Strangeness
I took a phone call in the shop and it was some young guy who wanted a book for his girlfriend. With painful slowness he gave me the details: Sexual Relationships by (he spelled it out) Ivor Biggin. Well it should have been Biggun: after so much effort, he’d even got the joke wrong. And I was equally uninspired. Only later did I think of what I should have said: ‘We were going to order that in, but then we decided that it sounded like a really bad joke.’ Or: ‘Sorry, some tumbleweed’s just blown through the shop, I’ll have to go and deal with that.’ Instead, I just said we didn't have it, and he put the phone down while mumbling to someone else in the room. What was really remarkable about the whole thing was the complete lack of humour informing it.
Customers are rarely funny intentionally. Paula served a woman with a New Zealand accent who asked for a book on (she thought) ‘gravy’. Well, we’ve had stranger requests. So she took her to the ‘sauces’ section of cookery, only to discover that in fact she wanted a book on ‘grieving’. Not the sort of misunderstanding you can comfortably laugh off, at least at the time.
On Friday night we left a tired Ross in the house, and visited the pub. On our return, three cabs had drawn up in front of the house and a very tall man with a sinister obsequious smile was standing outside the front door telling us that they had been ordered from our address. Well Ross had been planning to go to bed; it seemed unlikely that he had ordered one cab, let alone three. On the other hand, maybe he’d suddenly decided to have a party. But when I went in the house was dark and silent and there was no response from behind the closed door of Ross’ bedroom. I went downstairs again to discover that the taxi driver had had the wrong house number.
All perfectly explicable, of course, and yet the incident had a decidedly uncanny air. The fact that the cabbie looked like he should have been driving Dracula’s coach and horses helped; also, the fact that there were three cabs; and the hushed gloom of the house, in place of the imagined party. It was strangely frightening, in an unresolved, Robert Aickman-ish way.
Though perhaps not as frightening as Vernon Kay’s All-Star Family Fortunes on Saturday night. Since Vernon Kay has had his hair cut, he looks like a completely different person: it’s like he’s been replaced. The sequence where they introduced the families of the ‘stars’ had the camera zooming through the front door and all over their houses at terrifying speed, to the accompaniment of music played at nerve-jangling volume. Although this was ‘family entertainment’, it had borrowed its signature moves from some state-of-the-art horror movie. Is this what people now regard as normal? Dave and I fled from this inhuman spectacle to Billericay (with the aid of Chad, who drove) and we wound up watching the future head of geography at my old school bouncing on a trampoline in the dark at the back of a pub. Well obviously, there was more to it than that.
Customers are rarely funny intentionally. Paula served a woman with a New Zealand accent who asked for a book on (she thought) ‘gravy’. Well, we’ve had stranger requests. So she took her to the ‘sauces’ section of cookery, only to discover that in fact she wanted a book on ‘grieving’. Not the sort of misunderstanding you can comfortably laugh off, at least at the time.
On Friday night we left a tired Ross in the house, and visited the pub. On our return, three cabs had drawn up in front of the house and a very tall man with a sinister obsequious smile was standing outside the front door telling us that they had been ordered from our address. Well Ross had been planning to go to bed; it seemed unlikely that he had ordered one cab, let alone three. On the other hand, maybe he’d suddenly decided to have a party. But when I went in the house was dark and silent and there was no response from behind the closed door of Ross’ bedroom. I went downstairs again to discover that the taxi driver had had the wrong house number.
All perfectly explicable, of course, and yet the incident had a decidedly uncanny air. The fact that the cabbie looked like he should have been driving Dracula’s coach and horses helped; also, the fact that there were three cabs; and the hushed gloom of the house, in place of the imagined party. It was strangely frightening, in an unresolved, Robert Aickman-ish way.
Though perhaps not as frightening as Vernon Kay’s All-Star Family Fortunes on Saturday night. Since Vernon Kay has had his hair cut, he looks like a completely different person: it’s like he’s been replaced. The sequence where they introduced the families of the ‘stars’ had the camera zooming through the front door and all over their houses at terrifying speed, to the accompaniment of music played at nerve-jangling volume. Although this was ‘family entertainment’, it had borrowed its signature moves from some state-of-the-art horror movie. Is this what people now regard as normal? Dave and I fled from this inhuman spectacle to Billericay (with the aid of Chad, who drove) and we wound up watching the future head of geography at my old school bouncing on a trampoline in the dark at the back of a pub. Well obviously, there was more to it than that.
posted by martin at 12:56 PM
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