defining hitler

At work it’s all about the forthcoming loyalty card. A list of questions was e-mailed to the manager regarding preparations for it. How are you going to persuade people to give their e-mail addresses? How are you going to achieve your targets? Are your staff aware…? How will you…? On and on it went, relentless as a Nazi interrogation (I’ve been reading Sebastian Haffner’s Defying Hitler). In the time it took to fill in, some actual work could have been done. Not that I was filling it in - if I had been, I’d have cracked, and started enjoying myself. How are you going to use POS (posters and such) to maximize customer awareness? Please give details. Hm, well I thought we could wrap customers up in posters as they come through the door, set fire to them, then jump up and down on them to put out the flames, all the while shouting: ‘Loyalty card! Loyalty card! Loyalty card!’ Is that sufficiently ‘outside the box’ for you?

To escape all this horror I went to Frightfest, the horror film festival. I saw Joshua, a film about an ‘evil’ child who systematically destroys his mother and father’s lives and then goes to live with his uncle. As you can imagine, I was pretty scared. Then Wrong Turn 2, starring Henry Rollins. Yes, ‘starring’. Not ‘featuring’. The signs were not good. The director, who seemed more like an overexcited fan, was on hand, saying he’d wanted to make a ‘video nasty’. Well, he'd got his wish, because Wrong Turn 2 is pretty nasty, and it’s probably going straight to video. Well OK then, DVD.

I’m still not sure how I feel about watching these films with an audience who cheer and clap every gory demise. It’s like the last days of the Roman Empire: kind of fun. But there were times when, watching a hillbilly child with a distinctly Downes-syndrome look slurp the blood of his latest victim, I found myself wondering if political incorrectness hasn’t gone too far. I mean, why not just call it Wrong Turn 2: Attack Of The Killer Mongs? With Rollins as the great white ex-marine slaughtering the genetically ‘inferior’ (depicted as wholly evil) as audiences cheer him on? Of course I’m not saying that this was fascist propaganda. Rollins isn’t like that. But sometimes he was oddly reminiscent of that evil Nazi politician, history’s greatest monster, what’s his name, begins with an A - ? Arnold, is it?

continuous devilment

At work we are to live under the regime of the CDP, or ‘continuous development plan’ - they couldn’t quite bring themselves to use the word ‘career’, you notice. But ‘continuous’? Synonyms include: ‘constant’, ‘eternal’, ‘unending’ - all words that commonly preface the word ‘torment’. This is the future, then: learning to be a bookseller all over again - forever.

Not that there isn’t a lot to be learned. Take the other day. A woman came up to the counter and said: ‘I’ve come about the leopard.’ As an experienced bookseller, I immediately understood that she was talking about Di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard, a copy of which she had reserved over the phone. Whereas a neophyte might have assumed that a big cat was at large in the shop, and panicked. Similiarly, when staff refer to ‘Lynx problems’, one has to be aware that they are referring to difficulties accessing the website of the courier Lynx, not talking about wild cats leaping from the tops of shelves, onto customers.

At the weekend I found myself listening to a drunken Glaswegian singing cod reggae versions of blues numbers. No, it wasn’t a tramp, it was Paolo Nutini, at V. V was easy to get into and out of this year except for on the Sunday morning, when we were sent on a futile quest for the mysterious ‘purple car park’ and thought we’d be spending the entire day circling the event. Even the rain wasn’t too bad. But there were times when, listening to six-year olds studiously debating the relative merits of Kasabian and the Killers, I wondered if I wasn’t just too damned old for all this. I looked at the God tent and imagined myself going in, sitting down, shaking my head wearily, and saying: ‘God!’ Presumably that’s what it’s for.

And, perhaps, for making confessions. Like: I saw Mika. Well, by the time I’d decided that it was a bad idea I was already hemmed in by over-excited girls, many of them, as Mika prefers them, big. He does have a remarkable voice, when he isn’t squealing like a demented Disney chipmunk, but it is wasted on this relentlessly upbeat material. He needs bringing down a bit. Probably he should be locked in a room for two years with only Throbbing Gristle’s back catalogue for company. We’ll see what emerges.

As usual I was too stingy to buy a programme and was working from information that was slightly out of date, so I went to see Bright Eyes headlining on the Saturday not knowing that they had ‘withdrawn’. Before the set began a couple came up to me and asked what ‘these guys’ were like. So I described Bright Eyes as well as I was able, as ‘gloomy, country-tinged American rock’. Which sent them packing. And then the act turned out to be something else entirely - two Mexicans duelling with acoustic guitars. By which I mean they were playing them, not hitting each other over the head with them. Which might have been more interesting, but it would have worn thin, whereas ‘Rodrigo y Gabriela’ (drawing on their thrash metal roots) presented quite an entrancing, even exciting, spectacle.

What else? Some woman called Remy Nicolle sang about how she didn't want to sing Rn'B, like people expect black women to do, she wanted to sing rock. And she was. So that had worked out for her then. Babyshambles wound up a bit of a shambles, but you couldn't say you weren't warned. And the Killers: they put on a good show, but isn't there something a bit silly about their New Romantic take on Bruce Springsteen? Lines like: 'The Devil's water it ain't so sweet.' I don't know what the Devil's water is, but who would have expected it to be sweet? It's the Devil's water, for God's sake. Oh, well OK maybe it would be sweet to fool you into drinking it, and then there might be some point in mentioning it. 'That Devil's water, it may taste sweet but, actually, it's the Devil's water. So be careful'. Mentioning its lack of sweetness, however, is pointless. Almost as pointless as me going on about it.

get a virtual life

I went out for a drink with work. People were leaving, but I will surely see them again (as in some afterlife) on Facebook.

Paul, who is not leaving, was talking about how people like him cannot afford to move out of their parents' houses and are therefore condemned to become ‘perpetual adolescents’. He is considering forming a protest group. I suggested that they might indeed call themselves the perpetual adolescents, and whine in unison, and shout slogans like ‘That’s so unfair!’ They could all stomp upstairs and slam their bedroom doors at the same time; it would have the force of a bomb.

Paul is not keen on house-shares, but ours seems to be working out. Having said that, Dave hasn’t been here this weekend, and neither have I, much. Perhaps because of this, Ross has set up a virtual house-share in The Simms 2, with all of us as characters: I was able to view myself lying in bed watching TV. My bedroom didn’t seem to have any walls, but on the plus side I was younger and better-looking. ‘They seem to be getting on at the moment’, said Ross. Perhaps ominously.

Mat and Amanda are back from their holiday in Spain. They spent the entire time watching Jeremy Kyle and movies on ITV2. And if their relationship can survive that, it can surely survive anything. Mat was talking about using her as a consultant, presumably in business matters. Though the image that sprang to mind, no doubt unfairly, was of Mat asking: ‘What do I do now?’, every five minutes.

rambunctious

Dave, Ross and I met Jane and Hannah for a drink at The Swan. It was a typical Saturday night in Brentwood: we sat talking about the end of civilization as we know it. Hannah didn’t think anyone at the table would live to see old age: ‘Something will happen.’ ‘Something’ being some sort of nuclear cataclysm or natural disaster. Well, I agree: that’s precisely why I don’t have a pension. Jane reminisced about her Nan, who’d lived through at least one world war: people nowadays couldn’t cope in similar circumstances, she said: ‘They’d flounder.’ I pointed out that in the event of a nuclear holocaust, floundering is about all you can do. Speaking personally, I have no doubt about my ability to flounder with the best of them.

Ross is shaping up very well, and showed a wisdom beyond his years in not accompanying Jane to Sam’s like she asked. Even Hannah declined, a sign of her new-found maturity that I’m not convinced isn’t just a phase.

I dreamed that our landlady (played by a young Celia Imrie) was going to replace our dishwasher because it was ‘rambunctious’.