Whiskered

 We're approaching the 10th anniversary of a number of things, many of which make me smile, if a little sadly at times. Soon to come up is a decade since I ventured out to try and find Incognito Theatre
amongst the suburban labyrinth of New Southgate. I turned up, walked past it about 7 times (it is awfully well named), before finally spotting it around the back of a dark and silent doctors' surgery. The theatre had a church hall feel, and was populated only by elderly people painting the set, but one of them immediately offered me a part in The Comedy of Errors, and I'd found a theatrical home that would look after me for six years.

 The second, coming up in December, is a decade since my first ever trip to Australia. It was supposed to be a "trip of a lifetime" deal, a seven week loop of the eastern half of the continent. Then it turned out to be the equivalent of those moments where you wish a polite goodbye to someone you don't really like that much, and then find you're both walking off in the same direction and have to do it again several times. By the time I said a proper goodbye to Australia years later I knew her quite well, and miss her still.

I mock you, Amish guy....

The third 10th anniversary is very much linked to the second. That trip trip to Oz was the first time I ever grew a beard. It wasn't really a very good beard, as you can see. It was a product of some sort of sinful coming together of not being arsed to shave and thinking it gave me a rugged traveller look, which I suppose it did in a sort of old beyond my time McKewans-lager-swigging-itinerant sort of way. I was camping half the time so I probably looked like I'd been sleeping in a tramp's pants anyway. I lost my voice about two thirds through the holiday, and in my silence some young English tourists did confess that they thought I was cool and mysterious in a Clint Eastwood sort of way, since I spoke seldom and only in a gravelly whisper. It didn't last long. I got my voice back and immediately started singing Mairzy Doats. The whiskered visage could not save me from falling abysmally in their estimation.

 I may have said goodbye to Incognito and Australia, but I haven't said goodbye to the beard. It leaves me every now and again. Where it goes, I'm not quite sure. I got a postcard from Madagascar (a picture of a hang-gliding lemur) once in handwriting so bad it could only have been scrawled by a disembodied blob of facial hair, and there was the embarrassing time when it was caught trespassing in the back garden of Brian Wilde from Last of the Summer Wine, but apart from that, all I know is that it comes back to me eventually. And I'm very glad about that. Because I feel terribly exposed without it. Beardless pictures of myself make me cringe and want to quickly scrawl a fake one over my chin with a flip-chart marker. Even as the whiskers grow white in places and invite the intervention of Just for Men, (or at a push some more marker pen, though probably not a green one) I have developed the deep and abiding conviction without facial hair I look like Steve Coogan or, worse, like me. And that would be fairly disappointing for everybody.

Listing

I used to love The Radio Times. It seems rather odd now, given I have absolutely no relationship with formalised television schedules whatsoever (good old iPlayer), but back in the dreamy, rose-tinted days of yore the new RT would be optically devoured every week.

It didn’t take long. I’m fairly sure that not only did it only contain the two BBC channels (and no daytime TV, of course) but also lacked about 75% of the endless features that now pad out the magazine. So it was an easy task to familiarise myself with the future. It gave a sense of certainty in an often confusing world. You might not understand your maths homework, but you knew Wogan was going to be on at 7pm on Friday.

It also led to a minor theological debate in the household. In the reality created by my extremely religious mother, the first day of the week was Sunday. The rest of the world seemed to think the first day of the week was Monday. But The Radio Times, perhaps hoping to be known as The Radical Times, went out on a limb and declared that Saturday was the first day of the week. It’s an odd exception to the general rule that TV shapes your thinking: despite the fact that in TV listings land Saturday is still the first day of the week, I don’t think I know anyone who thinks it actually is.

But I think my adoration of the RT began to fade after the deregulation of listings and the expansion to cover other channels. It wasn’t the dirty presence of ITV in my beloved magazine that so bothered me as much as the special notice the BBC were forced to display when advertising that weeks new edition.

“Other listings magazines are available.”

 Of course I knew that already. The TV Times would make an occasional surreptitious appearance in the house at Christmas to round out our festive televisual knowledge. But that familiarity was too cosy, and certainly couldn't excite me. The knowledge - suddenly revealed to me - that yet more listings magazines were out there, waiting for my loving finger tips to turn their cheap coloured paper, that knowledge created a restlessness in me that destroyed my relationship with The Radio Times. I was unsatisfied. I had itchy eyes, desperate for something new. Variety was everything. I imagined the vast array of listings magazines that might come into my life. I would now see them advertised on my occasional foray onto ITV, rubbing their interviews with minor soap-stars IN MY FACE. Oh, it could not be borne! The Radio Times lay in a neglected heap, wrap-around souvenir covers flapping slightly in a reproachful zephyr.

And then came that fateful day when I actually walked into a shop and bought another listing magazine. It was a moment of emotionally charged betrayal. I plucked TV (fill in random suffix word here) from a shelf, as well a top shelf copy of Girls Dressed as Camels to hide it inside and avoid embarrassment. I got it home and for a time the excitement continued as I looked up what was going to be on Channel 4 at 9.15 on a Thursday night. And then I realised it.

There was nothing special here. The information was the same. The paper was slightly thinner. The articles slightly less well written. The whole experience was, frankly, cheap - and not as different as I had anticipated. I took TV Whatever and threw it in the bin, this time wrapping it in Mouse Torturers' Monthly to avoid seeing the condemnation in the eyes of the bin men. I went back to the sofa, scooped up my neglected Radio Times and sat it on my lap. It was the TV listings magazine for me, despite the riches available out there in the world. Other listings magazine were available, but my heart did not want them.

But something had changed. The innocence had gone. I had betrayed The Radio Times, and even if it forgave me, I could not forgive myself. I put it back down, smoothed some digestive biscuit crumbs from the face of Marcus Tandy from Eldorado, and then - with great tenderness - placed a cushion over it and left the room, never to return.

FACTS HAVE BEEN CHANGED TO PROTECT THE BORED. 

Self

Self. Selfishness. Shellfish.

No, not shellfish. At least I don’t think so. Or shelfish, which I suppose would be the act of being like a shelf in some way, perhaps due to a very angular hairstyle a la Vanilla Ice, the shelfish bastard.

I have, to which I may have casually alluded in a subtle plea for sympathy, recently become single. The process was one of those uncomfortably messy ones full of mixed messages and unspoken truths that drag things out over a unconscionably long amount of time (one reading of the situation would suggest that babies gestate quicker than this relationship properly ended), but it is done now. My period of depression and mild psychosis has been duly endured and dealt with, and now my future lies ahead of me. Which of course it always did. I just wasn’t looking where I was going, and regularly hitting my head because of it.

My life as a flow chart goat

It has occurred to me – rather belatedly given context I have no intention of revealing – that I have been in (or affected by) serious relationships for all but a few brief months of the last 9.5 years. By coincidence, it’s about 10 years since I did any seriously sustained writing. Whether, as in Alexei Sayle’s brilliant “The Mau Mau Hat”, these two women both inspired and distracted me in equal measure I may never know. Certainly in the case of my recent relationship, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to suggest that I invested a lot of mental energy nurturing and encouraging her creativity, rather than selfishly indulging my own. And suddenly, as if via an epiphany, I realise that this was a profoundly stupid thing to do.

I once had a dear friend – sadly no longer dear nor indeed my friend – who warned me never to rely on someone else for my own happiness. At the time I thought this overly cynical, and to an extent I still do. I think the truth of the phrase comes down to the word ‘rely’: does it mean that you should never trust someone to make you happy, or simply that you must never allow yourself to be the kind of person with nothing left to make you happy if someone lets you down? And that means – at least I think it does – that one should probably not do what I did. I truly, sincerely and desperately wanted my love to live up to her potential (as I'm sure she now will without me). But where was my similar effort to get me to live up to mine?

So, if all I have left is Self, I ought to make the most of it. I might be mediocre, but I owe it to myself to at least try to be magnificent. For a little while. 

Penguins

As soon as this random word came up, I was sure I'd written about penguins before. Then I realised it was back when this blog was on Myspace. So - cheating slightly - I dug it out. I think it was worth a retread. I hope, dear reader, that you agree... 

Dreaming Spires

Who knows what strange things led to this dream? Who knows what dark, subconscious thoughts convulsed in the depths of my brain. Whatever they were, they led here…

I was on a small, wooden boat with C*, crossing (I instinctively knew) not the sea, but a huge lake. The boat, roundish with a flat bottom, and an oar for each of us, was travelling happily, as the lake was fairly smooth and wave free.

As the shore began to recede, with no sign of our destination in sight, I recalled a vague warning about the centre of the lake, "where neither shore can be seen".

The far bank gets smaller. Grey clouds start to swirl above us. The colour leeches out of the world. As the water gets rougher in the sudden wind, spray forms clouds of mist that dance about us. Enormous swells build beneath our vessel, toying with the small boat, buffeting us as we try to hold onto the oars and drive ourselves towards the farther shore.

Then, suddenly visible through the mists, tall shapes appear. At first they appear to be masts of sunken ships, jabbing upward into the gloom from unseen depths. The narrow splintered trunks seem to sway, but as we get closer we realise that it is only us and the sea moving – these lofty pylons are not wood, but rock, and rock solid. Urging ourselves forward, we drift alongside one and lash a rope to it, clinging on with wet fingers.

And then, as dreams do, everything changed. The roil of the waves ceased, the rock of the spikes changed to what it had seemed to be anyway – wooden spires, submerged ships gasping for breath by shoving their masts desperately into the air. The water was no longer water, but a stony, barren desert, with pebbles instead of foam, but otherwise as featureless as the lake had been, stretching into the distance with no discernible landmark. Oddly for a dream, I was conscious of the change, and shared puzzled looks with my companion. We were still rocking – looking more closely I could see that it was the masts that were swaying as if in the breeze, dragging stone and sand with them as they metronomed back and forth, a wooden grinding noise punctuating the sudden quiet.

As I sought to untie the boat, I could see something happening beyond the masts. Shapes, many hundreds of them, were pushing their way through the arid soil, sloughing off the sand and stones and lurching towards us. Gripped by fear, I dropped the rope, and sought to hide us behind the mighty, swaying masts, but we were too exposed. The beings moved towards us, misshapen lumps they seemed, hunched and featureless, and I gripped an oar in self-defence as they drew so close I could hear their shuffling feet in the sand.

I prepared to fight, and the nearest shape rounded the jutting spar, revealing itself clearly to me for the first time. It was…

It was a zombie penguin.

How I knew it was a zombie penguin I'm not sure. It just looked like an ordinary penguin but with a vacant expression. Perhaps they were penguin fans of daytime TV. But I somehow knew they were more than that, and kicked the first one in the head. It toppled over like a bag of marbles.

Beside me C lashed out with an oar, flooring another shuffling bird, but there were too many. Desperately (smacking another penguin over the head with my own oar) I looked again at the apparently featureless desert, and was gratified to see a motorway service station shimmering like a mirage. Grabbing my companion's hand I jumped from the boat, and we weaved amongst the snapping beaks of the flightless fiends as we sprinted towards the mysterious Little Chef. We charged through the doors, just evading capture, slammed them behind us, and then secured the lock with a handy BIC pen.

"Is there something I can help you with?" asked the Butler, standing there with a cloth over one forearm and the bleeping lights of a fruit machine flickering behind his left shoulder. He looked disapprovingly at the BIC pen.

"Zombie penguins," I explained. He nodded understandingly and ushered us through into the canteen.

A little while later I removed the BIC and peered out, but the penguins were still clustered outside the door in silent vigil, and I had to kick another one in the head just to get the door shut again.

We were trapped forever in a Little Chef.

Not one word of this in an embellishment. Honestly. Except for the brand of the motorway service station. It might have been a Moto.

Speedy (clearly sick and in need of treatment).

* Name withheld to avoid attention of the RSPZP.

 

Map

I love maps. I always have. I'm not sure of the reason for this. There were no ancient maps hanging on the walls of my parents' house when I grew up. There were, however, books. Probably two multi-volume books paved the way for my current adoration of cartography: the vast, two-shelf-filling American encyclopaedias and The Lord of the Rings.

Why my parents - not particularly known for their adoration of American culture, particularly (in my Dad's case) when it came to the pronunciation of words, had spent clearly a bundle of money on 10 square feet of educational book that couldn't even spell properly I don't know, but these volumes were the main source of all knowledge for me as I grew up. From the moment I could read, instead of indulging my many questions, I was merely told to "look it up". So I did.

The encyclopaedias were, naturally, full to the fake-leather brim with words and pictures. They were also, naturally, full of maps. Lots of maps. Maps in extraordinary quantities. Glossing over their American obsession with dedicating more book space to US states than to European countries, the books contained double page spreads of surprising detail. The detail was particularly surprising because the books had been printed in the 1960s, and large swathes of the planet were still owned by Britain, causing the occasional problem for researching a geography project in 1981. More fascinating, the entire world appeared to be delicately shaded in pastel colours. A gentle pink here, a soft yellow there. I thought for a while that there was some deep relevance to this - after all, England was coloured a delicate shade of green, and that seemed pretty appropriate. If I'd gone to, er, Northern Rhodesia, I would have fully expected to be greeted by a landscape that was entirely yellow (as opposed to the overwhelming lavender of Southern Rhodesia). It would look pretty amazing from a plane. Beyond the subject country's* borders, surrounding lands would be a dull sepia, as if crossing the border took you back even further in time to a world of handle bar moustaches and cheerful oppression of natives. In some cases it probably did.

Fortunately, lessons at my school seemed to steer clear of the late 20th century post-colonial world, or at least the British post-colonial world. This meant the encyclopaedias never got me into trouble, though it also meant that I was 17 before I realised that Britain used to own Canada. No harm done, you might argue.

Real maps were one thing. Tolkien taught me that made-up maps could be even more fun.

It wasn't just that I enjoyed his, fascinating as they were (I particularly loved the tiny, almost 3-D renditions of mountain ranges, so much more interesting than contour charts on a real map). As soon as I worked out that with careful vibration of the hand one could could draw some very convincing coastlines, I was an unstoppable fictional cartographer. Fjords were the inevitable consequence of my wobbly hand technique - no 100-mile beaches in my worlds - but I enjoyed myself with huge inland seas that defied all the laws of nature, mountains that if to scale would probably have been 100 miles high, forests that looked rather like clouds, capital cities that stood nowhere near water courses... you name a naive creative cartographic oversight, I probably committed it. But it didn't stop me. I created continents, island kingdoms, planets, solar systems.

It was a planetary comfort zone. I couldn't draw people or monsters very well (except, oddly, for their eyes) but I could draw the place they lived. I've got whole worlds kicking about on scrappy bits of paper back home, resolutely unpopulated and with unconvincing pole-equator separation that would probably cause havoc with the ecosystem. I sometimes wonder if I dug them out from under my old bed at home, would life and civilisations have evolved, with tiny ink cities sprouting up in the white spaces where no giant mountains or foggy forests were lodged?

I only wonder this very briefly, because it's silly.


* I mean the country that was the subject of the article, not the one that was subject to the British crown - though they were often the same. 

Approximation

I'm sitting on a bus playing with a new toy. I could never blog from my iPhone - the approximation of a keyboard was so small that it drove me mad to do anything other than tweet (at last I understand the point of the 140 character limit). But this virtual finger tip tap dance stage is another matter entirely - it even facilitates my rather distinctive slap base space bar without complaining, though if I end up with a wee hole worn in the screen I may regret this.

Yes, I bought an iPad. It was an act of utter self-indulgence. Though not as indulgent as the day I went out and realised I had dressed to match my iPad-case combo. When you're accessorising to stop your appliances feeling unloved you know you've gone too far.

Gin

This almost never made it to publication. I am slowly stacking up 'draft' blogs that never quite get finished. I'm a bit distracted at the moment by a combination of awesomely good things and heart-breakingly bad things. Well, thing. Alas, at this stage I do not seem to be someone who draws creative inspiration from pain.

Or gin. Which is a shame, since I've drunk plenty of it.

Normally I reserve gin for flying - for reasons now lost in the gin-soaked mists of ginny time, I have developed a tradition of drinking G&T when the drinks trolley rumbles past on an Emirates flight somewhere points east. It probably makes me feel like some sort of explorer. I'm going to start a campaign for compulsory pith helmets on long haul flights. We can all imagine we're sipping our anti-malarial tonic water while keeping our eyes peeled for cloud formations that only we will ever see (unless Mr Johnson in 46B happens to be looking the same way).

At the moment gin is taking its place in a pantheon of liquid medicines, jostling alongside wine, whisky and quite a lot of beer, like some sort of cocktail of... erm, well just like a cocktail. A self-assembly cocktail. IKEA cocktail. Flat-pack alcohol - I quite like to the idea of putting my drink together with dowel rods.

You know, I don't think I've ever written the word 'dowel' before. Astonishing. Thank God for pointless blogging - I might never have written it! Can you imagine the tragedy?

You're probably getting the general idea of why I'm not finishing things at the moment. I'm trying to look at heartbreak in the following way:

Doctor: I'm afraid I know what's wrong with you. The symptoms generally include angina like attacks that affect breathing and cause the sensation of pressure on the heart. There is also sickness and nausea, which may affect appetite and will certainly be uncomfortable. You should be over the panic attacks stage, but reoccurance does happen so be careful. Worst of all though is that, like a urinary infection, this condition does have a psychological effect, which is perversely both symptom and cause. You will find yourself thinking and behaving irrationally. While it is important to remember that this is unavoidable and not your fault, neither must you give in to it, since this will cause an extension of your other symptoms. The bad news is, there's no cure. The good news is it's seldom fatal, and if you follow prescribed advice you'll be right as rain in a few months. Take liberal amounts of gin every night, and if symptoms persist, fucking drink more.