a topical spasm

Sometimes things happen in the public arena that are so shocking that you have no choice but to comment on them. Thus: Joey Essex on Mr. and Mrs. It was an astonishing performance. Inarticulate and weird-looking, he now resembles a real celebrity – the kind who hardly seems to belong in 'reality'. He is also a natural philosopher - at one point, I swear I heard him say: 'I'm language'. It's true, Joey – you are language. You've even invented a word: 'reem'. So what if it doesn't really mean anything? It's more than, say, Heidegger ever did. He just coined neologisms.

Oh, and then something else happened in Woolwich. Somehow, I wasn't shocked. Maybe I've read too much J.G. Ballard. One of the perpetrators of the atrocity went to a school quite near here – bet they won't be inviting him back to give a talk to the students.

Everyone else is talking however. Wading through my Mum's Daily Mail, I'm finding the topic hard to escape – even Fred Bassett is offering his thoughts on the subject (predictably savage). I wind up taking refuge in the 'Answers to Correspondents' section ('Until recently, maggot eyes were not well understood...'). Maggot Eyes – isn't that an Italian horror movie from 1973? No? Well it should be.

One thing everyone is talking about is reintroducing the snappily-titled Snooper's Charter, a bill allowing the security services (who have seemingly just proved how useless they are) greater powers to monitor your e-mails and texts and, for all I know, your excrement too. This bill was voted out quite recently, but is being talked up again on the sound basis that, if something has been rejected after careful consideration and with due process, it'd be a really good idea to bring it back as a knee-jerk reaction to something that happened in the street a few days ago. Anyway it was 'only the Lib-Dems' that objected. And now they want to stop hate preachers appearing on TV. Shame: their slot was the only thing worth watching on QVC.

the red recycling box has risen from the grave

It isn't often that an entry on this blog musters up an actual sequel, but here it is. After posting my recent entry on the red box, I returned home to look out the window and see that, on Recycling Eve, nobody nearby had placed a red box outside their house. It was as if they were trying to foil my plans to hijack their recycling. The next morning, however, there were two of them out there, and since they were both still full when I left for work I took the opportunity to discreetly offload a few bottles.

On my return that evening, a red box (empty) was sitting outside my door!

There was something uncanny about this, and I was not inclined to touch it. Besides, it had 36a written on it, as opposed to my 39a. Perhaps it had merely gone astray – there had been a strong breeze - and someone had mistaken my unnumbered door for 36a, and left it there. Perhaps 36a had seen me 'borrowing' red boxes and were giving it to me, either in a spirit of kindness, or out of resentment at my taking advantage of theirs. It was impossible to tell.

I left it, and there it remained, a sinister splash of red in the frosted glass of the door. The next day, I noticed that it had inched closer. It was like something out of a horror story, probably one written in diary form ('May 3^rd. It is there again!'), one which ends with the narrator furiously writing right up to the moment ('It is in the hall!') that the red box gets him ('Aaarg - ')...

Eventually one morning I took it across the road and left it outside the unnumbered door which I presumed to be 36a (not the one where the man came out and saw me interfering with his rubbish).

I returned at evening to find that it had moved, but only a fraction. I began to feel sorry for it. Perhaps it had only been looking for a home, and I had rejected it. It might have been abused in some way. Someone might have put plastic in it.

Nevertheless I began to dread returning home to find that it was back. The truth is, I don't really need a red box – I don't get through that much wine (no, really). And in fact the red box finally disappeared, but on the evening that this became apparent I got home to discover clods of earth outside my door! What did this mean? Perhaps, I thought wildly, it was a reference to my blog entry about funerals. But that would imply a more bizarre possibility – that someone is actually reading this!

There is only so much that the human mind can take. But perhaps it's true. Maybe everybody's reading it. Like so many other people nowadays, I could be a celebrity no-one's ever heard of. But I'm sure Google would have told me by now. I feel that my celebrity is more likely to be of the kind that attends the woman from the documentary Dreams Of A Life. You know, that woman who died and they only found her two years later when they broke down the door, a skeleton watching TV in her flat. How cool is that? This always struck me as a feelgood story, with its implication that you don't really need to pay your bills – that no-one will even notice.

Thus far, I have not seen the red box again.

In The Fog At The ICA

One good thing about working where I do, is that I can leave work at five (or maybe just before) and be in Central London by six (or maybe just after), thanks to the miracle of Shenfield Station. So the other night I was at the ICA easily in time to see In The Fog at 6:15 – in fact, I was too early, and thus had to sit through the ads. The ICA (Institute of Contemporary Arts in case you don't know) now seems to have more ads than the Odeon. I appreciate that they have a captive audience, but you have to wonder how well targeted these ads are. How many people who have turned up on a Tuesday night to see a long, slow Russian art-war film set in Nazi-occupied Belarus are seriously ever going to buy a Jeep?

For a start there were only about ten of us, only two of whom knew each other beforehand. A little way into the film an old man in the back row told this couple, who were shifting about, to sit still – they weren't sitting in front of him, but presumably their movement was distracting him. In truth, they had been irritating earlier, talking through the ads and previews. I realise that technically this is allowed, but something in their tone had suggested an unseemly relish, as if they were glorying in their accompanied status.

Later a man in front of me turned round to express his irritation at the ticking of a woman's watch. Even without looking at the screen, you could begin to see how wars start.

In The Fog is one of those art movies so serious that it sometimes threatens to tip over the edge into self-parody, as when a woman begs her husband (who is being taken off to be shot): 'At least take an onion with you.' And there is occasionally a sense that the camera is lingering slightly too long over things that don't always justify being lingered over. For example, a crow.

However, it's often very effective in detailing the way war turns people into different versions of themselves. Are these versions more truthful, or are they more like distorted caricatures? This is the question. Our hero ends up trudging through the woods with a corpse on his back, like an allegorical figure of guilt, even though he has nothing to feel guilty about. Probably.

Eventually, an actual fog does roll in, obscuring the film, or further obscuring it, and we are left with the sound (SPOILER ALERT) of the hero shooting himself (everyone else is dead). The credits then roll over the sound of the wind in the trees, birdsong, and faint accordion music – very effective, and yet there's a part of me that wishes they'd played When The Going Gets Tough (The Tough Get Going) by Billy Ocean over the closing credits. It would have been a bold decision, but I think it would have paid off.

solitary confinement

People seem to think that it's difficult, living alone. To the extent that almost anything else is preferable. How odd. I don't find it so difficult, having to accommodate myself to the crazy whims of absolutely no-one. I feel that I may already have lived with the only people in this reality that I am capable of living with. Perhaps there are others, and one could of course force applicants (if any) to undergo a series of tests beforehand. But there are no guarantees.

As to the notion of a significant other, that seems even more far-fetched. Even if you find that special someone, you then have to understand that they already have a life of their own. You have to meet their friends and their family. Their kids. Their pets. The very thought of it is exhausting. There is, I suppose, the possibility of finding someone with no friends or family. Like maybe a tramp. But I can't really seek out people with no friends or family. It's a little too much like a serial killer searching for victims.

That is one of the problems of living alone – you run the risk of forgetting how to be human. And there are times when I look down over Kings Road from my living room window and crazed power fantasies thrill through me as I see the people walking along, unaware of me, and imagine selecting one I like the look of, and transporting them somehow into my flat, as a diner might select a lobster from a tank. But I wouldn't know what to do with them, any more than I would with a lobster. Boil it alive, yes. But what about the claws?

My only real contact with any of my neighbours thus far has been over the Incident of the Red Box. And even that was barely an incident. The thing is, I don't have a red box for glass recycling, so I have developed a tendency, come Refuse Collection Eve, of looking out for other people's. The other night I darted across the road with my wine bottles and placed them with great care - because the box was already full - on top of someone else's empties. Suddenly the door of the house opened and a guy stepped out to find me crouched over his used glass like a really desperate alcoholic urban fox. I felt rather furtive and guilty, though of course I wasn't really doing anything wrong - was I? 'Am I allowed to do this?', I asked. 'No problem at all', he said, nervously inching away. 'No problem at all.' Then he walked off towards the station, before suddenly turning and walking back up towards town – presumably so discombobulated by the sight of me that he completely forgot where he was meant to be going.

I waited until he'd gone then crept back across the road to get more bottles. What am I turning into?, I wonder.

funereality

I didn't see Mrs. T's funeral – it seemed like a private matter, between her and the Tory party. After all, they created her and they destroyed her – it was only fitting that they should bury her too. Mrs. T was big on 'thrift' as I recall (even if her success was largely based on City boys conjuring money out of thin air), so perhaps she would have preferred to be dumped into the Thames in a weighted cardboard box. I think I would have preferred that, especially as I was paying towards it, but they went for the 3.6 million pound option after all. Apparently it was all very tasteful, and the crowds applauded, which apparently was not a protest.

And the other week I went to a real funeral – that of Bernard Sidney Sadler, Mat's father. This took place in a white-painted chapel like something out of the American Mid-West, pleasingly light and airy, but definitely in Essex. It was too light in a way, since the sun continued to beat down on my unprotected scalp even inside the place, coming at me through a skylight. A baseball cap had been rejected as inappropriate wear – I don't own a black one. Still, it seems indelicate to complain of 'roasting' in a crematorium; and obviously it could have been worse.

The service conveyed Bernie's personality with a light touch. His presence was felt, and the humanist preacher's slightly lugubrious delivery formed a nice contrast with Peaches, by The Stranglers, at the end. Even if it was the 'clean' version, with 'Summer' replacing 'bummer'. Some concessions to good taste must be made on these occasions. Still, except for the faint melancholy undertone of 'There goes the charabanc', it was still splendidly inappropriate for a funeral. And risky. Suppose they had accidentally played something by foul-mouthed female Canadian singer/rapper Peaches instead? Or even the other Peaches, by the Presidents of the USA? 'Peaches come from a can/They were put there by a man', the assembled mourners would have been bemused to learn. I expect Bernie would have been amused in any case.

We had been discussing inappropriate records to play at a cremation earlier on in the week, and in fact one had been playing on the radio when I'd got into Bobs' car to go to the funeral – Katy Perry's Firework. It strikes me that the one good thing about dying might just be the chance to force people to listen to your music collection. Naturally, I have considered this at some length with respect to my own funeral, and thus far I have come up with three choices. First there'll be Espresso, by the Monochrome Set, a jaunty number whose chorus goes: 'I'm going to Heaven, baby'. Then the post-apocalyptic folk rock of Swans, with Why Are We Alive? This should inject the right note of forbidding gloom into the occasion, plus ideally it will have people (if any) asking: 'Why are we alive, and he isn't?' And hopefully the answer won't be: because we didn't experiment with auto-erotic asphyxiation.

Lastly will come Chic's At Last I Am Free. Played over the end credits of the German film Barbara, this has the effect of turning a good film into a great one, so I'm hoping that it will have a similiar effect on my life, maybe even raising it to average.

Anyway, then we repaired to Sunshine House. Under the black umbrella of mourning a kind of reunion was taking place. People you never see nowadays were suddenly there. Even Dave, now svelte and beardless. That's what Malvern can do for you - if you catch a virus there (he's feeling better now).

Rhys was also present. He and Mat are going to write a self-help book 'for losers'. I said that the biggest problem they might have would be establishing their credentials as successful people. They looked bewildered - they held this to be self-evident. In any case the book is likely to end with instructions on how to shoot yourself.
 

Mat wants everyone to wear white at his funeral – specifically, Stormtrooper outfits (we're talking Star Wars, not Nazis, I should point out.) As an experiment, it would be interesting to see what would happen if we ignored his instructions (and his atheism) and gave him a full Catholic mass. Would he forsake rationalism and come back from the dead in order to register his displeasure? However, being ten years older, I am unlikely to make that one.

Time marches on. I used to imagine that old age is something I could stride through, ignoring it as I might a charity collector on the high street. Evidence is building to the contrary. It seems that I am far more likely to curl up like an Autumn leaf, though more gradually, before being blown into the abyss by an icy blast. Oh well. Best carry on drinking.