Faced once again with the crushing ediface of London. Its largeness, its dirtiness, its loping packs of feral children out knifing each other at bus-stops from three in the afternoon. The grime, the smell, the pretentiousness, its unknowability; its sprawl, its glittering, upsetting expense. Its so old. Its bones are old, even the flesh of London is old, falling away, crumbling beneath the teeming masses; the tourist exodus that keeps the shithole afloat; the migrant workforce that rebuilds and sustains its rotting flesh like so many friendly bacteria in a yakult commercial. Public transport is the worst and so therefore it is my fault that the world is so awful because I'm poor. If I hadn't wasted my time attempting to do something creative with my life and instead spent it in the aggressive pursuit of angry naked wealth it could have been a very different story. I might never again have had to go on a bus or experienced the clammy horror of the peak time tube. But this is clearly nonsense; its not like I had a choice! Those with a specific talent for making money make it in any field. Its a gift, a talent, a blessing and one that I don't have. To berate oneself for having no financial nous at all seems like an extra punishment; I'm poor and hate myself for being poor. But I'm still poor.
So I'm on the bus, I'm on the tube, my teeth fall out, my clothes go out of even the tangental relationship to style that they had and then slide back in again, squeezing themselves around my ever thickening form. And my wife has nothing and I can give her nothing. It is a crime to be poor in London. Its a crime to be poor at forty. And its a shame.
Kelly is very quiet and withdrawn at the moment. I'm sizzling with an untapped rage against the cruelty of existence. It's not a good mix. But there are moments of tenderness and serenity. We have each other, for now.I'm not going to let some bastard disease spoil that.
On the train to the spa town of Basers Basers. The Victoria line is down but other than that the journey is fine. A man sold me my ticket at Waterloo. An actual himan employee of the station. It was one of the oddest things to happen for a while: are people making a comeback?
Monday, 21 February 2011
Sunday, 20 February 2011
No B.T.? No comment.
No broadband again. I'm writing a stiff letter to BT. On cardboard.
I'm in Basingstoke again. Everyone else is at church and I'm blogging. There's a snap-shot of an existential crisis right there.
I'm in Basingstoke again. Everyone else is at church and I'm blogging. There's a snap-shot of an existential crisis right there.
Thursday, 17 February 2011
The cancer has now moved to Kelly's spine. The tumours on her liver have increased in size and she has a new one on her hip, which may require surgery in order for her to remain mobile (hip cancer? Who gets hip cancer? I never heard of hip cancer). This was her last appointment at The Royal Free and I for one am well rid of it. Nothing good ever happened there; just the slow erosion of health, her trust and belief in people. The cancer is tearing through her and nothing seems to be able to stop it. It is a horde; a host. I have no idea how long she has left, how long I have with her.
I wasn't with her when she found out; her mum was. I had a psychologists appointment. I tried to cancel but Kelly wouldn't let me, reasoning that the best person to talk to would be a psychologist,under the circumstances. I could think of a better person right off the top of my head but she was busy, comforting her mother.
Walking to the appointment at Manor House in Islington I walk past a church. It has an Alpha Church banner draped over its venerable exterior, like forgotten bunting. The poster promises an examination of "The Meaning of Life" and I realise that I don't really understand what it is advertising. Why would life have a meaning? What would it possibly be for? I'm sure they offer a more or less arbitrary framemework of non-empirical interpretation of life and a quite literal deus ex machina. But life? Why should it have meaning? Red in tooth and claw isn't fucking half of it.
My psychologist got an earful today. As per usual she looked worried throughout and wanted me to have a lot more sessions. I'm having them weekly now when initially there was nothing for about a month available. I must give good madness. It's probably a mixture of the lack of eye contact and the occasional mirthless guffaw, like a frightened chimp. I look like I could start hurling dung at the smallest provocation. I did actually cry this time. I've been weeping spontaneously in the street, watching adverts and in the library (which got me out of a fine). But never in the psychologists were I usually just deliver a stuttered speech in staccato barks.
I'm growing as a person.
I wasn't with her when she found out; her mum was. I had a psychologists appointment. I tried to cancel but Kelly wouldn't let me, reasoning that the best person to talk to would be a psychologist,under the circumstances. I could think of a better person right off the top of my head but she was busy, comforting her mother.
Walking to the appointment at Manor House in Islington I walk past a church. It has an Alpha Church banner draped over its venerable exterior, like forgotten bunting. The poster promises an examination of "The Meaning of Life" and I realise that I don't really understand what it is advertising. Why would life have a meaning? What would it possibly be for? I'm sure they offer a more or less arbitrary framemework of non-empirical interpretation of life and a quite literal deus ex machina. But life? Why should it have meaning? Red in tooth and claw isn't fucking half of it.
My psychologist got an earful today. As per usual she looked worried throughout and wanted me to have a lot more sessions. I'm having them weekly now when initially there was nothing for about a month available. I must give good madness. It's probably a mixture of the lack of eye contact and the occasional mirthless guffaw, like a frightened chimp. I look like I could start hurling dung at the smallest provocation. I did actually cry this time. I've been weeping spontaneously in the street, watching adverts and in the library (which got me out of a fine). But never in the psychologists were I usually just deliver a stuttered speech in staccato barks.
I'm growing as a person.
Wednesday, 16 February 2011
More bad news. More cancer. More medication that doesn't work. Less time left together. Another round of phone-calls. More tears, endless tears. I can't understand why nothing is working. She was fit strong and healthy and this thing is eating her up from the inside and nothing even slows it down. I'm so sorry. My poor beautiful girl.
An ology in ineptitude
Kelly spent Friday morning attempting to sort out the ongoing problems with our BT package. None of it works and every attempt to make it work makes it worse. It underscores just exactly how unsuited to the modern world I am (there is a reason why there are no pictures on my blog! I have tried, it just doesn't seem to work). Wireless Broadband seems predicated on magic; unknowable influences, probably to do with lodestones, crystals or some sort of shamanic ritual. We have no phone, no television and no internet. All attempts to fix it have failed, leading to baffled conversations with baffling BT technicians.
I take up the fight on Saturday morning. On each occasion my profile is raised, I am further prioritised, my customer status is enhanced. In practice this means nothing, of course: I'm still endlessly repeating my name, address, a short biographical sketch and the telephone number I'm calling about. An hour and a half on the phone, four BT technicians and one dash in a hailstorm to top up my mobile, and I'm told that my system will be fixed by the 18th "at the latest". This is the twelth. I'm then sent a confirmation text with the caveat that if the fault isn't with BT equipment I will be charged £130. I sent a short and direct text back.
* * * * * * * * *
We're moving. Kelly's drugs have been approved by Belfast Medical Association so we're away to Norn at the end of March. My new life beginning at forty. This should be interesting.
* * * * * * * * *
Life without the internet is odd. I'm reading "Darwin's Island" and watching "TV Burp", both laudable, but I feel as if I should be doing something else...this blog is like something someone giving up cigarettes would do to keep his hands busy. If I can't slag off adverts on telly, while watching telly, what the hell use am I? Colgate Sensitive pro-relief is getting off scott free! The Vodaphone Bees! The fucking Vodaphone Bees! (what's the story there anyway? Why bees? Aren't telephone communication masts supposed to be fucking with the bees navigational systems? Isn't that twisting the knife a bit. Poor the bees.)*
* * * * * * * * *
Michaelangelo was known as "The Inventor of Pork Things" by his contemporaries because of his need to stick cocks on all of his statues. This is a somewhat unrelated note, by the way.
* Further perusal tells me that these are in fact "Free-bees" or "Freebies" to indicate the range of high value offers available to Vodaphone customers. It's a pun, then. That's all right then.
I take up the fight on Saturday morning. On each occasion my profile is raised, I am further prioritised, my customer status is enhanced. In practice this means nothing, of course: I'm still endlessly repeating my name, address, a short biographical sketch and the telephone number I'm calling about. An hour and a half on the phone, four BT technicians and one dash in a hailstorm to top up my mobile, and I'm told that my system will be fixed by the 18th "at the latest". This is the twelth. I'm then sent a confirmation text with the caveat that if the fault isn't with BT equipment I will be charged £130. I sent a short and direct text back.
* * * * * * * * *
We're moving. Kelly's drugs have been approved by Belfast Medical Association so we're away to Norn at the end of March. My new life beginning at forty. This should be interesting.
* * * * * * * * *
Life without the internet is odd. I'm reading "Darwin's Island" and watching "TV Burp", both laudable, but I feel as if I should be doing something else...this blog is like something someone giving up cigarettes would do to keep his hands busy. If I can't slag off adverts on telly, while watching telly, what the hell use am I? Colgate Sensitive pro-relief is getting off scott free! The Vodaphone Bees! The fucking Vodaphone Bees! (what's the story there anyway? Why bees? Aren't telephone communication masts supposed to be fucking with the bees navigational systems? Isn't that twisting the knife a bit. Poor the bees.)*
* * * * * * * * *
Michaelangelo was known as "The Inventor of Pork Things" by his contemporaries because of his need to stick cocks on all of his statues. This is a somewhat unrelated note, by the way.
* Further perusal tells me that these are in fact "Free-bees" or "Freebies" to indicate the range of high value offers available to Vodaphone customers. It's a pun, then. That's all right then.
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
Lumber up, limbo down
Trip down south to see Doug and Gwen and Eirlys. I take an age to get ready, luxuriating in the empty flat. It makes no odds: I look awful. I'm aging like David Hemmings did; quickly and cruelly. There's no more blush on the rose and a lot of little pricks pointing it out to me. I've done a month of not eating, not drinking and exercising every day and actually appear to have gained weight.
I shift my jaw around under the living room lamp. The bulb is low energy and consequently the room is lit like a Michaelangelo. I look for the angle in the mirror, the one that used to make the jowls recede.But I can't find it. I need a cryptanalyst to crack the cipher, or a go on the Turing machine to chase it down. But it eludes me, lost to the ages.
I shift my jaw around under the living room lamp. The bulb is low energy and consequently the room is lit like a Michaelangelo. I look for the angle in the mirror, the one that used to make the jowls recede.But I can't find it. I need a cryptanalyst to crack the cipher, or a go on the Turing machine to chase it down. But it eludes me, lost to the ages.
Tiger Woodn't
I am obsessed with the Gillette fusion pro-glide advert. To the extent that I watched an American man on Youtube take the "Pro-glide Challenge". The results were disappointing. Firstly he had a goatee: I have nothing against goatees of course; they're just hair; blameless innocent hair. My massive problem is with the people who grow them. The only people who should have goatees are deeply conservative stage magicians and snooty Grandees. Any one else is either a poseur hipster or somebody trying to cop the allure and mystery of a stage magician without the the credentials. If you're going to grow a goatee learn a card trick or how to pour a glass of water into a rolled up newspaper. Or if you're aping a Grandee then be seen as often as possible smoking a cheroot on a balcony. That's what Grandees do, in my experience. So I assumed the worst when confronted by this character, with his Utah flat American voice and his shapeless plaid shirt; I assumed he was taking the "challenge" ironically.
There is a misconception amongst a particular brand of ham-headed middle English bore that Americans don't DO irony. They think it is an adjective describing the Flat-Iron building. The opposite is true. Since Americans developed, in a beaker, paid for with NASA dollars, a pure strain of irony in the late fifties it has been endemic. Nobody knows if they mean it any more, man.
But this guy DID mean it! He had had a bad shave with a previous Gillete product, tweeted about it, and Gillette had sent him the Pro-glide and asked him to accept the challenge. And he had, filming himself while doing it. He then proceeded, ploddingly, to give himself the worst, most cack-handed shave I have ever seen! He slathered a thin gruel of suds over the bottom half of his face and began randomly scratching away in a criss-cross formation, occasionally running the razor under the tap to remove the foam - he hadn't even filled the sink.
Unsurprisingly the shave wasn't too great, something he noted with every stroke: "It's still quite rough. It's still dragging" he intoned mournfully. It was like watching amateur pornography stolidly undertaken by a man who thinks a blow job really relies on exemplary blowing. And like a lot of amateur porn I didn't make it to the end.
Gillette's own advert is actually worse, taking place in the same corporate macho-land that sees platinum cards ping bra straps at twenty paces and where maximum strength flu remedies are the ultimate tool in business one-up-manship. Where else would a man leaping into your bathroom, tooled up and shouting "Hey Buddy!" manage to successfully engage you in accepting a "challenge". Perhaps in prison. Being propositioned in a bathroom means nothing in corporate macho-land as there are no gays at all, just well groomed, handsome men who look after themselves. Gays probably have their own toilets like that other semi-mythical beast: Woman. The fact that this appears to be happening at work**, where it's natural to strip to a skimpy towel in order to shave, in anticipation of "Buddy" guy* and his film crew, is unsettling in itself. This looks like very niche marketing to me.
That it's based on the American adverts is obvious and we all know how Americans feel about ordinary looking people on their televisions (there are none. Except the fatty on "Gilmore Girls")and hats off to Gilette for not simply revoicing them, a la "Just for Men" or "Vanish". And don't get me started on the all-you-can-do-is-chew lip synching of the "Accident Hero". But hats as resolutely jammed on as Vlad the Impaler's accountant's, for not changing a word of the script, even, especially, down to the opening "Hey Buddy".
So who is it aimed at? Young, sporty, straight men, with office jobs. (there is much joshing and muck-about fun at the end. Gays never take their mucking about seriously) The cash rich and taste poor: Beamer drivers.
Gillette you have alienated me and my plodding American cousin, albeit for very different reasons. For shame. Buddy.
*Not Buddy Guy, obv.
** Closer inspection indicates that it takes place in a gym. No one shaves in the gym. Old men wander around with their giant balls hanging out like cocky conker players but nobody shaves.
There is a misconception amongst a particular brand of ham-headed middle English bore that Americans don't DO irony. They think it is an adjective describing the Flat-Iron building. The opposite is true. Since Americans developed, in a beaker, paid for with NASA dollars, a pure strain of irony in the late fifties it has been endemic. Nobody knows if they mean it any more, man.
But this guy DID mean it! He had had a bad shave with a previous Gillete product, tweeted about it, and Gillette had sent him the Pro-glide and asked him to accept the challenge. And he had, filming himself while doing it. He then proceeded, ploddingly, to give himself the worst, most cack-handed shave I have ever seen! He slathered a thin gruel of suds over the bottom half of his face and began randomly scratching away in a criss-cross formation, occasionally running the razor under the tap to remove the foam - he hadn't even filled the sink.
Unsurprisingly the shave wasn't too great, something he noted with every stroke: "It's still quite rough. It's still dragging" he intoned mournfully. It was like watching amateur pornography stolidly undertaken by a man who thinks a blow job really relies on exemplary blowing. And like a lot of amateur porn I didn't make it to the end.
Gillette's own advert is actually worse, taking place in the same corporate macho-land that sees platinum cards ping bra straps at twenty paces and where maximum strength flu remedies are the ultimate tool in business one-up-manship. Where else would a man leaping into your bathroom, tooled up and shouting "Hey Buddy!" manage to successfully engage you in accepting a "challenge". Perhaps in prison. Being propositioned in a bathroom means nothing in corporate macho-land as there are no gays at all, just well groomed, handsome men who look after themselves. Gays probably have their own toilets like that other semi-mythical beast: Woman. The fact that this appears to be happening at work**, where it's natural to strip to a skimpy towel in order to shave, in anticipation of "Buddy" guy* and his film crew, is unsettling in itself. This looks like very niche marketing to me.
That it's based on the American adverts is obvious and we all know how Americans feel about ordinary looking people on their televisions (there are none. Except the fatty on "Gilmore Girls")and hats off to Gilette for not simply revoicing them, a la "Just for Men" or "Vanish". And don't get me started on the all-you-can-do-is-chew lip synching of the "Accident Hero". But hats as resolutely jammed on as Vlad the Impaler's accountant's, for not changing a word of the script, even, especially, down to the opening "Hey Buddy".
So who is it aimed at? Young, sporty, straight men, with office jobs. (there is much joshing and muck-about fun at the end. Gays never take their mucking about seriously) The cash rich and taste poor: Beamer drivers.
Gillette you have alienated me and my plodding American cousin, albeit for very different reasons. For shame. Buddy.
*Not Buddy Guy, obv.
** Closer inspection indicates that it takes place in a gym. No one shaves in the gym. Old men wander around with their giant balls hanging out like cocky conker players but nobody shaves.
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