the greatest love story of all time

There are occasional breaks in Mat’s constant chatter as he bustles about in the kitchen. This means he is texting Amanda, his girlfriend, currently in Australia. I think she is now to be referred to as his girlfriend, although for quite a while the official designation for their relationship was that he was ‘shagging the woman down the road’ (and vice versa). Clearly it’s more serious now. He’s heartbroken if she hasn’t texted him for five minutes (though she is permitted eight hours sleep). The texts are along the lines of: I miss you so so so so so much; I miss you a million times; I miss you a million times plus infinity. They really are.

At one stage he was saying that Amanda would rather be here with him than in Australia. ‘Get real’, I said. ‘She’s in Australia.’ He was quiet for a while, pacing around the kitchen. Then he suddenly said: ‘I’m getting a set of Global knives for Christmas.’ I’m still not entirely clear about how his mind works.

Still, it goes to show that persistence pays dividends. I remember the days when she would be lying on his bed and he’d be crawling all over her like a kid wanting to be let into a playpen. ‘Please can we have sex', he’d whine. ‘Please?’ It really was like a child tugging at his Mum’s sleeve. Except he wasn’t tugging at her sleeve. He was nudging at her arse. With his penis.

vange fobbing

Dave’s friend Mark came over and we went on a journey into the further reaches of Essex. It was a suitable day for Canvey Island and Jaywick. Never stopped raining. Canvey Island is twinned with… says a sign as you enter, followed by a list of European place-names, like a series of relationships that never worked out. We didn’t get out of the car, except to garner provisions or to smoke. It was like one of those classic British seaside holidays. Trapped in the car with a Thermos of tea and a tartan rug. Or in our case, ginger beer and a roll of kitchen towel. Looking out at the ‘seafront industrial estate’, as the signs seemed to put it.

It was probably the best way to experience the place. The best thing you can say about it is that, Sainsbury’s and Morrison’s aside, it has managed to fight off the big corporations who are destroying local shops, though to be fair, it probably wasn’t a pitched battle exactly. A grim-looking off-white building which might have been a garage was actually labelled: Centre For Young People. It didn’t look much fun, but probably it was more about indoctrination, if not actual brain surgery. The ability to live there would have to be acquired somehow.

We did get out of the car at Jaywick, a community of beach huts with an outlaw feel. It wasn’t at its best in the pouring rain either, but at least it wasn’t one of those depressingly uniform housing estates. People had used their small, but detached, homesteads as vehicles for free expression. They’d shoved a park bench and some pot plants on the roof. They’d filled rubber tyres with soil and planted pansies in them. Or they’d burned their places down to leave charred ruins; quite a popular choice, this. Imagine the family dancing round the flames. We returned to the car: it was still there.

other people's lives

Barbara, the manager, asked me and Paula into the office to ‘tell us about Christmas’. I thought she was going to sit us down and say: ‘Christmas is a magical time when snowmen come to life and elves help Santa bring gifts to all the good children.’ But instead she told us there would be more promotions than we could possibly handle, and that we’d open on Boxing Day and only get paid double time, instead of triple like it would have been under the old regime.

To lighten the atmosphere, Paula recalled a recent news story about a sexually experimental woman whose lover tried to kill her with latex, to which (cruel irony for the kinky) she had an allergy. She met this man on a ‘masochistic chatline’, apparently. I tried ringing one of those. They just put you on hold forever.

Back at home Mat was playing some computer game in which he pretends to be a submarine commander in 1939, patrolling the British coastline. It’s highly realistic, in that nothing much happens. I would have expected the future of gaming to be ADD-inducing ultraviolence. Instead, it’s the authentic experience of someone else’s boredom. So much more meaningful than your own.

idle thoughts

For some reason I lay in the bath trying to think of another word for ‘cool’. ‘Lazy’ came to mind. It has connotations of effortlessness, and cool should seem effortless. It’s also pejorative, like ‘bad’ or ‘wicked’, so it has that edge. Of course all slang has to be approved by the African-American arbiters of what is hip, but that should work for it too since one of the big racist assumptions about Africans, historically, is that they’re lazy, so this would have the virtue of turning that on its head (cf: nigga). Clearly, we can expect a few awkward conversations while this takes hold (‘That outfit is lazy.’ ‘But I spent hours putting it together!’) but I confidently predict that by the year 2010 we should see groups of unemployed chavs congratulating each other on being lazy. Except they won’t be called ‘chavs’. They’ll be called ‘legumes’. I don’t know why that is.

Possibly I am wrong about all this. My suggestion for a slogan for Ottakar’s stores converting to Waterstone’s (‘Now we are shit’) did not go down well with Waterstone’s marketing department. Why not? It’s bookish. It’s true. It could hardly be more offensive than some of the books we sell. God’s Call Girl: ‘one woman’s incredible journey from the convent to the massage parlour’. Once upon a time that would have been the other way round.

Also, unpacked this week: Lorraine Kelly’s Baby and Toddler Eating Plan. I never believed she was capable of that. Well, maybe I had an idea.

It’s the usual chaos at work. A man came to rip out some cables, only he was meant to be putting cables in. ‘Crossed wires’ are blamed. What this means, effectively, is that we have to keep lugging heavy boxes of books up the fire escape - because when the shop was set up they put our goods-in upstairs in our tiny cash office, and we’ve no lift. At least this raises the possibility of an unfortunate accident - those stairs can get very slippery - and compensation we can live on for the rest of our lives. Trouble is, everyone wants in. We’re going to have to get all the staff arranged on the fire escape with the area manager at the top and the Sunday staff at the bottom, then rely on the domino effect in its crudest form.

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I am permanently bemused. I come in from work and Dave’s room next to mine is full of noise: roars, explosions. Every now and again a voice intones: ‘A new giant has risen!’ I can only assume that it must be some kind of computer game. Meanwhile, Mat is downstairs at his laptop, topless, with a plastic gun.

Similiarly, at work, Paula is involved with some event at a local school. A notable children’s author is attending. ‘Will she want me to lay on some sandwiches?’, Paula asks someone over the phone. What an odd request. Paula's horoscope for that day told her that she was a tank, but that she should pop her head out of the turret occasionally.

On Tuesday we had a visit from Tim, a ‘Phoenix trainer’ (Phoenix being, as regular readers will know, the IT system favored by Waterstone’s and HMV). Curiously, he brought with him a big black musical instrument case, resembling a medieval instrument of torture. Perhaps he was going to gather us round for a campfire singalong about Phoenix. ‘Well if you press f7, tab down to column B/There’s a neat thing that you all should see…’ And so on.

This did not happen. Like all the people who come along to train us, he knew bits and pieces of things, but never the whole story and, after he’d run out of stuff to teach us, it wound up with four of us in the office discussing door-to-door atheism (why on earth not?) and leaving sick people to die on top of mountains. Then the lonesome Phoenix trainer dragged his guitar case into the night; or rather, early afternoon.

So things haven’t really got much easier. A customer rang asking where the French book she needed for her adult education class was (it was in, but she hadn’t got the message we left). ‘My friend ordered it from Amazon’, she said. ‘It arrived the next day. And it was cheaper.’ She went on to point out, as such people always do, that she only came to us out of the goodness of her heart because she ‘likes to keep the bookshops going’. ‘Madam’, I felt like saying, ‘I would rather that this bookshop closed tomorrow than that I should have to listen to your whining voice for even another second.’

In fact, of course, I said: ‘Sorry.’