100 Words: Holidays

The orange bus trundles round the coast road. Forty year old aircon does its best to cool down a stodgy collective of Brits, most of whom are older still.

Up on the hillside, half-finished houses gaze blankly out to sea like concrete skulls.

"I’ve figured out why holidays suit me. It’s because they involve eating out every night and not having to drive anywhere."

Kelly half-smiles at me. She’s inscrutable behind her tortoiseshell sunglasses but, if I am any judge, her expression is half indulgent, half exasperated.

"It's true. I suppose you are on holiday pretty much all the time."

Other people

One day we are in Lindos, the nearest town to the resort. It’s beautiful, a maze of lanes which fails to make sense of a jumble of whitewashed houses. We had stopped in the “internet kiosk” on our way down to take in the beach, and a girl comes in. She must be in her early twenties, slim, short blonde hair, almost Scandinavian looking. But then she asks “is the wireless working?” in an English accent, so we know she isn’t.

She sits at one of the terminals and logs on. Kelly takes advantage of briefly being in a tiny bubble of wi-fi to check some things and, because I’ve always been this sort of person, I look over the blonde’s shoulder at her computer screen as she writes an email to her mother. I can’t help myself. Half the time I barely know I’m doing it.

I’m doing okay, she says to her mother, It’s really quiet here right now. It gets busier in late July. That’s when all the Italians arrive for their holidays. Don’t worry about me. I’m working in Ikon, it’s a café bar. I want to move to Antika, which is a cocktail bar, but they won’t let me. It pisses me off, because the tips are better there.

I wonder what this period in her life will come to mean when she looks back on it in ten years, whether there will be a boyfriend who one day becomes a husband who she tells, early on, “I spent this crazy summer in Rhodes. I didn’t know anyone, and I worked in a shitty café and got hit on by all the Italians.” Everybody should have something like that in their past, the sore thumb that looks like it's on the run from somebody else's life. I can say that, safe in the knowledge that I never took a risk like that. I just read about risks, over people’s shoulders when they aren’t looking.

Later on, back from the beach and replete from dinner, we pass her as we walk past Ikon. She is standing outside, having a cigarette and wearing a branded apron. It’s surprisingly flattering. She gives us a smile of recognition, I have no idea whether it’s genuine; you don’t get to know someone that well, not by snooping in an internet kiosk.

The next day I find myself intrigued by the couple that aren’t a couple on the coach heading for Rhodes Town. We are on an excursion, catching a boat to Symi, the next island along. They get on the coach and are clearly doing that excursion too. They sit one behind the other and chat companionably away despite it being seven thirty in the morning, far too early to be sparkling. He has a shaved head, a zipped sports top and shorts in the kind of Burberry check you get if you can only afford to shop in River Island. She has wild red hair and a floaty top. She might be attractive if her nose wasn’t a little bit too snub, her ears a little bit too big, her freckles slightly too numerous. But after a good look I decide she’s probably not.

I wonder what they are to each other, because nobody would go on this sort of excursion alone. Perhaps they used to be more than friends, perhaps one day they will be more than friends, or maybe the timing will never be right for them as sometimes happens with people who ought to get a chance to prove they wouldn‘t be happy with each other. I try to imagine them, years from now, hosting dinner parties together but I can’t see it. Perhaps they will never have much more than a connection with each other than I have with them both right now, as I sit in the row in front of them with nothing better to do than speculate.

At the harbour we board a ship called the Nikolaos X. It’s billed as a cruise ship but it has seen better days and even calling it a ferry might be paying it a charitable compliment. Kelly and I sit in the bar, a hideous colonial mess of wicker, cane and cheap leatherette seating, and continue the latest instalment of the World Series of Cribbage. It started on our second day in Greece and quite closely resembles the Hundred Years War, except that it’s more viciously fought and shows every sign of lasting longer.

The almost-never-nearly-maybe couple comes into the bar, find seats and promptly fall asleep. She is curled up underneath one of the round-edged windows, streaked with dingy amber stains which must predate the “no smoking” signs. He is stretched out on a plastic bench. The early morning sun fills the cabin with a sepia light, makes them look more filmic than they are. Again, I wind up thinking about whether there is any story there at all. If they were Tetris tiles you could piece them perfectly together; except they aren’t, they’re just a man and a woman on opposite sides of the lounge. But they are facing each other.

Further down the cabin two elderly men sit at a table. One is bespectacled with an impressive, full head of hair. He looks almost boyish, and you can see the handsome man he probably used to be. But he looks placid, docile, not quite right in a way I can’t put my finger on. His companion couldn’t be more different; balding, angry and shy. He keeps cringing, as if he’s about to be slapped by an assailant only he can see. I don’t understand his shyness, nothing either of the men is doing makes sense. It makes even less sense that they are both wearing incredibly garish Hawaiian shirts, yellow and blue. They don’t talk to each other, in fact they don’t talk to anybody. But from this distance, from my seat, it looks like they are touching - perhaps armwrestling, perhaps holding hands. I can’t for the life of me work out which would be more incongruous.

It takes Kelly to point out to me that they are both handicapped. And the people at the table next to them, and the table next to them. The boat is full of people I don’t have the vocabulary to describe without sounding as if I am mocking, and I don’t want to mock them. It should make me know that I’m lucky, but it just makes me feel desperately sad that everybody doesn’t have the opportunity to be as ungrateful as me. So we abandon our card game and stand on the deck, surrounded by Germans, photographers, people with an interestingly selective approach to grooming and some individuals who manage to be all three.

Later we pull into the beautiful harbour at Symi and after a delicious lunch we wander the backstreets. The houses facing on to the water are stunning but behind them are the ones which have fallen into disrepair which nobody can afford to buy and renovate. Gorgeous dilapidation, paint in brilliant colours crackled by the sun on padlocked doors which may not have been opened in years. It’s a metaphor for things I would sooner not think about. We weave our way back to the streets just behind the waterfront, lined with shops and cafes for the flagging tourists who are waiting for the last ship off the island.

I look up. There, in the high, cruel space between buildings, a pair of teenage girls sit on a balcony in folding chairs. Both have masses of blonde hair, clearly not their natural colour. Their expressions are impossible to read, their eyes hide behind gigantic sunglasses like twin tinted windscreens. They cradle glasses of Orangina and play lazily at kissing the straws in the punishing heat. I don’t think they are Greek, if anything they look American. I have no idea why they are staying on this remote island, or for how long, or how they will cope. I cannot imagine there is any life in this place once the boat - complete with the couple that never was, the sad buddies in the loud shirts, the Germans and photographers and Kelly and me - is a speck in the distance. I wonder what they are doing up there. It looks to me as if they are planning a murder.

I’m beginning to realise that other people’s stories are almost certainly more interesting than mine.

Colonel Tapioca and the Translation of Doom

There are endless miniature pleasures to be had from being an English speaker abroad. Foremost among them is the opportunity to watch hapless people accidentally mangling a language which doesn’t come naturally to them. Not British tourists, of course - you’re lucky if you can get us to learn please and thank you in another language - but the efforts of your host nation to make everything nice and straightforward in what they believe to be flawless English.

I know, there are whole websites devoted to this sort of thing, but the difference between seeing it on a computer screen and discovering it yourself in real life is much like the difference between watching porn and having sex. Or so I’d imagine, anyway. Without giving away which of those fields I’m ignorant in, I can tell you that nothing quite matches the childlike sense of glee I get when stumbling across a taverna menu offering the seemingly cruel and unusual punishment of “fillet minion” or - my personal favourite, this - “chicken raped with bacon.”

Then there are the joys of finding words which are perfectly respectable in their mother tongue but take on an altogether different interpretation in English. My holiday snaps are full of examples of this; usually blurry pictures caused by camera shake, which in turn is caused by puerile sniggering which means no shutter speed is quite quick enough. Kelly has learned to get used to it, but the first time I made her stop so I could take a photograph of a restaurant called El Plat Anal in Granada there may have been a certain amount of eye rolling (and no, I didn’t eat there).

Then there was the Hotel Colon in Seville. If I’d gone to Seville on business I would have been a bit perturbed if my employers had chosen to put me up in the Colon; still, I’ve been in worse places, usually on an org chart. Not to forget the delights of Cordoba’s Intersport Ponce, which probably makes perfect sense in Spanish but simultaneously manages to be a frighteningly accurate summary of almost every sportswear shop in Britain.

That happens to be a good example of one of my favourite things, the way that Europeans choose to name their shops. There are endless minutes of fun to be had wandering round a large European city if you are even half as facetious as me. For instance, there is a chain of teen fashion shops in Spain called, improbably, Stradivarius. I know that most of the barely pubescent Spaniards shopping in there probably don’t have a clue who he was, but I still can’t help but feel that it’s inappropriate, given the age of the clientele, to have chosen a name so synonymous with fiddling.

Similarly, Spain’s store for rugged outerwear - sort of Gap meets Milletts, if you will - is called Colonel Tapioca. The colonel himself, a cartoon character who features prominently on the promotional material, is meant to resemble Indiana Jones but in fact looks an awful lot like the disastrous attempt to rebrand Captain Birdseye as a young stubbly brooding hunk. He scowls from the shop front, perhaps because somebody has just told him that he appears to be named after semolina.

Incidentally, I’ve always had my doubts about Captain Birdseye. I’m really not sure I see the wisdom of an advertising campaign centred about a twinkly old seadog living it up on the ocean wave in a craft almost entirely staffed with disturbingly small children. He appears to spend practically all of his time trying to encourage them to consume fish-based treats. His vessel is literally awash with kiddy seamen. How did the agency ever get that signed off?

It might just be me. I’ve always had grave concerns about The Goonies as well. The plot revolves around a bunch of kids, left unsupervised by parents, off on a mission to track down “One-Eyed Willy” and his golden treasure, but I still seem to be the only person whose wrong-o-meter goes off the scale thinking about that film.

This all came up as a result of discovering the latest gem towards the end of a long day in Rhodes Town. We had exhausted all the sights, wandered through the medieval lanes, bright and fragrant with hibiscus. We’d dodged the Vespas in the narrow streets, all driven by stocky, amply breasted and mulleted individuals of indeterminate sex. We’d even enjoyed the spectacle of going through Faliraki, the infamous pleasure centre twinned with Sodom and Gomorrah, on the bus. All the supermarkets are named after English supermarkets - an Asda here, a Morrisons there. I do wonder whether some of the holidaymakers in Faliraki are dense enough to think it’s somewhere in Norfolk.

I particularly enjoyed watching the old swingers on our bus scramble for the exit as the resort hoved into view, the main drag looking exactly that. One old lady getting off at Faliraki, almost certainly in more ways than one, very closely resembled what Liza Minnelli would have looked like if she hadn’t been able to afford a competent plastic surgeon and had had to settle for someone with a couple of bulldog clips and a bread knife. Her paramour was a teak coloured gentleman wearing a garish tight red lycra vest and a baseball cap on back to front and sporting an intimidating heterosexual moustache. He must have been fifty if he was a day. I ruefully watched their retreating backs with half a mind to follow suit and tail them; whatever they were going to do that day, you could be fairly confident that it would be even more fun than our plans.

Anyway, by late afternoon we were on a wander through the new town when we chanced upon a fashionable boutique selling ladies’ clothes. When I first saw the name emblazoned on the windows I did a visible double take, but when I looked back it was clear that my eyes weren’t deceiving me. There it was, as plain as day: Paranoia. My first thoughts were that the ad campaign could be something else; Yes, your bum does look big in this. And none of your friends are telling you. My second thoughts were that I knew almost instantly that I would end up writing about them, and I liked the irony that calling yourself Paranoia provided a cast-iron guarantee that people would talk about you behind your back.

After that, I didn’t give it any more thought until we were sitting exhausted in the scorching heat drinking our Fanta Limon and waiting for the dusty bus to arrive. What jogged my realisation was watching a gaggle of sinewy looking middle-aged French woman saunter past, united in the delusion that a straw cowboy hat can magically make you look ten years younger. Because fashion and branding is all about that same element of deception; about projecting an image of effortless supremacy so we can all buy in, all belong and all be individuals together.

For those who sign up I’m sure it’s all very comforting, but I wonder whether Paranoia might be on to something because those of us left on the sidelines can wind up feeling more than a little dispossessed. After all, last time I checked there isn’t a brand called Hugo Underling, or Hugo Poor-Sod-Who-Gets-The-Weekly-Reports-Delegated-To-Him. So I wish them every success, and I hope it’s the beginning of greater things for them and the concept of anti-branding in general. I for one can’t wait for the day when I can pop into Angst, pick up a nice new tank top, go home and change into it, dousing myself liberally with Solipsism For Men before heading out to a nice poetry reading somewhere. It can only be a couple of years away; unless of course I happen to be in fashion by then, in which case I'll give it a miss.

My favourite MLS: Wolf

Wolf is a friend of mine in real life, and if I revealed his real name he would do terrible things to me. Well done for concealing your amazement that Wolf is not in fact his real name. He also has a blog which can be found here. He writes:

Ten miniatures (Part 2) is one of a select few blog entries that I find myself compelled to reread on occasion. Not because Mr London Street has a pretty mouth and a fresh restraining order on me but because it is a beautifully self contained sequence of stories, each engaging the reader in the different aspects of how a life has been lived and exposing layers of a complex and remarkably articulate mind. The rise of the internet based meme has been one that has paralleled the growth of social networking, each meme a form of interactive story that has enabled us to show our peers - often whether they're interested or not - just how fascinating we really are. All too often what we fail to realise is that, outside of a select few who know us well enough to actually follow the written shorthand of our thoughts, those memes we fill in and disseminate do not educate or even particularly amuse. They simply pass through the stomach of the mind part digested and re-enter the buffet of light amusement that comprises this virtual world.

All too often, but thankfully not always. This post (and its sister piece) manage to sweep you along from high to low. Thoughtful and sympathetic in one paragraph through to gales of laughter a few sentences further on as our hapless protagonist shares his stories. No mawkish sentiment to be seen, just a calm telling of his tales with an insight and rhythm that makes for prose that is a rare joy to read. Without further ado I give you the man himself.


Ten miniatures (Part 2)

Here is the second half of my take on the meme - five more things about me which I haven't mentioned previously on the blog. Warning: contains references to diarrhoea which some people may find distasteful (I know I did).

6. Portraits

I love taking photographs, though I’m nowhere near as good as I’d like to be.

In particular, I love photos of people. In another life I would have loved to be a portrait photographer. I don’t understand anywhere near enough about how to light people, I’ve never been in a studio and I don’t have the equipment, but there's very little to match that moment when you take a picture and you properly capture someone. Not how they want to look, or even how they’d rather not look, but how they really look. The shutter clicks and you come away having shone a light on what makes that person them and preserved that moment, made it perfect (in the truest sense) forever. I suppose, when it works, I get the same joy from writing about people I know.

I went through a phase where I thought it would be great to have taken the profile picture of all my Facebook friends, a phase which lasted right up to the point where I realised the likely air fares that would be involved, and some of the awkward conversations which would inevitably ensue ("Yes, I know we’ve never met. I was just passing. In Calgary. Well, I wanted to take photos of you. Hello? Hello?"). But I had a good stab at it. I think I managed to get up to about 10.

Kelly is used to it now. It’s a running joke that I constantly want to take pictures of her, going almost anywhere and doing pretty much anything. For instance, I have a photograph of her drinking a cup of tea on practically every holiday we have ever had. She complains that they all look the same, but I know they don’t. Every one is different: a different cup, a different city, a different café, a different experience, a different hairstyle. That’s how I know the months and years are passing. Only the look of wary resignation is constant, and that’s how I know she’s still with me.

My favourite picture of Kelly is also my favourite picture I’ve ever taken, with my little Leica. Totally throwaway, but it’s the one I’ll always remember. Here it is:



7. Politics

I have always been a political animal.

It’s partly a consequence of not being a normal child, I suppose. Kids should be sniffing glue and feeling someone up next to the wheely bins outside Bejams, not listening to Radio 4 and wondering about the state of the nation. But isn’t it always the way, back then I just wanted to be a grown up and now I’m meant to be a grown up I wish I could go back and correct everything.

Or maybe it was a feeble attempt to bond with my dad, who probably still hadn’t completely forgiven me for beating him at chess. Either way, it didn’t work. For some reason after coming home from a hard day at work designing machines that dropped bombs on innocent women and children, nerves frayed beyond all repair during his latest failed attempt to kick his 40 Raffles a day habit, discussing the febrile condition of the National Health Service with a 12 year old wasn’t very high on his agenda. Poor man, with hindsight I can hardly blame him.

It’s particularly appropriate in what’s likely to be an election year that my 18th birthday fell a matter of weeks before the General Election of 1992. I was excited in the sort of way people nowadays get excited about Celebrity Big Brother, the main difference being that I wasn’t swept up in the zeitgeist but instead ploughing probably the most laughably lonely furrow in Britain. We had a mock general election at school, and I was one of the candidates. So were Ivor and Laura, people I’m still friends with today. As part of the research, we went to the hustings to watch all the proper grown-up candidates speak and enjoy the democratic process in action.

I still don’t really understand how we ended up as part of the entourage of the Monster Raving Loony Party on election night. We got talking to the candidate "Top Cat" Owen after one of the hustings and a couple of things he said really hit home. I remember him saying that he might not have the best policies and he might not have the best track record, but he had the best legs and he was prepared to prove it. He did this by parading up and down by the traffic lights in town holding a large sign and wearing spiffy bright green luminous tights.

You couldn’t fault his commitment to open government. It took bollocks, and it was a miracle he didn’t end up showing those to the electorate too. It brought a whole new meaning to one member, one vote.

I liked his defence policy too. He said "defence" should be six feet high and creosoted every other month. My high-minded commitment to democratic ideals and ending 13 years of Tory misrule crashed right into my love of appalling puns and there could only be one winner.

Plus he gave me a rosette.

So my first ever exercise of my civic responsibility - one some of my classmates wouldn’t get for another four years - was spent in a futile attempt to save a madman’s deposit. We sat in the leisure centre watching the votes get counted, in full Loony Party regalia, but it was clear his time had been completely wasted. The victorious Tory MP got up and made his speech and the moment it finished, all the Tory delegates marched out of the hall. It was compassionate Conservatism in action, leaving "Top Cat" Owen to deliver his final oration to a crowd of bored stewards and three helpful, disappointed sixth formers. He still made more sense than the victor, but nobody was there to hear it.

And the biggest tragedy? He was right. For a man in his fifties he had cracking pins. If you’d seen the Labour candidate in tights his thighs would have looked like two haggises in a duel to the death.

Oh, and I can’t listen to Radio 4 any more. It’s just too worthy for me.

8. Lifesaver

I had my life saved twice as a child by family members.

Both were the consequence of my almost autistic levels of absent-mindedness, something which I’ve written about before. The first time, my dad took me for a walk in the park where we lived in Bristol. There was a boating lake, with car tires all round the edge. For reasons I will never fathom, I decided that these would take my weight, which of course they didn’t. Aged about four and unable to swim, I sank like a stone into the green, algae-clouded water. I fell for what felt like an eternity - back then, colours were brighter, sounds were louder, tastes were sharper and the world was plain bigger. Slowly, coming from the sky, my father’s hand broke the surface of the water and inched towards me as if through green jelly. He gripped my hand and he pulled me out.

I may not have been in any danger, I’ll never know, but I remember being terrified and sheepish. I squelched all the way home, utterly soaked, and I knew my dad had saved me. My shoes weren't dry for days, and they were never the same. They smelled strange. My dad took great and exasperated pleasure in telling everybody he could find that I was an idiot.

But he saved me. It remains one of my earliest memories.

The second time was on holiday in Devon, where some of my family come from. I wanted to go out in the inflatable dinghy we'd brought along to inject (or possibly infect) some fun into proceedings, but none of my family would accompany me. In a rare and completely uncharacteristic display of intrepidness, I decided I would show them. I was going to do it myself and prove I didn’t need any of them.

So off I went into the sea. And it seemed like a great idea at first, but then I realised I didn’t actually know how to paddle a dinghy. But it didn’t matter, because the important thing was that I was moving. There was only one problem, which was that I was moving in a consistent direction. Towards France. Carried effortlessly by the tide, at first I didn't panic, but by the time the stark terror set in, I realised that I couldn’t "show" my family anything at all, because in a few minutes time they wouldn’t be able to see at all. Not without binoculars, anyway.

That’s roughly when I started screaming and waving. Even that was pitifully ineffectual. But somehow, my brother saw me and swum all the way out to rescue me. Again, for all I know I was probably still in the shallow end, but all I remember about it was that the sea was huge, my family was tiny and my brain was tinier still.

Kelly insists that she too saves me from certain death on a regular basis, because I have the road awareness of the bastard offspring of Frogger and a lemming. Many’s the time she’s had to yank on my elbow to stop me walking into the path of a stealth lorry, or so she claims.

For once, she’s right for the wrong reasons. She saves my life every day, but traffic has nothing to do with it.

9. Practice

My party piece is that I can unhook a bra with one hand.

If anything seems remotely difficult, I can’t be bothered to do it. I’d like to pretend that’s a new development based on getting old and lazy, but it goes all the way back to childhood. I tried learning the recorder, mainly because there were lots of girls there, but when you manage to make Three Blind Mice sound like Stockhausen it’s time to find other pursuits. I can’t roll my tongue. I’ve never been able to skim stones. We used to stand by the lake, my dad, my brother and I. My brother would launch a flat stone across the surface and we would watch it go off into the distance in a series of elegant arcs.

"Five, not bad." said my dad.

Then he would have a go and I would look on enviously as his effort gracefully skittered out of view. Like the summer, it looked as if it would never stop.

"Seven." said my brother.

Then it was my turn. The noise sounded a bit like an almighty splunk. In the background, you could faintly hear the fishermen quietly wetting themselves.

"Does that class as one or zero?" I said. But I knew which of those two I was.

The only things I’ve ever worked hard at mastering are being able to unhook a bra with one hand, and the ability to raise a solitary eyebrow. I practiced them both until I got them right (one of them in front of the mirror, I'm sure you can guess which one). Maybe it all comes down to motivation.

10. Confessions

One of the worst things I’ve ever done involves diarrhoea.

Not mine, I should add. One night when I was home from university, I was up late watching trashy television in the living room. Our dog Freya, who was getting increasingly incontinent in her old age, scrabbled at the metal frame of the patio door. This was a sign that she wanted me to open it so she could relieve herself in the back garden.

This was an irritation to me. Didn’t she realise that I was approaching a pivotal moment in American Gladiators? So I just ignored her: there would be an ad break in five minutes and she would just have to wait.

The scraping of paws on metal got more frantic, so I turned the volume up a little. After all, the inconsiderate bitch was drowning out a particularly critical sequence where the two beefcakes stood on those pillars and belted seven bells out of each other with massive cotton buds.

Then something terrible happened. The dog assumed a squatting position and, with legs locked in place, started to bounce along the living room floor like a furry shitting spacehopper. Creamy brown liquid squirted out onto the carpet and went everywhere. The noise and the smell were bad enough but the worst thing was the rictus look of horror on the dog’s face. I thought I was man’s best friend, it said, how could you do such a thing to me? Suddenly I couldn’t hear the telly any more, just a grotesque plopping and whistling sound. Eventually, it was over and the living room reeked of semi-digested “Butcher’s Tripe” dog food. And that stuff smelled bad enough before it had an intimate encounter with a dog‘s intestinal tract.

I looked at the dog, the dog looked at me, and then I did what any 19 year old would have done. I went to bed.

The next morning I went downstairs and my mother said "Something terrible happened last night. Freya had diarrhoea all over the living room floor."

"Really?" I said. "How awful."

Let’s draw a veil over the time I accidentally docked Freya’s tail in the back door, and move on.

My favourite MLS: Toca La Bocina

Toca La Bocina has an excellent blog here which I recommend visiting, if only to prompt her to post a bit more frequently. She writes:

I cannot imagine that another of your readers has not already selected it, but on the chance that We kiss with dry lips when we say goodnight has not been nominated I feel as though it might be criminal not to do so. This was the first of your posts that I ever had the pleasure of reading. I laughed, of course, but I also felt connected. I have been considered, or, rather, have considered myself "the funny one" for the better part of my (overly self-) conscious life. I've sulked in many a corner, anxious and uncomfortable while friends command the room. You captured that part of my youth perfectly, and with more humour than I have the talent to summon. You had me at "I AM TRAGIC" ...and I've not missed a single post since.


We kiss with dry lips when we say goodnight

We were talking at lunch today about how it’s not just the end of the year that has crept up on everyone, but also the end of the decade. When it was dubbed “The Noughties” all that time ago it was meant be a jaunty, nudge-nudge wink-wink play on words wasn’t it - get it? The naughties? We were all meant to be having fun, we were meant to be partying like it was 1999 for another ten years. Nobody banked on the war in Iraq, or recession, or the Boxing Day tsunami. Nobody foresaw the hideous rise of global terrorism or its equally vile non-identical twin, the music of Coldplay.

We all got suckered, didn’t we. And god knows what we call this next decade, but I hope it’s a rare example of a sequel which improves on the original. Because by the time we get to relive the Roaring Twenties I’m going to be 45 and that sounds pretty crummy to me even now. So enough about this New Year’s Eve, from me anyway. Maybe I’ll do a post next week entitled “Journey to the centre of the navel” and give you all my insights then, but in the meantime I’m sure you can find dozens of people musing on What It All Means.

Instead, let’s take a trip back in time to the last time this all end of a decade business happened, on Millennium Eve.

I remember when I was a kid thinking It’s amazing that I’ll live to see not only the end of a year or a decade but the end of a century, the end of a millennium. When you’re young it’s events like this that perform the confidence trick, that fool you into thinking you really are the centre of the universe. The twenty-first century - how space age! Not Buck Rogers space age, but good enough.

[Speaking of Buck Rogers, back then, I often thought that the main technological advance of the twenty-fifth century was adapting modern fabrics so they could make a space suit elastic enough to accommodate Gil Gerard’s paunch. But that’s beside the point.]

I remember wondering what the world would be like then, what I would be like then, what job I would do, who my friends would be. And of course, the most defining thing of all: where to spend an evening of such colossal historical significance? Do you remember where you were? I’m pretty sure you do. Maybe you were in a tuxedo or ballgown waltzing the night away. Or you were at home with a whole bottle of Stone’s Green Ginger Wine and Jools Holland on the telly, perhaps. You might have been out at a party or in Times Square or Trafalgar Square, surrounded by friends, strangers and future friends as the clock struck midnight and the city erupted with elation.

I bet you’ve all got some stories. Unfortunately, I do too. Because I, on the other hand, was in the Purple Turtle watching my friend Mike break up with a sixteen year old girl. They had been dating for, at a generous estimate, roughly two hours.

It wasn’t meant to be like this, I remember thinking repeatedly throughout the evening. Mike was my best friend back then, we’d been to school together and I’d known him since I was ten years old. All our other friends were out of town and we were both young, single and almost clinically desperate. Naturally buying tickets to see in the modern age in Reading’s biggest dive bar, a joint where you could normally pull in the time it took to walk from the beer garden to the toilets and back again, seemed the logical choice. So we bought tickets, donned our disgusting purple wristbands, and entered the bar.

We arrived about ten o’clock and grabbed a table at the front. Grabbing a table at the front of the Purple Turtle that early is like sitting in the front row of a lecture theatre i.e. every bit as telling as a tattoo on your forehead saying I AM TRAGIC.

I got the drinks in, and by the time I got back the girl was sitting at our table.

She wasn’t with friends. God alone knows what she was doing there. She took great pride in telling us she was nearly 17. In her defence I was increasingly finding even back then that I couldn’t tell what age anybody under 20 was any more, and it’s even more difficult now. These days I refuse to ogle anyone unless they can produce a birth certificate beforehand, because it’s too damned risky.

Not long after that, I went back to the bar to get more drinks for my oldest friend and his newest friend. To my horror, I returned to find it was almost impossible to work out where the girl’s face ended and Mike’s face began. I set the drinks down on the table with the sort of audible thud clearly designed to ask them to desist.

They did nothing of the kind.

Within a couple more minutes, he was practically undressing her at the table. I was sipping my pint, smoking a cigarette and studiously trying to pretend I was neither sitting with them nor perving at their attempts to get to third base in a public place. This is not easy to do at the best of times, especially with a face like mine. But I needn’t have worried, because my suffering was soon to end. They disappeared, hand in hand, to the ladies’ toilets.

By the time they returned it was about eleven and my evening was shaping up very unpromisingly. She went to the bar and Mike took advantage of her absence to proudly declaim “I would have shagged her, but she’s on the blob”, thus proving that it wasn’t the language of Shakespeare that had wooed her in the first place. The irony of picking someone who was barely pubescent only to be defeated by the imponderable workings of the menstrual cycle was lost on him, despite my rather heated attempts to talk him through it.

While she was away, another woman walked very deliberately towards our table from further down the bar. I had noticed her almost immediately when we first got to the Turtle and made a mental note that she was number one on the shortlist of women I would utterly regret failing to get off with later on. Maybe my luck was changing.

“I just wanted you to know that I think you’re really fit.” she said.

To Mike.

Then she kissed him on the lips and wandered away. This used to happen to me a lot – all that therapy has shied me away from using the phrase “ugly mate” any more, but I was always “the funny one” or “the one with personality”. Many years later I figured out that, compared to Mike, these descriptions covered most of the human race but at the time, it was my cross to bear. Plus sometimes they had a desperate friend, and that was good enough for me.

If we fast forward ever so slightly to five minutes to midnight, the scene looked very different. I was sitting at the table – still – nursing my drink and looking after Mike’s drink, and the girl’s. And both their stuff. They were at the bus stop outside, having a stand-up argument about whether they will see each other again and where “this” (and Christ alone knows what either of them would have defined “this” as) was all going.

I had to hand it to Mike. His interaction with this girl was a masterpiece of miniaturisation even the Japanese would envy – they had met, got together, (nearly) had sex, got to know each other, he had dallied with somebody else, they had argued and broken up in just under two hours. If only I’d had the number for the Guinness Book Of World Records.

So from a detached perspective I was quite impressed, but being selfish for just a second my chances of getting the snogs in while acting as a coat check attendant for my best mate and the woman he had successfully groomed and discarded were unbelievably slim. And anybody can pull on New Year’s Eve, can’t they? Just stand in a public place as the clock strikes twelve and wait for it to happen. I remember telling my terminally single friend Andy that anybody could pull on New Year’s Eve, during a New Year’s Eve we spent together in Nottingham, the city where woman outnumber the men and they’re all eye-poppingly comely.

Andy, of course, failed to pull. But I still say that if you tuck your jumper into your underpants all bets are off.

I politely told Mike and his ex-non-girlfriend (for want of a better label) that unless they got to their table somebody would probably steal their stuff, and I made my way to the bar. My friend Ivor has a motto which he claims has served him very well over the years, namely “You might as well go ugly early in the evening, because you’re sure as hell going to end up going ugly later on.” Many’s the time Ivor and I have sat in a pub bemoaning the fact that this mentality has never caught on among the fairer sex and if it ever does now, it will be too late for me. But anyway, I’m sorry to say that my first conquest of the new millennium was a textbook case of Ivor’s law in action. I’ve seen more appetising prospects in a tin marked “Tesco Value”.

My second conquest was number two on my shortlist of women I would utterly regret failing to cop off with at the end of the evening. Maybe my luck was changing after all, I thought to myself. Then she introduced me to her best friend, who as luck would have it was the considerably less attractive lady I had been necking with several minutes ago. So that was the end of that.

Let’s not talk about the third conquest of the evening. She made the first conquest of the evening look like Sienna Miller.

And don’t ask me where Mike was for the rest of this charade either, because I have no idea. Maybe he was keeping it real by spending eight minutes dividing up an imaginary CD collection with the sixteen year old girl, followed by four minutes agreeing visitation rights for the child they didn’t have. Actually, I suppose technically she was the child he didn’t have. Thank heavens for small mercies, which is in no way a reference to her quim.

Yes, with the benefit of this disturbingly horrendous hobble down memory lane I think it’s probably for the best that I’m no longer single and that I will be spending New Year’s Eve in having a civilised meal with Kelly and one of my best friends. Thank god my Noughtie days are well and truly over.

My favourite MLS: Miss Welcome

Miss Welcome blogs at A Perfect Welcome. I like her and her blog so much that I can get over the gnawing envy that she lives a stone's throw from Paris and I don't. She writes:

I'm not sure if you're going to want to re-post this in May since it is about Christmas (except, perhaps, that it's also about going away on vacation), but my favourite is still Stop Boris! and other festive disappointments.

It was the first post I read of yours and, as a new blogger, it set the tone for what a blog should be. It was both funny and insightful, talked about current events (Christmas, mainly), and managed to remember the readers. And it was soooo funny! So I set the bar for my own blog and haven't missed a post since.


Stop Boris! and other festive disappointments


I’m surprised to find that I’ve already written quite a lot about Christmas already. A tinsel-strewn pile of memories like half-wanted gifts, nearly all of them involving my family. Their thoughtful presents, or my father’s impressive efforts at party games. The annual battle of the decorations as my mother tried to plump for a tasteful and restrained colour scheme and a minimal arrangement while my father did his level best to transform the lounge into Liberace’s sex dungeon.

Then there was the year I got Stop Boris! for Christmas.

I must have been about eight years old. Stop Boris! was unbelievably hi-tech for a Christmas present by our standards - it was a giant battery operated tarantula that rushed towards you along a special mat. You, using the ray gun provided, had to shoot Boris right between his eight eyes to prevent him from nobbling you in a horrific fashion. The gun worked through the magic of infrared, which in 1982 was the closest to space age I had ever got, unless you count digital watches. It made Scalextric look positively pedestrian, if you'll pardon the pun.

There were only two problems with Stop Boris! The first one was that my aunt, who spent that Christmas with us, was the worst arachnophobe I’ve ever met in my life. That wouldn’t have been the end of the world on its own, but then there was the second problem, namely that the ray gun didn’t actually work. So on Christmas Day my poor aunt, probably nursing a phenomenal hangover after an evening ethnically cleansing our drinks cabinet, practically soiled herself in sheer terror as Boris bore down on us while I feebly fired infrared blanks at him.

To be fair to her, if you weren’t scared of spiders at the start of that experience you certainly were at the end.

Another year, my parents gave me a dictionary and a world atlas for Christmas. The same year, in fact, that my arachnophobic aunt bought me a copy of the Good News Bible. They were equipping me with all the tools I would need to have a stab at becoming the most tedious adult of all time.

Anyway, enough of Christmas past and on to Christmas present, because we’re on the home stretch now.

The single best way to tell is to switch on your radio. Every other song is about Christmas now. The transistor in the kitchen belts out sleigh bells and jangles, and every festive cliché under the sun wafts from its single tinny speaker. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that the golden age of Christmas songs is the Seventies. From where I’m sitting those themes, about having fun with your nearest and dearest, all gathered round opening presents, having fun and plying gran with sherry have a wistfully retro feel about them.

And here’s the thing: Christmas isn’t really about away in a manger. It’s not about a games console that can upload your Nectar card points over the internet and allow you to talk through a microphone at a twelve year old boy as you blast each other to smithereens through the magic of technology (if you showed a child today Stop Boris! I think they would literally piss themselves laughing). It’s not even about having a Terry’s Chocolate Orange or hacking the encrusted sugar off the neck of the bottle of Grand Marnier you haven’t touched since December 26th 2008.

No, Christmas is body fascism for families.

If you need any evidence, listen to all the songs, soak up all the adverts, watch all the films, and listen to all the conversations at work. It’s all about being surrounded by loved ones, as if doing anything else is an unthinkable sin. The only songs about being lonely at Christmas are because you’ve been dumped. There certainly aren’t any about not seeing your folks, or not wanting to. There is a whole constituency of people out there who aren’t represented, and maybe I’m writing this for them. And for me.

Today I’ll get on a plane with a combination of excitement and sadness. This time of year, some of the things I’ve lost along the way weigh more heavily than usual. I’m going to a country where Christmas doesn’t really happen until January. It’s easy to book restaurants, easy to wander round a maze of streets filled with white-roofed houses, easy to swap turkey and stuffing for chorizo and manchego. It’s almost easy to forget that it’s that time of year at all. In the ultimate seasonal deceit, it will almost be warm.

But I’ll know what I’ve left behind.

I hope you all have a fantastic Christmas with your families, friends, cats or even the voices in your heads. I’ll drink a glass of sherry in your honour (yes, even you) and I’ll be back before you notice I’ve gone. But before I do, one last thing: I thought hard about my favourite Christmas song.

For a while I was convinced it was Christmas Wrapping by the Waitresses, which I like despite the fact that everyone I know loathes it and even I can hardly deny that it’s the height of Yuletide naff. But in the end I’ve gone for something a bit more classic. Like all truly great Christmas songs, the festive season is a supporting character rather than the central part of the narrative. What’s more, I think it speaks to all bloggers who sometimes wonder if anyone out there is listening. I’m lucky not to feel that way, and that’s a blessing I will definitely count. Here’s I Took My Harp To A Party by the fantastic Billy Cotton. Enjoy, and Merry Christmas.

My favourite MLS: The domesticated bohemian

The domesticated bohemian has a superb blog here which is one of my favourite recent discoveries. He writes:

Do stand by my grave and weep. No, really is the one I remember being struck by. It's not necessarily my favourite, but it is the one that really captured my attention and made me keep reading. There was that great sentence early on:

"They have that kind of symbiotic relationship you often see in the workplace where they get on almost sinisterly well and finish one another’s sentences but would never dream of actually seeing each other outside work."

That was such an astute observation that it meant I was duty bound to read the whole post. I've got relationships like that at work and often see it in others.

Without giving the game away the post goes on to set out what particular funeral arrangements people had, or what they might set down for others to follow. I've come across some curious ones myself. An old friend who died at a ripe old age asked in his will for a stand up comedian. At the crematorium. We did as he asked. It was marvellous. Laughing at death was very Albert.

Me and my sister spent a very emotional night choosing music for my mother's funeral. After carrying me mam's coffin my shoulder was black and blue for a month. Which links us nicely back to this post which also mentions the pros and cons of pall bearing, as well as some genuinely funny choices in terms of funeral music.

I'm completely with him on expected behaviour at the main event - I'd be sorely disappointed if no one either leapt into the grave to attempt to hug me through the lid, or jumped through the curtain screaming "Noooooooo!" in an attempt to rescue me from the flames. Quiet dignity is way overrated.


Do stand by my grave and weep. No, really

So naturally, today’s post is about funerals.

I was expecting a normal day when I got into the office on Thursday, but with hindsight stopping by Mandy’s desk was a fairly reliable way to make sure that didn’t happen. Mandy and Abi sit in the bay next to mine - Mandy is a part time yoghurt thief and founding member of the cool kids. Abi is tall, statuesque, likes to pretend that she’s French and is occasionally mistaken for a transsexual (entirely unfairly, I might add). They have that kind of symbiotic relationship you often see in the workplace where they get on almost sinisterly well and finish one another’s sentences but would never dream of actually seeing each other outside work.

I still don’t quite recall how, at five past nine in the morning, we started talking about Abi’s funeral. It was especially confusing as she looked in pretty good health to me.

“I’m feeling morbid today.” said Abi. “I’ve always known I’m not going to live past forty.”

In my experience this is a common feeling in adolescence, but generally it’s supposed to fade away once you become an adult. Lots of people have a skewed view of the future when growing up. I was convinced I would never find a girlfriend. So, for that matter, was my mother: at one point I think she would have seriously considered giving me away free with a packet of Corn Flakes much in the same manner as those nacky plastic toys you could never quite work up the enthusiasm for collecting. I had another friend called Owain who was convinced he wouldn’t make it past the age of thirty. Of course he did, just like the rest of us, leaving him like one of those people who prophecies the end of the world and then looks like a complete lemon the day after it utterly fails to happen.

I on the other hand have never been fond of the “live fast, die young” philosophy. I’m more aiming for the “live so slowly you are practically in reverse half the time and die at the age of 90, possibly in a jacuzzi at the Playboy mansion” approach.

“I’ve got Abi’s funeral all planned.” said Mandy with evangelical enthusiasm.

I did a visible double-take. Normally this would sound sinister, a threat with more than a whiff of the gangland about it. But Abi was nodding and grinning along. Had somebody slipped something in my cappuccino that morning?

“You’ve planned Abi’s funeral?”

“Of course, it’s all sorted.” said Mandy. “I’m going to put the ‘fun’ back into ‘funeral’. I’ve got the songs and the buffet organised and everything.”

I looked round but everybody else, it seemed, was behaving perfectly normally. Maybe it was me that had gone mad. I wanted to pick up the whole scene and shake it like an Etch-a-Sketch, clear it and start again.

“You’ve picked the songs?” I was so fazed that all I could do was repeat words from what Mandy had told me in the hope that eventually it would begin to make something approximating to sense.

“Definitely. I want to have all the classics from when we were at school. I thought we’d start with Autumn Days, and then go on to something like Cross Over The Road.”

You couldn’t argue with the nostalgia value.

“I think at my funeral I’d like Simply The Best by Tina Turner, Nobody Does It Better by Carly Simon and How Do I Live? by LeAnn Rimes.” I said.

“Good call, I love that LeAnn Rimes song.” said Abi.

“I don't, I loathe all of them. But they’d be bloody fitting. And it’s not like I’m going to have to sit through them, is it?”

“Good point.” said Mandy.

“Mandy, for Abi’s funeral are you not tempted to go with Dude Looks Like A Lady by Aerosmith? Or possibly that song from the Wizard Of Oz - Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead?”

A hard stare from Abi ended the conversation and sent me scurrying to my desk. But the whole surreal exchange got me thinking about funerals. The selection of music is an especially thorny issue. One of the oddest funerals I went to was last year - the deceased was a biker and so were most of the congregation. On the plus side, everybody was wearing black. I was, however, about the only one with a tie on. The ceremony was conducted by two priests from the Universal Life Church who had purchased their titles on the internet, namely “Reverend Panther” and the rather less macho “Reverend Shrew”. After a series of touching tributes Reverend Panther took to the lectern.

“We’re now going to play one final piece of music to end the service. As many of you know, the deceased was a keen musician and here is one of his own compositions. This is Kaotika by the band Kaotika.”

At this point Reverend Shrew sidled up to a disturbingly large ghetto blaster, pressed the play button and the strains of Kaotika filled the genteel stone Cotwolds church. On second thoughts "strains" probably isn't the right word. It conjures up images of Vivaldi, whereas this band made Napalm Death sound like an awful lot like James Blunt. It wasn't really music in my book, more a man with severe laryngitis trying to set the Guinness World Record for coughing up phlegm accompanied by some exceptionally frenzied and brutal shredding. The pall bearers hoisted the coffin on their shoulders and as they carried it down the aisle all the bikers got to their feet and, as one, gave it a standing ovation.

Astonishingly it was deeply moving, though in the back of my mind I was also silently relieved that none of them had considered doing any crowd surfing.

Later that day I got an instant message from Mandy.

“Do you want to see the plan for Abi’s funeral?”

“I’d love to.”

So she sent it across.

ABI’S FUNERAL PLAN

If Abi dies:

1. Arrange buffet – ask Chet’s mum to make bhaji and samosa and perhaps some pakora.
2. Ring Jamie on "secret number". Don’t break the news, just get him to go to the hospital. Let them tell him. They are used to it.
3. Log on to her emails and send blanket email to everyone saying “sorry, Abi died. Don’t contact her on this mail address.” Login name W%$£"!* Password )(*&^%$£"
4. Empty her desk. If anything odd is found, pass to Mr London Street so that he can make a key ring out of it.

If Abi doesn’t die:

1. Be happy.
2. Say I told you so.
3. Still ask Chet’s mum to make bhaji.

My first reaction was to be completely nonplussed. My second reaction, naturally, was to be thrilled that I was specifically mentioned in the arrangements. My third and more lasting reaction was to think about my own funeral.

You know those people that say “I wouldn’t want everyone to be sad. I’d want it to be a joyous celebration of my life. I’d want everybody to have a great day and then try to get on with their lives.”?

Bollocks to that is what I say.

I want proper Old Testament style weeping, wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments, the whole shebang. I want everybody to be absolutely devastated with grief. I want all the men to make touching speeches about how they wanted to be me. I want all the women to deliver heartfelt eulogies about how they always regretted never sleeping with me and that now it’s too late. All the ones who have actually slept with me can instead get up and declaim at length that nobody they’ve ever slept with since has had a chance of living up to me and in particular that thing I do.

(Actually, playing Nobody Does Is Better around this point would be a good idea.)

Oh, and everybody has to wear black. If you took a photograph of all the women I would be fully expecting it to look like the Addicted To Love video, or… well let’s just say there will be trouble. And if they all end up having a massive catfight like Alexis and Krystle out of Dynasty, even better.

In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I realised this was too important to be left to chance. It sounded like an amazing day out, I was almost more disappointed to be missing it than I was about the thought of passing away. It just didn’t seem fair. After all, people had dress rehearsals for weddings. Why not have one for my funeral? It would be the event of the decade for all concerned. Seized by enthusiasm I leaned over the partition to my colleague Phil.

“Phil, if I had a dress rehearsal for my funeral would you come along?”

“Sure. As long as you don’t expect me to carry your coffin. Not unless you lose a couple of stone anyway.”

My favourite MLS: Otherworldlyone

Alyson writes one of my very favourite blogs, here. I have evangelised about it many, many times but if you haven't read it yet I still highly recommend it. She writes:

I'd by lying by omission if I didn't say that one of the biggest reasons Two nights in the Purple Turtle is a favourite of mine is because it's the first, and I believe the only, guest post Mr. London Street has ever done. And it's on my blog. That might sound a bit silly, but the truth is that some posts are personal. I don't mean personal in the sense that you don't share them with others, but personal in the sense that you've put your heart into them - given them that extra something. This post is clearly full of that extra something and after I read it the first time, I was honoured that he'd share it with me.

Friendship, love, timing, choices - all of us can relate to this post in one way or another. But few can put those things into words with such potency and infallible style.


Two nights in the Purple Turtle

Many years ago I met my friend Kirsty for lunch on an anonymous summer day. On the face of it, this was no different from the dozens of other days we had met for lunch, with one exception - this time Kirsty brought her along. We clicked instantly. We spent the whole lunchtime talking as if we’d known each other far longer than we had – far longer, in fact, than I had known Kirsty.

At the end, I went back to my desk to uselessly move work around from one part of an org chart to another in the name of productivity and efficiency. And that afternoon, my email pinged with a message from Kirsty. “She thinks you’re dishy!” it excitedly said. I didn’t think anybody under the age of 50 ever used the word dishy.

Over time, I came to realise that this was exactly the sort of thing she would say.

The emails between us began. Several emails a day – long, chatty emails about everything and nothing. When you first meet someone it’s all there, off in the distance, waiting to be discovered. All those tiny facts that you absolutely have to know when you really like someone – where they went to school, their childhood embarrassments, their favourite bands. What their mother’s like. What they like to eat. What they’re scared of. And then there is that bizarre feeling you get if you‘re really lucky, when you begin to realise that somebody you really like might want to know all those things about you. We have all been there. Those early stages are wonderful, where everything about that person fascinates you, and you want to know it all, piece by piece. All that potential.

The early stages of what though? My jealous, miserable and controlling girlfriend made the answer to that problematic.

The mistakes were all lurking out there, waiting to be made.

Back then I used to escape the house early each morning and hide from everything in Costa Coffee. I had a large coffee and a copy of the Mirror in front of me, along with four cigarettes and once I had finished them all I was almost ready to face my colleagues. It was time to myself to spend not thinking about how my life was going wrong, but then she started joining me. The coffee and the cigarettes still got finished, but the newspaper soon became surplus to requirements.

I never socialised with her outside work, I knew that was against the rules. My girlfriend was busy alienating all the women I was already friends with, initially through conventional means such as extreme chilliness. Later on, she developed more imaginative methods like sending them offensive texts from my phone late at night while pissed, pretending to be me.

So over those months, my life turned into a negative of most people’s lives. My days at work were full of colour, life and ideas and I didn’t want them to end. When I reluctantly shut down my computer I would head back to the house to a greyscale existence of rows and bickering. It felt an awful lot like falling asleep. The only things that were vivid at night were the daydreams and the sadness. The former led inevitably to the latter.

The exception was her leaving do. She was leaving Reading to go study a long way away and we had some drinks in a pub next to a gloriously hideous multi-story car park. Despite the build up, all the action happened elsewhere as my friend Ivor ended up dry humping Kirsty against the side of a transit van in a state of total inebriation. By contrast, she and I seemed like the grown-up chaperones, but none the less in a quiet moment she finally made explicit what had been crackling unspoken between us all summer.

“Something for you to think about when I’m in the frozen North” she said.

Out that back of the Purple Turtle at two in the morning she made a more tangible offer. By this stage we were both quite drunk. She talked about me moving to Newcastle with her, I had absolutely no idea whether she meant it. She invited me to walk her home. I was pretty sure she meant that, and I knew what it really meant.

There was only one problem: I couldn’t be that person.

I had spent that summer wanting to be that person, daydreaming about being that person. But when it came to it, it was beyond me. So I sat there at the bus stop and watched her walking off into the distance, leaving me with only my shortcomings for company. They made for lousy company.

My girlfriend found out and was furious. She punished me not for what I did but for what I could have done, and I began a protracted stretch living in the worst of all possible worlds. Meanwhile my correspondence with her limped on for a few months but it wasn’t the same. Now she knew this one thing about me, she seemed far less fascinated by everything else. And one day she contacted me from university and told me that our friendship couldn’t continue. It was too painful, she said. I could hardly blame her, since I felt it was no more than I deserved.

If I had liked myself better back then, things would have been very different. For that matter, my whole life could have been very different. But it took somebody else - on another summer’s day, flowing with gin and chemistry - to start to teach me to do that. And this, whatever it is, is not that story.

Life moved on and some time later I got an email from her. “I was looking through some old mails” she told me “and I thought ‘I can’t delete him’.” So we caught up. She filled me in on her news and I told her mine, that I had left that girlfriend and got married to someone I had known for seven months. I decided not to labour the point about the gin and the chemistry. The fact that I had one day done what I couldn’t do back then was in the background of our conversation like static on a phone line, but it was never discussed. I thought it would be okay.

She came down to visit. Kelly liked her and we all got along famously. I had a feeling that something had been mended, that we would be friends now and I was proud of that. Since conversations were no longer forbidden we used to have epic chats on the phone. I usually had to put aside time for them, block out a Saturday afternoon. And then when Kelly and I bought our first place I invited her to the housewarming party. Everyone liked her. My friends liked her. The two guys she picked up in the After Dark and brought back to my living room at 2 in the morning liked her. Even the floor held her in a warm embrace as she drunkenly toppled from her chair, after we had invited her new friends to leave.

And then I ended up sat on my doorstep with her at four in the morning feebly attempting to comfort her as she cried onto my shoulder.

“I always thought it would be me in the end after you split up with Cheryl. I always thought you were my boy.”

What could I tell her? I had always thought that too, but we had both been dead wrong.

The sun was coming up, and she didn’t want me to walk her home. So as before I watched her totter off into the distance but, this time, I went back upstairs to my life.

A curious detail of this saga is that many of the protagonists got back together with their exes. My jealous girlfriend got back together with her ex and now they live in Wolverhampton with a child and presumably a large collection of personality disorders. The man Kelly left for me got back together with his ex. He was decent about it all and I hope he’s happy. And she got back together with her ex too, the ex she was getting over when I first met her many years ago. I think they want children, something I would never have countenanced. I suppose these things have a habit of working themselves out.

The last time I saw her was a few years back on a chilly December night between Christmas and New Year’s Eve when people who wouldn’t normally set foot in Reading, like her, come back to spend time with their family. We went to the Purple Turtle and sat again in that back garden doing what we always did best, talking for hours about everything and nothing. Mended at last, perhaps.

In that setting, with those drinks, I thought it was inescapable that we would get round to discussing the only other time we were in the Purple Turtle together, many years ago. And, at about two in the morning, leaning against a fence and watching the revellers stagger past - younger than us, all their mistakes waiting to be made - we did precisely that.

“I just would have slept with you, you know that?” she said “It wouldn’t have been a relationship.”

I smiled inwardly.

“I know.”

My favourite MLS: Rusty Hoe

Rusty Hoe has an excellent blog called Living with Bob which is only partly about her experiences with dysautonomia. It is well worth a visit. She writes:

For me it's Moomintroll. I've been wracking my brain, trying to pinpoint what it is about this post that continues to resonate so strongly. I know it was the first of your posts that I read. Equally, I know that I would be hard pressed to recall my first encounter with the majority of blogs I read. I could go on and on about the subject matter. A beautiful snapshot of ennui. A truth in darkness. Maybe in some little moment of fate, I read it at a time when it reflected my own mood to perfection. The pervasive sense of separateness that permeates my being at times. Knowing that sometimes you are unable to access the same world as everyone else. Maybe it was that someone else was the strange child who saw the darkness inherent in the Moomins. Or maybe that I read those first few paragraphs and knew that I had been lucky to stumble across a very unexpected gem. Maybe I'll never be able to fully articulate what draws me to this particular post. Sometimes the emotion of the moment is simply far more enduring than the details.

Any half-wit with opposable thumbs (and even many without) can create a blog, but few draw you back. For me Moomintroll drew me back and I will be forever grateful.


Moomintroll

The saddest thing I ever saw as a child was the Moomins. Bagpuss didn’t even come close.

I remember stumbling upon the television show as a child and thinking that it was like nothing I had ever seen - the fuzzy felt characters wandered melancholically across the screen, accompanied by the narrator’s rich, plummy tones. Most children’s TV in the eighties was all dayglo and loud noises and action and lasers, but not this. It was muted, and sombre, and tinged with the sepia hues of gentle Scandinavian misery. Even when it was scary, like the eerie ghostlike Hattifatteners, it was sadly scary.

I was hooked.

I devoured as many of the books as I could find, from libraries or second hand shops. I must have been around eight years old. I particularly remember reading Finn Family Moomintroll, where the Hobgoblin’s Hat transforms the Moominhouse into a jungle. In it, Moomintroll wears a set of false teeth made out of orange peel. The book says “If you don’t know how to make these your mama will show you how.”

I asked, and she didn’t know.

One Moomin story struck a chillier chord with me than any other. The Moomins hibernate every year. However, in Moominland Midwinter, Moomintroll awakes in the dead of winter. His family are all curled up, snug and cosy, and they will not wake again until it is spring. They are in a place of warmth and comfort, one Moomintroll is unable to reach. He tries to snuggle back into bed, to no avail. He cannot drift back to sleep.


Looking outside the house, the world is transformed. The sun has not risen and the ground is covered in a carpet of frost and snow, an alien place he has never seen before and is suddenly banished to.

Maybe children were meant to hear this story and think that it was a magical new world, full of adventure and possibilities. But when I read it, I just thought of the solitude and the unknown, and I shivered.

The pains in my arms haven’t improved during my time off. There have been twinges, shocks and shooting pains despite me doing as little as possible. And, in my hotel somewhere on the murky border between Thursday night and Friday morning, I woke up in the darkness to find my hands felt like they had been set on fire and I couldn’t get back to sleep. Outside the dim monochrome of the room, Paris was a cold and alien place - deserted too, no doubt, except for the sort of people you wouldn’t want to encounter.

Next to me, my slumbering wife was snugly oblivious in a snoreless sleep, probably experiencing one of those surreal and wondrous dreams she specialises in. Some mornings, she remembers them and tells them to me and I can’t stop laughing because they make no sense of any kind. I couldn’t wake her up and I couldn’t get back to sleep.

And then, across all those years, all those books and all those only too clearly remembered television shows came flooding back to me.

You can be lonely on your own, you can be lonely in a crowd or a conversation, you can even be lonely in a relationship. I've managed them all and nowadays I try my best to be none of these things. Generally I succeed. But there isn’t any feeling I know quite as lonely as having to wander through that snowy landscape on your own when the person you love is in a warmer, happier place without you, and you cannot join them there.

My favourite MLS: Sarah

Sarah is a friend in real life, and might be familiar to readers of long standing for being responsible for the horror that is Muncle. She writes:

The font of all knowledge is my favourite post because to me it perfectly illustrates the idea that people not only write like they speak, but also that they speak in a font. Whether it's a hotel sign, menu or email the font adds another layer of understanding to the encounter you are about to have. I had to cringe the other day when I overheard a colleague say "you know my favourite font: Comic Sans..." - but that sums her up completely, and brought to mind this hilarious post.


The font of all knowledge

It all started at lunch when we were talking about how Chas n’ Dave had split up.

SARAH: They can’t go on now, can they?
MLS: Of course they can. Chas will carry on solo. Dave was only the bass player anyway.
SARAH: But what will he be called? “Chas” doesn’t have the same ring to it.
MLS: He’ll be known as “Chas out of Chas n’ Dave”. Just like Mikey’s new band is meant to be called “Blind Sailors” but is actually called “Blind Sailors. Not The Blind Sailors, just Blind Sailors.”
IAIN: I bet he loves you reminding him of that all the time.
MLS: It’s not my fault! I happened to call it “The Blind Sailors” and he corrected me and said “No, it’s not The Blind Sailors, just Blind Sailors”. If he hadn’t said that I would never have made anything of it. It’s silly. Like correcting someone for talking in the wrong font.
IAIN: What?
MLS: You heard me. It would be like someone saying “Excuse me, but you said that in Helvetica and I think you meant to say it in Arial.”
IAIN: True. There are definitely some people in our office who talk in Times New Roman.
SARAH: I think I’ve always wanted to talk in Verdana.
MLS: You do! (Sarah speaks very clearly and cleanly with no hint of an accent) You definitely talk in Verdana. Iain on the other hand is more of a Century Gothic type. And imagine the horror of all the people walking round the office talking in Comic Sans.
SARAH: Oh god. My old boss used to talk in Comic Sans. It was exhausting.
MLS: I’ve always wanted to talk in Trebuchet MS. But I’m worried about the associations with multiple sclerosis.
IAIN: Not to mention medieval siege equipment.
MLS: Exactly.

Then we moved on to my other theory of the moment. In the old days, if you wanted to call someone a massive fucktard you had to use the word “respect”. “With respect” means, of course, You are wrong.

“With all due respect” means You are badly wrong and I want everybody to know that I consider you, in the nicest possible way, to be a congenital idiot.

And the doozy, to be saved for special occasions, is “With the greatest of all possible respect.” This means How you managed to dress yourself and get into work this morning without round the clock assistance from a carer is completely beyond me. You are an A grade imbecile and I would like nothing more than to watch you get beaten to a pulp by a pack of wild chavs. Then I would like a randy pitbull terrier to arrive on the scene, smell your blood and treat your ringpiece with the least of all possible respect.

But now everybody has rumbled this and we need to find new ways to be rude. And, in writing at least, it’s all about the winking smiley. It’s the new “no offence” but, best of all, it’s still just about on the right side of the crest of the zeitgeist which means you can use it in all sorts of useful situations without being rumbled.

What, you don't believe me? Just look at these examples...

“You’re a retard. That is the stupidest idea I’ve ever heard. Everyone here is laughing at you and you deserve to end your career in humiliating ignominy in a warehouse somewhere in the less fashionable parts of Stoke – winking smiley.”

“I don’t plan to come round for dinner because the last time you served chilli con carne I genuinely thought something had escaped from your u-bend, jumped into a pan, been cack-handedly undercooked and served up with flakes roughly scraped from your crustiest verruca – winking smiley.”

“Catching up on the phone would be great, except that you have shown absolutely no interest in talking to me since you got a boyfriend and you don’t have to be Columbo to work out that the reason you are suddenly keen to chat is that it has hit the skids. And to be honest I can’t blame him as you’re shallow, self-obsessed, about as far from riveting as it's possible to be without actually being a rivet and, if memory serves, a moist and incompetent snog – winking smiley.”

See? It’s brilliant. It will catch on. It then led to a discussion about whether there should be a wanking smiley, but since the two dots in a colon and semi-colon are the same size I'm not sure any symbols on the keyboard adequately depict the eye-widening generally involved in banging one out. So I told my lunch-mates as much, just to lower the tone still further.

And with that, I headed upstairs to hop on the first of several conference calls with a number of fluent Wingdings speakers.

My favourite MLS: Minx Marple

Minx Marple is an occasional blogger here and a frequent Twitterer here. She's well worth checking out in both places. She writes:

I've been reading your blog for a couple of months now, revelling in your knowing combination of outright smut and elegant melancholia. You've made me cry in public once, and more than once I've been incapacitated by laughter. But what I like the most is when you write about your complicity with your wife, with such humour and tenderness. My favourite post - the one I'd most like to share with other readers - is Two weddings. I like the particularity, its romantic essence. I recognise it, it speaks to me of love.


Two weddings

2004

Brighton in February is a curious place. Without the sun brightening the Regency architecture like nature’s Photoshop, without the tourists clamouring through the Lanes or stumbling along the pier, it seems somehow bereft. The creak of seagulls in the sky cuts harshly through the cold air.

We trundled into town on a slow train, laden with bags and anticipation. The day is spent wandering through familiar alleys and shops, posing awkwardly for photos, enjoying the fact that the city is completely unaware of the significance of us, of our plans. In the hotel room we try on our rings for the last time. They have been sitting in little white envelopes, and every few weeks we have got them out and put them on.

It feels sneaky, as if we’re pretending to be adults.

We go for dinner in the hotel. We talk about the plans for tomorrow, though we don’t really have many. Our sleep is sound and dreamless on our last night of freedom from freedom.

The day dawns and we walk through the North Laine to the station to pick up our first witness. She’s almost as excited as we are, but the whole thing has an eerie calm about it. We don’t really know what we’re doing, what it will look like or sound like. How much it will be like the ones we’ve been to, or the ones we’ve seen on the television.

We go to lunch by the Pavilion. Our second witness arrives. I have never met her before, she has only heard about me in emails and telephone conversations. My heart genuinely swells with gratitude that she can be this happy, that she could so want to be part of this. We all have gin and tonic. It seems like the right thing to do.

Back at the hotel our witnesses check in and coo at the rooms. We change into something more formal, more suitable. I have never worn this suit before because I bought it for this occasion. Somehow I feel like I’m dressing up in a way that dwarfs my first day at school, my first day at work, my last exams. This is the only concession to formality, to conventionality, that I will make that day. I omit to wear a tie.

The four of us meet in the lobby and walk along the seafront. The witnesses jokingly make me get down on one knee and propose. I do it willingly but it’s plain odd. There has never been a proposal, never been an acceptance. We both always knew it would be like this. Not start like this, not end like this, just be like this.

We have been together for seven months. We have lived together for two. Practically nobody knows we’re here.

When we get to the town hall, they separate us from our witnesses. They are taken into another room and we are completely alone with the registrar. That’s the point where money changes hands. They don’t tell you how jarring that is – or how, more than any of the vows, it makes you realise the irrevocable change you’re about to effect. I don’t understand how this doesn’t deter people who don’t love each other from going through with it, but it doesn't, every year.

Our witnesses are already seated when we go into the beautiful oak panelled room. Row upon row of gorgeous chairs lie empty as we make our way to the front. There are six people there. The two of us, my best friend, her best friend, the registrar and another lady. I assume she isn’t the registrar’s best friend. We are rattling round this opulent chamber like a pea in a whistle.

The words we say are short and sincere. Somebody picked them for us, but I marvel at how true they are. I don’t understand why people write their own vows when these are so perfect. It is done in minutes. The registrar’s friend has to leave the room and come back with tissues because both of our witnesses are crying.

“I do a lot of these.” says the registrar afterwards as we are signing something irrelevant at a big desk. “I’ve got a good feeling about you two. When you were exchanging vows it was like there was nobody else in the room.”

I want to tell her that there wasn’t, but I keep that thought to myself. I know my wife of two minutes is thinking exactly the same.

We are shellshocked and ecstatic as we leave. There are photographs by the beautiful white pillars at the front of the building. Photographs in front of the pier. Photographs on the seafront. We are gleaming with happiness and everything and nothing has changed. We go back to the hotel and text messages fly from our mobiles like bubbles of pure joy, bursting with a jubilant splat on the screens of the phones of our friends all over the country.

I call my mother from the balcony of the cocktail bar. She is walking home from work. She cries with happiness and has to stop to compose herself. I hand the phone to my wife and they talk for a long time. When she returns, we have run out of cocktails and my phone has run out of credit.

I can’t envy people with big weddings though I respect their choice. They’re all in lovely big houses, with special readings and a riot of friends and distant family. Pimms on the lawn, professional photographers, discos and fights and cake and camcorders. Pay attention, all the guests tell the happy couple, the day goes by in a flash. Who you spoke to, what you did, it will all be forgotten the next day.

But I remember mine. I remember everything.


2009

We are at The Vyne, a beautiful old National Trust property in the middle of the Hampshire countryside. The rain everyone was so worried about has stayed away and the long cool stone room is filling up with guests. More guests than anyone anticipated, as the air is thick with thunderbugs. They land on my hands, on my face. We give up trying to swat them off. Busts line the walls, a succession of withering expressions peering at the seated guests. They will be the only stony faces I see today.

Our friends John and Nish are getting married.

When the registrar asks if anyone knows of any just cause or impediment Nish glares into the crowd like a pantomime villainess and the room echoes with laughter. Minutes later the parents take the screaming children outside and everything is perfect. I like their wedding a lot. For such a stunning, historic building the ceremony feels informal and quick. They’re in too much of a hurry to be married to worry too much about getting married, and that’s a feeling I can identify with.


And I feel like they too have realised the simplest but most hidden thing about all of this. Marriage makes no sense. People do it to change everything and stop things from ever changing, and they are all missing the point completely. Forget all those tax breaks and ticking different boxes on a form. Getting married is plain silly. If it made sense, nobody would do it. It’s one of the few great adventures you can have nowadays. For people like me, who don’t ever want kids, it’s pretty much the only one left.

Kelly looks over at me.

“What are you grinning about?”

“Nothing.”

My favourite MLS: Fiona

Fiona is a friend in real life and doesn't have a blog - at least, not one she's prepared to tell me about. She's best described as a cross between Morticia Adams and Fenella Fielding from Carry On Screaming. She has also been known to play backgammon with me in the work canteen. She writes:

Mr London Street is a friend of mine from real life, we've not been friends long, but its a good friendship and one that I hope will last. We did meet many years ago, but it was at a meeting about...something, not totally sure what. Neither of us really remember it but then I doubt either of us were paying that much attention. I then re-met him in an entirely social setting and he was immediately flagged as a potential source of entertainment. He made a joke about online chess being an unusual form of pawn. It was much funnier at the time, but we were quite drunk.

He is many things. They aren't all good, they aren't all bad, but none of them are dull. A lot of them are filthy.

He is exactly like you think he is from reading the blog. Kelly is exactly like you think she is from reading the blog. Actually, she's even better - and he knows why I think that, he's still miffed at me about it.

So, oddly, it isn't the lovely Two Weddings, or any of the huge number of posts that have had me laughing out loud and garnering funny looks from the men I work with, nor any of the ones that have just plain grossed me out. Muncle: I'm saying no more.

My nomination goes to A bad analogy, because it had me sobbing uncontrollably with its utter sweetness. Those of us who've met Mr London Street KNOW there's emotional depth and empathy there, however much he tries to hide it. This post proves our theory. It's why I hope he stays a friend in real life for far longer than we are friends at work.

And, just for the record: Backgammon ROCKS.


A bad analogy

I used to think that relationships were like jobs. It was one of those pleasing analogies where the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to make sense.

There were the ones I only planned to be in for a few weeks that somehow lasted for months. The temporary arrangements that were meant to keep me busy over the long hot summer, and come October time I realised I was itching to leave but was unable to hand in my notice.

There were the ones I did that, deep down, I knew were beneath me. They didn’t stretch me or make me think but they passed the time and I was bored and unambitious. Or those I loved but I somehow always felt I wasn’t good enough for, that I’d bluffed my way into. I suffered week after week of anxious waiting to be found out, followed by despair when I inevitably was. There were the ones I never quite applied for and when I look at my cv I wish I had. Ones that involved lots of travel to exciting places, and ones where I was homebased and watched four walls, slowly going mad. Ones where I spent my whole life on the phone.

There were messy ones and degrading ones, and there were the ones where I watched the clock. All the time.

There were the ones where no two days were the same, where I would long for a life less unpredictable. Or the ones where every day was, and I wished there was some variety. Because relationships are like jobs. Even when you have one it can be hard to feel like it’s a job for life and you still find yourself idly checking the paper on a slow afternoon. Keeping your eyes peeled.

And of course, relationships are like jobs because it’s easier to find one when you’re in one. When you have a job people want to hire you, when you don’t nobody wants to know. The headhunters stop looking for you. And when you leave one to pursue new opportunities it’s always ugly and leads to arguments about how quickly you can go and how much money people owe.

So I used to think that relationships were like jobs, but then I got your message this morning with its sad, awful news.

And now I know I was wrong. The end of a relationship isn’t like clearing your desk and going somewhere new. Going to a different office, picking up your security pass with its brand new unflattering picture, getting to know unfamiliar faces and fitting in again. Those are happy, exciting moments and thinking of you I knew the image doesn't work. No, the people who thought up relationship obituaries were right on the money, because the end of a relationship is like a little death.

There are the ones that are sick from the start and slip away to nobody’s amazement. Some live fast and are bound to die young. And some waste away over years until they are a shadow of their former self. When they eventually go, sadness fights for relief and neither completely wins. Not to mention the ones everyone expects to die virtually every day but somehow cling on forever. There are ones that nobody mourns, and ones that everyone mourns. One less place round the table at dinner, one less name on the Christmas card list and one less face at parties.

And then there is yours. Nobody had a clue. I’ve seen it happen many times to many people and every time I'm equally taken by surprise. It’s hard enough to understand a relationship from the inside, nobody will ever manage it from the outside looking in. It’s an alarming thought - how many relationships I know are holding the seeds of their own demise, ticking down to zero on the timer before my eyes? Is mine?

I wanted to tell you something comforting about your loss, and maybe when I see you I will. Perhaps I’ll have found some words better than this. Until then, this will have to do: cancel your plans. I will buy you cocktails at bright tables in noisy places. Or, if you’re not ready, we will drink pints in dark wood panelled corners. You don’t have to say a word about it or you can tell me everything. It doesn’t matter to me, whichever you’re least unhappiest with. None of it will end up here.

But come out with me. Let’s get drunk.