100 Words: Peer pressure

I was very proud of the shirt, a short-sleeved blue and orange check, not at all the sort of thing I normally bought.

My mistake was wearing it to work on Friday.

"You look like you've been run over by a paint truck." said Mikey over the first pint of the weekend.

"Don't say that!"

"No, it's nice." he grinned. "You should be presenting an art show on kid's TV in that."

On Monday, to make him feel guilty, I told him I'd taken it to the charity shop.

"Good." he said.

I hadn't. But I haven't worn it since.

The kitchen

There are plenty of ways in which I wish I could be more like other people. Working from home is a classic example.

Most people I know view this as a golden opportunity to multi-task and none of those tasks involve anything approximating to work. They tell me that there are far better alternatives; you can take in some daytime TV, catch up on the laundry, tidy up, do a spot of surfing, the opportunities are endless. There are more exotic pursuits, too - Mikey regularly jokes about having a "three wank day" when he works from home, Gemma's days out of the office are the frequent subject of smutty insinuations about afternoon delight, only some of them from me. They have a lot to do with the fact that her boyfriend is often at home during the week. But I can't seem to do any skiving.

It is the only area I've discovered, in fifteen years of what you could loosely describe as a career, where I appear to have some kind of work ethic. I should be popping into town for lunch, working wirelessly from a coffee shop, living in the kind of continental gleaming badly-dubbed world you only see in Vodafone adverts. By contrast, I hunch over the laptop for hours, unable to concentrate on anything else, not even getting up to put the kettle on. Apart from the occasional phone conversation there is no sound whatsoever; the simple act of putting music on in the background would feel like cheating.

Consequently, it's gone one before I shuffle into the kitchen in my pyjamas to think about lunch. It's pretty much the smallest room in the flat and everything about it is far from ideal. It's pokey, badly ventilated, badly laid out, doesn't have any natural light and there are nowhere near enough cupboards and shelves. But we didn't realise that; we had fallen in love with the living room by then, all that space, the high ceilings, the enormous sash windows, the daylight flooding into a lounge we were already beginning to imagine ourselves in and had mentally started to populate with furniture. Compared to that, the kitchen seemed an almighty irrelevance. Besides, it had granite work surfaces, and I was easily impressed by that sort of thing.

Some houses are like some people, you latch on to the things you like and by the time you realise everything isn't perfect you're stuck. Of course, some other houses are like some other people. You know you won't be interested the moment you clap eyes on them but you still have to make enthusiastic noises because somebody is showing you round and you've come all that way, and then afterwards you sit in the car with your wife saying "who in their right mind would be happy with that? I’d go mad if that was my life."

Away from the hum of the traffic on the main road, the kitchen is quieter still than the living room. The radio is not on – it only goes on when she’s in the kitchen, and normally I snap irritably at it until she rolls her eyes and switches it off. Now and again, they play an old jazz track and she and I dance round the slightly sloping slate floor until I start to feel awkward. Sometimes that happens sooner than others, but it remains the only time that I dance these days.

There is a noise though, and I can’t place it at first. Opening one of the cupboards I can hear a high-pitched ringing, like the tiniest bell, coming from within. Two of the glasses in there are touching, making the slightest of connections, and it’s the sort of sound where once you hear it you can’t hear anything else. Vexed, I start to move them, separating the champagne saucers, repositioning highballs, trial and error, hunting for the source of the sound without any success. It’s still going. I would have to change everything, take them all out to get to the bottom of it and I can’t face that. The sound taunts me as I close the doors and I wonder if maybe I can get used to it.

I ought to get used to the rice on the kitchen floor, too. I was struggling with opening the packet the night before. "I’ll get you some scissors." she said, watching as I toiled away without any success.

“You know what’s going to happen in a second.” I said. “It will split open and go everywhere.”

When it did, almost exactly a second later, it was as if I had predicted an unavoidable future rather than described the consequences of my own clumsiness. I’m good at that, nothing is ever my fault. It’s always somebody else’s responsibility, or else just the cosmos conspiring against me. We both laughed at my stupidity, me more than her, and I think she was a bit baffled that I found it so funny. I did my level best to sweep it up with a dustpan and brush but looking now I can still see tiny flecks of my failure to catch it all. Nothing is ever perfect, and I need to get better at facing that.

This room is full of things I never use. In some cases I’m not at all sure what they are for. We gave the coffee machine away – I knew what that did - but there are definitely objects lurking in cupboards that I don’t think have been touched since we moved in. The contents of the cupboard under the sink frighten me; I wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find chemical weapons in there. And yet I couldn’t throw any of this accumulated flotsam out. I’m worried that I’ll need it at some point, that one day a moment will come when I might be punished for my willingness to take unmarked carrier bags to the ungrateful hunchbacks in the charity shop. They never say thank you, and I always want to say “Look! This is good stuff! A lot of people would have kept this.” I’ve never properly learned that two wrongs don’t make a right.

The indigestion medicine is in a bottle in the cupboard, next to the soy sauce. It doesn’t matter that things are in a location that wouldn’t make sense to anyone else, provided I know where to find them. Everything could do with a clean, and yet it’s an oddly comfortable place to be.

I stand at one of the work surfaces and slice some olive bread. I’m disappointed when I look at the cross-section to find no olives there, no dark salty nuggets hiding within. This should be studded with them, and I feel short-changed. No matter; I cut off another slice. Again, nothing. I keep going, always trying again, always convinced that this is finally going to be the perfect slice, the one with all the good stuff in it that I’ve been waiting for. But it never is, so finally I admit defeat and head back to my desk and the to do list which, mentally at least, I never really left.

There are plenty of ways in which I wish could be more like other people, and working from home is just one example. Other people’s kitchens are full of food. Mine seems to be full of metaphors.

Bad doppelgangers

There’s one thing I do without fail every morning, as regular as clockwork, though you couldn’t set your watch by it. As I scramble through the market square on my way to work I always look up to the clock at the top of the glorious tower of Victorian bricks which forms part of the town hall, Reading’s miniature answer to Big Ben. Most people use this to tell the time, which is only natural, but for me it plays a subtly different but still more crucial role; it’s how I work out whether I have time to grab a cappuccino from the train station before making for my bus.

Years of practice have distilled this decision making process into a simple set of rules. If the clock says eight twenty-six or later, it means I shouldn’t even bother trying. If the clock says eight twenty-three or earlier, it means there’s plenty of time. I can even slow down - which is a good thing, because I look undignified enough at a leisurely saunter and even worse when clumping at speed, one foot chucked haphazardly in front of another. Anywhere in between those two times is borderline; then it all depends on what it’s like when I get to the kiosk, on the size of the queue of miserable looking passengers-in-waiting and weary briefcase-carriers dawdling and trying to decide what to have. The shape of a morning is completely dependent on a matter of minutes, the difference between a long goodbye or a short wave at the front door, the difference between shaving and not.

On Thursday morning though, I was completely distracted by the man walking past me, just by the new bookshop that nobody thinks will flourish, and it set off a completely different train of thought. At first I was certain it’s a man who used to work in the bay next to mine years ago, back when I worked in the battleship-grey hexagonal building by the train tracks, all round-edged windows and the sort of noisy air conditioning that could drown out your own thoughts, if you let it.

He wasn’t someone I knew well but I knew his type better than I wanted to; big, capable, a rugby lad, a political animal. He was the sort of colleague who survived cull after cull, redundancy after redundancy, emerging from the ashes each time with a marginally more impressive job title and a slightly larger empire. Every large company employs at least one person like this. Their success is always mystifying and often they simply create the illusion of productivity by marching round the office shouting to nobody in particular on a hands-free kit. It’s the kind of equipment that was designed with them in mind; fifteen years ago, they would have carried a clipboard instead.

On closer examination though, I realised that it wasn’t who I thought it was. Just as high end fashion filters down over a season and becomes a cheap knock off thrown together in a sweatshop, this man was a poor facsimile with all the bulk and none of the swagger. His features were slightly cruder, his tie was cheaper. Little things, that’s how you spot a fake.

It happened again as I got to the end of the long street, glum commuters trudging in the opposite direction like an identity parade of people suspected of being doleful. As I got to the crossing a woman cycled past me, fresh ruddy face visible through the frame of a woolly hat with earwarmers, and I got that feeling again. She looked like a friend of mine, a woman I haven’t seen in months who got pregnant and got boring. I’m no fan of children, but even I don’t think the latter inevitably flows from the former. But again, after a double take I took in that she was a double, and not a convincing one either. The friend in question doesn’t even live in Reading. Even if she did, she wouldn’t be seen dead on a bicycle. You would be more likely to spot me on a jet ski.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, though it is quite recent; I have been seeing the bad doppelgangers more and more these days. More and more people look almost, but not quite, like people I used to know.

It’s odd how if you look like someone famous it’s a talking point. You can earn a living from it; in some cases, you can make more money out of looking like somebody with no talent than you ever could out of any talents of your own. It’s an odd, unfortunate facet of the world now, and I wonder if it depresses the lookalikes. Or do they just think of the money and live in fear of the day when their almost-twin drops out of the public eye?

Looking like somebody nobody knows is a different matter altogether - far less remarkable, much more commonplace and only feted, it seems, by me writing this. Feted is far too grand a verb anyway to use when saying something so far from noteworthy: somebody I know and you don’t looks like somebody else I know and you don’t. And yet I did find myself wondering what it all meant as I stood in a reassuringly short queue to pick up my coffee, ready to board my bus in the fog that had only just started to materialise out of nowhere.

Did they simply run out of cast members in the movie of my life? I’ve always thought it would be an impeccably scripted and acted, beautifully shot affair, even if nobody would have heard of any of the bands in the soundtrack. I thought that was the trade-off, those were the benefits I would enjoy in return for having passed on any big explosions, stunt doubles or special effects. But this recent trend made me think that maybe I had been wrong all along. Perhaps it was the kind of low-budget independent movie where money was so tight that the extras had to double up, play several parts and hope nobody was paying too close attention to the continuity.

Initially this was a terrible blow to the ego, but the more I thought about it the more I saw the consolations. Imagine the exciting extra dimension it could add to everyday life! Suddenly all those crowd scenes you have to endure all the time would feel like they had meaning after all. A humdrum half hour spent queuing in the bank to pay in a cheque could be transformed into an exciting game, scanning the surroundings for somebody I’ve met before. Tucked at the back of a theatre audience might be someone who had previously featured as an old flame or an old friend, the next table along in the restaurant might have a particularly entertaining ex-colleague or a favourite teacher.

Then I realised that I was kidding myself: I live in my home town, where I grew up and went to school. Maybe that’s what makes the movie of my life feel low-budget, because I never went travelling or lived in London or took on the world. Nobody has ever needed to use a wide angle lens or a sweeping panoramic shot to film this. And I could already bump into an old flame, or an old friend, or a former teacher; if I see somebody who looks like them it’s probably because it is them. And even if these doppelgangers weren’t the real thing, what difference did it really make?

It was a chastening thought. And yet there’s still something I find comforting about it, something about the commonality of our experience. I find it reassuring that we all have more in common that you might think. If we don’t all look that different, maybe we aren’t all that different in other ways too. Maybe we can be connected in ways we don’t necessarily need to understand. And I like the feeling of echoed memory I get when I spot one of those lookalikes, the way it brings back feelings that would otherwise be lost or buried.

That night when I got home, I spoke to a friend on the phone for the first time in almost a year. The next day, I contacted one of my oldest friends after two years out of touch. Sometimes you have to travel back into the past to find where you need to be in the present. I don’t know if all of that would have happened if I hadn’t seen so many bad doppelgangers recently.

Lastly, of course, because this is all about me, there’s the most selfish thing of all to like about that phenomenon. I like the idea that one day, somebody I don’t know any more will be waiting, hot and cross on a Tube platform, sitting at a plaza in another country enjoying a cold beer in the sunshine, shivering outside an office hundreds of miles away on a wintry cigarette break, in a swimming pool, in a waiting room or even somewhere nicely incongruous like on holiday, getting ready to use a jet ski. And somebody will walk past them who looks almost but not exactly like me and they’ll remember me, even if it’s only for a moment. If they do, I hope I’m lucky. I hope they remember something good.

Dignity

It has been a testing year in the most literal sense, in that there have been plenty of tests, and she has been there for all of them. She was there the time they packed me off, childlike in pyjamas, into the rattling white tube. She was there the time they attached the electrodes to my hand and elbow and turned the dial. She watched as my arm twitched into the air, a levitation, a magic trick. “It was like a Hitler salute.” she told me later on, smiling despite herself, and so, to my surprise, did I.

She was there when they put the drops in my eyes, when I sat in the café, pupils the size of dinner plates, unable to see things properly, the world all bright blurry edges and swimming shapes, like photos from a camera where the light seals have started to perish. She made me put on her ridiculous outsized sunglasses and took pictures. “Look, you’re cute!” she said. Looking at them afterwards the silliness appealed to me. The holes in my eyes and the shape of the world had returned to something like normal, and only the good things were still extraordinary. They didn’t learn a lot about me in all those tests, but I learned a lot about her.

So naturally, she is also there when they put the camera down my throat.

We go into the room together and she sits in the corner. There is always a chair in the corner, in these rooms, and it’s always where she sits. They get me to lie on the coach on my side and then they ask me some questions. They ask if it’s okay to use my first name, and without thinking, I say yes. It’s a low and dirty trick, asking that. They don’t tell you just how many times you’re going to hear your name spoken in the next twenty minutes, like a mantra, like an incantation. If I’d known I would have bloody-mindedly said no, got them to call me Sir instead. Let’s see how they build trust and rapport now, I’d have thought to myself.

The ineffective, inadequate anaesthetic spray in my throat is next. It is given the bare minimum of time to work, only just long enough for me to register how vile it tastes. Then the guard goes in my mouth, like being at the dentist. I’m not scared of the dentist. You could almost think it’s innocent then, right until the point where they get me to swallow the tube. “One big gulp” says the nurse, jovially belittling what I’m about to do. It’s not a sensation I can properly describe; imagine swallowing something that never ends, for what feels like forever, and you might get close enough. I hope you cannot really imagine it, I wouldn't want you to be able to.

All I can hear is the rushing sound of the fluid in my mouth, my breathing, harsh and jagged, the nurses repeatedly saying my name, cajoling me, telling me to breathe. I am facing away from her, away from the screen. Even if I wasn’t I would still have my eyes shut. I’ve always been frightened of what I look like on the inside. I try to pick out, in the smallest of gaps between all those noises, a supportive silence from the corner. It’s one of the only things that helps.

I’m not one of life’s stoics, so I’m no reliable judge of whether this is anywhere near as awful to watch as it is to experience. I sort of hope it is. But how would anybody know? I can’t move or make any noise at all. I wish they’d stop saying my bloody name. I wish I could tell them that. But I can’t say anything, I can only lie mute, a jangling bundle of sensations I can’t ignore. If time flies when you’re having fun, it shuffles on its knees across broken glass at times like this. Everything is in the worst kind of slow motion, the slow motion in which accidents, disasters and sporting injuries always seem to happen. I could have been there for hours or seconds and I just wouldn’t have a clue.

The consent form I signed and gave to the nurse when I first arrived uses the word “invasive”. I can think of dozens of better, more accurate adjectives but if they were on the form instead nobody would ever sign it. The information sheet I was supposed to look at beforehand is folded up in her bag. I never did; I asked her to read it for me and tell me whether I had anything to worry about. I can’t be trusted to decide what to worry about, another test, a test I always fail.

An eternity later, they tell me they have got to the end of the procedure and that the camera is coming back up. Another lie; what they mean is that we’re at the halfway mark. This is when the retching begins in earnest, awful heaving with every tortuous millimetre. That noise sounds like it’s coming from somebody other than me, would that it felt like it did. I wonder if I could get the tube out quicker this way, but it seems not; the nurses sound worried. There is an urgent, hectoring tone to their voices as they keep telling me how brilliantly I am doing. I bet they say that to everybody. I bet they lie through their teeth to everybody.

I am lying in the foetal position as they draw this thing out of me, the hugest of rabbits from the tiniest of hats, rising up like a clichéd snake from a charmer’s basket. And they keep saying my name, again and again, so much that they’ve put me off it, telling me to concentrate on my breathing. It’s a grotesque parody of childbirth. Finally it is done and I am sitting up, no euphoric glow, nothing to cradle in my arms, no photographs of the beautiful moment, just a feeling of shame and confusion. Then I see all the blood on the pillow.

“What’s that?”

My throat still works. I wasn’t sure until that exact moment that it would.

“It’s nothing to worry about. It’s standard when we take a biopsy.”

The specialist sits me down and gives me the diagnosis. Still traumatised, I’m not in a fit state to take any of it in. It’s as if my brain is speed reading everything he says, condensing it down to one word, hernia, and when I realise that I feel old. Hernias strike me as something that old people have. They probably are, I probably am. I am handed more fact sheets, I in turn hand them to her. She can read them later for me, tell me how worried to be. I feel weak and bewildered as we leave the hospital and walk to the car. Cold, too: the air is biting and I can’t put my jacket on because the shoulder of my t-shirt is soaked with liquid. I don’t know what it is and would rather not be told, which is my attitude to a lot of things.

We drive home in silence. I can still feel the tube down my throat, a phantom presence I’ll subsequently discover lasts for days. Back at the flat, in a new t-shirt, I shiver uselessly on the sofa.

"You’ll be all right." she says.

"Will I?"

I always say that; she outranks any doctor. If she says I’ll be okay I nearly believe it, even though she gets bored of me asking. I worry that eventually she’ll stop answering me, and, always superstitious, I think that will be the day things start to go badly wrong, on more levels than one.

“Of course you will. Don’t be silly. Do you want me to do your verrucas?”

“Okay.”

I remove my socks, wriggle round and position myself so the pads of my feet are poking in the air. The treatment we’ve bought is like a suction cup, firing a freezing liquid into a confined space between the tube and my feet. It’s incredibly cold for a moment, and then it’s over. I am lying on my front, size twelve feet in the air while she performs molecular gastronomy on them with something a little like liquid nitrogen. It’s not a scene I remember seeing in any romantic comedy.

“There you are, all finished.”

“Is it like having a pet sometimes?”

There’s a terrible pause and I think she’s going to say Yes. She momentarily frowns in concentration, then she smiles, then she comes out with something even worse.

“No. It’s like having a child.”

Afterwards she goes into town to shop and lunch. I would usually go with her but instead I lie alone in the bedroom, dim daylight creeping under the blind, feeling ancient, feeling sorry for myself, feeling that tube that’s no longer there. I try to drift off to sleep so I can forget. And I hope there’s still something she loves about me, because it feels like I don’t have any dignity left.

Briefest encounter

As I stand outside the jewellers on the High Street I peer through the window and, for the briefest of split seconds, I make eye contact with the man to whom I owe everything. He’s about my age, balding, ginger, bearded and grumpy looking. A completely different shape to me, shorter and stockier, he stands wearily behind the counter waiting for somebody to serve. He doesn’t know who I am and we’ve never met, but that doesn’t change the realities of the situation.

When I properly met my wife she had been engaged to him for years. He was the boyfriend she hadn’t been able to shift when she went to university all those years before, and I suppose when she left under a cloud the fact that he was a known quantity counted for even more. When she and I first started corresponding I knew they lived together and their life had all the trappings mine was missing - a mortgage, nice furniture, cats, stability, holidays away and a circle of friends they saw every New Year’s Eve. There was a sense of immutable permanence, the likes of which I had never experienced.

It couldn’t have been much further from my existence without me living in another country. I suppose, in a lot of respects, I was. I was installed in a shabby rented house with a girlfriend I no longer liked and a boorish friend even less house-proud than me. There was nothing to be house-proud about anyway; if you looked through the gap in the bathroom floorboards you could just about see into the kitchen below. If you filled the bath too full the water would trickle out of the overflow and splatter onto the patio outside, drenching the piles of dog ends none of us could be bothered to clear up. The garden was a hideous wasteland you wouldn’t venture into without a machete and a small firearm. The landlord was too mean to spring for a shower so we had to use one of those contraptions that looks like a cross between a shower head and a stethoscope, forcing the rubber cups over the taps and hoping for the best. They invariably came off half way through washing your hair, forcing a cold soapy jig out of the bath and across to the sink to reattach them.

Nothing worked properly, nothing was new, and the house was on the very edge of the part of town where people would gladly walk after nightfall. The two Octobers we were there I remember hiding from the trick-or-treaters in the living room, curtains closed, refusing to come to the front door. My girlfriend used to complain that we were living the lives of eternal students but even then I was saving up; saving up my money, saving up bits of me I knew I would be wasting on her. I don’t think I consciously knew I was slowly planning my escape, but of course that’s exactly what I was doing.

The man I owe everything to works in a shop selling beautiful things, and if it wasn’t for the fact that he is the man behind the counter I would have gone inside years ago, but out of respect I never have. It’s always seemed wrong to. For years after she threw her lot in with me, my wife had to cross the road when passing his shop because she was so scared of bumping into him, especially with me. One time we visited Oxford with my mother and my step-father, and they deliberately went inside to see what he was like. My wife and I walked on and I felt ashamed of their behaviour; felt like indulging their curiosity was just laughing at him behind his back. I thought he deserved better than that, but then I would say that because I owe him everything.

When I look at pictures of my wife and her fiancé, they never seem happy. It’s not that they look unhappy either, more that they had been together so long they probably convinced each other that they’d transcended abstract concepts like that. I wonder if he managed to make her smile like I do; he probably did at one stage, but no evidence of it has survived. I am a far better historian, I keep the photographs where she smiles and looks beautiful, bin the ones she doesn’t like. I would say she makes that easy, but every time I do she tells me to shut up.

Looking at them as a couple in those photos, I see the abstract concept they couldn’t manage to transcend or outrun. It’s resignation, and it’s writ large across them both. They were a couple you could rely on, in it for the long haul. They had been together forever, and it went without saying that they would be together forever. Forever times two is an awful lot of forever, and with the wrong person it might even feel longer than that. If you put all the couples you knew into a dead pool, you would never have picked them to go first. It just wouldn’t have occurred to you.

They were the sort of couple I used to be in, where you sit in silence in a restaurant watching other people, wondering what they have that you’re missing, wondering if it’s just you that’s gone wrong somewhere. Other people’s relationships are like other people’s supermarket trolleys. We all start out with all those opportunities, all that choice and yet when it comes to checking out everybody else’s looks better than yours, like they have an extra dimension and yours doesn’t.

And yet not long after we started writing to each other she told me how close she’d come to leaving him the previous year. She’d stayed, she said, only for the cats. I didn’t question very hard what that said about their union, I didn’t even question why she was telling me that. I didn’t want to question anything. I just wanted to sit there all day reading her voice on the page, so I did. And then I prised her away from him. It wasn’t difficult, but even I have some concept of right and wrong. I wouldn’t have done it if I hadn’t thought her perfect.

It’s odd, standing outside and looking in and having that miniscule moment of connection with him. I wonder whether he knows who I am. I assume he doesn’t, but you never know; he still speaks to my sister-in-law, might have seen some photos somewhere. I wonder what I must look like to him, whether he would resent my height or my full head of hair. Some of their mutual friends tell me we would have got on like a house on fire under different circumstances which is neither a compliment nor an insult, just a bizarre piece of trivia about a parallel universe.

I feel unworthy in that moment, that flash of one-sided recognition. I feel like knowing who he is, having that advantage over him, and thinking these things constitutes lording it over him. And that’s the last thing I want. I come away from the encounter knowing that I’ll write this and wanting to do him justice.

He was just bad tempered enough that she thinks I am equable and fun to live with, just staid and prematurely middle-aged enough that my reckless irresponsibility can seem like a charmingly haphazard adventure. He didn’t love her mother as I do, scared her sister with his angry driving, never socialised with friends, didn’t really have friends. He would spend evenings glued to the television, watching the football. I still remember the sheer relief on her face when I told her I could take or leave sport.

Yet he was by no means a villain; he was kind and considerate when she told him she wanted to leave, civilised to a fault. There were no fights, no threats, nothing awful said that could never be taken back. In that he was a better man than me - if somebody I loved left me, I know I would be vengeful and spiteful. I’m a terrible winner, but an even worse loser. “If somebody I loved”: maybe the clue is there. He couldn’t have loved her as I do, or he wouldn’t have been so decent.

I think that’s about as good a summary as I can manage of a man I’ve never met and never will. Anyway, I have never been one for letting not knowing someone get in the way of my having an opinion. He was just enough that she didn’t leave him for somebody else before I came along, nowhere near enough to keep her from me when I did. He was the perfect act to follow, and for that I really do owe him everything. It is the oddest thing, and yet it‘s true: as much as any friend I have, I hope he’s happy now. I walk away, into the mass of tourists flooding the pavement in the rain, with a strange feeling of warmth towards that stranger in the shop window. It’s a warmth I dislike myself for, because I can’t see how it’s not condescending.

Thinking in silence

The alarm goes off to remind us to be quiet, and sitting in the silence I think clichéd thoughts, just like everybody else.

First I think that I’ve never known a real sacrifice and cannot understand how people can bring themselves to make them. I think about how much I love my wife, and what I’d give up for her, but that I wouldn’t give up the smallest things for anybody or anything else. It’s enough of an inconvenience taking out the recycling, making the little contributions. I wonder if that selfishness is a modern thing, whether the boys they packed off in the last century had unworthy thoughts like mine. They must have known what their chances were, but they did it anyway. Would I have lingered in a prison somewhere if it had been me facing that terrible choice all those years ago?

A modern thing indeed; perhaps it is. Next I think of a past that is vanishing, with its notions of duty and honour, and a world where good and evil were more tangible, concrete rather than abstract. A place where there were heroes and villains, where people abided by conventions. Treaties and declarations of war, not bombs on buses or grainy footage from a cave, full of threats. Or maybe it’s just the shifting sense of history that makes us see things that way. I think about how banal the First World War would have looked viewed through the prism of rolling news, of journalists embedded in regiments, of a rapidly mounting fatality count, a meter clocking up on a wall somewhere.

I think about the old and infirm, struggling in a society they are somehow better than, and I hope they can feel everybody’s care this morning. I wish they felt it the rest of the time, and I’m sure they don’t. I can’t help contrasting their behaviour with the rioting students yesterday, trying to prove their need for education through their utter lack of eloquence. And then I think that I’m idealising a whole generation to help me feel sorry for myself. I’m sure they can be crotchety and prejudiced, complain about the queues, bitch about immigrants. But this morning they are all perfect, and we are all ungrateful, or at least we couldn’t possibly be grateful enough.

Then I think about what the Germans make of today. And then something occurs to me which you aren’t supposed to think, let alone ever say; would it have been so dreadful if they had won? Or would I just be writing this in a different language, listening to different music, being a different person. Would it honestly have mattered? Somehow saying that is treason, but I can’t help it. They have grieving widows and mournful pensioners too. And the actions we take today further from home, in conflicts muddier than those archetypal fields, create fresh widows every day.

I look over at the Irish woman in the bay across from me, ranting on her very important call, oblivious to everybody’s respectful silence and I find myself cheered that she is the exception rather than the rule. I’m moved and I don’t know why. Uncomfortable that my colleagues might see my eyes shining, I decide to blame my awful headache.

I drank my tea too fast before the bell went off, and a cough catches in my throat, but I wait until the two minutes is over before I release it.

Thirty day trailer

November is the ugly sister of the calendar, unloved and unwanted. The clocks go back and everybody congratulates themselves on an extra hour in bed, but the price paid in return is high, too high.

Someone flicked the light switch on the world when we weren’t looking, while we were all asleep that night. Now, it’s dark when we wake, gloomy outside as I throw my clothes on and stroll to work in the cold. The windows in the lounge stream with condensation each morning, the only remaining evidence of heat it seems I never felt. It’s dark, too, when I get home. There seems no point in drawing curtains or raising blinds during the week, it’s an exercise in futility. All the good bright parts of the day are going to be wasted in an office, under flickering panels which colour everything beige, peering out towards the windows to make out the trees outside being lashed with rain.

Town is pregnant with the possibility of Christmas - decorations are strung across the tops of streets like tinsel, perch on lamp posts like crowns. Everything is decked out but not yet lit, holding its breath somehow. Each morning I, also dressed up, also not properly switched on, walk past them feeling like they echo me perfectly. I find myself wondering one afternoon where they all come from, if council officials take them down in January and pack them away in a gigantic cardboard box stowed away on top of a huge wardrobe or stuffed under an enormous bed in a spare room somewhere.

The other signs are coalescing, too; those songs we all know are beginning to crop up, on the radio and in the shops. Their jauntiness when played so out of context is disconcerting but not yet irritating. It’s early enough at this stage that we can all get frustrated and rail to our friends, but at least they still have the novelty value they will have lost by December. At the moment, the mithering at lunches and on buses about the festive season still feels fresh. It seems that every year, people start complaining earlier and earlier about Christmas coming earlier and earlier every year. Maybe I'll follow suit, feel flat in October next year instead.

The trick with the lights wasn’t the only robbery that has been practised in the last few weeks; whoever did that also took a huge bottle of metaphorical Tippex to autumn. It seems like only yesterday you could sit outside in the beer garden after work, enjoy the pavement cafes at weekends. People watching, as it happens, is one of the only outdoors activities I truly enjoy. And now? The sunshine is fleeting and intermittent but the cold seems permanent. It’s the sort of cold you feel well beneath the surface. You can still tread the fallen leaves underfoot and remember the childlike pleasure in that, but rather than being golden and crunchy they are brown and soggy, like cornflakes left in the bowl too long.

I try to stay positive, not my strong suit, because there are months of this to look forward to. Somebody at work told me that the twenty-first of December was the first day of winter and I thought Christ, it’s a month and a half until we have three more months of this. And there is much about this season that I love. Winter drinks are so much richer than summer drinks; there’s a place for a gin and tonic, but something comforting about port, brandy, winter Pimm’s, red wine in a snug warm room. I love being able to see my breath, one of the biggest consolations of a frosty morning. All my winter coats, herringbones and parkas, are far nicer than my summer ones, and each of them has a chap stick hidden in the inside pocket that has lain dormant since February, a tiny time capsule from the last cold snap.

There are all those firsts coming down the line; standing outside Marks and Spencers watching the beautiful soothing notes pouring out of the shiny brass instruments in the hands of the uniformed men, a glass of thick, sticky mulled wine, sweet and fragrant with cloves and cinnamon, picking the cards you’ll send your friends, roast parsnips and hot chocolate and parties and winding down. But so much of that feels like the stuff of December, because as I said November is the worst month of all. It is the absence of a month, defined by everything it isn’t, a month you spend waiting for the following month to happen. We started talking about our Christmas party weeks ago, already we’re discussing plans and parents and presents as if November’s just the trailer we have to sit through to get to the feature attraction. And that’s probably what it is, but nobody wants to watch a thirty day trailer.

I’m beginning to think my wife had the right idea, she spent October on the wagon. At first I thought she had gone mad, but now I realise what I didn’t grasp at the time. She’s cleverer than me; it gave her something to look forward to in November, a month which otherwise is only about looking forward. I might try it next year, I think I might need to.

The paralytic crouton

What’s the most reckless thing you’ve ever done?

Thinking this one through has brought back lots of unpleasant memories. Or at least what passes for memories, because all the leading candidates involve alcohol. Passing out after a night of heroic drinking and lying prone in the middle of Church Street while my friends desperately tried to guide traffic around my unconscious, concussed body is a particular low point. So was attempting to take on the north face of a Canadian lady called Charlene after a house party under the influence of both booze and marijuana without access to crampons or any of the rest of the requisite equipment. On balance, though, the very worst one has to be the one and only time I experienced car surfing.

This sad tale takes place on an ordinary Saturday night in around 1997, and in 1997 an ordinary Saturday night went something like this; me, my friends and my brother would go to the Bull and Chequers pub, drink a great deal (a reference to the quantity, not the price) of lager and then make our way to a nightclub. We were all stuck at home, living with our parents, single, desperate and very fond of lager. We weren’t very fond of nightclubs but we were fond of girls and the best way to see them was to go to a nightclub. The best way of overcoming our aversion to nightclubs was to get so drunk that we hardly noticed we were in one. At the time, Reading had a number of half-decent nightclubs; there was RG1 in the centre of town and a place called Utopia out on the edge of nowhere. The problem with both of them was that they were commonly considered to be meat markets, where anyone in their right mind could find a companion for the evening if they were so inclined. We all had a very real fear that we would be the exceptions that proved that rule, and we had no desire to put that to the test. In fact, we had a pretty good idea that we would leave a place like that empty-handed, and our egos were fragile enough as it was.

So instead we went to a far less salubrious destination called the Mill at Sindlesham. It was geared towards a different crowd where, if anything, we belonged even less. There was less skin on display, there were more perms to be seen (a veritable thicket of them some nights, visible above the cloud cover of the dry ice like a repulsive crinkly mountain range) and more people in their mid-twenties. There were also a lot of people in their mid-thirties pretending to still be in their mid-twenties, an attitude I have a lot more sympathy with these days than I did then. Of course we never pulled there either, but that was okay because behind their backs we were laughing at the whole experience. We were failing to get our rocks off in a postmodern way, or at least we told ourselves that most nights when we got into the taxi at the end of the evening without even the faintest sniff of action.

I remember that every Saturday I thought it would be different and that this time I would find the girl who didn’t fit in, had been dragged there by her friends and had gone along hoping she would finally meet somebody like me, and I remember that every Saturday night I was disappointed for another seven days. I think I spent most of the nineties hoping to meet that girl, and I never did. Either that or she was snogging somebody with no neck somewhere out of view before going home to contend with her own brand of disappointment.

I still remember my pair of blue check jeans from River Island that I used to wear every Saturday night. I still remember my olive green gingham shirt from Gap. I now realise they didn’t actually go together; maybe that’s what growing up means. I remember too that in those days nightclubs wouldn’t let you in wearing trainers, or t-shirts, or the wrong kind of jeans, a level of formality which was irritating then but seems ridiculous now. Now, the word “nightclub” is as silly and outdated to us as the word “discotheque”, and soon even the contraction “club” will seem as ludicrous as the word “disco”. But that is now and this was then, and in 1997 there was no other place to be.

I’d like to say we were above it all, sneering from the sidelines, but that wouldn’t be true. We’d normally focus on somebody not too attractive, not too good a dancer, doable yet attainable. Then, like a centrifugal force, we would gradually get pushed to the sidelines over the course of the evening while our targets ended up getting off with someone even less attractive than us who had the secret ingredient we were all missing; the absence of any shame whatsoever. We never quite managed to have enough to drink to level the playing field, and it wasn’t for the want of trying.

The night of the car surfing was the night we got closest, my brother, my friend Mike and me.

I remember it was about quarter to two. There was about one song left before the two slow songs that would enable everyone but us to snog someone, however unsuitable, on the dance floor. That was usually the point where we snuck to the cloakroom to get away and beat the rush, because there was nothing going on for any of us. Not for us the dubious delights of the “ten to two-er”, the woman who is magically attractive enough to get off with in the closing stages that you wouldn’t look at twice before then. All the ten to two-ers had blanked us at approximately quarter to one and yes, we were desperate enough to have been trying to get their attention since midnight. At quarter to two the nightclub had stopped serving food (because for some reason nightclubs used to) and we barely had enough money for our carriage home at the end of the night so we couldn‘t even drink through the pain barrier.

Not that it mattered; by that stage we were all completely blotto. My brother had that shit-eating grin he always had when he was pissed that made him look like Hobbes out of Calvin and Hobbes. He was a fun drunk, especially if your idea of fun involves standing next to someone while he vomits directly onto the bar at the After Dark, causes a distraction and then runs off before anyone notices the cheesy smelling pool of vegetable stew starting to dribble towards the edges and drip onto the floor below. He had vanished about fifteen minutes ago, and Mike and I were starting to worry about him having got into trouble when suddenly he materialised at our table in the bar with a tray containing three bottles of Budweiser and three colourless shots. He flashed that grin again.

“Look! They take cards.”

I still maintain that it was chugging those two final drinks in the space of ten minutes which tipped us over the edge, but oddly enough I still remember a fair amount about the end of the evening under the circumstances. We fell into a taxi with just enough money to get us to the shopping precinct and had to walk the rest of the way. I’m sure, too, that if only the chip shop has still been open we wouldn’t have got into anywhere near so much trouble. Anyway, we staggered towards our house, still remarkably animated given that it was half-two in the morning. I believe there may even have been an impromptu a cappella rendition of Wonderwall, because there usually was in those days. The last couple of streets before we got to our house were quiet and residential; grassy verges, the occasional tree lights off everywhere. Up the garden paths, past the perfect flower beds, were houses full of decent, suburban, law-abiding husbands, wives, fathers and mothers sleeping the sleep of the just, the sort of dreamless sleep that precedes a worthy day of DIY, car-washing, a lovely Sunday lunch in a country pub or a functional yet enjoyable excursion to a garden centre.

There’s only one thing I don’t remember. I can’t recall whose idea it was for Mike and I to walk over the bonnet of a parked car apiece, across the roof and then along the boot like we were playing some kind of computer game.

I do remember that it seemed like a hilarious idea, and I even remember doing it, kind of, clumping over the top of a perfectly innocuous car while Mike made a meal of the car just behind it. He was so loud it was hard to believe he wasn't leaving dents. I also remember the front door of the adjacent house opening and a couple coming out, thanking their hosts for a pleasant evening just in time to see Mike Riverdancing across what turned out to be their brand new car. I know for a fact it was brand new, because that fact formed a key and regularly repeated part of the tirade they delivered about our conduct.

Not straight away, I‘m afraid, because Mike and I made a run for it (as did my brother, who for once had been keeping his nose clean). They didn’t get to raise the issue, at great length, until the end of a brief chase up the road. It was a race we were doomed to lose, partly because running in a straight line turned out to be somewhat of a challenge and mainly because by then I was busting for a piss and a cigarette. By that stage of an evening I could quite cheerfully do both at once. They eventually caught up with us on the front lawn of our house; in hindsight heading for home might not have been the cleverest plan given that it gave at least one crucial detail away which could have been useful to heavies, vengeful family members or indeed the police. Unfortunately, people with the judgment to realise that we also tend to have the good sense to appreciate that the roof of a Citroen doesn’t constitute a public footpath.

The confrontation at the end of my front garden wasn’t a very coherent one. They were very angry, Mike and I were very drunk. My brother had sobered up in that way you sometimes have to when everyone else has momentarily gone insane, and was doing his best to act as peacekeeper. Quite a big task that, given that Mike’s line of defence consisted of saying “Throw the fucking book at me, I don’t care, I’m off to Mexico in a week anyway” over and over again as if it was the perfect answer to practically everything. In his mind, it probably was. Eventually the situation was defused - to this day I really don’t know how - and we crashed through the front door of my home. Mike raced through the ground floor, out through the sliding doors (I suspect to vomit all over our patio, not for the first time that year) and fell into one of the bushes in the back garden with a loud and leafy thud. He had put the prat into pratfall.

“I bet Jim Morrison never had this fucking problem.” he yelled to nobody in particular as we saw him twitching in the leaves like a paralytic crouton. At the time he really wanted to be Jim Morrison, and didn’t seem to realise that the Lizard King wouldn’t have been seen dead in the Mill at Sindlesham or touched a Moscow Mule. He wouldn’t have worn that tan leather blouson either, but at that stage we were all happy to let Mike keep his illusions. It was exactly then that, with perfect timing, my mother’s bedroom light flicked on and her head appeared, Gorgon-like, in the window. She explained, with terrifying clarity, that Mike was soon going to experience a degree of unpleasantness that Jim Morrison, even on the worst acid trip imaginable, could never have conceived of. You could almost see the frost forming on the panes of the greenhouse with every syllable.

That rather brought our festivities to a close.

The oddest thing of all though was that later that week, after a far more sedate evening down the pub, Mike and I sat down to watch The Doors on VHS. There’s a scene quite near the start, after one of the band’s early gigs, when they are walking through the streets of L.A. swept up in a carnival of free love and revolution. Shortly after that, Val Kilmer quite unashamedly jumps onto and walks over a car while delivering some load of old hogwash about liberating your mind and rebelling against something or other. He doesn’t get chased by a posse of disappointed squares and he certainly doesn’t get a bollocking off Ray Manzarek’s glacial mother. In fact, we rewound it and watched it again just to make sure, and it was quite clear that nobody so much as bats an eyelid.

Poor Mike. All that grief and, technically speaking, he was right after all. After careful consideration, we decided not to tell my mother about that in the end. It seemed wisest not to.

My twenties and other disasters

In case you missed Part 1, or just zoned out a few sentences into it (in which case fair enough), this week I'm being interviewed by one of my favourite bloggers, Alyson of Calling People Names. If you want to join in (and so far nobody has, which says to me that Alyson is doing a superb job) lob a question in the comments field or drop me a line and I'll try to answer those too. By this stage in the interview Alyson had already got me to confess to being an arsehole and finding flatulence hilarious so it's fair to say I was opening the emails containing each successive question with a growing sense of trepidation.

Tell me about something you learned later in life that you wish you knew in your twenties.

The initial temptation is to say “everything” and move on.

I learned loads of things in later life that I didn’t know in my twenties, so many that looking back it makes me wonder what I did in fact know in my twenties. Presumably it was just a bunch of stuff I didn’t know in my teens. This is probably like a hall of mirrors packed full of ignorance; doubtless in my forties I will look back at things like this and think “you poor, ignorant sod”. I'm also rather worried that if I start the list of things I didn’t know in my twenties I will still be writing it on New Year’s Eve, but since you asked I’ll have a crack at the edited highlights.

Smoking, for one - I really shouldn’t have ever done it. I can see why I did, but with hindsight it was a huge waste of so many things. I started to try and impress a girl, I carried on because I'd been dumped by another girl and all the time I convinced myself it was cool. It must have been at least supposed to be cool, because everybody who ever watching me sucking miserably on a fag told me I wasn't a natural looking smoker. I never made it beyond looking like a fifteen year old girl at a party trying it for the first time, which is not a good look on any young bachelor.

I did manage to give up once for the grand total of three weeks, but then I went on a disastrous holiday to visit a friend. We had some history, during a time when I thought that if a relationship wasn't tortured and impossible it wasn't worth failing at. I promised myself repeatedly on the seven hour train journey to Edinburgh that I wouldn’t get off with her, because that way lay disaster, so naturally I got there and promptly did. It was either sleepwalking or autopilot, but either way it wasn't clever.

Following many awkward and very tortured conversations about the relationship I knew perfectly well we couldn't have, we decided it was best that I go back home, so we went to the station only to find that I had missed the last train down south – at two in the afternoon. The next one was the following morning and for some reason, checking into a hotel never even occurred to me. As we sat there in Edinburgh Waverley train station, me shabby and dishonest, her depressed and upset, I did the only thing I could to show my contrition. I cadged a skanky Superking off the man at the next bench. I remember the box of matches I bought a few minutes later in a grubby newsagent just off Princes Street, bright cobalt blue heads, different like the pound notes.

After that it was like I had never quit at all; the next morning at half past six, having been up all night partly because she was so upset and partly because I was selfishly worried for my safety, I walked alone in the gloom to Haymarket station and took the first train out of Scotland. I was in the smoking compartment with two packets of twenty Marlboro Reds and little else in front of me. Somewhere around Crewe I thought better of it, tore the remaining cigarettes in half and threw them in the bin. The first thing I did when I got off the train at the end of my journey was buy another packet. The more I think about my smoking across my twenties, the more I think that maybe it was my middle-class cowardly attempt at self-harm. Playing the long game.

That story is a pretty good parable representing my twenties in general, I’m afraid. I wish I could have been happier with myself and less desperate to make the wrong choices just so I didn’t feel so alone. My whole approach to relationships was wrong, too. I wish that during the time when I was single I had been with somebody, and I wish the time I wasted on girlfriends I had spent on my own instead. I was lovely to people who didn’t deserve it and treated some people who were genuinely devoted to me quite appallingly. It almost feels like everything was completely the wrong way round, like the impression left by something rather than the thing itself.

I wish I had taken more risks; I still don’t take them really, but I think if I’d started at the age where risks and mistakes are regarded more indulgently maybe I’d be better at it now. It’s common to screw things up in your twenties, people expect it, but an active blaze-of-glory screwing up would have been magnificent, rather than just sitting at home in a grey gloomy bubble doing it by inertia which was all I seemed to be able to manage.

I’m conscious that I’m not answering your real question though, which is what I would have wanted to know in my twenties that I know now. And the reason is that, however much I look at what I’ve just written, it’s like time travel. You can’t go back and change just one thing; or rather, you can, but you don’t know what else you will inadvertently change or where you will eventually wind up as a result. Not here, almost certainly, and that’s why I can’t honestly say I would want anything to be different.

So instead, the honest answer to your question is this: there is one thing I learned in my thirties that I wish I’d known in my twenties. I wish I had known that my twenties would eventually end and that my thirties would be better. If I could speak to myself, an apparition from the future, that’s what I would tell myself. I don’t know if I would have found it comforting, I probably wouldn’t even have believed it, but I might have at least been reassured by the mistaken belief that cardigans are still in fashion in 2010.

I'm glad you resisted that temptation. 
 
What were your birthdays like as a child? Is there one in particular that stands out?

My memory is legendary. It scares my friends. Some people go out of an evening and they can remember roughly whether they had a good time. I can recall what I had for a starter, what I had as a main course, who sat on my left, who sat on my right, what they ordered, whether it was good and what the main topics of conversation were. I remember this many, many soirées later, even if nobody believes me any more because they've all moved on to something far more interesting.

It makes me a nightmare to know in a lot of ways because I see it as my calling in life to improve the memories of those around me, if by that you mean “never let them forget various things which they’d really rather”. It means I frequently win bets, much to everybody's chagrin. There are other plus sides too though; I’m good in pub quizzes, great at settling arguments and it's helped me pass lots of exams without having to do an awful lot. Yes, my memory is quite something. There’s a special section of that Rolodex for every knockback I’ve ever had, too; thank goodness I got married, otherwise it might have grown exponentially until I started forgetting things I really needed to know like my password at work, where I left my keys and whether I like peanut butter.

There is a trade-off, though. Sometimes I wonder whether I made a deal with the devil at the age of fourteen; perfect recollection of everything after that date, hazy memories of everything beforehand. I lived in Bristol until I was about eight years old, when we moved to Reading. My memories of Bristol are patchy at best, bits and pieces, some of them probably not even real but constructed from a sheaf of warm fuzzy photographs with round corners, all of which I haven’t seen in years. I remember being in a tent in the garden with mumps, white blonde hair and fat cheeks. I remember riding a bike on two wheels instead of four for the first time, the terror and exhilaration of wobbling down the long path in the park. I remember my dad’s brown-tinged aviator glasses (was everything brown in the late seventies? It feels like it was) and my jumper with oval pleather patches over the elbows. But it’s like a picture that’s shattered, lots of little shards that don’t join up into a coherent whole. Try as I might, I can't glue them together.

So I can’t remember birthdays. I’ve seen pictures of them, but I couldn’t place myself in that moment and tell you anything about what it was like. I couldn’t even remember the toys, or the candles, or the parties, though I’m sure there were lots of all of them. I can’t remember being happy or unhappy either, nothing except that I have a vague recollection of being a nervous child. Really, the blank is so complete that you’d think I’d been hypnotised or was trying to forget something awful. I don’t think I was, but then how would I know?

What I do remember is my sixteenth birthday, because my friends gave me the bumps. Not just any version of the bumps, but a special one which took place right next to the school pond, a murky body of water and algae next to the sports block, surrounded by midget triffids. Calling it the bumps is just my attempt to dignify what really happened, which is that they grabbed a limb apiece and tossed me into the water. Nobody was bothered by the whole thing but me. My friends were jubilant, my classmates indifferent. Even the delicate ecosystem of the pond was completely undisturbed by my humiliation. It was just another overgrown weed for it to deal with, after all.

I remember that once, in conversation, you mentioned that you don't particularly care for sexual posts. Why is that? If your recent post is any indication, you don't seem to mind when the subject comes up in a novel.

I don’t mind reading about sex provided it’s hilarious or embarrassing. Well, meant to be hilarious or embarrassing, anyway: unfortunately, most people writing seriously about their sex lives are also either hilarious, embarrassing or both, just not deliberately. I’m not saying people can’t write well about sex with no intention of doing so for comic effect, only that I’ve not yet read anyone who could. There’s something about writing erotica that makes most people I’ve read come across as if they’ve never had sex before in their lives, and the overall effect is almost always toe-curling to me.

One time I was settling in on the funbus, drinking my cappuccino and flicking through the blog posts that had gone up while I was asleep when I stumbled across a stray clitoris sticking out like a sore thumb - figuratively, not literally, though from recollection of the context of the post in question it was quite possibly both. It was far too early in the morning for that sort of thing, or it was as far as I was concerned.

I understand there’s a huge market for it, and I would never say it’s bad or wrong, but I personally don’t have any interest in hearing about anybody’s sex life any more than I would broadcast details of mine. It just seems to be the last frontier that I reckon people ought to keep to themselves. I think that even Web 2.0 ought to have a sign marked "Keep Out" somewhere on a perimeter fence, and for that matter I think there should be a perimeter fence. But even if there is, I'm sure you'll always find a few people sneaking off to have a sneaky fuck up against it.

I don't know. Maybe I'm not fond of it because I'm English or maybe it’s because I'm a prude after all. And I certainly can't rule out the possibility that it’s just a deep-seated worry that if I read enough about it I’ll realise I’ve been doing it wrong all these years.

Fair enough. We know there will never be any sexually explicit posts from you. Because it fits (not because I'm cheating) I'm going to ask you a question you asked of me. What else will you never write about - what are your no-go areas?

There are a number of topics I choose not to write about because, although they are interesting to me, I can well imagine they wouldn’t be interesting to anybody else. Politics is a good example of this; it fascinates me, but I don’t think I could write about it in a way which would convey that enthusiasm to others. Music, too - I love listening to music but I don’t think I would ever write about music I like or my favourite albums. I have a feeling if I tried I'd just sound like a tool. My reaction to records tends to be "I love this album" rather than "this is one of the most important albums I'll hear this year" and I wouldn't want that to change. The same goes for food; it’s one of my biggest passions but I couldn’t see myself putting up even the occasional restaurant review. I'd rather write about things where it's okay to be almost completely ignorant of your subject matter, by which I of course mean me.

I think blogs about those niches tend to work well when they are exclusively about that one topic, and even then they don’t particularly interest me. Political blogs tend to be shouty and spiteful, music blogs tend to be snobby and self-important and food blogs are great if you live in the area they are talking about, but otherwise I tend to think they’re of limited interest and the world of food bloggers strikes me as quite an insular one with plenty of backslapping going on. That might just be me, but I’ve got no real interest in reading about how great the food is at a plethora of restaurants I’ll never visit. Naturally, there are exceptions; there are a couple of food writers I follow, for example, but they are excellent writers who could turn their hand to anything (and I sometimes find myself wishing they would). I don’t think I have the confidence to try that myself, I have enough of a job writing about my day-to-day life at times.

In terms of no-go areas, I suppose there are two. First of all, if someone I know specifically asks me not to write about something relating to them or tell a story about them I will leave it out of the blog, provided I know them well. So you'll never hear the story about my friend's "quite satisfactory, thank you" sex life, the other friend who accidentally turned out to be a BNP sympathiser or my friend who went on a work trip with a colleague only to have an awkward moment where he kissed her upper arm and tried to pass it off as a friendly gesture. This can be frustrating at times, but I have just about managed to keep a sense of proportion and realise that it’s far more important to have more good friends and fewer blog posts rather than vice versa.

Incidentally, I once had a manager who said "vicey versey" instead of “vice versa”. Even if she’d asked me not to mention that I still would have done, because she should have known better.

Secondly, at the moment there are some parts of my family life I don’t write about. I am not on good terms with some of my family, and there are some elements of that situation which so far I’ve chosen not to write about. There is also a rich vein of stories I can't currently write about my family because it really would put the nail in the coffin, much as I would enjoy telling them. Without saying too much (which would be wrong) or trying to be deliberately cryptic (which would be irritating) that may change at some point in the future.

Some questions

A while back one of my favourite bloggers, Alyson of Calling People Names asked me if I would interview her for her blog. However, rather than send her a list of questions she wanted me to ask them one at a time and make them up as we went along, so it felt more like a conversation and less like a questionnaire. I was enormously flattered to be asked so I did it, I really enjoyed it and I think it worked out quite well. If you haven't seen it yet, the interview can be found here - it was great fun to do and I think some of the writing in Alyson's responses is just phenomenal.

Afterwards, I had to fight the urge to say something I normally associate with being a kid, namely "My turn! My turn!" But I didn't fight it very successfully, because I gave in and asked if Alyson would interview me. She did, and I'm going to put up the answers over the course of the week. Some of the questions are quite hard, and some involved bringing back some fairly painful memories, so we've all got that to look forward to. If, over the course of the next three (yes, three) posts you think of a question you'd like me to answer you can join in. Either put a question in the comments field, or drop me an email, and I'll answer as many as I can at the end. Or just sit back and enjoy me sounding like a pompous tit, that's just dandy too.

Without further ado, here we go.

You write quite a bit about your wife, about your relationship. How often do you ask her opinion before posting, and have you ever been disappointed by her response? Do you think criticism or praise means more or less coming from someone that knows you so well?

I do nowadays, but for a long time I didn't. For a start, I worried for quite a while that writing about it would jinx it. I'm still quite superstitious about what I write about a lot of the time, and I'm still especially queasy about some subjects like death and illness. I don't like to tempt fate. I'm not sure when that changed, but it's such a big part of the fabric of my life that it would be a bit odd if I didn't talk about it from time to time. Of course, the other danger walking that tight rope is that you say too much, or share too much, or come across as smug. I really hope that I don't fall into that trap, but I'm also very aware that I'm hardly the best judge. I suspect I do write about that side of my life a bit too much lately, but I imagine that will change. I never really know what I'm going to write about next anyway.

I actually ask her opinion on quite a lot of my posts nowadays before I put them up, not just the ones about her. There are only a couple of people who read my posts before I hit the publish button. I think the unfortunate thing about the ones you love the most is that the criticism means so much more and the praise means so much less. It ought to be the other way round, or feels like it should, but somehow it never is. As for being disappointed, I am always disappointed unless the response is "that was fabulous, it's the best thing you've written so far, and I just know the next thing you write is going to be even better still", but that says a lot more about me than her. Besides, anyone who wants that kind of feedback and voluntarily gets married is letting themselves in for an enormous culture shock.

A lot of the feedback I get on my posts from Kelly is good, sound, useful stuff about structure. In particular, she sometimes tells me the ending needs to be stronger or punchier, which is a trick she's learned from me. In fact, here's a handy tip: if anyone ever gives you a piece to critique and you're short of time, pick some paragraphs in the middle, find a sentence you like and then say: this is great, I particularly like this sentence... [quote the sentence here]... but the ending needs to be a bit punchier.

I promise I've never used this technique on you.

One time Kelly specifically thought that I had shared a little too much personal detail in a post, and that it would probably make everyone vomit over their cornflakes (if Australian), dinner (if English) and lunch (if American). On balance I thought she was right, so I took that bit out.

I think it's safe to say, if only judging by reader response, that you don't fall into that trap. I've noticed that you tend to get a great deal more feedback, and of the positive variety, when you write about Kelly. How much of Mr. London Street is that sensitive, superstitious man, and how much of him is the snarky, opinionated man some love to hate? Do you think you're often misjudged by other bloggers?

I’ve given this sort of topic quite a lot of thought, especially having met a few bloggers (though nowhere near as many as I’d like) in the flesh. I do honestly think that a fair few bloggers have an online persona which isn’t necessarily the person they are in real life and is far closer to the person they wish they were instead. In some cases, people are trying to be deep, sincere and earnest – or tortured, for that matter – when they really aren’t. One blogger who I stopped reading a while ago constantly talks about what a mess her life is and how hopeless she is at everything while simultaneously regaling you with stories about her ongoing literary endeavours, schmoozing round London or having articles published hither and thither. A common trick I’ve spotted is for bloggers to be outrageous, outspoken or courageous in a way which those writers simply aren’t in real life.

At first I was annoyed by all of that, but now I think it’s probably fair enough. Good for them, I say. And if it isn’t necessarily my sort of thing that doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for it out there.

One of my problems, though, is that I’ve never bothered with that myself. So the honest answer is that I am all of those things you’ve mentioned. I can be sensitive, heaven knows I can also be deeply over-sensitive. I can be superstitious, and I can be very sceptical about other people’s superstitions. I can be kind, and I can be extremely snide, and sometimes it’s a bit of a lottery which one you’re going to get. I can’t help it. One thing I’m relatively pleased about about my blog is that I’ve written more than a few posts which clearly show that I can be an arsehole, and I make no bones about it (and yes, before you chip in, this is one of them). If you don’t like it, I’m not making you read it.

What I will say is that I think using Twitter has created a bit of a distinction. I would say generally that my writing in the blog tends to be nicer, more inclusive, more conciliatory etc., but I can be a total shit on Twitter. I’m far more argumentative on there, and I don’t completely understand why. The ethos of Twitter is much like blogging; if you can’t think of anything nice to say don’t say anything, be supportive, be lovely etc. but for some reason I can’t fathom I find that much harder on Twitter. I think most of the bloggers I have fallen out with (and, being completely honest, it’s a long list) have generally been more to do with my interactions on Twitter than because of anything I’ve written on my blog or put as a comment on theirs.

As for me being misjudged, actually, no. I think they probably have a fairly accurate picture of what I’m like, they don’t like that and that’s fine with me. The only way in which they're mistaken is that they think I'm interested in their feedback. Sadly one of my main talents is the ability to rub people up the wrong way; I'm sure if I'd gone through my life without it I would have been more successful and far more popular, but I would also have been somebody else.

I know you've submitted writing for contests before and had one of your posts published in the UK's Esquire magazine. Are you actively seeking to publish more? If you were asked to write a collection of essays and they wanted the majority to be new material, what two posts would you choose to include and why?

No, I’m not actively seeking to publish more at the moment. I don’t think I write the sort of pieces people publish, most of the online journals I looked at publish fiction or poetry and I don’t have any particular interest in writing either. I have submitted a couple of pieces in the past, but I haven’t been able to find the sort of publications where my stuff “fits”. Maybe it’s because those publications don't exist. The problem with being published was that it created a sort of expectation that I could do it again, and it’s taken me a while to get over that and realise that it may well not happen.

If I was choosing two of my posts that I think would fit in a book, I suppose I would pick Intira, because it strikes me as one of the most self-contained pieces I’ve written and I was really happy that it said exactly what I wanted to say how I wanted to say it, something which happens a lot less often than it ought to. The other one I’d put in would be The Vaseline story, which has always been one of my favourites, if only in testimony to the fact that nobody will ever fully understand just how hard it was to talk my friend into letting me write about it.

Quite an interesting experience, looking through my stuff again and wondering what I’d pick. “Too short”… “not funny enough”… “doesn’t stand alone”… “has pictures in it” – the list goes on and on. Maybe that explains why I can’t see myself being published.

Great choices - though I tend to think that most of your posts could stand alone.

Moving away from the blog for a bit - what makes you laugh? Not just chuckle, but full out, tears in your eyes kind of laughter. Because honestly, I have trouble imagining you doing so.

This is a very mean question, because you’ve quite cleverly figured out that I’m not that sort of person. When people say that something I’ve written made them laugh out loud, I misinterpret that as particularly high praise because it’s really quite rare for me to have that reaction to things. Really, I ought to have my own acronym to put at the end of every text message and instant message I send. I was thinking of NLOL-DTIP, which, since you asked, stands for “never laugh out loud, don’t take it personally”. I can’t see it catching on.

There are, I suppose a few things. I scratched my head for quite some time, thought about it and then, relatively stumped, I decided to ask Kelly, the person who knows me best.

“I’ve been asked what makes me laugh out loud and I can only think of three things.”

“Well, there’s farting.”

“Four things.”

Clearly Kelly is one of those four things, as is farting. I suppose Kelly farting doesn’t count as a separate thing in its own right but take it from me, it’s extremely amusing. The more I look at the other two things I feel there’s not a lot to say about them. One is Dave, my best friend from university, a man I find tirelessly amusing to the extent that our wives are quite happy to pack us off on holiday together from time to time so they don’t have to. The other is any scene in any television show comprised of hilarious camcorder out-takes, ever, which involves a small child being accidentally twatted by a baseball bat. Endless hours of fun.

I suppose the other thing that makes me properly lose it is watching someone I love lose it. The best kinds of laughing fits - the ones I never have to rationalise or understand - are a sort of mass hysteria where you are all swept up in a moment. At first it’s about something funny, but then it’s funny because it’s funny, and then you are all laughing and you can’t even remember what about, except that you’re laughing at them laughing at you laughing about something. I love the uncomplicated euphoria of that moment. And the best thing? Sometimes, just when you think it’s come to an end you’ll catch the glint in someone’s eye and it will all start again, and you’ll realise that that pause was just a lull, the peaceful moment between huge dips on a rollercoaster.