the bear's wings

After the Christmas meal the other week (for once I got a practical present in the Secret Santa: a bottle of gin) Paul Jones and Dave and I stood in our kitchen discussing our ‘ultimate wish’. Paul’s was something completely incomprehensible involving the Starship Enterprise, and Dave quickly settled for ‘Kelly Brook covered in jam’, but I couldn’t oblige because I don’t believe in making wishes. I’ve read The Monkey’s Paw, so I know that if you make a wish and it comes true it will probably come true in a bad way. Hence Dave would end up with the corpse of Kelly Brook, who would have been drowned in a vat of jam. Or if she were alive and covered in jam, she’d just be impossibly angry about it.

Something I have never wished for is to meet Rustie Lee and this came true nonetheless. She was in the shop signing copies of her new book, which has a slightly off-putting picture on the cover of her smiling in a strained way and holding up a whisk, looking rather as though she has had to extract it from somewhere uncomfortably intimate. Still, the book is meant to be really good, at least according to Rustie Lee, who was on Phoenix FM just before coming to us, singing its praises to Xanthe Bearman (aka: ‘The Bear at Lunchtime’). I was listening to Rustie on the radio, and then there she was in the flesh (and plenty of it). Well you don’t get this with Ken Bruce. And she seemed very pleasant, though not so approachable that I could ask her the one thing I really wanted to know: ‘What’s Xanthe Bearman really like?’

Too late now. Two days later that Bear had flown, snatched up by Essex FM, who wanted her in spite of the fact that she was largely indistinguishable from ‘Gemma’, who presents the breakfast show. What clinched the deal? Her air of sounding like the receptionist who has to fill in at the last moment when the real DJ falls ill? Or does it help to know Rustie? Maybe I should have talked to her. I could do with being whisked off somewhere.

Although she might have a different interpretation of that phrase.

standards

Finally it happened. Someone complained about Pets With Tourettes. To me. It shouldn’t be on display at the front of the shop, was her comment, to which I gave the standard company response: ‘Piss flaps’. No of course I didn’t, and neither did I argue that Pets With Tourettes, like The Naked Lunch before it, is a work of genius that transcends conventional morality. I merely said that I’d ‘pass on her comments’, without specifying to who - or what. She strode out looking dissatisfied. ‘It’s like this on every page’, she’d said. As though it would have been better if pictures of cute fluffy kittens saying ‘I love you’ had been randomly dispersed among the hamsters telling you to fuck off. Oh yes, we could give that to Grandma.

There’s a lot of shift work happening at the moment. The other evening I emerged from my cubby hole to discover that for I was the only senior left in the shop. I was ‘in charge’. Naturally things had already deteriorated. Paul and Esme, the other remaining staff members, were playing hangman behind the counter. Paul asked me to suggest a letter and I said e. ‘I’ve done e’, said Esme, laughing hysterically. It did seem that the place was falling apart. Then someone left a note on the counter saying that ‘you may have shoplifters in your shop.’ Who had left it? One of the ‘shoplifters’ themselves? A cry for help? Stop me before I take something else? There were three loud young men in at the time - too loud, you’d have thought, to be up to much. Or perhaps they were there as a distraction from the real shoplifters, in one of those elaborate scams you see on BBC3’s The Real Hustle. And never in real life.

It was too hard to care. The young men left not obviously burdened down with extraneous bulges and I went back to my lair, where Phoenix FM was still broadcasting. ‘Community radio’, they call it. It sounds like a punishment and sometimes, it is.

small talk

We went to the Green Man for Bobs’ 40th. Everyone was there. Hannah, recovering from the after-effects of being bitten by a Mars bar in Australia (but I may have misheard this) was back on the booze and enthusiastically offering to ‘plan’ a New Year’s Eve party at our house, which will apparently be a ‘foam party’ in the back garden. When I suggested that she didn’t do so much planning for her own New Years Eve party a couple of years back, she protested, in a wounded tone: ‘I did pizza!’

Phil and Vicki brought their new baby Christopher with them. He was passed around the pub and remained perfectly undisturbed even when he reached Mat. (Probably just as well that he never got as far as me.) Previous to this evening, I have been telling people that I’ve only ever seen baby Christopher ‘under polythene’. What I meant was under the plastic transparent rain cover over his pram, but I wonder if people haven’t got the wrong idea. Especially the social services. Why was I talking to them anyway?

Amanda showed everyone the bone she had poking out of her foot (under, not through, the skin). The doctor told her the bone was swollen, so she looked up ‘bone swelling’ on the internet, and found, as you can imagine, lots of interesting things.

Paul Jones is looking forward to getting an Optimus Prime toy for Christmas. I asked him if he still played with his toys and he said: ‘A bit.’ He and Chad agreed that, in your twenties, ‘it isn’t the same’. Nevertheless, we discovered, Paul sometimes gets so involved in his games that his toys turn against him and he has to be rescued from them by the social services.

The social services... don't they do a good job? Of giving a spurious theme to these ramblings...

bleeding dross

Voluminous bright red ‘Christmas gift finder’ T-shirts have appeared at work. ‘Ask me for gift ideas’, they suggest. Who are they kidding? I have enough trouble finding gifts for people I’ve known all my life, let alone people I’ve only met ten seconds ago. Unless these shirts confer supernatural powers on the wearer… but I don’t want to know.

I don’t have to. I’m out the back. Soon I will be able to quote the ads on Phoenix FM verbatim, including the one for the beauty salon which promises to give visitors ‘the benefit of our culture’. In Essex, that’s like telling you to fuck off. They also use the word ‘strive’ which is a mistake in an advert, I think, because it makes the whole thing sound like a response to a customer complaint, as in: ‘We strive to give a friendly and professional service. Unfortunately, on this occasion we electrocuted and stabbed you. Sorry.’

Listening to Phoenix has also introduced me to music that I might previously have been unaware of. Not so much obscure stuff as the kind of songs that have been number one for the last five weeks. I’m talking about Bleeding Love by Leona Lewis. Although Phoenix do have a reasonably varied playlist, they seem inordinately fond of this, on one occasion even playing it twice within the space of ten minutes. ‘You cut me open and I keep bleeding love’, wails the X-Factor winner (unless it’s: ‘You cut me open and I keep bleeding, love.’) There’s a thin line between a vivid metaphor and something genuinely nauseating, and Leona is not afraid to cross it. Nick Cave, eat your heart out. Is the title of her next single, apparently.

Honestly, being forced to listen to this stuff has been a revelation. For example, it turns out that Rihanna’s Shut Up And Drive isn’t about cars at all. It’s about sex! Yes, really. ‘What’s under my hood’ is a reference to certain parts of a lady, while the driver’s ‘keys’ are symbolic of his throbbing manhood. She doesn’t explain why this man has more than one penis, but then we can’t expect strict biological accuracy from hit singles.

‘You’ve just sprung this big thing on me. I can’t take it all in.’ That was Heartbeat, just now. See, they’re all at it. Next week’s episode is about German porn. I'm not joking.