C words

I suppose it all starts with the sherry. Philip and Sharon are already ensconced at The Ship by the time we arrive, late as always. We have been stuck on a train so slow it might double as a rudimentary form of time travel, dropping you at your destination years or even months into the future, passing through stations where nobody ought to live. Because we were running so late, Philip asked me if I wanted him to get me a drink in for him. Because I am a knob, I asked for a dry sherry, and because I am thoughtless I didn’t ask Kelly what she wanted to drink.

So the solitary glass sits there on our table, a symbol for plenty of my failings, as we shrug off coats, scarves and gloves and begin the intricate dance of hugs and hellos. The pub is quite something, simultaneously in the middle of nowhere but feeling as if it is at the centre of everything. The room itself is beautiful and has already started to fill up at lunchtime with the sort of people who live a life I spend much of mine envying. You like some people the moment you meet them - I am spending lunch with three such people - but pubs can be like that too. Looking around I already feel a keen tug of regret that this place isn’t my local.

"The driest sherry they had was an amontillado." says Sharon, pronouncing it with a mixture of bafflement and wry amusement. "Anyway, we'll get you a proper drink once you've had a sip and realised you don't like it. I didn't taste it, don't worry, but I did smell it and it's not quite right."

"Oh no, that probably means it's perfect." I say, feeling apologetic about everything in general.

"They didn't even know if they had a sherry, you ponce." laughs Philip. "They had to search for a bottle and even when they found it, it obviously hadn't been opened in a long time. Then they had to work out how to ring it through the till because nobody's had any in so long."

"That's nothing. I have form in that regard. When I was eighteen my brother took me to the local pool hall, in a rough part of town. He asked me what I wanted to drink, and I saw crème de menthe behind the bar and decided I wanted that."

"In a pool hall?" Philip looks incredulous. All I can say is he doesn't know me that well yet.

"Yes, in a pool hall. And the worst thing is, all the sugar in the crème de menthe had encrusted round the neck of the bottle so they practically had to chip it off with a chisel to serve me my manly drink."

This is true, I‘m sorry to say. I can still remember it now as clearly as if it happened yesterday. The dingy surroundings of the bar, the pool tables all around and the more challenging snooker tables - the ones we were too incompetent to even attempt - through a door at the back. I remember the increasingly frenzied attempts by the barman to yank off the screwcap. He looked like the sort of man who wasn’t used to things not responding well to the use of force. I remember my brother saying Are you sure you don't want something else? and desperately hoping I would change my mind and me resolutely pressing on, the most pitiful eighteen year old that ever there was. I remember - the horror - saying in my perfect received pronunciation No, I'll definitely have the crème de menthe. I'm really looking forward to it. I can only just recall all this without wincing.

"Did anyone laugh?" says Sharon. She looks sympathetic, which is reassuring. I don't want to know whether the sympathy is for me or my twenty year old brother, dreading some kind of homophobic beating being doled out on the mean streets of west Reading.

"Everyone laughed. Everyone except me."

We take our seats in the restaurant, a handsome, buzzy room. The menu is just a long list of things I really want to eat, the way all menus should be but so rarely are. Even the vegetarian dishes look like things you might try if the mood struck you. Everything is perfect, from the welcome all the way through to the way the children are strangely muted. I believe it's known as being well behaved, something you don’t see a lot of in the restaurants in my hometown. Later on, one of them will ruin their good record by emitting a bizarre high pitched screech for over a minute like a car in the process of being broken into. That's all in the future though, as are the obnoxious brat called Allegra in the wine shop ("only in Clapham" says Philip sagely at that) and the glorious smoked cannon of lamb, the taste of all that is right about winter time there on my plate, just for me.

We are talking far too much for the staff to take our order. It’s barely a month since I saw them last but it’s difficult to know where to start because we have so many things to discuss - holidays and friends and gossip, projects and plans and visits. Sequels can improve on the original, you see, provided you manage to retain all of the cast and shoot at a suitably beautiful location. We appear to have got this formula right.

"One of my colleagues started following you on Twitter and then unfollowed you recently." says Sharon at one point.

I'm not entirely sure I want to know why this is. Did I mention my writing too much? Did I spill too much bile about somebody famous? Is there a chance they caught me grizzling or bitching non-stop on a bad day? Someone I respect recently called me a "beast" on Twitter, and even that gives an impression of devil-may-care abandon that doesn't fit. It's just spite and bile when all is said and done, spite and bile, and I don‘t even have an excuse. If you confronted me I might say I'm much nicer in real life, I promise. If you knew me in real life we might be friends. But I ask, because I've never been able to stop myself getting bad news. It’s why I open emails from my mother, or look at the last page of a paperback long before I get to the end. I’m just that kind of person.

"I know, why was that?"

"It was bad language." said Sharon. "He read one of your Tweets he didn't like and then said to me I've had a think about it, and I really don't need to read that sort of thing."

Bad language I can take as a reason; if people are shocked by that, I tend to think that’s their problem rather than mine. And when they invent a new word to describe people like Jeremy Clarkson I will use that instead and give the traditional four letter epithets a rest, but nobody has yet. They’re only words, and you can be far more offensive without ever venturing into Anglo-Saxon. Look at the Daily Mail for instance, if you can do that without wanting to bleach your entire head.

"Really?"

"Yes, he said he wasn’t happy with you using the cunt word."

Almost in unison Kelly, Philip and I burst into loud raucous laughter, a choir of merriment in perfect harmony. Every time I think one of us is going to stop they look at the others and the whole thing begins again. Out of the corner of my eye I see a waiter approaching us, no doubt keen to work out if we’ve decided what wine to drink yet, but even he thinks better of it. Sharon looks on nonplussed and eventually it subsides long enough for her to get a straight answer to a straight question.

"What’s so funny?"

It’s Philip that states the obvious for her, ever so nicely.

"Sharon, don’t you mean 'the C word'?"

The penny drops with perfect precision and this time we are all laughing, a bubble of smutty comradeship, living the life I spend much of mine envying. This is what it means to fit, this is what it means to find that spot after so many years. And Sharon will never have to tell a story like this years down the line, to new friends or strangers, and say Everyone laughed but me. I do wonder though, whether she subconsciously knew more than she was letting on. Maybe she was saving the C word to signify something truly reprehensible, something like crème de menthe.

Pink

I did a double take on my way into work this morning. As I approached the casino, heading over the bridge that takes me on my familiar route, a Transit van careered round the corner at a speed I didn’t think vans could reach without B.A. Baracus behind the wheel. I stepped back from the edge of the kerb and let it go past, and the second thing I noticed about it was that it was owned by some food wholesalers. That's what it said on the side, anyway. It could have just said they sourced organic ingredients, or were an ingredient specialist, or provided a wide range of ingredient based solutions. Whichever way you cut it they were still greengrocers, as sure as the word "Manager" in my job title doesn't mean anything either.

The first thing I noticed about the van, though, was that it was pink. A strange shade of pink, too, an inbetween, nothingy pink, more muted than shocking and livelier than salmon, a perfect slightly pink cuboid of not very butch greengrocery. I wasn’t sure if the cathode ray in my head was starting to degenerate, or if the world was like one of those monitors that should have been thrown out years ago, or if it was just pink after all. It was the only pink Transit van I had ever laid eyes on.

Who drives a van like that? Someone with no money to buy anything better, obviously. We’ve all seen vehicles in a colour nobody in their right mind would choose; the cheap looking mustard Ford that slouches towards the traffic lights as if embarrassed, the baleful purple colour previously only seen in navel fluff, the white that started out bright and ended up shite. They are always second-hand and always driven by someone cursing the taste of the idiot who bought it from new. Their red face is also a colour few people deliberately opt for.

But what if the colour of this van was deliberate, I thought. Far-fetched I know, but appealing none the less. The more I considered it the more I liked the idea of a new demographic, the pink van man. The Guardian, or better still, the Financial Times folded up on the dashboard. A bumper sticker saying "Honk for Proportional Representation". Regular phone ins (on a Pinktooth headset, naturally) to Radio 4 to put the case for a bold new Marxist interpretation of Beowulf. Booze cruises to the Dordogne or regular outings with your fellow drivers to Festival Hall for the latest season of European monochrome melancholia. And more rosé than you could shake a packet of Hubba Bubba at.

Put that way, if I could drive I might have wanted to be one. After all, I’ve always rather liked pink myself.

* * *

My first pink shirt, appropriately enough, was bought from Thomas Pink. Not the gorgeous shop on Jermyn Street, that would come later when I had more money, but from the not so salubrious outlet in "Swindon Designer Village". You may not have been to Swindon but take it from me, only a third of that description is true. It’s in Swindon, but Swindon is the kind of town where most people’s idea of a fashion designer is Dorothy Perkins, and villages are only supposed to have one idiot.

All that aside, I loved it. It was bright salmon, in a beautiful herringbone, and I didn’t even mind some of the mocking I got at work. "Real men wear pink" I told my colleagues.

"Yeah, right. And while we're on the subject, I still say that’s a handbag." replied my colleague Glenn.

"It’s a manbag Glenn. Trust me, one day everyone will have one. It’s from Zara." I retorted. I obviously hadn’t judged my audience very well - always an issue for me - because Glenn probably didn’t even know what Zara was. His regular uniform on Fridays was a pair of faded jeans and a plain white t-shirt of questionable vintage. Telling him, though, was a mistake because later that day he turned to me.

"If it’s a manbag, how come it’s on the women’s section of the Zara website?"

"Oh shut up."

The pink shirt worked superbly until the day I got sunstroke. Kelly and I had been visiting our friends Nick and Marilyn up in Derby, a trip which was even more exciting than usual because Marilyn had a boat. "It’s where I escape to when he gets too much. I just leave him alone with his porn and enjoy my own company." she told us. And I learned loads of things in our weekend on the river that I’d never known. I learned that no bacon sandwich tastes finer than one cooked on a stove on a boat where the bacon is popped onto a hot frying pan and straight into cheap white bread the moment it is ready, the boat rocking gently as if urging the bacon to hurry up and cook. I learned that getting drunk, listening to The White Album on a cheap cassette player and playing cards past midnight can make you wonder why people bother with television. And I also learned that when a boat zips along at quite a speed and the sun bounces off the water you can quite forget that you are burning and getting sunstroke.

By the time we got home on the train I was woozy and delirious. I got into a cold bath and I could almost see the steam rising off my sizzling body. The next day I had to chair a meeting with some quite important people, and I could barely understand what I was saying. It was as if I had booked the only meeting room in the whole building filled with jelly. I couldn’t remember anything anyone had said seconds after it was out of their mouths. The next day, when my fever had subsided, I looked at the notes I had scribbled on my A4 pad and I could only make out about one word in ten.

But none of that was the worst thing. Too dazed and sickly to put any washing on, I had to wear the only shirt I had clean, the salmon shirt. It so perfectly matched my burned face, neck and hands that I looked like I had turned up to work topless with a fetching herringbone texture all across my naked torso. How anybody in that room ever took me seriously again I will never know, but the shirt never felt the same after that.

* * *

My latest pink shirt is a gorgeous Prince Of Wales check and I picked it up in the sales earlier in the month. It’s the subtlest pink I’ve ever worn and I love it. One of the PAs makes a point of stopping by my desk nowadays.

"Where's your floral shirt?"

"Oh, it’s in the wash. Why, did you like it?"

"I loved it! It’s so nice to see someone in here wearing something with character."

I wonder if she says that to the effortlessly dapper black guy we sometimes see in the canteen, beautifully cut suits, grey wire wool hair, huge but classy spectacle frames and a bow tie every day. Iain and I aspire to dress like that. The fact that we’re too scared to is the only thing that’s stopping us.

"Well I’m wearing a pink shirt today. And there are flowers on my tie. Will that do?"

"Yes, but let me know when you’re wearing the floral shirt again."

I smile. I believe it’s also known as twinkling in this context.

"I will."

Manga Dave turns to me in despair. "Honestly mate, you’re such a sleaze sometimes."

Later on in the kitchen I am trying to drum up enthusiasm for my pink shirt. There isn’t a lot, but it brings out one of our favourite anecdotes as Phil turns to Iain and asks, all innocent face, "Do you still have your pink jeans?"

Iain does that cross face which always comes out when he knows we are about to rib him about something. I knew this story about Iain before I knew Iain well – it was legendary across all our offices, from Reading to Leeds: Iain was the man with the pink jeans. We used to have a company bulletin board and Iain’s pink jeans were one of the regular topics of discussion, along with people advertising rooms for let or trying to flog the latest batch of 200 Marlboro Lights they had brought back with them from a holiday they wished they were still on.

"They were not pink! They were…"

"…stonewashed red, I know." I say, cutting in and saving him the bother. "At least that’s what you say. I saw them once and they looked pink to me. Maybe the real name of the colour was something like 'distressed coral' or 'rouge femme'."

"Honestly. I’ve been through this a hundred times. They weren’t pink, I don’t have them any more and I took them to the charity shop." Iain sounds more exasperated than he really is as he rattles through that familiar speech, the closest you‘ll ever come to watching somebody talking in bullet points. I think he quite likes the attention but he plays up his frustration because it‘s what's expected. We all know the rules we adhere to in a conversation like this.

"Do you still have your big polo shirt with 'Mount Gay' all over it in big letters?" says Phil.

"Ye-es." says Iain impatiently. The tone, unspokenly, says come on then, let’s hear the punchline.

"Did you ever wear it with your pink jeans?"

"I think the verb is 'team' in this context Phil. We're talking about fashion."

"No I didn’t!"

"Did Alison ever see you in your pink jeans?" I ask. "I suppose we know the answer to that, because you're married."

"Very funny."

Of course, we already knew Iain still had his Mount Gay polo shirt, because Iain has been the same clothes size since he was 18. He comes in on casual dress Fridays wearing old university sailing club tops. Old money, you see; he never throws anything away. If his clothes were people, it would be legal to shag them, that’s how old they are. It’s a luxury I will never know - even if I could still fit into the clothes I wore at university, if I tried to wear them in public you would be justified in having me taken to a secure facility where I would be changed into an altogether less forgiving (but probably more stylish) outfit.

We take our cups of tea and head for the double doors, back to our to do lists on paper and our to don‘t lists in our heads. Something I had on my to don’t list jumps, unbidden, into my mouth, something I hadn’t intended to say.

"Iain, you would tell me if you ever found this irritating, wouldn’t you? I’d try to change if you did. I’d fail, but I would try."

Sadly, I know that is true. I would be tickled pink if he does, too.

Less obvious

I was late out of the front door this morning. The bed was a little bit too cosy, the snooze button a little bit too easy to hit when half-conscious and the song on the radio just a little bit too good to leave halfway through. As a result, when I eventually made my way down the hill towards the station I took a slightly different route to the bus stop, cutting through the heart of town. It meant walking closer to the mall that was nowhere near opening yet, passing a different set of fellow sufferers drifting in the opposite direction – more students, less office workers, a younger, more vibrant disappointment but the same old Monday morning.

At one point, walking over the steep bridge and making my way up the alleyway running along the back of one of the arcades, I looked up and saw a gorgeous window, just off in the distance, that I had never noticed before. It was beautiful, and yet like countless beautiful windows it was probably just the way light got in to shine on few abandoned lever arch files nobody would open, red and navy spines side by side, in a drab featureless room that nobody would ever enter. Fair enough, I suppose, I’ve known plenty of people like that.

The world is full of things, and sides to things, that we almost always fail to see. The backs of houses and shops are a classic example. I thought about this so much on the rest of my walk that I almost missed my bus. Suddenly, everywhere was full of beautiful peripheral details that I had ignored for years. A random panel of stained glass above a shop front, there for seemingly no sensible reason, only safe from vandalism because nobody else had seen it either, or had seen it and considered it a mirage. The date “AD 1891” carved into a shield, gracefully curling at the edges, in the brickwork at the apex of one of the buildings, surrounded by deep red carved roses, higher up even than the streetlights. The streetlights themselves for that matter, which resembled flying saucers if you looked at them with just the right frame of mind.

I got on my bus and the winter sun struggled to pierce the windows, gently washing people out until brown hair was tinged grey and ambition was muted into resignation. And, as so often, I found myself thinking of her, the exception that proves the rule as she always is. Because I can remember all the minor details about her, the things she doesn’t know she’s doing and the things she thinks that I don’t see. I could write a book, but if I did I would jinx it; she might become self-conscious and then she wouldn’t do them any more, they would be replaced by tics more awkward and nowhere near as loveable.

Funny how I noticed them where she was concerned but not with everything else: frame of mind, indeed. Why did I waste so much time thinking that paying attention to the minor details would be a waste of time? Even the phrasing was wrong: "minor details" rather than "less obvious details". In fact, nobody appears to use the word “detail” any more without qualifying it, as if they were never that important in the first place. Chugging down the motorway on my daily trip to a parallel universe where information is thought to have no intrinsic value unless it can be chewed up, partly pre-digested and regurgitated into the electronic sick bag of a single Powerpoint slide, this seemed to be the most important detail that a lot of people had missed.

In another, better world, maybe all these things would be the major details.

Needles, again

My consultations with April, my acupuncturist, always begin with a conversation about the weather. It may be ancient Chinese medicine, but we are still in England after all.

"It’s really strange out there." I say as I take off my parka and hang it on the hook, the gorgeous statue in Eldon Square visible out of the huge sash window. "It’s sunny and cold and rainy and windy."

"All four at once?" she says.

"Yes, like four seasons at the same time."

Our sessions are quite companionable by now. We chatter away as she peppers me with needles, and I realise over the weeks I have told her all sorts of things I was never planning to. My GP knows virtually nothing about me apart from the fact that I have a desk job somewhere in Bracknell but April knows that I write, that I’ve written about her, she knows about my marriage and my holidays, my meals and my bad habits, the latter only up to a point. As the first needles go in, always on my feet and my shins, below the hem of my rolled-up jeans, she tells me a story.

"I have been treating a lady with throat cancer, and then I was in town recently and I walked past her sitting outside Costa Coffee, drinking a really huge cappuccino. You couldn’t drink anything worse. I couldn’t believe it!"

I can’t help but smirk. I have a recurring nightmare that the one time my resolve weakens and I head into Kentucky Fried Chicken, April will walk past at the crucial moment when I rip the skin off a glistening thigh, fresh from the soggy cardboard casket, and wolf it down with undignified abandon. I can almost imagine the tableau, unfolding in slow motion - my aghast expression, as if I’ve been caught wanking by my mother, the intense frown of disappointment on April‘s face - even though it’s never happened. And she would look disappointed, too; there is nothing inscrutable about April, it’s one of the reasons why I like her.

"You mean she isn’t allowed to have coffee ever? Everyone has an off day."

"Yes, I know." says April, and she smiles. "I am a total coffee fiend myself, but I have one rule: I never drink coffee at home."

I recommend a coffee shop she hasn’t tried in town as she sticks some needles in my stomach, more cushion than pin cushion but pin cushion none the less. She gets me to undo the top button of my jeans, which makes me wish I hadn’t gone down a waist size recently, the one time that bigger clothes would have made me feel less fat.

"I want you to breathe all the way from your nose down to your energy fields, and if you do this you will find your stomach is very relaxing."

This sentence sums up so much of what I love about spending time with April. I’m still not entirely convinced I believe in energy fields, if I do I don’t know what they are and I definitely couldn’t tell you where they are. But I am in her hands, and she can make me better, and I want to believe so I do. I also love the way she says "relaxing" when she means "relaxed", one of the very few quirks in her flawless English. Or maybe it’s deliberate, maybe she’s making a point about living in the now. It has never been a strong point of mine; even as I think about that moment, as it’s happening, I am looking forward to the point where I will sit at a computer and write this about a moment that is now in the past. Things are always either about to happen or they’ve happened, nothing in between. But, funnily enough, my stomach is relaxing, so maybe she knows what she’s doing after all.

Next, April wants to try something different so I lie on my front, face poking through the hole in the couch.

"I am going to run a comb over your back. We call this Gua Sha, you can look it up on my website when you get home. It will remove blockages in your meridians. You may be very red afterwards, so tell your wife! I don’t want her thinking I am torturing you."

I laugh like a drain at this, she covers my back in oil which smells disturbingly like curry and then the scraping starts. Like so many things that have happened to me in this peaceful, high-ceilinged space I’m not sure I could call it good or bad, painful or painless, it’s just the sensation of my body being moved or stretched in ways it otherwise never would have been (now I come to think of it, that would also be my definition of "exercise"). I think I can’t find the words, but if I tried to distil this Eastern experience into my inadequate Western language, I suppose I’d say I sort of like it.

Then more needles, painful ones this time. So many sensations of soreness and spiking that I lose count of how many she must have used. “We are trying some new points today.” she says, by way of explanation. I trust her implicitly: We are trying some new points today is somehow matter-of-fact and calming in a way that the conventional This may hurt a little could never be. About five minutes later they are all in place, and one by one she turns or wiggles each of them.

At least, I assume this is what’s going on; I am lying face down, blind as a bat without my glasses on, but nothing else could explain what feels like an electrical storm passing across my back. I wonder whether she is making tiny adjustments to me as if I’m a radio, and that if she could only tune me perfectly and precisely nothing would ever go wrong with me again. Of course I know this won’t happen; there are limits even to her talents.

Afterwards, walking into town to meet Kelly for lunch, it strikes me with relief that April didn’t ask to look at my tongue. Normally she does this twice or three times during a session, apparently it tells an acupuncturist all sorts of things, not all of which I necessarily want her to know. Although seeing April feels nothing like seeing a doctor, some old habits die hard and one of them is airbrushing the truth about my lifestyle. So a trip to the pub on a Friday night is described on a Saturday morning as "a couple of drinks after work", a pie for dinner becomes "I’m eating more fish these days", clicking my neck from time to time becomes "I’m doing my exercises". But today, nursing an awful hangover, I’m only asked to show her my tongue once. I wonder, as I always do, whether while my mouth is telling her all those white lies my tongue is telling her the truth.

Grown-ups

It happened on a call this morning without me even realising. I was talking, in my voice that sounds normal to me but sounds posh on every recording I’ve ever heard and presumably sounds posh to others. I caught myself, properly heard what I was saying and had a moment of clarity: I sounded almost exactly like a grown-up. It only took me the best part of thirty-seven years to get there.

I’ve always felt like this, that everybody else seems to have got the metaphorical memo, got with the virtual programme and embraced adulthood in a way I’ve consistently found too difficult. No, not too difficult. What’s that word grown-ups like to use? That’s it: challenging.

Even after having done my job for years I've never really stopped feeling like I’m pretending to care in a way that other people aren’t and don’t have to. Every time someone says “We need to give 110%” and boasts about working extra hours, shows off about how late they stayed in the office last night or plays Top Trumps about how many hundreds of emails were waiting for them when they got back from holiday (“I had a thousand emails.” “Oh really, I had fifteen hundred.” “Well I was in the office at half five this morning.” “Well I was sending emails from the toilet when I got up in the middle of the night.” “I slept in my car last night and haven't been home in days.” “Well I have a camp bed folded away in a filing cabinet in the office.”) I want to do two things.

First, I want to tell them that 110% is mathematically impossible, but that’s nothing to do with being a grown-up and everything to do with being a pedant.

Next, I want to say something like “Really? I didn’t work too hard today, which is exactly the way I like it, and I can’t wait to get home and put my feet up, maybe have a drink after work or watch something cool on the telly.” But you can’t, because grown ups don’t. They swallow all the guff about things getting harder and harder year after year and how we have to constantly raise our game or step up to a proverbial plate. The game and plate appear to move even further and more often than the goalposts do.

But anyway, my ears weren’t deceiving me for once. I sounded composed, competent, mature, in control. But the rest of the time I don’t; I dawdle, or daydream, or make inappropriate jokes. I call my supplier and fill the call with innuendoes about spreadsheets, I say things like “Phil has quite a big package he wants to fire into you, will you be able to beat him off if it gets too much?” and I can’t wait til lunchtime, breaktime, hometime, me time.

I told Kelly I had to pinch myself because I almost sounded like a grown-up and she said “Me too.”

“We can just pretend to be grown-ups forever if you want.” I said.

“Let’s pretend not to be instead!”

Then I thought that I can go one better than that: let’s just not be grown-ups at all. Let’s get home and stick our pyjamas on and eat chilli and watch crappy television all night. Let’s not worry about kids, or responsibilities, or whether we’re getting the best deal on our car insurance or whether it’s time to switch to another mortgage provider. Let’s just have junk food and holidays and fart jokes and tickling and leave everyone else to be boring, if they want to. If sometimes we’re not sensible enough about the credit card, or whether the place needs tidying or if we never go the tip then never mind, maybe it really doesn’t matter. Let’s not save for rainy days, and if they come we can just go splashing in the puddles. And if nobody notices I don’t care, as long as she doesn’t mind us growing young together, a little bit younger every single day.

I’ll put it to her when she gets home tonight. Maybe she’ll pull my finger, if I ask her nicely.

The big reveal

I’m increasingly aware, as we stumble through the dead of a winter which already seems to have been dragging on forever, that the year is made up of milestones; they punctuate existence, and if you try hard enough you can just about trick yourself into thinking they give it meaning. I’m not just talking about the seasons, the grey smear of time between now and Spring or the joyous headlong rush from there into summer. I don’t just mean significant dates, either, however much I love all those key events; Christmasses and birthdays, Valentines and anniversaries, Eurovisions, Wimbledons, beer festivals and Bonfire Nights.

It’s an amalgamation of all of those things and the intangibles that don’t happen at set times; the first time we drive to the supermarket with the roof down on our little car. The first time it’s warm enough to sit outside after work, when we move from warming, comforting drinks to cold refreshing ones again. The point – and surely it will come, however distant it might feel right now – when you can no longer buy Easter eggs in the shops. A combination of all of those tiny factors, each exerting its pressure, is what applies the force that turns the world, even if sometimes you feel like it will never go as quickly as you want it to.

There are two other main seasons in my house, apart from the four everyone talks about. One is the blessed two months between April and June when English asparagus is in season and the shops are full of it. Kelly doesn’t really understand this, but I could eat it every night during those two months – steamed and gleaming with butter, salt and pepper, grilled and slightly charred with a fillet of fish perched on top of it, cut into sections and served in a cassoulet with zingy, lemony chicken and tons of beans.

I even like the smoky reek of your wee afterwards; perversely, it seems to be the only food where being reminded of what you’ve eaten later on in the bathroom still feels like a good thing. Not like the gruesome aftermath of steak tartare, for instance - I still get unpleasant flashbacks of following my friend Ivor into the bathroom we shared in a grubby hostel room in Prague back in 2003, fighting my way through the beefulent fug, holding my nose and desperately wondering whether there was anywhere I could buy a gas mask. The breakfast of nasty white bread and some kind of beige liver spread in a small circular tin with the image of a man fellating a sausage on it can’t have helped either, in fairness.

The second season which is important in my house is beard season, which usually runs for a couple of months around the turn of the year. The exact start and finish dates are nowhere near as set in stone as those of the asparagus season. Sometimes it lasts a month, sometimes it lasts as many as three months, but the general principle is always the same. It starts at the exact point where my wife has forgotten just how irritating she finds it to be married to a man with a beard, and ends almost immediately after she remembers.

It’s a pity, because I like having a beard. It means I get to spend an extra ten minutes in bed every morning, it gives me something to scratch when I’m stumped by something (almost endlessly useful, especially at work) and it doesn’t half come in handy when the cold wind is biting. Perhaps most importantly, I’m lucky that I can grow one; not all men can, and when it comes to masculinity I of all people - with my wine cellar, fancy fragrances and deep distrust of team sports - need all the help I can get. However, the vultures have been circling for my beard, metaphorically speaking, for quite a while; since the start of 2011 there have been a number of indications that it’s living on borrowed time.

“You look different.” said Natanong one morning when she greeted me at the kiosk and I wished her a Happy New Year. She had been thrown off balance already when I ordered a chai steamer instead of my usual cappuccino, but the change of appearance seemed to give her even more difficulty. “You look like… a cowboy, from the West Country.”

Something may have got lost in translation, conjuring up instead a shonky builder from Taunton, but I knew what she was getting at. She was not the only person to be nonplussed.

“What’s with the paedo beard?” said Manga Dave one day as we were heading to the kitchen.

“It is not a paedo beard.” I replied. “You take that back. No, better still, you name me a single paedo who actually had a beard. Paedophiles don’t have beards. Mass murderers have beards - Harold Shipman and the Yorkshire Ripper, for example - but not paedophiles. So by all means say I look like a mass murderer, but not a paedophile. So there.”

In my head, this had sounded like a quite brilliant argument. Regrettably, from the embarrassed winces of the Indian contractors queuing up to nuke their vegetable curries, it seemed it wasn’t quite so impressive out loud.

“Gary Glitter has a beard.”

“Oh come on! That’s not a beard. It’s a freaky plait of hair coming out of his chin. You can’t call that a beard.”

I looked in vain over at the huddle of horrified people at the microwave. They didn’t seem keen on making eye contact.

Dave didn’t let up - my IM pinged one afternoon.

“You know how when your hair was longer you used to play with it all the time when you were on conference calls?”

“What of it?”

“You do it with your beard now. It’s just as annoying. How do you get anything done?”

The final straw was in the kitchen on Friday.

“Dave’s right.” said Gemma as I made myself a cup of tea from the urn, a magic cylinder which inexplicably has the power to turn hot water and a tea bag into tea flavoured sewage. “You do look a bit like a paedo.”

“Do I?”

“I’m afraid so mate.” said Iain. I should have known really; with hindsight, turning up to work with a beard, wearing a dark brown cardigan was probably an error of judgment. The brown cardigan is after all the international uniform of child abusers everywhere. Well, child abusers and Roy Cropper out of Coronation Street anyway, and if you compared the average kiddy fiddler to him the paedophile would probably sue you for defamation.

More to the point, by this stage the pressure from Kelly was becoming unbearable; much as I was enjoying the novelty of the phrase “You’re not coming anywhere near me with that thing” referring to the hundreds of trespassers all over my face, something had to give. When I got home that night, I told her it was time for it to go.

“Only if you’re sure.” said Kelly, which of course translates as About time too. This is one of those phrases people only use in couples to be gracious in victory but never mean. For instance, if Kelly offers me the last chocolate in the box or the bigger piece of cake I always say it too, when it means Only if you’re sure, but just say yes, because I don’t have the slightest intention of giving you the chance to reconsider.

Standing at the sink, I switched on the beard trimmer. It was like running a lawnmower over my face, and I remember thinking that months of careful growth and cultivation could be destroyed in less than a minute, a stripe of stubble on my chin where only moments ago my beard had been. There was no time to be sentimental, though; the sink was full of hot water and it was time for the scrape and tap, scrape and tap of transforming rough to smooth.

I looked up in the mirror, prompted by a sixth sense, and there she was over my shoulder looking on with a silly grin as I completed my metamorphosis.

“Is it like having me back?”

“Yes, it is. I've missed you.”

There was a complicit pause, then the tapping and scraping began again in earnest. When it was finally done she kissed me on the lips, unobstructed by unwelcome bristles for the first time in what must have been a couple of months but felt like far longer. “My boy!” she exclaimed, her eyes sparkling and her nose crinkling. And I didn’t even need to look in the mirror again to realise I was smiling as well, because to me it felt a lot like having me back too.

* * * * *

A short postscript: I could stop there, but it wouldn’t be entirely honest. I’ve only told half the story, because I only shaved half my face. Before heading into the bathroom, I gave her a choice.

“Would you like to see what I look like with a goatee, with a Hitler moustache, or mutton chops?”

She pondered for a moment.

“Hmm… not the goatee.”

I was relieved by that. I had one about ten years ago, completely oblivious to the fact that it was the patron facial hair of the 1990s, and should have been left there.

“I think you should go for the mutton chops.”

So I did it, and I’ve got the photographs to prove it. The response was overwhelmingly positive, actually - through the magic of the Internet I was described, among other things, as ‘dashing, in a 70s academic way’, sporting ‘the finest pair of chops this side of Bill Sykes’ and ‘resembling a startled Victorian philanthropist’. I could see where they were coming from; it’s not a look you see many people working today, but that night, drunk on the euphoria of being reunited with most (but not all) of my face I could quite imagine it catching on. I was seized with a desire to purchase a stovepipe hat, and fell asleep that night fondly daydreaming of undertaking Very Important And Efficaceous Grand Social Projects.

Kelly made me keep them the following day so when we went to lunch everybody else got an unexpected side order of mutton chops. I got a few funny looks amid the chattering pram wielders smugly enjoying their own affluence at Bill’s Produce Store, but I figured it was a price worth paying. There just aren’t enough individuals these days, are there? We were off out to a wedding that evening, which was when I reluctantly waved my new look goodbye. The lawnmower came out again, the tapping and scraping was heard again in the bathroom, and I emerged looking almost like myself again. Still, it’s nice to know I can carry them off if the need arises in future.

“I’ll miss them, will you?” I said, emerging into the fading daylight of the living room, totally clean shaven once more.

“It's funny, but I will.” said Kelly. “I know you couldn’t have kept them, but even so.”

“I know, they had to go. If I’d kept them you would never have been able to take me seriously.”

That prompted what, to me at least, looked suspiciously like an insubordinate smirk.

“Yes. Something like that.”

Life on other planets

It has been many years since I’ve had to do any last minute shopping on Christmas Eve. Everything is meticulously planned, purchased and written down and ticked off on one of those spreadsheets my wife is so fond of. It’s many years, for that matter, since I’ve had to wrap anything but my presents to her. She is a black belt at gift wrapping; no shape is too complex or challenging for her, they all get placed on the living room floor and in a blur of brown paper, tape and ribbons they are turned into picture perfect mysteries. My wrapping has a similar, unintended effect because unless it’s a book, a CD or a DVD I wrap it with such incompetence that you would never know what lies beneath. Men get a lot of stick for buying books, films and records as gifts, but I still maintain that it’s mainly because they’re the only things we know how to wrap.

This all adds a certain irony to the fact that we spend Christmas Eve looking round Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar, a shopping mall from the time before shopping malls even existed. Heading through one of the gates, we find ourselves in a labyrinth of covered streets lined with shops and stalls like nothing I’ve ever seen.

I’ve never understood why, in any large airport, you can find two or even three duty free shops selling exactly the same things; the same cognacs, the same huge bottles of gin, the same squat boxes of Toffifee which are all you can afford with what remains of your currency. Why do there need to be three, I’ve always thought. Why not use the space to sell different, more interesting things? That’s what makes the Grand Bazaar so instructive because it’s clear, looking round, that the airports are simply following an ancient trend. There are mile upon mile of jewellery shops, their windows glowing with gold. Each one is almost completely indistinguishable from the last or the next but each also has a man outside intent on telling you that his sells exactly what you didn’t realise you were looking for, something unique. What they actually sell instead is things which are that much used misnomer, merely very unique.

Beyond the jewellery lie the bags, the carpets, the ceramics, the hanging lanterns, antiques, hidden squares and tiny passages. It’s a riot of colour and oppressively hot, even warmer than outside. This is probably a lesson modern-day malls have learned from them. For people who hate shopping, or don’t like talking to strangers, this must be as close to a circle of hell as you’re ever going to get in this lifetime. Naturally, I love every minute but I do wonder how English tourists ever coped in places like this before the advent of charity muggers. The culture shock must have been colossal back then.

Everywhere you walk there is a transaction that goes on between you and the traders. Sometimes it’s straightforward: they ask you to go into their shop. Sometimes it’s very straightforward: they tell you to, in that way which can conveniently almost be blamed on poor English. Sometimes it’s sneaky; “do you remember me?” is a particular gambit they try even though you have never met them before and don’t know them from Adam, however strangely familiar their technique might be. Complimenting my wife seems to be another popular tactic; if only I had the time to stop and tell them how ineffective that is.

It doesn’t help that they are all so cheeky and charming. You can’t hold it against them, and anyway they are only doing their jobs. It’s also just the right side of relentless, but only just. After about fifteen minutes in the Grand Bazaar, you quickly learn to smile or grimace in a way that suggests you aren’t interested and won’t be stopping. The real killer is if you show any signs of weakness. If you stop, or slow, make eye contact or look at a map you are doomed and one or more of them will descend on you eager to help. They are very good at giving directions, or at least they are provided you are going to their shop – and you are going to their shop, you just don’t know it yet.

The only shops we go into unprompted are the bag shops, as my wife has a particular interest in these. She scrutinises leathers and labels, asks questions, frowns at price tags. “Look at this one.” says one of the men proudly. “One hundred per cent top quality genuine fake.” It’s an oxymoronic notion which could only make sense somewhere like this, and yet somehow it does.

I said it was a transaction between us and the traders, and it is. They noisily broadcast to the world what they have to sell. In return we broadcast silently to them that we are English; without exception they say “Where in England are you from?” rather than “Where are you from?” Everybody seems to know this without having to ask. I’ve always been proud of being English but confronted with it in this way I can’t work out whether it’s flattering or galling. I suppose I’ve always thought that people who are obviously English show it in ways I don’t like, like wearing a T-shirt adorned with a slobbering bulldog, ordering chips with everything, vomiting in the streets before sundown or smashing up a McDonalds. They are xenophobic and intolerant, whereas I’m quite the opposite. Well, I am unless you’re English anyway.

It doesn’t seem to matter, because the Turks seem quite well disposed to the English. I don’t know enough about the history to have any idea whether I am kidding myself about that; I find that the language barrier, if you let it, can be a very comforting form of ignorance. Every time I’ve been about to go off to Paris on holiday people have come out of the woodwork with stories about how horrible the French are. Practically everybody I know seems to have one - they generally stop short of being spat at in the street, but are crammed full of the sort of small rudenesses, glares and tuts, that the English are remarkably sensitive to (and equally skilled at doling out to others). And yet when I tried speaking a little French, however badly, all that diffidence melted away. It is much the same with our hosts this Christmas; say merhaba when you meet them, attempt Görüşürüz when you part company, do your best not to mangle teşekkür ederim when you have cause to be thankful and they light up. They are clearly totally unused to anybody making the effort, and I think that’s a sad story in itself.


The edges of the Grand Bazaar seem to be nebulous, amorphous even, and trying to wander out we find ourselves hopelessly lost in a warren of streets, no longer under cover but still lined with shops. Shops selling mattresses, shops selling grotty bedding, cheap electronics, countless shabby looking pashminas and ponchos. The streets are groaning with people, more people than I saw outside the mosque or in the bazaar, so many that you can only shuffle through, taking in all the tat in slow motion. Even Terminal 5 at Heathrow, packed with irate passengers waiting for their planes, seems practically open plan by comparison. One shop is selling jiggling electronic Santas which light up and play a bleeping rendition of Jingle Bells. It would be a novelty gift at home but it’s more of a novelty here, the only festive merchandise I have seen since we landed the previous day.

“Jesus.” says my wife. “It’s like a whole city made of shops.” and she’s right. Eventually, we make our way to the end of the labyrinth and find ourselves on a narrow street lined with stalls selling food. I never mind walking slowly down those, funnily enough. The sights and the sounds are a different kind of overwhelming: colossal brightly coloured cones of spices in wooden tubs; an array of cheeses in different colours and textures, huge white slabs, creamy plaited logs like lengths of rope; all manner of fish, octopus nailed up as if crucified. And again, the friendly interventions begin. One short, stubbly, smiling man whose age is impossible to figure out comes up to us.

“Where in England are you from?”

I briefly consider pretending to be French but decide I could never carry it off. Not in a tweed jacket, anyway.

“Reading. It’s near London.”

I always say that second bit when I’m talking to someone who isn’t British, because it pre-empts the inevitable second question, namely “where’s that?”

“I was born in Canterbury!” he says, beaming.

This small world syndrome is simultaneously exasperating and sweet. When people found out I went to Oxford, a university of ten thousand students, I was always told “ah, you must know John, he’s at University College doing biochemistry” as if we all lived in one gigantic dormitory.

“I know it.” I said. This is technically true. I even know a few people who live near there, or have been there on day trips. I myself have seen the Archbishop of Canterbury on television a few times. I like him, he looks a little bit like Gandalf’s nerdy younger brother, which I think is how an Archbishop of Canterbury ought to look, and he has a terrific mellifluous voice. Telling this to the market trader, I decide, would be pointless.

“Do you want some spices?”

“Not today, we’re not going home for several days.”

“I can vacuum pack it for you!” he says. This is obviously an excuse he gets an awful lot.

“We’re sort of in a hurry. Maybe later in the week.”

“Here is my card.” That’s obviously an excuse he gets a lot too. “Come back later. You can call me Del Boy.”

He’s lovely. If I had been in the market for spices, I would definitely have bought them from Del Boy, and I felt like telling him that, though I think he would never have believed me and even if he had, I’m not sure if would have made any difference. Saying it here, now, will have to be enough.

It’s odd, this being abroad for Christmas thing. When I went to Granada last year it was the same yet different, the Christmas lights were up and lit and everybody said Feliz Navidad, it’s just that their celebrations were starting later than ours. But this is so alien that the feeling of disconnectedness is there. The lights are up on İstiklâl Caddesi, framing the nostalgic tram that trundles from one end to the other, but they are to celebrate the New Year instead. Normally when I travel I am struck by how much unites us all, but I’m not feeling it so much in Istanbul. These people have different cultural references - we will never read the same books, like the same bands, they would not understand half of what I’m saying here. I can’t blame them, I’m not sure I do either.

That night my wife and I have dinner at a meyhane, a traditional Turkish restaurant, on Nevizade Sokak. It’s a street lined with restaurants, with the Turks sitting outside on the pavement watching a carnival of craziness wandering past. We are seated inside, because all the tables in the heart of the action have already gone, but we are facing out onto the street. It’s the best of both worlds, a fantastic view and safe from the rain that keeps threatening to strike. Watching the Turks eating is another illustration of why I like them so much - everything is sociable and shared, all gesticulating hands, loud conversations and people butting into and cutting across each other. Nobody minds, because that’s what they all do. It’s like watching a huge family having a great time - what Christmas, funnily enough, ought to be about but isn’t always.

The real cabaret though isn’t the people at the tables but the ones wending past, and they seem to come round continuously. Wait ten minutes and they slope across your field of view again, as it you are sitting in the centre of a zoetrope. One man grabs my attention time and time again, wearing deely-boppers that light up in a variety of garish colours. As the light fails, he becomes harder and harder to miss, easier and easier to appreciate. People stop at the tables waving sheaves of lottery tickets, and we shake our heads in the universal language that says Don’t even think about coming up to me. A band comes into the front room of the restaurant and plays something lively and demented, for seemingly no reason. The violinist puts his foot up on a nearby chair and the waiters somehow navigate their way around him.

Another person wanders from table to table trying to interest people in buying what appears to be a supersized bottle of vodka. “Why does he think anyone would be interested in that?” I say to my wife in disbelief as he wanders off. Ten minutes later he is walking past again, just behind the man with the deely-boppers. Ten minutes after that the table right in front of us has bought and opened the bottle and is passing it around and the waiters, threading through a particularly spirited performance by the band, are handing out shot glasses.

“This is quite something, isn’t it?” my wife says, and I turn to her and nod. I’ve never had a Christmas Eve quite like it.

We are sitting side by side, which is my favourite formation. I never tire of looking at her, but it’s important on nights like this that we see the same thing and have the same experience. That’s the connection that’s important this year, the connection that’s always important. And I find myself thinking how strange it is; the planet is crammed full of people you couldn’t possibly ever meet and even if you did you couldn’t communicate with them, and even if you could, you would struggle to relate to them. We wonder about life on other planets, and we don’t always appreciate the miracle of coincidences, near misses, things you do and things you omit to do that conspire, on a warm Christmas Eve with the threat of rain, hundreds of miles from home, to land you at a table sitting next to the only person that speaks your language.

Boswell and Fiona

The first Friday of 2011 means the first trip to the pub after work of the year. It’s not enough to redeem being back in the office, struggling to remember my password, struggling to remember the point, but it comes close enough. I work out my password at the third attempt, but I might get to December before I work out the point of it all, if there is one. As I climb off the 5.15 funbus my phone glows with a text message from Mikey: I’m in the Oakford. And get me a Becks, yeh?

Mikey is the nucleus of all trips to the pub. He’s always in a different pub, or a different part of the same pub, always surrounded by people and it’s never the same motley mixture twice. I find out later on that he sends a text at about 4pm every Friday to everybody he knows (which is really quite a lot of people) telling them his preferred venue. He doesn’t much mind who turns up, because he knows everyone is going to be there at some point throughout the months ahead. Every Friday has different permutations, some are better than others, but he is right in the middle of them all. I’m there a lot of the time, Boswell to his Johnson, but I know perfectly well that when I’m not the world keeps spinning, and it’s spinning around him.

The first week back at work means a lot of people desperate to forget the first week back at work, which in turn means a bumper crop of faces in the pub, some of them belonging to people I’ve never met. Mikey always introduces everybody and then carries on nonchalantly talking to whoever he likes, as if your presence is of relative indifference to him. I imagine it’s pretty much how being a courtier must have felt in days long ago. On this occasion when I first arrive Andy, who I’ve met and don’t massively like, is talking about the prospects of the Liverpool manager keeping his job with a man I’ve never met and whose name I don’t catch. There’s usually at least one complete stranger at our table every week. The most galling moments on these Fridays are invariably the ones where Mikey introduces me to someone I’ve met before, only for me to remember them and for them to have completely forgotten who I am. This happens quite often; I imagine it probably happened to Boswell too.

Dave, who I’ve met many times and who fortunately does remember me, arrives shortly afterwards, back from an epic trip to Australia and the States. He works in the music business and has been working with Debbie Harry and Chrissie Hynde. “Chrissie is a complete bitch.” he says to me, “But I’d been warned so I just kept my head down and didn’t try to be her friend. Yes Chrissie. No Chrissie. Yes, I’d love a vegan meal with the rest of the crew, Chrissie. It’s just easier.”

This doesn’t surprise me. Back in the Eighties my dad was on a plane to Munich on business and so was she, and he said much the same. I remember how impressed we all were when he came back bearing countless boxes of Lebkuchen and regaling us with the story. Back in those days seeing someone famous was like spotting a unicorn; there were fewer famous people twenty-five years ago and they were somehow famous for something in a way which seems merely optional today. I suppose when you have thousands of TV channels on twenty-four hours a day screening any old shit, the world needs more people to be famous so they never run out of shit to screen. It was a story I could tell at school - not like when my dad sat in the seat next to the lead singer of Prefab Sprout. Nobody at school was interested in that. But when somebody meets someone genuinely famous there’s only one question to ask, so I ask Dave.

“What was Debbie Harry like?”

“Oh, that’s different. She was lovely.”

He then regales Mikey with the news that while he was on tour he got them both to sign a poster for Mikey. Debbie Harry has written Mikey, your hair is beautiful on it.

“Did she actually see a picture of Mikey’s hair beforehand?” I say. I’m a bit incredulous because, from a distance, Mikey’s mod crop looks an awful lot like a coconut. Remarkable, definitely, but beautiful? I suppose it’s in the eye of the beholder, after all.

“No, funny you should ask that because it did come up and I couldn’t for the life of me find a picture.”

“So how did she know it was beautiful?”

“She took my word.”

That’s what I like about the Oakford - some weeks it’s full of scenesters and you have to wait for ages before being served by the incompetent man in the trucker cap who looks like a cross between Donny Tourette and Lurch from The Adams Family, sometimes you get to have a drink with a man who’s word is good enough for Debbie Harry on tonsorial matters. Mikey just beams, and it’s mostly pleasure but ever so slightly tinged with smugness, as if he feels he’s the sort of person that sort of thing ought to happen to. It must be lovely to have been made that way.

A couple of the people round our table move on, heading off to start their weekends with the more permanent, less floating parts of their lives, and we are joined by a couple of newcomers. One is Mikey’s friend Dyson, a chap so swarthy that he can grow a perfectly serviceable beard in the course of an evening which would put mine to shame. Dyson has a first name, I can’t remember what it is, but nobody uses it; he’s always just “Dyson”. He plays in Mikey’s band, which I know for a fact because I’ve seen them perform. I ask Mikey what the name of his latest band is (it’s gone through about four incarnations in the time I’ve known him). “I dunno, it’s ‘Kremlin’, or ‘The Kremlins’ or something.” he says before conferring with Dyson. “It’s ‘Kremlins’ apparently.” he concludes.

Dyson is also a stand-up comedian (though I only have his word for this, as I’ve never seen him perform). I’ve never heard Dyson tell a particularly funny joke, but I try not to judge him on that; after all, if I did people might start expecting me to be insightful or eloquent, and I wouldn’t flourish under pressure like that. I’m always a bit uncomfortable making smalltalk with him because I know he does stand-up. On the one hand I am desperate to impress, on the other I’m worried about having something stolen - not necessarily something funny, but maybe a piece of what makes me me that will get noted down and used for the purpose of entertainment. I wonder if people have the same nervousness when they find out that I write. In fact, maybe it’s fifteen-love to me merely by virtue of having written this.

The other friend who joins us is Mikey’s friend Tom Brown. Of course, Tom Brown could just be referred to as Tom but nobody does; he’s always “Tom Brown”. So when he turns up Mikey says “Hello Tom Brown.” and he takes a seat next to me. Tom Brown is a very funny man with a lugubrious face who, if you close your eyes, sounds exactly like Boycie from Only Fools And Horses. In all the times I’ve met him he’s always worn the same hooded top, to the extent where I wouldn’t be amazed to discover that he owns nothing else. Tom Brown is a graphic designer and he was unemployed for most of last year and, as a result, was reduced to living with his parents. He was remarkably chipper throughout - if it had been me, I would have hanged myself, but that’s Tom Brown all over.

At least, I assume it is; you never get to know people well in the superficial badinage of a Friday night. There is a golden hour and a half of relative silence in the Oakford Social Club and then they crank up the music (always a mix of edgy stuff you’ve never heard of, things you have heard of given an edgy mix or mashed up with something else or the occasional classic, played as a knowing exercise in irony) turn down the lights and all forms of social interaction become impossible. I wonder if I have a special name they all use the way Dyson and Tom Brown do, and decide that I probably don’t, although I can’t work out whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. And then my friend Fiona, fresh off the 5.45 bus, sweeps into the pub.

Fiona and I have known each other for years, been to the same parties and shared many an uneasy funbus ride. Usually, these are uneasy for her, mainly because I spend the whole journey relentlessly haranguing her with my long-standing suspicion that she would love to sleep with Donald Pleasence, the demented driver who seems to feature less and less often these days. I carried on doing this even though I knew she hated it, because I can be an arse. Then something odd happened; Fiona learned a coping strategy nobody else had thought of. She just popped her earphones in, switched her MP3 player on and pretended I wasn’t there. This approach had better not catch on - if it did I’m not sure how I’d cope – but you have to admire her problem solving skills.

On New Year’s Eve we were on the same bus home and, at the other end of the journey, headed the same way through town. As the mid afternoon gloom descended on the long street, we made our way between the redbrick buildings, accompanied by our shortening shadows.

“We sort of nearly became friends this year, didn’t we?” I said to her.

“We were going to become friends and we said we’d go out for a drink, but then you said you’d check your diary and come back to me and you never did.”

This has the ring of truth about it. I do that sort of thing a lot.

“Well why don’t you come out after work on Friday? There’s always a crowd of us out.”

Fiona drags an extra chair round our now crowded table and heads off to the bar to get some drinks in, returning bearing a pint of Guinness and a gin and tonic. The former is for her, the latter is for me (“And you wonder why people think you’re gay” is something she says to me on a regular basis). Fiona is a formidable character – statuesque without being big, lots of long thick hair, bone structure you might call handsome if you thought you wouldn’t get punched and eyes with a slight glint of mania in them. Over the course of the next couple of hours I discover that this glint is quite in keeping with the rest of her personality; a warning sign, perhaps.

“I won’t stay after this one.” she says, almost at the beginning of our conversation.

“How come?”

“I’ve forgotten to bring any money out with me.”

“Don’t worry about it, they take cards here. You know, like all pubs.”

“I don’t have one.” says Fiona. There’s a pause while I try to understand what this sentence means, given that it cannot possibly have its literal meaning.

“You left your card at home?”

“No, I don’t have a debit card. They’re dangerous things.” she says. Fiona is smiling, as if this was the most plausible thing in the world. In my experience, most people who don’t have a debit card don’t have one because they don’t have a bank account, or a home for that matter.

“You don’t have a bank card? But how do you, you know, take money out… do you go to the bank every week?”

Fiona was smiling and nodding now, as if she was humouring somebody who was intellectually cumbersome. Shouldn’t it have been me doing that?

“Every month, actually. I take out three hundred pounds!”

So many questions sprung to mind, some of them best expressed inwardly, many of them rhetorical, more than one rather existential in nature. I thought it safest to confine myself to the practicalities.

“And how do you prove who you are?”

“Oh, I take my passport. Except most of the time I don’t even need to do that any more because they know me at the bank. Last time I went in I got someone new, and my handwriting is so bad that my signature didn’t match the one on their records. The woman behind the counter was about to turn me away when the woman at the next desk tapped her on the shoulder and said Oh, don’t worry, that’s Fiona. She comes here all the time. Anyway, it works, I‘ve got loads of money in the bank.”

This must be how people get a reputation. We always see eccentric old ladies in the street, or aggravating everybody in the queue at the post office, and we assume they are pressed out of a mould or pulled fully-formed out of a vat, but they have to start somewhere. They start out like Fiona, in a flat with cats and a bunch of quirks which are allowed to run unchecked. Now I come to think of it, I’d been out to restaurants with Fiona before and she had OCD tendencies with her food as well - insisting on eating the meat first, then the potatoes, then the vegetables, one after the other. I have trouble with butter in the Marmite jar, but it still seemed like a quixotic approach to eating out to me.

“So, where do you keep your money, is it under the mattress? Fancy inviting me back for a cuppa?”

That got a scornful look.

“As if I’m going to tell you that. I don’t have a safe though, I don’t see the point. I just have a fireproof box.”

“A fireproof box?”

That smile again, as if Fiona was explaining something very simple to somebody extremely stupid.

“Yes, a fireproof box. For my deeds. You know, the deeds to my flat.”

Where do people even buy a fireproof box from? If your entire flat has burned to the ground how useful will a set of deeds confirming that you own a colossal pile of ashes actually be? Why didn’t you just buy a safe? Is this sort of thing the reason why you asked me recently to text you once a week just so that somebody knows you haven’t died before the smell starts to bother your neighbours? Would it be best to just change the subject and ask Got any nice plans for the weekend? Can I get away with saying any of these things out loud?

“Don’t you keep those with a solicitor?”

“Do you know how much they charge? No thanks!”

At this point our meeting - or possibly near miss - of minds was interrupted. Mikey, like the Pied Piper, was leading us on to another pub and the conversation, disrupted by the stroll through town which was only just springing to life, never quite picked up where it left off at the other end. Over at Great Expectations, round another table, was another array of empty pint glasses and another mixture of acquaintances and strangers. Lucy, who lives in the flat upstairs from me, was there and I suppose I ought to have already known that she knew Mikey too. I think everybody in Reading does.

All in all it was a pretty typical Friday night. It’s a pity though - a big bit of me wishes I had stayed in the Oakford, being fascinated by Fiona. I’m not sure any evening out with her could ever last long enough; every question and answer seemed to take me that little bit further from life as we know it, and I had a feeling that if I could have just spent a couple more hours talking to her I would have had enough material to keep me writing from here until the summer. Next time I text her to check if she's alive, I'll ask if she wants to do it again.

Signature scent

"We should have our own brands of fragrance, like celebrities." I said over lunch. It was a theory which had been flitting across the surface of my brain all morning, and I was keen to try it out on a captive audience. Once they've sat down, the sandwiches are out of the tinfoil and the tupperware containers have been popped open there's no getting away.

"Iain’s could be called ‘Chopper, by the house of Iain’." I added, in a nod to Iain’s legendary dimensions south of the border.

Everyone made that face which inevitably follows when I reheat a joke in my metaphorical microwave for the umpteenth time. It’s fair enough I suppose, nobody likes leftovers. I used to think recycling my jokes was environmentally friendly, but some days I suspect it’s just another form of noise pollution.

"And Gemma’s?" said Iain, unconvinced by this line of conversation.

"'Afternoon Delight by Gemma' perhaps." I said, making reference to our long held suspicion that Gemma works from home some days because her boyfriend is there too with time on his hands and more hormones than I ever had at his age. "Or maybe Norks."

I still occasionally get accused of looking at Gemma’s chest more often than is strictly necessary. Given that it’s never really necessary to look at a chest unless you’re a general practitioner I suppose what I mean is that I occasionally get accused of looking at Gemma’s chest at all. It’s a bit of a sore point, partly because I maintain that I never do and partly because Iain looks at it almost as frequently as I do.

"What about your boss?" said Gemma, looking up from a drab pasta salad she had made herself. It looked like she had played lucky dip with the last few cans in the cupboard but had been too proud to stick the resulting claggy mess in the bin and plump for a jacket spud instead. "What would his fragrance be called?"

"Delegate, probably. Or 8-Ball."

That was the first time Iain laughed. It is sometimes like being bossed around by a random decision generator; if you wait long enough you normally get asked to do two completely contradictory things in a single day. When that happens Iain and I have an unspoken agreement that they cancel each other out and instead we get to do nothing or, better still, play our favourite game, where you have two minutes to find the ugliest photo you can in the phone list. It’s sort of a trolley dash for mingers.

"Mikey?"

"Eau du Mod, I reckon."

"And what would mine be called?" said Manga Dave. He asked as if he wanted to know, the tone said Me next! Me next! Do me!, but the wary eyes told a different story. He was sitting there waiting to be underwhelmed, an expression I normally associate with family.

"Manga of course." I said. "That one’s too easy."

Manga Dave gave me that look he gives me sometimes, weighing me up, seeing through me. It’s unnerving when you meet someone new, they’re fourteen years younger than you and you feel as if they have got the measure of you in next to no time. He gives the impression that he’s worked me out like a Sudoku that only had a handful of numbers missing in the first place. It makes me feel the one thing I least want to be but most often am: predictable.

"I know what your fragrance would be." he said. "It would be called Déja Vu."

Win-plated

I came up with a new word on holiday. It’s “win-plated”, and it means something which appears to be made of win but which, once you scratch the surface, really isn’t.

It turned out to be surprisingly useful. For instance, have you ever had a bad tour guide on holiday? They are definitely win-plated. Little smacks quite so much of the betrayal of potential; you should feel as if you’re receiving special treatment but in reality it’s almost worse than nothing. One time last year when Kelly and I were in Rhodes we went on a boat trip to Symi, the next island along, and our tour guide was appalling. She was a middle aged lady called Daphne, hair thirteen shades of beige, big shades and mildly alarming stonewashed denim shorts. She had a bizarre accent and even if I had listened to her all day I wouldn‘t have worked out where she was from. Many words concluded with an “-ah” which really didn’t belong there, done with an almost theatrical flourish which, even now, makes her far too easy to impersonate. It was not quite Greek, not quite Italian and not quite possible to take seriously.

On the boat over to the island, Daphne spent all her time in a corner chatting to the bar staff and as we tramped round the unimpressive monastery which was our first port of call she sat outside, clanging away on a fag no doubt. Had the climate permitted it, she would probably have sashayed around in the kind of furs that give PETA an aneurysm. She had the sort of bearing that suggested that doing things for others was a kind of charity work she was lowering herself to even though she knew she wasn’t really cut out for it. I’m not sure she was cut out for being a tour guide either.

It didn’t help that the whole history of Symi appeared to be built around sponges, something Daphne pointed out at considerable length on the quayside once we had all disembarked and gathered around the manky fake Gucci umbrella she was holding aloft.

“In the sixteenth century, the people of the island were conquered by the Turks-ah, but they were allowed free movement through the Ottoman Empire because they made the Turks-ah many gifts of sponges” she said in her lilting voice to our cluster of tourists, very few of whom appeared to be listening.

Kelly and I made eye contact and our eyebrows rose almost in unison. I’m sure it was true, even if the rather archaic phrasing left a lot to be desired, but just how fabulous could these sponges really have been? Especially since back in those days “Imperial Leather” had an altogether different meaning.

Daphne continued to deliver her lecture on Symi as we all visibly faded in the sweltering heat. She had the bored air of someone reading an autocue for peanuts, which I suppose was pretty much what was happening because she might as well have had the words tattooed on the inside of her eyeballs. She seemed even more bored than we were, if that were possible, although passing on what little information she had was a very good way of evening the score.

Unbelievably, almost every event that had ever affected Symi appeared to centre around sponges in one way or another (now I come to think about it, they should appoint Prince Edward as their patron saint). I couldn’t personally see how Daphne could top the bit where she said “And then in the nineteen twenties, disaster struck with the invention of the synthetic sponge-ah. This was very bad for the island.”, so that was the point where I lost interest and started to wonder whether she would ever stop talking so I could go and grab some lunch. But there was more, including a trip to the market where Daphne delivered a masterclass in picking a great sponge to take home. Appropriately enough, the more she talked about sponges, the less we all soaked up.

If I had to sum her up, I’d say that she was like a cross between a bad Wikipedia article and a satnav. Still if nothing else she made me think - mainly “I’m paying sixty Euros for this?”, but thinking all the same.

Nowadays, I’ve found a preferable option; what you do instead is get your spouse to read out bits of the guide book aloud. I accept that it’s not ideal but what you lose in knowledge (which, if Daphne was anything to go by, isn’t necessarily much) you gain in interpersonal skills, not to mention the smaller party size. And so it was that on Boxing Day I headed to Topkapi Palace with my part-time tour guide and full-time wife in tow. Of all the ancient buildings in Istanbul, the palace was the one I had a particular interest in. Not because of the spectacular architecture, said to rival that of the Alhambra, with all the incredibly intricate details and mile after mile of tile after tile. Not, either, because of the view out from the walls across the Golden Horn to the other half of this incredible city. It wasn’t even because all of the historic bling in the Imperial Treasury, testament to the Turks’ ongoing mission to prove that any object could be improved by encrusting it with precious stones (a mission which could never have survived the invention of toilet paper).

No, I wanted to go for research purposes. It has a harem, you see, and I’ve always quite fancied having one of those myself. In my mind’s eye, it would be an opulent stately home of some kind with countless boudoirs, a bagel shaped swimming pool surrounded by sunloungers, a bar, a wine cellar, a book lined snug where I could smoke my cigars and more baby oil than you can shake a stick at (and yes, on this occasion I may well be using the word “stick” euphemistically). Maybe they could have baby oil dispensers at every doorway like they do with sanitising hand gel in hospitals – not a sexy image, sadly, but the best I could come up with, not having given the matter anywhere near enough thought. Of course, if I did that all the doors would have to be automatic because otherwise all of my harem would be so slathered up that they wouldn’t be able to grasp the door handle anyway. Lubrication has its limits, after all, and I wouldn’t want my concubines there for hours trying to get into the next room so they could fix me a Bloody Mary.

I’m beginning to realise at this stage that the more I talk about my harem, the less appealing it’s beginning to sound, so let’s move on. And admittedly, I hadn’t even got round to thinking about the personnel, unless you counted the attractive blonde with the big nose who gets on the funbus and the rather nice-looking lady on reception who checked us in when we got to our hotel, but you’ve got to start somewhere. Hence the trip to Topkapi Palace; I wanted some pointers on how it’s done because left to my own devices it was starting to sound less like a sex playground and more like the wrong kind of correctional facility. It was time to learn from the past masters.

We eased our way through the turnstiles and found somewhere comfortable to sit so she could leaf through the guidebook, tracking down the section on the harem. Meanwhile, the Japanese tourists swarmed all around us, hell bent on photographing every square inch of the tiled walls as if it was a preferable experience to just looking at them for a while. I sometimes wonder if the profligacy encouraged by digital photography is necessarily a good thing at all, and never more than when I’m at a tourist attraction. Some people haven’t even learned how to stop the flash popping up on their digital SLRs - set to auto mode, no doubt, as they have been since purchase – taking photos of their loved ones which ensure that, for posterity, they will look even more pale and red-eyed than they really are.

Kelly, I have to say, was not as supportive of my research as I was hoping, because she then took great delight in debunking every myth I had fondly been harbouring about the harem. There was very little evidence of nookie, orgies or grape-peeling, it seemed, and instead we were going to wander round viewing the living quarters of what was effectively a community within a community. Unfortunate, that, because I was looking forward to seeing the Turkish equivalent of those white PVC sofas which only seem to exist in porn clips. The Sultan, she explained, could father children with dozens of women, and the most powerful woman in the palace was the Sultan’s mother. However, because succession was not dictated by order of birth any of the women in harem, if in favour, could conceivably have given birth to the future Sultan.

Consequently, what I had always believed would be a palace of earthly delights was instead a backbiting political jungle with women scheming and fighting for power and influence, aided and abetted by the more than slightly mad eunuchs who ran the whole domestic side of the harem. There was one bright spot to the emerging picture: it was at least gratifying to know that the Turks seemed to think housework was incompatible with owning testicles, a view I’ve long held myself. I’m worried it might become a self-fulfilling prophecy, because apparently if I don’t run the vacuum round more often I may find myself parted from mine.

Words can’t describe just how far my crest fell as Kelly went into extensive detail about just how unpleasant a place the harem would have been, punctuated with an occasional aside of “I do hope you’re paying attention to this bit”. Of course I was; my dreams were in tatters. I had hoped that the harem would be like one long episode of Hollyoaks, except with an all female cast of nubile lovelies and a solitary man (possibly Mr Cunningham, the bearded old duffer who used to run the convenience store) getting to shag them all. In reality it seemed more like Loose Women on ProPlus, with the occasional grating appearance from a blacked-up John Barrowman.

I think Kelly read the concluding paragraph of the guide book out with far more glee than was strictly appropriate. “The harem, although often mistakenly thought to be place of sensual pleasures, was almost certainly much closer to a nerve-shredding chamber of horrors.” She paused on the word horrors for dramatic effect. She’d done such a good job that I was surprised, on snapping out of my reverie and looking round, not to find a crowd of rapt tourists listening on. “There, I hope that’s set things straight.”

“I don’t care, I had the Playboy Mansion more in mind as a blueprint anyway.” I said, but I sounded one hundred per cent petulant and zero per cent convincing, and we both knew it. I was just going to have to come to terms with the fact that harems are win-plated too.