast tangle of limbs, cords and fluids that, like most child-births, could well have been coloured by a painter vomiting onto an easel. That name stuck for the baby, and many historians have recounted how it was fortunate how the exclamation was not, “Gordon Bennett!”, or “Janet Street-Fucking-Porter!”. Indeed, it would have brought the vast majority of Sunday school goers to tears that no amount of scones could subdue.
Meanwhile, three wise men decided to follow an especially bright star in the sky that was said to lead to Bethlehem and the virgin birth. As most people know, many stars rise and set like the sun, and this star was no exception. Every night it would rise in the east, travel slowly in a grand arc to the west, while the hapless wise men followed its course on land in a large curve westwards. As the star set, they would resolve to carry on following the next night, after catching up on much needed sleep during the day. The next morning, they would head back east to where the star was rising and start again. The first wise man died of starvation after lying crippled for four days after a particularly vicious happy-slapping, and the second was eaten by a puma around day ten. The third wise man, Caspar, who later took on a Hollywood role portraying a friendly ghost that did not scare children into shitting themselves, took up the gifts of the other two, and wisely decided around day fifteen to use his SatNav instead, reaching Bethlehem by the evening.
The baby was presented with the three great gifts which, apart from the gold, make little sense in today’s materialistic, crass and immoral word devoid of religion and filled only with cynical half-wits like myself. So it came to pass that a lowly barn-baby made his name famous, for his charming chivalry, selflessness, good humour and links with the music industry.
A Short Piece of the Interview Transcript:
As recovered from a bin in Wood Lane by a tramp trying to retrieve a piece of falafel, still moist to the touch but with spicy malingerings reminiscent of his own spell as a Foreign Correspondent in the Middle East:
Bashar: What were your first thoughts as you emerged into that barn?
JC, Superstar: I did wonder how someone as supposedly important as myself could have ended up being born in such a place. Even under a pool table would have been more dignified. A quick look in the Yellow Pages after all the crowds had gone revealed plenty of more luxury places, such as the Hilton on Al Quds Street, and the tastefully redecorated Nativity Hostel only 200 yards from the barn. It was the gifts I was more disgusted with, in truth, the gold and frankincense weren’t even chewable. And the model of the Mir space station was downright unrealistic, it never had solar refractors that shape.
Bashar: When did you first suspect that you were the son of God?
Superstar: My religious education class at primary school was the first inkling. I saw a stylised picture of myself being born in that barn. That, and the incident when I turned our Special Needs teacher into a toad.
Bashar: That business with the loaves and fishes, it was reported widely on Sky News at the time, how much of that was fabrication?
Superstar: It was a little exaggerated by the press, but they had this sale of bread on in Lidl’s, plus I had some leftover fish in the freezer from that fishing trip with Moses in the Autumn. I long to do some proper fishing though. I do feel his method of splitting the lake down the middle causing the fish to instantaneously drop dead onto the lake-bed took some of the joy out of it.
Bashar: You realise what you just said is not historically accurate?
Superstar: How can you call someone the son of God and then deprive him of the ability to practice Time Travel?
Bashar: Fair enough. What would you say were the most challenging aspects of your position in society?
Superstar: The paparazzi are a constant headache. Not one bloody issue of Heat seems to go by without a picture of me picking up some milk from Costcutter, and some slanderous, venomous caption about my alleged tight-fistedness. Being descended from a deity doesn’t mean you can’t be thrifty.
Bashar: Fair point, can I have your autograph?
At this point, two laser beams shoot from Superstar’s eyes and through Marty’s hand, causing it to melt as his clipboard, now revealed to be hosting an obscene doodle, clatters to the ground. The interviewer collapses onto the floor writhing in agony. The interview is brought to a quick close as the Health & Safety Executive are called in to mull over the accuracy of the ‘Interviewing JC Risk Register’ that had been submitted prior to filming.
An un-edited version of this interview will be shown on Bravo in the Spring. JC’s new book, My Father’s Stepladder – Prying Insights Into What Makes God Tick, will be available from all good bookshops on January 14th. He can also be seen presenting Have I Got News For You on February 7th.
Merry Christmas.
Tuesday, 25 December 2007
Monday, 24 December 2007
The Telescope’s Lure
If I were feeling charitable, I would quietly add astrology to the ever-lengthening list of “Things I Don’t Get”, along with cigars, India, contraflow bus lanes and God and leave it at that. But this being a seasonal time of year (whatever that means), I am spoiling for a fight with this ropey and imbecilic concept.
Way back in 3000 B.B. (before broadband), several people of the notably underemployed variety looked up at the stars and then looked back down at their filth-stained landscape - full of people lancing each other’s boils and murdering cats, dropping their babies off ledges while grasping for the gin bottle and writing words with too many ‘e’s at the end, throwing excrement at the blasphemous in the stocks and generally wallowing in a steaming pit of bilious fluids and eking out an existence straddling the bread line all the while trying to maintain some kind of pious dignity because their creator and tormentor must be appeased or else they’re fucked and will be sent to a place in which worms gnaw at your eye and there ain’t a great deal you can do about it – and they thought, the sky must hold the answers, because they sure as hell aren’t down here. “In the stars, people!”, they said. “Up there your fate is decided, not down here. Even yours you lecherous kerb-suckler” (kerb suckling being an important profession at the time).
So we see the dubious beginnings of the ‘science’ (Kiran quickly swallows down momentary rising of phlegm) of astrology. A while ago, my mum came back from abroad brandishing a piece of paper in which my fate had been decided by an astrologer or snake-oil salesman, based only on the time and date of my birth. I have been here before. I have been told to sign my name doubling my first initial to “KK” as this would rectify an imbalance in the Numbers of Purity or whatever and redeem my sinful life into a new-born existence inextricably linked to the planets. No matter that it left me one ‘K’ short of a vicious sect of yore. Anyway, said bit of paper was interesting as it charted my life and attributes from birth, and therefore gave me over two and a half decades of history. Apart from discerning that I was male (and I think they had to be told that first off) and that I am argumentative, and that I was likely to have a serious disease when I was three years old, it was pretty bollocks. And it also predicted a serious disease at three-year intervals which miraculously failed to transpire. Though luckily this life-map was wrenched from my mother’s hands, when it turned out she had got the year of my birth wrong, negating the whole thing even in her eyes. Well who keeps count anyway. I haven’t since I turned 26 or 40 or so.
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t actually find astrology a physically dangerous belief in the same way that religion or homeopathy are, it’s just that there is something vaguely unsettling about it. All those charts, all that smoke and mirrors, knowing that in tandem with the work of astronomers, that there is also astrology, a parasitical barnacle appended to the astronomer’s arse, mimicking their actions but then running off on a tangent to dupe the weak-willed into subservience. It is about as appetising as a televised circumcision. If astronomy explains the walls and the ceilings that provide your shelter, and the cooker that kills the bacteria in your food, then astrology is a drunken cousin who comes down the chimney and shits in your soup. Or perhaps I’m getting confused with Santa.
Anyway, what is great is that, once again, science dicks on superstition. People are said to be born under a constellation, meaning that the Sun appears to be residing within a certain constellation at the time of birth. The Sun traverses the entire apparent sphere of the sky in a year, and sits in each of the zodiac constellations for about a twelfth of that time. The thing is:
a) The constellations aren’t even approximately the same size, so these zodiac periods all differ wildly in size. The sun is only in Scorpio for one week of the year, not a month.
b) Due to something called ‘precession of the equinoxes’, 86% of people have the wrong star sign (i.e. mostly they are one sign out, though a few are two signs out). The whole map has ‘shifted’ since the Plague Era when people drew up their maps and charts.
On the last point, this is due to the tilt of the Earth and the way in which the squint axis (which causes the seasons) itself rotates very slowly relative to the Sun over a period of 25,765 years changing the star we designate the pole star every few thousand years and realigning the position of the celestial sphere in relation to the ecli… la, la, la, yawn…
Once upon a time there was a little advertising executive called Samantha who was thirty years old and lived on her own in a cottage made of marshmallow imbued with asbestos so that the gentle fire in the hearth did not cause any undue damage and she had an ickle fluffy rabbit that she loved called Monsieur Fluffboots. Of course Samantha lived in a wonderful land of milk and honey called Rainbow Land which is situated in north-eastern France and can only be reached by rubbing your left-shoulder against the Rainbow Tree which can be found thanks to a yellowing treasure map left in a Starbucks in Reims by a group of dispirited pirates way back when.
Samantha loved her ickle fluffy rabbit and she used to talk to it constantly, muzzling her face in its fur and tickling it and giving it anything it so desired, as long as that was talcum powder or brandy.
One day ickle wickle Monsieur Fluffboots got very sick and sneezed great swedges of mucus onto the walls of his hutch and Samantha got very upset so she went and told her therapist who told her to get a fucking grip because it is only a fucking rabbit. This made things alright for a while, the sensitive charm of her therapist allowing her to get through the difficult days ahead. But Monsieur Fluffboots got more and more ill, refusing his brandy and insisting on gin and tonic, which was very expensive as it had to be imported from outside Rainbow Land, and whole lorry loads had to be reversed backwards and forwards so that their left sides rubbed against the Rainbow Tree so they could gain access to the kingdom of the Rainbows.
As the days wore on, Monsieur Fluffboots left eye swelled and turned blue and then at last burst, causing him to kick his ickle fluffy bucket and go up to the fluffy pink clouds and harp-playing rabbits and marsupials of wabbit-heaven. Awwww.
This made Samantha sick with rage at the injustice and she climbed up a nearby tree never to set foot on the hallowed turf of Rainbow Land again. There she would sit for hours, weeping, eating marshmallows, and hugging the steadfast ready-embracing tree that had offered her comfort in her time of woe.
Samantha’s mother was a kindly old woman who was able to bake pies that steamed satisfyingly and brought all the ickle squirrels and robin red-breasts to the ends of tree limbs whistling happy tunes whenever her and her pies were there. Samantha’s favourite was a marmalade pie, but day after day her mother left them on the ground next to the trunk and still the little advertising executive never touched them. One day, several years later, the ten-foot high rotting mass of decaying marmalade and pastry became too much for Samantha and she jumped into the middle of it and smothered herself all over and it all got a little pornographic and this is the point when you always wake up isn’t it…
…Welcome back. As I was saying, this slow movement of the ecliptic (the path along which the Sun appears to move) means that if you think you are an Aquarius, you are probably really a Capricorn. And just to really mess things up, a thirteenth constellation has hijacked part of the zodiac. It is called Ophiuchus, and is slotted awkwardly between Scorpio and Sagittarius like a bald-headed alcoholic miraculously appearing in your tourist snap of the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square. So if you were born in late November, chances are you are actually Ophiuchus (pronounce it “Oh fuck us”, it’s close enough), the Serpent Bearer, which means you are great at handling feathered boas and the like. Unless by ‘bearing’, they mean it in the ‘child-bearing’ sense, in which case, lucky you, you are going to be giving birth to a snake at some point. I imagine that is even more upsetting if you are male.
There then, is my guide to astrology and its merits. “But it’s only just a piece of fun”, I hear you say (I do believe in telepathy), and it’s Christmas, think of the children.
All valid points. Which is why in the next post, you will get your very own real horoscope, courtesy of my alter-ego, El Keranu, who likes incense and tie-dye clothing and acupuncture and alchemy and the good word of the Bible and the mystical flowings of ying and yang and those zen gardens that have a small rake and a tiny sand pit too small to drown even a stunted toddler in. Until then…
Way back in 3000 B.B. (before broadband), several people of the notably underemployed variety looked up at the stars and then looked back down at their filth-stained landscape - full of people lancing each other’s boils and murdering cats, dropping their babies off ledges while grasping for the gin bottle and writing words with too many ‘e’s at the end, throwing excrement at the blasphemous in the stocks and generally wallowing in a steaming pit of bilious fluids and eking out an existence straddling the bread line all the while trying to maintain some kind of pious dignity because their creator and tormentor must be appeased or else they’re fucked and will be sent to a place in which worms gnaw at your eye and there ain’t a great deal you can do about it – and they thought, the sky must hold the answers, because they sure as hell aren’t down here. “In the stars, people!”, they said. “Up there your fate is decided, not down here. Even yours you lecherous kerb-suckler” (kerb suckling being an important profession at the time).
So we see the dubious beginnings of the ‘science’ (Kiran quickly swallows down momentary rising of phlegm) of astrology. A while ago, my mum came back from abroad brandishing a piece of paper in which my fate had been decided by an astrologer or snake-oil salesman, based only on the time and date of my birth. I have been here before. I have been told to sign my name doubling my first initial to “KK” as this would rectify an imbalance in the Numbers of Purity or whatever and redeem my sinful life into a new-born existence inextricably linked to the planets. No matter that it left me one ‘K’ short of a vicious sect of yore. Anyway, said bit of paper was interesting as it charted my life and attributes from birth, and therefore gave me over two and a half decades of history. Apart from discerning that I was male (and I think they had to be told that first off) and that I am argumentative, and that I was likely to have a serious disease when I was three years old, it was pretty bollocks. And it also predicted a serious disease at three-year intervals which miraculously failed to transpire. Though luckily this life-map was wrenched from my mother’s hands, when it turned out she had got the year of my birth wrong, negating the whole thing even in her eyes. Well who keeps count anyway. I haven’t since I turned 26 or 40 or so.
Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t actually find astrology a physically dangerous belief in the same way that religion or homeopathy are, it’s just that there is something vaguely unsettling about it. All those charts, all that smoke and mirrors, knowing that in tandem with the work of astronomers, that there is also astrology, a parasitical barnacle appended to the astronomer’s arse, mimicking their actions but then running off on a tangent to dupe the weak-willed into subservience. It is about as appetising as a televised circumcision. If astronomy explains the walls and the ceilings that provide your shelter, and the cooker that kills the bacteria in your food, then astrology is a drunken cousin who comes down the chimney and shits in your soup. Or perhaps I’m getting confused with Santa.
Anyway, what is great is that, once again, science dicks on superstition. People are said to be born under a constellation, meaning that the Sun appears to be residing within a certain constellation at the time of birth. The Sun traverses the entire apparent sphere of the sky in a year, and sits in each of the zodiac constellations for about a twelfth of that time. The thing is:
a) The constellations aren’t even approximately the same size, so these zodiac periods all differ wildly in size. The sun is only in Scorpio for one week of the year, not a month.
b) Due to something called ‘precession of the equinoxes’, 86% of people have the wrong star sign (i.e. mostly they are one sign out, though a few are two signs out). The whole map has ‘shifted’ since the Plague Era when people drew up their maps and charts.
On the last point, this is due to the tilt of the Earth and the way in which the squint axis (which causes the seasons) itself rotates very slowly relative to the Sun over a period of 25,765 years changing the star we designate the pole star every few thousand years and realigning the position of the celestial sphere in relation to the ecli… la, la, la, yawn…
Once upon a time there was a little advertising executive called Samantha who was thirty years old and lived on her own in a cottage made of marshmallow imbued with asbestos so that the gentle fire in the hearth did not cause any undue damage and she had an ickle fluffy rabbit that she loved called Monsieur Fluffboots. Of course Samantha lived in a wonderful land of milk and honey called Rainbow Land which is situated in north-eastern France and can only be reached by rubbing your left-shoulder against the Rainbow Tree which can be found thanks to a yellowing treasure map left in a Starbucks in Reims by a group of dispirited pirates way back when.
Samantha loved her ickle fluffy rabbit and she used to talk to it constantly, muzzling her face in its fur and tickling it and giving it anything it so desired, as long as that was talcum powder or brandy.
One day ickle wickle Monsieur Fluffboots got very sick and sneezed great swedges of mucus onto the walls of his hutch and Samantha got very upset so she went and told her therapist who told her to get a fucking grip because it is only a fucking rabbit. This made things alright for a while, the sensitive charm of her therapist allowing her to get through the difficult days ahead. But Monsieur Fluffboots got more and more ill, refusing his brandy and insisting on gin and tonic, which was very expensive as it had to be imported from outside Rainbow Land, and whole lorry loads had to be reversed backwards and forwards so that their left sides rubbed against the Rainbow Tree so they could gain access to the kingdom of the Rainbows.
As the days wore on, Monsieur Fluffboots left eye swelled and turned blue and then at last burst, causing him to kick his ickle fluffy bucket and go up to the fluffy pink clouds and harp-playing rabbits and marsupials of wabbit-heaven. Awwww.
This made Samantha sick with rage at the injustice and she climbed up a nearby tree never to set foot on the hallowed turf of Rainbow Land again. There she would sit for hours, weeping, eating marshmallows, and hugging the steadfast ready-embracing tree that had offered her comfort in her time of woe.
Samantha’s mother was a kindly old woman who was able to bake pies that steamed satisfyingly and brought all the ickle squirrels and robin red-breasts to the ends of tree limbs whistling happy tunes whenever her and her pies were there. Samantha’s favourite was a marmalade pie, but day after day her mother left them on the ground next to the trunk and still the little advertising executive never touched them. One day, several years later, the ten-foot high rotting mass of decaying marmalade and pastry became too much for Samantha and she jumped into the middle of it and smothered herself all over and it all got a little pornographic and this is the point when you always wake up isn’t it…
…Welcome back. As I was saying, this slow movement of the ecliptic (the path along which the Sun appears to move) means that if you think you are an Aquarius, you are probably really a Capricorn. And just to really mess things up, a thirteenth constellation has hijacked part of the zodiac. It is called Ophiuchus, and is slotted awkwardly between Scorpio and Sagittarius like a bald-headed alcoholic miraculously appearing in your tourist snap of the Winston Churchill statue in Parliament Square. So if you were born in late November, chances are you are actually Ophiuchus (pronounce it “Oh fuck us”, it’s close enough), the Serpent Bearer, which means you are great at handling feathered boas and the like. Unless by ‘bearing’, they mean it in the ‘child-bearing’ sense, in which case, lucky you, you are going to be giving birth to a snake at some point. I imagine that is even more upsetting if you are male.
There then, is my guide to astrology and its merits. “But it’s only just a piece of fun”, I hear you say (I do believe in telepathy), and it’s Christmas, think of the children.
All valid points. Which is why in the next post, you will get your very own real horoscope, courtesy of my alter-ego, El Keranu, who likes incense and tie-dye clothing and acupuncture and alchemy and the good word of the Bible and the mystical flowings of ying and yang and those zen gardens that have a small rake and a tiny sand pit too small to drown even a stunted toddler in. Until then…
Sunday, 23 December 2007
The Reflourishing Act and The King Salmon
Ever so often, from behind the miraculous Cabinet Of The Future that I bought in a car boot sale in Yoker, back when such events weren’t hijacked by skag addicts toting skips of stripped-out copper piping for paying for that bloodshot habit, I find an article from the future. I have kept this mostly to myself, as releasing such information generally plays havoc with bookmakers, who have a nasty habit of setting about your knees with crow-bars, and also, frankly, because I am evil. But here I thought I would share one such article, from a local newspaper about 20 years hence:
EVENING CHIMES, 3 July 2027,
Glasgow, People’s Democratic Republic of Scotland.
Our Illustrious Leader, King Lexus Salmon, decreed a year ago this day the commencement of the 2026 Reflourishing Act, that we may all in the near future revel in the beauty that has become of our fair city in the years since independence. It is the duty of this esteemed organ, which is in no way affiliated or steered by Our Illustrious Leader or Our Highly Esteemed Government, peace be upon them, to detail the ways in which every Scot’s life, be they man, woman, child or botch-job post-op hermaphrodite, has been enriched by our Leader’s policy founded on the principles of love, beauty and freedom.
Already, the impact of the Tartan Army’s invasion of North and South Korea five years ago has meant the disabling and dismantling of their ship-building industry, meaning the re-opening of yards up and down the Clyde. Happy workers could be seen hobbling with mirthful delight etched upon their faces, meatball tins in hand, apprentice workers shirking off playful cuffs to the ear from their elders. The ripping up of tarmac has continued unabated, with rail-layers working around the clock to re-instate the tram lines torn up decades before by Folk from the Labour Side.
With the oil crises precipitated by the Iran War, the Venezuela “Police Action”, and the 2nd American Civil War which has resulted in Bush gaining an unprecedented sixth term in what is now termed the United States of Florida, King Lexus Salmon was quick to defend Scotland’s policy of shunning oil. “We have seen, in our lifetimes, the horror, hatred and sheer belligerence resulting from this little black substance which, truth be told, doesn’t even taste that good. Except the North Sea variety of course”, several people were seen to swoon at this oratory genius, theatrically pressing hand-back to forehead as they went under, “The time has come to look forward!” he went on, bellowing at the fire afore, “Trams! These are the vehicles of the future”. No sooner had these words been uttered, than these green and orange contraptions were wheeling about the roads, though a manufacturing fault meant that within a day the vast majority had piled up in depots and route-ends, reverse gears having been mistakenly omitted. This was palmed off eloquently by the administration as a minor hitch, and “A price worth paying for progress”.
Those cynics who dubbed the “Let Glasgow Reflourish” campaign “The Great Leap Backward” are starting to eat their words, watching with awe as thousands take to the motorways with their jack-hammers, breaking up the tarmac before the stone-masons cart in their quarried sandstone to once again thrust their solid tenement edifices skyward. Progress comes at a cost, of course, and a dubious decision was made not to close the roads before their destruction, “Can you imagine the carnage? All of Scotland gridlocked! We will close the roads when there is no road left to close”, Transport Minister Scott Raille was quoted as saying while striding to his waiting tram, before lifting a briefcase in front of his face and punching a photographer. Meanwhile, several drivers were admitted to the city’s hospitals with injuries after driving into lumps of sandstone, and, in one notable incident, driving into a freshly-planted tree on the Seaward Street off-ramp. Thousands queued up along the Broomielaw to buy souvenir pieces of the Kingston Bridge in scenes reminiscent of post-Cold War Berlin. Commentators speculated that pieces sold so far amounted to three times the volume of the original bridge.
Clattie Dreg, Owner of the Stomped Englishman chain of pubs that has been one of Scotland’s most outstanding success stories since independence, reported that there had been a 200% upturn in alcohol sales, as people drank away the misery of living in the newly re-built slums, part of the much-lauded, “Drive for Authenticity” that has adorned the banners in George Square since the enactment. The upturn in numbers of children admitted to clinics with rat-bites in the new hovels was trumpeted as “A tremendous achievement” by Health Secretary Annie Chess, and a true sign that “Scotland is embracing the character and grit, warts and all, that got us through two World Wars and will get us through the impending Third”. All around city centre streets last night as every night these days, joyous crowds in varying degrees of consciousness swaggered and laid about, sipping on their greened-with-town-gas milk bottles.
In the east end, many dance halls that had not seen the light of so much as a solitary disco-ball for some decades suddenly kicked themselves into life; men in cloth caps mingling with the glad-ragged girls, all frolicking together in scenes reminiscent of a late-night film in which romance is interspersed with moody exchanges of glares, standings of pints, and the odd sharply-curtailed scuffle in a piss-stained alleyway. Elsewhere, the old gangs made their return to the centre, the peripheral housing schemes being gently bulldozed street-by-street and coaxed into piles of masonry and concrete, never to rot, only to crumble and exfoliate with the battering of the seasons. Shug Sharpe, CEO of Silhouette Razor Blades went teary-eyed in front of our reporter as he recounted how he had longed for these days to return. “It is so nice to see us return to our values, namely, the use of the good old-fashioned razor blade to settle a score. I have watched sadly as the youth of yesteryear turned their backs on these beautiful implements, in favour of more coarse items like bog-standard knives or, dare I say it…”, he looked around and when he was sure they were alone, whispered, “Guns”. Business had been booming, especially at the newly constructed Tram-Thru facility in Garscube Road where punters can merely lean out the tram window and swap their Five Jock Note for a ready blade. He plans to open another branch in Cumberland Street in the autumn.
The final touches of soot-daubing were being added to the tenements lining Dumbarton Road last night, in a city-wide drive to undo the sand-blasting that ‘disfigured’ the city in the 1980’s, reinstating the industrial heritage that, as King Lexus put it, “Coloured our past with eye-dazzling shades of grey and so will colour our future for evermore”. King Lexus also hinted last night that the HMS Thistle Bru was in the final stages of fit-out in preparation for its voyage of discovery to Panama. Admiral Lyon Jackson was said to be wetting himself with anticipation.
Next Week: How has it affected the pigeons? Our “Whatever Happened To…?” series concludes with a piece on Lulu, and The Truth Behind the Squirrel Killings.
Other Famous Salmons:
Though our illustrious leader be a great salmon himself, there are other lesser salmons around. Here, courtesy of the Evening Chimes, is a guide:
Salmon Hayek – Famous actress, best known for her role in popular flick “Leaping the Falls”, about a coming-of-age Texan girl-salmon and her trials at the hands of her mischievous snake-charming stepfather and his playful goat, Sonny.
Salmon Rushdie – In the heady days following the lifting of his fatwa for offending a notable religion practiced by Puffer fish, he has gone on to found a successful college for young salmon writers. Following complaints from the Racial Equality Commission, this was broadened to include all fish, except halibut because said religion disapproves of getting battered.
Osalmon Bin Laden – Notorious terrorist and harbinger of doom. Often seen toting a Kalshnikov while his latest video release is played on infinite loop on Al Quatic, a cable channel dedicated to the mercenaries of the deep.
Salmon Flaps – Pornographer extraordinaire, who specialised in the much-coveted “waterfall shot” and who choreographed zoological masterpiece, Deep Stoat.
Jaws – Vicious bastard of a fish. The Great White Salmon is said to have outwitted Captain Ahab and his harpoons long before the advent of whales in 1772.
EVENING CHIMES, 3 July 2027,
Glasgow, People’s Democratic Republic of Scotland.
Our Illustrious Leader, King Lexus Salmon, decreed a year ago this day the commencement of the 2026 Reflourishing Act, that we may all in the near future revel in the beauty that has become of our fair city in the years since independence. It is the duty of this esteemed organ, which is in no way affiliated or steered by Our Illustrious Leader or Our Highly Esteemed Government, peace be upon them, to detail the ways in which every Scot’s life, be they man, woman, child or botch-job post-op hermaphrodite, has been enriched by our Leader’s policy founded on the principles of love, beauty and freedom.
Already, the impact of the Tartan Army’s invasion of North and South Korea five years ago has meant the disabling and dismantling of their ship-building industry, meaning the re-opening of yards up and down the Clyde. Happy workers could be seen hobbling with mirthful delight etched upon their faces, meatball tins in hand, apprentice workers shirking off playful cuffs to the ear from their elders. The ripping up of tarmac has continued unabated, with rail-layers working around the clock to re-instate the tram lines torn up decades before by Folk from the Labour Side.
With the oil crises precipitated by the Iran War, the Venezuela “Police Action”, and the 2nd American Civil War which has resulted in Bush gaining an unprecedented sixth term in what is now termed the United States of Florida, King Lexus Salmon was quick to defend Scotland’s policy of shunning oil. “We have seen, in our lifetimes, the horror, hatred and sheer belligerence resulting from this little black substance which, truth be told, doesn’t even taste that good. Except the North Sea variety of course”, several people were seen to swoon at this oratory genius, theatrically pressing hand-back to forehead as they went under, “The time has come to look forward!” he went on, bellowing at the fire afore, “Trams! These are the vehicles of the future”. No sooner had these words been uttered, than these green and orange contraptions were wheeling about the roads, though a manufacturing fault meant that within a day the vast majority had piled up in depots and route-ends, reverse gears having been mistakenly omitted. This was palmed off eloquently by the administration as a minor hitch, and “A price worth paying for progress”.
Those cynics who dubbed the “Let Glasgow Reflourish” campaign “The Great Leap Backward” are starting to eat their words, watching with awe as thousands take to the motorways with their jack-hammers, breaking up the tarmac before the stone-masons cart in their quarried sandstone to once again thrust their solid tenement edifices skyward. Progress comes at a cost, of course, and a dubious decision was made not to close the roads before their destruction, “Can you imagine the carnage? All of Scotland gridlocked! We will close the roads when there is no road left to close”, Transport Minister Scott Raille was quoted as saying while striding to his waiting tram, before lifting a briefcase in front of his face and punching a photographer. Meanwhile, several drivers were admitted to the city’s hospitals with injuries after driving into lumps of sandstone, and, in one notable incident, driving into a freshly-planted tree on the Seaward Street off-ramp. Thousands queued up along the Broomielaw to buy souvenir pieces of the Kingston Bridge in scenes reminiscent of post-Cold War Berlin. Commentators speculated that pieces sold so far amounted to three times the volume of the original bridge.
Clattie Dreg, Owner of the Stomped Englishman chain of pubs that has been one of Scotland’s most outstanding success stories since independence, reported that there had been a 200% upturn in alcohol sales, as people drank away the misery of living in the newly re-built slums, part of the much-lauded, “Drive for Authenticity” that has adorned the banners in George Square since the enactment. The upturn in numbers of children admitted to clinics with rat-bites in the new hovels was trumpeted as “A tremendous achievement” by Health Secretary Annie Chess, and a true sign that “Scotland is embracing the character and grit, warts and all, that got us through two World Wars and will get us through the impending Third”. All around city centre streets last night as every night these days, joyous crowds in varying degrees of consciousness swaggered and laid about, sipping on their greened-with-town-gas milk bottles.
In the east end, many dance halls that had not seen the light of so much as a solitary disco-ball for some decades suddenly kicked themselves into life; men in cloth caps mingling with the glad-ragged girls, all frolicking together in scenes reminiscent of a late-night film in which romance is interspersed with moody exchanges of glares, standings of pints, and the odd sharply-curtailed scuffle in a piss-stained alleyway. Elsewhere, the old gangs made their return to the centre, the peripheral housing schemes being gently bulldozed street-by-street and coaxed into piles of masonry and concrete, never to rot, only to crumble and exfoliate with the battering of the seasons. Shug Sharpe, CEO of Silhouette Razor Blades went teary-eyed in front of our reporter as he recounted how he had longed for these days to return. “It is so nice to see us return to our values, namely, the use of the good old-fashioned razor blade to settle a score. I have watched sadly as the youth of yesteryear turned their backs on these beautiful implements, in favour of more coarse items like bog-standard knives or, dare I say it…”, he looked around and when he was sure they were alone, whispered, “Guns”. Business had been booming, especially at the newly constructed Tram-Thru facility in Garscube Road where punters can merely lean out the tram window and swap their Five Jock Note for a ready blade. He plans to open another branch in Cumberland Street in the autumn.
The final touches of soot-daubing were being added to the tenements lining Dumbarton Road last night, in a city-wide drive to undo the sand-blasting that ‘disfigured’ the city in the 1980’s, reinstating the industrial heritage that, as King Lexus put it, “Coloured our past with eye-dazzling shades of grey and so will colour our future for evermore”. King Lexus also hinted last night that the HMS Thistle Bru was in the final stages of fit-out in preparation for its voyage of discovery to Panama. Admiral Lyon Jackson was said to be wetting himself with anticipation.
Next Week: How has it affected the pigeons? Our “Whatever Happened To…?” series concludes with a piece on Lulu, and The Truth Behind the Squirrel Killings.
Other Famous Salmons:
Though our illustrious leader be a great salmon himself, there are other lesser salmons around. Here, courtesy of the Evening Chimes, is a guide:
Salmon Hayek – Famous actress, best known for her role in popular flick “Leaping the Falls”, about a coming-of-age Texan girl-salmon and her trials at the hands of her mischievous snake-charming stepfather and his playful goat, Sonny.
Salmon Rushdie – In the heady days following the lifting of his fatwa for offending a notable religion practiced by Puffer fish, he has gone on to found a successful college for young salmon writers. Following complaints from the Racial Equality Commission, this was broadened to include all fish, except halibut because said religion disapproves of getting battered.
Osalmon Bin Laden – Notorious terrorist and harbinger of doom. Often seen toting a Kalshnikov while his latest video release is played on infinite loop on Al Quatic, a cable channel dedicated to the mercenaries of the deep.
Salmon Flaps – Pornographer extraordinaire, who specialised in the much-coveted “waterfall shot” and who choreographed zoological masterpiece, Deep Stoat.
Jaws – Vicious bastard of a fish. The Great White Salmon is said to have outwitted Captain Ahab and his harpoons long before the advent of whales in 1772.
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Let Them Eat Kayak
Or alternatively “Darwin Story Evolves”, or “Och aye canoe”. Paul Merton and the tabloids have the monopoly on puns in this instance though, so no more from me.
In my nine years in London, these are three of the things I learned:
1) Never fall asleep on a Night Bus.
2) The entire UK construction industry, from the loftiest CEO to the lowliest asthmatic work-horse that drags a wagon full of steel to the building site every morning, is irretrievably fucked.
3) If you sit down, press your knuckles against your forehead and strain hard enough, eventually you will either have a dump or a creative idea.
By a link more tenuous than a weather-beaten rope bridge across an Andes gorge, I’m guessing that John Darwin and his wife wished there had been an entirely different outcome when practicing option three - for their idea, though creative, was completely unworkable. In case you have been on another planet, or you have enough of a life (unlike me) to avoid populist soap-opera news and its mind-contorting whims, this is about the unfolding story of a canoeist who disappeared among the decommissioned ghost ships and grey waters of the North Sea near Hartlepool, back in 2000.
After £60,000 spent on helicopter, RNLI and police searches, and possibly even with the input of the little-known Militarily Trained Otter Squad (indispensable for uncovering mines in the English Channel during the Second World War, the poor furry suicide freaks), the search was called off. The people put down their newspapers, shook their heads and went back to their cups of tea, lamenting about poor Mr Darwin succumbing to a Giant Octopus, Great White Shark, prehistoric sea scorpion or any other thing that could explain the total absence of a body.
It is a fairly common occurrence for people to die from the elements in this country. This is a wet place, and an island, and so people drown, and it has some quite seductive hills, and so people die of exposure in them, quite possibly adorned in the “khaki shorts and flip-flops” so hated by Billy Connolly. Duly, those far from the story forgot quite quickly about it, possibly within minutes of its third- or fourth-priority airing on the national news. When the story was dredged up again, rather unlike John Darwin himself, most people did not have any recollection of the original disappearance.
But how things change. In a quirk that has amazed all, and certainly entertained Charlie Brooker if not all of us, Mr Darwin has come back from the dead and walked into a police station in London, claiming that “he thinks he might be a missing person”. On the first day that this story broke, it was treated with the kind of innocent happy-go-lucky reporting normally seen in the “And finally…” section of Metro. That it involved an apparent death need not harm the jovial nature of the story. After all that self-same “And finally…” column featured a man in Germany who allegedly lived off only cabbage and beans and suffocated to death in his own flatulence. Apparently a few of the people who retrieved his body from the bed also succumbed to the fumes and had to be hospitalised. A poor man died, but the story still provided us with much-needed mirth amid the gulping of other people’s sweat that occurs during the daily commuting headlock.
The fog of innocence seemed to lift quickly in the canoe saga though. First, the confounding news that John Darwin had been arrested. Then the focusing of the media noose on his wife in Panama, cue panoramic shots of a strangely futuristic and skyscraper-littered Panama City, looking every bit the tax–evading hideaway. Then, apparent genuine shock from the wife, but the confusion mounting with the amount of time she seemed to be taking to reunite with her long-lost husband. Then outrage from their sons who apparently knew nothing, one of whom then disappeared mysteriously leaving his girlfriend a note that he had gone abroad. Nothing like some well-placed anger to throw the dogs off the scent (and hopefully down the stairs to be impaled on a rake, I detest the animals). All of this allegedly of course, no one knows anything with any certainty yet. And lastly, but most brilliantly, someone types in the Darwin’s names and ‘Panama’ into Google, and a photograph taken last year shows them happily standing together along with the estate agent pops up. It reminds me of the time I posed with that body-bag. Really bad move, but at least I got an Open University degree in Bathroom Tiling out of my time inside.
The unravelling of this story has captivated the nation, but it has done so in quite a different way than we are used to. This story is different; there is no hysteria, just gentle but definite interest. The story is so rich and amusing that a fiction writer would have trouble crafting something comparable even when uninhibited by boundaries and physical realities. It climbed quickly to number one on the news priority scale, and has remained perched atop this infamous throne for a number of days now. The government must be happy that something so frivolous at least seems to be taking the heat off the dodgy donations stories that had occupied us before.
This mystery has all the great hallmarks: Houdini-style disappearance, family rifts, flights abroad, public U-turns on national news, rampant amnesia, sweaty and nervous visits to a Catholic church, false doors in flats, scrawled notes and packed bags, ashen-faced understatement from a Cleveland police spokesman, an incriminating photograph… Pink Floyd could write a concept album on it. All the story needs is a furry animal or two, a guest appearance from Paris Hilton and a subtle finger of blame pointing at binge drinking culture and unilateral military intervention and we’ll have ticked all of the boxes.
Mrs Darwin returned to the UK and is as we speak being questioned by police. The life insurance people won’t take this apparent abuse of their service sitting down. With every day that goes by, the story gets murkier and murkier. Fascinating. The story has more holes in it than a moth-eaten shirt kept in a stuffy Oklahoma drawer since the Dust Bowl migrations. But enough of this or we will drown, again unlike Mr Darwin, in a sea. Of metaphors that is (groan).
Instead, here is my guide to How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found (and no, no link to the Radiohead song of the similar name, you have to pace yourself or you will find yourself on a bridge parapet, sack of coal in hand, staring at the river beneath you and wondering how cold it will be). This might be useful should you ever have to flee, especially from the Law (rub hands with glee to maintain warmth):
1) Change your name to something very prevalent in the general population. John Smith is good, as it is ubiquitous. John Doe is not so good, as you will be automatically implicated in court cases for people who need to remain publicly anonymous. Actually they will still find you. Haven’t you heard of CCTV? Only use as a last resort.
2) The old plastic surgery trick. Go under the knife. Cheap surgeries can be done on the street in Glasgow and with often minimal blood loss as our knifemen are technically adept and enjoy to practice. With any luck, you will lose quite a bit of weight as well. A well-placed pool of melted set-square can puff out those unsightly gouge marks.
3) Chameleon Blood Infusions. Since global warming brought more tropical climates to our south coast, chameleons have been arriving on their little lizard boats in droves. They often arrive unannounced in such towns as Hastings, Littlehampton and Bournemouth and often go unnoticed in the general population, many within the service industries, and they have even carved their own niche in the lucrative paint-mixing industry, adept as they are at colour emulation. However, some of them fall on hard times, and do not find such ready acceptance. Many resort to alcoholism, and their most steady source of income is the selling of their blood to people, like yourself, who want to be able to blend into their surroundings so as to avoid discovery. The going rate is £10 a pint, and two pints should be more than enough for you to turn into a chessboard or a psychedelically-patterned curtain in an instant. Hang around the waterfront at the aforementioned towns and whistle the Archer’s theme tune to attract the blood-letters.
4) Become a viking. For many years, this used to be an idle pass-time for people with pots of money and oodles of leisure time. These days, a Viking package tour will set you back a fraction of the cost, and you can go back and reclaim the Norse kingdoms without need of a passport or National Insurance number. Horned helmet optional but advised.
5) Deify yourself. Easier said than done. But as a god, you will be worshipped by millions and be immune from prosecution. Just the ticket when you are being hunted down by the authorities for starting that earthquake. Learning the harp, adhering to a strictly focused exercise regime that will build your biceps into an aileron-shape capable of flight, and installing a megaphone amplifier in your throat, hooked up to the battery supply for your pacemaker (for that godly “Wizard of Oz” effect) won’t disappoint.
6) Live in international waters. For this, you will need a dinghy, an oar, and several decades supply of food. Once there, it will be impossible to be prosecuted or extradited. Whatever you do, don’t use a canoe though.
7) Powder of Sympathy. This substance, popular in eighteenth century France among madmen, alchemists, would-be navigators and injured dogs, can be mixed together from Copper Sulphate, mixed under the auspices of the Sun when it is in the constellation of Leo. When an implement that has been used to wound someone is dipped in the powder, it triggers a sharp pain in the victim. Lightly wound the judge in your impending court case and then while the case is being heard, continually dip the knife in the sympathy powder. The pain will cause him to adjourn the trial. Then quietly slip out the fire escape and away! Away!
8) Become an Avon Lady (cross-dress if necessary). No one knows where the fuck they went, do they?
Ah, Mr Darwin. Such a fall from grace. To think you could have stuck with the earthworm studies and world-changing biological theories. Charlie Brooker reckons that they should be let off for entertaining the nation. I reckon it won’t be long until they are up there with great current-affairs personalities like celebrity terrorist-tackler, Smeato.
In my nine years in London, these are three of the things I learned:
1) Never fall asleep on a Night Bus.
2) The entire UK construction industry, from the loftiest CEO to the lowliest asthmatic work-horse that drags a wagon full of steel to the building site every morning, is irretrievably fucked.
3) If you sit down, press your knuckles against your forehead and strain hard enough, eventually you will either have a dump or a creative idea.
By a link more tenuous than a weather-beaten rope bridge across an Andes gorge, I’m guessing that John Darwin and his wife wished there had been an entirely different outcome when practicing option three - for their idea, though creative, was completely unworkable. In case you have been on another planet, or you have enough of a life (unlike me) to avoid populist soap-opera news and its mind-contorting whims, this is about the unfolding story of a canoeist who disappeared among the decommissioned ghost ships and grey waters of the North Sea near Hartlepool, back in 2000.
After £60,000 spent on helicopter, RNLI and police searches, and possibly even with the input of the little-known Militarily Trained Otter Squad (indispensable for uncovering mines in the English Channel during the Second World War, the poor furry suicide freaks), the search was called off. The people put down their newspapers, shook their heads and went back to their cups of tea, lamenting about poor Mr Darwin succumbing to a Giant Octopus, Great White Shark, prehistoric sea scorpion or any other thing that could explain the total absence of a body.
It is a fairly common occurrence for people to die from the elements in this country. This is a wet place, and an island, and so people drown, and it has some quite seductive hills, and so people die of exposure in them, quite possibly adorned in the “khaki shorts and flip-flops” so hated by Billy Connolly. Duly, those far from the story forgot quite quickly about it, possibly within minutes of its third- or fourth-priority airing on the national news. When the story was dredged up again, rather unlike John Darwin himself, most people did not have any recollection of the original disappearance.
But how things change. In a quirk that has amazed all, and certainly entertained Charlie Brooker if not all of us, Mr Darwin has come back from the dead and walked into a police station in London, claiming that “he thinks he might be a missing person”. On the first day that this story broke, it was treated with the kind of innocent happy-go-lucky reporting normally seen in the “And finally…” section of Metro. That it involved an apparent death need not harm the jovial nature of the story. After all that self-same “And finally…” column featured a man in Germany who allegedly lived off only cabbage and beans and suffocated to death in his own flatulence. Apparently a few of the people who retrieved his body from the bed also succumbed to the fumes and had to be hospitalised. A poor man died, but the story still provided us with much-needed mirth amid the gulping of other people’s sweat that occurs during the daily commuting headlock.
The fog of innocence seemed to lift quickly in the canoe saga though. First, the confounding news that John Darwin had been arrested. Then the focusing of the media noose on his wife in Panama, cue panoramic shots of a strangely futuristic and skyscraper-littered Panama City, looking every bit the tax–evading hideaway. Then, apparent genuine shock from the wife, but the confusion mounting with the amount of time she seemed to be taking to reunite with her long-lost husband. Then outrage from their sons who apparently knew nothing, one of whom then disappeared mysteriously leaving his girlfriend a note that he had gone abroad. Nothing like some well-placed anger to throw the dogs off the scent (and hopefully down the stairs to be impaled on a rake, I detest the animals). All of this allegedly of course, no one knows anything with any certainty yet. And lastly, but most brilliantly, someone types in the Darwin’s names and ‘Panama’ into Google, and a photograph taken last year shows them happily standing together along with the estate agent pops up. It reminds me of the time I posed with that body-bag. Really bad move, but at least I got an Open University degree in Bathroom Tiling out of my time inside.
The unravelling of this story has captivated the nation, but it has done so in quite a different way than we are used to. This story is different; there is no hysteria, just gentle but definite interest. The story is so rich and amusing that a fiction writer would have trouble crafting something comparable even when uninhibited by boundaries and physical realities. It climbed quickly to number one on the news priority scale, and has remained perched atop this infamous throne for a number of days now. The government must be happy that something so frivolous at least seems to be taking the heat off the dodgy donations stories that had occupied us before.
This mystery has all the great hallmarks: Houdini-style disappearance, family rifts, flights abroad, public U-turns on national news, rampant amnesia, sweaty and nervous visits to a Catholic church, false doors in flats, scrawled notes and packed bags, ashen-faced understatement from a Cleveland police spokesman, an incriminating photograph… Pink Floyd could write a concept album on it. All the story needs is a furry animal or two, a guest appearance from Paris Hilton and a subtle finger of blame pointing at binge drinking culture and unilateral military intervention and we’ll have ticked all of the boxes.
Mrs Darwin returned to the UK and is as we speak being questioned by police. The life insurance people won’t take this apparent abuse of their service sitting down. With every day that goes by, the story gets murkier and murkier. Fascinating. The story has more holes in it than a moth-eaten shirt kept in a stuffy Oklahoma drawer since the Dust Bowl migrations. But enough of this or we will drown, again unlike Mr Darwin, in a sea. Of metaphors that is (groan).
Instead, here is my guide to How To Disappear Completely And Never Be Found (and no, no link to the Radiohead song of the similar name, you have to pace yourself or you will find yourself on a bridge parapet, sack of coal in hand, staring at the river beneath you and wondering how cold it will be). This might be useful should you ever have to flee, especially from the Law (rub hands with glee to maintain warmth):
1) Change your name to something very prevalent in the general population. John Smith is good, as it is ubiquitous. John Doe is not so good, as you will be automatically implicated in court cases for people who need to remain publicly anonymous. Actually they will still find you. Haven’t you heard of CCTV? Only use as a last resort.
2) The old plastic surgery trick. Go under the knife. Cheap surgeries can be done on the street in Glasgow and with often minimal blood loss as our knifemen are technically adept and enjoy to practice. With any luck, you will lose quite a bit of weight as well. A well-placed pool of melted set-square can puff out those unsightly gouge marks.
3) Chameleon Blood Infusions. Since global warming brought more tropical climates to our south coast, chameleons have been arriving on their little lizard boats in droves. They often arrive unannounced in such towns as Hastings, Littlehampton and Bournemouth and often go unnoticed in the general population, many within the service industries, and they have even carved their own niche in the lucrative paint-mixing industry, adept as they are at colour emulation. However, some of them fall on hard times, and do not find such ready acceptance. Many resort to alcoholism, and their most steady source of income is the selling of their blood to people, like yourself, who want to be able to blend into their surroundings so as to avoid discovery. The going rate is £10 a pint, and two pints should be more than enough for you to turn into a chessboard or a psychedelically-patterned curtain in an instant. Hang around the waterfront at the aforementioned towns and whistle the Archer’s theme tune to attract the blood-letters.
4) Become a viking. For many years, this used to be an idle pass-time for people with pots of money and oodles of leisure time. These days, a Viking package tour will set you back a fraction of the cost, and you can go back and reclaim the Norse kingdoms without need of a passport or National Insurance number. Horned helmet optional but advised.
5) Deify yourself. Easier said than done. But as a god, you will be worshipped by millions and be immune from prosecution. Just the ticket when you are being hunted down by the authorities for starting that earthquake. Learning the harp, adhering to a strictly focused exercise regime that will build your biceps into an aileron-shape capable of flight, and installing a megaphone amplifier in your throat, hooked up to the battery supply for your pacemaker (for that godly “Wizard of Oz” effect) won’t disappoint.
6) Live in international waters. For this, you will need a dinghy, an oar, and several decades supply of food. Once there, it will be impossible to be prosecuted or extradited. Whatever you do, don’t use a canoe though.
7) Powder of Sympathy. This substance, popular in eighteenth century France among madmen, alchemists, would-be navigators and injured dogs, can be mixed together from Copper Sulphate, mixed under the auspices of the Sun when it is in the constellation of Leo. When an implement that has been used to wound someone is dipped in the powder, it triggers a sharp pain in the victim. Lightly wound the judge in your impending court case and then while the case is being heard, continually dip the knife in the sympathy powder. The pain will cause him to adjourn the trial. Then quietly slip out the fire escape and away! Away!
8) Become an Avon Lady (cross-dress if necessary). No one knows where the fuck they went, do they?
Ah, Mr Darwin. Such a fall from grace. To think you could have stuck with the earthworm studies and world-changing biological theories. Charlie Brooker reckons that they should be let off for entertaining the nation. I reckon it won’t be long until they are up there with great current-affairs personalities like celebrity terrorist-tackler, Smeato.
Sunday, 9 December 2007
Brakes to the Grindstone
Somewhere during a murmuring sleepless night recently – too much taurine - staring at the jagged France-shaped hole in my ceiling, I collected a few splinters of thoughts together regarding a new predicament. It may have become a little muddled, shelved as it was between other thoughts such as my recurring fear of an upcoming but fictional exam, and a prolonged scene of harmless affection involving Claire Danes. Bless her wee cotton socks.
Anyway, in the sweatshop world of data entry, I was thinking that there is one reason to maintain efficiency, and two reasons to abort it. The reason for efficiency is driven by the obvious fear of being laid off for non-performance. It is no shock that your labours are catalogued on lists and poured through. I found a mysterious stack of my spent data sheets balancing on an in-tray with my initials appended, due for filing. I found a group of people sitting by my desk one morning when I arrived, discussing the merits of so-and-so, and how many database entries each had done. All these people whose fate they were deciding were only initials to them, they had no idea that one of their number was listening while waiting anxiously to get his seat back and paper-cut his way through another day.
The two linked reasons for procrastinating, on the other hand, are firstly that you are paid by the hour, and therefore naturally find merit in increasing work time at the expense of efficiency. The second reason is the distinct possibility that your work might run out, and that you will be cast into the street, inevitably in the pouring rain, to wheedle home in a lamenting state and roll up all your empty timesheets and burn them under a chimney flue so that you can at least you can try and delude passers-by that you are choosing a new Pope, however unlikely that act is to take place in Streatham or wherever.
But these contradictions add up to the work-equivalent of seeing a 15 mph speed limit on an open motorway.
In the end, I, along with others who started at the same time, will fall victim to that very last reason, the finite nature of the work, next week. In the horribly imposed competition, done on sleuth, we were willed to go as fast as we dared, knowing we were racing towards a wall, but preferring to hit the wall in the distance rather than be dragged screaming off the course mid-way for slipping behind as at least that way we stayed in the race the longest. I suppose that had we been more organised, some kind of union or cartel kind of arrangement could have taken place where we gained some kind of mutual benefit by grouping together at a slower pace. Applying Game Theory and the Prisoner Dilemma to the real-life scenario of keeping a job didn’t really cross my mind as I don’t fully understand it, and the intricacies of ‘Generous Tit-for-Tat’ and other statistical lunacies pale when you are confronted with a large stack of paper. But it is still a harsh lesson to learn a fortnight before Christmas. The bar scene in “A Beautiful Mind” illustrates this nicely.
Now I realise that in order for companies and capitalism to work, there can be no other way for them to operate. And that is not to say that I am not about to dig up Marx from his Highgate resting place and tote him around on a stick down Oxford Street, standing beside the “Golf Sale” people and extolling the virtues of seizing back top-hats’ profits for the liberation of the masses. It is just an observation. On a side note, an accountant friend once told me of his desire to read “Das Kapital”, Marx’s tome pleading his economic case. Normally the word ‘seminal’ would be used here, much as it is customary to use the word ‘eclectic’ when referring to Jools Holland’s show, but I feel the author’s name speaks for itself. We finally found it towards the end of a day filled with aimless absurdities and considerable dog-earing of a travelcard. We had expected an awe-inspiring political pamphlet like The Communist Manifesto which is slim, readable on a medium-length city bus journey and thought-provoking to the extreme. By which I mean that you step off the bus cross-eyed. The thing actually turned out to be split into volumes, each of which was so weighty that to fondle it out from the bottom shelf and lift it to reading height would have contorted your spine into an irreversibly damaged shape, possibly consigning you to your bed for life, and able to amply claim that device of income redistribution by the state we call Incapacity Benefit. Perhaps that’s ironic or something.
My real point is not to weigh one economic system against another, I have neither the knowledge nor the insight to achieve this, nor is it to advocate one method of work as opposed to another. It is simply to ask this: Why the fuck are we all going so fast? And what is this going to cost us?
The world is full of technological innovations that were supposed to turn our lives around, to free us from the all-waking-hour necessity of gaining nourishment, inviting us to pursue leisure. No need to grill bread, here’s something called the toaster. Need to get to work? Why not live miles away and we’ll slap down some tarmac so that you can jump in a vehicle and be there in minutes. What’s more, you can now separate out from your neighbours in all the new space afforded, and spend your ample down-time fulfillingly in the expanses of park in between. The vacuum cleaner was widely marketed as the tool that was going to liberate wives from house work. Yes, this magical suction device will mean you can make the home spotless in a fraction of the time, meaning that you can take your children to the lovely new park after their morning toast for hours at a time, marvelling at that motorway on-ramp that made all of this possible.
A couple of years ago, I read a report that the human race has accumulated more information and data in the last five years than in the entire history of the species prior to that. In the couple of years since that report, it would not surprise me if we had near doubled that amount again. There will be no end.
I don’t deny the beauty of technology and the outstanding effects some of it has had on the human race, I just wonder whether at some point we might all realise that in some aspects we have been chasing our own tails. I have long wondered whether there is a state of equilibrium for the amount of discomfort that we can experience collectively, and that some ‘improvements’ only serve to change the position of this equilibrium. This would be fine if this point of equilibrium was at a point of comfort. But our nature means we must push it as far as it will go, to a level bordering on the intolerable, and there we shall stagnate until relief pushes us onto a differently situated but equally intolerable position. But there is an absolute cost as well. This new position can arguably be worse, as lifting the benchmark forces everyone to meet the new target. Compare it with, say, the measures made in the UK to allow people onto the housing ladder. Banks allowing mortgage-lending at higher levels relative to salaries and other policies to make borrowing easier have the laudable aim of letting people access properties which higher prices had sadly ruled out. However, everyone has been given this same chance, the equilibrium of what people can afford moves upward, and it is against this new benchmark that all people will now have to climb. And they wonder why bricks are like gold dust. More on this in later posts.
Of course, all this means that everyone has further to fall when it all goes wrong. One defective rung of the ladder, let’s call it the sub-prime rung, might rot through, causing everyone to tumble. And in every walk of life where this principle of endless efficiency gains become more and more vulnerable as time goes on, and the boundary drifts further ahead, like the horizon you can always sail towards but never reach. The problem with this theory of undoing the endless acceleration and turning it into a collective deceleration that will allow us to move the point of equilibrium to a place more comfortably within the capabilities of our ape-descended minds, is that it only works if everyone does it. Or if we do it in total isolation, Amish-style. Unfortunately for us, this is probably a futile enterprise.
Unless, that is, my plan to found my own state on a very small area of a third-floor flat in Glasgow comes to fruition. I realise this idea has been travelled to the nth degree on TV programmes and the like, but my state is special as it is going to be founded on a hopefully harmless ideology. It will be called The Republic of Lethargy, and the order of the day will be the living of life at a reasonable speed. And in a group, it is only fair that that falls to the speed of the slowest member. Procrastination, rather than being seen as the thief of time, will be seen instead as the borrower of life. There will be no king or queen, only a democratically-elected chairman, who, as the name suggests, will be required to remain seated at all times (on a commode though, for hygiene reasons) so as to eliminate the possibility of he or she partaking in a fitful burst of pointless work. My flatmate and I have already made admirable steps in eliminating all unnecessary haste, slobbing of a workday evening under duvets in the lounge. In order to maintain the sanity of the weak-willed, a state religion will be introduced, though it will be optional and possibly only practised by those under the temporary umbrella of despair. As one of the aforementioned duvets in the flat is decorated with the character, Hamtaro “Little Hamster, Big Adventures”, I feel it is only fair that Hamtarism become this religion. I am sure nothing sinister can come from the expansion of a state founded on a sole economic idea and a flimsy religion. We wouldn’t have the energy to fill in the paperwork to buy a missile anyway.
Anyway, so I plead with you, please come and join the Republic of Lethargy and help end this circus once and for all!
In recognition of this plea, and it is especially directed at the millions of needlessly frantic people in London, here is an invitation to listen to a beautiful song named Go Slowly by Radiohead. Even if the original meaning of the song is not entirely related to this blog entry, perhaps its leisurely pace will convince you of the merits of avoiding breakneck speed for a while. Not all races are worth sprinting. Round that last corner and you’ll be within sight of the cemetery.
You shouldn’t take any of this too seriously though. I am just bitter about losing my job. I should be able to find another one from the temping agency hopefully. That is, if someone else doesn’t get there first.
Anyway, in the sweatshop world of data entry, I was thinking that there is one reason to maintain efficiency, and two reasons to abort it. The reason for efficiency is driven by the obvious fear of being laid off for non-performance. It is no shock that your labours are catalogued on lists and poured through. I found a mysterious stack of my spent data sheets balancing on an in-tray with my initials appended, due for filing. I found a group of people sitting by my desk one morning when I arrived, discussing the merits of so-and-so, and how many database entries each had done. All these people whose fate they were deciding were only initials to them, they had no idea that one of their number was listening while waiting anxiously to get his seat back and paper-cut his way through another day.
The two linked reasons for procrastinating, on the other hand, are firstly that you are paid by the hour, and therefore naturally find merit in increasing work time at the expense of efficiency. The second reason is the distinct possibility that your work might run out, and that you will be cast into the street, inevitably in the pouring rain, to wheedle home in a lamenting state and roll up all your empty timesheets and burn them under a chimney flue so that you can at least you can try and delude passers-by that you are choosing a new Pope, however unlikely that act is to take place in Streatham or wherever.
But these contradictions add up to the work-equivalent of seeing a 15 mph speed limit on an open motorway.
In the end, I, along with others who started at the same time, will fall victim to that very last reason, the finite nature of the work, next week. In the horribly imposed competition, done on sleuth, we were willed to go as fast as we dared, knowing we were racing towards a wall, but preferring to hit the wall in the distance rather than be dragged screaming off the course mid-way for slipping behind as at least that way we stayed in the race the longest. I suppose that had we been more organised, some kind of union or cartel kind of arrangement could have taken place where we gained some kind of mutual benefit by grouping together at a slower pace. Applying Game Theory and the Prisoner Dilemma to the real-life scenario of keeping a job didn’t really cross my mind as I don’t fully understand it, and the intricacies of ‘Generous Tit-for-Tat’ and other statistical lunacies pale when you are confronted with a large stack of paper. But it is still a harsh lesson to learn a fortnight before Christmas. The bar scene in “A Beautiful Mind” illustrates this nicely.
Now I realise that in order for companies and capitalism to work, there can be no other way for them to operate. And that is not to say that I am not about to dig up Marx from his Highgate resting place and tote him around on a stick down Oxford Street, standing beside the “Golf Sale” people and extolling the virtues of seizing back top-hats’ profits for the liberation of the masses. It is just an observation. On a side note, an accountant friend once told me of his desire to read “Das Kapital”, Marx’s tome pleading his economic case. Normally the word ‘seminal’ would be used here, much as it is customary to use the word ‘eclectic’ when referring to Jools Holland’s show, but I feel the author’s name speaks for itself. We finally found it towards the end of a day filled with aimless absurdities and considerable dog-earing of a travelcard. We had expected an awe-inspiring political pamphlet like The Communist Manifesto which is slim, readable on a medium-length city bus journey and thought-provoking to the extreme. By which I mean that you step off the bus cross-eyed. The thing actually turned out to be split into volumes, each of which was so weighty that to fondle it out from the bottom shelf and lift it to reading height would have contorted your spine into an irreversibly damaged shape, possibly consigning you to your bed for life, and able to amply claim that device of income redistribution by the state we call Incapacity Benefit. Perhaps that’s ironic or something.
My real point is not to weigh one economic system against another, I have neither the knowledge nor the insight to achieve this, nor is it to advocate one method of work as opposed to another. It is simply to ask this: Why the fuck are we all going so fast? And what is this going to cost us?
The world is full of technological innovations that were supposed to turn our lives around, to free us from the all-waking-hour necessity of gaining nourishment, inviting us to pursue leisure. No need to grill bread, here’s something called the toaster. Need to get to work? Why not live miles away and we’ll slap down some tarmac so that you can jump in a vehicle and be there in minutes. What’s more, you can now separate out from your neighbours in all the new space afforded, and spend your ample down-time fulfillingly in the expanses of park in between. The vacuum cleaner was widely marketed as the tool that was going to liberate wives from house work. Yes, this magical suction device will mean you can make the home spotless in a fraction of the time, meaning that you can take your children to the lovely new park after their morning toast for hours at a time, marvelling at that motorway on-ramp that made all of this possible.
A couple of years ago, I read a report that the human race has accumulated more information and data in the last five years than in the entire history of the species prior to that. In the couple of years since that report, it would not surprise me if we had near doubled that amount again. There will be no end.
I don’t deny the beauty of technology and the outstanding effects some of it has had on the human race, I just wonder whether at some point we might all realise that in some aspects we have been chasing our own tails. I have long wondered whether there is a state of equilibrium for the amount of discomfort that we can experience collectively, and that some ‘improvements’ only serve to change the position of this equilibrium. This would be fine if this point of equilibrium was at a point of comfort. But our nature means we must push it as far as it will go, to a level bordering on the intolerable, and there we shall stagnate until relief pushes us onto a differently situated but equally intolerable position. But there is an absolute cost as well. This new position can arguably be worse, as lifting the benchmark forces everyone to meet the new target. Compare it with, say, the measures made in the UK to allow people onto the housing ladder. Banks allowing mortgage-lending at higher levels relative to salaries and other policies to make borrowing easier have the laudable aim of letting people access properties which higher prices had sadly ruled out. However, everyone has been given this same chance, the equilibrium of what people can afford moves upward, and it is against this new benchmark that all people will now have to climb. And they wonder why bricks are like gold dust. More on this in later posts.
Of course, all this means that everyone has further to fall when it all goes wrong. One defective rung of the ladder, let’s call it the sub-prime rung, might rot through, causing everyone to tumble. And in every walk of life where this principle of endless efficiency gains become more and more vulnerable as time goes on, and the boundary drifts further ahead, like the horizon you can always sail towards but never reach. The problem with this theory of undoing the endless acceleration and turning it into a collective deceleration that will allow us to move the point of equilibrium to a place more comfortably within the capabilities of our ape-descended minds, is that it only works if everyone does it. Or if we do it in total isolation, Amish-style. Unfortunately for us, this is probably a futile enterprise.
Unless, that is, my plan to found my own state on a very small area of a third-floor flat in Glasgow comes to fruition. I realise this idea has been travelled to the nth degree on TV programmes and the like, but my state is special as it is going to be founded on a hopefully harmless ideology. It will be called The Republic of Lethargy, and the order of the day will be the living of life at a reasonable speed. And in a group, it is only fair that that falls to the speed of the slowest member. Procrastination, rather than being seen as the thief of time, will be seen instead as the borrower of life. There will be no king or queen, only a democratically-elected chairman, who, as the name suggests, will be required to remain seated at all times (on a commode though, for hygiene reasons) so as to eliminate the possibility of he or she partaking in a fitful burst of pointless work. My flatmate and I have already made admirable steps in eliminating all unnecessary haste, slobbing of a workday evening under duvets in the lounge. In order to maintain the sanity of the weak-willed, a state religion will be introduced, though it will be optional and possibly only practised by those under the temporary umbrella of despair. As one of the aforementioned duvets in the flat is decorated with the character, Hamtaro “Little Hamster, Big Adventures”, I feel it is only fair that Hamtarism become this religion. I am sure nothing sinister can come from the expansion of a state founded on a sole economic idea and a flimsy religion. We wouldn’t have the energy to fill in the paperwork to buy a missile anyway.
Anyway, so I plead with you, please come and join the Republic of Lethargy and help end this circus once and for all!
In recognition of this plea, and it is especially directed at the millions of needlessly frantic people in London, here is an invitation to listen to a beautiful song named Go Slowly by Radiohead. Even if the original meaning of the song is not entirely related to this blog entry, perhaps its leisurely pace will convince you of the merits of avoiding breakneck speed for a while. Not all races are worth sprinting. Round that last corner and you’ll be within sight of the cemetery.
You shouldn’t take any of this too seriously though. I am just bitter about losing my job. I should be able to find another one from the temping agency hopefully. That is, if someone else doesn’t get there first.
Wednesday, 5 December 2007
The Jags, the Healthier Alternative
There is another way to support football round here. One that doesn’t involve the fear of having your belly ripped open for wearing the wrong shirt in the wrong pub. Why not have a go at the other options? There at least half a dozen other league teams in the Glasgow area. It is a sad state of affairs that the state of play in this city is such that you might want to scurry scared from its most popular teams, but that is the unfortunate state we are in.
So it was in this resigned spirit that last Saturday a few of us dragged ourselves out of bed even though overnight the Atlantic had somehow been evaporated into the sky, mooring fishing boats, sperm whales and a Soviet-era mechanical shark (with attached bugging devices to uncover the inner discussions of capitalist halibut) on the beach at Largs. Above, ever-ready to spill, the upturned ocean chopped and bulged, black as coal, poisonous intent within. It had awe-inspiring patience. While I faffed about looking for shoes under the bin bags, scraping mould off a plate so that I could cut toast on it, cursing while I looked for my keys, trying to brush my teeth without the brush slipping, banging my gums and triggering a fortnight-persisting ulcer of eternal agony, all the while my hands fingering from the still undissipated alcohol, the sky looked on and said, “Not now, boys, just hold on there, await my signal.”
Six flights of stairs, several dog barks and a slam of the front door later and the lot came down. A plague of water. I did what any decent human being would do, and ran fearlessly across the road with the elegance of a three-legged horse on hot coals. In doing so I was narrrowly missed by those colostomy bags-on-wheels, the four-wheel-drive. Bastards. At the local barbers, I learned about such things as the new supermarket (which will be run by coke dealers), the new business that had opened up next door (run by coke dealers), and about the local coke dealers (run by national coke dealers). But all this is a pre-amble to the impending visit to the ground of the glorious third team of football, the mighty Jags, yes, Partick Thistle!
I do not support a football team anymore and I have pretty good reasons for this. But given the opportunity to watch football, in Glasgow, without people singing about being up to their knees in so-and-so’s blood, or about committing gratuitous sexual acts to a head of the clergy, I couldn’t really pass up. So it came to pass, on a day dreich even by Scottish standards, that we braved a freezing monsoon to climb up a hill to a lonely stadium. Everything of note in this city is up a hill, there are eighty-eight of them (in your face, Rome), something to do with glaciers I believe, and they are so prevalent that it even makes walking places “as the crow flies” an often regretted move. Fucking crows, see how they laugh at us with their squawking and how they mock us with those devil wings. Sorry, I had a bad dream about them once, luckily my mattress was still dry when I woke up, but it was a close-run thing.
Firhill stadium is in a strange place. Locked in a desolate location, one of those many parts that have had random tenements smashed to the ground in Le Corbusier-fuelled “artist’s vision” city-planning, it perches on the side of aforementioned hill, clinging like a barnacle, and looks almost like a temporary fixture. Indeed, it is one of those teams that I always fear may make some cost-cutting exercise and move to some random town like Aberfoyle, alienating all its supporters much as Wimbledon did years ago but I’m sure they’re far more sensible than that. Now I have already professed to knowing nothing about football, but it is a laugh, and it allows some of the most spectacular people-watching (albeit, sporadically) available. And also they have pies, delectable, bite-sized, rough of crust yet melding soft through the inside, toasting warmly within you like a single internal ray of sunshine amidst the horror of a Scottish winter.
Of course, like any hard man, I came well equipped with a sturdy Ribena bottle only to have it removed and binned by a police officer. Well, you can hardly blame them. Who can forget the blackcurrent-fuelled orgies of rage that saw European football plagued by casual violence and thuggery in decades past? The sight of grown men lamping each other over the skull with blackcurrant cordial bottles will become, in centuries to come, an iconic image for use on tapestries. Indeed historians (now sadly beardless for the radioactive fallout of the next world war will have rendered the hirsute extinct) will comment wisely, stroking their sideburns and giving sure-eyed, scientific glances while removing their spectacles to make salient points about the blackcurrant invasions of yore, the effect of thousands of angry young men taunted by a small leather ball and the horror of an entire generation in the advanced stages of pie addiction. I think we should set to work on these tapestries immediately, lest the memory fades. The Great Bovril Flood of ’04 could be beautifully invoked using embroidery, I feel.
The strange thing about the policeman (remember him?), is that he actually asked me whether he could have my Ribena bottle. I might have tried politely refusing, but then that would have been the start of the tear gas, water cannon and repeated baton charges, while I flailed in his general direction, blinded, using the girl next to me’s scarf (with girl still attached). I might have caught him in the throat with a particularly vicious woollen bauble but it is no use putting these things down to chance. I have been outwitted by a bin, several kerbs, at least two flights of stairs, a glass balcony door (haven’t we all?), a telephone and several other inanimate objects in my past, so perhaps I should leave tangling with trained police officers for a little while. And I am meant to be preaching pacifism Jags-style anyway.
Most of the sheltered seats were taken over by shivering folk huddling themselves up for warmth, and also some cunning labels to show the seats reserved for season ticket holders. The labels seemed warm enough but I fancy the people were only minutes away from wheeling some bins in and setting them on fire, allowing them to do the pat-the-flames manoeuvre with their mittens. For reasons of cost, I suppose, the roof doesn’t quite reach over all the seats, and the sodden ones down the front were free. We shuffled along and then sat down, our arses having been numbed by the cold before they even made contact. The sleet was like a poor man’s light show, with spectacular choreography of left-leaning, right-leaning, the occasional vertical and even the odd upward draft of rain scattering afore as if afflicted by the gravity in an Escher print. Making a shot in this wind would be interesting at least.
The actual game was entertaining enough. There was a good sense of desparation reflected in the pace, though at no point did anyone bring out a shovel and proclaim that he was digging for victory, as may have occurred in games of lesser standard. Lest it be forgotten that the most dramatic scoreline in professional football’s history occurred in Scotland. A trouncing of Bon Accord by Arbroath 36 (count ‘em) nil. The players of the former are now presumably in alternative employment doing dressage, show-jumping or any other equestrian pursuit where you are actually meant to let things go between your legs. Luckily play did not have to be abandoned for flooding, as the water only got about neck high, but it came down in torrents. We soon started to resemble the stereotypical gurning Scotsman, face screwed up against the sleet, crevices etched into the face, pinched by the cold and numb. The skin so frozen that even raising an eyebrow seems to release a crack of noise. I am torn between whether this is a better or not stereotypical image than the kilted behemoth in a field of corn, sunshine lapping down, shot putt in hand as he aims for some-or-other piece of wild game to slaughter that he can then sling over his back as he stomps merrily down the hill to his wife, Leanne, for her to slave over on the stove while the weans catch the potatoes as they frolic in their pen.
Partick Thistle were 2-0 up until the last five minutes of the game. The man sitting in front of him, who was nothing short of a lyrical genius. He managed about twenty different intonations of the word, “cunt”, ranging through spat-out, inquisitive, coughed, staccato, and my own personal favourite, the sneer. He also came out with some more drawn out comments, clearing his throat as if addressing a crowd, and seeming to grasp at an invisible lectern as he did so, “Aha. Yous lot’ve left yer wive’s daein the late night shoppin’ while you sit here an’ watch yer team get fucked”. I should mention that they were playing Saint Johnstone, from Perth which is very, very north. The last town before you get to the proper Highlands. They have those feathery, clipped accents that are quite becoming, not like our nasal drawl. At one moment, that same man turned round to say our pal, who was from Greece and still very much in learning of our local dialect, “You know, I’ve got a wet arse”. His wife then added, “I bet you feel much happier for knowing that”. He nodded in reply a little too eagerly.
Then suddenly all bets were off. For no reason, a penalty was awarded for Saint Johnstone, which they scored on the 90th minute. Cue whistling, demented slaggings and a pouring out of hatreds until we were knee-deep in the viscous stuff. Even eight-year-old children were pouring out words that they had instantly plucked from the air and thrown forth from their lungs in ecstatic rage. It really was heart-warming how you could boil up that much hatred, even without religion to stir things up. It makes you rest easy and believe in the inately passionate nature of man. At least, I think that’s what the announcer said.
The announcer, by the way, has the second-best job in football. She was having a whale of a time. Apart from seeming to get a substituted-off player’s name wrong “No wonder we’re getting fucked, that man’s been deid since 1968”. Someone seemed to be up there in the commentary box tickling her feet with that gopher carcass (there’s always a gopher carcass involved) while she tried to keep her composure. I would dearly covet that job. Of course the best job in football is the mascot. Partick Thistle’s mascot is absolutely brilliant and I love it. It is like a puffin*, drawn by a deeply autistic child with a penchant for purple. The child’s typical landscape drawing would have involved a lime green sky. This puffin thing has a multi-coloured beak which makes it look like it hurried home after a hard day fishing with rampant nookie on his mind and took a wrong turn accidentally braining himself in a Dulux factory. This mascot made an appearance for about five minutes on the edge of the pitch, trying his best to take people’s mind off their slowly developing hypthermia by flapping jovially. Inside, maybe, was a grown man weeping away while looking at a passport-sized photo of his family that he had stuck to the inside of the costume, though I do hope not. He then went for a ‘jog’ around the pitch, before patting one of the ball-fetcher-boy’s heads and then slinking off down a concealed exit. Oddly, I couldn’t see any holes where he could have seen out. I can only assume that he has trodden the hallowed turf of Firhill so often that he knows every little clump and divot by toe-touch alone. That’s devotion for you, as the advert goes. He was never seen again. I can only assume that he was set upon by other Glasgow team mascots and then taken to an out-of-town shopping centre car park and shot, gangland style. Lucrative business this dressing-up-in-animal costumes lark. Just watch “Death to Smoochie” (a box-office flop but a fantastic film). That would be a real shame. If anyone has seen a purple puffin being beaten with sticks by a bear and a hound, you should contact Strathclyde Police.
Anyway, after Saint Johnstone scored their penalty three minutes from time, they then hacked in another goal in the final minute, and a devastated crowd bayed for the referee’s blood for awarding the earlier penalty, which had now contributed to an eleventh-hour 2-2 draw. A large-faced woman led the abuse, concocting a several minutes-long speech using several newly invented curse-words without taking a breath and turning a level of scarlet that even momentarily melted through the permafrost. We screamed until we were hoarse, and chanted “Cheat, cheat, cheat”, and when the officials finally left the ground I had a feeling that there were some plastic surgeons out back ready to change their identities. They might even have hired that finger-print-melting identity-destroyer from Men in Black. Fitting for a referee don’t you think?
Despite the result, a thoroughly great experience. My toes have almost thawed now, which is lucky because sucking them isn’t half as much fun when they are numb. Don’t worry that deserting the Old Firm is going to sap some passion out of your football crowd experience. The path to the Jags lies open and with it every high and low you could ask for. I have no knowledge of football, but I know good entertainment when I see it…
* - On doing a little research (typing three words and clicking the mouse a couple of times), it transpires that the “puffin” is in fact a toucan. It is called Pee Tee and is my new hero. It is too late for me to pick a football team to support anew, and like renaming a boat, I’m sure switching team allegiance brings monumental bad luck. But I support Pee Tee. May he reign supreme and see us to the end with a cheery flap of his wings.
So it was in this resigned spirit that last Saturday a few of us dragged ourselves out of bed even though overnight the Atlantic had somehow been evaporated into the sky, mooring fishing boats, sperm whales and a Soviet-era mechanical shark (with attached bugging devices to uncover the inner discussions of capitalist halibut) on the beach at Largs. Above, ever-ready to spill, the upturned ocean chopped and bulged, black as coal, poisonous intent within. It had awe-inspiring patience. While I faffed about looking for shoes under the bin bags, scraping mould off a plate so that I could cut toast on it, cursing while I looked for my keys, trying to brush my teeth without the brush slipping, banging my gums and triggering a fortnight-persisting ulcer of eternal agony, all the while my hands fingering from the still undissipated alcohol, the sky looked on and said, “Not now, boys, just hold on there, await my signal.”
Six flights of stairs, several dog barks and a slam of the front door later and the lot came down. A plague of water. I did what any decent human being would do, and ran fearlessly across the road with the elegance of a three-legged horse on hot coals. In doing so I was narrrowly missed by those colostomy bags-on-wheels, the four-wheel-drive. Bastards. At the local barbers, I learned about such things as the new supermarket (which will be run by coke dealers), the new business that had opened up next door (run by coke dealers), and about the local coke dealers (run by national coke dealers). But all this is a pre-amble to the impending visit to the ground of the glorious third team of football, the mighty Jags, yes, Partick Thistle!
I do not support a football team anymore and I have pretty good reasons for this. But given the opportunity to watch football, in Glasgow, without people singing about being up to their knees in so-and-so’s blood, or about committing gratuitous sexual acts to a head of the clergy, I couldn’t really pass up. So it came to pass, on a day dreich even by Scottish standards, that we braved a freezing monsoon to climb up a hill to a lonely stadium. Everything of note in this city is up a hill, there are eighty-eight of them (in your face, Rome), something to do with glaciers I believe, and they are so prevalent that it even makes walking places “as the crow flies” an often regretted move. Fucking crows, see how they laugh at us with their squawking and how they mock us with those devil wings. Sorry, I had a bad dream about them once, luckily my mattress was still dry when I woke up, but it was a close-run thing.
Firhill stadium is in a strange place. Locked in a desolate location, one of those many parts that have had random tenements smashed to the ground in Le Corbusier-fuelled “artist’s vision” city-planning, it perches on the side of aforementioned hill, clinging like a barnacle, and looks almost like a temporary fixture. Indeed, it is one of those teams that I always fear may make some cost-cutting exercise and move to some random town like Aberfoyle, alienating all its supporters much as Wimbledon did years ago but I’m sure they’re far more sensible than that. Now I have already professed to knowing nothing about football, but it is a laugh, and it allows some of the most spectacular people-watching (albeit, sporadically) available. And also they have pies, delectable, bite-sized, rough of crust yet melding soft through the inside, toasting warmly within you like a single internal ray of sunshine amidst the horror of a Scottish winter.
Of course, like any hard man, I came well equipped with a sturdy Ribena bottle only to have it removed and binned by a police officer. Well, you can hardly blame them. Who can forget the blackcurrent-fuelled orgies of rage that saw European football plagued by casual violence and thuggery in decades past? The sight of grown men lamping each other over the skull with blackcurrant cordial bottles will become, in centuries to come, an iconic image for use on tapestries. Indeed historians (now sadly beardless for the radioactive fallout of the next world war will have rendered the hirsute extinct) will comment wisely, stroking their sideburns and giving sure-eyed, scientific glances while removing their spectacles to make salient points about the blackcurrant invasions of yore, the effect of thousands of angry young men taunted by a small leather ball and the horror of an entire generation in the advanced stages of pie addiction. I think we should set to work on these tapestries immediately, lest the memory fades. The Great Bovril Flood of ’04 could be beautifully invoked using embroidery, I feel.
The strange thing about the policeman (remember him?), is that he actually asked me whether he could have my Ribena bottle. I might have tried politely refusing, but then that would have been the start of the tear gas, water cannon and repeated baton charges, while I flailed in his general direction, blinded, using the girl next to me’s scarf (with girl still attached). I might have caught him in the throat with a particularly vicious woollen bauble but it is no use putting these things down to chance. I have been outwitted by a bin, several kerbs, at least two flights of stairs, a glass balcony door (haven’t we all?), a telephone and several other inanimate objects in my past, so perhaps I should leave tangling with trained police officers for a little while. And I am meant to be preaching pacifism Jags-style anyway.
Most of the sheltered seats were taken over by shivering folk huddling themselves up for warmth, and also some cunning labels to show the seats reserved for season ticket holders. The labels seemed warm enough but I fancy the people were only minutes away from wheeling some bins in and setting them on fire, allowing them to do the pat-the-flames manoeuvre with their mittens. For reasons of cost, I suppose, the roof doesn’t quite reach over all the seats, and the sodden ones down the front were free. We shuffled along and then sat down, our arses having been numbed by the cold before they even made contact. The sleet was like a poor man’s light show, with spectacular choreography of left-leaning, right-leaning, the occasional vertical and even the odd upward draft of rain scattering afore as if afflicted by the gravity in an Escher print. Making a shot in this wind would be interesting at least.
The actual game was entertaining enough. There was a good sense of desparation reflected in the pace, though at no point did anyone bring out a shovel and proclaim that he was digging for victory, as may have occurred in games of lesser standard. Lest it be forgotten that the most dramatic scoreline in professional football’s history occurred in Scotland. A trouncing of Bon Accord by Arbroath 36 (count ‘em) nil. The players of the former are now presumably in alternative employment doing dressage, show-jumping or any other equestrian pursuit where you are actually meant to let things go between your legs. Luckily play did not have to be abandoned for flooding, as the water only got about neck high, but it came down in torrents. We soon started to resemble the stereotypical gurning Scotsman, face screwed up against the sleet, crevices etched into the face, pinched by the cold and numb. The skin so frozen that even raising an eyebrow seems to release a crack of noise. I am torn between whether this is a better or not stereotypical image than the kilted behemoth in a field of corn, sunshine lapping down, shot putt in hand as he aims for some-or-other piece of wild game to slaughter that he can then sling over his back as he stomps merrily down the hill to his wife, Leanne, for her to slave over on the stove while the weans catch the potatoes as they frolic in their pen.
Partick Thistle were 2-0 up until the last five minutes of the game. The man sitting in front of him, who was nothing short of a lyrical genius. He managed about twenty different intonations of the word, “cunt”, ranging through spat-out, inquisitive, coughed, staccato, and my own personal favourite, the sneer. He also came out with some more drawn out comments, clearing his throat as if addressing a crowd, and seeming to grasp at an invisible lectern as he did so, “Aha. Yous lot’ve left yer wive’s daein the late night shoppin’ while you sit here an’ watch yer team get fucked”. I should mention that they were playing Saint Johnstone, from Perth which is very, very north. The last town before you get to the proper Highlands. They have those feathery, clipped accents that are quite becoming, not like our nasal drawl. At one moment, that same man turned round to say our pal, who was from Greece and still very much in learning of our local dialect, “You know, I’ve got a wet arse”. His wife then added, “I bet you feel much happier for knowing that”. He nodded in reply a little too eagerly.
Then suddenly all bets were off. For no reason, a penalty was awarded for Saint Johnstone, which they scored on the 90th minute. Cue whistling, demented slaggings and a pouring out of hatreds until we were knee-deep in the viscous stuff. Even eight-year-old children were pouring out words that they had instantly plucked from the air and thrown forth from their lungs in ecstatic rage. It really was heart-warming how you could boil up that much hatred, even without religion to stir things up. It makes you rest easy and believe in the inately passionate nature of man. At least, I think that’s what the announcer said.
The announcer, by the way, has the second-best job in football. She was having a whale of a time. Apart from seeming to get a substituted-off player’s name wrong “No wonder we’re getting fucked, that man’s been deid since 1968”. Someone seemed to be up there in the commentary box tickling her feet with that gopher carcass (there’s always a gopher carcass involved) while she tried to keep her composure. I would dearly covet that job. Of course the best job in football is the mascot. Partick Thistle’s mascot is absolutely brilliant and I love it. It is like a puffin*, drawn by a deeply autistic child with a penchant for purple. The child’s typical landscape drawing would have involved a lime green sky. This puffin thing has a multi-coloured beak which makes it look like it hurried home after a hard day fishing with rampant nookie on his mind and took a wrong turn accidentally braining himself in a Dulux factory. This mascot made an appearance for about five minutes on the edge of the pitch, trying his best to take people’s mind off their slowly developing hypthermia by flapping jovially. Inside, maybe, was a grown man weeping away while looking at a passport-sized photo of his family that he had stuck to the inside of the costume, though I do hope not. He then went for a ‘jog’ around the pitch, before patting one of the ball-fetcher-boy’s heads and then slinking off down a concealed exit. Oddly, I couldn’t see any holes where he could have seen out. I can only assume that he has trodden the hallowed turf of Firhill so often that he knows every little clump and divot by toe-touch alone. That’s devotion for you, as the advert goes. He was never seen again. I can only assume that he was set upon by other Glasgow team mascots and then taken to an out-of-town shopping centre car park and shot, gangland style. Lucrative business this dressing-up-in-animal costumes lark. Just watch “Death to Smoochie” (a box-office flop but a fantastic film). That would be a real shame. If anyone has seen a purple puffin being beaten with sticks by a bear and a hound, you should contact Strathclyde Police.
Anyway, after Saint Johnstone scored their penalty three minutes from time, they then hacked in another goal in the final minute, and a devastated crowd bayed for the referee’s blood for awarding the earlier penalty, which had now contributed to an eleventh-hour 2-2 draw. A large-faced woman led the abuse, concocting a several minutes-long speech using several newly invented curse-words without taking a breath and turning a level of scarlet that even momentarily melted through the permafrost. We screamed until we were hoarse, and chanted “Cheat, cheat, cheat”, and when the officials finally left the ground I had a feeling that there were some plastic surgeons out back ready to change their identities. They might even have hired that finger-print-melting identity-destroyer from Men in Black. Fitting for a referee don’t you think?
Despite the result, a thoroughly great experience. My toes have almost thawed now, which is lucky because sucking them isn’t half as much fun when they are numb. Don’t worry that deserting the Old Firm is going to sap some passion out of your football crowd experience. The path to the Jags lies open and with it every high and low you could ask for. I have no knowledge of football, but I know good entertainment when I see it…
* - On doing a little research (typing three words and clicking the mouse a couple of times), it transpires that the “puffin” is in fact a toucan. It is called Pee Tee and is my new hero. It is too late for me to pick a football team to support anew, and like renaming a boat, I’m sure switching team allegiance brings monumental bad luck. But I support Pee Tee. May he reign supreme and see us to the end with a cheery flap of his wings.
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