bounce

Monday, Mat - driven temporarily insane by a poor internet connection and the prospect of a house inspection - suddenly grabbed a pair of shears and started hacking at the garden, while Dave and I looked on, Dave occasionally offering useful advice. When Mat couldn’t quite reach something, for example, Dave said: ‘You need to be taller.’ Later, Dave set fire to all the garden waste he could find and brooded over the fire for many hours, and I hoovered the stairs. After dark, when it came time to go to the cinema, Dave would not leave the fire. ‘Fire good. Multiplex bad’, he grunted, hunched over the flames. He was still there when we got back. The garden wasn’t.

Since I had a week off, I spent a lot of time in the cinema. I saw a couple of movies at Frightfest - an annual horror film festival - in Leicester Square. Pan’s Labyrinth is an adult fairy tale (does that sound dodgy?) which definitely represents director Guillermo del Toro’s best work to date (mind you, he also directed Blade 2, though he had the good grace to look embarrassed about that). Hatchet, based on an idea the director, Adam Green, had when he was eight, is perhaps not of quite the same order. A reasonably smart and funny script is not perfectly realized in a film that looks like a home video. You could probably send scenes in to You’ve Been Framed, if people getting their arms torn off wasn’t considered too extreme for Saturday teatime viewing. Still, it was good to see it with an audience who know the correct response to the sight of a (perfectly inoffensive) minor character getting the top of their head ripped off: which is, of course, to clap and cheer wildly.

On Sunday there was a barbecue in the wilds of Stock, or Mountnessing, or somewhere. Nicki Hunt’s parents held it for no real reason; although, at the same time, no expense was spared. There was a hog roast, Portaloos with hot running water, and an ‘adult’ bouncy castle. It didn’t look particularly adult, until it got dark, and then the cheerful monkeys adorning it started to take on a sinister aspect. Bodies sprawling in the gloom of it’s furthest recesses suggested corpses, or shadowy orgies. I began to visualise a low budget sex-horror film set entirely in a bouncy castle: Frankenstein’s Bouncy Castle of Freaks, perhaps. Surely it would run and run at Frightfest.

I didn’t go on the bouncy castle because, as Mat pointed out, if I ever experience a rush of adrenalin, I explode. This is why the new film Crank is not about me. In this, Jason Statham’s character will die if his adrenalin levels drop below a certain amount. So that - or so the trailer seems to indicate - he has to spend the entire film running around shouting and acting like a character in a bad movie. Conveniently enough. The trailer starts with him marching up to the camera and announcing, in his normal Cockney geezer tones: ‘My name is Chev Chellios.’ Could they have tried any harder to make him look silly? Perhaps he could have strolled up to the camera wearing a ballgown and pearls and said: ‘They call me - the giant hamster of Marseilles!’ In a bad French accent. That might have done it.

the vomit, the vomit

Sunday we went to the V festival. Saturday we did too, but I’m excluding it because otherwise I will go on and on about Art Brut and Radiohead and the Saw Doctors covering (very briefly) the Pussycat Dolls. Sunday started with Phil’s Range Rover being paintballed in Herongate, before we’d even got near Chelmsford. Suddenly, splashes of vivid colour splattered over the windscreen, like we’d been shat on by a psychedelic seagull. Presumably kids in a car going in the other direction had been responsible. A new craze, perhaps, which may even have a name. If not, will ‘psychedelic seagull’ do?

We positioned ourselves in the usual spot at the main stage, next to the patch of vomit with the broken sunglasses in it. We saw Kubb. I wanted to hate them because of that terrible ‘romantic’ song they did - ‘Let it grow, let it flow inside you …’ (He’s singing about his penis! Eugh!) However I could not hate them. They soothed me. (I didn’t even know I needed soothing). And since, I believe, they include an ex-member of Reef in their number, they are performing a valuable service in keeping him occupied and thus preventing Reef from reforming. Keep up the good work, boys!

My soft spot widened to include the (unashamedly nice) Feeling, so then I had to do penance by spending most of the rest of the day in the Virgin Union tent, where the more obscure bands play. This had its compensations. Paul Weller was apparently very good, but did he jump down into the crowd and sing Jealous Guy, like Davey MacManus of The Crimea did? Did he toss marshmallows into the audience like the guy from Bellx1 did? I suspect not. As for Matisyahu, I didn’t know what to expect. Japanese electronica? Novelty ska-punk (the drummer’s hat somehow suggested this)? But no, Matisyahu was, as I should have known, an Orthodox Jew performing reggae. With a side order of exhilaratingly noisy guitar heroics from the backing band. Very good too, though you wondered what his position on ganja was. To make things even more culturally confusing, this was when the crowd started pulling out glowsticks.

What would Morrissey have thought? He once said that reggae was ‘vile’. Now, his reaction would probably be along the lines of what he said when an interviewer told him that Tatu (who covered How Soon Is Now?) were ‘teenage lesbians’. ‘Well’, he said. ‘Aren’t we all?’ Not that he’s mellowed exactly. He’s still, fiercely, himself, even if he doesn’t really know what that self is, or whether he loves or hates it. It’s this sort of peculiar contradiction that keeps the fans hooked. And has everyone else fleeing in droves.

That was certainly the case here. The threat of Morrissey created what was almost a stampede from the main stage. As I cowered from the stream of well-up-for-it lads and teenagers with whistles, I reflected that, after experiencing the full-on uplift of Faithless, the last thing these people wanted to hear was that ‘life is a pigsty’. Even if, according to those of my friends who attended Faithless (which was all of them), several crowd members had provided a practical demonstration of Morrissey’s thesis, by wallowing in their own filth. And not just their own. One drunken woman pissed in front of everyone, then later got too drunk even to manage that, and as an alternative collapsed with her head in the pool of vomit with the broken sunglasses (now covered in sawdust, but still…)

What with the bulk of the punters headed - mostly - for Razorlight, it was for once not only possible to get to the front of the main stage for the headline act, it would have been unforgivably rude not to. Although naturally I stood to the side. Morrissey, patron saint of the misfit, would have understood.

everything is fine

At Brentwood station I saw a poster advertising some charity that invites you to ‘sponsor a brick’ to help build a home for kids with cancer. All very laudable, but what you actually got on the poster was an enormous brick with the words ‘for kids with cancer’ written on the side of it in a babyish and slightly sinister scrawl. As though you were being invited to put them out of their misery.

Had the advertisers not considered the implication, or was this actually a deliberate way of grabbing your attention? In a vaguely similar way, walking down to the station , I saw a sign in a shop window: ‘Sewing Machines Repaired: We Call On You’. It wasn’t ‘We Will Call On You’, which would have been perfect, but the ominous tone was still there. Like they’d call on you whether you like it or not. And don’t try and pretend you don’t have a sewing machine, because they won’t believe you. And they have ways of making you talk.

The reason I was at the station was that I was in Waterstone’s on Oxford Street for a couple of days, experiencing the goods-in process. Which meant standing in a windowless back room scanning books into a computer. Everyone around me seemed strangely subdued, as though my presence inhibited them. Whenever I left the room, I imagined a party starting - everyone laughing, making cocktails, breakdancing - only for a studied silence to resume on my return. Possibly this was my basic paranoia. The only really unrestrained guy there was Dennis, who took in the deliveries. He was 58, and given to speaking his mind, even, he pointed out, to the management (‘They just laugh’). At one point, I’m sure he came in and said the police had shot someone outside, but nobody really reacted to this, so maybe I was wrong. There was much more interest in the fact that he was later seen walking around holding a spoon. Crazy guy!

This was my first introduction to the Phoenix system, which is going to take over Ottakar’s. It does everything if you let it: replenish stock, tell you what to return, compose marching songs to boost morale, punish the lazy… They’ve allotted four hours for till training to each member of staff - enough time for a minor surgical procedure, you might think. Worrying. In fact, faced with it, I saw that it had its charms. I may even have fallen a little bit in love with it. Erwyn, who demonstrated the thing to me, assured me that this was perfectly normal, as he adjusted the electrodes attached to my skull…

Yes. Everything is fine.

sex toys and terror

Mat has gone to Spain for two weeks, leaving our lives strangely fragmented. Here are some of the fragments.

Wednesday Dave and I watched Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks, an Italian horror film in which Count Frankenstein puts a woman’s brain into the body of a Neanderthal man who looks a bit like Paul Whitehouse, only bigger. Eventually the villagers all quit the pub to take up flaming torches and destroy the monster, all except one guy who says he’s ‘too pissed.’ The DVD includes the U.S. trailer: ‘See the underground rock pool!’, the voiceover booms, oddly neglecting to mention the two women cavorting in its waters, their own natural formations proudly on display.

Thursday I went to see friends in Maldon who are heavily into gardening. They had some produce to offload, which is why I ended up getting home at midnight, a little the worse for wear, wielding an organic cucumber.

The next day, Dave left to visit his parents. I haven’t seen him since.

Friday, I went ‘home’ for dinner. My Mum’s friend Maureen, from Canada, was there. We ended up watching a DVD about Alzheimer’s because Maureen is in it, as a number of different characters, sporting a number of different wigs. It was scarier than Frankenstein’s Castle of Freaks. I already have most of the symptoms. And then there’s the bit where a woman describes changing her mother’s nappy, and how she enjoyed it because it brought them closer together. ‘She did it for me, and now I can do it for her.’ David Cronenberg is remaking this as we speak.

Saturday I used part of the organic cucumber in that classic of English teatime cuisine, the cucumber sandwich. Normally I find cucumbers boring, but surely, I felt, an organic cucumber would be full of the flavour the supermarkets breed out of it. It would probably taste like salami or something. It certainly looked different. Less reptilian. Neither had I ever, to my knowledge, had a cucumber sandwich before. The excitement was just piling up.

Sadly, I have to report that organic cucumbers taste very similar to shop-bought ones, though no doubt they are far better in every way. In the context of a sandwich, they mainly serve to make bread and butter seem exciting in comparison.

Later, we were in the Terriss Bar. A man had a blow-up doll called Philippa handcuffed to him. I know the doll’s name because we got introduced. The doll’s face bore a pronounced resemblance to that of the shrieking figure in Edvard Munch’s painting The Scream. People had written all over it, like it was a plaster cast. One person had written: ‘My mother sucks dead dogs’ cocks in Hell.’

Dave has returned since I wrote that. It wasn’t the cucumber that scared him away after all. I haven’t yet told him I ‘scored’ last night. I want to see his face when he meets Philippa…