The medium

The posters in the foyer of the theatre advertise the show as “An Evening With Psychic Medium Tony Stockwell”. My first reaction is to wonder what other kinds of medium there are, and how interesting an evening it would be if you were watching one who didn’t even pretend to be psychic. I can easily imagine it turning into a riot or a lynching, as hordes of middle-aged spiritual types storm the stage brandishing polaroids of their departed loved ones.

We take our seats in the cramped auditorium as You Are Not Alone by Michael Jackson plays in the background. I can see how it might fit the evening’s entertainment, but it doesn’t stop it being more than a little creepy. The subject matter would be enough on its own, the fact that the singer has been dead less than a year himself completes the wrongness. I amuse myself, but not Kelly, suggesting other songs they could play before the performance begins. Somebody’s Watching Me by Rockwell, perhaps, or the theme from Ghostbusters.

I look round at my fellow audience members. I seem to be in a completely different demographic to nearly everyone else. Kelly and I seem to be the youngest people present by a considerable distance, and we are hardly in the first flush of youth ourselves. There are a significant number of people who, I’d say, are paying twenty pounds for the possibility of contact with the other side when they could save themselves the money by simply hanging in there for another couple of months. Not only that, but having a belief in the hereafter is apparently compatible with a very interesting range of haircuts. I hope they have better stylists in the spirit world.

I feel uncharitable for thinking that, but it’s easy to be rude about people when they’re abstracts.

The medium takes to the stage, all chirpy charm and bonhomie. He’s dressed in the sort of suit that people who aspire to shopping in Debenhams would consider sharp - smart enough to look like he’s doing well, not so smart that the audience might not think he’s one of them. It strikes me right from the outset as more about forging a link between the medium and the audience than it is about any link with the spirit world, and watching him at work is a fascinating exercise in psychology.

“I’ve got a man who must have been 64 or 65 when he passed to the spirit world, his name is Tom or Thomas. He’s the father of somebody here, and I’m getting a strong sense that he owned a boat.” he rattles out, fact after fact after fact, eyes rolled up towards the ceiling.

A forest of hands shoots up around me. I fight the surprisingly strong urge to raise mine too and just agree with everything he says. I’m not sure whether it comes from wanting to stick out like a sore thumb or desperately hoping to belong. It might just be that I’m a bit of a troublemaker. Yes, I think it’s probably that.

“My uncle was about 54, he was called Tom and he loved going on cruises.” says one of the audience. It appears to be close enough.

The people with their hands raised seem so desperate for it to be them, and he seems so eager for one of them to make a connection, that a certain element of plea bargaining goes on. He gently, sweetly plays them all off against each other until he settles for what he thinks might prove to be the closest fit. It’s quite something to watch. And yet there seems nothing calculated about it, he’s personable and funny and he works the audience beautifully.

At one point he’s talking to a woman about her mother.

“I’m getting something about a clock. Something about how she left a clock behind and you got it but someone else in the family wanted it.”

On the big screen behind him the camera shows a close up of her completely uncomprehending face. She has spent the last five minutes nodding and looking genuinely perturbed about some of the things he has got right.

”No. Nothing like that.”

Quick as a flash he replies.

“Well I think you’re lying.”

There is a huge laugh in the crowd and I find myself joining in. He has a lovely way about him, telling her that of course he’s joking but she should give it some thought. Maybe there is a clock packed away in the attic somewhere, he suggests, and she nods fervently. Even when he draws a blank, the audience find themselves thinking that maybe he is right after all. He’s got something.

There is more of the same in the second half and I watch for the patterns which emerge. I find myself reflecting that I couldn’t exactly describe him as taking risks. The people in the spirit world coming through to reach the ones they have left behind are all Davids, Mikes, Sarahs and Paulines. You don’t get anyone “upstairs”, as he calls it, called Maxwell or Mohammed or Maeve (he has a brief dalliance with a Marjorie but he’s clearly not getting anywhere, and wisely moves on).

He asks one lady with a mullet and the voice of a navvy whether she’s got any tattoos, and another intimidating looking gentleman whether he knew a heavy drinker called Jim who had spent time in prison and since passed over to the spirit world. When he does this, it’s hard not to feel like he’s playing percentages. But he knows what to say and what not to say. Nobody who’s died is ever nasty or unpleasant. Cantankerous or set in their ways, perhaps, especially towards the end when they’re in a lot of pain, but always good people. Nobody is ever ugly. They are always beautiful in life and even more beautiful afterwards. To listen to him speak, you would think that the afterlife is just full of gorgeous, wonderful people constantly transmitting messages of warmth and loveliness to all the sad ones left behind on earth, the feelgood antidote to every horror movie you have ever seen.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a beautiful idea, but can it really be true?

I’m partly here because my first formal engagement with my in-laws was seeing a show like this in Oxford. My sister-in-law’s friend had cancelled and I was dragged along at short notice. I grabbed the opportunity with both hands - perhaps surprisingly, I am not a complete skeptic about this sort of thing. As a kid I did the ouija board with my friends. We sat round the dining table in my house and watched with horror as the wine glass whizzed smoothly from letter to letter, all written out on notepaper and blu-tacked crudely to the knotted pine. Not only did the glass move, but it rotated at breakneck speed as it did. I couldn’t help thinking that if we’d all conspired to try to make the glass travel that quickly we would have knocked it over in no time.

“Can whoever is pushing it stop, it’s scaring me.” said one of my friends.

“I’m not pushing it.” I said.

“Nor am I.” said everybody else.

So I know that sometimes just because I can’t understand how something can be physically possible doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work. After all, I have seen the ouija board, I own an iPhone and I’ve witnessed the meteoric success of certain individuals in the workplace. Not being able to understand everything can be a comforting thing, especially for the people here. You don’t need to be a psychic to see that many of them need comfort.

And there are moments, fleeting moments, in the show tonight when something happens which I do not understand and cannot explain. At one point the medium is talking to a woman about her mother.

“She knows you’ve been wearing her perfume lately. She likes it, she’s happy that it reminds you of her. She knows that you put it on today before you came out tonight.”

The woman, who has been fighting so hard to keep her resolve for the last ten minutes, loses it completely and I see her face crumple. Tears come quickly, and I wouldn’t even want to guess how long she has been holding them back. It could have been a long time. When you see a moment like that in front of your eyes, it’s difficult for them to stay completely dry. I think it requires a special kind of heartlessness to see that and to say lucky guess, heartlessness I’m glad I don’t possess.

Another man he speaks to has clearly lost someone in his family who was murdered. He is too shellshocked to offer any information at all in response to a barrage of facts from the medium, he just keeps nodding and saying yes. He seems to want the medium to carry on for as long as he can stand while simultaneously longing for the whole experience to be over. All I can feel is cheated that he’s not keeping his side of the bargain and telling us what happened, but then I catch a look at his eyes on the big screen, screaming while his mouth remains silent.

Later, the medium talks to another woman whose mother died in hospital.

“I’m getting the sense that there was something wrong with her foot. It wasn’t why she was in hospital but there’s something not right. Does that mean anything to you, darling?”

“There was an accident… she lost a foot.”

The woman is almost inconsolable with grief. Lucky guess? I know these people want to believe, but I can’t explain something like that. I don’t think I even want to. I’m not sure either that I want to think about its full implications – for her, for me, for all the people here in the theatre looking for something they never quite got when their loved ones were alive. To close the show, he asks people if they have brought a photo they want him to try and make a connection with. Nearly everybody has, and I find myself painfully aware of what a charmed life I’ve had. Because my friends and my family are all still in one piece, even if my relationships with them aren’t.

And I curse myself for even thinking that, with my morbid fear of jinxing everything.

At the end Kelly and I climb the stairs and head out into the night, on a quest for a restaurant still open at ten o’clock.

“What did you reckon?” says Kelly.

“It’s just not on.” I tell her, “I’ve been to a few of these now and never once has he got Princess Diana. I’ve half a mind to ask for a refund.”

Deep down though, I know that I’m a bigger fraud than he could ever be. Because what I’m really thinking is what I always think after a show like this. I wish he’d called out the name Edith this time, just this once.

100 Words: Haircut

We bump into a friend in the blazing sunshine.

“He’s having a proper haircut for the first time.” Kelly says, as if I’m twelve.

“You’re getting it sculpted!” he replies with disconcerting enthusiasm.

Queasy with nerves, condemned in the chair, I’m half expecting someone to flick a switch. The head massage, naturally, just made me even more tense.

Afterwards, I look like somebody else, younger than me yet more grown up. That sculpture analogy’s surprisingly apt; funny that the act of removing something somehow makes you more than you were.

Sad, too, how that principle never applies when I undress.

100 Words: Perspectives

The old man on the bar stool held court all evening, an instantly dislikable tangle of hair, beard and opinions. Any decent British pub contains somebody like this. 

We went on to another bar at closing time. In a dingy room washed with reggae I felt as white as it's possible to feel without a pointy hood and burning cross.

Leaving at one a.m. I spotted him again - quiet now, alone on a bench, looking out over the cemetery.

And I felt sad for him, because I had so much to go home to, and I don't think he did.

100 Words: Connection

She returns bearing coffee and muffins, full of enthusiasm after a facial. She just spent an hour at the centre of the universe.

I haven't got out of bed yet. It feels like somebody is gently massaging barbed wire into my shoulders. 

My universe seems to be disintegrating. 

Sunlight streams under the blind, highlighting every hair on my arm. 

We both fall asleep - her because she's so relaxed, me to get some respite. We're in the same room but in totally different places.

Her hand reaches out, mine takes it. And in that way, some kind of connection is made.

Unfinished business

I was never entirely sure what the right analogy was for my first proper relationship.

At first, I thought that it was like a radioactive element, slowly degrading over time so that with each passing season there was so much less of it. Perfect at the start, toxic later on. In the latter stages, I started to see it more like an arcade game end of level baddie or Yul Brynner in Westworld; every time you thought it was dead, every time you thought you had got to the end it would lurch to its feet again, angrier, noisier and more destructive than before. And then one day we got to the end and the corpse didn’t even twitch, it just lay there in unnatural silence. I was just shy of twenty-one years old in my final year at university, and I had absolutely no notion of what would happen next. There was, after all, no precedent.

After getting through the awkward phase when we didn’t speak came the awkward phase where she was convinced I was seeing someone else, a friend of mine. She would wake up every morning at seven o’clock and check the curtains of her suspect’s room, and then she would get on her grotty bike and cycle glowering into town, scaring the traffic and the policeman gesturing elegantly with white gloves on the crossroads at the top of the hill, to check my curtains. They were never both drawn on the same day. Then came the awkward phase when she took her investigation to the next logical step, camped outside my college room, all angry spiky angles and barely contained fury, pretending to read a copy of More magazine, convinced that I had another girl in there.

Finally came the very awkward phase – morning, to be precise – when her suspicions were confirmed.

Even after the dust had settled from that awful day she wanted us to be friends, and to my surprise I found I wanted that too. When we finally separated, I had realised that one of the main things I felt was sadness that I’d never find out how everything worked out for her. It seemed crazy to me that you could spend years closer to one person than anybody else, that they could be the person who heard and told you the smallest details and the tiniest quibbles, that you could share all the most significant pieces of nothing in particular, and that when it was all over you were supposed never to speak again.

It’s a very long fall from all to nothing, or at least it feels that way when you’re not yet twenty-one and there is no precedent. Now, with the benefit of many years of bigger and sillier mistakes, I wonder whether in truth that drop gets even more perilous as we get older. I think perhaps as we grow and develop the concept of “all” gets larger and more complex and our memory of what it’s like to have nothing at all gets hazier and more distant, and therein lies the danger.

As we went about trying to be friends after two years of trying and failing to be so much more, it was a different analogy which came to mind. To do otherwise would have felt like putting down a novel halfway through, incomplete and not right.

I wanted to know how it would all end; whether she would ever make sense of her parents’ marriage and whether they were happy, or why they stayed together if, as she suspected, they weren’t. I wanted to find out why her brother was so vile and how she could protect her sister from those feelings of gloom and lack of confidence that had blighted her own childhood. I wanted to see how she would find a place in the world where she belonged. Even if we hadn’t had a happy ending I still wanted to stick around to see her find hers.

Over the fourteen years that followed we managed to stay friends with varying degrees of success, fourteen years in which she went out with a range of guys, none of whom was remotely like me and none of whom I remotely liked. Meanwhile, I went out with a number of women, most of whom she seemed to barely notice. I spent an unsuccessful month staying in her flat, hiding in the kitchen with her flatmate when she got home from work in what we both called “one of her moods”, but never to her face.

She visited me numerous times and got off with most of my friends. There were many long and bafflingly oblique phone calls. One unsuccessful affair she had with an attached man took up hours and hours of my life, talking round and round in circles about why he wouldn’t leave his girlfriend. I was forever being asked questions that he probably had no answers to, or none that he’d tell her anyway, and I certainly didn’t have any magic words to say. I would always come away from those conversations simultaneously thinking I hope she gets what she wants and Thank goodness that isn’t me.

The last time I saw her, a couple of years ago, she got very drunk and nearly trashed my front room by accident.

We haven’t spoken in over a year now; things just petered out, and I’m not sure we will again. But what I learned from the friendship, partly from her and mainly from me, was just how naïve I was. Relationships and friendships, partners and friends – they are indeed like novels, but not the type we all used to read in the good old days with neat conclusions, where wonderful things happen to the richly deserving. No, they’re more like the books I read now, where the end seems to be an arbitrary point in time that could just as easily have come twenty pages sooner or a hundred pages later.

I’m not sure she ever worked out what was going on with her parents. Her brother, as far as I know, is still vile. Her sister grew up normal and happy despite everything, not because of anything she’d done. I don’t think she seems any more at ease in the world now than she did when I met her, when we stayed up in her college room until six in the morning and I thought, for that very first time, this is it, I’m really going to kiss her (I didn’t know then that it takes a very rare relationship for that not to be the finest moment). Nothing gets resolved, and life goes on all the same. We all fight with these themes all our lives, and only sometimes do we make sense of anything. If we do, you can bet it merely serves to shed more inconvenient light on all the other things we still have to learn.

That is, I’ve discovered, just how things work. If you feel cheated when the book closes, not to be revisited, then maybe you’re just missing the point. There will always be a minor character lurking in a couple of stray paragraphs that you wish you’d found out more about. There will always be a relationship unresolved between people you are willing to find one another, only for you to never discover whether they do. There will always be conversations unfinished, opinions you wish people hadn’t kept to themselves or letters unsent which only exist somewhere in somebody’s head.

And when the ending comes, whenever that is, twenty pages too late or a hundred pages too soon, there will always be a tangle of loose ends like a nest of snakes.

Seven things I like (Part 6)

7. My father's poetry

It’s no coincidence at all that this series of posts comes to an end on Father’s Day.

I’m not going to write a glowing tribute to mine today for a number of reasons, not least of which being that he really wouldn’t thank me for it. He’s not that kind of father and just as significantly I have discovered, relatively recently and very much to my surprise, that I’m not that kind of son either.

Instead I thought I would pay tribute with his own words, by including a couple of poems of his which are reproduced with his kind and only slightly grudging permission. He worried that it might reinforce the impression that the blame for some of my occasional angst could be laid at his door. Since that’s almost certainly true, I think that’s a risk he’s going to have to take.

My dad has gone through a number of fads and phases, and I remember them all. There was the passing interest in Tarot readings, around the time that my parents split up. He had dozens of different packs, read all of the different books on what cards meant what and distilled them all into his own. Taking such a scientific approach to something supposed to be so mystical is just him all over. I don’t think it helped him to find the answers he wanted. But hot on the heels of that was his obsession with badminton, one I’m sure he doesn’t regret since he met my stepmother that way.

More recently, it’s become an abiding passion for tango. I still remember him and my stepmother at the party for my fifth wedding anniversary smoothly gliding round the dance floor to music from Flight of the Conchords when most of the rest of us were too drunk to stand, putting us all to shame. His yen for collecting is undimmed too, he’s now working on a collection of fountain pens which makes me a little green with envy on every new visit.

But his writing is the passion of his I best remember and most love. When I was a teenager he wrote two thirds of the funniest novel you never read in your life; every few weeks a printout of the next chapter would come my way and I would devour it in next to no time. But then he just lost interest and stopped, much to my frustration. Years later he would say “that bastard Terry Pratchett came along and did it all so much better” and I know he believed it, but I wasn’t so sure.

When he started writing poetry I was a bit taken by surprise. Generally speaking, he would sooner die than express most emotions in conversation, or indeed out loud. So when I read poetry of his, I couldn’t help wondering if it had been written by somebody else masquerading as my dad. Now I am a little older, I think I understand better that we say different things in different ways and can be all sorts of complicated contradictions.

In any case I loved his writing, always have, and was always prepared to endure all sorts of poetry readings for the five minute slot when he would make his way to the microphone. He was invariably in a different league to most of the people there, a feeling I think he has always rather enjoyed. Even at the time I was very conscious that it should have been the other way round and I ought to have been doing something to make him proud of me, but I think I still have plenty of time. Besides, he still owes me for one evening when he performed a poem in a style which sounded dangerously close to rap.

These are two of my favourite poems by him, about his own parents, and they seemed especially appropriate today of all days.

Ghost To Ghost

I wasn’t prepared for an outbuilding,
a squat-blocked, concrete afterthought.
It felt more like intensive indifference
in that whispered foot-fall space
between the unmade graves,
the rows of shallow breathing beds,
each waiting to shed its burden
with a discreet fanfare of drawn screens.

You were as I expected, from the call,
an instrumented bundle, wired and tubed
from nose and arm and side,
tied to a bleeping box,
its phosphorescent trace
your only acknowledgement.
A shelved grey puppet, fragile,
effortlessly pinned by the thin coverlet

What could I find to say to you, sleeping,
drifting in drugged, slow decision?
Do not go gentle seemed pretentious,
obvious, and anyway you, a knocked-down,
dragged-up boy of the iron valleys,
would have had no time for Dylan’s
brass-belled vowels.

We were never for talking or touching,
you and I, and so I was surprised
when my hand took yours.
I squeezed and waited
but no Hollywood miracle occurred,
the well was too deep,
too deep for any echo.

No, we never talked, man to boy
or man to man but if echoes do survive
that long returning and if,
after all these years you read,
over my shoulder,
the memories in this mirror
then at least we have talked
ghost to ghost and now you know.
Once, I held your hand.

Pictures

Twice a week sometimes, the six of us
went to the Kingsway Picture House.
The queue would wrap itself around
the building for Clark Gable but we
were always toward the front,
a strategically aligned phalanx
of two by three.

Gran and Auntie Mabel in the lead,
old lady with elbows like stilettos
partnered with a slow monolith
who could, on Gran’s command,
stun a bulldozer. Two kids safely
in the middle, with you and Dad
bringing up the rear.

You were young then and happy,
often for no good reason. I remember
watching Gone With The Wind
in overcoats and afterwards,
ignoring the cold, you played Scarlett
on the way home, even though
our South had snow.

Now, the Kingsway is a car park,
Gran is long gone, Dad too and big
Auntie Mabel lives with another sister
and probably growls at the postman
and chases cats from the garden
and you, like your world, have shrunk
from pictures to TV.

I can’t quite remember when your life
went from wide-angle to close up. It’s as if
that stunning shot of Atlanta’s stockyards,
filled with the broken future of the South,
had suddenly zoomed in to focus,
oh so sharply, on a single wound.

* * * * *

That brings this meme to a close, so thanks for enduring it all the way to the end. Now, as promised, I’m going to pass it on to seven blogs and I’ve tried to pick some new blogs I haven’t mentioned before.

The View From This End - I love Moannie’s blog which is so gracefully written on such a wide range of topics. I particularly recommend her longer posts about her past which are beautifully put. A good example of Moannie at her best is this post.

The Eternal Worrier - Gorgeous, affecting writing and some genuinely funny portraits of working life. His most recent post is a good example of what he does so well, and I think he has even better writing ahead of him.

The Domesticated Bohemian is another of my very favourite blogs lately. He too is going through a phase of mining his past and telling fantastic stories which are word perfect. I loved this post with a passion verging on the evangelical.

Happy Frog and I - A fellow Reading blogger who I can just about forgive for regularly trouncing me in the pub quiz, Happy Frog’s blog is an uplifting mixture of poetry, nostalgia, lists and all manner of other nicely done posts. I especially enjoyed this one about Prague.

El Corte a la Inglesa is a great blog by an Englishwoman in Spain who has a criminally small following. Among many of her posts that I’d highly recommend, this one is a good place to start.

Living Shallow, Living Well is a blog about which I know virtually nothing but every time a post comes up on it I read it and really enjoy it. The most recent post, It was particularly good.

Knightley or Elton, last but not least, is one of those fantastic blogs that has a voice so distinctive that you just want to pull up a chair and listen to them talking about pretty much anything for as long as they can spare. Again, all his posts are superb but to get the gist read this one first.

They don’t have to do it, and if they do they certainly don’t have to do it at length the way I have if they don‘t want to. They don’t even have to write about seven things they like, but I’d love to read some kind of list of seven things from them. I don’t mind if they don’t though, if they simply want to take this as me telling them that I really enjoy their blogs, that’s fine too. And if you want to take this as a recommendation to go and check their blogs out, go ahead.

There, all done. By my reckoning I should be due another meme in about six months’ time.

Seven things I like (Part 5)

6. Unusual food

I realised what the sixth item on my list was a couple of weekends ago, during a very enjoyable evening which was all the more enjoyable because it came about through one of those happy accidents that happens from time to time. It all started because Kelly and I got it into our heads that we really fancied eating at Myalacarte, our favourite restaurant. The only problem was that it’s impossible to get a table there at short notice - it’s always booked weeks in advance because it happens to be a lot of other people’s favourite restaurant too.

Not to be deterred, Kelly rang on the off chance. She’s that sort of person – if her family had a coat of arms the words “if you don’t ask, you don’t get” would be emblazoned on an undulating scroll beneath the shield. I’m not sure what would be on the shield itself apart from a cup of tea, and I don’t know enough about heraldry to know whether a cup of tea can ever be described as “rampant”, but I think you get the general idea. Anyway, as it turned out we got lucky because the restaurant had had a cancellation barely a couple of minutes beforehand, and if that isn’t fate subtly intervening and the cosmos giving you an open invitation to stuff your face, I don’t know what is.

So it was that I found myself in a restaurant on a Saturday night, surrounded by the burble of contented conversation and feeling very pleased with my good fortune. This is of course by no means a rare occurrence; I like restaurants and do my best to visit as many of them as possible, largely under the pretence that I’m trying my best to single-handedly lift the country out of recession through the medium of conspicuous consumption. And my altruism doesn’t stop there - I also try to do my bit for the environment by walking to the restaurant if at all possible. Honestly, I’m all give.

Myalacarte is one of those places that likes to tell you the provenance of everything. Not to the nth degree like other restaurants I‘ve been to, there’s no list of suppliers at the back page saying Dave – short swarthy cove with a beard and a lazy eye, you might have seen him down the Nag’s Head at weekends, glued to the fruit machine - dives for these scallops himself every Thursday off the coast near Brixham, but it tells you where things come from and has an admirable policy of trying to make sure practically all of its ingredients come from the United Kingdom.

This is a superb idea but regrettably you can already tell that the whole concept of provenance has jumped the shark, and that’s still true even if you know exactly where the shark came from and who caught it. Whether it's the word “local”, or worse still the colossally naff phrase “locally sourced”, the notion is so ubiquitous now that it’s lost all meaning, it’s just what you say because everyone else is saying it and the notion of being left behind with your regionally sourced or - heaven forbid - internationally sourced ingredients is too awful to contemplate. I’m pretty sure I’ve eaten recently at places where “locally sourced” is just a poncey translation of “bought from the nearest branch of Tesco”, and I‘m equally sure that that doesn‘t count.

Having failed to peruse the menu on the website ahead of time (a schoolboy error on my part, and not one I make often), I was delighted to find that it was a cornucopia of tempting choices. Normally I find it difficult to choose in restaurants, partly because there are so many wonders and what-ifs to negotiate, all those dishes you may spy turning up at the table next to you and kick yourself that you didn’t have the courage to order. In my case, I’m usually also desperately trying to avoid ordering spam by mistake. But that Saturday night, as I looked eagerly through all the choices on offer, the strangest thing happened. It was as if everything on the menu was printed in an impossibly small, faint font except one item. If it didn’t jump off the page it was definitely at least bouncing up and down on a pogo stick shouting “pick me! pick me!” There it was:

Gressingham duck on the plate, smoked breast carpaccio, confit gizzards, pan fried heart, soused ribbon vegetables, purple potato crisps

I don’t know when I became like this. Growing up, I was a very fussy eater, unless you count that brief period I went through where I thought that glass was a viable foodstuff. That phase ended almost immediately after my mother had to confiscate a couple of shattered highballs at the dinner table, although in my defence even that paled into insignificance compared to the horrors of a slice of her risotto only slightly more malleable than a tectonic plate.

But somewhere along the line something shifted, and now I adore ordering the unthinkable every bit as much as I enjoy saying the unsayable. It doesn’t matter whether something shocking is going into your mouth or coming out of it, that moment of awed incomprehension from your nearest and dearest is something I enjoy beyond measure. Truth be told, you get an even better quality of funny look when you plump for the sweetbreads than when you make an off-colour joke, but it’s very much along the same lines. It helps that a lot of people mistakenly think sweetbreads are testicles, naturally, although I’m always offended that people seriously think I’d want to eat the genitalia of anything from the animal kingdom, dead or alive. Still, it can’t be worse than that ex-girlfriend of mine who tasted of out of date beef and onion crisps.

I think it all began when I discovered black pudding. I absolutely adore the stuff in all its forms – sweetly pungent morcilla from Spain, a nice robust boudin noir from France or even the good old-fashioned British stuff, crumbly circles of blood and grain with a spot of HP sauce for good measure. It’s fantastic stuff. I’ll never forget my first day as a married man when we sat round the breakfast table in Brighton trying out our rings (and in Kelly’s case, her new surname) for size and enjoying a full English with our two witnesses. The best thing of all - and on a day like that, at the start of the best part of your life, it’s quite a long list of very good things - was how the unwanted black pudding from my dining companions piled up on my plate like poker chips. As if I didn't feel like I'd won the jackpot already.

But it wasn't just how it tasted. If I'm completely honest with myself, the other factor is that it really gives some other diners the creeps. Just as disturbing as eating glass, and far, far tastier.

As a kid I never got into birdwatching, or those I-Spy books where you got points for spotting a clarinet or a particular kind of mushroom. But if they did one now where you had to track down and eat weird and wonderful things, I’d definitely sign up. Sometimes it works – sweetbreads are a case in point, and springbok is also rather nice – and sometimes it backfires (if I never have pig’s trotter again it will be much too soon) but it’s always different. And let's face it, I can eat chicken any time I like.

I very much had all this in mind as the waiter approached our table.

“So, what are gizzards like?” I asked him.

“Well,” he said, clearly steeling himself for a rather difficult sell, “What they are is…”

I quickly cut across him. In the nicest tone I could manage, mind you. After all, the last thing I wanted was for my dish to eventually arrive with some unadvertised foam of dubious origin.

“Let me stop you there. I really don’t want to know what they are. If I know what they are, there’s probably no way I’ll order them. You can tell me what they are later on, maybe when I’m paying the bill, but for now I just want to know what they taste like. That’s all.”

With that out of the way, he spared me the anatomy lesson and I ordered them.

The dish, when it turned up, was beautiful. The carpaccio of breast was pink and tender, fanned in the centre of the plate. Off to the left was the most delicate and beautiful assortment of rejects I had ever seen, and I have seen - and been - quite a few rejects in my time. The hearts were small discs of flat, tender meat, like edible coasters. On top of each was a small nugget of meat. Like one of those especially amateurish auditions in the early stages of a TV talent show, if you hadn’t known what it was you would never have guessed. Predictably, they were utterly, lip-smackingly delicious.

Not long after the waiter stopped at our table and saw the empty plate in front of me.

“What did you think?”

“It was gorgeous, especially the gizzards.”

“I liked them too.” said Kelly, “They were really rich. Very dense, too.”

The waiter allowed himself the smallest of smiles as he picked up our plates, and he couldn’t quite help himself as he came out with his parting shot.

“If you knew what gizzards were, you’d understand why they’re so dense.”

Seven things I like (Part 4)

5. My Sigma 30mm 1.4 lens

There are million of parallel realities out there, all almost exactly the same as this one except in a single crucial respect. In one of them, a different sperm got there first and I was born Melanie instead. Every family has a back-up name and Melanie was my parents’ choice, left unused following my brother’s birth two years previously. I don’t know whether they wanted a girl. I’ve never really thought to ask and it seems unimportant now.

But I wasn’t just nearly Melanie; I understand that even the name I bear today was by no means a foregone conclusion. Luke was also in the running until the last minute before it was discarded. For what it’s worth, I’m happy about that. I like my name. Being called Luke would be like spending your whole life walking round in shoes half a size too big; not necessarily uncomfortable, but wrong somehow.

Of course, in a parallel world I am probably heaving a huge sigh of relief that my name is Luke and not some other unfamiliar looking tangle of letters sitting incongruously on the front of envelopes, on credit cards and pay slips. Then again, there are some days now where I look in the mirror and I don’t entirely recognize myself. Maybe it’s Luke that’s staring back at me.

Anyway, those are just the things I nearly was right at the start when I popped out screaming into the world an hour and a half after the waters broke, the only time I have ever been early for anything. At every fork in the road I nearly was all sorts of different things, and maybe I would have been if things had been different. In my mind’s eye I can see them all, a myriad of tiny universes, each containing another version of me. Naturally I am at the centre of each universe, just like I’m at the centre of this one.

Over there I can make out the me that didn’t need glasses. I can’t even begin to imagine all the events that flow from that and how they help to construct an almost unrecognisable me. Maybe that me, in turn, was good at sport so didn’t get picked last, so learned to dance, so got chosen at school discos and married his childhood sweetheart. I don’t think we would have an awful lot to say to one another, were we to meet. He would probably tell me that I need a haircut.

Further away is the me who didn’t go to Oxford. Ambition wouldn’t have been burned out of him, the way it was with me in those musty book-lined rooms listening with a mounting sense of panic to impossible questions, or lounging on the lawns wondering what gene I had missed out on that gave everyone else that impression of being innately at ease with their surroundings wherever they went. He most likely earns more than me and I bet he drives a lovely car. But I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets home at eight o’clock every night to a wife that isn’t worth hurrying home for, if he has one at all.

Countless different mes out there that I’ll never be. There is a me that started writing earlier, a me that hasn’t started yet and a me that never will. I envy the first, feel sorry for the second. The latter, fortunately for me, is unthinkable nowadays.

I don’t know how hard this is to believe, but this was nearly a photography blog. That’s partly down to how it all started; the prequel to this blog was that I used to put albums of photographs on Facebook with captions and descriptions, and my friends would then all weigh in with their comments. I also considered it because I would have loved to live in one of those alternate realities where I was a photographer rather than an updater of pointless spreadsheets and stater of the obvious to the congenitally challenging.

I’m glad I didn’t, though. I’m really nothing special as a photographer and I don’t have enough of a desire to get better. Not only that, but wherever I look there are blogs by people who take better pictures than mine (of more interesting things, too), understand how cameras work better than I do and can explain things better than me. No, I am far better off sticking to writing about me because whatever my shortcomings it’s a subject I know better than anyone else – whatever my wife or family might tell you.

That said, I still love taking photographs. Some of the reason for that is my lens; my parents clubbed together to buy it for me a couple of birthdays ago, and I remember opening the box and being stunned by the sheer weight of the object in my hands. It was photographic equipment that could easily have doubled as a murder weapon.

Explaining why I like my lens will richly demonstrate why talking about photography is best left to the experts. It’s a “prime” lens, and what that basically means is that there is no zoom. If you want to zoom in on something, you have to use the old fashioned technique and walk closer to whatever you’re planning to photograph. I rather like that, because it makes me use my imagination more and make a conscious decision about whether something is really worth capturing. I think in some ways that digital photography is almost too easy, I miss the agonising wait for a flimsy paper envelope from Boots which is 90% full of disappointments. It made those good photographs feel like that much more of an achievement.

The trade-off for having to walk up to things is twofold; first, because of the focal length of this lens it’s fairly close to what you actually see through your own eyes when you walk around. That’s a good thing for me because it helps me feel a little like the camera is an extension of my own eye, and when you are painfully aware of an ever-present pair of spectacles coming between you and the viewfinder like an unwanted chaperone you need all the help you can get. More importantly though, with a prime lens the images are sharper - and because the lens can open so wide, you never need to subject your friends to the horror of flash photography, which flatters no one. Nobody appreciates a flash, whether it’s coming from the top of a camera or courtesy of a seedy old tramp in a raincoat.

It also means that sometimes, when it’s getting dark, the lens can do incredible things. I swear it sucks light that isn’t really there out of the room and deposits it glowing in the image. The other great thing about having a lens which opens so wide is that it produces photos which look nothing like a standard picture from a digital compact, where everything is in focus and the overall effect can be distinctly two-dimensional. My photo albums are full of evidence of me mercilessly exploiting this, because it’s the only thing I know how to do which makes my pictures look anything like “real” photographs.

It would be plain wrong to end this without some examples; all foreplay and no climax, and I wouldn’t do that to you. So here they are - I won’t go through them blow by blow because most of them are pretty self-explanatory, but suffice it to say that the images that follow include one of me enjoying New Year’s Eve that certain readers of a delicate temperament may find uncomfortable.








I have to say that, looking through them one more time, I wonder if it’s really about the lens at all, or whether it's just that the lens happened to be on the end of my camera when I went to all those places and did all those things. I like the idea that it might be the latter, just as I like the idea that what I’ve written here is only slightly about a piece of glass and much more about how happy I am that I’m the person who needed glasses, went to Oxford and ended up writing this rather than anyone else.

Even if that does mean that this isn’t a photography blog by somebody called Melanie.

100 Words: Diet

A mail while I'm on holiday requests a hundred words on "diet". Definitely topical under the circumstances, but I'm struck instead by how curious a word it is. 

It simultaneously describes everything we consume and futile attempts to reduce it; an inherently contradictory word meaning both the presence and absence of food. 

Imagine if "sex" meant both sex and abstinence.

Finally, I could describe all my relationships as overflowing with sex: loud sex, angry sex, sex in public places.

Sex with several people at once. 

And, of course, at the end of those partnerships, more sex than I could stand. 

[Suggested by Jeannie.]

Seven things I like (Part 3)

[Blue Italics of Housekeeping: Sorry if you are wandering through my blog and have stopped by hoping to read my post My wife's grey hair. Normally, it would be here in all its glory (it's one of my favourites, as it happens) but I have taken it down because I've submitted it to a publication. It will go back up eventually, but in the meantime, feel free to pop a comment on wishing me luck.

Thanks!

MLS]

Seven things I like (Part 2)

3. Bad television

I have always had quite the love affair with atrocious television, and the worse the better. I don’t mean mediocre telly, god knows there is more than enough of that around. Generic formulaic talent shows, reality telly and the latest instalment of the celebrity circus all leave me profoundly unmoved. It’s not that I can’t appreciate good television either - I can, but like good radio or “good” newspapers it’s usually far too worthy for me. Part of the tone of something like Location, Location or Grand Designs or the latest drama by Stephen Poliakoff is just too self-congratulatory for my liking. Aren’t you clever for tuning into this? it seems to say, Almost as clever as us.

No, I’m talking about truly terrible television, that‘s what can transform me and an armchair into conjoined twins for hours on end. Television that - in another, more cultured world - would just never have been made at all.

My family first went to Canada when I was about fifteen. I remember leaving the airport and experiencing a climate I didn’t even know was possible - hot muggy air like a smothering blanket and hammering warm rain. Just the combination of those two words, adjacent in a sentence, “warm rain”, was the stuff of science fiction back then if you grew up in Britain and I had never experienced anything like it. Looking at that almost tropical downpour you could see why my Canadian relatives needed the word "drizzle" explained to them.

My family fell in love with many things about the place over the fortnight that followed - the climate was the instant attraction, but Canada had far more to hold their attention than that. There were the gorgeous views, lush hills covered with stunning conifers and gigantic sweeping national parks with not a branch of KwikSave to be seen for miles around. Then there were the beaches on the banks of the Ottawa River - they had beaches, next to rivers! back home we had grumpy anglers and decomposing crisp packets - and the final clinching fact, namely that we saw a bear wandering the riverbank and it wasn’t in an enclosure or anything.

I was oblivious to all of that nonsense. I was far too busy falling in love with the TV programmes.

The soaps were amazing. The Bold And The Beautiful, The Young And The Restless, Sunset Beach. Characters with preposterous names like Ridge, Thorn, Storm and Caress (although I never saw a character called Throb, I was fairly certain I would have done if I’d watched for another couple of weeks). Huge baroque follies of plots which usually revolved around jewel theft, amnesia, people being in a coma, infidelity or a combination of all of the above.

An example would be like this: Thorn stole the fabulous diamond from Ridge and is having an affair with Ridge’s wife Caress, who used to be married to Thorn but has had amnesia since falling off a stallion. Storm has been blackmailing Caress claiming that she stole the diamond and Throb, the only person who can clear Caress’ name has fallen into a coma after falling off a stallion etc. etc. Storm sneaks into the hospital every night disguised as a nurse and injects Throb with a vicious serum to ensure that he never recovers.

Not only that, but the producers had mastered the trick of using so many flashbacks that you didn’t actually have to have been watching very long to pick up what was going on, to the extent where each episode probably only contained a couple of minutes of new footage. In case you were still struggling, the acting normally gave you a pretty clear idea of the moral character of everyone concerned. They didn’t don a top hat and tie a screaming maiden to a railway line, but it was close enough. I think that the fortnight I was there, The Bold And The Beautiful was mainly concerned with a murder trial which seemed to go on even longer than it would have done in real life. I was robbed of seeing the conclusion by my having to go back home at the end of the trip, but the way they were going the verdict might have dovetailed nicely with my thirtieth birthday party.

All this made Dynasty look like Chekhov, so naturally I was completely hooked. But North American television had even more delights to offer. I loved the game shows, in which you could win actual money, rather than the UK ones where you were lucky to come home with a teasmaid. I soon realised why they weren’t called quiz shows, either, because they didn’t involve real questions - or if they did they weren’t exactly questions you could class as tricky (later in life I came to realise that, given the intellectual capacity of the contestants, this was probably like the Krypton Factor to them). Not to mention the ads: television this side of the Atlantic was so rife with ads that they would show the end of a game show, cut to some ads, then show the end credits and then show some more adverts. Not only that, but the end credits of the game shows simply consisted of a list of all the companies who had donated prizes. More adverts!

The other overriding impression was the shouting. So much shouting, either at an estranged partner in a soap, or whooping at the audience when you got a right answer, or by somebody desperately trying to flog you something during the gigantic segments in between. Some of the people shouting were presumably doing it in order to be heard above their choice of casual wear, but surely not all of them. In any case it was a completely different world to English television at the time, where newsreaders always sounded faintly apologetic to be telling you about the awfulness going on in the world.

My mind could barely cope with such a Day-glo sensory overload of tat. After two weeks exposed to that sort of television I could barely spell my own name any more and I dread to think what would have happened if we’d been staying longer. I might well have bought a trucker cap and expressed an interest in one day joining the army. But the love affair with bad television stuck, and it has lasted ever since.

For instance, I love daytime television. If I am off work ill, there’s nothing I like more than making a soothing cup of tea and sitting down in front of Jeremy Kyle. I adore his way of making a complicated social issue like alcoholism or wife beating into some kind of dogmatic witch trial: So mate, you should stop hitting your missus, stop shagging around, get off your arse, find a job and be a real man. Yes or no? YES OR NO? It’s just phenomenal entertainment. After that, you can watch Trisha - who does the same thing, except she’s a little nicer.

Then there are all the shows about people who are deeply attached to all their family heirlooms - except that actually they’d like to flog them all so they can get an apartment in Magaluf, or a hot tub or a huge gas fired barbecue. Then, after Loose Women and possibly a shower, you get to all the shows about people who’ve flogged all their heirlooms and are now trying to find a nice apartment abroad. They have exacting standards in daytime TV land, and all want to find somewhere nice and hot where you can still get decent fish and chips and they print the Sun and everybody speaks English.

The adverts in daytime television are like looking through a telescope at a parallel universe and feeling slightly dirty because even then it’s too close for comfort. Or, to put it another way, they’re brilliant. Until I started watching them, I didn’t realise that there is a whole demographic out there that these ads are pitching to, full of people I previously didn’t know existed. They dream of having an accident at work that was somebody else’s fault (this is a revelation in itself, because I always thought accidents were nobody’s fault) and getting a big lump sum on a no win, no fee basis from a kindly personal injury lawyer who is practically doing it for free because they care so much about injustice. You know, like all lawyers. This, combined with the fact that they have consolidated all their debts into one affordable monthly payment, completely changes their lives enabling them to do all the things they have ever wanted. Based on what I’ve seen, that pretty much consists of buying a luxury condo in Spain and one of those baths with a door in the side that you can walk into. All is well, and just in time for Countdown.

Kelly finds it exasperating that I can happen upon the epitome of televisual dross and remain motionless for hours. I on the other hand am just frustrated that she’ll never know the joy of a punch up on telly, the drama of the lie detector test/paternity test/tug of love verdict. I saw one episode of Jeremy Kyle which managed to encapsulate everything I love about the genre; the title speaks for itself. It was called My Lesbian Mum Dresses Too Young! Everyone I have ever mentioned this to is convinced I’m making it up, which fills me with sadness. Best of all, if they ever run out of crap television programmes - and on the evidence so far, you'd have to say this is unlikely - all they have to do is find two truly awful programmes, weld them together and bingo! Yet again somebody has put the word “crock” into “crock of gold”. I remain convinced that one day ITV will show a programme called Britain’s Most Dangerous Drivers Say The Funniest Things and when they do, I just want you to remember that you saw it here first.

I can‘t leave this topic without mentioning my current favourite, which is a television programme called Snog Marry Avoid. For the benefit of the uninitiated, the basic premise is this: Britain is full of deeply unattractive ladies who are slathered in fake tan and caked with makeup, sport grotty looking hair extensions, fall out of nightclubs wearing next to nothing every Friday night utterly blotto on Bacardi Breezers and think Christina Aguilera’s outfit in the video for Dirrty was a tad conservative. This, I have to say, is fundamentally true; you see them on the streets of Reading hunting in packs on any given weekend. They bring to mind the famous simile "as fit as a butcher's dog", except that they are not fit in any way. Really, they just look like a butcher's dog, or indeed anyone else's. Or, more accurately perhaps, no one's.

The programme aims to fly the flag for natural beauty by showing some examples of this species how deluded they are about their own attractiveness. They do this by interviewing random members of the public, all of whom unanimously concur that the lady in question is a bit of a minger. Since I’ve never seen them interview a man in dark glasses while his golden retriever tries to hump the cameraman, it's difficult to see this as anything other than a foregone conclusion. They then proceed to give contestants (I’m not sure if this is the right noun, but it sounded a bit more sensitive than my second choice, “exhibits”) a “makeunder” which strips off the make-up, gives them a decent hairstyle and provides clothes which in many cases are made of natural fibres and cover almost the entire chestal region. They then run the exercise again and the same talking heads conclude, to a man, that suddenly the ladies in question are very suitable indeed and that they would love to take them out to a branch of Strada some time.

The presenter - ironically a pretty poor advert for natural beauty whose roots are showing in virtually every episode - then catches up with the women a few weeks later. Without exception, their faces are one shade of orange, their hair is about eight different shades of Christ knows what, they are wearing the sort of outfit you wouldn’t even see on a knife thrower’s assistant and they are saying that they enjoyed the experience but they miss their padded bras and nobody felt them up in the alleyway outside the nightclub with their sophisticated new look. All right, they don’t say the last bit but it’s very heavily implied.

Every episode of Snog Marry Avoid is exactly, and I mean exactly, the same and that's why I love it so. Not only that, but by the end of each one it’s blindingly obvious that the reason there has been the grand total of zero epiphanies - yet again - is that the women involved never had any interest in natural beauty and just wanted to be on telly.

Which you can guarantee they will be, because they will keep making programmes like this as long as there are enough lowbrow people like me lapping them up.

Seven things I like (Part 1)

It’s ages since I did a meme (well, I’ve only done the one) but I have been tagged again, this time by the superb Motherhood: The Final Frontier. The rules with this one are that you have to write seven things about you, and then go on to tag fifteen other bloggers. If a job’s worth doing it’s worth doing properly, I reckon, so I am going to write about seven things that I like. After all, there’s so much negativity in the blogosphere, isn’t there (he said, tongue largely in cheek)?

Memes are apparently supposed to be short and sweet but, as usual, I've written something a bit longer so this is going to be in several parts throughout the week. I won’t tag fifteen bloggers at the end - nobody could be that sadistic - but I will mention seven blogs I am particularly enjoying at the moment and if they want to play too that would be lovely.

Right, here goes, stuff I like. How hard can it be?

1. Paying for things in exact change

I love the irony that the amount of money in your wallet at any given time is inversely proportional to its weight. To me, there are few experiences finer than getting rid of all that shrapnel in the process of buying a paper, or a cappuccino, or a pint of milk on the way home from work. Doing so, counting up all those tiny copper and silver fragments of real money, and getting to the right amount feels like a tiny triumph (and, by the standards of many of my working days, probably is a triumph). It’s like a Sudoku for the brain dead, and the best thing of all is that the person behind the counter is usually grateful for the change. The people behind you in the queue maybe less so.

When I was in my mid-20s one thing I used to loathe was waiting in the queue at Marks and Spencers behind old people who would inevitably get to the front and then seem completely stunned that somebody might be expecting money from them. They would then riffle through their purses with arthritic fingers for what seemed like an eternity to cobble together the money to pay for whatever it was they were buying. I would slowly get crosser and crosser as this took place. Bloody old people! They’re up at something like five in the morning and they’ve got all day to do this sort of thing. There should be a law against them polluting the shops at lunchtime I would think.

Nowadays I have a pretty good idea that when I’m 45 I’ll be the sort of person that really pissed the 25 year old me off. I’m quite relaxed about that; reading this, I’m none too sure that I like the 25 year old me anyway.

There is of course one exception to the above, and that’s our staff canteen. Hopeless at anything involving money, they never have any five pound notes. You would think this is one of the simplest things to get right; most cash machines dispense ten pound notes, most things in the canteen cost under five pounds, ergo they are likely to need quite a few five pound notes, right? But no: every day they have invariably run out by about half eleven in the morning. So on those occasions I take great enjoyment in not paying with the exact change, even when I have it. "Oh, I'm sorry" I say as they scrabble around for pound coins, not meaning a word of it.

2. Categorising things

I don’t think I realised how much I enjoy this, or how tragic it is, until we got the new bookshelves this week.

We’ve never had room in our flat for all the books we buy, and about every couple of months a collection of the least impressive paperbacks is rounded up, scooped into carrier bags and deposited at the nearest Oxfam. This isn’t such a problem as all that; I read a lot of books but most of them disappoint me in one way or another so I don’t lose a lot of sleep over saying goodbye to them. I seem to be an expert at buying books which look great on paper (if you’ll pardon the pun) but turn out to be exceptionally turgid in one way or another. I’ve also waded through some horrendous prose torment in my time, just because it was recommended by someone I like or lent to me by - especially fatal, this - somebody I was trying to impress.

I sometimes wonder whether I’m not a natural reader, because books that people rave about leave me so cold. I also worry that I’m getting too fond of the sound of my own voice to read anyone else’s, but that’s far too close to the truth so I’ll probably delete this sentence before hitting the “publish” button.

Anyway, what this amounts to is that space is at a premium and all the books that I’ve bought over the last couple of years which I’ve really loved have nowhere to live, or did until we bought the new bookshelves and assembled them this weekend. Oddest of all I realised during the week before the furniture turned up that the thing I was looking forward to the most was putting them all in order.

And which order? So many choices. Height order? Alphabetical order? Chronological by date of publication? Chronological by date of purchase? Genre order? Some set of permutations of all of the above? The possibilities were seemingly endless, and for some inexplicable reason I found myself really enthused about that. So much so that I was even prepared to endure the horror of assembling flat pack furniture just to have that opportunity.

The hard work was done on Saturday and the books went in, filling up the space and furnishing the room beautifully. The travel guides went on a shelf at the bottom, a handy (alphabetised) list of all the places we’ve been. But I like to think that the novels, in their way, were a pretty good snapshot of some of the other places I have been too. Seeing them all in one place at last, from books I’ve owned since a kid (a tatty hardback copy of the Hobbit signed “with love from Daddy, 1981” which at one stage I thought I might read to my own kids, though now I know I never will), past some of the science fiction misfires of the eighties and through to the books I read and loved on a sun lounger in Greece, I realised how well they sum up a side of who I used to be and who I am now.

One of my favourite things about that view, though, is the way that categorisation can throw up such strange bedfellows. Leonard Cohen is a stone’s throw from Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper, which is something you’d be unlikely to see at a literary cocktail party. Dodie Smith stands shoulder to shoulder with Jacqueline Susann, who could undoubtedly show her a thing or two.

I think it must come down to imposing order on chaos, or something like that, perhaps more of that control freakery which appears to come unnaturally naturally to me. Let’s not even get on to the subject of my iPod, where the categorisation is if anything even worse. All the tracks on there have a star rating, and that’s before we plumb the depths of the playlists I‘ve set up. “3 star and above”, “not rated yet”, “over 3 stars and under two minutes forty-five seconds”, “not played in the last six months”, I could go on but it’s best for all concerned if I don’t. The last time a friend had a proper look at my iPod, their expression suggested that they were considering running off at their earliest convenience to try and get me sectioned.

It took all my strength not to put the seven things in this series of blog posts in alphabetical order, by the way.

Younger brother

Even at half-eight in the morning, even settled into my usual seat, squinting blearily out of the window and already regretting the extra ten minutes I would have at work because of the half-term absence of traffic, it was unmistakeable. Somebody walked past me wearing a fragrance I wore eight years ago.

If it wasn’t exactly the same it was close enough, and when it comes to the past close enough is often as close as anybody can hope to get. I was different back then in a lot of ways; I‘d never thought scent could be one of them, but it was. I used to wear fresh, green scents - appropriate, as I suppose I was fresher and greener myself in those days - and without any warning the disappointments of 2002 came flooding back like it all happened yesterday.

My foremost disappointment of 2002 got married to somebody who wasn’t me last month. But that’s okay, because I got married to somebody who wasn’t her and I understand that might have been her main disappointment of 2004. After that it was an unremarkable trip to work but the damage was done. The smell was gone within minutes - good ones too frequently are - but even if it didn’t hang in the air, the memories did.

I spent the all too short journey down the motorway thinking forward, something I can’t help but do because living in the present is invariably beyond me. Perhaps there will come a time in 2018 when I get on a train - deeper lines, greyer hair, thicker middle - and somebody wafts past me and I catch the briefest postscript of Chanel Pour Monsieur. What disappointments will I remember then? What is the class of 2010 going to be like, will it be a bumper year?

I sometimes feel like this, but I always feel something. In my heart, I know that’s progress.

Later on, I walk home through Eldon Square and the backstreets, gorgeous houses decked out in ivy and wisteria. They look like places I would love to live, if I’d had a different life. If I wasn’t happy going back to my flat, if I didn’t feel that catch in my throat when I first spot the amber glow from the big windows and the tall telltale figure singing along to the radio in the kitchen, this walk would do me no good at all. Anyway, it’s not a problem tonight; the sidestreets are clustered with pubs but I won’t be going into them this evening, however inviting everything looks in the sunshine that has intensified out of nowhere.

One of the class of 2010 lurks in my bag, the birthday card I haven’t sent him yet. Carefully picked but not carefully packed, weeks late. In many respects it’s the younger brother of the card I never sent last year, the one that started all the trouble that got so out of control, a distant cousin of the unopened Christmas presents that still sit on the bench in the hall, forlorn in their wrapping paper. Like younger siblings everywhere, it’s destined to disappoint. It has burned a hole in the green canvas all day and, distracted as usual, I have passed several postboxes too absent-minded to part with it.

At the end of my walk, the street I live on is still lively with traffic. It’s that point in the early evening when the number of people heading into town for a night out has begun to outweigh the number returning home after a late day at work. Soon the rhythm will shift again and it will be lit by night buses and opportunistic black cabs, but all that is hours away. It was bin day this morning, the man from the chip shop wheels his down the alleyway looking apologetic. I’m sure he has his reasons for that, but I’d rather not know what they are.

Finally I get to the postbox and open my bag. The envelope flies into the black hole behind the slot and I kiss it, and my disappointments, goodbye.

The best of British

Here is the oddest thing about my recent holiday in Rhodes: I spent ten days alongside people who, technically speaking, are Europeans just like me. They have the passports to prove it and yet I don’t seem to look like them, their customs are baffling to me and, as far as I can tell, we don’t speak the same language. Obviously I’m not talking about the Greeks. The only time I saw Greek people, by and large, was when they were fixing me a drink, taking my order or driving a bus or taxi. On all those occasions they were unfailingly polite and pleasant. Not only that, but they all knew about fifty times more words in English than I do of all foreign languages put together.

On reflection this might not be such a bad thing compared to the alternative. For instance, were I ever to go on holiday in Germany I would be sorely tempted to use all the German I know, which would entail asking how to get to the train station, telling passers-by that that my biro no longer works, explaining that I own a guinea pig and enthusing that my favourite pop group is Johnny Hates Jazz. The latter three facts aren’t even true, and even if they were I can’t see they’d get me very far.

No, I’m afraid I’m talking about my fellow Brits. As one of the sneering metropolitan elite (second tier, clearly, since I live outside London) I am used to city breaks, swanky hotels and restaurant hopping. So it’s safe to say that I’m not normally in surroundings like those I experienced on holiday, or surrounded by the sort of people I encountered.

Pefkos is basically a single road lined with tavernas and a range of charmingly themed cocktail bars. There’s something for everyone; “Rock Café Bar” if you like hard liquor and the peerless musical oeuvres of Europe and Def Leppard, “Wild West” if you have a taste for moonshine and/or panning for gold and “Bambooze” if you like, well, booze. Actually most of that is a lie; the only real theme is booze. The cocktail menus are emblazoned on giant boards outside every bar and boast dozens of cocktails most of which I had never heard of, and I like to consider myself something of an expert. I’m sure some of them have been made up for shits and giggles, not least “Mocha-Choca-Lata-Yaya”, which to my enormous disappointment doesn’t contain any marmalade (I checked).

Leaving aside its dubious delights, and those of the terrifying sounding “Cheeky Vimto”, the cocktails seemed to fall into three broad categories. There were the fruity ones which get you very drunk in a short space of time. There were the creamy ones, which also get you very drunk in a short space of time. Finally, there were the ones coloured blue, which are best avoided unless you plan to end up on a table at two o’clock in the morning with your underpants on your head. Having ordered some cocktails - purely in the name of research, I might add - I can also confirm that they do indeed arrive with umbrellas sticking out of them along with, in one case, an especially demented looking paper parrot.

This was a bit of a revelation for me, given that I’m used to quibbling over which rum goes in my mojito or whether my bloody mary has sherry in it. But to say so rather misses the point; this experience is not designed with me in mind, but for the Brits, and they love it. One round the pool spoke proudly about it being his fourth season at the resort, a middle-aged Scottish couple we shared a cab with from a neighbouring village had already booked another trip here for September.

“Middle-aged” seemed to be a theme. Everyone in Pefkos was either older than me or younger than fifteen and accompanied by their parents. The standard holidaymakers were in their forties, stolid looking couples ambling down the main drag looking complacently delighted with their good fortune. Frighteningly intense tans were the rule rather than the exception; the women appeared to have been dipped in creosote, sunburned elbows sagging with spare skin like the droopiest vulvas in the world. The typical man looked as if somebody had taken a brown marker pen to him with reckless abandon, his distended mahogany belly stretching out in front of him crying out for a wheelbarrow to put it in.

By those standards, I must have looked like an albino. Not only that, but the last time I felt this young and thin, I was actually young and thin. I also seemed to be the only man without a tattoo; at one point I was worried that if this had come to light I might have been forcibly evicted from the hotel complex.

At first, it wasn’t apparent that the resort was crawling with my fellow citizens. In fact at first it appeared that Kelly and I were the only people there.

I’ve never understood the dynamics of a place until I’ve spent some time there. I remember how, before going to Spain, I scoffed at the suggestion that the locals didn’t dine until ten o’clock. How ridiculous! I scoffed. It simply cannot be true. I refused to believe it, in fact, until I had sat through the exquisite tumbleweed torture of the eight o’clock sitting; just me, Kelly and the truckload of teenage Americans too hungry to pay any attention to local customs. You would have been able to hear them from the opposite end of a packed football stadium, so I’ll leave it to you to imagine the effect they had at the next table along in a deserted restaurant. It was hard to tell whether the waiters were sympathetic, or quietly pissing themselves every time they went back to the kitchens.

Pefkos was much the same on our first night. Wandering through the resort, fresh from the coach and itching to stretch our legs, we decided to check out the bars. We passed a succession of garish entrances, deafened by the music blaring out from within. But they were all practically deserted. If you kept your eyes peeled, you could just about make out a solitary table of holidaymakers in each one, glumly supping at beer in a frosted pint glass and looking like they were wondering if they’d done the right thing. That is an expression I understand; I recognise it only too well for a number of reasons.

One after another, every bar told the same story. It was as if someone had taken enough people to nicely fill a nightspot and instead distributed them evenly between about twenty places, the Nightclub of Babel. It briefly occurred to me to lead them all like the Pied Piper of Hamelin to a single bar where they could have the mother of all parties, make friends for life, have a holiday romance, get married, have children, name them after me. But I decided against it; I don’t have those kinds of powers of personal magnetism and even if I did I could find a far better use for them. Besides, none of them were remotely attractive.

It wasn’t until our second night that I worked out where everybody was. After eating at the hotel restaurant we decided to wander past the poolside bar to check for signs of life. There turned out to be more than we had bargained for, because the hotel’s weekly karaoke night was in full swing. The throng, wedged into plastic chairs and perched on stools, was made up of more Brits than I had seen since we arrived at the hotel.

“Let’s go to bed.” said Kelly.

“No, this could be fun.”

Metaxa in hand, I sat back and enjoyed an array of crimes against music, all of which made Keane look like relatively small beer. It was an embarrassment of riches, or - more accurately - just richly embarrassing. A man inexplicably named “Chico” swaggered to the microphone and did Billy Ray Cyrus, in a performance so excruciating that I half wished that I was instead watching him doing Billy Ray Cyrus. At least that way one or both of them might be muffled.

More was to come. A lugubrious fellow called Maurice proceeded to cheerlessly murder a couple of country and western songs I had never heard of. It must have served as a welcome distraction from his usual vocation, which looked as if it might involve driving a hearse round the West Midlands. Then a couple stormed the stage in a failed attempt to give Islands In The Stream the kiss of life. I desperately prayed that they were father and daughter, although deep down I thought it far more likely that they had met when he was driving her school bus and had started sleeping together uncomfortably soon after that.

The showstopper was a small boy called Cory valiantly struggling with Thriller. Not to put too fine a point on it, it wasn’t. His entire family stood at the front faithfully recording the whole train wreck on an omnipresent digital camera. I found myself wondering if the grainy footage would show one day during the X-Factor grand final, the narrator drawling Cory dreamed of stardom from an early age over cutesy clips of him giving his all. His all turned out to be surprisingly little but none the less, even I would have to agree that there is something wonderful about having dreams. We should all try it.

Having said all of that, the oddest thing happened at some point during the evening’s entertainment. I don’t know exactly when the tipping point was - maybe during Maurice’s immortal rendition of Crystal Chandeliers, maybe later - but I realised that I had turned up intending to sneer but that instead I was genuinely swept up in it. Perhaps it was the third Metaxa, or maybe it was a realisation that the people round the stage were having fun: real, unforced, visceral fun rather than all the things I think I enjoy that sometimes pass for fun, like pushing artful but soulless looking food round a Michelin starred plate or reading a book because it’s “important” rather than because it’s enjoyable.

It was a very telling lesson. I don’t think I could live my life that way but I could have a crack at doing it for ten days. So I gave it a go, and by the end I would say my enjoyment was only twenty per cent ironic, maybe even as low as ten. I made some compromises, like remembering the Greek for “please” and “thank you”, but on balance I think I did a pretty decent job. And even if I didn’t, I still reckon demolishing a Jilly Cooper novel on the night flight home left me in credit. I owed that to Britain, if nothing else.