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As usual I was too stingy to buy a programme and was working from information that was slightly out of date, so I went to see Bright Eyes headlining on the Saturday not knowing that they had ‘withdrawn’.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.