24/7

One series of 24 ends; another begins. This is on DVD, of course, Mat and Dave moving from season three to season four. A good opportunity for me to wash up, or have a bath. I just can’t suspend my disbelief for that long. I’m not talking about the relentlessly unlikely build-up of events in 24; I’m talking about the American government being on the side of right. Let’s face it, if ‘CTU’ really existed, it would probably be helping to create terrorist atrocities, for ‘tactical’ reasons, not stop them.

Charlie Brooker says of the latest series that it’s not as funny as it used to be. But even season three seems to be missing out on some great comic possibilities, judging from what I’ve gleaned by glancing up from my laptop or book. For example, a terrorist, never mind why, is threatening to release a deadly virus unless the President uses the phrase ‘the skies are falling’ during a TV broadcast. How lame is that? If you’re able to force the President of the United States to say anything you want on live TV, why not ‘my wife is hung like a donkey’ or ‘I need someone to wipe my bottom - now!’

But the reason for 24’s popularity is probably its vision of the dynamic workplace. People who spend every day logging insurance claims or whatever can fantasize about being in an office where everything you do or say carries dramatic weight. Fortunately I have no need to do this, my workplace being so dramatic in itself. ‘Where are the shelf strips for the 3-for-2 manga promotion?’, I roar. ‘I don’t know’, frets Paula. ‘I don’t think they were in the delivery from head office.’ I fall to my knees: ‘Noooooooooooooooo!’

The other day a teacher returned loads of copies of Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man for the very good reason that they didn’t mention spaghetti. We had to kill her.

...and back to having to think of proper titles. Like this.

At work, Paul returned from San Francisco, where he went for just over a week. Paul, like me, hardly ever goes anywhere, so there was a certain amount of muted excitement at his return. In the moments before he arrived, Jo was craning her neck to see out of the staff room window, as though expecting some bronzed Adonis to appear. But no, he was still small and ginger. He said he saw a lot of bums. Tramps, I think he meant. Place is full of them, apparently.

A woman asked me to recommend a good book ‘for a man’. Easy: anything with a dark cover. Next!

Mat and Dave both went away at the weekend, so I had the place to myself. This whole enormous space! What would I do? What wouldn’t I do? I watched Making Your Mind Up, the programme in which our Eurovision entry is decided on, sadly missing, however, the moment in which Terry Wogan announced the wrong winner. People are taking Eurovision seriously now - or they’re extra desperate - so there were a lot of washed-up pop stars in the line-up of hopefuls. Justin Hawkins, formerly of The Darkness, was there, looking like Rupert Everett’s debauched younger brother. He was part of a double act called Hawkins and Brown, a good name for a firm of solicitors I thought. When Fearne Cotton asked him if he’d ‘always loved Eurovision’ he mumbled something to the effect that he had, especially since his career fell flat on its face seven months ago. It wasn’t a joke.

On the other hand, there was definitely a sense that people had made an effort this year, even with the throwaway stuff. ‘It isn’t easy being cheesy’, quipped a member of Scooch, who went on to prove this with a laboured routine in which they dressed up as air hostesses and air stewards and imitated planes flying. They made Steps look like The Horrors. And they won, of course.

retrospective seven: and you're back in the room

I have to face it, it’s me as much as anyone who dominates the TV in this house, me who is seduced by it. But who can blame me? Freeview has opened up a whole new world. It’s 1997 week on BBC4! Hard to believe that I might previously have lived out my days without knowing that. The other day I even saw Help, My Dog’s As Fat As Me!, which was swiftly - and perhaps insensitively - followed by Kill It, Cook It, Eat It. See, even if the programmes are crap you can admire the scheduling.

In between programmes we sit there deconstructing the adverts. ‘No-one wants to be a sausage in a sausage factory’, says the one for Dolland and Aitchison, attempting with a feeble cartoon to dramatise the soulless, mechanistic treatment you supposedly receive from rival opticians. But if you were a sausage, Dave and I aggressively maintain, wouldn’t that be the best place to be? It would be the place where you were born: better than a freezer in Sainsbury’s, or a frying pan. And what do sausages have to do with opticians?, we splutter, outraged. They don’t even have eyes. Except maybe all ground up inside them.

Then there’s that Iams ad where the woman talks about her ‘furry alarm clock’, meaning her cat waking her up in the morning; but it always sounds like some obscure innuendo to me, and never fails to make me snigger.

At work, Paula spelt ‘deceit’ wrong on one of her ‘recommends’. She spelt it ‘deceipt’. When I pointed out her error she accused me of ‘taking the p’. Ah yes, the standard of banter is so much higher in a bookshop than in other working environments, n’est-ce pas? I know I moan about work, but some days I'm as happy as a sausage in a sausage factory.

retrospective six

We went to a masked ball, which Nicki Hunt was holding for her thirtieth, in conjunction with the charity connected with the illness she suffers from, Reynauds scleroderma. There was more than one kind of charity involved here: a free bar ensured that, along with our giving, we did a lot of receiving as well. A hell of a lot. In fact you might say we received and received and received until we fell over. Or Hannah did. There was a sweepstake on what time she was going to throw up, but she fell out of the minibus instead, which no-one had allowed for.

I won a prize in the raffle - a miniature rugby ball signed by Jason Leonard. Given my level of interest in rugby (it is low), people were expecting me to sell it on e-bay at the earliest opportunity, but, in the spirit of Hannah I decided to act against type and went round drunkenly boasting of how I’d always been a fan of ‘Leonard Jason’ and, when challenged, saying that he looks like Jason from Coronation Street, ‘only bigger’.

I even felt I knew this, though only from seeing him on the front of his memoirs. In any case, it transpired that I was thinking of Jason Robinson. Who doesn’t really look like Jason from Coronation Street either.

Only Chad and Jane went on afterwards, to make the best of their dress by pretending to have just got married, thus getting into Duke’s for free. Inside, everyone came up to congratulate them. On being asked why she had no ring, Jane muttered something about it having been ‘a spiritualist ceremony’. At that time of night in Duke’s, of course, anyone will believe anything. Useful to know, that.

retrospective five

The other evening the doorbell rang with a different chime to the usual: a cheesy Big Ben impression. Nobody was there. This has happened several times now; Mat theorised that one of our neighbours has a similar bell which uses the same frequency. Or something. The upshot is: we have two doorbells. One which means we have to answer the door, and one which we can just sit back and enjoy in luxury. We’re going up in the world.

We also have a cat which sits at the end of the garden sometimes. Hopefully it will never come any nearer, because it does look worryingly large as it stares at us and licks its lips. And that’s at a distance: what would it would be like up close? The other day I glimpsed a black tentacle poking out from behind the shed, curling and uncurling. If it wasn’t a beckoning alien, it was presumably the tail of another cat (the first one being ginger).

Perhaps it is even bigger. Perhaps it has eaten the other one. Certainly, I haven’t seen it since.

In response to all these stresses, Mat has given up caffeine; or at least he’s giving it a rest. He has discovered that most of his personality traits are in fact symptoms of caffeine addiction (restlessness, stream-of-conciousness babbling, various mental disturbances) and since he has been addicted since the age of two, it seems that he’s on to something. The question is: can the Mat we know continue to exist? Here’s hoping.

What he loses in personality he can always gain in bulk. A terrifying glimpse of his possible future was offered by a documentary the other night about bodybuilding pensioners. All orange with fake tan, they were gasping and contorting themselves as desperately as lobsters in boiling water. Some, clenching their bodies tight, managed to make it look as though rigor mortis had set in prematurely. The runner-up in the ‘super ultra masters’ competition for the over-seventies said: ‘This competition has given me a taste of what it’s like to be in this kind of competition.’ See, brains as well as brawn. Mat, inspired, immediately headed downstairs for the big tub of weight-gain.

retrospective four

The other night we might have gone to The Pink Toothbrush, Dave and I, with Chad, but we’d only recently returned from Ikea with shelves, a kitchen table, chairs and a dishwashing brush, and were too apathetic to go. So this is what maturity’s like, I thought to myself. We watched The Mummy Returns, which is spoiled by an obnoxious child actor who can’t act, and Highlander: Endgame (aka: Highlander: Endgame: Why?) which is spoiled by everybody who made it. Not that there was much there to spoil.

Tuesday night we didn’t go out because it was pancake day, so we had pancakes, in the kitchen. Pancakes and wine. Just like in the Cliff Richard song. Few people realise that, along with Mistletoe And Wine, Cliff did a song to mark every feast in the Christian calendar - Easter Eggs And Wine, Ascension Day And Wine. There are those who maintain that, for him, it was really all about the wine. That he is not so much a committed Christian as a soon-to-be-committed alcoholic.

Excuse me, I’m free-associating.

Maybe my mind has been affected by Milkdrop, a program that sets all kinds of randomly generated pretty patterns to music, and which our TV now plays. The patterns are disturbingly hypnotic, almost alive, suggesting that Milkdrop is actually a cover for alien invasion and that creatures are infiltrating our minds as we watch. They are telling us to go to their earthly headquarters, Ikea, and buy more shelves.

retrospective three

The TV is eating us alive. We seem to have no defence against it. Mat, hobbled by an ingrown toenail operation and a lack of internet, is particularly susceptible. He watched Coyote Ugly all the way through the other night. This is a movie about a noisy new York bar full of obnoxious people that looks like my idea of hell. So watching the movie for me would have been like watching one of those horror films where you’re praying the heroine won’t go into the bad place, only here the bad place isn’t some old dark house, it’s this bar, and she not only goes there, she keeps going there. Then she gets a job there. Then she turns into Leanne Rimes. Apparently.

I have found myself watching Pimp My Ride, a show in which supposedly hip mechanics remove the boring bits of cars like, you know, the engine, and replace them with a record player. Or Kelly Osbourne - Turning Japanese in which they send Kelly to Japan just so she can turn her nose up at everything (‘I don’t wanna be a samurai!’) And American Idol. Over and over again. In vain do I try to direct my housemates to more improving fare, like Coronation Street or Deal Or No Deal. They just go back to the guide, decide that ‘nothing’ is on, then watch it.

Of course I am as much to blame as anyone. But the screen is so big and it cannot be resisted. I am entranced by reruns of Bullseye and The Krypton Factor. Programmes that were never meant to be seen more than once. ‘Well that’s the end of this series of Bullseye’, Jim Bowen said the other night. ‘See you in the Autumn.’ Then, after a commercial break: ‘Welcome to the new series of Bullseye.’

Something is wrong here.

retrospective two

A woman rang at work trying to sell us a book called Get Rid Of Your Accent. I said it didn’t sound like the kind of thing that would sell in Brentwood. People seem to enjoy their accents here, though possibly they are making a mistake. She said: ‘Do you have a lot of foreigners there?’ ‘God yes’, I was tempted to say, in my best upper-class British voice. ‘Swarms of the blighters. But I seriously doubt if any of them can read.’ I held my tongue, though because, curiously enough, she had a foreign accent herself.

A former employee, Sam, came in with her daughter Ruby, who is - what? - two? However old or young she is, she certainly had an unerring grasp of the most annoying thing she can do in a bookshop. Which is to ‘post’ the books down the back of the shelves, so that they fall into the dust-and-spider-haunted cavity behind and have to be fished out at a later (endlessly deferred) date. She walked around doing this with some enthusiasm, like it was her new job. This is the year, says Sam, in which they will finally make the move they have been going to make for years, to America to live near her parents. Or to Norfolk to live near his parents. (Perhaps you can see why a delay has arisen). One of the two will definitely happen this year. Sam seems to think it will be Norfolk, but I can’t help thinking that America will suit Ruby best.

Extremes of weather continue. Now it’s snow. This morning I heard a commotion outside my bedroom window and it was a couple of youths stealing our ‘LET BY’ sign to go sledging on. I’m not in Ingrave any more, I realized; then immediately went back to Ingrave, where the Daily Mail could give me some perspective on the weird weather conditions (‘Confused Trees’, ‘Frogs In Peril’) and I got my hair cut by a woman who reminisced throughout about a disastrous family holiday in the New Forest in which the tent caught fire and her parents lost their eyebrows.

retrospective one: the internet is back

On my first night in the new place I was not actually in the new place, I was in Suffolk, sleeping on a curious (but not uncomfortable) armchair-sofa hybrid rigged up by my aunt. There was in fact a bedroom upstairs, with two beds, but that room belonged to the new cat. It needs its space. Nerves, you understand.

I was in Suffolk to see the Christmas show my cousin’s partner writes and stars in. This year, the show was entitled (overentitled, some might say) The Mystery of the Blood Beast Horror of Wolfbane Hall Mystery. Sample joke:

HOUSEKEEPER (handing flask to her employer, a werewolf): Your vial.

MY COUSIN’S PARTNER: Yes I know, I can’t help it.

There were glove puppets and innuendo. I had a Solero and sat directly behind (former That’s Life star) Doc Cox. My cup ranneth over, as, back home, everyone else did the work (thanks for stepping in, Phil and Rhys).

By the time I got back to my new home I was so confused about my whereabouts it was like I’d moved to another country. As I write, my room is still full of bin bags and boxes, like a puzzle that defies solution. But I like it. 19 Waterloo Road never felt right. Secretly, it was always waiting for its real owners to come back. In the meantime, it expressed its resentment by hitting me on the head repeatedly with its kitchen cupboard doors.

They didn’t bother to clean, or even hoover, in Copperfield Gardens prior to our arrival, so some filth greeted us (though obviously we’re no stranger to that). The boiler makes an eldritch keening noise, the meters in my room indulge in sudden fast flurries of ticking and irregular clonking sounds, and the neighbours speak to us. Still, so far, it feels OK. And the neighbours appear to be fine, really. Even GAZ99, as his number plate proclaims him, does not appear to be a drug dealer, or user. They’re probably worried that we are. But we have a big TV now, in our expanded lounge. That’s all the drug we need.