The Servant

At work, Paula noticed that she was walking around the shop canted slightly to the left. Head lowered, as though she was walking into a high wind. I told her that this was the first stage of ‘shopkeeper’s cringe’, a disorder that afflicts shop workers as a result of years and years of being servile. Remember those shops of yesteryear staffed by aged hunchbacked munchkins scurrying around after the customer’s least requirement? Well, nothing’s changed. Even I find myself saying thank you at the most inappropriate times. Someone stopped and asked me directions the other evening, and I thanked them at the end of it.

I was very nearly unhelpful. The car stopped in front of me, presenting me with the passenger’s seat window wound down, and an elderly woman sitting there smiling up at me expectantly, saying nothing. Various confused scenarios ran through my mind all at the same time. Was I expected to recognise her? As my long lost Auntie Jean? At which point, would she shoot me? I almost ran off, deciding the situation was getting too weird. But she was deferring to her husband, who eventually leaned over to ask the way to Romford. I think they were from the North.

The main difference with shopwork these days is that we’re also being servile towards (in our case) the Phoenix system. People ask what it’s like working in a bookshop and I say: ‘Well it’s like that film…’
‘What, Notting Hill?’
‘No…’
‘You’ve Got M@il?’
‘No: The Terminator, that’s it.’
Except that, rather than some high-tech ultra-powerful machine dominating us, we are the slaves of DOS. Clunky and halting like George A. Romero’s zombies, but ultimately just as overwhelming.

Basildon Bond

I went to the movies twice. One time I saw Casino Royale. Daniel Craig makes a good Bond: thuggish yet intelligent, but not too intelligent. Bond films used to be all about the Bond girls but now it’s all about him, stepping out of the sea in his Speedos, Torso of the Year. So as we left the cinema, we were all just discussing his body. Mat thought his tits were too big (not something you often hear him say), and Dave didn’t like his lower lip; Amanda, however, was enamoured of the whole package. She was predicting that Speedos and dinner jackets will soon become extremely fashionable - though possibly not as part of the same outfit.

My other visit to the cinema was to see a Japanese horror movie called Hausu, or House, from 1977. It wasn’t quite as packed in the NFT as Basildon had been for Bond, but there were enough people in to make me wonder about who the Hell we were, these weirdos who’d turned out on a cold Monday night to see a film in which a girl gets eaten by a piano and a man is turned into a bunch of bananas. Were we insane? Or was it just the film that was insane? It’s one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen, setting a tone of hysterical kitsch which just gets more and more hysterical until it erupts quite naturally into horror. Of a sort. The special effects look like a child’s scrawled over the print with crayon. If you saw this as a kid, you’d remember it as a bad dream. Though it is in fact a good film.

My sitcom script was returned to me by the BBC. Well, the SAE I sent them was returned to me, only it proved to have someone else’s script inside it: appropriately entitled Lost Hope. The day after I got this I got a text from Mat saying I had ‘a letter’ from the BBC waiting for me at home. I became foolishly excited, thinking that they might actually have decided to commission my sitcom. This lasted for about three seconds, until I realized how terrifying that would really be, since I’ve only written the one episode. Then Mat texted to say that the letter was ‘script-shaped’, and I went all the way back to disappointment again. It was, in fact, my script, with exactly the same rejection letter they’d given to Lost Hope. Only the name had been changed. So I sent Lost Hope back to its author and figured, as I shelled out for second class postage, that on some cosmic level, the BBC now owes me…

It owes me 75p.

community service

I had to work in Romford, getting the train in. A young woman opposite me got done for having the wrong ticket. She’d stayed at her boyfriend’s overnight, she explained, and got confused about her zones. ‘You dirty thieving whore!’, I hoped the guard would say (in a Belfast accent, ideally) but instead his manner was almost ridiculously gentle. Disappointing. I needed a bit of drama to wake me up.

Although on second thoughts, perhaps waking up wasn’t such a good idea. This was Romford, after all. At Waterstone’s Romford it was business as usual: the manager had just handed in her notice (their seventh manager in two years, I believe). This was Carole, who used to manage Ottakar’s Brentwood. She wants to spend more time with her young son - or, to be more accurate, some time with her young son. Shelf-stacking in Aldi, Wickford, is starting to look like an obvious next career move.

Fortunately, I didn’t have to have much to do with the customers. From what I could glean, they didn’t want to buy books, they just wanted to talk. One man, brandishing a book about Manchester United as an icebreaker, tried to have a conversation with me about football. Naturally this didn't last long - though longer than I would have liked. An old woman went up to the counter on the pretext of looking for a book about her affliction - some kind of rash - but really, she just wanted to talk about the rash (the red lumps, the white bits on top of them) and then about the ailments troubling the rest of her family. It was a quintessentially English scene, like something out of an Ealing comedy. Only not in the least funny.

The staff were fine, though. The obligatory Finnish Goth. A Muslim woman who came into the returns room while I was boxing something up and asked: ‘Do you mind if I pray?’ I’ve never been asked that before but naturally, I was fine with it. ‘Just don’t make any noise.’ A couple of drinks after work on my last day and I was careful to be out of Romford before the stabbings started (usually about eight).

a retreat into wilful obscurity

That last blog generated a great certain amount of comment and controversy (among a small number of people) so here, in order to avoid vulgar populism, I am mainly going to talk about Czech cinema and South American socio-politics.

A customer once came into the shop at Christmas-time wondering if we had anything on South American socio-politics. Well, it made a change from being asked for The History of Farting or whatever else was big that year. But of course, we didn’t. The customer looked offended and left. ‘Should have put a bag over her head and beaten her with a stick’, grumbled the then-manager, for it had been a long day. ‘That is South American socio-politics’, I pointed out. How we laughed!

I went to see Czech director Jan Schwankmayer’s Lunacy at the London Film Festival. It’s a ‘philosophical horror story’ out of Poe and De Sade, but not quite as good as that sounds. Still, you get to see a Black Mass celebrated, with chocolate cake and oral sex. Tarred and feathered doctors running amok. A giant steak bursting out of a wardrobe. The remake with Jennifer Love Hewitt should be interesting.

At home we’ve been watching a lot of Futurama, which I like, interspersed with a bit of 24, which I don’t. Although listening to some of 24’s dialogue, it was sometimes hard to tell the difference. ‘Your insane plan has backfired!’ shouts the President. That’s the thing about insane plans though, isn’t it? They so often do.