boiling a hyena

Next week comes the big announcement at work about ‘harmonisation’. This is the final melding of Waterstone’s and Ottakars: they want us all to sign new contracts. The drill is: the manager makes the announcement, you ‘go off and think about it’ (stagger dazedly away and fix yourself a stiff drink, or two) and then come back for a ‘one-to-one’ with your manager (drunkenly abuse them and get fired).

No, I’m sure it won’t be like that. I mean, ‘harmonisation’! It sounds so lovely. Like ‘friendly fire’.

It was Bank Holiday. The rain did not cease to scratch at the windows. Scrabble-playing weather. Currently I am sat here watching telly. The Two Ronnies is on, over and over again. What, is it Two Ronnies day or something?

Yes. On ITV3, it is.

I could have gone to see Pirates Of The Caribbean 3 (everyone else has) only I thought even the trailer went on too long.

Mind you, look at me, I’ll watch any old shit. On Sunday I even watched Heartbeat. Is this still set in the sixties? They played White Rabbit over the climactic scenes, but it’s hard to tell. It has been going so long that it should be set in the future by now. Or perhaps it has diverged into a parallel universe.

This episode was about a ‘family entertainer’ who arranges to be falsely accused of theft for the publicity. Of course it all goes wrong and he ends up threatening to kill his female assistant and trying to stab a policeman. Even better publicity, you might think, but this is where Heartbeat differs from real life where - or so I read in the Brentwood Gazette - Jodie Marsh is launching a quest to find a husband on MTV. The title of the programme (Who’ll Take Jodie Marsh Up The Aisle?) may give some idea of the seriousness of the project, but if you want to know more you can always visit www.marryjodiemarsh.com. I haven’t.

Is ‘marry’ now just a euphemism for ‘fuck’, then? Is marriage the ultimate sexual perversion? Hmm, let’s think about that. The dressing up. The rings. The vicar looking on. Everyone watching. Maybe Jodie has a point. Or maybe I’ve been watching The Two Ronnies for too long.

bombshell

I got home on Thursday and Mat offered to make me a cup of tea. I should have known something was up. ‘Amanda’s asked me to move in with her’, he said. ‘And I’ve said yes.’ ‘If she asked you to jump off a cliff would you say yes to that?’ Actually, I didn’t say that, not thinking of it at the time.

The upshot is, we have a room going spare if anyone is interested. Obviously, when I say anyone I don’t mean just anyone. Hannah has expressed an interest, which is a great idea, in principle. Just as long as it never actually happens.

People ask, do I resent Mat’s precipitate departure from the house. I reply: ‘He’s going to be with the woman he loves. Of course I resent it.’ It isn’t like he’s broke or something (well, actually, it is); then my resentment would be tempered by sympathy (or something similiar like, I don't know, amusement). But oh no: he’s found love! Why not just grind our faces into the dirt while you’re about it?

Last night I dreamed that Andrew Lloyd Webber moved in with us.

trailer

A female customer was complaining about the ‘poor selection’ of Tottenham Hotspur books in the shop. ‘Yeah and you should see our section on elephant gynaecology’, I was tempted to say. ‘It’s tiny.’ Which is a bit unfair, perhaps, but we do have four or five Spurs titles, and we’re a general bookshop, not Spurs ’R Us. ‘Bookshops aren’t what they used to be’, muttered another customer on the phone to Jo. However, customers, it seems, are exactly what they used to be. Wankers.

I went to see the film The Lives of Others, a German movie about East Berlin’s secret police, the Stasi. I don’t know much about the workings of the Stasi but it all seemed quite plausible. Then, right at the end, one of the characters walks into a bookshop and the bookseller asks if he’d like his purchase gift-wrapped. Why? Don’t Germans buy books for themselves?

In fact, the only reason he asks this is to give the character a reason to utter the film’s last line: ‘No, this is for me.’ The book he’s buying is dedicated to him, you see, and it’s about him, and really it’s the only thing he’s got out of years and years of working for the Stasi. So, yes, it’s all very moving but what about the bookseller? Isn’t he being exploited here?

The Stasi would never have permitted this.

I was watching this with Lindsey in London. Afterwards, she briefly contemplated taking one of those rickshaw-cycle-things all the way back to Stevenage where she lives, an epic journey which would inevitably become a book, and then a film. We worked it out then and there: the mutual resentment that eventually turns into a bond; the rickshaw-jacking in, say, Hemel Hempstead; the police chase. Meryl Streep would play her and Ryan Gosling could be the driver. Clive Owen can play me giving my account of her actions to an enthralled media: ‘She’s just seen The Lives Of Others. She’d renounced Marxism and was on the lookout for a worker to oppress.’

As soon as I’ve finished my script about the demonically-possessed dishwasher, I’ll be right onto it.

Tobey carvery: director's edit

In the absence of Mat, the house has seemed peaceful, but now Mat’s back. I prepared for his return by lowering the cultural tone and deserting BBC4 for Sky Three’s Ross Kemp On Gangs. You couldn’t help but enjoy its assumption that the (apparently notorious) ‘numbers gangs’ of Cape Town would treat the former Grant Mitchell as an equal. I’d rather expected him to go the whole hog by blacking up and getting himself ‘initiated’ - which is to say, gang-raped - in Cape Town prison, but instead he kept his distance, giving the various gang members his trademark ‘hard stare’ (borrowed, of course, from Paddington Bear).

Mat’s return was swiftly followed by a visit from Rhys and Dave Stacey. Dave - our Dave - immediately fled to Cornwall, as though obeying an unwritten law prohibiting more than one Dave from occupying the same building at the same time. Dave Stacey, another former Aberystwyth student, is a lanky guy, famous for his lack of coordination (physical, not sartorial). Indeed, he hadn’t been in the house half an hour before, simply by reaching for a Stanley Kubrick box set on the shelf next to him, he’d set in motion something that resembled a minor earth tremor in its effects.

It was a situation hardly likely to be improved by an all-day drinking session, which Mat, Dave and Rhys indulged in the next day, but in fact the aftermath of this was not too terrible. I went for a curry with people who warned me gleefully of the carnage that would no doubt await me on my return to the house. When I did get back it was to find Masters Of The Universe (the live action film, not the cartoon) playing on DVD to an audience of two, both of whom were showing their appreciation of its qualities by sleeping soundly.

The next day, Sunday, nobody was in a condition to do anything but stare into space, and anything that happened to intervene in that space, which in the event was Spiderman 3 followed by that board in the Toby carvery where numbers flash up to inform you that your table is ready. Spiderman 3 is not the most perfectly structured movie I’ve seen, but it is a model of concision and good sense compared to the board at the Toby carvery. For a start our number was 185, which certainly bears no relation to the number of tables in the place, large as it undoubtedly is. Then numbers on either side of it were appearing seemingly at random. They might as well have been beamed from the far reaches of space for all they meant to us as we sat there, losing the will to live. Mat looked even more than usually like one of Dracula’s victims; Rhys’ wallet kept dropping from his floppy hands.

Eventually, 185 appeared and we got our carvery, all except Dave who, being a vegetarian, had the vegetarian choice. In a Toby carvery the vegetarian choice is: have what we give you or renounce vegetarianism. If you do renounce vegetarianism, you get a special hat, and the waitresses dance round you wearing stag’s heads and chanting: ‘Meat! Meat! Meat!’ Or so I’ve heard. Quite sensibly, Dave opted for the puff-pastry-and-whatever-it-conceals option.