100 Words: New toys

We turn up early so my dad can show us his new toy. It’s parked outside, diminutive, battleship grey. Even I am slightly surprised by the red scorpion decal on the bonnet.

Near the motorway, he presses a button on the dashboard, marked "SPORT". The vehicle approaches warp speed.

Later, Kelly describes it as like being on a fairground ride, only more dangerous.

"Why did you buy such a fast car?" I ask. He beams. I somehow know his answer before he says it.

"You should see the looks on the spotty boy racers’ faces when the lights turn green."

[Suggested by The fearless threader.]

100 Words: The Elephant 6 Recording Company

We were the only people at the gig who’d heard of the band, the record label logo was on her t-shirt.

My girlfriend let me talk to her - back then, I had to ask. Back then was different.

We shared a train carriage home, I wasn’t allowed to talk to her again. But we kept bumping into each other at gigs. My girlfriend wasn’t at all of them - eventually, my girlfriend wasn’t at anything.

She sends me a message from her travels, asks me to write a hundred words about the record label.

Instead, I write them about her.

[Suggested by Sarah. I'm glad I asked her about her t-shirt all those years ago.]

100 Words: Rain

Her father and brother took it surprisingly well when she dropped out of university, bringing me home with her. I was 24.

We painted her bedroom ceiling red, badly. On our backs, it was a canopy of crimson clouds.

Her brother moved out; when we had guests, we stayed in his old room. The rain kept time against the skylight.

Later, I left under a different kind of cloud. Her father chased the van down the drive; I owed him money.

All I took away was my clothes, my teddy bear, and the memory of the rain on that skylight.

[Suggested by Philip.]

100 Words: Office politics

There was a time when our CEO would send an email most weeks. We soon cracked the code.

"Craig is leaving to pursue opportunities elsewhere." meant Craig's been sacked.

"Following long discussions with Craig, we've agreed that the role no longer fits his career aspirations." meant Craig's been sacked. His pay-off is more than you'll earn in two years.

We’ll never be the subject of proclamations like that. Eventually we’ll skulk out unlamented by the seniors, have a modest leaving do in a nearby pub.

The payouts dried up anyway; nowadays our CEO only sends a mail if somebody’s died.

[Suggested by Alyson.]

100 Words: Similes

I realise that I've started thinking in similes.

One came to me last week at platform 4, waiting for my train again, surrounded by passengers I'll never know.

I found myself thinking that other people are like the lit front rooms of basement flats I used to see on evening walks through leafy North Oxford, all those summers ago.

Briefly, in passing, they all seem pleasant places to spend time, but you have no chance of seeing anywhere near enough to be certain.

Not a perfect simile, but it'll do.

After all, there's nothing quite like a really good simile.

100 Words: Film and digital

Digital photography is the eugenics of images.

Anything out of focus can be destroyed. You need never again see a bad photo of yourself, eyes shut or mouth open. We can all be thinner, prettier, more sympathetically lit than we really are.

It’s Stepford perfection though; we can’t be real unless we’re defined by our mistakes too. We’re not beautiful without our uglier moments.

A world where everyone looks amazing all the time is a world of white noise where I don’t want to live.

For something truly perfect, you need to look at film: higher highs, lower lows, lifelike.

[100 Words is back. Please comment, email or Tweet at me with the #100Words hashtag with suggested topics for future 100 Word posts. Thanks to Alyson for this one.]

Lettuce and Dick

What did you learn at work yesterday? Here's what I learned; small changes can have big effects on group dynamics. Iain was out of the office sounding posh and knowledgeable at an industry event. He's good at that, he's got the accent for it. You don't need to be technical if you have the accent, all those engineers and propeller-heads who understand complicated stuff like networks and protocols just nod and back down in the face of his plummy, perfect diction. 

I, since you were wondering, don't quite have the accent. 

So it was just Gemma, Manga Dave and me for lunch, and since the sun was glorious outside we decided to throw caution to the winds and leave the office, strolling down the long straight dangerous road to the Other Building. It's an ugly walk, past the burger van which does an inexplicably roaring trade, mainly to the lumpy anglers sitting fruitlessly next to what is either a tiny lake or a massive pond. I've never worked out which, but I'd put money on it containing more condoms than fish either way. After that you have to find a safe place to cross the main road, playing Frogger, dodging the gloomy suburban drivers. They generally look as if they can't decide between heading for a DIY superstore or just ending it all. I can sympathise; I too would find that a tricky decision. Bracknell specialises in the sort of people who were waiting desperately for the Bluetooth headset to be invented - not because they ever planned to use one, but because it makes it harder for folk like you and I to figure out that something is not quite right with them. 

The Other Building is like a five year old child's idea of a big whizzy office. It's a horrible cacophonous open plan cheap plastic adventure playground full of people who genuinely feel that it's the nerve centre of all corporate life everywhere. It has no corridors, but wherever you look you can see people having corridor conversations all the same. But it does have one thing going for it, and that's the canteen. 

The canteen in our building is manned by chefs who seem to believe that cigar ash is the magical something special which transforms thousand island dressing into something called "Cajun sauce". By contrast the canteen in the Other Building contains a swanky grill bar where they cook things from scratch (that mystical ingredient so in vogue these days) in front of your very eyes. It's a sign of how starved we are, in more ways than one, that this is such a novelty. You can always spot the grill bar because it's surrounded by a disaffected throng of workers moaning about how long everything takes and longing to hear the ping of a microwave. Some people. 

Once ensconced, Gemma, Manga Dave and I got to talking about the wild reckless years at university and I realised just how keenly I felt Iain's absence. Dave is fresh out of university, Gemma can still remember it. For me, it's all just sepia-tinted memories of things that were never that reckless in the first place. "Oh, I remember my first all-nighter in the college library, and the time we all had that icing sugar fight in Eric's room" would have sounded even more pathetic said out loud than it does sitting here fey on the page. I was struck by how thoroughly ancient I felt, roughly at the point where I just about stopped myself before saying "of course, there were no mobile phones back in those days."

Before Manga Dave joined our merry band I could just about delude myself that Gemma and I were about the same age, but that lunchtime I realised that it was exactly that, a delusion. And maybe it was paranoia, but the occasional look from both of them seemed to resemble the expression you wear in the company of a grandparent. The kind of grandparent, in fact, who spends their days rocking back and forth by an open fire, swathed in a tartan blanket, dribbling ever so slightly and talking at great length about how nobody has respect for anyone or anything any more in this so called "modern age". 

I suppose this is the shape of things to come, which wasn't at all a pleasant epiphany. In fact it quite put me off my tuna nicoise, which was a pity because it had taken the nice man at the grill station the best part of ten minutes to put it together. I wonder at what stage it starts to become a little creepy or sad to hang out with people like Dave and Gemma, when I should succumb to the inevitable and start going to classical music concerts and National Trust properties at weekends. Admit defeat, listen to the Archers. I don't feel ready, but I don't like the alternatives much better. 

After lunch we walked back to our office in the brilliant sun, tailed by our long stripey shadows. Soon, of course, it will be gone. We are all beginning to talk about how much we're looking forward to the Christmas party but we're not ready to talk about Christmas, and we see no contradiction in that. It feels like summer's very last hurrah, a fact reinforced by a message from Mikey later that afternoon. "Come to the Allied after work. It's the final day of summer. I've decided." (Mikey's pronouncements always have the ring of a papal decree about them, only he's less fallible.)

I felt glum listening to Gemma and Dave chatting away on the route back about things young people like, like Gossip Girl and happy slapping, so I decided to lift the mood the only way I know how, by resorting to filth. After all, they'd never see through that, it's what they've come to expect. 

"Did you hear that Phil said something last week that was disgusting even by my standards?"

"What was that?" said Dave. 

"Well, you know the girl in your team that sits next to you? She used to work for Iain a few years back, and Phil is convinced that Iain's got a soft spot for her. Apparently last week she went off to the toilet and when she came back past Iain's desk Phil sent him an instant message."

"What did it say?"

"Well, you know what Phil is like. Apparently it said something like You love that, don't you mate. You want to lick the last drops off her lettuce."

Both Gemma and Dave groaned in disgust. In my book that's worth twice as many points as any laugh. 

"Jesus, that's rank." said Dave. 

"Even I thought it was rank, I've never heard it called that before. I guess it would have to be a baby gem though, right? And drops of what, vaginal vinaigrette? Come to think of it, I think I've got their first album."

"I never know whether you come up with this stuff on the spot." said Dave as we rounded the corner, the office coming into view. "I can't tell whether it's rehearsed so I don't know whether to give you props."

There's the age gap in a nutshell right there. Manga Dave could use the word "props" without seeming like a tool. 

"That 'I've got their first album' line is a running joke." said Gemma. "He uses that all the time."

"Make the most of it, Dave. I'm slightly funny for the first three months, I'm okay for the next few months, and then... Gemma, how long did it take before you'd heard all my jokes twice and were sick of me?"

"About a year." said Gemma. "The last straw was when you kept going on about my sister." It would have hurt, but her eyes were kind. I wasn't entirely joking when I said I was tiresome, but she wasn't entirely serious when she agreed. Days like yesterday can hang precariously on fine distinctions like that.

I had planned to turn over a new leaf, but my best intentions were shot to pieces later that afternoon when we all heard Manga Dave on a conference call with a man named Dick. After that, it was open season; credit to him though, he managed to keep a straight face on the phone which almost certainly would have been beyond me. 

"So, did Dick give you a good probing?"

"Ha ha, very funny."

"No really, did you get a grip of Dick by the end of the call?"

Dave gave the exasperated look of somebody who knows he has at least another five minutes of this to put up with. I was disappointed by that - people aren't supposed to figure me out that quickly, but Dave is a smart cookie. 

"Did you find Dick a bit of a handful?" said Iain, back from London for the afternoon and probably feeling like he'd never been away.

"I knew you'd be on a call with him." I said. "Even before you spoke you clearly had Dick on the tip of your tongue."

"And is this the first time you've come into contact with Dick?" said Iain. If anything, he might have been enjoying proceedings even more than me.

"Yes, as it happens." said Dave wearily, fast running out of patience. At that point I started to wonder whether Dave was more corporate than I'd given him credit for. Perhaps we should be more careful around him.

"Anyway, Iain went to a boys' school too. I bet he's very au fait with Dicks of all shapes and sizes." he continued. 

"Nah." I said. "I've worked with Iain for years now. He definitely doesn't know Dick."

Everybody laughed, and I could tell that Dave was mentally awarding me those props he was talking about earlier. Just another day of puerile banter on what had been officially declared the last day of the summer of 2010. But I was the only one thinking, in the back of my mind, that I've told all those jokes a dozen times and more. I could do them in my sleep, I probably have. Maybe I was that afternoon. But eventually they will all realise that and get bored, and want something more which perhaps I can't provide. And then one day after that, the oldest swinger in town, maybe I'll get bored too. And what, I wonder, happens then?

That Was The Week That Blogged #25

First things first, thanks to everybody who nominated a blog post this week. There were very few of you; so few in fact that I felt a bit uncomfortable that I was almost selecting winners from the bunch of blogs I read as a matter of course. If I get a similar number of comments, nominations etc. this week then it will be the last week I do TWTWTB for a little while. Not complaining, not throwing a hissy fit, just explaining how things are. So if you like it and you want it to continue please support it. If not, never mind. Maybe I'll do some more 100 Word blog posts at the weekend, or try something else. Maybe I'll write fiction. I don't know.

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

1. Secret Wishes by Tiptilted

"I would have difficulty remembering his face without photographs. The shape of him, his presence, it has all faded to a haze, a space I can't see the edges of any more, but never can stop feeling the emptiness of it."

This is a small but perfectly formed picture of grief. Kiz writes beautifully here about loss and remembering, saying just enough to pierce you without going overboard and heading into schmaltz or mournful posturing. It makes me think of how we remember people, all the pieces of information which in time become our version of reality when we think about everybody we really miss. And they don't have to be dead for you to do that and be struck by it. If I focus my mind, I can recall a particular laugh, or running jokes in emails, or long phone conversations about nothing much which feel like they might never end - even though looking back I know they did and that they were always going to. Try it yourself; it makes it remarkably easy to cherish what you have. And then be grateful, like I am, that reading Kiz's words gave you back that insight.

2. Teacup diary entries by spiral bound

"There is a corner in the storage area of the staffroom at the library where all of our Christmas books are kept until the Festive Season begins. The shelf is a mess of red and green spines shoved higgledy-piggledy. Even though today is the 16th of September I lingered."

I liked this so much I overlooked the glaring typo (which I'm sure you'll track down, too). I often wish I could write this sort of thing - a lovely series of short, keenly observed vignettes of people and situations. Writing like this creates a fabulous sense of space around it, you sense that there is so much you aren't being told and wish you were. It's almost like it has been distilled rather than abridged from something considerably longer. Poetic in the best sense (so much more so than many people's attempts to write what they think is poetry but is essentially bad prose) this is calm, still and very much sort of wonderful. Oh, and I love the ending. I almost forgot to say.

3. Battle Lines by 52 Seductions

"It occurs to me during this time that we argue like this in complete safety. When we were first together, each row carried the risk of a break-up, and I used to feel like I was fighting on two sides at once: to protect my own interests, and save our togetherness. Now, that danger’s gone. We’re not going to split up, not over this, not over anything. And that leaves us in a terrible bind."

Doing blog awards like this has been very good for me. It has challenged my prejudices. Because I pick things based on how they are written, rather than who has written them, and I award them to posts rather than blogs. In the past that means I have occasionally given TWTWTB to bloggers who I personally don't much like, or posts that aren't representative of their writers. The former definitely isn't true here, I'm sure that Betty (who writes the 52 Seductions) is just lovely. But this blog challenges a lot of my prejudices. For a start, I am ill-disposed to anybody who has a publisher interested in their stuff or who happens to mention in their comments that somebody has optioned the film rights. That's not their problem or fault, it's entirely mine; the politics of envy in action.

More to the point, the central theme of Betty's blog isn't really the sort of thing that floats my boat. It details Betty's and her husband's fifty-two weekly attempts across the course of a year to seduce one another in new and unexpected ways. If that's your sort of thing, you'll no doubt love the entire blog and eagerly devour the whole lot. Personally, despite having a weak spot for smut I really don't want to read about sex. The words "penis" or "clitoris" in a post are likely to send me scurrying away elsewhere in next to no time, and if you're the same you may stop reading this now. I'm not sure I'd blame you for that.

Anyway, that doesn't change the fact that Betty is a superb writer and this post is a great example of her at her absolute best; a forensic portrait of how couples argue and simultaneously how much and how little those disagreements actually mean. She makes interesting points about how couples fight within a comfort zone. She makes me think about those power plays and games within my own relationship, also very stable but not without incident. And she also paints pictures with real skill; cider in a plastic glass, the hush of a quiet night on a dark beach, the inevitable and touching reconciliation. All depicted with talent to spare, and not a penis or a clitoris in sight.

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.

Home visits

My aunt’s bedsit is a comfortable place. I’m not sure how well I remember it, but it feels like it hasn’t changed a lot in thirty years. The week before I had been visiting her in hospital and she told me she was thinking of moving because her landlord wouldn’t let her get a washing machine.

“I said I’d put it in, I’d pay for the plumbing, and he said no!” she said. “I’ve paid him rent all this time, I’ve never given him any trouble.”

“You should look for somewhere else.”

“I will, once I’m better. I’ve got more money since I gave up smoking. Thank goodness I stopped before this all happened. I don’t know how I would have coped in the wards without cigarettes.”

“Anyway Aunty Mary, you can’t call them bedsits any more! Things have moved on. They’re studio flats nowadays. You’ll get so much more for your money, and you might get less space but you’ll have more storage. They use space more sensibly in modern flats.”

Playing the words back, they sound patronising and ill-informed. It’s easy for me in my bourgeois flat in the middle of town. I haven’t been renting for three decades off the same man with so little to show for it. Also, in the back of my mind, I can hear an element of forced jollity, trying to squeeze out the positivity which always sounds jarring coming from me. The mantra I repeat to myself is one I couldn't say out loud but so want to be true: You will get through this. You will be okay. You will get better and you’ll find somewhere else.

Hospital visits have never brought out the best in me.

Coming through the front door, on one of my regular visits, I get a clear reminder of how wrong I am. This is a bedsit and no other word will do to describe it. A miniscule single bed in the corner, monastic in its simplicity. The tiny kitchen is effectively in a cupboard. The doors open to reveal a sink, a stove, a couple of shelves. I mentally try to fit the contents of my kitchen into it and realise they could never go.

A fire is on; that ages this place too, that there is a fire. It has the imitation coals with a red bulb lending them an artificial light, though it’s sunny outside. Shelves are full of bits and bobs; family photos, little ornaments. My aunt has a taste for the miniature, but it never really occurred to me until now that it might be because she doesn’t have the room for anything else. A porcelain dragon I bought for her when I was a child sits above the portable CD player, eyes looking up imploringly. “I still have that dragon you gave me” she told me in hospital, and I felt bad because I didn’t remember it. The things we do without thought that cast shadows on other people’s lives. But looking at it now it’s as if I bought it yesterday.

There are pictures in clip frames on the wall, something I thought only students had.

The room – the bedsit, I should say – is huge. The radio is on - not music, something with voices. I don’t ask her to turn it off, it’s much more civilised than MTV pumping through a widescreen TV, like when I visit my in-laws. There are two chairs, both beige, both scruffy but comfy. She sits in hers and I sit in the guest chair, or at least I do when I’ve made her a cup of tea. Tea must come first, an immutable law which doesn’t need to be written anywhere.

The whole place smells of something I can’t place and then I realise – it’s not unpleasant but it smells like my grandparents’ house, of oldness. I don’t think of my aunt as old and I’m sure she doesn’t either, though she must feel it on days like today. Another reminder of my grandparents’ house; the bathroom is freezing cold. It is down the corridor, nasty lino, no softness or colour. A pair of inadequate mirrors, mismatched and chipped round the edges, perch on top of the cistern and the nearby window ledge. I don’t like the idea of her having to clean herself in there, days after being discharged from the wards. I didn’t realise people lived like that, sharing a bathroom with strangers. And then I get that feeling of being patronising again.

We go to the supermarket, her first trip out since she got back home. She keeps thanking me for keeping her company, she keeps thanking me for everything. I wish she wouldn’t. She sent me a text last week thanking me for going to see her in hospital and I replied saying Please don’t thank me. I’m doing it because I love you. And my eyes stung when I was typing it because I realised that it’s true, and that it’s over a year since I told anybody but my wife that I loved them. I was on a late train home, looking out of the window, hoping none of my fellow passengers would catch me crying.

The supermarket is much more fun than I was expecting. If you have spent days nil by mouth and need someone to encourage you to eat bad things, to put on lots of weight in a short space of time, you couldn’t hope for a better shopping companion than me. Another misconception; I thought my aunt lived on oven chips but she eats everything. Cheeses and chocolates, biscuits and snacks are pronounced “yummy”, gleefully swiped and deposited in the trolley. She’s perturbed by the crowd, all oblivious to the operation she’s only recently had, but we navigate through it all the same. “I’ve never spent so much!” she says as I load what feels like contraband into straining thin carriers.

Back at the bedsit, I take charge of sorting out her fridge. It’s the smallest I’ve ever seen and tests my powers of spatial awareness to the limit; the trickiest three-dimensional game of Tetris. Some of her food predates the rush to hospital and needs to be binned or at the very least shaved. I make a particular note of her stash of chocolate; nobody with a weakness for such things could be entirely joyless.

“You’re doing such a good job. Do you put the shopping away at home?”

I tell her yes, but I omit to mention all the things I don’t do at home. I don’t clean up after myself, or hang up the washing. I’m enjoying seeming like a good person and I don’t want it to stop.

“Right, it’s all in.” I say. “You need to throw this stuff out. And some of your food expires soon, so make sure you eat it tomorrow. I’ll be texting you to check up, and I’ll know if you’re lying.”

“Okay mum.” she says with a smile.

The bedsit changes beyond all recognition as the sun sets. The curtains are drawn, the lights come on and the fire, previously tacky and outdated, glows with a cheering warmth. I can make out the voices of Tony Hancock and Sid James, rich through the speakers, the sound of nostalgia and recognition. I go to the tiny stove, stand at the hob and cook my aunt her first proper meal in weeks, and we chatter away. Neither of us is hungry, so it’s just enough. And then we sit there, her in her chair and me in mine and talk. She tells me about growing up with my mum and her brother, and about her parents. I tell her how Kelly changed my life. (“I’m so glad you married her.” she says. “That last one was a bully.”) The room, too warm all afternoon, is now perfect. I can see it might be a lovely place to convalesce and I don’t feel quite so bad when I take my leave, sweeping her tiny frame up in a disproportionately huge hug at the front door before jumping into a waiting black cab.

These are the inbetween weeks, while my mother is on holiday. I am the only person around who can make the trip down and check that my aunt is okay. I don’t know how things will change when she returns, but I’m enjoying this period now for what it is and there’s nothing dutiful about my visits. The image I am looking for strikes me as the taxi pulls up outside a train station which is beginning to feel like a second home. Family isn’t a network, it’s a net. Sometimes it’s the sort where you get tangled up, trapped in it and you can’t escape. Sometimes it’s the kind that breaks your fall when you think nothing possibly could. On nights like tonight, you can’t tell which it is. Maybe both.

My favourite paragraph

Everybody uses a lot of phrases without understanding what they really mean, me included. Here’s one: the office was dead today. Every day, people all over the world return home from work and say that, with the best of intentions, to their partner or spouse. But it isn’t true, and you don’t appreciate just how far it is from the truth until you see your workplace at ten o’clock on a Saturday morning.

Kelly and I pull up in the empty car park and walk into reception, where the man on the desk seems completely fazed that anyone would want to enter the building at the exact point when the weekend is most brimming with promise. I can empathise; I feel that way every morning. I have to sign in despite having my ID card on me, they let Kelly through the barrier after a brief spell of questions followed by blankness which has always characterised my exchanges with anybody working as a security guard.

We climb the steps to the first floor.

“This carpet’s a bit manky.” says Kelly. “Is this the first thing your customers see when they visit you?”

There’s no point in arguing. Kelly has always worked in companies with money, or at least companies that are far more reckless about spending the money they haven’t got. She’s also very good at getting out before they go belly up, another talent I missed out on. We wander ghostlike through the banks of unmanned desks. Deserted, an office is a curious thing, the husk of something mediocre. The greys look greyer, the beiges a blander shade, the tiny signs of personality at each desk more futile and forlorn.

“Look!” I say. “Here’s where Gemma sits.” Her name plaque spells out her full name in blunt, ugly capitals. A tatty flag mounted on a flimsy plastic pole swings above her desk, announcing to the world that Gemma is a fire warden. There are far worse ways to sum Gemma up than that; she’s the sort of person who would happily volunteer to be a fire warden. Requests to get her to wear the fluorescent yellow tabard to social events have so far fallen on deaf ears.

It’s like walking through the film set of my life after they’ve shouted “cut!” for the last time and everybody has gone back to their trailers. There is no noise - something I only realise, paradoxically, by listening very carefully. There’s no hum of exhausted photocopiers and printers, no conference call posturing from the brash American man just along the way, no posh muttering sound of Iain swearing at his recalcitrant laptop, nothing at all. I feel like we’re archaeologists, or the only survivors of a nuclear holocaust.

Fifteen years ago, when I was the sort of person to snog in stationery cupboards, this scenario would have presented opportunities. Fifteen years ago, I worked with a man known only as “Dirty Darryl” who took a masturbation break in the gents at half-eleven every morning without fail. I never understood why he felt the need to share that piece of information, but he did. He had glassy eyes and the hair of a serial killer, and nobody shook his hand after that. Even he might have changed in fifteen years; I know I have.

We cross over to the cluster of desks where I sit and I show Kelly Phil’s desk, a picture of his baby boy plastered across a mouse mat and a cutesy mug shouting “DADDY” in huge childlike letters, each a different crayon colour. From there we pass my boss’ desk, his mouse mat boasting a devotion to Slipknot I know he doesn’t possess, an ironic present from Phil.

Iain is my neighbour and his desk is everything mine’s not; neat, clean, orderly. His mind is exactly the same, he never forgets or omits anything. There are a handful of carefully selected, tastefully shot pictures of both of his children and a Dilbert cartoon he has taken from job to job for almost ten years. You can see the marks at the corners where it has been blu-tacked to desk after desk. Whether he finds it funny or depressing is the best possible barometer of any particular day. His pride and joy is a cover of a sailing magazine (also about fifteen years old) showing him cool and unflappable, crewing a boat. It’s all very Duran Duran, and he has a lot of hair in that photograph. He looks like, if his mouth had been open, you’d expect him to have a lot of shiny teeth to match.

My desk, by contrast, is like a slag heap made entirely out of paper. Photocopies of receipts of expenses claims from months ago “just in case” battle for surface area with A4 pads full of notes of meetings I didn’t even care about at the time. There is a clean knife and fork by the mouse, for reasons which escape even me. Just out of reach is a pile of newspapers speculating about the likely outcome of an election which already feels an eternity ago. At least my keyboard is clean. My old keyboard used to make Gemma ill; I once joked that I would disconnect it, creep up behind her and rub it against her face. From that point onwards, she’s always looked nervous whenever I approach her desk.

Kelly takes Iain’s seat as I flick my computer on and it noisily chugs into life, a process which normally takes several minutes. Sometimes it sounds like it’s undecided about whether to fire up or take off.

“Right.” she says. “Let’s get this over with.”

I had woken up that morning with an uneasy feeling, something intangibly scraping on a nerve deep beneath the surface. At first I wondered whether I was bothered about something I’d done, racked my brain, came up with nothing. And it should have been nothing, because I had nothing to feel bad about; a lie in was calling to me, hours of swimming in that perfect spot, the secret world caught between the duvet and the mattress. My wife had finally returned from yet more travels and the day stretched out waiting to be half-filled with nothing in particular. Yet the nagging feeling wouldn’t go away, and then it coalesced into thought. It wasn’t something I’d done, but something I’d forgotten to do.

“Kelly, I’m going to have to go into work today.”

A single eye opened, then the other one reluctantly followed suit.

“You’ve got to be joking. Why?”

“They’re upgrading me to a new desktop at the weekend, and I completely forgot. Unless my files are in the right folder they’re going to be wiped.”

“What files are that important?”

I told her.

“Okay. Let’s get dressed.”

My computer finally springs into action and I navigate and click through folders while Kelly looks on frustrated. I am not slow on a computer but I’m not in Kelly’s league; it’s only the fact that Excel has not yet been named an Olympic event that prevents me from being married to a gold medallist. She rolls her eyes and it’s clear that she needs to do something else to save her from impatience. She hands me the memory stick.

“Do you have any Post-Its?”

I hand her some and she neatly writes “SEXY MF” on one along with a large straight arrow before attaching it to the photograph of Iain sailing. I’m not in the office on Monday, he’ll come in and be nonplussed to find it there. I don’t want him to find out it was a joke but I know he will, like the anonymous Valentine you hope is from a hot brunette but turns out to be your friends having a laugh.

“Is it there?”

“Yes, found it.”

There it is, a single document simply titled Correspondence. At seven years old, it’s easily one of the oldest things in the folder. It’s our story from the beginning all the way through to the end of the beginning, mails that started with us talking about how we were going to attend the same party and ended with us planning our life together. The whole thing happened in less than a month. So much changed in that four weeks; my life changed, I changed, the person I could become changed forever. I don’t need to read it to remember sentences like landmarks on our journey to belonging together, though we both knew we belonged together from the start. I want to go home but I don’t says one mail at hometime, when she was returning to her fiancé. At the risk of sounding too keen (because I just don’t care any more) what are house prices like in Reading? says another the following week. She would not return to her fiancé many more times after that.

I skim it to check that it’s all there, and it is.

We sit for a second, bathed in the warm glow of words on a screen that we both remember well. I can remember all those heightened sensations, and I know that our happiness now isn’t worse than that, just different and deeper. We made all the big decisions right at the start, and then ran around filling in all the details after the fact. There’s no reason on earth why things should work out that way round, but we just got lucky.

I copy the file to the memory stick and heave a sigh of relief. I check my email for one last time before closing things down.

“This mail says they’ll leave your old desktop behind.” says Kelly. “Honestly, you’re such an idiot. We didn’t need to do this at all, we came in here for nothing.”

“I didn’t know that though. Would you have wanted to take the risk that we’d lose all this?”

She pauses.

“No. But you’re still an idiot.”

I don’t say anything, because I know she’s right. She knows it, too. Silencing me is one of the many things she can do now that she couldn’t do seven years ago, but I can’t say I honestly mind. I spent my whole life waiting for somebody who knew how to shut me up.

“Go on, show me the dildo in your top drawer.”

I wordlessly pull out the drawer. It’s there next to my cereal bowl and my mug, as if being in the top drawer of a pedestal in a provincial office trading in the vital commodities of not much is the most natural place in the world for a vibrator to be.

“Whoa, that’s massive.”

We stop by the staff restaurant on our way out, partly so I can show her how horrendous it looks. To miss it out would be to cheat her of the whole guided tour, and that doesn’t seem right, especially after she said “so this is where the magic happens” when I showed her the kitchen, complete with hundreds of branded mugs in every colour, all ringed with anonymous caffeine stains. In the canteen I pause briefly to write “£3.70 FOR FISH AND CHIPS IS SHOCKING VALUE” on their whiteboard in angry red marker pen in the unlit gloom, and we share a complicit smirk before signing out for the benefit of the security guard. In the twenty minutes we’ve been there he seems to have completely forgotten that we had even arrived. I find myself relieved that organised crime has never chosen to target our building. They could have a field day.

Walking back out towards the car I find myself thinking about the closing paragraph in the document we came here to liberate.

We had been together less than a week when I jokingly asked her what I was letting myself in for. And what she sent me back was an enormous list, full of her plans for our lifetime together - from the mundane details like picking furniture and sharing shampoo to the grand sweep of the places we would go and the things we would do. I melted when I read it, not just because she had thought of everything but because I had too. She had read my mind; she didn’t need seven years of practice for that, she could do it right from the outset.

Over time it has become our manifesto, our guarantee, our regular progress report. The best to do list in the world, and the one I hope we’ll never finish. If we ever did, I know we’d just go back to the beginning and start it all over again. It is my favourite paragraph in the whole world and it always will be, whatever I read in however much time I have left. And I remember right at the end, there’s a line space and then a tiny, perfect sentence in isolation, the final sentence of the whole document. It must be the most rhetorical question I’ve ever heard.

Do you think that will be enough?

The morning is still gloomy as we take our seats in the car and she puts the key in the ignition. Our promises to each other are safely tucked at the very end of a document, safely stored on the memory stick, in turn safely hidden in Kelly’s black satchel on the back seat. If we’d lost it we still couldn’t have forgotten what it said if we’d tried, because we have been living it all these years, but I feel better knowing that it’s there. And I want to tell her Yes, that will be more than enough. That is more than I could possibly hope for. But then there’s a moment, just before we pull away from that awful building, where we look at each other and smile and I know there’s no need, because she already knows.

That Was The Week That Blogged #24

I'll tell you this for nothing, this doesn't get any easier. As always, I'm hugely appreciative of all the nominations I got this week and it's getting to the stage where sitting down and sifting through the list which clocks up on my iPhone from Sunday to Saturday is one of the treats of my weekend. Or at least it would be if it didn't get to the bit where I realise that nobody's going to make my decision for me and I have to pick three winners. This week has been no different but reading so many impressive pieces - sad, funny, silly and nostalgic - is a sobering reminder of just how much ability is out there.

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

1. Clara by Siren Voices

"Rowan Close is so dark and definitively shut up for the night it can’t possibly be real. It feels like one of those cute miniature streets in a petting zoo, one mouse per house; if I reached out through the ambulance window I could gently lift a roof and see a ball of fur curled up in a nest of grass."

I thought this was magnificent. Genre blogs have always left me a bit cold. Dating blogs, food blogs, second-rate "look at the wacky conversations I have with my husband" blogs. I suppose you could include ambulance blogs in that. But when you read writing you love, the fact that there might be a genre lurking in the background or crouching in the small print is a total irrelevance and Siren Voices is a classic example of this. Spence is an excellent writer and this is beautifully observed, a wonderful picture of a house, a woman and a visit at night. The fact that the narrator has pulled up outside in an ambulance is neither here nor there, though it's fortunate for us that he did or this terrific piece would never have been written. Whether it's as fortunate for Clara that he did is another matter altogether.

2. EARTHQUAPOCALYPSE by today is my birthday!

"I think the shock of Something Happening In Christchurch is actually bigger than the shock of the quake. Christchurch was even trending on Twitter for a few hours this morning, which goes beyond the wildest dreams of the creators of both Twitter and Christchurch."

If only all news reportage was like this. The earthquake in Christchurch generated lots of shock and handwringing on Twitter and then, singing from the wreckage, came this hilarious blog post which deflated the bubble of seriousness in no time. Ally is a worryingly prolific writer, one of that rare breed who make writing seem unbelievably natural and turn the rest of us green with envy. I'd love to think that in the background she's polishing and crafting every individual phrase, but I'd guess not. She'd be even more frighteningly good if she did. More than that, she's effortlessly funny; one of those people who can spill their brains on a page without ever writing a dull sentence. As a result, picking a part of this post to quote was a very difficult job because it's all so very quotable (another favourite was "Devastation was widespread! Our pot plant fell over."), but I'm sure if you read it you'll have yours, too.

3. Infinite Variety by The Clean White Page

"A man was coming towards them. He was walking the careful ice walk, watching his steps. He looked up and smiled at her father. Then his glance fell on her. She saw his face change. He was anxious and trying to hide it. The sidewalk was narrow and they had to stop. The man and her father exchanged a few words, showing their teeth, raising their eyebrows, nodding. Neither of them looked at her. Her father put his hands in his pockets and kept them there when they walked on. She ran her hand along the cold rail and pretended not to notice. They reached home without him touching her again."

Tina is an extremely talented storyteller, doing the sort of writing you actually see very little of in the blogosphere. If I were lazily characterising her blog I would say that it's a slightly reminiscent of The Twilight Zone, a superb collection of short and eerie stories. It's that genre thing again; I suppose technically they tend to centre around the supernatural but slapping such a crude label on them would cheapen her narrative and descriptive powers. This is not a piece of writing you can quickly flit through on a bus ride or a short break at work - you need to do it justice, make yourself comfortable, drink it in. It's well worth it. This is the first story Tina's put up in quite a while and I hope there are lots more to come very soon, but for lucky people who are new to her blog her back catalogue features dozens of fantastic stories every bit as good as this.

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.

On menswear

Do you remember non-uniform day at school? I do. There were always a few children – you could count them on the fingers of one hand – who turned up in their school uniforms, and I was one of them. My dirty little secret was that I hadn’t forgotten like the others. It was just preferable to pretend I had, rather than face a jury of my peers clad in a patterned sweater that even Jehovah’s Witnesses wouldn’t have been able to look at with a straight face. It predated magic eye pictures, but if you looked at it for long enough your eyes would defocus and the word “loser” would loom huge in the foreground. Though in all honesty, it probably already did.

One of those horrendous jumpers even made it to university with me where it proved beyond doubt that condoms weren’t the only form of contraception you could slip on to a stiff knob. I continued to wear it right up to the day when, in the drab amphitheatre of the law library, I bumped into another student even geekier than me decked out in exactly the same knitwear. It was a novel take on being embarrassed to find somebody wearing the same outfit as you, a modern horror few men ever get to experience. I never put it on again, oblivious to the fact that I continued to sport a cardigan with much the same pattern, only in around eight different shades of brown.

Would that these were the only mistakes I have ever made, but they’re just the tip of an iceberg which most of the time I would rather forget. Photographic evidence of the light grey jeans (bad enough on its own, but I liked them so much I bought two pairs) has long since been destroyed, along with any pictures of me in the black double-breasted cotton trenchcoat I bought from Burtons and the boxfresh cheap nasty so-bright-they-were-visible-in-the-dark trainers. I believe they were New Balance, a brand which everyone told me was not cool immediately after I bought them but nobody told me about beforehand. But then if you go clothes shopping with your mum and your brother, that's what happens: you wind up looking like a cross between Herr Flick and Francis Rossi.

Now of course I’m all grown up, or at least I pretend to be. Spending my days in an office is strangely reminiscent of school when it comes to matters of wardrobe, and I appreciate that even more these days. There are consolations in the conformity of the uniform of working life. Best of all though are the nuances of dressing for work. The parameters are fairly narrow - albeit nowhere near as restrictive as the grotesque bottle-green v-neck of my comprehensive days - but even within those parameters it’s easy to do little things that go badly wrong. Watching men who don’t understand the rules can bring little joys to meetings, add a tiny frisson of fun to encounters in corridors and lifts. It’s the wiggle room that makes it fascinating.

To graduate from my adolescent sartorial horrors to one day writing on this subject suggests a style journey I really haven’t made, but just as being unable to sing has never stopped Simon Cowell I still feel perfectly qualified to judge mistakes from the relative discomfort of my tired foam-backed chair. And, in my office at least, you see rather a lot. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the advanced luxuries of style like a well or badly cut suit jacket. Would that I were qualified to hold forth on that subject. No, I’m talking about the basics: wear a jacket. If you work in the sort of office (like mine) where, when you wear a jacket, people say things like “job interview?” (or the timeless classic "court appearance?", for the zany) it will stand you in good stead.

Similarly, wear a tie. Not regularly – because that says that you don’t understand the chain of command, nobody important wears ties these days – but about once a month. Never give any reason for it. People need to sense that you exude an aura that you could do better than this job, if you really wanted to. Wearing a tie every day says that your employer is doing you a favour. Wearing one once a month says quite the opposite. I know very little about how to tie a tie, so I can only offer one general principle there, based on practical experience of watching people in the workplace. It’s this: if your tie knot is almost as wide as your neck, take a long hard look in the mirror and then start work on reducing the size of both as a matter of urgency.

I also only have a few suggestions on shirts, which ought to go without saying but – as I have realised to my horror over the past couple of years – don’t. Again, I’m going to assume you don’t need to be warned off polyester; it seemed like a brilliant idea in the 1970s, but so much did (although I do often find myself wondering what was so bad about the three day week, or black and white televisions for that matter). I am hoping that we have all fought and won the battle against polyester, so I won’t say any more than that.

Similarly, I’m hoping there is no need to caution you against the button down collar. I’ve never understood their popularity in the first place. We men are bad enough at buttoning things at the best of times so why prominently display two more opportunities to cock it up? But it’s more than that; something about the button down collar screams special in the wrong way. It suggests you need additional help. It says that, presented with a collar stiffener, you might well attempt to self-harm.

The latest frontier to open up in the battle against shit shirts is the non-iron shirt. This is the new polyester. Non iron shirts are right up there with machine washable suits and the Duran Duran covers album they did back in the Nineties; just because it’s technically possible to make doesn’t mean anyone should ever have attempted it. Shirts are meant to be ironed. Sleeves are meant to have creases. Shapes are meant to be crisp. Really, if it’s that much trouble just wear a shellsuit to work. You might as well, you won’t be giving much worse an impression.

I was especially horrified recently in Marks and Spencers to see a shirt which was described as “luxury non-iron cotton”. Let’s lay this preposterous myth to rest once and for all: wear one of these and you are putting the moron in oxymoron. There really is only one way that a cotton shirt can be both luxury and non-iron, and that’s if you have a butler who does it for you. Otherwise, you are just fooling yourself and you’re going to go to work looking like an estate agent. All's not lost though; maybe the shirt will go perfectly with that tie you wear every day.

On to cufflinks. I have a particular interest in these; men get few enough opportunities to accessorise as it is and we need to make the most of them. As with any accessories your choice says a lot about you, so here’s how to avoid saying I am a congenital idiot: either wear nice ones or don’t wear them at all. There is no place any more for the hot and cold water tap motif, or Scrabble tiles. They are the equivalent of a tie festooned with cartoon characters (I used to own some of those too. It seems only fair to tell you this in the interests of full disclosure). Oh, and if you bought “groom” cufflinks for your wedding day they, like your wife’s dress, should never be dusted off again. The wedding ring ought to be sufficient proof that you are married, though I do sometimes find myself wondering in exceptional cases.

Perhaps what should be the most elementary thing of all – only wear them with French cuffed shirts. I know, I know, but believe you me, I’ve seen people failing to follow this simple rule many times. At first it prompted that laugh which, halfway through, you desperately attempt to pass off as a cough. I’m more used to it now but it’s still embarrassing; to see cufflinks foisted on a single cuffed shirt is to witness the saddest de-coupling of perception and reality. The wearer thinks Look at me, look at the effort I am making whereas the viewer simply thinks Look at him, that’s what he classes as making an effort.

Having made it to the end you must be wondering what I have to say on the subject of shoes. Sorry, but where they are concerned you’ll have to fend for yourself. My feet are enormous and consequently I only have tips for men with size 12 feet, well, one tip: keep your feet under the table at all times. Always get to a meeting room early and ensure you are seated before anyone arrives, and try your hardest to be the last to leave. However boring it gets. With luck, people might mistake it for a work ethic.

Torch wood

“Mate.” said Phil as we stood in the kitchen last week making our coffee. “Have you ever heard of something called a Fleshlight?”

“No, I haven’t.” I said. This was true.

There was a pause, just long enough for me to figure out two things. First, that Phil was extremely pleased with himself and secondly that there was no way he was going to give up his valuable information without me showing a bit more interest.

That’s Phil all over; he’s a funny one. When he first joined our team I didn’t know what to make of him - tall, round and lugubrious with goggle-like spectacles and spiky hair he looked a bit like a chubby reimagining of Sonic The Hedgehog, but as time has gone by I’ve come to love his funny little ways. The fact that he takes three times as long as everyone else to make a hot drink. The way he always calls me ‘mate’, to the extent where I sometimes wonder whether he remembers my name at all. His pet theory that I’m a swinger, which is of course based on no evidence whatsoever.

Phil is also absolutely convinced that nobody at work likes him. Nothing could be further from the truth, but I think he needs to feel like that to make sense of the world. If he ever realised that we all think he’s somewhat marvellous his entire worldview would collapse, and I don’t know what would happen to him then.

“So Phil, what’s a Fleshlight?”

“Google it mate.” he said, almost shaking with excitement. “Google it on your iPhone.”

So I did, and I imagine you will too after you’ve finished reading this. It was quite an eye opener.

What a “Fleshlight” is, in the immortal words of their own website, is a molded masturbation sleeve “housed in an attractive and sturdy canister that resembles an ordinary flashlight, allowing for simple and discreet storage”. Or, to put it another way, it’s a torch you can fuck. They come with a range of orifices - one resembles rubberised lady petals, another is modelled on a pair of "the other" lips (complete with a filtrum above it, which is one way of saying this way up I suppose) and a third looks like a ringpiece or somewhere you might shove a tea towel if you couldn’t be bothered to hang it up. The less said about the optional version “Count Cockula” the better.

“Phil, how did you find out about this?”

“I was out last night and one of my mates told me he’d bought one.”

“Why in god’s name would he tell you this? Why would he tell anybody?”

“I don’t know mate, but who’s complaining?”

Put that way, it seemed to be a good point. Understandably, the discovery of the Fleshlight rather overshadowed the other events of the working day as Phil, Iain and I discussed the mechanics across our partitions between especially boring conference calls which, disappointingly, were not about torch-shaped sex aids. I found myself constantly fighting the urge to mention them on my conference calls, mainly because it would have been a bit of a contextual leap.

“No, I don’t have any other business, except to say Have you lot ever heard of the Fleshlight? Seriously, check it out, you can thank me later. I’d like to see this specifically noted in the minutes of this call, with an action for all the guys present.” would probably, on balance, have been a mistake.

“I might buy one.” said Phil at some point after lunch, a lunch which had only really had one topic of conversation funnily enough.

“How much do they cost?” said Iain, who sounded remarkably interested. Well, his wife has only recently had their second child.

“It says ‘from £16’ so I guess it varies.”

“Ah, it’s always the way.” I said, “It’s all about the apps.”

Further investigation established that this was in fact the case. You could pick a number of interiors for the Fleshlight each of which optimised pleasure in its own way. “Ultra tight” simulated the “tightest anal sex imaginable” (fortunately they had the good sense to avoid the sales pitch ‘perfect for paedos’, which was a rare exercise of good taste in the whole sorry scenario), “Speed bump” featured “hundreds of soft massaging beads” and best of all “Vortex” appeared to consist of go-faster stripes which, according to the blurb, did exactly that.

“I just wonder how different it would be from using your hand?” mused Phil, unfortunately out loud. “And surely using it lying on your back would be a bit of a waste of time.”

“I suppose if they’re water resistant you could take one into the shower.” I said.

“Yeah mate, the shower’s got potential.” said Phil. His eyes had lit up and I instantly found myself regretting my contribution. He seemed keen enough to have one as it was, he really didn’t need any encouragement from me.

“It’s a shame you can’t fit one with a DAB and a timer.” I said, “You could slip it on and get it to give you a wake up call. They could call it a cock radio.”

That brought the conversation to an abrupt halt, that and an exasperated look from my manager. He had a point really. Technically, at that precise moment, I was sort of being paid to talk about sex toys. Maybe that letter to Santa had found its destination after all. But even though we stopped talking about it my mind was still whirring with the implications of this new frontier in technology assisted coitus. I remember wondering whether the average vibrator would fit in the average Fleshlight and recall feeling a bit depressed when I realised it couldn’t possibly; after all, the Fleshlight catered to penises as they actually were, whereas the vibrator catered to how women wanted them to be.

Just when I thought the day couldn’t get any better we bounded up the steps of the funbus to find Donald Pleasence in the driving seat, black aviator shades firmly in place. He wasn’t wearing his black leather bomber jacket, but you can’t have everything. I suspect that Donald thinks that Tom Cruise will one day play him in the film of his life, but he doesn’t realise that even Tom Cruise would struggle to portray the full extent of his delusional fervour.

Sitting in our usual places at the back were Mikey and me. We were joined by Phil and Manga Dave, who is the new boy and so-called because his incredibly tall hair makes him look like an anime character. He’s fresh out of university and this is his first job, which I must say surprises me because I didn’t think there were any jobs any more. Manga Dave is almost unbelievably young at 22 but sounds loud, posh and confident on the phone as if he’s been doing his job for about four times as long as I’ve been doing mine. A public school education will do that for you, I’m told.

Naturally, Phil filled them in on his new find and the questions came thick and fast.

“Do you think they sell them on eBay?” said Mikey.

“Good point.” I said. “It would all depend on who’d had it first though, wouldn’t it? You wouldn’t want one after Iain had finished with it, it would be pretty bloody slack to put it lightly.”

Iain’s reputation for impressive dimensions precedes him. Rumour has it even his wife calls him ‘Chopper’.

“How on earth do you clean it?” said Manga Dave. I was quite impressed by his practical bent, given that he still lives with his parents and has probably never done laundry in his life.

“God knows.” I said. “Maybe they sell special bottles of washing up liquid in the shape of a cock.”

“Well, I’ve decided I won’t buy one.” said Phil, “But if I had one I’d definitely use one.”

“Bollocks.” I said. “You’re going to buy one and we all know it. Do you know what this reminds me of? When I was at school there was a kid called Tony in my year. He got in trouble for clocking up record fines on a library book called Perfect Pastry, so we always thought there was something a bit funny about him. Anyway, he had a dog called Lucy. He was completely devoted to her. And once, we were sitting in the common room and he said ‘I’d never have sex with a dog, but if I did it would be my Lucy.’ We didn’t come away from that conversation thinking ‘Tony has no interest in bestiality’, we came away from it thinking 'Holy shit, Tony wants to shag his dog'. And you’re just the same with that frigging Fleshlight.”

Unsurprisingly, everyone was quiet after that and I felt slightly guilty about having a rant which probably said an awful lot more about me than it did about Phil. Or maybe they were all struck, like I was, by the fact that ‘frigging’ was the wrong adjective to have used. As we sat there silently, the bus glided through the traffic, past the prison, and I thought Just think how much money you could make selling Fleshlights in prison. It was like having a song stuck in your head, only instead of a song it was more of a dong. Even the lamp posts, soon to be illuminated when autumn hits and the daylight fades earlier and earlier, even they had a disturbingly phallic look about them.

Soon the bus would drop us off outside the Oakford where Donald would have a bespoke witticism for each of us as we dismounted. Mikey and I would grab a few cheeky pints at the Allied Arms, Manga Dave would take the train home where mum would have a nice hot meal waiting for him and Phil would probably go back to his house, kiss his wife hello, ask how her day was and then lock himself in the toilet to do a bit more research.

“You should get one.” I said to Manga Dave. “You’re the only single one among us. Go on - get one, try it out and let us know whether it’s any good. Do it for science.”

The bus drew to a halt and standing up, laptop bag in hand, Manga Dave flashed us all the smug smile of the insufferably young.

“Sorry fellas, but no thanks. You three are all married, so I’m fairly sure you all need one a lot more than I do.”

That Was The Week That Blogged #23

First things first - thank you to everybody who nominated a post, whether it was by email or Twitter. I read every single one, I can't remember a week where I've had more suggestions and I really, really appreciate it. It makes my job a lot more difficult, but in the best possible way. Some of the nominations were blogs I already read, but far more were blogs I had never heard of. Some of the blogs nominated were huge blogs with lots of readers and masses of comments on every post, some of them were small blogs without a single comment. Having so many blogs nominated made such a difference I can't even tell you.

I realised just how much of a difference it made over the weekend when I started to try and sort out this week's winners. The shortlist for this week had about fifteen on it and after reading it again and again I had just about managed to narrow it down. To eight. Getting it from eight to five was a challenge the likes of which I'd not previously experienced, and the process of getting it from five to the final three was like asking me to choose between the children I don't have.

As it happens, every single one of the winners this week was nominated by at least one person, which I hope is encouragement for you to make my job equally hard next week. There were so many excellent posts to read that I was hugely tempted to include a "highly commended" section, but I resisted. If the quality stays as high as this I may not be able to avoid that in future. Anyway, my three this week are all terrific pieces, each in its own very different way.

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

1. Drunkenness Is Temporary Suicide by Schmutzie

"I am an alcoholic. The mojo I have been working since 1988 isn't working for me anymore, and I must live a life I can love if I am going to survive."

I won't say this is brave. That would be the easy way out in responding to a piece of writing like this. I'd much rather say that it's brilliant, which it is. It's an excellent, clear-eyed, unsentimental look at addiction; why it happened to her, how it happened to her, and perhaps most importantly what happens now. I say "to her" because it very deliberately isn't making sweeping generalised points. It's a very personal piece but without ever excluding the reader, which is itself an achievement. I don't feel qualified to say any more about it than that, but it's really quite exceptional. An interesting aside is that Schmutzie runs a weekly blog award scheme called Five Star Friday. It's nice to be able to give her an award for a change.

2. Be Our Guest by Living Shallow, Living Well

"'A vagabond is living in my car!' I excitedly announced the next day at work. I loved saying the word 'vagabond'. It was 100 times more sophisticated than 'homeless person', 'hobo', or 'crack head'."

Most of the blog posts that win TWTWTB tend to be serious non-fiction pieces, and I'm not sure why that is. I think writing humour is considerably harder, and to do it with a light touch like this takes some doing. In a week where I read more than one laugh-out-loud funny post, this one just edged it because it's such a terrific idea and it's executed perfectly. The image of the narrator leaving an organic cheesecake in the trunk for the homeless man camped out in her grubby dilapidated 1992 Subaru is just gorgeous. I only wish this post had been longer, but leaving the reader wanting more is one of Living Shallow, Living Well's many talents.

Actually now I come to think of it, comedy films never win the Oscars either, do they? But anyway, this is Oscar-winning stuff as far as I'm concerned.

3. Another first by The Blub-Blub

"Towards the end, he was so frail he reminded me of photos we'd seen of his father Arthur, who had come back from fighting Japs in PNG 6'1" and 58kg from picking up Dysentery just for fun (as if fighting for your life every single moment of the day and night isn't bad enough, imagine literally shitting yourself to death at the same time)."

I kept coming back to this one. Someone nominated it, so I went over and had a look and I have to say I wasn't sure. In the week that I published a blog post explaining what sort of things I looked for in a blog post, this one broke all my informal rules. Block capitals, multiple question marks, a conversational tone I don't normally go for. But I read all the way to the end, because it was nominated by someone whose opinion I respect, and the ending nearly made me cry. So it stayed on the shortlist, and I kept coming back to it.

Every time something got shaved off the shortlist I looked hard at this one and found that it has something in it that I really love and admire that I'm not even sure I could put my finger on. Rules are made to be broken, and none of them counts for much when someone can move you without paying them the slightest attention. And I kept coming back to this one. Finally there were only three, and this piece is one of them, and I'm happy about that because it's got something I don't always see in writing. Let's call it a sort of unconventional beauty.

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.

25 again

I don’t know how stress affects you but it’s always got me exactly the same way, ever since I was little: right in the stomach.

An early example was my first year exams at Oxford. Not having properly learned anything, I instead settled for reading hundreds of pages in a very short space of time in the hope that the information on them would saturate my brain like a sponge. After a while, all I had left was the sensation that I could look at a page as long as I wanted but that nothing would go in any more. The words, indecipherable hieroglyphs, just bounced off my eyeballs.

As if the stress brought on by my ignorance wasn’t enough, I was also worried about the dangers inherent in my method of preparation. I was worried that all that information would seep away, again just like a sponge, before I got the chance to chuck it, completely unprocessed, onto a waiting page. Never mind that it might not actually answer the questions I was being asked, that was as beside the point as my answers would be. I also worried that if I turned my head too sharply or nodded too vigorously random facts – facts I might shortly need – would drip out of my ears and on to the carpet below.

The morning of my first paper, I got up after four hours of restless sleep and shambled to the college dining hall (think a cut-price Hogwarts and you’re pretty much there) for breakfast. I sat there, trembling and elephant-grey, unable to eat a thing and worried out of my mind. All I had to drink, because it was all I could manage, was a glass of orange juice. It made a triumphant comeback fifteen minutes later when I was crouched over the toilet bowl, stomach wracked with nerves, too busy throwing up to put on my suit and read my notes one last time. It was just as thin and watery second time round, catapulted into the water by my gastric trampoline.

The following morning was exactly the same.

But it starts earlier than that, in even more embarrassing circumstances. I remember having to pull out of a chess tournament with stomach cramps when I was about twelve. It was something to do with the cub scouts, I think, an organisation I belonged to but never belonged in, and I had got to the third round. That’s when the anxiety just got too much for me - everyone else there was geeky enough to be thoroughly enjoying themselves but that was beyond me; the triple fear of losing, making a mistake or humiliating myself became so agonising that my insides just went haywire.

Looking back now, what strikes me is what a towering achievement it represented to be a misfit even among misfits. I was a colossal enough nerd to play chess competitively but I couldn’t even do that right. What happened after that was like a tragic parody of those scenes you sometimes see in big sporting events but rather than a crowd of medics fussing over me on the touchline while the camera zoomed in and the commentators filled dead air, you instead had a kindly old lady feeding me milk of magnesia while my mother and father said “Are you all right? Are you going to be okay? Are you sure you can’t go on?” Naturally, it cleared nicely up in the car on the way home after I had thrown the towel in.

I started to get those all-too-familiar feelings in the run up to Gemma’s twenty-fifth birthday party.

When I had accepted it was an event far in the future and mentioned in passing, and of course my colleagues Iain and Sarah would be going too, so I wouldn’t stick out like a wrinkly thumb. But then as the day grew nearer it transpired Iain was going on holiday, and then it turned out that Sarah couldn’t get a sitter and a picture slowly emerged of just me, in the back garden of the Purple Turtle, with a bunch of people over ten years younger than I am. Those images of the Fonz, only seedy viewed from the perspective of adulthood, all started to flood uncomfortably back.

“Will I embarrass you?” I asked Gemma on the way to make mediocre coffee number five of an otherwise unremarkable working day.

“Of course not.” she said with the careless speed of someone who isn’t really listening to the question. Then there was a brief pause. “You are bringing Kelly, aren’t you?”

“I’ve made a list of things I’m not allowed to talk about. I thought it would help.”

“You’ve made a list.”

Gemma gave me a look which clearly communicated that not talking about them might have helped, but that feeling the need to make a list most definitely didn’t. I didn’t realise that’s what that look meant at the time, though with hindsight the absence of a question mark at the end of her sentence should have been enough of an indication to change the subject.

“Yes. As long as I don’t mention your sister sleeping with your boyfriend’s twin brother, or repeat those jokes about your sister fancying your boyfriend, or mention your friend with the wonky boobs, or accidentally talk about your pet theory that your friends Colin and Laura have zombie sex I think it’s all going to be fine.”

Said out loud, it sounded a lot less reassuring than I meant it to be. Gemma just rolled her eyes.

“How am I going to seem young enough for this party?” I said to Kelly later that night.

”Really, don’t worry about it. She knows perfectly well what you’re like.” she replied, only paying me half of her attention. The rest was devoted to the music channel on the television, which was playing a range of R&B classics. At the time I had found it irksome, but I was rapidly coming to realise that it might represent my best chance to get down with the kids of today and shit.

“Who is this? I think I’ve heard it on the radio.”

“It’s Tinie Tempah.” said Kelly, just as his name conveniently displayed at the bottom left corner of the screen.

“You’re kidding me. ‘Tinie Tempah’? Would it really have killed him to spell either the word ‘tiny’ or the word ‘temper’ correctly? What’s happened to standards?”

Kelly sighed.

“For future reference, you should definitely avoid saying anything like that at Gemma’s party.”

I continued watching the rest of the Top Ten but it was a thoroughly unedifying experience that just made me feel even older. It did give me a range of potential style tips for the evening but most of them revolved around wearing a singlet of some description, possibly with a baseball cap on backwards while leaning against a convertible automobile surrounded by gyrating hotties. I did briefly wonder about appropriating an umlaut for my name, seeing as it had worked so well for Jason Derülo, but I couldn’t see a vowel it could convincingly crouch above without making me look like a bit of a wally. Maybe it was because I wasn’t wearing a singlet at the time.

I approached Gemma with my findings on Friday.

“What do you think about singlets?”

“Singlets?”

“You know, vests.”

“Please don’t wear a vest.”

“And where do you stand on the music of Jason Derülo? Incidentally, did you know his real name is Jason Desrouleaux? I asked Professor Wikipedia.”

“Nobody listens to that sort of thing. Really, stop worrying - just be yourself. Well, sort of yourself.” Gemma frowned, clearly struggling with getting across exactly what she wanted to say. “Just be… less of yourself.”

On Friday night we had dinner with my friends Glenn and Lucy. They didn’t have an awful lot of helpful advice, which was quite reassuring in a way; if nothing else, I think Glenn would look even sillier in a singlet than I would. I filled them in on my attempts to reconnect with the youth of today, and the blank look on Glenn’s face made me feel like I was making progress.

“Who in God’s name is Tinie Tempah?”

I fought back the urge to cheer in solidarity.

“I’ll get his video up on YouTube.” said Kelly, tapping away on Glenn’s laptop. It was a terrible end to a lovely evening; not only did I wind up feeling even further from young than ever, but worse still I had Tinie Tempah’s song (or, as I believe they are also known, “choon”) stuck in my head - a position it would occupy, as it turned out, for practically the entire weekend.

Saturday dawned bright and threatening and I would quite happily have swapped my night at the Purple Turtle for another cub scout chess tournament. I was beginning to think that I’d look like an equally seedy old pervert at either. Kelly and I hopped onto a train to Oxford for the day and sitting in the Covered Market, watching yet more irksomely young people wander past, I realised there was still an untapped mine of knowledge I hadn’t even considered. Of course! The internet!

I put my plea for assistance out there, a metaphorical message in a bottle washed in the supportive ocean of Web 2.0. The responses that came back weren’t quite what I was expecting. Particular high points included: ”Pick a random person in the bar and pretend to be their social worker”, “Claim to be a member of the Klaxons” and the especially helpful “Avoid making eye contact. Avoid not making eye contact.” The hive mind had failed me; there was nothing for it but to face the music, even if it was being made by people who had raised umlauts and typos to an art form.

It was with trepidation, much later that day, that I reluctantly followed Kelly down the steps at the Purple Turtle and headed out to the beer garden. Even at the unfashionably early time of half nine it was packed with revellers in varying states of drink induced psychosis. Back when I was 25 there was nothing I liked more than spending an evening here, and you could always guarantee being trapped in a corner by some bonkers Goth with big jugs who would tell you all about her plans to take a lot of drugs and travel across South America in a camper van, shortly before getting off with somebody less attractive than you. I was quite gratified to see that I was by no means the oldest person there, although it didn’t help as much as I hoped. I still felt like I was.

My mind was churning with instructions. Don’t mention zombie sex. Don’t make eye contact. Don’t mention wonky boobs. Don’t get caught avoiding eye contact with anybody. Don’t tell them you like Jason Derülo. Are you wearing a singlet? No, I’m not. Good. Don’t wear a singlet. Really, it was awful, even worse than the voices in my head the rest of the time. We found Gemma and her posse occupying a table right at the far corner.

“You made it!” she said as we took our places.

“Of course we did. Would I stand you up?”

Gemma looked at me critically for a second.

“You’ve put product in your hair.”

I was kind of hoping she wouldn’t notice that.

“It looks nice. It makes you look younger.” she said. The overall effect was ruined by her smiling indulgently at me, as if I was a favourite uncle.

Gemma proceeded to introduce us to all her friends. Far too many of them were called Sean for my liking, though I could see it would make things easier later on. One was also called Dog, or Curlz, or something (that creative misspelling again - they were all at it) and looked a bit like a kindly hobbit. Even he was called Sean in real life.

“We’re lucky my mum isn’t here.” said Gemma. “She kept saying Oh come on, let me come along. She said she wouldn’t be too old because you were coming along too.”

Marvellous. After that there was nothing for it but to drink an awful lot of vodka - not so I fitted in, but so I didn’t care whether I did or not. From that point onwards, things calmed down a bit and I started to feel like I wasn’t quite such a charity case after all. Maybe I wouldn’t let the side down and the evening would pass without mortification. That feeling lasted for quite some time - right up to the point, much later on, when I was passed somebody's mobile, seemingly for no reason in particular.

“Look at this picture on George’s phone.” somebody said.

George was a large chap who had sculpted his eyebrows in a way I hadn’t generally associated with heterosexuality. The picture had been taken at groin level and showed George (at least I assumed it was him) holding what appeared to be a shiny hen’s egg between finger and thumb in front of his fly.

“Why is he holding an egg?” I said, completely nonplussed.

“That’s not an egg, dude. Look again.”

I squinted at the screen. It was round, oval, brown and perfectly smooth. Surely it had to be an egg? Except that on closer consideration I’d never seen veins on the surface of an egg before, or for that matter the slightest hints of stubble. The churning in my stomach now wasn’t nerves, but revulsion as I realised what was really going on.

“Please tell me that’s not George’s bollock.”

“Uh huh.”

“But it’s… bald.”

“Of course it’s bald. You mean yours aren’t?”

And that’s how I discovered the main difference between me and your common or garden twenty-five year old man. It’s not about vests, or eye contact, or listening to R&B, or anything as peripheral as that. I did a straw poll around the table and all of them, without exception, were sitting on a spacehopper. Every single chap at the party, apart from me, was sporting a downstairs Kojak. Not just that, but they were all looking at me very strangely once they gathered that I wasn’t. Typical; I was the only person without smooth hairless nadgers and I was the one feeling like a freak.

“Anyway.” I said in a desperate attempt to rescue the situation, “I heard that people only shave their balls to make their cock look bigger. Maybe the reason I haven’t shaved mine is that I don’t need to.”

“We really need to talk.” said Kelly almost immediately, and with that all my credibility was shot to pieces. I was a seedy, hairy, tiny-penised old man, and about the only thing you could say for me was that I’d done rather well for myself in the matrimonial department.

It was difficult to top that, and the evening drew to a merciful close soon after. The twenty-somethings had a taxi to catch, because they’re lightweights, and Kelly and I went for a drunken kebab, because we’re hardcore. But I still learned a lot, including that being twenty-five is definitely overrated. It’s far more important to be older, wiser and comfortable in your own skin, even if far more of it is covered in pubic hair than the youth of today would necessarily recommend. I remember telling Kelly that the next day around three o’clock in the afternoon when we finally got out of bed. Twentysomethings might call that a hangover but I call it a lie-in, and when you get to my age I reckon you can call it anything you like.