well sick

Last week Dave had a brush with the highly-touted ‘norovirus’. The first symptom was watching the whole of the Eastenders omnibus in spite of having seen each individual episode at the time. I could tell that something was wrong, and wasn’t surprised when ‘waves of nausea’ followed shortly afterwards.

So far I have managed to avoid that. I still haven’t had a (legitimate) sick day off in my life. When Bruce Willis points this out to his boss in the film Unbreakable he instantly gets a pay rise, and later turns out to be a superhero. Real life is not so kind. However, I was told this week that I have 65 allotted sick days per year (that’s four months off if I time it right) and something in me must have welcomed this news because on hearing it I almost immediately fell ill.

First I had a sore throat and soon I sounded like that girl in The Exorcist (I stopped short of projectile-vomiting bile, but I had plenty of equally green snot to hand). Dave and Ross were highly amused, requesting Barry White impressions and renditions of favourite movie trailer voiceovers. Indeed at this point it almost was a novelty. My throat felt ill, but I didn’t.

Next day it was the other way around, but still I went in, and left only two hours early. The day after was my day off in any case and Saturday I was back in the thick of it. My 65 days remain intact. If this opt-out fails, I also found time to apply for (an application form for) another job. Office work. Fewer hours, more money. Every other Friday off. The only snag is you have to have an ‘interest’ in human resources. How do you fake that? I’m so uninterested in them I can’t even be bothered to find out what they are. Despite this, I’ve made a start: ‘Of all the earth’s resources, I believe humans are one of the most important. Humans are considered vital to the running of many organizations. I myself am human…’

Perhaps I should work on my new-found talent for illness instead…

echo echo echo beach

Vera Duckworth died in Coronation Street. They weren’t revealing how it would happen. Would she be mistaken for a terrorist and gunned down in the street? Or would she choke on a stick of Blackpool rock? In the event, mercifully, they opted for ‘quietly, at home’. Jack’s initial reaction (hugging himself and whimpering in an eldritch way) was oddly abstract, like something (so I like to imagine) from a Noh play. But by the end of the second episode, I felt as you should feel: like an acquaintance of long standing had passed away.

That’s the thing about soaps. Viewers may become so involved in them that they mistake the characters for real people, but on the other hand there’s an equal and opposite reaction - a tendency to watch them ironically. Like these are people you know, but don’t have to care about.

Interesting to bear this in mind when watching Echo Beach, ITV’s new soap, which is prefaced by a comedy about the making of the thing. The comedy, benefiting from Ben Miller’s central performance as the soap’s producer, works, but the soap? Shot through a slight haze and acted with varying degrees of awfulness, Echo Beach is a curious experience. It’s like watching a dream someone from the first show is having. Not a particularly interesting dream; rather, the kind you have just before waking, when you’re beginning to see through it all. Chunks of the first show’s ‘reality’ are unearthed throughout, lending it a spurious conviction.

One unforeseen result of this is that, judging by the trailers they were showing (Primeval, Thank God You’re Here, Al Murray’s Happy Hour), Ben Miller now has to feature in every show made by ITV. Having penetrated to this crucial second level of reality, and made himself indispensable there, he is now a fundamental part of the channel’s structure. Or was it only that Ben Miller had a January sale, and ITV got there early?

3D visualization

I recall this unpacker we hired one year; never said anything memorable except this one thing that has stuck with me, and that was very much by the by: ‘I was sitting in the living room last night’, he said, ‘and the TV went pear-shaped.’ There was something about that image that pleased me.

It’s only when, as last week, I’m forced to confront myself in the Next changing room mirror, that I realise why ‘pear-shaped’ is such a bad thing. There’s something peculiarly unflattering about the mirrors in there, or is it me? Oh yeah: it’s me.

Still, you’d think having a skinny chest and a bulging belly would be chic in a world where models are encouraged to starve themselves. It’s the Third World malnutrition look.

Oh well, it’s that time of year when we are encouraged to make a new start. Diet. Exercise. As if! We met up with Mat and Amanda last night and they had the fulfilled glow of those who have adhered to New Year’s resolutions. Amanda has had colonic irrigation and Mat has been having job interviews in London, experiences broadly similar in the sense that both parties have been placed in odd and unaccustomed positions. And dissimilar, of course, in that Mat’s interviewers have not thus far shot a jet of water up his arse. Or not that he’s saying, anyway.

careering

So now we are entering the dark days of Waterstones Brentwood. Both Paula and Paul have left. They will be missed for their humour and for the work they did and even, yes, as people. When I mention work, I’m really talking about Paula. She did work none of the rest of us knew existed, though we will do now, when, left to accumulate, it suddenly falls down on top of us. Paul took a more leisurely approach, but I shall miss hearing his characteristic, immensely slow, tread on the stairs. Although it suggested the relentless advance of Frankenstein’s monster, it was oddly reassuring. It seemed to say that there was all the time in the world.

Genteel, intellectual, and sleepy, Paul was like a survivor from another age, a golden time when everyone who had a certain temperament was practically guaranteed a job for life with the BBC. Failing that, he had to make do with Ottakar’s, but, sadly, he decided that he needed money. On his leaving card I wrote that he’d never survive in the real world: ‘You’re doomed. Doomed, I tell you! DOOOOOMED!!!! All the best, Martin.’ The pen smudged, and I said that it was my tears. It wasn’t of course. It was just a crappy biro.

Here is my favourite anecdote about Paul:

We were loitering at the back gate of the shop, waiting for a guy to turn up with a skip, when a man in a plaid jacket who seemed to fit the bill came bounding along. Paul walked up to him, smiling shyly, and said, in his slightly suggestive, Leslie Philips kind of way: ‘Hello…’ The man, who was not our man at all of course, looked very uncomfortable, and hurried off, no doubt thinking we were elderly rent boys...

Which is probably how he'll end up, come to think of it.

so this is the future

Instead of remaining in 2007, bits of which I liked, I decided to go forward along with everyone else into 2008, implausibly futuristic as it sounds. A party at our house sealed the deal. Our preparations were few: we laid on some nibbles and sexed the toilets. The gents’ downstairs was designated by a close-up photograph of a crushed wasp; a flower served to illustrate the ladies’. After the three of us had spent quite a long time sitting around staring at crisps, people began to arrive.

Unlike last year, there was no nudity and I did not experience missing time. After a while people started asking me to make cocktails for them, a sure sign that they were very drunk. Nobody remembers what these things taste like but they are invariably blue. There were no casualties except for Rhys, who had been suffering anyway from some sort of virus. I encouraged him to down a shot, saying that it would ‘settle his stomach’, although in fact his stomach was not in the least pacified. It was outraged. It dragged him out of the room and proceeded to beat him up in the downstairs toilet while we all stood outside laughing, to make him feel less alone.

The next day I had a new experience. No, nothing like that. I played a ‘computer game’. Actually not for the first time ever, but not far off. Dave and Helen and Paul Jones were in the living room battling this enormous demon with a mouth in its belly that belched fireballs. The sacred controls were handed to me, and in spite of only pressing buttons randomly (and by no means all the buttons available to me) I was mysteriously able to defeat the monster… one time out of about forty. Still, I’d expected to be turning lazy somersaults in the air; or running off to investigate a distant land mass, as would no doubt have happened in ‘real life’. ‘You’ve done this before’, said Paul. I agreed that I had pressed buttons before, ‘but probably not this quickly.’

the C-word

For those who asked me if I had a good Christmas I had a new stock answer this year: no. I became more familiar than I wished to be with the psychogeography of Basildon hospital. The car park with sandbags lying around its edges like basking tumours. The sign explaining that money from parking fees is ‘directed to patient care’ (carefully allowing for the possibility that it might be distracted by something more straightforwardly enjoyable). The one big emergency we witnessed while we were there was when the parking barriers failed, and you could get in (or rather, out) for free. A team of surgeons was called out from some brain operation to deal with it, and they had it up and running in no time at all.

We went in at ground level, descended two floors, and could still look out the window and perceive ourselves to be on the ground. This, it turned out, was due to an optical illusion known as ‘the Thames Valley’. Few illusions remained inside. My Dad had what was meant to be a ‘fast recovery’ operation to remove ten inches of colon and a tumour. That was on 6th December. He’s still in there. It was the usual drill: you go in feeling reasonably healthy and wind up feeling, and looking, like you’ve been in a Japanese POW camp.

He can’t face anyone but the immediate family. We sit there around his bed, in silence sometimes, like in church, except the texts are less reassuring. Keep out of the reach and sight of children. Bile bag. His gaze tends to be inward. One day he told us that he’d had a really good morning. This was pleasing, until he explained that he’d thought he was at Ipswich golf club. That was the morphine. Some people see purple spiders, so he’s lucky. Except for the blockage caused, apparently, by a clip they put inside him that was meant to be ‘non-stick’, but which stuck. Except for the ongoing infection in the wound from the operation to cure the blockage.

On Christmas morning, when my Mum rang the hospital, he was described as ‘comfortable’. It isn’t something you’d wish anyone: a comfortable Christmas. And he was anything but, of course.

Given all this, I felt immune to Christmas this year. Though I still had to queue up in Marks and Sparks along with everyone else.