I'm With Crazy

About a year ago I sat next to the man who invented bungee-jumping.

It was on a bus, so when he shared this conversational nugget with me naturally I assumed he was lying or demented. So I just smiled and nodded and murmured, ‘Of course you did, you clever thing you!’ But at the end of the journey he pressed his name and email address upon me, and I went home and checked it out on Wikipedia.

Huh. Turns out he invented bungee-jumping.

Well, technically the Aztecs invented bungee-jumping, but the crazy bus guy was the first proper white dude to do it, so that counts for more.

Although he turned out to be telling the truth about that, all that hurtling face-forward towards the ground at terminal velocity had clearly taken a vicious toll on his noggin. I pretended to be droolingly asleep when he initially sat down next to me to avoid conversation, but then my mobile rang and I blew my own cover by answering it, because I’m a bit thick like that.

He pounced instantly. ‘Do you mind if I talk to you?’ he asked.

I must interrupt the anecdote here to share with you a deeply private little factoid about myself.

That is, I am one of a tiny proportion of humans born entirely lacking any vertebral column. This congenital deficit has made life wearisome for me for almost three decades. I often muse on how differently things could’ve turned out if God had granted me a structurally-intact endosekeleton.

I pine for a spine, in short. I am so ‘spine-less’, to coin a word, that it is a miracle I am able to walk upright unassisted.

As a result of this unfortunate cartilaginal deficiency, I have for 28 years running been voted Person I Dream Nightly Of Being Seated Next To On Public Transport by the readers of Loonies Weekly.

And so, when the crackpot bungee-jump pioneer enquired if I would be open to a 90-minute diatribe on his past, present and future, my response was such an enthusiastic assent as to basically amount to a sloppy tongue-kiss.

Then, for the millionth time in my life, I sat back, braced myself for the verbal torrent of insanity, and silently thanked God that he hadn’t asked for a blowjob.

His life story turned out to be characterized by a bewilderingly rapid succession of euphoric highs and crushing lows, like a narrative analogue of the bungee-jumping that turned his cerebrum to mush. Consequently, it proved hard to twist my features into appropriate facial expressions in time to match each bizarre new episode.

Fondly reflecting on the uncommon beauty of his first love, for instance, he mused: "Making love to her for the first time was the deepest tenderness I have ever experienced."

I barely had time to adjust my visage to read ‘Well, isn’t that nice’ before the abrupt appendix: “She died in my arms two weeks later calling out my name.”

I found being the sole audience to his bi-polar memoirs so unspeakably stressful that by the time he disembarked, leaving a lingering hand-kiss and the paper serviette on which his details were scrawled, I had soaked through three layers of clothing with terrified sweat.

You would think that experiences like this – and believe me, this is one of umpteen – would have trained me to project a frosty unavailability to thwart the conversational advances of strangers.

Not so.

A mere two weeks ago, I was having a drink by myself at a quayside bar in Cape Town while catching up on some email. And clearly the only frosty thing about me was the lager I was quaffing, because it took approximately 8 minutes for the nearest lunatic to descend.

"Do you mind if I join you?" he asked, pulling out a chair and sitting down while he spoke.

My boneless flesh oozed out of the slats in my seat, unsupported by any osseous framework, as I shook my head in mute misery.

"I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of a guy called Nostradamus," he began.

Happy Gnu Year!

Ladles and jellyspoons, I give you 2010!

Twenty-Ten! I mean, Ground Control to Major Tom: futuristic enough for ya?

I have also heard this promising new annum referred to as ‘Twenty-Zen’ by hipsters, but personally I prefer to call it ‘Plenty-Yen’, as 2010 is the year I intend to become very, very big in Beijing.

I have marked the turn of the decade by pole-vaulting into the modern era, circa 2001, via the purchase of an i-pod. I realize this is the equivalent of boasting about your hot new donkey-cart around the time of the arrival of the BMW Z3, but nuts to all of you.

And the i-pod is only the start, my friends. I have high hopes for 2010. As I walked home from a party early on New Year’s morning, the snow began to fall in big white flakes upon my face, and it tasted like hope and redemption. Hope and redemption and frozen water with a slight smack of petroleum, but basically the heady cocktail of dreams come true.

Other things on my to-do list this year include:

- finally perform a citizen’s arrest;

- launch own fragrance range, Dishevellée, par Bec;

- submit tender for re-building of Haitian motorways;

- start up lucrative social-networking sites for stationery enthusiasts - ‘MySpacecase’ – and wildebeest aficionados – ‘Gnu-Tube’

- dance as if nobody’s looking, by dint of throwing hand-grenade in opposite direction in crowded nightclub;

- test hippie hypothesis that when all the trees and fish are gone, you won’t be able to eat money;

- create life-form in petri dish and rule over it firmly but fairly;

- run for office (necessitated by consistently missing tube/bus in the morning)

- blog more.

Who’s with me?

Suffer the little children

I had to babysit a ten-year-old and an eight-year-old last week. My girlfriend offered to look after them while their mother did some last-minute Christmas shopping. She’s nice like that, my girlfriend.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I was a bit scared before their visit. After all, the last time I spoke to a ten year-old, I was one myself. I felt deeply unprepared. What are ten-year-olds like? I wondered. What kind of developmental milestones have they reached by that stage? Can you have conversations with them? Or do you just stick a crayon in their chubby fists and wipe away their drool occasionally?

They arrived. Firstly, I was surprised by how seemingly capable they were. They were able to do things by themselves, and they wore little coats and everything, almost like bonsai versions of normally-sized people.

The older one even shook my hand, which was weird, like having a pixie’s hand in yours.

‘I’m Beatrice,’ she piped.

‘Nice to meet you, Beatrice,’ I said shyly, pumping her pixie hand. The younger one hadn’t learnt how to shake hands yet. So I just held up my hand open-palmed to him, to show him I meant him no harm, and smiled in a way which was supposed to be kind of reassuringly aunt-like but probably made me seem like a lascivious paedo welcoming new prey.

My girlfriend spoke to them a bit like how she talks to me, sort of loudly and slowly and including lots of orders. It seemed to work well. But then she took the older one out of the room, leaving me sitting opposite the eight-year-old in deafening silence.

My palms started sweating.

‘So, Henry,’ I commenced, clearing my throat, ‘what are you doing for New Year’s Eve?’

He looked at me blankly and remained silent.

Fool! I mentally chided myself. He probably doesn’t know what New Year’s Eve is! Anyway, he’s eight! He doesn’t have New Year’s Eve plans! It’s not like he’s about to announce he’s pre-booked VIP entrance at Mahiki with champagne and nibbles!

‘So you’re on holiday at the moment?’ I tried again, while furiously texting my friend Tarry ‘topics of conversation for 8-yr-olds asap pls urgent’.

‘Yeah,’ he mumbled, not troubling to hide his boredom.

Ask them what they want for Christmas, Tarry texted back.

‘Is that a Blackberry?’ asked Henry, with a grudging flicker of interest.

‘It is indeed!’ I cried enthusiastically. ‘You can hold it if you like!’

I slipped the phone into his hands with exaggerated care to emphasise its fragility and specialness.

He inspected it for about three seconds and handed it back, bored. ‘My dad’s has a touchscreen.’

With that he got up and exited the room, repulsed by the conversational tedium. Almost instantly the ten-year-old took his place.

‘What do you want for Christmas, Beatrice?’ I asked brightly. She observed me dispassionately for a moment.

‘You do know my father’s just had a stroke,’ she said, with the air of someone pityingly dispensing information to a social inferior.

‘Yes,’ I said in a neutral yet resolute manner, determined not to show weakness.

‘Well, so I haven’t had a lot of time to go shopping,’ she continued, with the frazzled, world-weary air of an overworked investment banker reduced to buying last-minute gifts off Amazon. ‘But I’ve made Henry a present.’

She beckoned me closer so she could whisper what it was. ‘You know the story of King John?’ she hissed.

‘Yes,’ I lied firmly. I cannot afford to reveal ignorance in front of this freakish little prodigy, I thought. I will have to pretend to know everything in the world.

‘I’ve copied it out in my best handwriting, and drawn pictures at the bottom. That’s what I’m giving Henry.’

‘I’m sure he’ll love that,’ I said unconvincingly. What a crap present! I thought. I’d be pissed if someone gave me that.

‘Ooh, look!’ Beatrice squealed, her attention diverted by a comic figurine on the mantelpiece. ‘A bobble-head Jesus!’

‘Yes,’ I said sententiously. ‘Do you know about Jesus, Beatrice?’

Beatrice rolled her eyes in an unnecessarily exaggerated, theatrical style. ‘I’m an atheist,’ she drawled. ‘That’s how much I hate Jesus.’

Gosh! I thought, taken aback. That’s a bit harsh!

Mini-Richard Dawkins launched into a complex explanation about the lack of empirical rigour characterising the arguments of those responsible for spreading theological doctrine, but we were mercifully interrupted by the return of my girlfriend and Henry, the former bearing a bowl of biscuits and various icing implements.

We’d baked the biscuits the night before. We weren’t able to find any Christmassy cookie-cutters in the shop, so most of them were in the shape of spindly giraffes.

‘Giraffes!’ chuckled Beatrice, inspecting one of them. ‘I love it! Giraffes have absolutely nothing to do with Christmas – but, y’know, it’s so wrong, it’s right!’

I stared at her in disbelief.

No! I countered furiously in my head. What’s wrong is ten-year-olds delivering knowing little aperçus about confectional incongruity, in the manner of a wry Nigella Lawson! What’s wrong is the fact that you are almost certainly cleverer and generally more capable than me, 17 years your senior! And finally, what’s wrong is that despite your general precociousness, you keep licking the cookies to fine-tune your icing designs!

Kids today, eh. They may look just like scaled-down versions of ourselves, but they’re not like us at all. Trust me.

Say whaaaaaaaaaaaa'?

Every now and then a news story comes along which is obviously more interesting than all the other media preoccupations du jour, but oddly not treated as such.

So it was in September, for instance, where the news didn’t so much ‘break’ as ‘softly crumble’ that liposuction fat can be easily converted into stem cells. Why aren’t people more excited about this? Here we have a chance to cure leukemia and America’s obesity problem in one fell swoop! And yet the response from those who set conventional news agendas appears to have been one big yawn. Bizarro.

And a similar thing is happening right now. Drifting off to sleep last night, I found this story tucked away in a blink-and-you'll-miss-it corner of yesterday’s Guardian. Allow me to summarise: a landmark judgement has ruled that the media will be allowed to attend the hearings of a secretive court about whether “a young man with an international reputation should have decisions made for him by others”.

The ruling is being hailed by media wonks as a victory for transparency and journalistic access and…oh, pardon me, I appear to have nodded off.

It is bleeding obvious that the most fascinating aspect of this report is: WHO IS IT???

He is described in the judgement as “famous”, but the public is unaware that he is suffering from a condition that makes him “unable to manage his own affairs”. WHO IS IT??

Can everyone please stop tweeting about the head of the BBC claiming tuppeny-ha’penny on expenses for a watering-can and focus on this infinitely more interesting issue? And yes, yes, it is obviously grotesquely insensitive and repugnant to speculate on this unfortunate young man’s identity, so if that sort of thing turns your stomach, kindly look away now.

Does anyone else think it might be Prince Harry?

Cry Me A River

There is water sluicing through the roof as I type. It is dripping in a slow but methodical fashion from a rather discouraging gash in my ceiling which has opened up in the last few days and now seems to be steadily widening.

At first I attempted to control the leak by placing a rubbish bin under it. But the drip slyly changes direction approximately once every two minutes, evading capture. After half an hour of scuttling back and forth, bin in hand, eyeing the ceiling with a crazily fixed intensity in order to plot and thwart its leaking arc, I abandoned my Sisyphyean efforts.

The sound of the water hitting my carpet, in huge, despondent plops, is not a joyful one. It is a bit as if the flat itself is weeping. And who can blame it? I would also have a serious case of the cries if my ladybits were being excavated to house a soon-to-open late-night shisha bar, as is the unfortunate case on the ground floor below, but that’s a story for another night.

I’m not asking for your pity: I’m saving those supplications for my elderly Chinese landlady. (Although the last time she was called to the party, to rescue us from an overflowing toilet, she opined that it would do us good to pick up the basics of plumbing as necessary preparation for “housewife job”, so I am not holding out a great deal of hope. No doubt she will see this as a golden opportunity for me to learn the ropes of a bit of light structural engineering.)

I merely wish to make the observation that my life is not one of undiluted glamour.

This fairly obvious point struck me with thunderous intensity as I was trudging home from the cinema tonight, shortly after another Damascus-style revelation. The first was that the taxi-driver who ferried me home late last Wednesday night overcharged me by something in the region of 200%. But then I recalled the possibility that he may have levied what one might delicately term a “vomit surcharge”, and so I shall charitably call us even.

But the second epiphany – that my life is not one in which, say, Anna Wintour might find herself comfortably at home – was rendered starker by tonight’s cinematic offering, which in a heroic act of steely will I maintained wakefulness throughout. The film in question was An Education, which tells the story of a young girl’s battle to choose between the hedonistic abandonment of a love affair with a glamorous older man, and the possibility of winning a place at Oxford if she just buckles down and gets to grips with her pesky Latin conjugation. I believe this is the point at which a more considerate blogger would insert some sort of flashing spoiler alert, since I can inform you that she chooses the man, loses everything, and then gets it all back. On Her Own Terms.

Bravo and jolly well done to her! I was, of course, rooting for the pedagogic path throughout. I nodded furiously when her various ever-so-slightly-lesbianic teacher/mentors extolled the peerless virtues of higher education. I punched my little fist in the air when the protagonist dutifully spelled out her hard-earned conclusion, that “there’s no shortcut to the life I want”. It was all I could do not to leap to my feet and deliver a standing ovation during the concluding scenes of her cycling amidst the dreaming spires with implausibly shiny hair and a pleasingly weighty book-bag. As the credits rolled, I was filled with contentment for a narrative satisfyingly resolved in everyone’s best interests, with Hedonistic Evil firmly subjugated to Educational Good’s superior might, and everything just peachy with the world.

It was only as the lights went on and I began to deposit the punters’ discarded ice-cream pots and smuggled-in sticky beer cans in a black rubbish sack that it slowly began to dawn on me that something might not be quite right. This feeling of stirring unease stayed with me as I locked up the toilets, exchanged farewells with my co-usher, an Eritrean refugee, and signed out my time-sheet to register a solid 5 hours’ toil remunerated on the minimum-wage pay-scale.

Only in the course of my walk home did these sentiments cohere into something approaching crystallisation. And when they did, boy, was I pissed.

“I’ve been duped!” I cried out to no-one in particular, or I would have, if I were a character in a 50’s caper-movie.

I was seized by an urgent desire to run back to the cinema, clutching a megaphone, and re-broadcast the film with an accompanying soundtrack of my screeching “Don’t do it! Choose the rich dude! The only life that your Oxford education provides a shortcut to is one that involves a roof with a hole in it!”

But I didn’t, of course, because access to the projection-room is far beyond my professional remit. Also, the abundance of late-night shisha bars gracing Kilburn’s High Road do not offer megaphone rentals as part of their utility package, although I have reason to believe that they are open to discussions about contract-killings, so it seems an arbitrary point at which to draw your service boundaries.

Instead I came home to assess the spread of my bedroom’s new lake, and started googling ‘dry-stone-walling for beginners’.

After all, they do say that knowledge is power.

I Demand Your Inattention

One of the gilt-edged leaves of my glittering “portfolio career” is that I work in a cinema. Fortunately it is a small independent theatre, so there frequently aren’t many punters, which means that on most nights I can help myself to one of the expansive back-row “lovers’ seats” without a dividing arm, fold my legs over the chairs in front of me, and take a cosy little sleep.

But these sleeps aren’t that ‘little’, actually. I am in an expert position to inform you that films are getting longer and longer. These days, by the time the lights go on and I stumble out bleary-eyed to resume my professional duties, I have essentially fulfilled half my recommended night’s sleep quota. And I’m talking about the actual passing of recorded time, not the experiential dimension of it (whereby forty-five minutes of some French auteur’s latest celluloid spoodge-deposit equates to one minute of Masterchef).

I was musing on this the other day while reading an article on the top ten most popular Youtube clips of all time. The list surprised me, topped as it is by “home video of toddler Charlie biting his brother’s finger”, which I cannot claim to be familiar with, and featuring a glaring absence of cats. None. Not even that one who eats noodles with chopsticks. I wonder if this was some kind of sub-editing mistake by the publisher of the list, as we all know that filmed cat antics are basically the giant purring motor that sustains and propels the interweb as we know it today.

You may also be interested to learn that 22 million people have to date viewed “a clip featuring a man with a massive jaw and no eyes”, which is approximately 21 million more people than can tell you the name of the current UN Secretary General. Maybe if Ban Ki-moon had a massive jaw and no eyes, he’d get more hits. We could also call him 'Moon-jaw' then, which might be fun.

It is clear that if, as Neil Postman suggested, we are indeed “amusing ourselves to death”, our last recorded splutters will take place over a crumb-littered laptop keyboard while the Sneezing Baby Panda clip plays on eternal repeat. And no judgies from this corner: I say we could do worse than pick the sneezing baby panda (4th on the list) as the emblem of our time. Of the 44 million recorded views of that particular clip, I am personally responsible for roughly a third. That thing is just cute in a whole different way.

But I find this interesting because the Sneezing Baby Panda clip lasts a wholly satisfying 0.16 seconds, whereas my full-length feature snooze in the cinema tonight stretched to 2 hours and 15 minutes, which appears to be about standard for today’s major releases. How can this bizarre discrepancy in what we demand from our entertainment in time-allocation terms continue?

I say it can’t.

I don’t know about you, but the internet has reduced my attention span to that of a goldfish whose typically minuscule goldfish concentration-powers have been diminished yet further by a rare form of goldfish ADD, and then curtailed even beyond this by the effects of repeatedly battering his tiny head against the side of his tank.

I know I’m only addressing myself at this stage, anyway, since I lost the rest of you to Youtube at “home video of toddler Charlie biting his brother’s finger”.

The internet has only had the chance to work its insidious rotting effect on my mush-like frontal lobe for the past 14 years. I first started “surfing” – and how ridiculously archaic that metaphor is now – in 1995. I discovered today that in 1995 there were only 635 websites on the internet. Which begs the question: how come one of them was devoted to an algorithm which generated “hilarious” excuses as to why you hadn’t done your homework? That was definitely the first site I discovered. And how apt, looking back: whatever dotcom start-up was responsible for that was eerily prescient as to exactly what type of content would be in most demand on the internet.

After getting bored with the homework-excuse website, I got a penpal. I picked him off some weird dot-matrix listserv. His name was Per, he lived in Sweden, he was about 45 and in retrospect probably ‘grooming’ me, to employ the technical paedophile term. Ah, sweet memories.

But anyway, 14 years is all it’s taken to turn me into someone who tires of a topic after roughly the time it takes to watch an infant panda sneeze unfathomably cutely. The internet is forty years old this year: by the time the next forty rolls around, we’ll be like the rabbits in Watership Down, incapable of counting numbers beyond two.

So it only remains to me to wish you a very happy birthday, Internet. Wait - didn’t I start off talking about the state of cinema today? Ah, fuck it, I’m over that.

Are You There, Bec? It's Me, Master Bates

Last night I got a series of phonecalls from a man energetically masturbating while a porn flick played in the background.

You may be confused by the words “a series of” in that sentence, but the truth is I couldn’t stop myself answering the phone, time after time.

Partly, I was spurred by the same motivation that keeps people watching Lost: that deepseated belief in the possibility that it’s about to get more interesting. And judge ye me not: I say if you lose that shred of childlike optimism, that faith-sparkling cornerstone of your very humanity – well, then, should that dark day befall me, cut me open and use my robotic innards as spare vacuum-cleaner parts.

Also, I was fascinated by his multi-tasking wizardry. Imagine the relentless focus it must take to maintain a rigorous self-pleasuring action while simultaneously dialling a nine-digit number and engaging with pornographic material! Call me workshy, but that strikes me as downright exhausting. That many competing distractions would’ve made my head explode into fleshy pieces from overstimulation, like an epileptic at a live taping of the X-Factor.

Not that I was giving him much in the way of erotic fodder. It must have taken a rich and vibrant inner world for him to replace my irritable “Mum, is that you?” repetitions with the mental image of some fishnet-clad hussy getting cosy with the phone between silken sheets.

But the main reason I kept on answering and listening intently was that I was struck by the possibility that I might be able to pick up a clue to his identity or geographical position from the ambient sound of the call. Like a specific and highly-localised form of birdsong in the background, which would enable me to whack my thigh and cry “By gum, the Knsyna Loerie! You’re nabbed, son!”

Even moving past the fact that this scenario involves me morphing into a TV detective from the 60s in Yorkshire, I do recognise that there are certain logical impediments to this plan. Primarily, I can’t tell a birdsong from a police siren. Secondly, even if I had identified the sonorous hoot/tweet/cackle of the Knysna Loerie, how would that have helped me? The only people I know who live in Knysna are my friend Kirby’s parents, who after lengthy consideration I have crossed off my list of suspects as they are quite busy running a vegetation-export company and don’t know my phone number.

Also, I must reluctantly concede, as maddeningly desirable as my dulcet tones are, it probably wasn’t someone sitting in Knysna. Long-distance rates are sheer bloody murder, aren’t they? Daylight robbery. Unless you can find a way to telephonically harass someone via Skype, in which case the element of surprise is somewhat lost (“Please add wank_call_69 to your contact list!”).

So in the end I gave up, turned my phone off, and allowed him to reach his shuddering climax to the sexy purr of “The caller you have dialled is not available”.

But it reminded me that I should do as my mother does and keep a small police-regulation whistle within reach of the phone at all times. God knows why she initially found it necessary to launch this counter-offensive on obscene callers, as I cannot imagine she is in high demand on aural-jerk-off listservs. But at one stage during my adolescence, her eagerness to bring out the whistle was such that in *any* ambiguous telephonic situation (such as, say, a stranded daughter phoning tearily from a crackly call-box) she would grab the whistle with unseemly glee and blast it down the line like a Bafana Bafana supporter with a vuvuzela after a goal.

“Such filth”, she would say afterwards, snapping the phone back on to its cradle smartly.

Such filth, indeed.