The television set and the architect

Last month, you might remember that I wrote a series of posts about things I liked. It feels so long ago, now. At the end, I passed it on to seven other bloggers and I’ve been incredibly touched that so many of them took up the challenge and have been doing the same. Two of them have just finished their own sequences. The Eternal Worrier has completed a series about seven people or things that left an impression on his life which is genuinely superb. Equally impressive is The Domesticated Bohemian, who has written a fantastic set of posts about seven things that never fail to make him smile.

I have so enjoyed watching these guys pick up a theme and run with it and produce phenomenal writing in the process, and now they have both passed it on to seven bloggers themselves. It’s like the opposite of a chain letter; between us we might all eventually reclaim the meme and give it a good name after all. I’m as pleased as punch that I might have started all that.

But I also feel more than a little like a fraud, because the shameful truth is that I have considerably more experience of, and am far better at, disliking things.

There is so much out there to dislike, after all. The majority of newspaper pundits, for instance, or nearly anybody under the age of forty who happens to be presenting a television broadcast. Pointless space filling puff pieces in colour supplements. Hype about pop music. The collective delusion that Lady Gaga is important, seminal or anything other than the latest in a long line of Madonnas. The celebrity bandwagon and publications like Heat magazine speculating about how people can be too fat one day and too thin the next, complaining about body fascism and flogging cosmetics on adjacent pages. Endless column inches complaining about people in the public eye who desperately seek attention, constantly feeding the mouth that bites.

I know people get sniffy about the snideness and sniping in modern life today. They’re almost certainly much nicer people than I am and they‘re probably right, but I can‘t let go of it. I could say that it’s important to know what you don’t like or you become one of those people who doesn’t have a bad word to say about anybody or anything. And we all know how tedious they can be; they might get their reward in the next life but you wouldn’t want to be sitting next to them at a dinner party in this one.

I could say that, but it would be a feebly specious way to justify myself when the truth is a lot more straightforward: I really, really enjoy it. I know it can’t be good for me in any way. Psychologically, it probably says awful things about me. I can’t imagine it does wonders for my digestion or blood pressure. It’s probably set back my progress as a writer, a friend, a networker, and even a human being. The thing is, I simply cannot seem to help myself.

You don’t have to tell me that it’s unattractive, I already know. I’ve had years of being told, even as a teenager.

“You’re always so negative.” my mother would say, immediately after I’d shouted some obscenity at the television.

”No I’m not.” I would respond, proving her point twice over.

Kelly has got used to it now. If I’m watching a TV programme which irritates me, or reading a newspaper article I don’t like, and I happen to offer some commentary – which happens with predictable regularity – she’ll step in. At first, she did this ever so nicely but six years into married life she is much more firm and unsparing. Nowadays she’ll say “Shut up, I don’t want to hear it”, but in the early days it was something fonder and more indulgent like “You’re railing again.” I used to do a lot of that; I was responsible for enough railing to put a makeshift perimeter fence around the whole of Britain.

I don’t mind Kelly’s violent reaction so much, because I’m slowly managing to bring her round to my way of thinking. If a Tesco advert comes on - with its fatuous jingle and a self-satisfied voiceover by somebody safe and famous telling me how reassuringly cheap their food is - she scrambles for the mute button in record time with all the zealous enthusiasm of Robinson Crusoe discovering a pornographic magazine which has fallen through a wormhole in the time-space continuum.

Some days, immersed in the Internet, I might vaguely overhear Kelly out of nowhere saying “Oh, fuck off Davina” and without looking up I can be absolutely certain that Davina McCall is cawing about haircare products on the TV. For those unfamiliar with Davina McCall (and if you are, oh how I envy you), the best way I can describe her is that physically, she’s half-woman, half-crow. Emotionally she resembles a woman in her mid-forties who has gone to see a hypnotist who made her believe that she is nineteen years old and is now unable to snap out of it. I think that description is as good a job as I can do of conveying just how embarrassing she is to watch.

The potential to find new things to dislike increases exponentially when you look at the extra dimension offered by the internet. I’m irresistibly drawn to things I plain can’t stand, like hipster blogs full of half-baked poems, derivative unfinished prose and out of focus photographs. Or ponderous paragraph after ponderous paragraph packed full of semi-colons punctuating the contents of somebody’s intellectual colon. People who have swallowed a dictionary. People who have gargled a thesaurus.

I am a traitor for saying this. Blogging is a genre which - quite rightly - is built on positive, encouraging feedback. It’s a wonderful thing, and having that support is amazing. But my ability to sabotage my best efforts means that sometimes biting my tongue is very difficult indeed. It doesn’t stop me coming up with devastatingly cruel comments in my head, none of which I would ever commit to writing. This is why, on the odd occasion when somebody leaves something spiteful on my blog I am only 80% shaken and upset. The other 20% is probably cheering them on. If I wasn’t me, I’m not convinced I’d like me either.

“Why do you read all those things that make you so cross?” says Kelly. It’s a very good question, and I really ought to try and cultivate the necessary substance to be able to answer it.

“Because they’re so bad. So, so very bad. Jesus, look at this one.”

“No way! Don’t try and get me involved in all this negativity. Oh, fuck off Davina.”

Her variant of Tourette’s syndrome can be a remarkably useful secret weapon in my ongoing battle for the moral high ground, though I’m still left with one hell of a mountain to climb.

Fortunately, it’s not all bad and the dark side hasn’t completely claimed what little remains of my soul. In fact, what’s reassuring about the internet isn’t the preponderance of people, things and ideas I dislike but how easy it makes it for tiny parts of your life to intersect with lovely people for a fleeting moment that you would otherwise never have had. It’s very important for me to try and remember that, so whenever I’m boiling with irritation about the latest piece of fake gushing from some Antipodean lesbian berk in cyberspace I try very hard to remember two things: the television set and the architect.

The television set was Kelly’s pride and joy when we moved in together. It was the swankiest TV I’d ever seen at the time - grey, curved and far prettier than my boxy black portable telly, the one I’d bought after leaving university (at the time, it was the only New Year’s resolution I had ever kept). Mine was banished to the bedroom, allowing me to watch daytime TV in the morning while I waited for Kelly to come out of the shower. I’d never had a television in my bedroom before, and it soon became apparent that that too did very little for my blood pressure, or that railing at the screen which Kelly found so endearing back then. I ended up giving it to a friend.

The television in the living room, on the other hand, started to die several years later, so we replaced it. But it was by no means unusable and far too good to take to the tip, so we stuck it on Freecycle, sat back, and waited for somebody to take our problem away. Freecycle is a wonderful idea. I love the way people will turn up to your house and pick up practically anything you‘re getting rid of. I’ve not found anything yet that is so unappealing that you can’t find somebody on the internet who wants to come round and remove it from your life.

I sometimes worry that Kelly will put me on Freecycle. I also sometimes worry that if she did, she wouldn’t get any emails.

At first, I didn’t understand what sort of people would snap up any unwanted bric-a-brac just because it was on offer. I didn’t get an insight into that for a while, but then Kelly went to visit my mother-in-law and help her to declutter. My mother-in-law is a proper hoarder who can’t throw anything out, and her house is a tribute to that ethos, full of all sorts of random things. Things she thinks she can fix, things she thinks might come in handy one day, things she can’t bear to part with.

“But we aren’t seeing your mother for at least a month! I am not having that carpet sitting around in the spare room for a month just so it can then spend an eternity in your mother’s spare room.”

That always gets the look from Kelly that says We can talk about this for as long as you like, but when we’ve finished you’re still going to do what I say. She learned it from her mother.

The spare room in my mother-in-law’s house is legendary. An archaeologist could document dozens of separate strata of tat in that room alone. I wouldn’t be surprised to find Lord Lucan in there, or the Ark of the Covenant. It got so bad that Kelly took time off work and spent the day blitzing it with my mother-in-law, an experience probably best likened to Vietnam. At the end, there were three piles in that room: a large pile of things she was keeping, a small pile of things to put on eBay and a colossal pile of items for Freecycle. And somehow, for reasons which still escape me, there were people who were even bigger hoarders than my mother-in-law who came to take it all away.

A few weeks later we were visiting again and I spotted a huge glass Galileo thermometer on her mantelpiece, next to some wedding photos and flanked by a disturbingly cute cuddly toy.

“That’s nice Rose, where did you get that?”

“Freecycle.” she said proudly, as my face hit my palm in disbelief at the futility of it all.

We got loads of emails about our television set. You can usually sift most of these out - a lot of them turn up quickly and are clearly landlords trying to furnish slummy shared houses. I’ve lived in those kind of houses and paid those kinds of landlords every month, and I had no desire to give them a free television, especially because I knew they weren’t getting a free television so they could afford to buy their tenants a decent carpet. They were getting a free television for the same reason that their tenants had a repulsive carpet.

The man we eventually picked to receive our once lovely television was, however, a little odd and so were his emails.

“Would you mind dropping the television round at my house?” he said.

He had completely missed the whole point, which was that it was not a delivery service. We very politely told him he had to come and get it himself.

“Fine, I’ll get a taxi. When will you be in?”

When the evening came, we expected some kind of oddball. Perhaps a bespectacled geek who lived on his own and couldn’t drive. A man, in fact, like the man I would have become if I hadn’t met Kelly. Instead, when the doorbell rang we couldn’t believe our eyes because there, standing on our doorstep, was a scrawny child. He couldn’t have been more that fourteen years old. On the road outside was a black cab, meter still running.

He held his hands out as I loaded the television on to them. It was quite possibly bigger than he was. He tottered down the stairs as Kelly and I watched nervously with gritted teeth and then, like an alien heading into the mother ship he disappeared into the depths of the taxi and was gone. I admired his pluck, his imagination and his surprising reserves of physical strength, and as he vanished I congratulated myself for not having given our television to a slum landlord.

Kelly emailed him later that night offering technical support if he wanted any assistance setting the television up, programming the channels and what have you. She’s good at all of that technical wizardry, whereas some days I can’t even work out how to switch our television on. The reply came back the following day.

“No, I’m all right. I’ve got it all sorted. Thanks so much! I use it to play Guitar Hero in my bedroom, it’s brilliant.”

It’s funny how you can get a warm feeling out of interacting with somebody you’ve only met once and knowing that a tiny fragment of your life intersects with a tiny bit of theirs. Despite my negativity I still know when my heartstrings are in motion, and the boy who could play Guitar Hero in his bedroom because of me, to my delight and most likely his mother’s utter frustration, was the ideal antidote to taking an arbitrary dislike to a virtual stranger. And the experience with the architect was much the same, except of course that I never met him at all.

The architect played a minute part in my life several years ago in what, to all intents and purposes, should have been a completely commercial transaction. He was selling a pair of vintage Danish silver cufflinks on eBay in a design I had never seen before, a stunning, stylised wave. Their age was a big part of what made them so covetable; I think I like silver so much because, like people, it’s nowhere near as interesting until it’s slightly tarnished.

Most eBay transactions involve a simple exchange of information - the mundane mechanics of addresses, payment details, postage costs – but for some reason this one was slightly different. Negotiating the safe arrival of the cufflinks involved emails back and forward which filled in the broad strokes about the man who was parting with such a classic, sophisticated piece of jewellery. He was an architect, living in Chicago, and he was selling a number of sets of cufflinks on eBay because he was about to retire. He didn’t say whether there were no family to pass them on to, or whether his family wouldn’t appreciate them, and I never asked. I’ll never know whether he was childless, or had fallen out with his children, or if they had taken up a profession which had no need of such things. But it was clear that these were the absolute masterpiece of his collection, the ones of which he was most proud.

I built up a picture of him across the space of the two weeks that we were in touch, most of which was simply me filling in the gaps based on what little I knew and what I wanted to believe. In my mind he was a fastidious, delicate man, with perfect crisp striped shirts, white hair and thin-framed glasses. Piercing blue eyes. In my imagination he worked in a beautiful skyscraper designing beautiful places, wearing his beautiful cufflinks. I’m not sure anyone drawn to an object so gorgeous could make anything ugly, though if anything could challenge that idea it would be me. Every email was a masterpiece of clearly-worded courtesy. He wrote like I imagined he drew - clean lines, pleasing shapes. I think he liked the idea that his cufflinks would be travelling across the ocean before he would get to do so - he had visited England before, and hoped to do so again in retirement.

I imagined that he had a secretary. I imagined that his secretary adored him, and wished he was her father.

By the time they arrived, I was sorry to break off our correspondence. I told him that the cufflinks were every bit as beautiful as I had hoped, and that I had had to pay duty on them (even in such a pleasant conversation the mundane mechanics intruded, as they have a habit of doing), and thanked him for doing such a fantastic job. And he said something that stayed with me in his final mail. He said “I hope they bring you luck in your future career, now that I’m at the end of mine.”

Not for the first time in my life, I felt like a fraud. Because he did something big, and important, and distinguished. They were the perfect cufflinks for him, they suited him. They made sense, when he wore them. And he had passed the baton on to a man who just wanted to look good while cracking bad jokes on conference calls, or delighting in hilarious typos like “I can get you data from the fist of June” (Poor June, I replied in a mail to one of my suppliers today). I didn’t have the heart to tell him what a disappointment he’d find me if he knew me better - strange, that, since now I am telling all of you.

But when I have a difficult meeting with customers, or when my department is being visited by an auditor, or when I have my annual performance review, I always find myself putting on the architect’s cufflinks. Oddly - for no reason at all - it seems like the right thing to do, and those days are never as bad as I think they’ll be. It’s funny that I still refer to those lucky charms as ‘the architect’s cufflinks‘; maybe one day they will feel like mine, but if they don’t on balance I think that will be okay. It somehow seems appropriate that I, too, will have nobody in particular to pass them on to.

The needles

I am late, just as I’m always late for everything. I forgot to get any money out the night before, and I left the house at the last minute, so I run to the cashpoint in the searing heat. I’ve long suspected that ATMs just know when you are running late; that’s when they take eons to recognise your PIN, or wait an age before moving from one screen to another. Those are the times where they whir for what feels like hours before spitting out your money, seemingly from a vault many miles below the surface of the earth. In extreme cases they have been known to swallow my card and refuse to give it back until the bus has long gone.

A bona fide eternity later, notes in my wallet, I scurry across the busy road with scant regard for my personal safety. Being hit by a car I could deal with, being late for this appointment would be deeply embarrassing. Even on foot, even minutes away from my destination, the motorists I dodge look in even more of a hurry than me. Windows are open and an array of radio stations pump mindless sounds into the shimmering haze. Inside the cars, couples who have run out of things to say are hitting town, and they’ll stay there until they’ve run out of things to buy.

I on the other hand have nearly run out of time. I get to the steps of the building two minutes late according to my phone (which on past experience is quite a charitable judge of punctuality) and April greets me at the door. She looks younger than I expected, though on reflection I would be hard pressed to say how old I thought she was. She’s smartly dressed in a crisp white shirt. I notice her glasses are by Gucci; I don’t expect an acupuncturist to wear Gucci, though I have absolutely no reason to think that.

“Would you like some water?” she says. I nod. I’m just about the right side of out of breath but from my damp forehead I’m very much the wrong side of dry as a bone. Considering this is supposed to be relaxing it has got off to a terrible start, and it’s all my fault.

We go up to the top floor, to a big airy white walled room with high ceilings. I know this place well, I used to have weekly sessions of a very different nature here and was pierced in an altogether different way. Seeing that big oatmeal sofa again is like running into somebody in the street who you used to know, I don’t know whether to acknowledge its presence or blank it. Out of the window I can make out a tall office block further into the centre of town, and I feel like I ought to know where it is.

We talk about my symptoms and April asks me a lot of questions. I don’t understand what they all have to do with anything. When do I go to sleep? Am I a hot person or a cold person? Are my hands hot or cold? My feet? Do I sleep on my side? Sometimes I don’t understand April’s accent and I need to ask her to repeat herself. I feel embarrassed for asking, as if I should know. April doesn’t give a lot away. Sometimes, I will answer a question and she nods and says “Yes! Very good.” It’s like she is giving me an oral exam on behalf of the cosmos, and I don’t know which are the right answers.

She beams when I tell her that I quit smoking seven years ago. If smokers could feel the sheer joy she radiates at that point they might all give up at the drop of a hat.

I graduate to the couch after taking my top off. I have the sort of complicated relationship with my body which can only end in tears; some days it feels like I was transplanted into it thirty-six years ago and it’s finally getting round to rejecting me. And yet in some ways at least I am quite comfortable in my own skin, and I have no problem with sitting there shirtless while April tries to get me to relax. My spine is out of alignment, she says, and one of my shoulders is far higher up than the other. Small adjustments can make big differences, she tells me. I feel like, as someone who tries to write, I ought to understand that concept.

She rubs an oily white cream into my arms and feet. The tube has Chinese symbols on it which I cannot make out and could not possibly understand.

“Is the smell all right?”

I lift my arm to my nose, sniff it and can’t help but grin.

“It’s lovely! It smells of root beer. Root beer is one of my favourite things.”

April gives the huge surprised smile of someone who doesn’t hear that very often, and we have something in common. It almost makes things comfortable as I sit on the couch, anxiously waiting for the jarring, frightening moment when the first needle goes in. I’m conscious of April standing behind me, no doubt looking at my neck through those Gucci glasses, deciding where to strike first. I brace myself.

“Was that uncomfortable?” she says.

I nearly fall off the couch. I had no idea she had started yet.

Slowly, steadily, the needles go in. It’s the weirdest feeling - or rather, lack of feeling, because I am barely conscious of any of them. Initially I refuse to look - whenever I have my blood taken for tests I can cope as long as I never have to look down at the syringe sticking into my arm. I just stare at the educational poster on the wall (showing some grisly educational pictures relating to smear tests) and keep my gaze fixed there until the whole thing is over and the plastic, ruby-red tubes are stickered up and safely finished, sitting there on the table like gigantic fountain pen cartridges.

But it feels so innocuous that I find I’m unable not to peek. The needles are tiny, dotted in grids all along my arms and feet. What would they look like if I joined them up with a biro? Would it be a map of two years’ pain, or some new constellation I have never seen? I wonder where I have been while all of them have been going in because it can’t have been here, I don’t remember any of these. Not just that, but my breathing has slowed, my shoulders have dropped and I feel completely at rest for the first time in some time. I half expected the whole thing to have a soundtrack of whale music, strings or pan pipes, I didn’t know what to expect, but in this high-ceilinged room the whole process has taken place in a companionable silence with a woman I have known for less than an hour.

I am transformed. When I got on the couch I was a soggy lump of clay waiting to be pierced by lances, now I am a thin and gauzy tissue, fixed to a board by thumb tacks. They are the only thing that stops me from fluttering away. And then it is over as quickly as it has begun. I feel rueful watching April walk round me taking the needles out, one by one.

“You have done really well. You are very good at relaxing.”

I don’t think anybody has ever said that to me before.

I hand over the money I went through such torment to get, we agree a time for the following weekend and I take my leave of her. I go out through the grand red door and blink in the sunshine, back on the gorgeous Georgian square, ringed with stunning houses I regularly fantasise about living in. I call Kelly. She is shopping in the centre, and we agree to meet up for lunch. “I want you to tell me everything about it.” she says.

On the walk into town I examine my arms and hands. Even in the strong afternoon light, I can only just make out the tiniest of marks here and there. If you didn’t know better, you wouldn’t think there was anything there at all.

That Was The Week That Blogged #17

Narrowing this down from the seven posts on my shortlist to the three eventual winners involved an awful lot of head scratching and re-reading - I hope it's this hard to do every week. Please keep the emails and Tweets with recommendations coming; I read every single one, even if I don't necessarily pick them all.

TWTWTB is my weekly award to the three best things I've read in blogland in the previous week. Here are this week's winners:

1. 7 impressionists on my life (Part 6) by The Eternal Worrier

"A blue nylon rope lay untidily on a shelf like an offer of a way out. I must have sat staring at it for hours. I know I cried like never before and never since. This was it; the moment was there, on offer to me. This would teach them. They would find me black after a few days, hanging and stinking the place out."

Writing about depression is not easy. Writing well about depression is nigh-on impossible. But I didn't pick this because of its subject matter; that would have been too obvious a choice, especially this week when I've read so many excellent posts. Writing about depression like this, without a hint of mawkishness or self-pity, is truly an astonishing accomplishment, yes. But it's the writing and not the subject matter that I completely respect about this post, that's why it won this week. The Eternal Worrier is just getting better and better, and watching him so completely in control of his ideas and how to express them is an absolute joy, even if that's a funny thing to say about a topic so sad. I hope he, and you, will understand what I mean.

2. Oh!!! by Coffee Helps

"With very little in the way of explanations, she proceeded to grate potatoes and mix them with the flour until she had a gloopy paste that looked not unlike vomit. Then she tucked my t-shirt sleeves up into my bra strap and spread the stuff all over my arms and shoulders."

If you don't want to click on the link and read the post after that quote, I guess we probably don't have an awful lot in common. Coffee Helps is a new blog to me, and this post was a very welcome and extremely funny discovery this week. A great story, superbly told with a beautifully light touch. Highly recommended.

3. Billy by The Domesticated Bohemian

"He had a bizarre collection of hats. None ever seemed appropriate to the season, day, or weather. Cowboy hat, baseball cap, toy policewoman's helmet, santa hat, red cowboy hat with white fur trim."

I have a thing (as you can probably tell by now) for moving, unsentimental, clever writing. Writers who pull that off are probably amongst those I envy most of all. This is a lovely piece by Philip; it's moving because you totally feel the loss of someone you didn't even know existed a handful of paragraphs previously. When you think about that for a second, you realise it's quite an achievement. It's unsentimental because there is no manipulation, no technicolour mechanical tugging of the heartstrings to make you feel that way. And clever? It's clever because it's not really entirely about one man, but about the community he lived in. There's nothing showy about this piece at all; if there was it wouldn't be half as brilliant as it is.

Here's what you can do to support That Was The Week That Blogged. First, pop by and check all the winners out in full. Feel free to tell them I sent you, in fact it's practically compulsory.

Secondly, if you read (or write) a blog post you think would be a worthy winner next week, either comment here, drop me a mail or Tweet at me with the hashtag #TWTWTB. The best ones will be announced on the blog and on Twitter every Sunday.

Last of all of course, if you won this week: congratulations! Feel free to take the rather fetching picture at the top and copy it onto your sidebar. Of course, I won't be offended if you don't.

The couple in the mall

There's an elderly couple dancing on the top floor of the mall. This is the second time I've seen them. There they are, outside House Of Fraser, covering all that ground in amazingly elegant cycles. 

He has thick glasses on and wears a light grey suit that might be older than me. To use the word dapper would be cliché, to use anything else would be dishonesty. He wears that suit with the ease of a man who has never worn anything else. 

At first I think he has a hearing aid, but then I realise they are ear buds and he is wearing headphones. Only he can hear the music. Only he needs to. 

His partner looks older, also impeccably dressed. The sunshine through the skylight hits her white hair and turns it to a barely visible candyfloss. I wonder what music is playing, and how old they are in their heads. Quite possibly younger than me. 

They move together perfectly, with the ease of people who know everything about each other. In all the hideous corporate away days I have ever been sent on, I've never seen anything even approaching teamwork like this. 

It takes some doing to humble an entire mall, nobody could do it on purpose. But this couple achieve what the balding, bug-eyed preacher on the street outside could never do, because everyone is silent. The chavs and the slack-jawed yobs picking their next destination are mute, and they watch too. It's a little moment of beauty that I'll remember long after I don't know what I had for lunch today, or what the weather was like. 

I hold Kelly's hand and we watch for a while. Neither of us needs to say what I know we are both thinking. I'm not entirely sure what the couple in the mall are a metaphor for, but I hope one day they'll be a metaphor for us.

The plural of 'dildo'

Gemma’s socks are entirely responsible for me finding out things I’m not sure I wanted to know about vibrators.

She left them at home on Tuesday, which meant that she couldn’t go to the gym, which meant in turn that Gemma, Iain and I ended up sitting round the table at lunchtime chatting away about all sorts. Given the level of debate normally present at our lunches it’s a wonder we’ve never got round to talking about vibrators before; in the last year or so we’ve covered pretty much every other taboo known to man, but there’s always another boundary to go beyond. Or at least, people who notice things like boundaries tell me there are.

It didn’t start out that way, because it began with a perfectly innocent conversation about Iain’s birthday which is only a couple of weeks away.

“Iain, I was thinking of having a whip-round and clubbing together to buy you a copy of Edward Penishands. Would you like that?”

For the uninitiated, this is a pornographic re-imagining of the Tim Burton classic which Iain once watched on a stag night and apparently thoroughly enjoyed. If you want to know more (which to be honest sounds unlikely from where I’m sitting) the full story can be found here.

“God no!” said Iain. “I imagine it’s not available any more anyway.”

This sort of challenge is like a red rag to a bull to me, especially at lunchtimes. It didn’t take long on my iPhone to demonstrate that it was very much still available, at the bargain price of twelve US dollars. Not only that but, much like Amazon, the website it was available from offered a range of reviews of the film. If it wasn’t for the fact that you had to confirm you were eighteen and were treated to a picture of a smiling busty lady in lingerie before you got to the product information, you could almost have believed it was Amazon. I’m sure there were Amazons in some of the merchandise on offer, anyway.

“Most of them seem a bit disappointed that it’s not hardcore enough, but apparently it’s meant to be very funny. No, hold on. Here’s a much more in depth review Iain, listen to this: ’story line spoof loosely depicted adaptation is interesting, tried to stay true to the expressions of awkwardness from the original character. I would recommend if you were a fan of the original movie.’”

Based on the stills I’d seen of Edward Penishands there were definitely some expressions of awkwardness. Or it might have been Edward’s come face; without further investigation it was difficult to tell.

“They’ve kind of missed the point, haven’t they?” said Iain.

“Yes. They seem to think it’s a genuine sequel. Here’s another review that says that it’s only any good 'if dildos get you off'.”

Somehow I thought the plural of dildo should have an “e” on the end, but it didn’t seem like the right time to point that out. Instead, I turned to Gemma.

“How old were you when you got your first vibrator, Gemma?”

I don’t know much, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned in life it’s this: you can get away with posing all sorts of inappropriate questions as long as you have the shamelessness to ask them completely deadpan, as if they really aren’t any less commonplace than “do you take sugar?” or “did you have a nice journey here?” And it almost worked - as if on autopilot Gemma’s mouth opened and she was seconds away from telling me the answer before her expression clouded over with the realisation of what she was about to say.

“I can’t believe you asked me that!”

“Oh come on, you know you’re going to tell me eventually.”

Gemma gave a deep sigh before giving in to the inevitability of this argument.

“It was in my first year at university.”

“That’s nothing.” said Iain, “My wife never used to own a vibrator until I bought her one for Valentine’s Day.”

That brought the conversation to a sudden halt. Considering it was only one sentence, it contained an awful lot of information to take in in one go.

“You bought her a vibrator for Valentine’s Day?” I said. Repeating what Iain had just said seemed like the safest option, though it had the unfortunate side effect of making it all even more real.

“Yes. But not just that, I also bought a… you know…”

Please don’t say cock ring. Please don’t say cock ring I thought to myself, a frantic mantra.

“…a DVD.”

“You bought her a vibrator and a DVD?”

Really, this whole trick of repeating everything Iain said would have to stop eventually. If nothing else, if we both ended up on different conference calls later that afternoon I could easily make a complete tit of myself, even more so than usual. I decided to buck the trend by saying something new.

“Most men would just settle for flowers.”

“Well, I thought I’d give it a whirl. Admittedly, I was a bit nervous at first, but when she opened the box and gave me a little smile I heaved a massive sigh of relief.”

“I’m so glad you said DVD just then.” I said, having heaved a massive sigh of relief myself only moments ago.

“What did you think I was going to say - anal beads?”

Anal beads. I hadn’t thought of that, and now it was a difficult image to shift. Good work, Iain.

“What kind of message does that present send out though? ‘Here’s something to sort yourself out when I’m off sailing’, that sort of thing?”

“Absolutely not! It was… well, you know… for both of us.”

I was shocked. I’ve met Iain’s wife; she’s so nice, so wholesome and lovely. Every now and again Iain brought in her home made chocolate cake. It was fantastic stuff, and even knowing where her hands might have been couldn’t possibly put me off it, but even so. Honestly, if you scratched the surface of people all you found was filth, filth and more filth. It was provided you knew where to look and were asking the right questions anyway.

“So what was the DVD exactly? Given that it wasn’t Edward Penishands, I mean.”

“Oh, it was really funny.” said Iain. At this point his voice assumed a throaty, mock-erotic tone. “It was called Terror, Terror, Terror.”

This conjured up images of altogether the wrong kind of axe wound. Was it a snuff movie?

“What’s porny about a film called Terror, Terror, Terror?”

“Not Terror, Tera. The woman in it was called Tera Patrick. That’s how they pronounce it in America.”

“And was there any girl on girl?”

I’m not even sure why I asked this. It had sounded like a perfectly reasonable question in my head, which on the balance of probability is where it should have stayed.

“Loads.” said Iain, with a big cheesy grin on his face, “One of the best nights of my life, that was.”

I had to admit, Iain had gone up in my estimation. It took a certain character to have the gumption to buy your partner a battery powered downstairs invader and a grumble flick on the day of the year dedicated to romantic love in all its forms. I wanted to shake his hand and congratulate him on behalf of all men everywhere, but thought better of it.

“I always find vibrators a bit intimidating.” I said. It was the best attempt at changing the subject I could come up with.

“Me too.” said Gemma, who up to that point had been looking on in what looked a lot like a state of trauma, “Mine doesn’t have any of those scary attachments or knobbly bits. You can get glass ones, mind you.”

“Can you?” said Iain.

“Of course you can.” I said, “Though technically speaking they’re dildoes, not vibrators. [now it was me talking I figured it could at least be spelled properly]. They feature in porn all the time.”

The deathly silence denoted that this conversation had gone badly wrong. Worse still, even when talking about sex I managed to be a pedant; a fact which clearly illustrated why there was little or no hope for me. I kept looking from Gemma to Iain desperately hoping that one of them would like me enough to step in and rescue the conversation, but they appeared to be quite happy watching my discomfort. And who could blame then?

“Or so I’m told. Anyway, I agree. All those attachments are just terrifying. It’s all very well having a clit tickler but if your vibrator is made by Moulinex, things have definitely taken a turn for the worse.”

I gabbled and gabbled but I couldn’t make things better however hard I tried. The tone had been lowered even beyond standards I was comfortable with and, to make matters even more disorientating, my mind was whirring with white goods/sex aid combinations. Who could help a woman finish fastest - Russell Hobbs, or Morphy Richards? I couldn’t begin to imagine what a racy copy of Which! magazine it would make for. I can safely say that I’ve never been so relieved to get back to my desk in my life.

Perhaps the most uncomfortable thing of all crossed my mind as we settled back into an afternoon on pointless calls and I heard Iain effortlessly managing and delegating things, looking to all the world like a normal person again. I was painfully aware that my flat contains not a single vibrator.

What’s wrong with me? Am I some kind of pervert?

Birmingham

I tried to like Birmingham, honestly I did.

It started as a brilliant plan which I read on my Blackberry during a coffee break halfway through the sort of meeting which really should be outlawed on Fridays. “I can get us a great deal on a hotel in Birmingham tonight.” Kelly said, “How about it, shall we take a trip away?” So I met her at the station after work, and we gleamed with excitement on the platform, a city break packed with potential spreading out in front of us further than the railway lines, racing off out of view on the horizon.

The euphoria was still very much present and correct when we checked into our beautiful hotel, abandoned our luggage and took our seats in the bar downstairs, Bloody Marys at the ready. All weekends should start with a Bloody Mary, just as Fridays shouldn’t contain any meetings. Things only got better when we got to our table in the brasserie and Fabrice the sommelier bounded over to find out what we made of the wine list, all magnificent glossy bouffant and dark rimmed spectacles.

“I can’t decide between the Sicilian red and the Mexican red.” I told him, “I’ve never had a Mexican wine before.”

“Well,” said Fabrice with a gratifying French accent even thicker than his hair, if such a thing was possible, “The Italian is very fruity, very full bodied, but the Mexican…”

We waited, but no further words came.

“Well, the Mexican is more…”

Still nothing. The silence at this stage was so pregnant that I found myself wondering exactly what adjective Fabrice was about to emit. My money, for what it was worth, was on ‘Mexican’. I had the full sixty seconds it took me to come up with that before Fabrice spoke again.

“It’s…”

More silence at that point, followed by this: Fabrice’s English completely ran out and he was reduced to communicating the sheer primitive power of the Mexican wine through the twin powers of growling and mime. He made a noise not dissimilar to an emptying drain and began gesticulating wildly with both hands. It looked a bit like that trick strongmen in leopardskin leotards do where they tear a telephone directory in half with their bare hands, only instead he seemed to be trying to force the two halves back together through brute force alone, and possibly compress them to the size of a sugar cube into the bargain.

After such an impressive display of charades, it would have been rude not to order the Mexican red, and it was superb. But sadly, it was indeed impossible to describe without resorting to sign language. That said, Fabrice’s little routine more than did it justice, believe you me; these French sommeliers know what they’re doing. Later on, approaching repletion after two courses and a gruelling bout with the apex of Mexican viniculture, we examined the dessert menu. It should be compulsory to have three courses on a Friday evening, just as you should start that evening with a Bloody Mary following a day containing no meetings; really, my manifesto was slowly taking shape piece by piece.

“I think I might have the dark chocolate delice.” I said to Kelly, who fifteen minutes ago had been ‘far too full, thank you’ but was now paying the options much closer attention, “How about you?”

“I fancy the cheese trolley. I’m surprised you’re not having cheese, it looks really good.”

“No, I’m in the mood for chocolate. Besides, you get loads of cheese. I’m sure when it comes you’ll save me a few nuggets.”

Almost imperceptibly one of Kelly’s eyebrows raised, a drawbridge of skepticism.

“Yeah, that’s right, I’ll save you a few nuggets - from my bum.”

That was the moment where my fellow diners, the waiters, and indeed Fabrice for that matter were treated to the spectacle of Kelly dissolving into puerile and uncontrollable laughter which rang out, surprisingly loud, across the tastefully lit, chi-chi space. I’m not sure what they made of it all, but that’s probably because within seconds I was following suit. I’m afraid this happens a lot, and very rarely at anything that would be funny to anybody but the two of us. It’s just a wonder it wasn’t set off, as it usually is, by an atrocious pun or anything involving flatulence.

Fortunately she did save me a few nuggets of cheese when the hysterics had subsided and the trolley - whiffy and laden with wonders - had rolled up to our table. The goat’s cheese coated in rosemary was particularly fine.

We slept soundly, woke refreshed on crisp white sheets and I got to indulge one of my favourite little pleasures, shaving in a hotel bathroom. I don’t know why I enjoy this so much - maybe it’s because they have those little angled magnifying mirrors or because, unlike my bathroom at home, the room is sufficiently large that you can look in the mirror after a nice hot shower without just seeing a foggy Impressionist take on your own face. Don’t even start me on those special heated mirrors that never steam up, I’m beside myself with excitement when I stay somewhere with one of those.

So it was all going swimmingly at that stage, only to hit the skids when we stepped out of our hotel the next morning and took to the streets to explore our surroundings, because that’s the stage when we realised that we were in fact in Birmingham.

You know those bits of a city - every city has them - which are scruffy and scuzzy? Nasty concrete edifices designed by a committee and built by careless sadists, usually in the Sixties. Nacky pound shops or low-end chain stores, with exhausted and despairing chain smokers slouching past in sportswear which has never been worn during sport. The only reason you would go through an area like that is to get to where you really want to go. Now imagine a city made up entirely of areas like that, packed full of the offcuts from other conurbations.

You don’t need to imagine, because Birmingham is that city.

You know those glorious bits of a city where everything works? Where an area has just the right shops, just the right bars, just the right people? Where you instantly feel like you have found your place, your niche in the world. Every city has these. London has the South Bank, or Upper Street, or Marylebone High Street, or Brick Lane, so many different areas where everything just feels perfect. I too have a soft spot for Elizabeth Street in Belgravia, though this might be just for people-watching the Sloanes, an activity which never fails to entertain.

But other cities have this too - Brighton has the Lanes, or the North Laine. Nottingham has Hockley, Bristol has Clifton. It’s just the same further afield - Paris has the Marais, or Saint Germain and I could spend many a happy hour wandering the retro shops of rue Amherst in Montreal, one of my favourite cities in the world. Even small towns have them - there is a lovely spot by the cathedral in Winchester where my heart just sings. It might just be one beautiful shop, one delightful deli and a couple of pavement cafes but it’s a tiny epicentre of perfection.

Even somewhere like Reading has a spot like that. It may not have all the cool boutiques or the cultural hotspots, but when I sit outside Picnic on one of their uncomfortable rickety chairs on a sunny morning nursing a mocha and watching the town come to life, I know that I’m absolutely where I ought to be, and I couldn’t be happier. Like I said, every town, every city has a sweet spot like this. Everywhere, it seems, apart from Birmingham.

Not only that, but I walked past and through several places that were clearly intended to be that sort of area, and none of them were. That might have been the saddest thing of all. I can safely say that if we didn’t find it it wasn’t for the want of trying, because we tramped everywhere. From the Custard Factory - an artists’ quarter which was basically a loosely organised squat of patchouli-flavoured second-hand clothes shops - to the Jewellery Quarter, which was essentially an entire district made up of the sort of jewellers you would only go to if you had got someone pregnant and her father was about to hunt you down and kill you, we tried everywhere. The search for the silver lining went on all day, and I can’t imagine a hunt more futile.

On our travels, we spotted a couple of very curious trends. For a start, never in my life have I been to a place with so many personalised number plates. They were everywhere. At first, this made little or no sense to me, but as the day wore on I figured it out - if you live in Birmingham, and there are no shops worth speaking of, and you don’t have the sense to leave, you’ve got to spend your money on something and maybe that’s it. It was the only logical explanation I could think of, in a city which seemed to take a perverse delight in defying logic.

I feel mean just typing all that. Nobody I spoke to was anything less than friendly and lovely. The people of Birmingham seemed like a fantastic bunch. What in god’s name had they all done in order to deserve living here?

Another even stranger trend was this: in the space of a single afternoon I must have walked past a dozen couples made up of a ginger man and a very large woman. Now, I’ve got nothing at all against curvaceous women, in fact I’m very much an admirer of the fuller figure myself (or, as my friend Ivor used to put it, a “chubby chaser”), but these women were in an altogether different division. The only consolation of seeing these unlikely matches was knowing that, however unappealing Birmingham might be now, it was going to be even more so in approximately eighteen years’ time when the fruits of these couples’ reproductive labours were roaming the streets.

Towards the end, after yet another stroll over a diseased looking narrow concrete footbridge running over what seemed to be a gigantic flyover, we finally found the modern art gallery. It was a gorgeous red brick building, with an attractive café in it. Because I have a hankering for menu porn, I quickly deduced that it served a mouthwatering array of authentic tapas which left me cursing the fact that we hadn’t been there at lunchtime.

Naturally it was between exhibitions, quite literally nothing to see there. It sort of summed everything up.

Dejected, we wandered through Brindley Place, past one of the fountains. This was clearly the sort of area that was meant to sum up Birmingham’s cultural hub, and if you get your kicks by sitting in a Costa Coffee which looks like Norman Foster’s take on the Portakabin it probably does, but we had well and truly had enough. To add to the surreal air, the NIA was hosting the final of the Wheelchair Basketball World Championship and the Dutch women’s team were there in a circle (I suppose wheelchairs made a team huddle a bit of a challenge). They looked a darned sight happier than me, and the fact that this was probably a high point in their sporting careers put things into perspective. But only a little, because I was far too selfishly put out by then.

Cutting our losses we headed back to the hotel and grabbed our bags. As we fled for the train station under yet another minging bridge, wheely case clattering over the slabs, I turned to Kelly.

“So what would you give Birmingham out of ten?”

“I don’t know. Probably a four, but only because the Bullring is so impressive. What about you?”

I paused momentarily.

“Well, if we’d had a suite in the hotel instead, and we’d gone out for a Michelin starred meal, and when we got back Drew Barrymore had been reclining on our bed begging for a threesome, and she had talked you into it, and I then mysteriously, magically, lost two stone overnight I suppose it might just have got a three out of ten. But even then, even as I watched you and Drew nuzzling up to each other for the very first time, I still reckon in the back of my mind the whole experience would have been tarnished by me thinking ‘What the hell am I doing in Birmingham? It’s a shit hole.’”

Kelly frowned. Her expression said A simple ‘3 out of 10’ really would have been enough.

I couldn’t help it. It might be Britain’s second city, but it will now always be a steaming pile of number two to me.

100 Words: Young

My walk home passes the buzzing bars and restaurants by the canal. In summer, people materialise seemingly from nowhere; in winter, my town contains nowhere near so many people.

I encounter a tableau on the steps, four teenagers spotlit by sunlight. Glowing as if about to be photographed, perfect smiles, yet nobody’s pointing a camera at them.

I wonder if that’s how being young feels.

Not that I've entirely forgotten; minutes later a favourite song fills my headphones. I delight in singing along, far more enthusiastically than is necessary.

I’m easily ten years younger than I was ten years ago.

That Was The Week That Blogged #16

Thanks to everybody who emailed me or Tweeted at me this week with nominations for this. I really appreciate it, it makes my job an awful lot more difficult but also considerably more enjoyable. Keep up the good work!

TWTWTB is my weekly award to the three best things I've read in blogland in the previous week. Here are this week's winners:

1. Mountain Mary by Wendy House

"I fell in love with Mary. Not the love that hungers for sexual validation. Not a love that needed to be returned."

Gorgeous - small but perfectly formed, this post captured someone truly beautiful and some wonderful, still moments that happened between her and the narrator. I liked this one a lot.

2. Helpers by Professor B. Worm

"People often mistake the catatonic look in my eyes for intelligence and deep introspective thought, thusly assuming that I know everything about everything. Little do they know “that look” comes from the medications I take to prevent me from lifting my leg and pissing all over them in public."

Oh, but this is funny. Professor B. Worm illustrates just how easy it is to give out brilliant advice, and just how hard it is to watch people thank you effusively and then ignore the whole lot with almost perverse proficiency. On the rare occasions when I bother to dispense advice, this happens to me an awful lot.

3. Sisters - A Memory To Keep by Grumpy Young Lady

"In the big wooden bed they lie, curled like a closing quotation mark."

Another beautifully concise and precise pen portrait of a relationship between two women. This is very nicely done - nothing is overwrought, just enough detail, just enough left to the reader. In my limited experience writing like this is far harder than Grumpy Young Lady has made it look here.

Here's what you can do to support That Was The Week That Blogged. First, pop by and check all the winners out in full. Feel free to tell them I sent you, in fact it's practically compulsory.

Secondly, if you read (or write) a blog post you think would be a worthy winner next week, either comment here, drop me a mail or Tweet at me with the hashtag #TWTWTB. The best ones will be announced on the blog and on Twitter every Saturday.

Last of all of course, if you won this week: congratulations! Feel free to take the rather fetching picture at the top and copy it onto your sidebar. Of course, I won't be offended if you don't.

The MLS show

Last year there were times when my life felt a lot like a sitcom. Every day Mikey, Cornish Rob and I would hurtle through the factory gates and grab our usual seats on the funbus. Me always next to Mikey, Cornish Rob always the other side of the aisle, usually finishing off a long conference call with engineers with names like footballers – Dazza, Lozzer and Bazza. And, to complete the classic lineup, Donald Pleasence was always at the helm putting the fear of God everyone else on on the motorway, much like a cross between Robocop and whoever was driving the creepy black truck in Duel.

Meanwhile, at the back the three of us would talk all sorts of nonsense; I don’t think I’ve had a year in my life when I laughed so much. It didn’t seem to matter what we talked about, and perhaps it was just the euphoria of being free from work for another sixteen (count them, sixteen) hours, but everything seemed to be absolutely hilarious. Not just that, but I had a clear feeling that I was part of something, like I was in the sort of gang I was never anywhere cool enough to join at school.

Now things are different, this year seems more muted and I’m reminded that life is like a long-running TV show in plenty of ways. Your favourite characters can be ever-presents in the first couple of series and then they move on. They might get written out, perhaps they get their own spin-off or maybe they just get bored of the dialogue or the lack of development. This was all clearly illustrated to me a few weeks back when I reached the bus stop one morning to see Donald Pleasence’s familiar silver Mercedes there, all fancy seatbacks and traytables, humming beautifully. My heart sang, but at the same time I knew it felt like he was making a cameo appearance in my life.

“Long time no see.” I said as I went up the stairs.

“That’s your fault, not mine.” he replied, quick as a flash. But I could tell he was pleased to see me.

In the back of my mind I could almost see the live studio audience my life is filmed in front of applauding as they saw Donald first appear on the screen. And, in the back row, someone was undoubtedly leaning over to a friend and saying “This used to be much funnier when he was in it.” His friend probably then said “I know. Do you remember the episode with the emergency stop?” And I worry that they might be right.

The lunchtimes seem flat, too. Gemma has joined a gym and she’s talking about going three times a week, so before too long we may not have her round our little table every day, sharing the disappointments and tolerating the smut.

“You do totally look at my chest all the time.” she said at lunch today. “You’re not even subtle.”

“I do not! Anyway, you know how you said I forced you to go to Bageltopia yesterday and made you eat a ‘spicy Tijuana’ bagel, made just the way you like it?”

We’d all needed to go. It was the day after our annual salary review. We all needed a bagel.

“Yeah.”

“And you know how secretly you really enjoyed it?”

“Yeah. I'd been looking forward to it all morning.”

“Is that how you feel about me looking at your chest as well?”

“Oh, shut up.”

I was on to a loser, and everyone knew it. I said the only thing I could think of to rescue the situation, knowing as I did it that I sounded about twelve years old.

“Anyway, Iain does it too, you just don’t catch him as often.”

There was a pause while Gemma contemplatively munched on a solitary apple, part of her latest valiant attempt - running out of time and thwarted by bagel consumption - to slim into a bikini in time for her annual holiday.

“My sister said you should write some of those funny blogs like you did in the good old days.”

She went on to tell me what happened to her boyfriend Dave last week, when he was up a ladder setting up cameras for a traffic survey. He reached behind the ladder and felt something spongy, soft and disconcerting on his hands. Pulling them back he was horrified to find they were covered in pigeon shit. His mouth involuntarily opened in disgust, only for a pigeon passing overhead, with perfect comic timing, to take a humungous crap right into it.

Gemma's sister is spot on; there was a time when I would have gone to town on a story like that. And now? I don’t know. Before long Gemma may leave the cast as well, she might go and find a proper job rather than going to waste here with us updating spreadsheets nobody is interested in. Maybe one day, some time soon, the opening credits to an episode will say With special guest star Gemma and the audience will go crazy.

All shows go through this. New writers, new cast, new characters, new directions. I find myself scanning my life, wondering who the next major characters are going to be. Because it is a wonderful thing when somebody new appears out of nowhere and turns out to be significant; all my life, I've never stopped looking around for the next big thing. And, because I need to keep some sense of perspective, I remember that all these people are the latest in my life, but not necessarily the last. Because there was a time when my funbus trips were spent talking to Claire - or Fiona, a gobby Scouser I took great delight in tormenting with filth at half-eight every morning. There was a time when my funniest trip to work was the time that Fiona and I were terrorised by a demonic wasp and I nearly ended up on her lap, which is a place that only the most pernicious wasp could motivate me to go anywhere near.

There was a time when my lunches were spent with Debra and Helen, rather than Gemma and Iain. And we used to have such fun, so much fun, just different fun. Thinking about it now is like watching the early series of a long-running programme; thinking I can’t believe I used to dress that way or God, I didn’t know anything back then or worse. The last time I saw Helen was at the party for my fifth wedding anniversary. “I love the stuff you write.” she said to me, after introducing me to her lovely new boyfriend Steve, “But it’s sad to read some of the stuff about you going to lunch with Gemma, because that used to be me.”

I knew exactly what she meant, even if I’m pleased for her that she escaped our office, got a wonderful new job and a lovely spin-off with Steve. And now they have a joint production, and he’s called Liam, and I know she couldn’t be happier. Even if I do miss the stories about her cousin with the imaginary boyfriend who nobody has ever met - including, strangest of all, her cousin. Or that time she had the most romantic stalker of all time and deleted all his mails because she was too chicken to ask him to stop. Really, he stalked her so sweetly I half wanted to tell her to give him a chance (a smile from you makes my day he said, in his fifteenth unsolicited and unresponded-to email on one particularly forlorn week).

Sometimes this year it feels a little like the story arc in my life has gone somewhat astray and I’m not sure where it’s all going. Because deep down, however much I play to the gallery (and I do that a lot) I’m the audience that matters most. And even I think the new characters they’ve introduced, like the grumpy driver with grey hair and a hearing aid who shouts at me for carrying my morning cappuccino onto the bus, just aren’t as good as the old ones. But I’m not ready for the end credits yet, though, so let’s see what happens next. Stay tuned if you want, I’ll keep you posted. I’ll still be here, either way.

While the cat's away

The times when you notice that you’re lonely are the funny times, bits and pieces, the beginnings and ends of things.

Disliking your own company, you have done a good job of filling your time this week. There are people to see, dinners to have and places to go. You could almost feel like they were a succession of normal evenings and generally you do, right until the point when you get back to the flat. Normally you would say "get back home" but home doesn’t feel like the right word on nights like that, because your home is elsewhere.

Instead, you are in a flat that doesn’t look like yours, all huge rooms, long straight lines, empty glasses and cups as far as you can see. It's as full of detritus as it is devoid of company. It looks as if you’ve had a party and not yet cleared up and that's half right; you’ve not cleared up yet, but it’s hardly been a party.

It’s not just space that is altered but time too. Everything lasts longer; left to your own devices, the nights stretch on for ages. Bedtime has been moved to the small hours by unpopular demand, and a morning without rituals feels too much like the night before, feels too much like the morning before that.

The times that you notice that you're lonely are when you realise that somebody pressed the mute button on your life when you weren't looking. The morning routine is conducted in almost-silence. You can hear the thud and click of closing the bedroom window and flipping the catch, loud as a hammer. At the start of the week there is no beautiful, cautionary voice ticking you off for complaining at the radio. By midweek you don't have the heart to complain at the radio anyway. By the end of the week the radio is not even switched on.

The blinds in the living room stay drawn for days. You are home too late and in too much of a hurry in the mornings to lift them. People walking past must think that both of you are away, on holiday perhaps. Would that it were true.

You notice you are lonely on the late trains returning from London. Still in your suit in the sweltering heat, you look like somebody with nothing much in his life to go back for, which happens to be true. But as you look round at your fellow passengers in the same boat, cruelly pinned to the tatty backs of their seats by the blades of evening sunlight, you know your solidarity is false. You aren't like them, you've been parachuted into that demographic but for a limited time only. And you will be rescued, just not yet. So you start the journey lonely and end it guilty that you've patronised so many people who have to do this day in, day out.

When the woman opposite asks you if you could wake her up when the train pulls into Swindon, you feel sad about having to tell her that you are getting off a few stops before.

You have got stupidly attached to the gigantic spider scuttling round the bathtub and you can't bring yourself to kill it. It's the only flatmate you have. You have a nagging suspicion that, given another week on your own, you might wind up talking to it.

In the dead of night when the final light has gone out, you sleep on her side of the bed, your glasses folded and resting on the unfinished paperback she left behind. It nearly, slightly, helps.

[This piece was published in The Pygmy Giant.]

That Was The Week That Blogged #15

Does anyone remember that I used to do this? Well, I've decided to start it again. It will be a bit slimmed down and stand alone without those long meandering intros I used to do, but the principle is still the same - recognising my favourite blog posts each week.

TWTWTB is my weekly award to the three best things I've read in blogland in the previous week. Here are this week's winners:

1. Memories of my Father by The Secret Life of an Unknown Housewife

"I remember my sister and sister-in-law searching frantically through drawers as he lay dead, removing letters to his mistress that we did not want our mother to find."

I loved this affecting but unaffected portrait of a complicated family relationship. Understated, not at all sentimental and very nicely done.

2. 7 impressionists on my life (Part 2) by The Eternal Worrier

"The fridge fitted in quite nicely in-fact, with our second hand TV that you needed to turn on 45 minutes before you wanted to watch anything. The TV screen would be snow at first, until gradually a picture would form."

I'm a sucker for well-written melancholy, and this man does it better than almost anybody I read. This is sort of (and I hope he won't mind me saying this) like an upmarket version of Up The Junction.

3. Me & Cuz by Living Shallow, Living Well

"That was the summer I dated my cousin.

Not literally, of course. That's gross."

I'm not sure if this was creepy, touching, sad or funny. I think that makes it all four, and brilliant. Well worth checking out.

Here's what you can do to support That Was The Week That Blogged. First, pop by and check all the winners out in full. Feel free to tell them I sent you, in fact it's practically compulsory.

Secondly, if you read (or write) a blog post you think would be a worthy winner next week, either comment here, drop me a mail or Tweet at me with the hashtag #TWTWTB. The best ones will be announced on the blog and on Twitter every Saturday.

Last of all of course, if you won this week: congratulations! Feel free to take the rather fetching picture at the top and copy it onto your sidebar. Of course, I won't be offended if you don't.

The Vaseline story

One of the most unfortunate things about life is that often, the Venn diagram showing the people we are attracted to and the people who are attracted to us simply resembles a circle waving desperately at a much smaller circle across a yawning divide. And the smaller circle is usually full of freaks.

We men have found a way round this, namely that we talk ourselves into being attracted to anybody who has even a passing interest in us. That way, the Venn diagram looks more like a tiny circle at the centre of an indiscriminately huge circle. Bullseye. My friend Ivor summed this up eloquently once during a visit to a nightclub by saying. "You might as well go ugly early in the evening, because you’re sure as hell going to end up going ugly later on." It’s a charming principle though regrettably not one that actually works. And believe me, there’s little more crushing than being rejected by somebody you don’t even really fancy.

It’s tougher for women, and nobody embodies this more than my friend Eleanor. She has a type of man that she likes — she is drawn to big, bearlike men; funny, motivated, passionate, political, hugely intelligent men. You’ll have to take my word for it that such a man is no less than she deserves.

Fate, however, appeared to have different ideas, because the men that were attracted to Eleanor, for a long time, appeared to only have one dreadful thing in common. Not a poorly concealed enthusiasm for the musical works of Barry Manilow, a fanatical yen for Morris dancing or a diary full of weekends spent re-enacting medieval battles. Those kinds of shortcomings might not be visible right from the start the way, say, a lazy eye would be, but you don’t have to spend much time with people like that to work out that there’s something wrong with them. The moment you shake the metaphorical box you hear the disconcerting rattle that tells you that all is not entirely intact inside. Eleanor, on the other hand, attracted men with one very particular defect, which quickly became apparent, normally in an unpleasant and embarrassing way.

The sort of man who went for Eleanor wanted to subject her to anal sex.

The first time it happened, it was easy to write it off as bad luck. It wasn’t just that the man in question wanted it, although that was apparently bad enough in itself, it was more that he wouldn’t stop going on about it to the extent where their beautiful friendship had to end. Nobody thought any more of it than that at that stage. It was just a comic interlude in Eleanor’s love life; it happened hot on the heels of the man at work where the sexual chemistry had simmered for weeks only for him to turn out to have a miniscule penis which, in Eleanor’s own words, "came out after every stroke".

The second time, we all just assumed it was a coincidence; the rock guitarist she met through work. She developed a fondness for his band at roughly the same time that he revealed his even greater fondness for getting his brown wings. Of course, Eleanor was having none of it or, more accurately, he was. He never got round to his difficult third album or her especially difficult third orifice, and they went their separate ways.

After the third successive man turned out to be an evangelist for sodomy, Eleanor declared it officially beyond a joke. As it turned out, that was a pity because, for the rest of us, that was when the situation started to become amusing. The endless conversations over a “white rabbit” cocktail –- a blend of chocolate, cream, vodka and dreams — upstairs at Café Iguana were perhaps less so.

"Why? Why do they all want to do that? What is it about me that makes men think ‘anal sex’?"

I looked at Eleanor. It was not a question I had ever anticipated being asked. She was certainly pleasant enough that you wouldn’t necessarily want her to be facing in the opposite direction. She had lovely long legs but I had never really considered approaching them from that angle. She was a classic English rose without any hint of hidden filth. The more I thought about it, the more I was stumped: why did everybody want to bugger my friend Eleanor?

Regrettably, it became a bit of a routine after that. Eleanor would date a man in a flurry of activity, there would be excitement that this might be a serious long-term prospect but it was always marred with a degree of trepidation about the inevitable denouement. And inevitable I’m afraid it was; I lost count of the number of times I would have a phone conversation with Eleanor that went something like this:

"You haven’t mentioned that guy you were seeing for a while. How’s that going?"

"We broke up."

"Oh. Anal sex?"

"I don’t want to talk about it."

Of course, all runs of bad luck have to come to an end (unless, for instance, they culminate in you being hit by a bus) and Eleanor’s terminated when she met Mark, a slightly older man at work. He was suave, he was debonair and - perhaps most importantly - he was experienced.

"I can’t tell you how nice it is to go out with a grown up man for a change. It’s so different!"

"Really?" I said. Speaking as somebody who was very far from being a grown-up, or indeed a man, I felt quite protective about my fellow muddling-through-mid-20s fuck-ups, even if all the undesirable perverts Eleanor had run into were somewhat letting the side down for the rest of us.

"Definitely. We go for meals, instead of just going to the pub. In restaurants. I mean, can you imagine?"

Actually, at the time, I couldn’t. She interrupted me musing about this to continue with her torrent of enthusiasm.

"He has his own place, too. I haven’t even stayed over yet, because we’re taking it slowly. Taking it slowly! It’s so refreshing dating somebody this way."

"Anal sex?" I said. These two words followed by a question mark seemed to feature in a lot of my conversations with Eleanor.

"Not a sausage, so to speak." She said. "It’s because he’s older. I think he’s sewn all his wild oats and done all that stuff already. It’s such a relief."

At the end of the call I hung up and reflected on how lucky Eleanor was, with only a small nagging worry in the back of my mind. I didn’t hear from her for well over a month after that, but tried not to worry. I rationalised away the radio silence; it stood to reason that she was off living the high life in restaurants with her sophisticated older man, and was far too busy to meet me in the greasy café at lunchtimes to collaborate on the Times Two crossword and scrounge cigarettes off me. I didn’t mind a brief spell alone with my frothy coffee in a plastic beaker, but when I did see her next it was an all together more dejected Eleanor joining me on the cracked leatherette banquette.

"What happened with Mark?"

"We’re not together any more."

My better nature fought with every sinew to say something flowery and supportive, and failed. In my defence I was a lot younger then, though I have a nasty suspicion that I’d still react the same way now. Besides, I had a feeling the script had almost been written for me, and my next line was set in stone.

"Anal sex?"

"It’s worse than that."

"How can it be worse than that?"

She proceeded to tell me the story, thereby demonstrating that it could indeed be far worse. What happened was that one night, after work, Eleanor and Mark decided to give the restaurants a miss for once and, instead, head out for a few drinks. A few drinks turned into a few more drinks, which turned into a lot of drinks and mutated into Eleanor being invited back to Mark’s bachelor pad.

"It was the first time he’d ever invited me back. I was so excited; I thought it really marked a milestone in our relationship. This is it, I thought, he’s going to take this to the next stage."

How right she was; Eleanor didn’t remember much more about the night of passion at Mark’s, but the events of the following morning were to remain deeply etched in her memory. She woke up prone, on her front, with a mouth like a nuclear winter and an apocalyptic headache to match. But what was worse was a nagging, moist sensation in a very worrying place where moistness really should not be.

Confused, nauseous and with a growing sense of apprehension she looked over her shoulder. There was Mark, the sophisticated man of her dreams. Those dreams would previously have involved him returning to bed from the kitchen bearing a nice cup of tea and maybe some smoked salmon and scrambled eggs. They were unceremoniously shattered almost immediately, because to her aghast horror there were no scrambled eggs and there was certainly no tea. Instead, he was crouched over her in a decidedly sinister manner, holding a tub of Vaseline in one hand and diligently applying it to her posterior with the other.

She looked him in the eye.

He stared back blankly, as if her regaining consciousness had just never featured in his plans at all. Her sphincter contracting in record time, she sprang to her feet, threw her clothes on and left in total silence. In fairness to him he didn’t even attempt the tired old chestnut of "It’s not how it looks" or "I can explain everything." Though, as I heard the story, I did find myself wishing he’d given it his best shot, if only to see whether he came up with anything creative.

That is always the thing that has vexed me most about the whole sorry saga was that we never did find out what Mark’s Plan B, so much so I was never sure he had one. But worse still, did he even have a Plan A? Was he hoping she would awaken to discover that she actually enjoyed being anally violated by stealth? Or, worse still, was his ambition that she would remain unconscious throughout the whole dastardly deed? If it was the latter, it didn’t say an awful lot for his dimensions or, for that matter, his technique.

We never did solve that riddle; Mark got married not long after that and, last I heard, he had invited Eleanor to stay with him and his wife abroad, which suggests that his capacity for perversion and his unbridled optimism remained undimmed. Eleanor on the other hand? I caught up with her in the process of writing this to do a bit of fact checking and to my horror there was one error she wanted to correct.

"I did fancy a guy – a lot actually — who was into historical re-enactment!" she said. "Oh, he was lovely. Stop laughing."

She is still searching for her bearlike, funny, passionate, political man and I have no doubt that she will find him. But while she’s waiting for him to make an appearance she’s off on a date soon with a ginger bloke she’s met off the Internet. It’s good to keep your hand in, if nothing else. I have reluctantly given her my blessing, but suggested that she shouldn’t come crying to me if he too shows an unnatural interest in her bottom. When I gave her this advice I nearly said, "Don’t take this the wrong way." But, now I that I come to think of it, there seems little danger of that.

[This piece was published in the first issue of Hippocampus Magazine.]

Saying goodbye

There was a very long time when I thought I would never know anybody who was on the same page as me. The same book seemed far-fetched, the same shelf ambitious. In reality everybody seemed to be at the very opposite end of a gigantic library, humming and dimly lit, as if I was separated from all the people I had met by the rigid tyranny of the Dewey decimal system. I didn't think that would ever change, then she showed up.

When she did, all those questions we perpetually ask like "is this right?" and "how good is good enough?" were answered at a stroke by virtue of their becoming meaningless. To my astonishment I found my own piece of what I previously thought was just a cliché, the one we are taunted with in books and films and long for all our lives.

Now we are not just on the same page but two complicit halves of a single word, with not even the fig leaf of a hyphen between us. It's all so seemingly seamless; she completes my sentences and finishes my jokes, at least all the ones she hasn't already stolen and passed off as her own to all my friends. I don't mind, how could I? How could I mind her doing anything? Anyway, sometimes she lets me finish her chocolate, at least any that I haven't already stolen. Between us we seem to have developed a language only we can speak. When I have bad days, knowing that gets me through them. On the good days I rejoice in the fact. Often we add new words to it together, and those are the very best days of all.

The thing nobody tells you, though, is just how hard this makes goodbyes.

The little ones I can manage; her endearing wave at the front door every morning, the wave like nobody else's, or the "have a good time" I say (and mostly mean) deserted before a girls' night out. I have learned, too, to deal with the words you have to say before a long weekend and the way you can't help but feel. But I still really struggle with longer goodbyes than that. It feels ungrateful to say so when there are so many people who would like nothing more than to have somebody to say goodbye to, or are trying to come to terms with having said the last and longest of goodbyes.

Next week she will be a continent away. I wouldn’t say the bed will be too big - I don’t believe there’s any such thing as a bed that‘s too big - and the frying pan won’t be too wide, because it will be a miracle if I use one at all. But the evenings will be too long, the route to the bathroom inconveniently short and direct, and there will be a marked decline in the quality and quantity of the dialogue.

We’ve never really done goodbyes. When we met we lived miles apart and our whole life was a quest to spend as much time together as possible. Every Friday I would run out of the factory gates and race straight to the train station. My weekend, my life, couldn't begin until I saw her face, there on the other side of the ticket barrier. There is little like that flash of recognition when you spot the single most important thing in your existence from a distance. Even now, if we are meeting after work I always see her at the split second she comes into view. I seem to know she is there almost before I see she is there. It’s no great talent, just second nature to me now.

I remember, too, the creeping dread of the Sunday afternoon and our efforts to make Sunday nights last an eternity. They culminated in her driving home, sleep deprived, far too early on a Monday morning. And then we moved in together, and the goodbyes got smaller and less significant, at least for a while.

We both knew it couldn’t last forever, and disaster finally struck when I had to go to India for a week with work. A car came to pick me up at seven in the morning and in a near fatal error, because we couldn’t bear to say goodbye, she accompanied me to the airport. So we ended up stuck in a grubby basement in Gatwick for an hour on grotty plastic chairs surrounded by the sleeping and the drunk. We desperately tried not to cry, we desperately tried to spend that time memorising each other‘s faces for later on, knowing all the while that parting was inevitable. It was one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had. Pain isn’t like pleasure; drawing it out can only ever be classed as torture.

At the end, I sent her away while queuing for Departures because it was too much. After the hardest goodbye of all, she walked off towards the stairs and I turned to face the queue. I promised I wouldn’t look round, and then I broke my promise to myself just as I knew I would the moment I made it. I looked round, and the only consolation was that unless she had eyes in the back of her head (as I had long suspected) she couldn’t have seen me crying.

“Did you pack this bag yourself, sir?”

“Yes.”

“Could anyone have interfered with it?”

“No.”

I didn’t know I was lying. She had left tiny folded-up notes hidden in my hand luggage, in my suitcase, in my washbag, around a dozen of them. It took me days to find them all, every day a fresh new miniature heartbreak.

Later on, I got to my hotel room in Bangalore, miles from anyone I knew and hours from anyone who would be awake, right at the perimeter of that metaphorical library again. The rain was softly dusting the trees outside with mist and the traffic was still audible, even though it was six in the morning. I checked my email to find an attachment from her. After she’d left me she had gone into London and she had sent me a tinny video clip, taken on her digital camera. She was sitting at one of our favourite cafés in London.

“Hello.” she said, eyes still a bit puffy. It was odd to hear her voice, knowing she was almost certainly asleep back home. “Look, it’s Marylebone High Street.” she said, with that almost-jaunty tone in her voice that I’d heard so much of in the run up to my journey, the tone of putting a brave face on things. Someone had to be the strong one, after all, and it was never going to be me. From the crack in it, this was the closest I’d ever seen her come to failure.

The camera panned round and I took in the view, knowing that I would have given anything to have been there instead.

“Here’s the seat I wish you were at.” she said, and the camera jerkily homed in on an empty chair. And there in my room, after stabbing at the pause button, I cried for what felt like a very long time.

The packing is taking place around me as I type. There is a general chatter of deciding what bag to take as hand luggage, what the weather will be like over there, and whether she’ll have enough changes of clothes. I know full well, even as I tune her out to finish writing this, that in a day’s time I would give my right arm to hear just a fraction of this background noise. It’s still all chirpiness here, for now at least, despite my knowing that this is not a Sunday night that will stretch into Monday and beyond. I’m not allowed to say anything glum - we are still putting a brave face on things - but I know how I will feel tomorrow when the doorbell rings, and I wouldn’t wish it on anybody.

Even having said that, I will remember that grainy video clip when I come home to an empty flat on Monday night and settle in for a week of trying to keep a lot of things at bay. Because I have had relationships with people where, at the same party, in the same bed or even on the same tenancy agreement, they felt like they were on the other side of the world. And I would trade them all - have traded them all - for the reward of being with somebody who feels as if they are always with you irrespective of how far away they might be settling down to sleep that night, however much I might wish for a world without goodbyes.

Out of context

I enter his empire nearly every morning at about twenty past eight. I am well aware that he is master of all he surveys - from the newspapers, through the undesirable plastic wrapped magazines full of disappointing breasts, to the bewildering array of crisps I thought they stopped making years ago. Without examining the best before dates on the packets carefully, I can’t be sure that they didn’t.

Standing behind the counter, he is in complete control. The shirt always looks flashy. He has a tiny go-faster stripe carefully carved into one eyebrow, and a tuft of hair cultivated beneath his bottom lip. Most mornings, he nonchalantly flicks through the latest tabloid, with the shocks and disgraces laid out in front of him, all primary colours and large bold print.

Nearly every morning at about twenty past eight I hand him a pound coin and leave with my newspaper. I don’t think he’s a morning person, so we have an arrangement. I don’t remove my headphones or try to make conversation with him and in return he lets me jump the queue. It works superbly for both of us, so I sneak in front of the gaggle of schoolgirls too busy shouting at each other to pay for their Red Bull and scratchcards, finish the transaction and I’m on my way. I have, after all, a bus to catch.

Last week I was heading home from work and I passed him as I strolled past the shops in town. It was one of those gorgeous evenings where if I’d had someone to go to the pub with I would have been there already. Seeing him was like the moment when you first see a newsreader, out from underneath the desk. The sudden revelation that he had legs was followed by the jarring realisation that his top and bottom halves didn’t match. The shirt was still flashy but the tracksuit trousers below had seen better days. Not only that, but even on their best days they can’t have looked like much.

Just as some people look fantastic frozen in photographs and awful when they open their mouth, he didn’t look right walking around outdoors. Out of context, there in the daylight as if for the first time ever, he looked timid and tired. His eyes were sad and his gait was apologetic, I don’t know what for.

I’m not convinced this was all about context, because it’s also partly about understanding. In my hurry every morning I never stopped to see him properly. It never occurred to me that he’s probably far too young to be doing a job like that out of choice. It’s much easier to see him as happy in his kingdom than it is to wonder if he’s trapped in the prison of a family business that he doesn’t even want.

Because I’m selfish, I also wondered whether I look that defeated at the end of a working day. I may well do.

The next day, I entered his empire at twenty past eight and I gave him a pound like I nearly always do. The girls bickering at the counter didn’t know that the previous evening had ever taken place, and nor did he. Nobody watching would have done. But I knew, and I remembered, and I made sure I thanked him. I made sure I really meant it, too.