monkey envy

On Eastenders, Pat and Shirley had a fight. Dave said it was like a scene from a Godzilla movie. ‘Well, they are played by men in rubber suits’, I said. Which is true, I believe.

Some time ago we got a free PG Tips monkey with our teabags in Sainsbury’s, and we were very pleased with the new addition to our household. However, the other night Dave and I were walking to the pub and saw through one of our near neighbours’ windows an absolutely enormous version of the same creature stuffed on top of some bookshelves with its long arms dangling down. We gawped at the monkey, craving it.

Later however, after the pub, it struck me that our neighbour’s monkey was too large, grotesquely large, like a bloated grey spider looming over the room. We don’t need to keep up with the neighbours anyway, because we have a Dualit toaster, which according to those in the know (which is Mat and Dave and practically nobody else) is the crème de la crème of toasters. Ours is a small one, but the important thing is that we are on the toaster ladder.

At work I am still searching out books, prompted by occasionally cryptic computer printouts. What could Victoria Beckham’s Learning To F be, for example? Well of course it’s Learning To Fly, what else? My all-time favourite of these is the poem Do Not Stand At My Grave And Weep, which on the old Ottakars print-outs used to come out with just the last letter missing. Sometimes I think my sense of humour will never grow up.

the lost theme park

The other day while walking to work I saw an old man inching towards me along the pavement, aided by sticks. As I drew close to him he suddenly started talking at me: ‘Alright I’m alright are you alright?’ I smiled politely. He just went on in this vein: it was as though he was an exhibit in a high-tech museum and, in straying too close, I’d activated him. If I didn’t move away quickly, he’d keep on going until his voice got all slow and blurred and he shuddered to a halt. So I moved away quickly, wondering if I was living in some kind of theme park and if so, what is the theme?

At work I have been searching for books to return in the cavernous returns room upstairs. Occasionally the most hard-to-find books have ironically aposite titles, as though the Phoenix system is playing a joke. The other day, for example, I found myself hunting fruitlessly for The Lost Gospels. Meanwhile, Paula was rearranging the room according to the subjects each member of staff looks after. ‘Does Paul do “Pets”?’, she asked at one point. ‘Well’, I said. ‘I’ve heard rumours…’

Mat has gone to Canada, and yet his voice can still be heard in our kitchen, due to some sort of technology. Or perhaps he hasn’t gone to Canada at all; perhaps he has been eaten by the dishwasher. Wherever he is, he is working, and burbling away to himself as he does. Just what we need - ambient Mat. Although there is at least now the possibility of turning him off.

my hundredth post

It seems that Mat and Dave have activated the webcam in the kitchen, possibly in the hope of identifying any additional housemates who might be living here rent free. Or are they trying to catch me masturbating into the mayonnaise jar? (Fat chance: I always take it into my room). Anyway, it is a bit creepy, like being spied on by really rubbish sex perverts, the highlight of whose voyeuristic day is watching me do the washing up.

Maybe I should get some costumes. Put on a bit of a show.

I don’t need a high tech surveillance system to spy on them. While gathering the rubbish together in the garden the other night I could hear Mat babbling inanely away to himself through the open office window more clearly than if I’d been in the room with him. No doubt some student nurse in Highwood hospital (directly behind us) is writing a thesis on his stream-of-consciousness ramblings and their implications for Mat’s mental health. Not to mention mine and Dave’s.

I wish I could consult this theoretical student’s notes, actually, just to find out if - as Mat maintains - his verbal doodles contain genius. As far as I can recall, they mainly consist of popular songs with the lyrics replaced by obscenities. Well, we all do that, don’t we? Don’t we?

There’s a particularly irritating song by Freddie and the Dreamers - or is it Gerry and the Pacemakers? - that comes on in the shop over and over again. It goes like this: ‘I’m gonna hug and kiss you / Do you mind? / Make an idol of you / Do you mind?’ So annoying is it that it is impossible to hear the thing more than once without substituting your own lyrics: ‘I’m gonna beat you senseless / Do you mind? / Rip your fucking head off / Do you mind?’

Or is it just me?

one night in Brentwood

I joined Hannah and Chad for an extension to her birthday drinks of the night before. The Swan was uncharacteristically noisy: a live duo performing Beatles covers. Chad bought Hannah a Guns n’ Roses T-shirt, which she decided to change into in the pub. She did it under cover of her zipper jacket, so her hands disappeared and her torso seemed to mutate, bumps forming and disappearing as, so it seemed, her body tried to eat her head. At this point the band started singing: ‘Something in the way she moves…’

An hour or so later she was throwing up in the doorway of W. H. Smith’s. She herself later likened this to a certain scene in Team America: World Police. And it really was like that. Just when you thought she could produce nothing more, a further torrent gushed forth. Rather naughtily, I amused myself by imagining the customers and staff of W.H. Smith’s slipping over in it the next morning. Who says I’m not a corporate man?

What else could the night hold? Plenty, as it turns out. But I can’t talk about that. It’s sub judice. Suffice it to say that we witnessed an ‘incident’ in the taxi rank. Although ‘witnessed’ is a relative term, considering that I was paying an equal amount of attention to the climax of the first Nightmare On Elm Street movie, which was showing on the TV in the cab office. It’s just as well that I didn’t have to give a statement to the police since I would probably have identified the perpetrator as wearing a black and red striped sweater and wielding razor-clawed fingers. As it was, I only had to give my name and number to a policeman with eyebrows so carefully plucked and arched that, if he hadn’t been in uniform, I’d have sworn he was a drag queen.

wild at heart

Dave has set up something called ‘teamspeak’ on the laptop in the kitchen (yes of course we have a laptop in the kitchen; don’t you?) which enables both him and Mat to demand tea from upstairs if they can hear that I am in the kitchen. Although really it is, I think, to facilitate the playing of computer games like Rainbow Six. You can be washing up and suddenly a fuzzy, disembodied voice from the corner of the room will start talking about shooting terrorists. In this setting, and in the absence of background noise from the game itself, the whole thing does sound a bit feeble. Oh, Mat and Dave are killing terrorists in the office again. Wonder if they want a cup of tea.

This amazing technology has also enabled Rhys, in Cardiff, to overhear a completely banal conversation about squash taking place between me and Mat in our kitchen.

In order to get away from all this, I walked home (that is, back to Ingrave) through the woods. I do like the woods. I’d come back as a tree if I reincarnation were an option; I’d become one tomorrow if the technology was available.

Unfortunately, you do also get people in the woods. And rather a lot on this occasion, judging by number of vehicles in the car park. Everyone, it seemed, was here, including the Grays School Media Arts Centre, or so the legend inscribed on a blue van suggested. Throughout the walk, I could hear a distant jabbering of shrill voices; then, on the home stretch, I looked behind me to see a small army of chattering dwarfish figures, all dressed in bright colours, hot on my trail. Was this the Grays School Media Arts Centre? I fled before they could make me part of a workshop.

Later, back at Copperfield Gardens, I conquered my technophobia to the extent that I did actually have a conversation with the laptop in the kitchen, which was channelling the spirit of Rhys. ‘It’s no different to a phone really’, said Rhys, attempting to defuse my awkwardness. To me, however, it was more as if the dishwasher had just started talking to me, in a Welsh accent. About David Lynch.