Bec's Plan B

Are You There, Earth? It’s Me, Ophiuchus

2011-02-23T14:25:00.000-08:00

I've taken two months off from the world to stare into the abyss, by which I mean my abnormally large navel. The problem with this is that when you do eventually poke your head above the parapet of your self-absorption, you discover that a ton of shit has gone down. I’m sure that so much stuff didn’t used to happen when I was growing up. This is the point at which someone better than me would insert an edifying McLuhan-shaped discussion of the mutually-constitutive relationship between news and 24-hour news channels, but, y’know, zzzz!

Just today, for instance, just an averagely boring Wednesday, they found both a new dinosaur and a missing Enid Blyton novel. Which leads me to suspect that I am really not putting my back into tracking down my driver's license somewhere in my top drawer.

I don’t know anything about anything any more. Like Rip van Winkle, I have awoken to an entirely unfamiliar world. At the point when I checked out, the shark terrorising Sharm el-Sheikh was the most interesting thing to happen to Egypt since the curse of Tutankhamun’s tomb, and Gadaffi was just a hilarious sex-addict with big shades, like Michael Jackson with political aspirations, or Silvio Berlusconi with epaulettes.

I am the first to admit that everything I know about modern Egypt I learnt from reading Death on the Nile, and Libya is very easily confused with Liberia, don’t you find? But one of the many things that I fail to understand about recent developments in that part of the world is how Yemen is not yet burning. I always thought Yemen was the real basket-case of that gang. Terrorists are always from Yemen. They have ten-year old divorcees in Yemen. Yemen needs to sort its shit out, yo.

Anyway, I have been reading with fascination about this new universe I inhabit. And I mean ‘a new universe’ quite literally: I still cannot believe, for instance, that nobody bothered to inform me that they changed the star signs.

My friends Alex and Anna mentioned this to me the other night with a heavy helping of blasé and a side-portion of yawn, as if it were no big deal. As if after almost 29 years of life as a proud, fiery Aries, it meant nothing that I was to be unceremoniously demoted to Pisces! Fucking insipid, watery Pisces! (No offence.) The only positive aspect I can discern in this is that Adolf Hitler and I no longer share a star-sign, but say what you like about Adolf Hitler, at least he was a bit of a self-starter.

Upon arriving home, I burst through the door to confront my housemate Adam with this news.

“They changed the star signs!” I yelled accusingly.

He laid down his pen. “Who is ‘they’?” he asked calmly.

I paused. “Them!”’ I said, realising that I was sounding like Julian Assange again, but powerless to stop myself. “Astrologers! Astronomers! Astronauts!”

Let me take a step back and explain, in case you too have unfathomably allowed this news to pass you by.

To put it in terms the layman will understand, and I am drastically simplifying my own advanced grasp on the astrophysics that underpin this, the earth wobbled and all the star signs got fucked up. I’m not saying this is because I haven’t been blogging, but the timing is suspicious.

As a result, there are now new star constellations in the sky that didn’t exist when star signs were ‘introduced’. (‘Introduced’ in this context is polite newspaper-speak for ‘dreamt up by the Babylonians after a few too many spliffs and a desperate yearning for some ontological anchor because Christianity hadn’t been invented yet’.)

Consequently, there is a new star sign, Ophiuchus, and good luck pronouncing that one when you’re speed-dating. It is also known as ‘the serpent holder’, which coincidentally enough is also what Gaddafi calls his female bodyguard. Because of bloody Ophiuchus, the rest of us have been shifted reluctantly along the star chart, like sulky Londoners pissed about having to move down the tube carriage at rush-hour.

As you can imagine, the response from the internet has been vastly unimpressed.

‘Cat’, for instance, had this to say: ‘I have been a taurus from birth and I have all the qualities of a taurus and I act and believe and do things LIKE a taurus… NOT an aries. What I’m supposed to just SUDDENYL change my way of thinking and point of view just because someone says I will? BS. Man I am who I am! ‘

Not since God answered Moses’s question about His name with those same concluding words (Exodus 3:14) has a sentiment rung out so powerfully. I stand with you, ‘Cat’, although I must point out your grotesque ingratitude in OBJECTING to being transferred to Aries. It’s kinda like a Yemeni being all grumpy about being handed a green card.

Like the majority of the internet-reading world, I am choosing to process the star sign information by simply ignoring it. For god’s sake, if I gave two shits about what science had to say about any given matter, I would also have to support funding for stem-cell research and believe that HIV causes AIDS and a whole bunch of other stuff that amounts to a big fat heap of buzzkill.

You know what they say, after all.

Denial: not just a river into which Hosni Mubarak threw suitcases stuffed with gold in the hope of creeping back to retrieve it once things have calmed down.

Is This A Startling New Cultural Moment?

2010-12-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

I feel like Julian Assange and I have quite a lot in common. Due to recent upheavals in my personal circumstances, I have been living a life not unlike that of an international fugitive: spending a night here, a night there, existing out of a backpack, always with one eye on the door for a CIA smash-through. From one person-of-no-fixed-address to another, my major piece of advice to Assange would be to invest in multiple toothbrushes.

Also, I’ve decided to launch an online venture called Bekileaks. Each day I will release the full email correspondence between me and one of my closest pals. It will cause absolute chaos among my friend group when everyone realises the full extent of how freely we disseminate supposedly secret gossip, but it’s time to break the global stranglehold on information control. Everyone must know everything! YOU’RE a bad drunk, and HIS fixed eye-contact makes me feel weird, and SHE totally texted your boyfriend once. Take that, The Man!

The Wikileaks issue is rendered complicated, for me, by the fact that I generally view information as a burden rather than a gift. There’s tons of stuff I’d rather not know. I have no desire to be made aware how perilous our global security really is. I am already an anxious person, and if I had to allow myself to really think hard about the LOLtastic vignette that fourteen tons of weapons-grade uranium were left chillin’ on a Libyan runway while Gadaffi got a blowie from his curvy blonde minder – well, I’d have to start on the whiskey even earlier in the day. Additionally, the fact that the world’s top diplomats communicate like teenage bitches passing notes in Maths class is knowledge I can do without, although it has led me to consider that I may be ideally suited for an ambassadorial post.

So that’s Wikileaks dealt with. Now I’d like to move on to more important matters, namely the American troubadour and child-bride Katy Perry.

Ms Perry recently performed her new single, Firework, live on the X Factor. Stripped of studio gimmickry, her voice had such a strained, hysterical quality that I began to suspect that someone was actually standing behind her pressing a gun into her lower back. This is, of course, far from unfeasible in a Simon Cowell production.

But it is the song itself which interests me, because it fits into a zeitgeisty new cultural genre I would like to term Marginalisation Porn.

Firework's theme is, roughly put, that even though you are a social no-hoper, Katy loves you. “You're original, cannot be replaced,” she screeches consolingly. “After a hurricane comes a rainbow”, which will be news to the residents of New Orleans, but we’ll let it go.

In the accompanying video, Katy is dressed as Ophelia in an am-dram production of Hamlet, and stands on a balcony to deliver her inspiring message Evita-style. She appears to be girdled by an extraordinary pyrotechnic brassiere, which shoots fireworks into the night sky on command. Yes, fireworks come out of her tits. You can see why Russell Brand wanted to put a ring on it.

The bits that don’t show Katy squirting roman candles from her areolae show society’s outcasts achieving self-actualisation. A gay teenager lunges his male friend. A fat girl suddenly finds the confidence to rip off her clothes and dive-bomb into a swimming pool, an act that proves both the affirming power of Katy’s fireworks and the Archimedes Principle.

Pause on that one for a second, and let’s take a quick look at the latest offering from Pink.

As a slight tangent, I’ve been thinking lately how very annoying Pink must be to hang out with. You just know that she’d be all like ‘I’m MAD, me! I’m properly mental! I’m wearing a cowboy hat!’ the whole time, and you’d be rolling your eyes going ‘Give it a rest, Pink, we get it,’ and she’d be all like ‘Shots! Who wants shots?’ and you’d be like ‘For fuck’s sake Pink, it’s ten a.m. At a funeral’, and then she’d careen off to hump someone’s leg. You know what I mean?

Anyway, Pink’s newest release is a ditty called Raise Your Glass, in which she proposes a toast to all those who are “wrong in all the right ways”, the “nitty gritty, dirty little freaks” who are “too school for cool”. Lest these descriptions seem a little vague, the video helpfully identifies the kind of folks she means. They include: fat chicks again, gays again, women with dreadlocks, men with long hair, black people who wear knitted hats, and skateboarders.

So here we have two major recording artists choosing to appeal specifically to nerds, freaks, and social rejects; any human being who isn’t about to get laid any time soon. In some ways this is doubtless a canny commercial decision, as this precise demographic probably has money to burn on iTunes downloads since they have zero socialising/contraceptive expenses. On the other hand, what has happened to rock ‘n roll? Popular music is not supposed to be about these people! Popular music is supposed to be a glimpse into a room where impossibly sexy people are getting it on with other impossibly sexy people, and you’re not invited.

As with so much else in my life, I blame Glee and Lady Gaga.

Glee has fetishised marginalised high-school students to the point where for all I know, all conventional social hierarchies in secondary education have been conclusively overturned and your only hope of making Prom Queen is if you have some unsightly orthodontic apparatus and/or a spinal injury.

As for Lady Gaga, she started this nonsense. Her entire performance discourse is built around the notion of what it means to ‘be a freak’. And whatever Lady Gaga does, everyone else has to follow or risk seeming passé. This is presumably why poor Christina Aguilera is with visible desperation trying to implausibly relaunch herself as a burlesque vamp when puhleeze, we all know about her days on the Mickey Mouse Club. It is also why the next time you see Pink, she will probably be wearing a pant-suit made out of bacon rolls.

But it is perhaps unsurprising that in this topsy-turvy new social order, the hottest person in the world right now is a hacker with greasy white hair.

Here endeth today’s lesson.

Word.

2010-11-01T14:49:00.000-07:00

I’ve started working for the dictionary.

Which dictionary, I hear you ask? The dictionary. The English one in Oxford. The Big Pimpin’ Mack Daddy, as we call it in lexicography circles, and after we drop that bomb we get laid, like, fast.

Let me take your questions one at a time, please.

Q: If you look up ‘awesome’ in the dictionary now, what does it say?

A: Bec. Just ‘Bec’.

Q: Can I get a word into the dictionary for you?

A: Yes, if you send me £100 in unmarked bills and five usages in different print sources spanning a hundred-year period. And don’t bother doing that shit where you write something on a bit of notepad and then take a lighter and burn the edges to make it look like a piece of parchment from 1600. I don’t fall for that any more.

Q: Am I drunk on power?

A: Partly, and the rest is Blossom Hill Chardonnay.

The truth is, although I have painstakingly cultivated the portrait of myself through this blog as a fast-living, hell-raising rock-‘n-roller, someone who routinely sticks a knife into the toaster to retrieve the bread, just for the hell of it – well, at heart, I’m just a big, fat, nerd.

As such, working at the dictionary makes me feel a little like I’ve just won Gold at the Nerd Olympics.

Previously, I spent my entire life giving people unsolicited, unwelcome and deeply-resented advice on word meaning, usage and spelling. I literally could not help myself.

“Ahem,” I’d say, with the giddy rush of mixed exhilaration and shame that accompanies the performance of any compulsive behaviour, “I think you’ll find that ‘disinterested’ means something quite different from the sense you intend there.”

It’s like a sickness.

Now that I’m in Word HQ, it’s been very freeing for me. It means that I feel I can occasionally let the odd slip-up from my interlocutor pass without comment.

You don’t HAVE to tell them what ‘ambivalent’ actually means, I whisper to myself, digging my fingernails tightly enough into my palms to draw blood. Tomorrow, you’ll just amend the dictionary entry to read: ‘Anyone who doesn’t use it in exactly this way will DIE SOON, By Order, God’.

It’s a good thing the dictionary doesn’t know that I would happily work for free, because I would. As it is, I don’t have time to spend all the elf-gold they pay me in. I do know that if I save it all up for a year I can redeem the little coins for a special pencil in the dictionary shop, and that will be a magical day.

I get anxious about the words. I want to do the best I can for them. I’m their advocate, their bridge between illegitimacy and the big time. Sometimes I think of myself as a one-woman X Factor judging panel for words hoping to make it.

"And who do we have here, then?" I murmur, as I pick a long-forgotten word-slip from the vault of words.

“Subsexual,” one whispers back. “I’m Subsexual.”

“Subsexual, hey?” I muse, studying it. “Saucy little thing, aren’t you? And what’s your story?”

“It’s always been my dream,” Subsexual shrugs. Or maybe that’s just my fingers tweaking the slip. “My friend Hypersexual made it in, and my cousin Asexual, and my aunt-who-used-to-be-my-uncle Transsexual…”

“Touching journey,” I nod. “But when it comes down to it, Subsexual, do you have the full package? I can’t help but feel that you lack substance.”

“Please,” Subsexual whimpers, crumpling. “It’s my dream.”

“We’ve all got a dream, kid,” I say, tucking Subsexual away in the Not Heading For The Dictionary Any Time Soon pile. “And I’m living mine.”

Putting the 'Pro' into 'Protest'

2010-09-20T14:25:00.000-07:00

I went to protest against the Pope last weekend. I felt deeply conflicted about it, because the official campaign was called Protest The Pope. When did ‘protest’ become a transitive verb? I worried. Then I looked it up in the dictionary, and buried down in the sub-senses I found that you can use ‘protest’ transitively, but that it’s chiefly an Americanism. I guess that’s okay then, I thought uneasily, but for the sake of consistency I do hope all the placards make reference to ‘pedophiles’ and ‘secularization’.

I hadn’t had any plans to protest against the Pope, but my friends Steve and Richard were going and I didn’t have anything else on. Also, in fairness, I’m South African. Protesting is our number one favourite thing to do other than viewing the world through a racialised lens. We’re basically a country of 49 million Berkeley undergrads.

I have no beef with Catholicism, just to be clear. In fact, a month ago, while holidaying in Italy, I travelled to the holy shrine of Loreto, which has a cathedral in which is situated the house where Mary was chillin’ when the angels came and told her she would give birth to Jesus. They transported the bricks of the house from Nazareth to Italy during the Crusades, fearing for its safety, and rebuilt it in the middle of the cathedral in Loreto. While mindful of the need for religious sensitivity in the current climate, I must report that it was a tiny bit weird. There were a lot of people with their eyes closed ecstatically rubbing themselves against the bricks. The last time I saw those kinds of scenes, I was in the dark-room at a gay club. Nonetheless, being a bit of an opportunist, I took advantage of the chance to indulge in a little light frottage of my own.

What was cool, however, was that there was some Jesus-era graffiti carved into the bricks, which translates loosely from the Aramaic as ‘Nobody talk to Judas OK’. Or something like that.

Anyway, I made up my mind that I would be going on the march to protest about one specific issue, namely the Vatican’s anti-condom stance and its deleterious impact on rates of HIV/AIDS in Africa. If only I’d expressed it that smoothly when approached by a BBC journalist on the march, and not fallen prey to a paralysing seizure of vox-pop anxiety. ‘C-condoms,’ I stammered, when he asked what I’d come to protest about. ‘Um, condoms, and AIDS and stuff.’

‘Right,’ he said. ‘How interesting,’ and walked away, ostentatiously not writing anything on his notepad.

Everyone going on the march had been asked to make their own mock Pope’s hats out of red cardboard. I hadn’t done my homework, but Steve and Richard had made two.

‘Put them on!’ I urged when we got to Hyde Park Corner and surveyed the sea of red cardboard mitres.

They seemed oddly reluctant. ‘You know what, you can have mine,’ said Richard, handing it to me.

I looked at it. It wasn’t that it was bad, exactly, it was just that it looked like a hat you’d find on the head of a garden gnome rather than the head of the head of the Catholic Church.

‘Thanks,’ I said. It would have been too churlish to back out, so I tugged it on to my head. It didn’t really fit. To make it stay on, I had to walk with my head bent forwards like someone staring at their feet out of embarrassment. But that was okay, because I was embarrassed.

Scrabbling in my bag, I found a black pen. ‘The Pope’s anti-condom stance costs lives!!!’ I scrawled in angry capitals on my gnome hat. Then I felt better, because it looked less like I had fallen out of the Magic Faraway Tree wearing it.

It was a very English protest. ‘No Sects Please, We’re British,’ read one placard. I saw at least three quoting the Father Ted joke, ‘Down With This Sort Of Thing’.

We chanted, but no-one really raised their voice above a polite, conversational tone.

‘What do we want?’ we inquired, en masse. ‘Rational thought! When do we want it? Now!’ I’m sure I heard a few people murmuring ‘Unless that’s not convenient’.

One of Steve’s friends, who hadn’t heard the answer, turned to me. ‘What do we want?’ he asked. ‘Rational thought,’ I explained.

He rolled his eyes. ‘Personally, I want a caramel frappuccino,’ he said.

There’s only so long that you can repeat ‘What do we want? Rational thought!’ without starting to feel like a bit of a twat, I find.

Soon we moved on to the gentle exhortation, ‘Pope go home!’

‘Pope go to hell!’ shouted a dissenter behind me.

‘Oh Max, you’re such a radical!’ drawled his companion.

We were supposed to march all the way to Downing Street, where Richard Dawkins was waiting to whip us into an aggressively secular frenzy. But after an hour Steve and I started to steal anxious glances at our watches.

‘It’s just that we have to be at that dinner party at 7.30,’ he said, looking at me guiltily.

‘And we did say it would be nice to fit in a glass of wine beforehand…’ I confirmed.

‘And, I mean, we’ve done our bit, really, haven’t we?’ he said, starting to edge out of the march on to the pavement.

‘Oh absolutely,’ I agreed, following him. ‘I really feel we’ve done something important here today.’

Later, I was forced to leave my hat in a bar in Earlsfield. It wouldn’t fit in my handbag, and I didn’t want to offend people on the Tube.

After all, I’m an activist, not a fundamentalist.

Big in Japan

2010-09-02T14:59:00.000-07:00

Have you heard the story of Beckii Cruel?

That sounds like the opening line to a Country & Western song, or the subtitle of my soon-to-be published autobiography, but it’s actually a genuine query.

Beckii Cruel was brought to my attention a few nights ago by a friend who expressed shock that I didn’t know who she was, since “it seems like the kind of thing you spend all day frantically googling”. She was absolutely correct, of course: ever since I began my forensic investigation into Beckii Cruel I have been thoroughly immersed in her curious world.

If you look up Beckii Cruel on Wikipedia, you will be informed that she is a ‘Manx pop dancer’, a description you may have to take several minutes to think about. For the benefit of ignorant Africans like myself, ‘Manx’ is the term for an inhabitant of the Isle of Man, and – turns out – not simply the name of those creepy cats without tails (please see exhibit above).

A ‘pop dancer’ is apparently someone who dances around to other people’s pop songs. The phrase is, I grant you, entirely semantically transparent. I was simply unaware that something I do in the mirror as foreplay to a lengthy self-pleasuring session constituted a prized form of artistic expression. Heigh ho.

Beckii Cruel is currently 15 years old, but the section of her personal narrative which concerns us begins when she was 13. From a young age Ms Cruel – at that stage still known by her birth name, Rebecca Flint – developed an interest in Japanese anime, a subject I know literally nothing about and do not feel much inclined to explore. It’s Japanesey cartoons, innit?

The question of why a pre-teen on the Isle of Man would find this subculture so engrossing is one that I suspect requires a trip to the Isle of Man during winter to satisfactorily resolve. However it happened, young Beckii got well into anime, and in particular into ‘cosplay’, which – as if I had to remind you – stands for ‘costume roleplay’. Wikipedia has a long explanation of cosplay using fancy and erotic words like “anthropomorphic” and “gender”, but however you try and sex it up, it’s still a bunch of geeks in Star Wars outfits to me.

So there’s young Beckii, coming of age on the Isle of Man, and her absolute favourite thing to do – bless her – is dress up in anime outfits and dance around to Japanese pop songs. Weird, I know, but probably better for her in the long run than binge-drinking White Lightning and having sex with tree-stumps, which is how other Manx adolescents get their jollies. Of course, she videos it all – because if it’s not on the internet, how do you know it ever really happened?

It’s the ultimate modern-day fairy-tale: the videos get picked up in Japan and promptly go viral. The Japanese, it seems, simply cannot get enough of this Manx teenager bopping away in her bedroom. She is a huge fucking star. 14 million people have watched her videos. She has released chart-topping albums (she had to learn to sing first, obv) and a DVD. She gets sent extravagant gifts from her fans. One of them posted her a bass guitar for her 15^th birthday. A great many of her admirers appear to be, er, elderly gentlemen, but I am confident that their feelings towards her are appropriately avuncular.

Here’s the thing: having seen her vids, I have to say that objectively speaking she’s rubbish. She can’t sing, her dancing is weak, and her outfits look like a last-minute Little Red Riding Hood costume you might throw together in a moment of desperation for a Halloween party. I am, of course, being hideously enthnocentric , and it may be that my cultural insensitivity is blinding me to the complex semiotic layers of “anthropomorphism” and “gender” lurking beneath her amateurish pantomime.

The key to Beckii’s popularity is said to be the fact that she physically resembles an anime character: small face, large eyes, slender limbs. Based on this logic, when aliens eventually make contact with Earth, I am guaranteed to be a sensation in the outer galaxy. This is because I share many of the corporeal features commonly associated with the appearance of space-people: thin, snaking arms; an enormous forehead; I could go on. NASA better hurry up with that mission to Mars, so that my Martian fans can get busy sending me millions and millions of Mars bars.

Not all Japanese response to Beckii has been adulatory, however. Comments on her Youtube channel frequently accuse her of being a ‘Weeaboo’, a word which I would find upsetting to have yelled at me at close range. I could explain the folk etymology of ‘Weeaboo’, but your comprehension would be predicated on familiarity with at least three other internet memes, and our days on this planet are few and dwindling. Suffice it to say that it is a synonym for ‘Wapanese’, or wannabe Japanese.

I think that I, like my namesake Beckii Cruel, might be Wapanese. After all, what’s not to love about the culture which produced my favourite website of all time: Cat Prin, “the tailor for a cat you know”?

When I am monstrously rich from the proceeds of my intergalactic fame, I shall travel to Japan, armed with a small cat for whom I wish to purchase bespoke outfits. In the meantime, I believe the Isle of Man is lovely this time of year.

Death: What Is It Good For?

2010-08-23T16:28:00.000-07:00

September’s coming. I have a sense for these things. They call me ‘The Human Almanac’ in various online role-playing games I participate in.

Between you and me, I hate September. As the great singer-songwriter TS Eliot once trilled: ‘September is the cruellest month/ What with it getting a bit nippier at night/ And you having to find a sort of transitional jacket that’s halfway between a cardigan and your heavy winter coat.’

I feel like by the time you hit September, the year’s basically over. The bartender’s collecting up the glasses, the lights are coming on and you’re standing there blinking, going ‘Wait, that’s it? That was 2010?’

All the early promise of the year, the dreams and aspirations, the vows and fervent resolutions of change and progress – that’s all gone now.

The year is shorn of its fairy-dust now, stripped away and exposed; much like the pre-digital touch-up photos of Jennifer Aniston published this weekend, which reveal her to have a certain amount of epidermal sun-damage and also something weird going on with her eyes, almost like she’s completely empty inside.

Once September hits, you’re just left with a melancholic procession of days drearily trudging to a New Year’s Eve party you’ll end up at with people you hardly know because as usual you forgot to book something in time even though you swore this year would be different.

I read an article almost exactly three years ago which has haunted me ever since. It was about how time seems to speed up as we get older. Of course, time isn’t really speeding up; but since your subjective experience of time passing is all you’ve got, it is. The phenomenon is so powerful that when you hit 30 – assuming you live to be 80 – your life is 60% over, in experiential terms.

Look, don’t shoot the messenger, okay? Here’s a video of a kitten who eats with a fork.

The fork has clearly been tied to its paw by its owner, but if you close your eyes a bit and squint, it’s easy to just surrender to the magic.

Where was I? Oh yes, how we’re all practically dead already.

Obviously this isn’t good news per se. Especially if, like me, you’re 28 years old and the most valuable thing you own is a pair of hair-straighteners which your sister passed on to you because they don’t heat up so good any more.

Clearly I have a lot of work to do, and frankly I need more time. At my current rate of progress, I’ll be 75 before I’m able to buy my own printer.

In the interests of extending my personal mortality deadline, I just googled ‘How to become immortal’.

Turns out it all seems perfectly possible, which is tremendous news! Don’t we feel a little foolish now? We conventional squares keep on plodding away at our three-score-years-and-ten, unaware that whole communities on the internet have already got this shit totally sewn up!

An expert called Marty Ettington writes on the subject:

One of the most fascinating things I found out in my research was that there are numerous people recorded in history who have lived to over 150 years.

This was very unexpected [VERY!] because most government record keeping and the Guinness Book of world records only record people living up to about 123 years. [WELL THEY WOULD SAY THAT, WOULDN’T THEY?]

Records from the Bible also show a lot of people who lived to over 900 years old. [ALSO GOD IS QUITE OLD, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY MENTION THAT TOO.]

I even found other books and blogs which referred to a person living today who is 2800 years old, and an Enlightened Immortal who is over 9000 years old. [IS IT KEITH RICHARDS? I BET IT’S KEITH RICHARDS.]

People on the internet are a tough audience, though. One feisty little sceptic has noted in response:

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How can people live for over 9000 years if its only 2009 right now?

Ooh, Marty, he’s got you there!

Unfortunately to unlock Marty’s secrets of immortality you have to buy his book for $35, and the whole point, Marty, is that I need those extra 8972 years to make that $35.

Still, there’s always cryogenics, which I just discovered is actually called cryonics when it relates to freezing dead humans.

But Jesus, $155 000 just for a stab at eternal life? Pull the other one, American Cryonics Society. Also, they don't even guarantee you'll wake up in one piece. For all their excited chatter about how awesome ‘Reanimation Day’ will be, they only go as far as committing to: ‘The suspension team is charged with delivering the subject to future medical people in as good a shape as is possible.’

Well, you know what? There are some occasions in life when ‘we’ll do our best, promise’ just isn’t good enough. Also, I’m no expert, but I suspect the technical term for ‘medical people’ may be ‘doctors’. And finally, if you really want people to take you seriously, maybe you shouldn’t title your downloadable fact-sheet ‘Freeze A Jolly Good Fellow’.

It’s all looking pretty bleak.

But as Noah once said: ‘Better to light a candle than sit around bitching about the darkness and how obviously you don’t know how to rewire a fusebox because you’re not a freaking electrician.’

Accordingly, I’m going to start researching New Year’s Eve events today.

This year will be different.

Things I Learned Last Week

2010-08-02T14:41:00.000-07:00

Practically everything I read in the last fortnight seemed to be about Facebook, except for those dull but worthy Guardian pieces about the fact that people in Niger are so hungry they’re eating their own feet. They will soon run out of feet, so please consider sending them one of yours, although make sure you have a foot left to put down when they ask you for more. ‘Give them a foot and they take a leg,’ as we say in South Africa.

With the social responsibility element of today’s discussion thus dispensed with, let’s turn back to Facebook, which recently recorded its 500 millionth user. I was at a digital marketing workshop a week ago where the convenor explained gravely: ‘That means that if Facebook were a country, it would be the third biggest country in the world.’

I find that there’s something vastly unimpressive about framing its size in that way. When you think about the fact that if every single Facebooker in the world lined up next to India, India would basically just point and laugh and then speed away in the shiny new Tata motorcar that they bought for three rupees – well, it makes the whole Facebook Reich seem a bit silly.

However, I’m all in favour of thinking about Facebook as a country, as long as we get to put the squeeze on it in the way that other countries face. I’d like to see Facebook making gigantic contributions to global aid, for a start. I would particularly like to see a system rolled out whereby for every Farmville update you are exposed to on your Newsfeed, Facebook has to donate one dollar towards real-world agricultural subsidies.

Anyway, congratulations to Facebook, and I hope Mark Zuckerberg marked the occasion by using some of his estimated personal fortune of $4 billion to buy himself a business suit. I am sick and tired of seeing that little dork address technology conferences in his Gap hoodie. It’s like he’s rubbing all our noses in it. Dress like you have some goddamn respect for us.

As a result of the 500 million-milestone, Facebook has been all over the world news, and not in a good way. Articles like this one were marked by a tone suggesting that each new Friend Request happening right now somewhere in the world essentially inches humanity one step further along the inexorable path to the apocalypse. I don’t necessarily disagree, but maybe we could just get a fucking shred of perspective here? After all, there are plenty of other, more urgent signs that The Reckoning is imminent. (Like the fact that strident 8-year-old feminist Lisa Simpson got married this weekend. But to balance it out, I see that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston have called off their engagement, so perhaps the great circle of life spins peacefully once more.)

Newsweek, for instance, published the hilariously alarmist yet apparently straightfaced 10 Ways Facebook Can Ruin Your Life. It includes scenarios like the possibility that you use the site to track down long-lost family members and then discover that you are one of the 50% of such people that experience an unstoppable Genetic Sexual Attraction to your own kin.

LOL, I hate it when that happens.

But the most interesting of all the space devoted to hand-wringing over Facebook was a piece in the New York Times entitled As Facebook Users Die, Ghosts Reach Out. Facebook is increasingly plagued by the fact that its pesky users keep dying, you see. How dare they? Don’t they realise we have a thousand-year empire to run here?

The way it works currently is that when someone dies, a family member can fill out a form to have their profile page transformed into a ‘Memorial Tribute Page’ for all eternity.

The problem is, in Facebook’s view, that not many people are aware this option is available; or, in my view, that the bereaved are too concerned with the trivialities of burying the dead and mourning them appropriately to give a rat’s ass about what’s happening on Facebook.

As a result, Facebook often struggles to determine who’s dead and who’s not, which is a predicament I can relate to, as I often travel on the London Underground in the early morning.

I’m sure we have all encountered the situation of Facebook kindly urging us to ‘Reconnect’ with a recently-dead Facebook friend, as if offering a sinister portal into the afterlife. The people the NY Times interviewed about this found this experience to be jolly helpful:

Ms. Purvin, a 36-year-old teacher living in Plano, Tex., said that after she got over the initial jolt of seeing her [dead] friend’s face, she was happy for the reminder.

Well, yes. There is that, I suppose. I can’t say I feel similarly, but I suspect that I am simply better than Ms. Purvin, and consequently capable of accessing memories and emotional responses without being prompted by a social networking site.

Anyway, the article reveals that Facebook is working on an algorithm which will automatically scan all users’ profile pages for phrases like ‘Miss you’, and ‘Rest in peace’, and diagnose death accordingly. If this technology takes off, the potential for its expansion and development is mindblowingly exciting. By 2020 I hope to have replaced myself altogether with an iPhone App which scans people’s facial expressions for clues as to mood and makes appropriate chit-chat accordingly.

When I wasn’t reading about Facebook, I was busy mourning Spain’s decision to ban bullfighting. Don’t get me wrong: I’m all for animal rights. Animals are welcome to as many rights as they’d like. As long as they don’t interfere with my rights to eat them between two wodges of mayonnaise-slathered white bread, or watch them spectacularly haemorrhaging blood all over a stadium in Barcelona on a sunny afternoon with a pint in my hand.

When it comes to animals lately, however, I have been witnessing what I can only describe as a rights culture gone mad, innit. It may have escaped your attention, for instance, that in March Switzerland held a national referendum to determine whether animals should have lawyers. Switzerland in fact already boasts one dedicated animal lawyer, a man called Antoine Goetschel, whose last client was a pike.

I am happy to say that a small scrap of collective sanity prevailed in the country which has already made 2010 an annus douchebaggus by banning minarets, letting Sepp Blatter continue to live, and giving Roman Polanski a giant high-five. They voted against it. But not before having a big national conversation about it all.

Fine, I say: let’s let animals have lawyers. On the condition that they can only have other animals acting as their lawyers. Then we’ll see who wins.

The Swiss debate happened just a month before a ‘leading academic’ came forward to claim that wildlife documentaries are an unacceptable invasion of animal privacy. Over to Dr Brett Mills:

“Animals, just like humans, have a basic right not to have their most intimate moments – such as mating, giving birth and dying – broadcast to an audience of millions.”

Hmmm, hmmm, yes, I see what you’re saying there, Brett – except for the one enormous flaw at the very heart of your argument: they’re animals.

Anyway, with that as background, it was with a sombre spirit that I read that Spain would pull the plug on bullfighting. I watched a bullfight in Barcelona two years ago and, to be honest, it was pretty much the best afternoon of my life.

It was riveting. I know a lot of romantic shite is written by Hemingwayesque wankers about the majestic pageantry of it all, the brutal yet magnificent theatre of death – but let me tell you, it’s all true. When that jaunty oompah band strikes up and they sloooooowly drag the bull out of the stadium, oozing life, while the matador parades around brandishing its sawn-off ear and all the senoritas throw their panties at him – well, you’d have to be some kind of crazy Swiss person not to be stirred by it all.

And lest you think me utterly heartless, I should mention that 12 bulls were on the menu for slaughter that day, but we left after only 6. Any more seemed a bit greedy.

Also, two of my companions were sobbing uncontrollably.

Get a grip, I seethed in my head. They’re only bulls. Not people in Niger eating their own feet.

Things I Learned This Week

2010-07-16T17:54:00.001-07:00

1. You will have read by now that French politicians have voted to ban the wearing of the niqab in public. I have nothing intelligent to add to this debate, so I thought I’d add something puerile but satisfying to the debate instead.

Here is a small graphic I made to remind us of France’s rollercoaster what’s-hot-and-what’s-not social index. Click on it to educate yourself accordingly:

It has been less widely reported, however, that a Tory backbencher in the UK, Phillip Hollobone, has tabled a motion for the UK to follow France’s example. You can read the steaming pile of horse-manure that passes for his ‘argument’ here, but allow me to save you the trouble by extracting the money-quote:

Part of the joy of living in our country is that we pass people every day in the street, exchange a friendly greeting, wave, smile and say hello.

Oh, pardon me: I just laughed so hard I did a little wee. I believe I have mentioned the occasion last year when a complete stranger walked up to me on the street and punched me. I did not observe his unprovoked assault being accompanied by a friendly greeting, wave, smile, or ‘hello!’, but I apologise if I overlooked it on account of being doubled up in agony emitting small whimpers. But even at the time I did take a moment to reflect on how jolly, jolly glad I was that I wasn’t wearing a niqab, because that would make me an oppressed tool of the patriarchy.

2. On a similar note, the Daily Express announced on Tuesday that an “explosive report” predicts that 1 in 5 Britons “will be ethnics” by 2050. Because Daily Express readers don’t normally bother with article text, they made sure to spell it out quite clearly on their front page:

I for one am terrified. What will the other four be? If they won’t have any ethnicity, maybe they won’t have ARMS OR LEGS either? MAYBE THEY WON’T HAVE ANY HEADS?

But in the meantime, let’s remind ourselves how to spot Ethnics on a busy London street.

3. With a sigh of relief, let us turn now to South Africa, where politicians comport themselves with dignity and gravitas and racial tensions are so pre-World Cup. Today I learnt that ANC Youth League leader Julius Malema has a son!

In a TV interview on Wednesday he revealed that his personal sexual philosophy is “one man, one woman, using a condom”. Except, apparently, when the man in question is Julius himself - since he segued effortlessly into the news that he has a three-year old son.

I am deeply torn by this revelation. On the one hand, all I can say is: Awwwwwww! Imagine how cute and fat mini-Juju must be? I yearn to tickle his chubby little sides and strap a tiny replica of Daddy’s Breitling watch to his chubby little wrist.

On the other hand, did we learn nothing from The Boys From Brazil? If this initial spawning turns out to be just the beginning of a plot to seize total control of South Africa using nothing more than the potency of his loins, I want you to remember that you read it here first.

4. Old Spice took over the internet this week. Yes, the World Wide Web was colonised by a deodorant. Their initial web adverts, featuring former American football player Isaiah Mustafa giving advice to men on how to "be a man, man" became the most successful online media ad campaign in history. This week, Mustafa recorded 180 personalised ads in response to tweets and messages, including a marriage proposal.

Why do I mention this? Because the Old Spice ads are funny and clever, and thoroughly contradict the hitherto accepted wisdom that online ads should be as rubbish as possible.

Online ads up to now have fallen into two categories. Firstly, the MAYDAY MAYDAY EPILEPTIC SEIZURE visual-assault group, where an ad explodes uninvited upon your screen, showering it with neon faeces and nightmarishly animated emoticons.

Secondly, the I WOULDN’T CLICK ON THAT EVEN IF IT WAS A BUTTON TO DISARM NORTH KOREA category: the static ones that look like a kid with learning difficulties cut out a bunch of letters from a ransom note and stuck them back together with their own spit.

This taxonomy may not be exhaustive, but you get the point.

No-one wants either of these. Online advertising has just been one huge wasted opportunity up to now, because let’s not kid: people on the internet will watch almost anything. People on the internet are the least discerning human beings in evolutionary history, other than Peter Hollobone MP’s constituents. I count myself proudly among the former group.

Things I will happily watch on the internet include but are not limited to: anything funny; anything sad; anything pretty and magical; anything revolting; anything with small animals or animals wearing any form of clothing; anything featuring people with bizarre disabilities; anything with people falling off things or getting things thrown at them.

That’s quite a lot to work with. Get busy, online advertisers: I want top-hatted mice selling me toothpaste, and I want it now.

5. Congratulations to India! No, silly, not because this week saw the launch of a Facebook app by Vaseline which enables Indian Facebookers to lighten their skin in their profile pics.

Though that also happened.

No, because India got themselves a nice new currency sign for the Rupee. Whoopee! I think it’s great. It looks like an R that means business. An R pictured on the run, dashing off to where it’s needed. An R so busy and important that it forgot to put on its initial downward stroke this morning, but who cares? This R has places to go! It has over a billion wallets to fill! It can’t be hanging around waiting for its | !

The motivation for the re-design was “a desire to give its currency a unique identity”. I felt a bit jealous when I saw the Rupee’s new unique identity. Why shouldn’t the good old Rand treat itself to a new unique identity, I thought. Just a little makeover. Something to set it apart from the Iranian Rial and the Malaysian Ringgit.

So I took the liberty of designing it myself. You’re welcome, South African Reserve Bank.

The World Forgetting, By The World Forgot

2010-07-13T11:42:00.000-07:00

My parents haven’t had friends since 1994. They claim to be better off as a result.

I think my mum might be weaker than my dad in this respect, though, because sometimes she defies the terms of their house-arrest and invites the American neighbours around for drinks. My father permits this because the American neighbours are only in residence for four months of the year, so there’s no risk of this entente developing into something dangerous.

I suspect my mother might sometimes want more with the American neighbours. She has expressed a degree of positivity about them that I haven’t heard from her lips in well over a decade. "Very sophisticated people, my dear," she told me when they moved in, which I think means they have a bookshelf.

But my father is a harder nut to crack. I asked him his opinion on the couple in question. "He is a strange, fey little creature," he responded; "and she talks too much," accompanying the latter with a mouth-flapping hand gesture.

My father is not strictly to be trusted on such matters, however, as his unsociability is to a degree that makes Harper Lee seem like Paris Hilton. If he met Helen Keller he’d probably declare her "a bit yappy".

His hermitage seems to be gathering exciting momentum as we speed through the 21st century. I’m not sure where exactly it’s going, but I wouldn’t rule out a scenario which sees him end his days peering through the letter-box with a sawn-off shotgun and a knee-length beard.

Still, the signs have been there all along. One morning about 15 years ago he was driving me and my sister to school when he got stuck behind a car at the school gates that he considered to be going unacceptably slowly. Flying into a rage, he commenced a multipronged offensive: vuvuzela-style beeping, obscene hand gestures, and winding down his window to deliver the time-honoured Irish salutation of "GET YER FINGER OUT YER ARSE YER FECKIN’ EEJIT".

We made it into the school grounds relatively unperturbed, as this was entirely standard behaviour. I skipped merrily off to class only to receive an immediate summons to proceed straight to my extremely frightening English teacher, who was about 108 and had never had sex ever.

"Sit down," she commanded me coldly as I entered her empty classroom. I sat, bemused. I thought perhaps she had wanted to call me in to commend me on my use of the word ‘corpulent’ in my latest essay, but her manner seemed frosty.

"I have a message for you to deliver to your father," she hissed. I blinked. Perhaps she and my father were having an affair? If so, she was clearly about to end it. She was quivering with anger.

"Tell your father," she spat, actual bits of saliva flecking her mouth, "that I’m SORRY I drive so SLOWLY, and that I’m SORRY he finds me so terribly, infuriatingly STUPID, but I have a SERIOUS CATARACT PROBLEM in my right eye that means it is IMPOSSIBLE for me to drive at the RECKLESS PACE HE MIGHT PREFER when the sun is shining DIRECTLY IN MY FACE."

I emerged teary and trembling. At home that evening, I told my father the story with all the breathless judgement and blame and self-pity that only a 12-year old can muster.

He snorted. "She should go to a bloody optometrist then, to get those cataracts seen to," he said, and turned back to his newspaper with a small smile of triumph.

I mention my parents today because, in that terrifying alchemy wrought by the passage of time, I appear to be turning into them a little more every day.

And apparently this process is entirely visible to others. A woman I had never met before turned to me at a dinner party on Saturday night and said, "I’m getting the sense that you don’t enjoy company very much." In fairness, directly beforehand I had been discussing the most convincing kinds of lies to tell in order to escape social engagements, so it’s not like she had some creepy Paul-the-Psychic-Octopus powers.

The major manifestation of my retreat from society thus far is the fact that I am now three weeks Facebook-free . This wasn’t an easy decision to make, because I happen to be really really good at Facebook. I have, over the past four years, invested heavily in my Facebook presence. I built it up from nothing, you know, working away solidly with my bare hands, often putting in two or three hours a day.

We’ve had some good times, me and Facebook. Like the time I tried to sell all my Facebook Friends on the Facebook Marketplace. ‘Diverse portfolio, wide spread of ethnicities and political views,’ I wrote, practically vomiting with laughter. ‘Make me an offer.’ No-one did.

Or that glorious day when Katie Price, aka Jordan, aka pneumatic equestrienne and ‘glamour-model’, accepted my friend request. Oh, the belly-aching chuckles that her status updates reliably induced. Fortunately I archived some of them to return to now in low moments:

Katie Price Children who think they're ugly, I think you need to wait a few years and see how you are, because I wasn't the person I am now.. people say I look better now, than I ever have. So just wait, nothing to rush into, lets face it, If I was a man, i'd love to wake up next to me every morning ha ha.

Katie, what I’d give to wake up next to you every morning ha ha.

But in order to explain why I so suddenly and rashly erased my Facebook account, I’d like to turn to Berlin for a moment. Berlin, as you no doubt remember, is the home of Knut, the world’s cutest polar bear.

Knut, it seems, is in a spot of bother. Knut is not a well bear. In a typical display of the tabloid press’s nuanced understanding of mental health, I have seen the little guy variously described of late as “bipolar”, “psychopathic”, and the folksy old “crazy”. Oddly, I have yet to see Knut termed ‘knuts’, so I wish to place a life-copyright on that description, which the Sun may purchase from me at a reasonable price.

Yes, a lifetime in captivity is turning Knut madder than a box of frogs. He paces obsessively round his pen. He is desperately addicted to an audience of gurning, waving, sugared bun-proffering humans. Here’s the quote from his keeper:

‘He cries out or whimpers if he sees that there is not a spectator outside his enclosure ready to ooh and aah at him.’

I think you see where I’m going with this. Because really, isn’t everyone on Facebook a bit like Knut?

Or is it just me? Maybe it’s just me.

Anyway, good thing the blogosphere is so different from Facebook’s endless vanity-parade. This right here is art for art’s sake, just so we’re clear.

But just in case it isn’t, I’d be obliged if you could send me some sugared buns.

We’re Not In Blantyre Any More, Toto

2010-06-15T15:04:00.000-07:00

It was weird about those Malawian gays, hey? One minute they’re all prepared to rot in jail for love, then you blink and one of them fucks off with a woman. I feel so cheated. After all we did for them!

In fairness, I can’t take all the credit for their freedom, because I never got round to signing any of the online petitions. Don’t look at me like that: I figured I’d have loads of time. And I did ‘like’ someone else’s Facebook status expressing outrage, and every now and then I would think about the whole affair and shake my head sadly. One of these days when my diary clears up a bit I’ll get working on Aung San Suu Kyi in the same way.

I felt a kinship with Steven and Tiwonge, you know. I myself am both a practising homo and was born and raised in Malawi, under the benevolent dictatorship of Hastings Banda. Or, to grant him his full title, His Excellency The Life President, Ngwazi Doctor Hastings Kamuzu Banda.

In the pantheon of African dictators Banda lacked the full psychotic flair and inventive dress-sense to take him to the top of the league-table of crazy. To put it in terms political analysts will understand, he was Xtina Aguilera to Mobutu Sese Seko’s Lady Gaga. But he did have some adorable little quirks. Every time he drove through the city all educating would cease, as we lined the roads to dutifully wave to him. We’d wait for hours in the sun for his cavalcade to swish by, with the great man languidly fluttering his trademark fly-whisk. I blame these regular gaps in my schooling for the fact that I can’t do long division, but at least I can wave really well.

I could discuss Banda all day, but I want to get back to Steven and Tiwonge, the now-estranged gay couple. My girlfriend keeps saying ‘We all saw it coming.’ Did we? I didn’t. But then again, I’m notorious for taking things at face-value. I still believe Michael Jackson had a skin condition.

Gay rights campaigners say that homophobia drove them apart. Fair enough. My own relationship can barely withstand the internal fissures caused by my continuing refusals to allow my girlfriend to pluck my eyebrows. If I had an entire country threatening to kill me on top of that, we probably wouldn’t last long.

My friend Cristina, who grew up in a tiny Greek village and thus has a unique villager’s perspective on the situation, finds the most perplexing aspect to be the fact that, in this claustrophobic rural community, a woman has now agreed to enter a relationship with the surely irrevocably-tainted Steven. ‘What is she thinking?’ she says. ‘That shit WILL NOT FLY in the village.’ And Cristina should know: she once pulled a bloke in the dim lighting of her local bouzouki and then realised it was her cousin.

The courageous Malawian woman in question, one Dorothy Gulo, is on record as explaining her motivations as: "I'd heard about men getting involved in a sexual relationship. I was curious so I accepted him." Call me a hardened old cynic, but that ain’t exactly the stuff of Air Supply ballads.

The whole episode is rendered more complex by the under-reported fact that Tiwonge identifies as a woman. Some would say this means there was no ‘gay’ relationship to start with: just two people living as man and wife, in the way that God and Sarah Palin intended. In this sense, Steven’s flight to the arms of Dorothy isn’t some kind of seismic shift in sexual identity at all. I eat Judith Butler for breakfast, but sometimes I miss the good old days when you could assess someone’s gender by pulling their pants down when they weren’t expecting it.

The issue of homophobia in Africa, to get serious for a moment, has more layers than Hastings Banda’s three-piece silk suits. (And I’m assuming, for the sake of this metaphor, that those had loads of layers.) For every Museveni claiming that homosexuality is ‘un-African’, you get a leftie anthropologist earnestly pointing out that young Zulu men have been practising ukusoma (thigh-sex) with each other for centuries. Both points may have kernels of truth, but neither is strictly germane to a coherent discussion.

Personally, I wish Steven and Dorothy every happiness, and hope that Tiwonge finds a hot piece of man-flesh to make Steven steaming jealous.

And if you’d like a take-away thought, I point you to the words of one of the last century’s greatest thinkers, Juice Newton, in her underrated tract ‘Angel Of The Morning’: ‘If morning’s echo says we’ve sinned, well, it was what we wanted now.’

This Is Not About The World Cup

2010-06-13T15:52:00.000-07:00

I woke up this morning feeling dirty, inside and out.

I have given up drinking, you see, and replaced it with jogging and being smug.

For two glorious weeks not a drop of the devil’s tears has passed my lips. But this weekend, as an act of solidarity with the World Cup’s host nation, I threw myself with unseemly vigour off the wagon, and sustained some psychic bruising in the process.

As a result, I had quite specific requirements for the café where I would slake my hungover thirst and hunger today. Not for me the well-lit Americanised neutrality of a Starbucks or a Café Nero. This would not be a simple act of refuelling, but an exercise in penance. I would search for the café I deserved.

As soon as I walked in I knew that I had found it.

It was less a ‘coffee shop’, in the traditional sense, than a cathedral to gloom. It was dark. Shabby little booths were upholstered with torn and scuffed velvet. Attempts at decoration appeared to have stopped with an uneven line of loudly-ticking clocks affixed to one peeling wall. Their melancholic time-keeping provided the only sound other than that of the octogenarian proprietor dolefully mopping the floor. Shuffle, slop, shuffle, slop; with the kind of dignified misery it takes a lifetime to perfect. He looked like he might just whip out a knife and kill himself at any point. Maybe just saw his own head off right then and there.

I requested a vat of coffee and his greasiest breakfast in a tone of weary sadness which seemed appropriate to the setting, and settled into a booth near the back with a newspaper. I avoided eye-contact with the only other customer, a pony-tailed man in his seventies completing a Sudoku in a depressed sort of way.

Over the course of the next hour, the place gradually filled up a bit. But, absorbed in my reading, I didn’t pay much attention.

Then, putting my newspaper down to eavesdrop on a conversation and observe my co-patrons a little closer, I realised with a sudden start that everyone was insane.

An old Jamaican man in front of me talked to himself unceasingly for 40 minutes, punctuating his monologue with wheezy chuckles, sighs and head-shakes.

A younger guy walked in and was greeted with ‘Good morning.’ He spun to face the speaker. ‘What’s good about it?’ he demanded, but with a strange, frenzied ferocity, as if he had wagered his life-savings in a bet on the response.

A woman interrupted him: ‘What’s wrong with your eye?’ There was nothing visibly wrong with his eye. He swung round to her. ‘Ssssssh!’ he whispered, in a panicky sort of way, his eyes darting around the room, pressing his index finger to his lips.

Another woman stumbled in. Her hands were black with dirt. She had scraped her hair up into a kind of bouffant Amy Winehouse effect, using what appeared to be a pair of old underpants. She wore wild eyeliner and holey tights. She was the maddest one of all.

She turned to the one normal person in the café, an ostensibly sane woman having coffee with her mother.

‘Allo,’ croaked the madwoman.

‘Hello,’ replied the sane woman, with some hesitation, but quite courteously.

‘Aven’t seen you for a while,’ slurred the madwoman. It seemed to me profoundly unlikely that they would ever have had cause to meet socially before, but the normal one seemed not to want to offend.

‘No,’ she said, with an awkward half-laugh. Then, clearly striving desperately for something appropriate to say, added: ‘You look good.’

YOU LOOK GOOD!

I mean, she really didn’t look good. She looked like she was coming down off a twenty-five-year-long heroin bender. She looked like she had recently been scrabbling on her hands and knees in a ditch for fag-ends. She looked like someone dressed up as a mad drug addict for a play. She did not look good.

‘Fanks,’ she mumbled.

The normal woman, perhaps feeling she had to expand on her rash compliment, pressed on. ‘I like… what you’ve done with your hair,’ she said cautiously.

I believe I have already mentioned the fact that her barnet consisted of a scraggly beehive held together with a pair of torn knickers. It was essentially the hairdo equivalent of wearing a t-shirt proclaiming ‘I AM OFF MY FUCKING HEAD’.

‘It looks almost… African,’ the normal one elaborated.

A shadow passed across the madwoman’s face. She didn’t like this idea one little bit.

‘No,’ she growled, shaking her head defiantly.

‘Yeah, a bit like an African…turban,’ the normal one said, clicking her fingers with the satisfaction of someone hitting on a phrase that perfectly captures what’s in their head.

‘NO!’ snarled the madwoman, turning her back on her interlocutor furiously and continuing to shake her head in a frenzy of non-cooperation.

I ducked behind my newspaper hastily, terrified that I would be called upon to referee the dispute.

I wondered how all the crazies knew which café to meet at. Perhaps, I considered, they have community-mobilising resources we don’t know about. And if so, isn’t that a bit unnerving?

Walking home, I was struck by an even more frightening possibility: what if they thought I was one of them?

Havana Good Time

2010-05-25T17:03:00.000-07:00

I went to Cuba last week. I felt guilty because the whole time I was there I was secretly hoping that Fidel Castro would die. I kept thinking what a wicked anecdote it would make. ‘Politics? Don’t talk to me about politics. I was in Havana when Castro kicked it, you know.’ Then I’d lean back in my chair and light a cigarette with a far-away, world-weary expression, as if I’d seen things I couldn’t possibly discuss in polite company.

Every time I saw the slightest sign of an animated group of people talking together, I felt sure the moment had come. My guidebook told me that Cubans don’t like to use Castro’s name in conversation - as has been the case throughout history with other feared dictators, like Voldemort. Instead, they make the sign of a beard, or tap two fingers on their shoulders, to represent his military epaulettes. I scrutinised their every gesture hungrily but I never saw anyone do that.

I was burning to discuss Castro and everything else with real-life Cubans. ‘Hola, señor,’ I wanted to say, casually approaching someone with a mojito. ‘So how’s that whole communist vibe working out for ya?’

But we were hamstrung by our lack of Spanish and I was afraid of being thrown into a gulag by an undercover policeman. Or, worse still, tapping my shoulder with two fingers while making meaningful eye-contact and having people think I was wiping away dandruff or something.

But in our taxi on the way to the airport, we had an unusually loquacious, English-speaking driver. We passed by an official-looking building. He gestured towards it. ‘That is where Fidel lives now,’ he said, just tossing the name out there without so much as bothering to make the sign of the beard. ‘They make hospital for him in there.’

‘Ooooh,’ we breathed, noses pressed to the window.

‘Sometimes he come out,’ he continued. ‘He crazy, sometimes he come out and walk around naked waving his arms wah-wah-wah.’

‘Really?’ we squealed, eyes wide as saucers, willing Fidel to do exactly that as we cruised by. Imagine the Facebook photos!

‘No,’ he said abruptly and unsmilingly.

We shrunk back into our seats, ashamed.

Since Cubans have no financial incentive to work hard, they’re expected to do so largely on the basis of inspiration from the propaganda billboards which line the streets in the places where commercial advertising features in other countries. One popular poster proclaims ‘Vamos bien!’: ‘We’re doing well!’

I mean, it’s not great, is it. ‘You’re doing well!’ It’s the kind of exhortation a mother shouts pleadingly at her fat kid as he shuffles in last place around the track at Sports Day. It’s not exactly Churchillian in its rhetorical force. If I was slogging away with my machete on the sugarcane field and I saw a poster saying ‘You’re doing well!’, I’d mutter ‘Glad you think so’, and stuff a bit more pilfered sugarcane into my backpack to sell on the black market, and then take a long nap between the furrows.

You can understand how people get a little down, and take it out on innocent, angel-faced tourists.

One steaming hot afternoon, I was standing in an alley outside the casa where we were staying, having a smoke before I joined the others inside. A man approached me. He gestured at my cigarette packet and said ‘You give me cigarette.’

‘No,’ I replied.

He stopped.

‘Why?’ he asked, perfectly reasonably.

‘Because I only have four left,’ I replied, with equally rational logic. Up to this point, the exchange had the civilised thrust-and-parry of a debate in the Oxford Union.

He stepped close to me and stabbed his finger in my face. “Choo are a fuckeeng muddafucka,’ he hissed.

Then he walked away, before turning around again from about two metres. ‘A fuckeeng muddafucka!’ he yelled, to make sure there were no misunderstandings.

That hurt my feelings a bit. For Christ’s sake, there was only a lousy Marlboro Light at stake. It wasn’t like I had dragged his mum into the road by her hair and forced her to submit to humiliating sexual acts.

Then I considered the fact that maybe he’d have been able to barter the smoke for a chicken, or a house, and I felt a bit bad.

But I’m giving a distorted view here, because most Cubans were perfectly friendly to us. This nice bartender in Varadero, a beach resort, asked my sister repeatedly if she’d go swimming alone with him at night. Awww! Now that’s hospitality.

Every time he suggested it to her, she said ‘Maybe later,’ with an airy gesture intended to indicate somewhere around ten-past-never.

To capitalise on his affections, when I went up to get a round of drinks, I beckoned him over and confided: ‘I’m Rachel’s sister,’ in the hope of jumping the queue.

He looked at me with pity.

‘I’m very sorry,’ he said gently, with the air of someone declining a date with a deranged admirer, ‘But I have already spoken with Rachel.’

I was pretty crushed, I can tell you. There’s nothing like being turned down for sex you haven’t even offered to make you feel rubbish.

Conversationally, the Cubans were a distinct cut above the French-Canadians that swarmed all over Varadero like gravy and cheese over a big plate of poutine. They were invariably astonished to hear we were South African. ‘Buut…’ they’d say, their faces screwed up with confusion, jabbing at their forearms, ‘not black?’

‘I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of Apartheid,’ I’d begin my patient lecture on the evidence for the existence of white South Africans. ‘But the whole point…’

At the swimming pool we met one très genial man from Montreal, Edmond, who worked for a beer company. Struggling for conversation, having already mined all possible resources from the discussion of poutine, I asked him if he had ever been to Caya Largo, another Cuban beach resort famed for its beauty.

‘Uuuurgh,’ he spat with revulsion: ‘Non! Non! Caya Largo eez fifi!”

‘What does fifi mean?’ I asked, thinking that maybe it meant, you know, a bit twee.

‘Zere are all ze men, and zey go swimmeeng like zis,’ he said, and stood up to perform a grotesque pantomime of a man going for a dip with his penis waving about freely.

‘Tu comprends?’ he enquired earnestly. To help illuminate matters, he pulled a nearby male friend close, puckered up his face for a kiss and then pushed him away rather more roughly than was strictly necessary. ‘Eeeeeeeuwwwwwww!’ he yelled merrily, chuckling wildly at the hilarity of it all.

‘Back in Montreal,’ he continued, composing himself, ‘I have one friend who is fifi! I cannot have two fifis! Or three fifis! One fifi, eet eez enough!’

‘That’s funny, I also have a fifi friend,’ began my travel-companion Theo, until I kicked her savagely under the water and she fell silent.

But that’s the problem with opening up your country to tourists. All you get are prissy bitches who won’t share their cigarettes, stuck-up cows who won’t go swimming with you late at night, and a whole bunch of fifis.

The Beautiful Game

2010-05-02T10:19:00.000-07:00

I have been resident in the UK for just over 4 years. I exhibit most of the classic behavioural tendencies of immigrants: I am hardworking, ambitious, hate other immigrants and run a small corner-shop. Well, I did run a small corner-shop until the recession hit and people didn’t want to buy corners any more, so I had to close up. The financial crisis has also meant that I’ve had to cut back on being hardworking and ambitious, so I basically just hate other immigrants full-time now.

Another thing I’ve started doing that immigrants are really into is attending public meetings. This week, for instance, I went to my area’s public election hustings. I was told that was where people got to grill the election candidates, so I brought along a pair of barbecue tongs and a six-pack of Fosters. I came home hungry and disappointed.

This week I also had a run-in with about 60 of my old colonial masters, in another public meeting. I was asked to sit on a panel to address members of the England Football Supporters Association about the upcoming World Cup in South Africa. Turns out the famously shy-and-retiring wickle flowers who follow the England team around the world yelling ‘Oggy Oggy Oggy’ and bashing other fans’ heads in with beer bottles were feeling a wickle scared about braving the dark continent. Bless ‘em.

I had assumed that the event would be held in some kind of hall, but I discovered upon arrival that they’d hired out a pub. In retrospect, duhhh. Research has shown that if England football fans are removed from their natural environment of bacon-flavoured crisps and kegs of lager, they will wither and die within ten minutes. The organisers weren’t taking any chances. The audience was already set up with foaming beer-glasses, and entry-rights had been restricted to individuals wearing St George’s flags emblazoned on their ample midriffs. Some of the women sported St George’s crosses in a diamante-studded effect, which Vogue informs me is the dernier cri in forward-looking fashion for this season’s sartorially-minded football yob.

The meeting’s setting also ensured that the pearls of reassuring wisdom dropping from our chiselled South African lips were regularly interrupted by the emergence of the pub’s cook, bearing steaming plates of deep-fried dinner, shrieking “SAUSAGES AND CHIPS? WHO ORDERED SAUSAGES AND CHIPS?” I bet Mandela never had to put up with that at the UN.

There were four of us on the panel, and 60 of them, so I instantly calculated that in hand-to-hand combat we’d be outnumbered 15 to 1. And, of course, they’d have St George on their side. Despite my apprehensions, however, things started off perfectly amicably. We painted the picture of a dreamy utopian society where the sun always shines, the three-quid wine flows like water, and the friendly natives are standing by to take stranded English fans into their homes in time of accommodation need, and ferry them by piggyback from Bloemfontein to Rustenburg if they miss their flight connections.

Then things suddenly took a turn for the worse. A large gentleman lumbered to his feet and announced: “Your national airways, Souf African Airways, has just released a report predicting that seventy fousand pieces of luggage will be stolen, not lost, stolen, by baggage-handlers during the World Cup. What d’you ‘ave to say about that?"

I choked back what I actually ‘ad to say about that, which was that he would be pleased to hear that the freebase cocaine he so clearly indulges in is also cheaply available in South Africa. A secondary preferred response might have been ‘You do the legacy of St George a disservice when you lie like that,’ and yet a third could have been ‘Well, that figure should set your minds at ease, since a report in December last year showed that 2.1 million pieces of baggage go missing at English airports every year’.

(Unfortunately I didn’t have that latter factoid to hand at the time – it’s the fruits of my post-event rage-fuelled googling. Which also failed to bring up any trace, unsurprisingly, of this alleged own-goal PR masterstroke on SAA’s part – the “report” promising to steal fliers’ luggage.)

We spoke instead of South Africa’s new space-age airports, of the Orwellian surveillance systems, of baggage-handlers who were so congenitally honest that they wouldn’t even be able to bring themselves to pull a sickie when they were less than terminally ill…but to no avail. The ubuntu spell had been broken. Low-level mutterings of disapproval began to hum and build. Lager was downed with renewed ferocity.

Then things kicked off in earnest: the AWB menace was apparently keeping them up at night. Would they be hacked to bits by machetes in the race war?

"Machetes?" said my co-panellist Audrey. "No. Criminals in South Africa use guns."

How we laughed! When I say ‘we’, I mean the four of us on the panel. No-one else laughed.

"Also, with regards to the AWB threat," Audrey continued (in for a penny, in for a pound), "It’s my understanding that white supremacists don’t tend to kill white people."

How I clutched my aching sides! How they didn’t.

I tried to appeal to our shared common-man status, to convince them I wasn’t a government apparatchik feeding them lies.

“As an ordinary South African,” I began, “I can tell you that the AWB is a laughably insignificant political force in South Africa.” (I had been planning to draw a parallel between the position occupied by the AWB in the South African popular imagination and that of the BNP in the UK. Then I looked around at the sea of St George’s flags and rapidly thought better of it.)

"That’s not true!" they shouted, brandishing their pint-glasses. "We read about them all the time in the newspapers here!"

"Well, certainly up until Eugene Terreblanche’s murder, they hadn’t received any media coverage in South Africa for years," I said. ["MASH AND BEANS, ANYONE? WHO ORDERED MASH AND BEANS?"]

"South Africa doesn’t have any newspapers!" someone yelled in a sudden stroke of inspiration.

"Yes they do!" I shouted back fretfully.

"Well, no-one reads newspapers in South Africa!" the same genius cried, practically orgasming at his own cleverness.

["SAUTEED IMMIGRANT? I HAVE ONE PORTION OF SAUTEED IMMIGRANT?"]

"Anyway, what about that Julius Malema?" someone else shouted. "That bloke who goes around saying he wants to kill all the white people!"

Audrey again fearlessly stepped up to the challenge. "Technically he only wants to kill farmers," she kindly explained. Again, this went down like a… like a confident black woman making a joke at the expense of a bunch of white football fans. (Personally, I think we could have done more with this comedic opportunity by exploiting the homophone of ‘boer’ vs ‘boor’, but, y’know, je ne regrette rien.)

"Start treating us with some integrity!" someone cried.

The High Commission’s representative attempted to pour some diplomatic oil. "Look, I’ll be interested to hear what you guys say about this all when you get back from South Africa," he said.

"IF we come back from South Africa!" came the response, which may or may not have been accompanied by some high-fiving.

The fun just carried right on. "The UK is playing the USA in Rustenburg. This is the perfect opportunity for a terrorist attack. What guarantees can you give us that such a terror attack won't take place?"

Answer: none, other than the certainty that a million virgins waiting for suicide bombers in the Islamic afterlife are not sufficient recompense for losing your life in Rustenburg.

And on, and on, until the panel’s convenor drew things to a merciful close. "I think we’ve all really learned a lot tonight," he said brightly. "Now I’m sure you’d all like to buy our panellists a drink."

I didn’t see a lot of people enthusiastically assenting to this proposition, but I may have missed them in my frenzied sprint for the door. If there’s one thing we immigrants know, it’s when you’ve overstayed your welcome.

Speaking Out On Behalf Of The Blind

2010-04-21T05:00:00.000-07:00

Sorry I haven’t blogged for a while. It was cos of the volcano.

I have so little respect for you that I can’t even be bothered to make up a better excuse. What does that say about you? You need to have a good, hard think about where you’re going wrong.

It may interest you to learn that I work from home. It may interest you to learn that I work, for that matter, but I’m not prepared to discuss that.

Anyway, as a result, it’s, what, 11.29, on a perfectly serviceable Wednesday morning, and I am literally lying in bed. That’s not a figure of speech; I’m typing this (with slight discomfort) from an almost totally supine position. Although I am tightly swaddled in blankets, I am wearing a thick blue dressing gown, for added cosy-factor. I have not showered, which is also not on my any-time-soon to-do list; and I may or may not have recently concluded breakfasting on a packet of jelly-tots.

Can you please stop thinking about how goddamn sexy I am and focus on the actual content of what I’m saying?

Thank you.

I am not idle, just to clarify: I am still conducting business from this position. It gives me a body-convulsing frisson of excitement to be sending important and professional emails from my Outlook account while essentially wallowing in my own filth and intermittently shovelling great fistfuls of sweeties into my mouth. Sometimes I even take important and professional phonecalls, which necessitates the hurried oral ejection of half-masticated bonbons.

‘Oral ejection’ sounds really pervy, but it’s actually not.

Basically, if freedom really is just another word for nothing left to lose, as the great Kris Kristofferson once suggested, then I count myself joyfully, wildly, inspiringly dispossessed.

Why this kind of emancipation is so awesome is because it allows you to pursue your own interests during work-breaks in a way you might feel uncomfortable about in an open-plan office.

I have many interests, and a recent addition is porn for the blind.

Perhaps you, in your usual uncaring, fully-sighted selfishness, have never even stopped for a moment to consider ‘Hey! I wonder how people who can’t see have a wank.’ You disgust me.

Because I am better than you, I have contemplated this, and now I have the answer. Two answers, in fact.

The first is that an enterprising lady has just brought out a porn book for the blind, ‘Tactile Minds’. Check it out, you know you want to. Go on, I’ll still be here when you get back.

It’s rubbish, right? Can you believe that shit retails for $225? I mean, why doesn’t she just go up to blind people on the street and grab their wallets and run away?

Also, is this woman on crack? She appears to have extremely bizarre notions about what constitutes mainstream eroticism for the visually-impaired. I don’t actually know any blind straight men – I realise this makes it sound as if, by contrast, I have a vast personal retinue of blind gay men, which is sadly not the case either – but I’m willing to bet that no-one on God’s good earth is aroused at the prospect of:

A tactile picture of a woman dressed as a pink elephant. She wears a cardboard & paper mask, a chest plate with holes for her breasts, and paper "feet" tie around her wrists with ribbon. Her vagina is shaved, and her pregnant belly is small.

It’s just insulting. If I was blind I’d write a strongly-worded letter to the UN. Or dictate a strongly-worded letter to the UN to my carer.

Or, perhaps, I would take up my other option for solo erotic stimulation: by listening to transcripts of porn films narrated by helpful volunteers. Yes, friends and creepy strangers, I am about to induct you into a whole new universe of fun:http://pornfortheblind.org/. You’re welcome.

Actually, don’t thank me yet. Particularly if you’re blind and, y'know, really depend on this stuff.

For a start, they insist on laboriously spelling out the URLs of the dodgy sites they’ve accessed the free 30-second porn clips from, forward-slash after agonising forward-slash. It takes about a minute on its own. Why bother? These people will not be returning to the site on their own to see the action for themselves.

Secondly, the people they have roped in to do the commentary are ludicrously bad. In the interests of research, I have listened to a number that are narrated by what seems to be a dorm-room of giggling frat-boys, who make no effort to restrain their shrieks and yelps of juvenile hilarity as they talk you through the action. Pull it together, chaps! Someone out there is earnestly trying to masturbate to this! Have some fucking respect.

The creepiest one I’ve heard has got to be ‘Girl fucking Barbie’. It is disturbing partly because it appears to be voiced by a bored 14-year-old girl killing time between Facebook and homework. She almost audibly yawns as she drones her way through deeply unsettling lines like ‘The whore is inserting the Barbie’s legs now’.

I don’t mean to be churlish about this public-spirited project, but there’s also a weirdly racist slant to many of the clip titles, which I think we all agree demeans the reputation of our blind masturbating friends. After all, some of my best blind masturbating friends are black.

In short, 10/10 for charitable intentions, 0/10 for execution.

I’d like to know whether the blind community is as outraged about the paucity of high-quality pornographic resources for them as they have every right to be. And how heartbreaking if the reason they're blind in the first place is from over-masturbation!

If nothing else, my foray into the world of porn for the disabled has conclusively answered that old question of whether you’d rather be blind or deaf. Because the specialised pornographic offerings for the Deaf – c’mon, I had to! – are loads better. Basically you get hot blondes in bunny-costumes painstakingly using sign language to inform the audience of exactly which filthy thing they’re about to do next. Which is really nice of them.

It seems odd that porn for the deaf even exists. Surely no-one watches pornos for the dialogue? And as far as I understand, plot structures tend to be of the kind that don’t really require verbal elaboration.

But that still leaves the blind community high and dry. I shall be contacting my MP directly.

The Naked Class-Traitor

2010-04-08T12:54:00.000-07:00

Jamie Oliver. What an arse.

Yes, you heard me. Chubby-cheeked cheeky-chappie Jamie, all tooth-gap, glottal stops and dimples, “drizzle this”, “bish bosh that”. Can't stand him.

But this week I was heartened to discover I have allies in the citizens of Huntingdon, West Virginia, who took umbrage with his attempt to peddle his noxious dietary fascism around the States in a kind of sinister second-wave colonising exercise.

I'm referring to his latest culinary-missionary endeavour, 'Food Revolutions', the TV show where he trundles about America telling everyone they're a bit 'mouse and rat' (fat) and should eat more 'lyrical ballad' (salad). Those are not real pieces of Cockney rhyming slang, I just 'laid them cups' (made them ups) like he does.

The jolly burghers of Huntingdon were just about to crack into their peaceful daily brekkie of supersized Hawaiian pizzas washed down with vats of chocolate milkshake, when who should burst in but Jamie, oozing laddish judgement.

The Huntingdonians didn't like his attitude one little bit. They unpicked the pieces of pineapple off their pizza and threw them at him, since they didn't want those bits anyway.

Then they rubbed 'im up and down with a lovely little piece of rosemary, drizzled 'im with just a splash of balsamic vinegar, stuck 'im on a great big skewer and ate a delicious Jamie kebab. And it only took five minutes' preparation, tops.

Not really. They actually just formed an enormous phalanx, distended belly to distended belly, and waddled him out of town.

"We don't want to sit around eating lettuce all day!” yelled one local DJ after him.

It was all too much for wickle Jamie, and he ended up in tears, wailing “They don't understand me”.

Well, I would like it known that I stand (or sprawl, rather) in complete solidarity with the citizens of Huntingdon, West Virginia.

Partly, this is because in my own life my girlfriend plays Jamie Oliver to my heart-disease-ridden Huntingdonian.

As a result, I know how it breaks one's spirit to be continually told that “chicken nuggets aren't a breakfast food”, and “it's unnecessary to put salt on your teacakes”, and “cereal is made to be eaten with milk, not Sprite”. You know what I mean? It gets a gal down. For heaven's sake, I don't want to sit around eating lettuce all day! I am not a 'nun's habit'!

But the other reason I'm with the Huntingdon folk is that Jamie Oliver is a big fat class-ist. I had it out with my girlfriend about this the other day.

“You know what? Jamie Oliver is a big fat class-ist,” I said to her.

Lowering her newspaper and eyeing me with her customary thinly-veiled disgust, she said: “Do you really need that extra butter on your icecream?”

“Yes, actually, I do,” I responded, with the dignified defiance which is the signature of my relationship behaviour.

“Fine,” she said, with the weary resignation which is the signature of her relationship behaviour. “Why is Jamie Oliver a big fat class-ist?”

"Because,” I began, “he only goes after poor working-class communities. It's like poverty porn.”

I could see she was a bit impressed by the phrase 'poverty porn', so I continued.

“He goes in and is all paternalistic and, like, stop feeding your kids KFC and have some of this lovely-jubbly basil pesto, and all the middle-class people watching are all sniggering 'look at those chavs eating KFC for breakfast, don't they know anything', and the poor people are like 'Oh fanks very much Jamie, we're only gonna eat basil pesto forever now innit' while rolling their eyes at each other behind his back, and the minute the camera's off they tuck straight back into their KFC cos it's ￡1.99 for 25 chicken nuggets – which are fucking delicious I might add – as opposed to ￡17 to amass the raw ingredients for basil pesto, oh, and also, they don't have time to go to Fresh & Wild to pick up some fucking pinenuts because they've been down the mine all day.”

I was quietly pleased with my cogent and incisive analysis, and waited, head bowed modestly, for her appreciation.

“Um,” she said, “But the reason he targets poor working-class communities is because they tend to have the most unhealthy diets.”

"Ho really?” I blustered, caught off guard. “Really? Do they? DO THEY?”

"Yes,” she replied, and turned back to her newspaper.

I thought really hard, panicking slightly, for several minutes. Then I had it.

“Ho, well, what I want to know,” I said, mentally high-fiving myself, “what I want to know is, what about the super super rich people who subsist off very very enormously unhealthy diets of, like, cream-soaked guinea-fowl stuffed inside butter-drowned pigs?”

Boo-yah.

“Um...” she said, with a look I couldn't quite interpret, so I chose to take as imminent surrender to my superior point. I could smell victory.

"You know what you never see?” I said, warming rapidly to my theme. “You never see him going into, like, CASTLES, and to Oxford college High Tables, and being like, 'Oi mate, that cream-soaked guinea-fowl's gonna do yer heart in, you should get the cook to make some of this scrummy basil pesto'.”

She sighed, a long, fatigued deflation. “I don't think guinea fowl's actually that unhealthy,” she said. “And anyway, I don't think rich people really eat like that all the time.”

“I bet they bloody do, you know,” I said, darkly. “I bet they bloody do. When they're not feasting off the flesh of POOR PEOPLE.”

"You know what?” she said. “You look hot with buttered icecream all over your lower face. Let's have sex.”

And due to the raw, unabashed carnality into which the discussion descended, I never even got to make my killer point.

Which is: if Jamie Oliver's so goddamn healthy and all, how come his face is so puffy and pasty? If I saw him in my local pub I'd assume he sat around all day stuffing his chubby cheeks with crisps and sausage rolls.

Ooh, crisps and sausage rolls: that'll do nicely for dinner. Bish bosh.

In It To Win It

2010-03-28T13:44:00.000-07:00

I play the lottery.

Actually, I reject the verb ‘play’, because that implies an element of frivolity which is entirely lacking from my engagement with the lottery. To say that I ‘work’ the lottery is perhaps more appropriate. I invest in the lottery, even better, as this accommodates the sense of guaranteed returns.

People like you look down on people like me. Because you don’t play the lottery, do you? Ho no. “Fools’ tax, innit,” you sneer. “Designed to keep the untermenschen in their place by ensuring they spend all their disposable income on gambling.”

Well, this just isn’t true. On the latter point, the proletariat don’t spend all their income gambling, they also spend quite a bit of it on cider, fags, and X Factor text-votes. On the first point, who exactly is going to be the fool out of you and me when I am the one carrying a giant oversized cheque for £40 million?

That’s right. It will be you.

The lottery has been on my mind for a while because of my growing disapproval of the behaviour of lottery winners: a charmed group which, up to this point, does not yet include me.

Unless you count the time a few months ago when I got an email telling me that “Camelot has some very exciting news about your Euromillions ticket! Please log on to your online account.”

(Like most serious, professional lottery players, I conduct my business online, rather than in the grubby ‘two Creme Eggs and a Euromillions lucky-dip strip please’ corner-store of yesteryear.)

In the twenty seconds it took me to exit my email and access my online account, that 40 million quid was as good as spent.

‘I’ve gone and done it,’ I thought, without much surprise, just the satisfaction of someone finally receiving their due. ‘I’ve only gone and won the bloody lottery.’

‘Congratulations!’ flashed the message on the screen, just as I’d always pictured it in my financial forecasting sessions.

‘You have won £5.’

‘5 quid?’ I thought, wrestling with the cognitive dissonance that accompanies the reduction of your expectations by 39 million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-five pounds. ‘That’s not very much. Still, it’ll cover half the cost of my tickets for next week.’

But to return to my gripe: I have long been disappointed by lottery winners.

It seems practically de rigueur, these days, to win about fifty million pounds and then frame your plans for the money and its attendant celebrations in the most dreary way imaginable.

I’ve seen it at least a dozen times recently. ‘John Smith, you’ve just won FIFTY MILLION POUNDS!’ shrieks the journalist. ‘How will you celebrate?’

‘Well,’ sighs the winner, as if the sheer ennui of it all is just too draining to contemplate, ‘me and the missus might go down the kebab van later and get some chips and gravy, and since it’s a special occasion, maybe beans on top as well.’

‘And the money? Any immediate plans?’ hyperventilates the hack.

‘We’ve been saving up for new grouting for the bathroom, so I reckon we’ll finish that off first,’ he’ll yawn. ‘I’ve had my eye on a nice little piece of lineoleum from B &Q for the front hallway. We’ll be able to get that now, of course, maybe even a couple of square metres extra, and not have to worry about it.’

‘And don’t forget the kids,’ drones his wife. ‘There’ll be a packet of crisps for each of them, and a family-pack of KitKats to share in front of the telly later.’

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

Anyone who has the temerity to express such rubbish plans for the money should be instantly stripped of it. The lottery is the theatre of dreams! Jealousy, avarice, gluttony, lust, and madness: these are the passionate and worthy emotional states which should play out across the lottery’s glittering stage. Not modesty, caution, prudence, humility, and good sense. Where’s the fun in that? If that’s what I was into, I’d put my weekly lottery spend into a “savings account”, which I believe is a special piggy-bank for people devoid of imagination or hope.

Lottery winners betray all of us with their leaden aspirations.

If I won the lottery, I know exactly what I’d say, because the scene rehearses itself in my head quite regularly.

‘Bec Davis, you’ve just won FIFTY MILLION POUNDS!’ screams the journo. ‘How will you spend the money?’

‘I shall build a castle made entirely from cheese,’ I will explain, with quiet confidence and poise. ‘The biggest castle the world has ever seen, and there will be a moat of Fanta, which will flow in orange radiance around its stinky perimeter. In the grounds I shall maintain my own zoo, and keep a pygmy elephant , who will wear a waistcoat of saffron, and serve me great goblets of Veuve Cliquot from a tray around its neck.

'There will be a cat as big as a pony, on which I shall ride around the castle, reeling drunk, with a sack of cream crackers on my back, snacking on the turrets and battlements. I will never wear grotty human fabrics on my skin any more, but only materials spun from gossamer and starlight. A troupe of dwarf troubadours will accompany me wherever I ride, serenading me with numbers from the back catalogue of Dusty Springfield. '

If this is all sounding a tad Michael Jackson-ish, then let me remind you: say what you like about the man, but if there’s one thing he never lacked, it was class. Our current crop of lotto millionaires would do well to take a few lessons.

The final straw for me was reading last week’s reports on lottery-winner Kevin Halstead, whose £2.2 million win happened the day after his divorce was finalised.

The comment from his ex-wife of one day? “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.”

No murderous envy, no seething rage, just an apparently sincere pat on the back. “It couldn’t have happened to a nicer bloke.” As if he’d just been made Employee Of The Month at Iceland.

I’d be so much better at winning the lottery than the people currently entrusted with the job. They should really let me have a bash at it. Any day now, I expect.

Bec Davis And The Metaphor of the Shabako Stone

2010-03-15T16:17:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend and I spent Saturday afternoon at the British Museum.

‘How do you do it?’ I hear you sigh. ‘How do you maintain your relentless rock ’n’ roll lifestyle?’

I dunno, honestly. We were still pretty worn out from the previous Saturday at Ikea in Milton Keynes, but those Benin bronzes weren’t going to thoughtfully examine themselves.

Actually, we were there to see the Nigerian sculpture exhibition, which should be compulsory viewing.

The exhibition is a fitting reminder that the average West African in 12 AD had a daily diary which looked something like: ‘Wake up. Stretch limbs on hand-carved throne-bed. Eat feast. Create highly sophisticated terracotta full-face mask to wear in complex spiritual ceremony later. Engage in multi-layered abstract thought. Sculpt naturalistic representation of wood-god from burnished copper and polished jewels. Eat feast. Debate creation myths,” and so on.

While most of the rest of the world, at this time, were ticking off their two solitary quotidian ‘to-do’s of ‘sit in own faeces’ and ‘root for grubs’.

In your face, Nick Griffin.

I hadn’t been to the British Museum for a while and I’d forgotten just how awesome it is.

Well, bits of it, anyway. I’ll be honest, the Chinese Ceramics have never done much for me, and I’m too scared to approach them after the whole Fitzwilliam Museum porcelain vase debacle. Remember that? When a visitor to the Cambridge museum in 2006 slipped on his shoelace, fell down the stairs, lurched into an exhibit, and smashed two priceless 300-year-old Qing vases into tiny, heartbreaking shards on the floor. I really felt for that guy. I think we all know it could have been any of us. The banality of vandalism, and all that.

But far and away the grooviest part of the British Museum has always been its Ancient Egypt holdings, or ‘thefts’, as I like to call them. (On that point: the Museum really needs to be more honest about its exhibits’ provenance. I suggest that appended to each item’s notes, where it currently says ‘Sudan, 14 AD,’ they should be forced to recount in full the circumstances of its robbery. ‘Lord Dewsberry distracted the Khartoum palace guards with a tap-dance routine while Morton Stanley-Livingstone jimmied off the ivory panels with a Swiss army knife.’)

Back to Ancient Egypt: that shit is wild. At the risk of sounding like an over-sugared fifth-grader writing up a report on a school trip, did you know they used to mummify animals as well as humans? And not just cats. Crocodiles too! And eels! Eels! What were you thinking, Rameses? Eels are the most rubbish creatures ever to mummify! They end up looking exactly like sausages in batter! And no-one wants that, unless you’re hungry and from Newcastle.

My favourite item in the British Museum, though, is the Shabako Stone. Here’s a picture of it. The Shabako Stone is a 710 BC slab on to which an ancient scholar carved sixty vertical columns of hieroglyphs recording the ‘Memphite Theology’: the story of how the god Ptah brought all things into creation.

So far, so impressive.

Until someone found it lying around a few centuries later and decided it would make a simply ripping millstone.

Let’s take a moment to give this the attention it so richly deserves. You spend the best part of your adult life painstakingly, agonizingly, chiselling away at a piece of rock, in order that the origins of the universe – the origins of the universe - not be forgotten.

Only for some halfwit to come along and think ‘hey, that’s flat and solid – I’m gonna grind me some corn on that sucker.’

As you’ll see from the picture, this ancient and holy tablet now has a whopping great hole in the middle, and huge troughs scarring it from where this numbskull sawed away, humming blithely, never once stopping to consider ‘Golly! In a world where a written alphabet is pretty novel, I’ll bet these weird inscriptions could mean something jolly important!’

Isn’t this the ultimate illustration of the futility of human endeavour? It’s pretty much the most depressing thing I’ve ever seen, and I’m the world expert on depressing things, after spending three days dressed up as a Christmas elf in a Swindon shopping centre.

Let’s save future generations the time by burning down the libraries now. If any hardback dust-jackets survive the flames, we can saw them into bits and use them for coasters.

I could do with some extra coasters.

Feeling Lonely? Don't Rule Out Roulette

2010-03-08T15:54:00.000-08:00

You know those mornings when you wake up and think ‘Shit, I’d love to watch a stranger masturbating into a webcam today?’

No? If not, you’re on your own, at least if the spiralling popularity of Chat Roulette is anything to go by.

Chat Roulette, for those of you who inhabit a blissfully oblivious universe of lofty culture and highbrow political debate, is the latest craze to sweep the western world’s interwebs. (I specify the western world because I believe Chat Roulette is unavailable to South African internet users, in possibly the most egregious example to date of wanton discrimination against the global south.)

Chat Roulette is the brainchild of some Russian teenager who got bored with only Skyping his friends. And who can blame him? Winters in Tomsk can be slow; and haven’t we all, at times, railed against the petty social conventions which keep us from exchanging close-ups of our genitalia with strangers, unless the two participants in question are a loon on a London bus and me.

When you log on to chatroulette.com, you are only a click away from being connected to a webcam chat with a complete stranger. Should their appearance or conversational repertoire not meet your exacting standards, you simply press ‘next’ and another would-be chatter will replace them. It’s like speed-dating for people whose parole terms prevent them from leaving their bedrooms.

First things first. Yes, there are a lot of men wanking into their cameras. I read an article suggesting the approximate proportion was 1 in 10 users: from my experience, I’d put the figure substantially higher. Maybe that estimate wasn’t counting the dudes who have yet to get their wang all the way out, and initially confine themselves to groping within their underpants in a considerate way.

Fittingly, however, given that this month marks the 40^th anniversary of the Women’s Rights movement, there are also a small but heartening amount of women who are similarly happy to flash their woo-woos for the fans.

Conversation, which is mainly text-based, is somewhat less erudite than you may hope. An indication of the average age-range and dominant concerns of the participants is found in the fact that the number one chat-starter of choice appears to be: ‘have u ever had sex yet’.

A second common topic is dudes complaining about other dudes waving their schlongs around. To quote one of my male interlocutors (approx age: 15), ‘Im fead up’.

‘Why?’ I responded kindly.

‘All the dicks on here,” he answered. Then, to helpfully clarify his expectations: ‘I wanna see chicks pissing on the carpet.’

Like most of the content on the internet, Chat Roulette is simultaneously vein-severingly depressing and frighteningly addictive, in a kind of dead-inside way. Getting a glimpse into the lives of the Chat Roulette participants will confirm everything you have ever bleakly suspected about just how dark and miserable the human condition really is.

In my brief foray into this murky world, I did not witness any women performing sex acts on household pets, but apparently this is not uncommon. I did see a few things which chilled me to my core, though. Like a man standing completely still, wearing a black mask which concealed his whole face except his eyes, a black top hat and only a black waistcoat. If this doesn’t sound that creepy, picture that staring straight at the camera, straight at you, unmoving except for a slight nodding motion, silent, seeming to peer deep within your soul, even though you know rationally this is impossible because you don’t have a soul. Oh, and because you haven’t enabled a webcam, so he can’t see you back.

I also couldn’t shake my fear that every ‘next’ click was bringing me one click closer to witnessing a glimpse of some terrible crime: someone violently torturing an old lady who mutely mouths ‘help’ at the webcam before the image is whisked away to be replaced by another masturbator. Or a suicide: mark my words, blogosphere, someone is gonna top themselves live on Chat Roulette at some point soon, and then we’ll all be sorry.

Now I shall have a nice warm mug of cocoa and retire to bed. Sweet dreams.

This Blog Is By Appointment to Her Majesty

2010-02-27T01:58:00.000-08:00

~~The funniest thing happened to me on Tuesday night round the Queen’s place~~

~~Tuesday night? Oh, nothing much, just spent the evening with a few close friends and Elizabeth II~~

How does one casually drop into conversation that one spent one’s Tuesday evening at Buckingham Palace with the Queen?

I have thus far had only one opportunity to do so: namely, Wednesday morning, when I stumbled in a bleary haze out of my bedroom only to run into one of the many strangers who seem to wander around my new dwellings at any given time.

“Hello,” I croaked, trying to unglue my eyelids enough for it to seem like I was making eye-contact like a normal person.

“Hello,” she said, eyeing me with visible concern.

“I’m so sorry,” I whispered hoarsely, gripping the staircase for support. “I’m just so terribly hungover.”

“Oh, I see!” she said brightly. “Why, where were you last night?”

The universe stood still for a moment. I felt as if I were teetering at the aeroplane’s entrance before an almighty skydive, and then I jumped.

“Buckingham Palace,” I said, trying to seem offhand while also focusing on not vomiting. “The Queen had a … thing.”

“Riiiight,” she said, in a tone I instantly recognized, because it was exactly the same one I used when that man on the bus told me he invented bungee jumping. “Anyway, nice to meet you.”

I stared after her, helpless, as she walked into the lounge. She thinks I’m a liar, I thought. She thinks I’m deranged, or pathologically dishonest, and that this is my crazy lie for today, but that by tomorrow I’ll have moved on to claim that Lindsay Lohan is my first cousin, or that my dad invented the fax machine, or something.

Maybe I should go after her, I thought. Maybe I should follow her into that room and convince her I am telling the truth by showing her my namebadge with the royal insignia on it. Or my invitation, on thick, embossed, ivory card. Or I could ask her to smell my hand, to see if there isn’t maybe the tiniest whiff of powdered glove on it.

I did nothing of the kind, though, because I felt too unwell.

Allow me to clarify a point which may have you confused: I doubt that the Queen was similarly indisposed on Wednesday morning. I did not receive any text messages from her, for instance, saying ‘Am sooooooo hungover LOL wtf did we do last nite???? Don’t u dare tag me in any pix on Facebook u biatch!’

Her Majesty did not hand around flaming sambucas, or lead us in a round of ‘how low can you go’, or dare people to see if they could down their drink quicker than her.

In fact, I did not see a drop of alcohol slip down her royal throat, which is obviously a bit irksome to contemplate now, like when your self-righteous teetotaller friend invites you round for dinner and you end up getting wa-hasted out of boredom and then she phones you the next morning, poison dripping from every syllable, to say ‘How’s the head?’

In fairness, it was not at the Palace itself that the descent into inebriation occurred, but afterwards. Afterwards, when we spilled like laughing children out into the rainy London evening, euphoric with reflected glory, sprinkled with the fairydust of proximity to ancient power, our heads filled with marvelling and wonder – it was then that we decided it might be nice to round off the evening with fourteen pints at the closest dive-bar. It only seemed fitting.

At Bucky P itself – which is how we regular visitors refer to it, or sometimes just as ‘Liz’s pad’ – behaviour was exemplary. I found myself experiencing a rush of unexpected affection for the short, hunched, white-haired lady whose hand I was so desperate not to squeeze (a devastating no-no, apparently) that I laid my sweaty palm in her glove with the softest of touches and withdrew it immediately, almost like a ‘Too slow’ high-five that you then stroke your hair mockingly with.

To compensate I went on to crunch Prince Philip’s hand as if we were engaged in an arm-wrestling competition, and then lingered in the hope that he would deliver some racist non-sequitur to me that I could then sell to the papers. Something like “South African, eh? And yet not a blackie. Extraordinary.” Instead of which he beamed at me perfectly benevolently and politically-correctly, and I felt ashamed.

The interior of Bucky P, I can report, is almost embarrassingly kitsch in places. In particular, the matching his-‘n’-hers pink thrones – hers embroidered with the ERII heraldry, his with a simple ‘P’ – would not be out of place in Paris Hilton’s boudoir.

The Palace toilet-paper is not, contrary to what you may have thought, embossed with any royal logo. Just as well, or whole rolls of it would have ended up in my borrowed handbag. You need to steal something with logo, my friend Cristina informed me sternly in advance of my visit. Anything with logo. But there was nothing with logo, other than the thrones, which would have presented logistical difficulties to smuggle out.

I could tell you the tales of my brief yet shudderingly erotic encounters ‘neath the Palace roof with the likes of Annie Lennox, but I’m saving those for the many, many moments of casual chat over the next four decades where I shall name-drop my soiree chez Windsors. In the process I shall no doubt shed friends by the dozen, until I am old, incontinent and alone, rocking back and forth in my chair, murmuring ‘Did I mention that I met the Queen?' And it’ll still be worth it.

For now I will confine myself to mentioning a chat I had at the boozy tail-end of the evening with the Management Accountant of the Royal Household, an Afrikaans woman from the Klein Karoo with an accent so thick and warm I wanted to spread it on my toast. She has weekly one-on-ones with the Queen, she told me, where the Queen pours over the figures for all her properties with steely vigilance, alert to sudden upturns in the quantity of dishwashing liquid purchased for Balmoral, or the amount of lamb-chunks for the corgis they’re going through at Windsor.

“And you know the thing about the Queen?” she said earnestly. “She don’t take shit, hey.”

With those words echoing, her colleague gently but firmly began to usher us towards the Palace doors.

Tea Cake Or Not Tea Cake?

2010-02-14T17:01:00.000-08:00

Happy V-Day!

V stands, in this instance, for Victory over the dark horsemen of solitude and sadness. On this 14^th of February, year of our Lord 2010, I am a winner!

My girlfriend thinks she is the real winner. She tricked me today by giving me a present after we had explicitly agreed not to exchange gifts. And then she said sweetly, ‘This means I won Valentine’s Day, right?’

As if Valentine’s Day were the egg-and-spoon race at the school fête, instead of one of the holiest days in the Christian calendar!

We celebrated in modest but appropriate style, by engaging in some low-key sexual intercoursing, and then going to see A Single Man, the perfect Valentine’s date movie if you will stop at nothing to ensure that your date exits the cinema affixed to your person like a limpet, sobbing “please don’t end our illicit gay relationship by dying in a car accident on the icy roads or I’ll have to kill myself like a somewhat wobbly-jowled Colin Firth”.

Colin Firth did quite a good job of acting like a professional homosexual. He even had to kiss one dude with tongue, and achieved it without any visible on-camera retching.

I’ve never understood why straight women are so crazy for Colin Firth. I suppose it’s because he played that wedge of emotionally-retarded masculinity, Darcy. Well, hopefully the millions of chicks whose panties moisten when his wobbly-jowled English face arrives on screen won’t be put off by seeing him pop a chubbie over naked pics of his dead boyfriend.

V-Day comes at the end of a week where I came down with a nasty cold, discovered that my computer had been taken over by a malicious virus, contemplated the crushing emptiness at my existential core, and realized that I have an inordinate fondness for tea-cakes.

Now, I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking that tea-cakes are muffin or scone-type confections, right? Little baked goods. Wrong, amigos, dead wrong. Tea-cakes begin with a layer of biscuit, atop which is perched a large mess of soft marshmallow, and the whole fiendish creation then enrobed in cheap chocolate. They are, in a word, yumbles.

Yesterday I ate eight of them in a row. I’m not even embarrassed, seriously, even though you have to unwrap them individually, which you’d think would act as some kind of mental firewall. Not for me. I’m like one of Charlie Bucket’s breadline-dwelling elderly relatives.

Of all the ills that beset me this week, my computer getting hijacked by the Paladin virus was by far the most disruptive. It has made its presence felt by splattering porn all over my desktop, whimsically shutting down my computer whenever it so chooses, posting inane Facebook statuses in my name, and spamming most of my email contacts with unbewieeeeevabwy cute photos of tiny hedgehogs nibbling on biscuit crumbs.

Okay, fine, the last two were me acting alone.

But I can’t possibly take it to a computer shop to get fixed, because then I’d have to confess that I picked up the virus on a dirty torrent site after watching episodes of Glee till 4am on Monday night while robotically stuffing tea-cakes in my fat cheeks.

It’s just not a pretty picture, is it?

In other news, I’ve moved house, which presents me with a devastating ethical dilemma.

It’s the sort of etiquette problem that people write to The Times’s ‘Modern Manners’ column about.

I love that column. People always write in with shit like, Dear Sir, I’ve invited the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Prime Minister of Sri Lanka to supper at mine tomorrow night, but I only have one ruby-encrusted gold throne… I think you see the problem.

Anyway, I need to write in. I’ll say, Dear Sir, What is the precise length of time one must allow to elapse before one can start talking some serious smack about new housemates in a public, blog-based forum?

It’s a bit tricky. I like them all very much, but we’re still in that delicate mutual-courtship phase where they might not take a bit of light character-assassination in the jolly spirit in which it would be intended.

I must muse upon it, blogosphere. Perhaps I can purchase their consent with tea-cakes.

I'm With Crazy

2010-01-31T16:59:00.000-08:00

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!

2010-01-26T14:58:00.000-08:00

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

2009-12-28T09:45:00.000-08:00

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'?

2009-11-14T02:54:00.000-08:00

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

2009-11-06T17:47:00.000-08:00

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

2009-10-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

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

2009-09-07T16:10:00.000-07:00

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.

Lady Looks Like A Dude

2009-08-21T18:42:00.000-07:00

Caster Semenya. I can’t remember when last I was so gripped by a news story. Oh yes, it was two weeks ago, when newspapers reported that Sam the koala, who became the anthropomorphists’ pin-up of choice after the Australian bushfires, had tragically died. From chlamydia.*

Well, Sam, just because you’re young and cute and can sip adorably from an Evian bottle doesn’t mean you can fuck your way through the Outback without protection. I vote for Sam as the poster-koala of all future STI awareness campaigns.

But anyway, so Caster Semenya, the South African “female” who romped to an insultingly easy victory in the 800m event in the World Athletics Championships, is now suspected of being “male”.

And, in truth, the part of me that isn’t in an imaginary but magical life-partnership with Judith Butler, can see where they’re comin’ from. Lady *does* look like a dude.

When I use the word “lady”, I’m quoting from the outraged statement of the South African Football Players Union, who questioned: “Why does IAAF only choose Semenya out of all the ladies at the Championships?” Yes, quite. This is an important political point, SAFPU: *all* so-called “women” should be under suspicion, not just those who know how to flower-arrange and write thank-you notes on monogrammed cards and dismount gracefully from a horse-drawn carriage.

SAFPU’s statement is just a drop in the ocean of the media outpourings devoted to using Semenya’s case as a useful way of exposing the complete inability to separate the concepts of ‘sex’ and ‘gender’, to discuss gender issues in any kind of coherent or meaningful way, and a frightening indicator of how hidebound we still are by what constitutes appropriate behaviour and appearance for a “man” and a “woman”.

But if you wanted to read about heavy stuff, you’d be on perezhilton.com. Let’s get back to the cheap jokes.

Fortunately (from the perspective of comedic fodder), the South African Young Communists’ League has also weighed spectacularly unhelpfully into the fray:

"The [Venus and Serena] Williams sisters were never subjected to such public humiliation as is done by the international athletic body. Is it because they are of American descent?"

Er, no, it’s because the Williams sisters don’t look like the Wayans brothers.

Semenya’s case was also done no favours by a phone interview given by her father, which I listened to on Youtube two days ago that now seems to have been mysteriously removed, in which he launched a passionate defence of her ‘femaleness’.

With one problem.

No doubt simply due to not being an English first-language speaker, he repeatedly made reference to his daughter using the male third-person pronoun. “It doesn’t bother him,” he announced earnestly. “He knows he is a girl.” D’oh! I smacked my forehead so many times during the interview that it’s left a permanent dent.

Newspaper articles in the UK – unless you count those from The Guardian, which inevitably called Germaine Greer out of the underground bunker she shares with The Pregnant Man to comment immediately on the impending gender apocalypse – have focused on intense scrutiny of her appearance.

“Semenya has a delicate dusting of facial hair,” one published.

And? I myself am cultivating a very distinguished-looking goatee at the moment. My friend Sim is also available on request to tell you about the woman she saw on the Tube once, who casually opened a voluminous bag to pull out a Wilkinson Sword and a mirror in order to begin painstakingly scraping at her beard.

But at least on those grounds we can surely rule out the possibility of fraud by design. If the South African Athletics Federation wanted to disguise a man as a woman for medal-winning purposes, they could do it a helluva lot more convincingly. Like giving Caster a long blonde wig, and some falsies, and a smear of lipstick.

Hell, they could even get in the guy the ANC uses to disguise Julius Malema as a human.

Also, if I were Caster Semenya, I’d respond to the IAAF’s concerns that I look like a man by voicing my own concerns that IAAF president Pierre Weiss looks like a fatter and more dishevelled version of Hercule Poirot, but I’m not about to suggest that he be stripped of his post and gets down to solving the mystery of Madeleine McCann’s disappearance using only his leetle grey cells.

The battery of tests lined up for poor Semenya by the IAAF include, other than the requisite poking at her genitalia, a full psychologist’s examination. Judging by the IAAF’s sensitive handling of the “gender verification” case thus far, one can only speculate what such an investigation might involve.

“Okay Caster, I’d like you to give us the recipe for a creamy roux. And what ingredients would you add to this vinaigrette to produce the desirable level of piquancy?”

“Caster, if you look at this screen here, there’s a picture of a half-naked fireman protectively cradling an infant. Can you produce a visible mixture of tears and arousal?”

So she's fast, she has a 'tache, and her speaking voice is a bit like Barry White's after a night chainsmoking. Chances of her being female seem about as high as those of a fuzzy marsupial dying of chlamyida.

*http://www.thelondonpaper.com/thelondonpaper/green/news/bushfire-survivor-sam-the-koala-dies-of-chlamydia, if you query this

When Good Neighbours Become Good Friends

2009-08-14T18:37:00.001-07:00

It's Friday night in Kilburn, where I live, which means the air is thick with marijuana and congealing blood and the gentle lullaby of police-sirens will shortly sing me to sleep.

Ah, Kilburn. And people ask me why I don't move back to South Africa! Why on earth, when I can experience most of the attendant personal safety risks and absolutely none of the quality-of-life benefits right here in NW6?

Kilburn has a particular atmosphere unto itself which I find difficult to express using the clumsy tool of words. If you were here I'd employ a mixture of tap-dance, capoeira, and hand -puppetry to convey its heady ambience.

It's supposedly a neighbourhood rift asunder by gang violence. That's what our co-bartenders tell us. We were fascinated - particularly Cristina, whose dark past as a Chicana gang-girl occasionally manifests itself in her ability to spell out the word 'Blood' using only her fingers and thumbs. It's really accurate, as good as reading the text in Times New Roman font 18. Again, you gotta see it.

Anyway, tell us more, we said. Who are these gangs?

"Well, there's the Irish," our informant responded. What are they like? we pressed. What do they do? "Drink a lot, and sing sometimes", he answered earnestly, at which point our credulity dissipated, since this seemed more like a valid ethnographic precis of a national character than some terrifyingly niche gang initiation rite. What else do they do, this fearsome posse? Eat lots of potatoes? Believe in leprechauns?

A sozzled Paddy crooning 'Molly Malone'. I'm shaking in my boots.

So we scoff at the notion of Kilburn as a gang-land, with expertise hard-earned on the streets of LA and Hanover Park respectively. (For 'LA' and 'Hanover Park' you may want to substitute 'Gig Harbor, Seattle' and 'Rondebosch' respectively, but the point is, we know our Crips from our Bluds, our 26's from our car-guards.)

But Kilburn certainly has a dark underbelly. 'Underbelly' is not strictly accurate, actually. Just 'belly' would probably cover it. A few months ago Cristina had to step over a stab- mangled corpse on the street on the way to Tesco, which was inconvenient. And two weeks ago a man punched me on the High Street at 10am on a sunny Saturday morning.

I hadn't been expecting it, really. Neither had I been "asking for it", as yet another bartender colleague helpfully suggested. (It was probably one of the Irish. After all, I *was* draped in an Ulster flag loudly talking smack about Ronan Keating at the time. I should have checked for his secret shamrock tattoo.)

I wheeled round to face my assailant - a perfectly-normal looking middle-aged gentleman - in shock. “Soooorrrrryyyyyyy,” he sneered, in approximately the same tone in which you deliver a parentally-enforced apology to a sibling you have just viciously pinched on a car-trip, and then add under your breath: “that you're so STUPID”.

This hurtful episode has played on my mind somewhat in the subsequent days. Naturally, a number of vivid revenge scenarios have presented themselves. In the main one, I turn to him and say in a cutting yet composed manner, "Oh, *I'm* sorry, because I didn't realise we'd all agreed to entirely abandon the social contract which pettily deters us from randomly assaulting fellow pedestrians en route to an optometrist's appointment! Since we're all done with that, I trust you don't mind that I'm about to take a dump on your shoe."

Anyway, it brought home to me the alienation of deracinated urban living for us peripatetic expatriates. Because no-one helped me, you see. I feel strongly that if I'd been living in some cosy community-orientated olden-days society at least a baying crowd of vigilantes would have run him down and hacked him to death with their bare hands and farming implements. Where's mob-justice when you bloody well need it?

In the wake of this incident I have thus been considering trying to get to know our neighbours. It seems wrong that we live our isolated little pod-lives, like battery-hens, barely exchanging a nod on the stairs, when we could be getting together for jolly evenings of Scrabble and kangaroo courts.

Our neighbours directly next door seemed most promising. They are a - pardon my French - homosexual couple. One of them is a wealthy ageing German gent and the other is an unemployed young Philippino man, but I have absolutely no reason to believe it is not a relationship premised exclusively on a set of shared interests and a deep emotional connection.

For a while Cristina and I became convinced that they were running a drug-empire from their flat, due to the fact that every single day they receive multiple intriguingly-shaped packages in the post (which is deposited in a communal receptacle) marked 'adaptor'. How many adaptors can two people need, we wondered? And if you knew you would need 60 different plug-points in a single month, wouldn't you just bulk-order them to save the inconvenience of discovering at the end of every day that you needed yet another for the morrow? In short, dear reader, we smelled a rat, and not just the one which routinely shreds our cereal boxes in the kitchen.

So we launched a daring investigation, which saw me steal one of their packages and bring it up to open with Cristina. With hands trembling in anticipation of the heroin stash we would uncover and then sell to the Irish, we tore the parcel open. And discovered: an adaptor.

Never ones to allow a surface reality to mislead us, we then proceeded to smash the adaptor open in order to reach the priceless contraband which surely lay beneath its smug, plug-like exterior. And discovered: some tangled wires, as fitting the circuitry of, well, an adaptor.

Then we felt a bit bad for having stolen and destroyed their adaptor, and sheepishly left it next to the kitchen bin for the rat to munch on.

Since we resigned ourselves to the probability that they are not, in fact, international narcotics-smugglers, and instead just gays with a lot of appliances, our desire to befriend them has waned somewhat. So I am turning my attention to the neighbours opposite, whose roof garden is at exact eye-level with my bedroom window. This is occasionally awkward, as I am wont to parade around in a state of undress while miming to Bonnie Tyler with a hairbrush, but I feel like they have a LOT more to be embarrassed about.

Like the early-90s techno they blast at the flimsiest pretexts for celebration (a sunny day; a night undisturbed by an Irish drive-by spud-hurling). Or the tumultuous relationship one of the Eastern European inhabitants carries out with her (presumably English) boyfriend entirely telephonically.

"HOW YOU CAN SAY THAT?" she howls through heaving sobs, gesticulating wildly with a cigarette while striding back and forth upon the roof, cellphone pressed to her ear. "HOW? HOW YOU CAN SAY THAT?" She's doing it right now.

Upon reflection, perhaps the couple below them, whose kitchen I gain an unobstructed bird's-eye of from my current position, would be more fruitful material for a lasting friendship. They too are a gay couple. We know this because a few months ago Cristina's boyfriend saw, from the vantage-point of our bathroom, one of them administering a diligent hand-job to the other. Right there in the kitchen.

We really must have them over for wine and canapes. Assuming the Irish don't get to them first.

How Swine Flu Ruined My Sex-Life But Taught Me Valuable Lessons About Humility And Grace Towards Lepers

2009-07-19T14:06:00.000-07:00

I have swine flu. Right now, as I type these words, I have swine flu. I can see you, fumbling to spray the screen with some biohazard-nuking aerosol. But don’t worry. I am typing this alone in a hermetically-sealed chamber far away from you. Thank heavens that the internet has made it possible for plague-vectors like me to tell you my thoughts without actually breathing my diseased spores on you.

There’s no Tamiflu for me, alas, as I have no “underlying health problems” and I don’t fall into a risk group (the very old, the very young, the very pregnant, although I damn near lied about the latter to get my hands on the drugs).

See, word on the street is that Tamiflu is amazing. Apparently it turns you around in 30 minutes flat. I’ve become a leetle obsessed with Tamiflu, in its glaring absence from my own illness-wracked life. I picture Tamiflu’s gleaming capsules entering my flu-ravaged body and going to work like mini-Asterixes, spearing those fat little swine wherever they find them and roasting them on a spit for a giant feast.

I phoned up my doctor’s surgery in a bleary haze on Friday morning.

"I'm feeling fluey," I told the receptionist. That was enough, like the code they use at shopping centres to warn staff of a bomb threat: "Doctor Sands is in the building”.

“We don’t want you coming in,” she said sharply. Perhaps a little too sharply, I mused, after hanging up the phone. After all, there’s a fine line between ‘justified caution in a global pandemic’ and ‘just plain hurting someone’s feelings’.

A doctor phoned me back. She sounded young and nice. I described my symptoms, she asked a few more questions, and concluded with a diagnosis of swine flu – as firm as one can be when examining someone over the telephone. I could’ve told her I had also grown a curly tail and was prone to uncontrollable oinking fits and she’d have had to take my word for it.

“But you’re not really that sick, are you,” was the tendentious line of questioning that followed the diagnosis. “I mean, it’s not like you’re in bed.” I could practically see her tightening her grip around the box of precious Tamiflu clutched in her fist.

“I am in bed, actually,” I replied, offended. “I’ve been in bed for two days. I only leave my bed to use the bathroom.”

“Oh, so you can use the bathroom unassisted,” came the response. Squeeze that Tamiflu a little tighter, Doc. “So it must be quite a mild case.”

Okay then. Try telling the people around you: “Oh, I’ve got swine flu, by the way – but don’t worry, really a very mild case.” Watch how fast they spit out the Coke you’ve been sharing with one straw.

My girlfriend, who has been what the NHS call my ‘flu friend’, texted some mates to tell them she was running late for dinner with them because she had to bring some paracetamol to my swine flu sickbed. (Paracetamol: the pauper’s Tamiflu.) “Dude,” came the response from Friend 1, “I’m really sorry she’s sick and all that, but can we maybe cancel tonight? I’m not gonna lie, I’m a bit freaked out at the thought of those germs.”

Puzzled, she phoned up the normally more sensible Friend 2. “Swine flu??” were the first shrieked words out of Friend 2’s mouth, replacing ‘hello’."You have swine flu under your roof?"

Er, thanks. That’s me you’re talking about. Needless to say, her dinner invitation was retracted.

My girlfriend has been saintly about mopping my brow and cooking me broth, or at least heating me up Sainsbury’s broth. But it is a little disconcerting how she follows me around, ostentatiously scrubbing everything I touch, using antiseptic wipes from a little packet. And every now and then she finds something new I’ve dared to touch, and then all hell breaks loose.

"You touched the tap?" she’ll shout from the bathroom. I assume she has a little ultraviolet torch now, to detect where my diseased fingers have been. "I have to use the tap too, you know!"

"Well, you want me to wash my filthy infected paws, don'tcha?" I mutter back. "What should I use to open the tap, my elbow?"

"Yes," she’ll shout back. "As long as your elbow is covered by a sleeve."

It all makes me feel a bit like an eighteenth-century leper.

And don’t get me started on the fact that it’s apparently swine flu etiquette to call up everyone you’ve so much as smiled at over the past week, to let them know that the germs could be coming their way. Emailing the parents of a three-month old baby I’d spent the previous evening cooing over, I felt like I was some syphilitic gigolo phoning Maria Von Trapp to tell her I’d given her crabs. Irrationally enough, there was real guilt and shame there.

Perhaps it’s because of the virus’s name. We all know H1N1 (its technical appellation) ain’t going to catch on any time soon, and there’s something about ‘swine flu’ that just sounds so dirty. Like you really have been rolling about with actual pigs – as many would-be comedian friends will point out to you, should you contract the flu. “Pigs are not just non-stop makeout machines, you know,” wrote one wit on my Facebook wall.

At least my friends believe I have swine flu. I phoned up my mother in Cape Town to break the news to her as gently as possible, so as not to cause her unnecessary grief and alarm.

“Nonsense, my dear,” she said briskly, as if that were the end of that.

"But I do," I insisted, sounding more like a petulant teenager with every syllable. "The doctor told me and everything!"

"Such rubbish," she replied, clicking her tongue in irritation. "You are probably a little bit liverish."

I embarked on a long and aggrieved explanation of Occam’s Razor and its application to medical diagnostics in this instance, but there’s no arguing. The problem, I gradually realised, is that she doesn’t believe in swine flu.

Heaven forfend it does not take her daughter’s fluey corpse in a body-bag to teach her what’s-what about modern epidemiology. Heaven forfend.

Mine Host

2009-07-11T16:50:00.000-07:00

I have been in York with my girlfriend for the last few days. York is very charming. York is also a bit weird.

I stopped into a shop for a newspaper a few minutes ago, and got chatting to the affable shopkeeper, as one can safely do in a foreign locale where there is no danger of this becoming a daily communicative obligation. He informed me that the John Bull Races are taking place in York this afternoon.

‘So you’d do best to keep out of town tonight,’ he warned. ‘They attract a very bad crowd. Geordies, mostly, and gypsies.’

Mistaking my incredulous expression for confusion, he leaned forward to clarify conspiratorially: ‘Pikeys, y’know. We call them pikeys.’

‘Well, that’s okay,’ I said hastily. ‘I’m going to watch a film tonight.’

‘What are you seeing?’ he asked with friendly interest.

‘Bruno,’ I replied.

‘I hate that man!’ he shouted with sudden vehemence, bringing his palm down on the counter for added emphasis. ‘Ali G, yes. Borat, I like. But Bruno I hate. That man is just racist.’

While in York we are staying at a guest-house where the landlady, Emma, seems bemused and slightly repulsed by us. It is the type of guest-house where the idea is that you get to know Emma pretty well over the course of your stay. Perhaps, when you leave, you might even give her a hug, or press your home address upon her with fulsome invitations for a visit. It’s a little charade that helps English people get over their deep embarrassment at the idea that they are paying to sleep in a stranger’s private home. This way, everyone can pretend that they are old friends on a long-arranged visit.

Anyway, I think it is safe to say that Emma will not be forcing embraces upon us any time soon. This, as mentioned, is because she does not care for us.

She doesn’t dislike us because we are gay. This is of no relevance to her, I believe. She dislikes us because in other small ways we disrupt the propriety of desired guest attitudes and behaviour.

It is my girlfriend who I blame for irrevocably damaging our relations right off the bat on our first morning by declining a fried breakfast. This caused Emma visible distress and confusion. “Nothin’ cooked for you at all?” she asked, her eyes narrowing in suspicion. “Not even an egg?”

With my unerring instincts about human nature, I knew instantly that this was a mistake. I gathered this partly because Emma’s face was now a scowling mask of disapproval, but mainly because I have unique insights into the soul of the Yorkshire people, gleaned from my attentive childhood reading of the comprehensive oeuvre of James Herriott.

In order to compensate for my girlfriend’s incendiary behaviour and to ingratiate myself into Emma’s favour by comparison, I announced beamingly: “I’ll have everything! Deep-fried! You can throw a coaster in the griddle with a tub of butter and I’ll eat that too! Yum yum!” or words to that effect.

But too little, too late. We have shown too meagre an interest in Emma’s passionate endorsement of York’s attractions – topped, in her book, by five designer shopping outlets (“there’s bargains there, in’tit”); we ignored her recommendation of where to dine – a dingy tavern accurately named ‘Hole In The Wall’ – and just this morning a weak joke I made about the orange juice went horribly awry.

‘I hate Emma’, I found myself furiously texting my girlfriend over the breakfast table in the wake of this.

‘She’s just trying to be nice’, she responded via text; and then, as a helpful afterthought, ‘Perhaps it is yourself you hate?’

That floored me for a second until I came back with a resounding winner:
‘Perhaps it is YOU I hate!’

Ha! That showed her.

But this is why I find myself perpetually uneasy in guest-houses, B’n Bs, any lodging-place with a named proprietor with whom you are expected to develop a personal relationship, rather than a faceless, interchangeable team of automatons who invisibly replace your towels. It’s too much pressure. In my daily life I have enough trouble maintaining my relationships. On holiday the last thing I want to do is worry about whether my landlady likes me enough.

My parents used to stay quite regularly at a small family-owned hotel in the Transkei. ‘Small’ and ‘family-owned’: the danger signs are right there for the alert. The most ghastly aspect of this otherwise charming and comfortable establishment was that they would, at dinner, present each guest with a newsletter of sorts. (I should mention that the hotel was on such an isolated part of coastline that there were no other dining options available for you at night beyond the hotel’s restaurant, so they had a captive and guaranteed readership.)

This newsletter would present the reader with various pieces of information about the weather, tides, in-house entertainment; and would then proceed to chronicle WHAT EACH GUEST HAD DONE THAT DAY.

‘The Van der Merwe family hiked up to the famous wreck of HMS Mariner this afternoon, and gathered a number of interesting shells en route!’

‘Judith and Marvin Kriel decided to devote the day to bird-watching in the wetlands, and were rewarded with several sightings of the Emerald Kingfisher!’

The information for this pernicious broadsheet would be pried from guests in the late afternoon under the guise of casual conversation with hotel employees, who would then scurry off to record this in some central intelligence database for publication a few hours later.

Can you imagine the horror? It’s okay for people like my parents, who would actually spend the day hiking to shipwrecks and birdwatching, as is compulsory in terms of the Over-60’s WASP Handbook; but for godless layabout lard-asses like me?

‘Rebecca Davis woke at around 11am and briefly contemplated getting up before deciding that a few hours’ extra sleep couldn’t hurt. Eventually arising at 1pm, she resolved that the cloudless skies and panoramic coastal vista rendered the environment perfect for an afternoon of humorous cat videos on YouTube with the room’s curtains tightly drawn, and was rewarded with 5 hours’ worth of solid-gold feline high-jinks while eating a family-pack of Kit Kats and throwing the wrappers on the floor.’

What would they think of me?

I have a couple of hours now before my girlfriend finishes her conference. If I hurry back to the guest-house by myself, I might be able to get Emma on my own.

And if I can explain how funny the orange juice joke was, maybe I can make her really, really like me.

Riddle Me This, Jacko

2009-06-26T15:30:00.000-07:00

Allow me to be the latest fatuous commentator to add my words to discussion of Michael Jackson's untimely passing. It may seem to you that all that is necessary, and much that is not, has already been said on this matter; but that would be shortsighted. There is much, much more mileage to yet be flogged from Jackson's withered corpse, and I intend to do my bit. It's what he would've wanted.

Earlier today I attempted to convince my disapproving ladyfriend that my growing fascination with the Jackson death-circus was not, in fact,evidence of my vapid and diseased mind, but a more profound concern for some of the weightier questions thrown up by Jackson's pegging.

I suggested to her that some of the taxing existential queries Jackson's death pose unto humanity include the following: "What does music mean in people's lives? What is our relationship to celebrities? Is it possible to experience genuine emotion at the death of someone you never met? Why do we have this need for performed public grief? Can we feel sadness at the death of someone 'bad' or morally compromised? Should the circumstances of an artist's private life influence how we view their product? Are these not interesting questions? Are you even human? Does a barrage of rhetorical questions steamroll a debate opponent into submission? Yes."

But as any armchair philosopher knows, there is little satisfaction to be had in voicing these meaningful inquiries without taking a stab at responding to them. I would hate for you to be kept up all night buzzing with the uncertainty, so I will now give you the correct answers.

1.) What does music mean in people's lives?
Music is very useful. You can use it to drown out the sound of construction on the building opposite. If you play it loud enough it hushes the little voices in your head that tell you you'll never amount to anything. It also fills the silence when you are on a long car journey with someone you dislike. It is interesting that we speak of silence as needing to be 'filled', as if it were some giant empty jar we lived in. Which, in a way, we do, don't we? So we must fill the silencejar with musicjam, and soldier on.

2.) What is our relationship to celebrities?
We know who they are, but they don't know who we are. This is irritating, obviously, and sometimes leads us to kill them to teach them a lesson.

3.) Is it possible to experience genuine emotion at the death of someone you never met?
Yes. If Tina Fey kicked it I would rend my garments, cover every mirror in my house, and stop bathing. This would be not unlike my usual routine, but I would do it all through body-convulsing sobs, and I would also stoop and drag my feet as further evidence of my unimaginable burden of sorrow.

4.) Why do we have this need for performed public grief?
Because it permits you to communicate with strangers, which is forbidden by English law unless you are at a bar-counter, whereupon it is acceptable to signal frustration with the length of time the bartender is taking to serve you by turning to the person on your left and giving a brief shoulder-shrug and exaggerated shake of the head.

A secondary reason is that it allows you to feel part of something bigger. In the olden days they got this from meeting up on the commonage to do folk-dances, and in modern times its function has been filled by large-scale political protest, but now we have Twitter instead of a conscientised civil society, and I leave it to you to decide whether the trade-off has been worthwhile. (Hint: definitely.) "No man is an island in the stream", as Kenny Rodgers once sang in a touching duet with John Donne; and celebrity death provides a pretext to bridge the stormy ocean that separates us from our fellow humanoids, via a soft word, a gently-proffered tissue, and the clasping of one white-gloved hand in another.

5.) Can we experience sadness at the death of someone 'bad' or morally-compromised?
Yes. Because we are all bad, and should be punished, and also you should take the beam out of your own eye before attempting amateur optometry on others, which is potentially dangerous and may cause retinal scarring.

6.) Should the circumstances of an artist's life influence how we view their product?
If someone did bad stuff before doing art, then yes. For instance, if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad were to bring out a Country & Western album tomorrow, I would write an acerbic review saying that his lyrics were puerile and maudlin and that he consistently failed to produce compelling harmonies on the mouth-organ. Which might well be true, but actually what I would really mean is: "fuck you for your appalling human-rights record". This little rule also applies the other way round, if someone did art and then gave that up and did bad stuff fulltime. I am thinking, of course,
of young Adolf Hitler, whose flower still-lifes I would not hesitate to label "tired, naive, and lacking basic spatial awareness", but what I really mean is "fuck you for the 6 million". O.J. Simpson is a grey area, because the Naked Gun movies are really very droll.

I think we have all learned quite a lot tonight.

Magpies: Cross Them At Your Peril

2009-06-10T10:10:00.000-07:00

I read an article recently which caused me enormous concern.

It was about a new study which has found that magpies can identify human beings. As in, they can tell people apart and remember things about the individuals and recognise them again upon re-encountering them.

As I type these words, the whole story sounds ever-more unlikely to me. This faint sense of unreality is not helped by the fact that despite exhaustive googling, I have been unable to track down any such story online.

Maybe I got the type of bird wrong. Do magpies even exist, in real life? The whole idea of magpies seems a bit cartoonish, what with them always stealing gold coins from the gypsies and suchlike. Maybe it was hummingbirds or something.

Anyway, I definitely read this story in some reputable publication, like the London Lite. And, as I believe I’ve mentioned, it sent shivers down my spine.

In fact, I have been telling everyone I meet about it. If you’re reading this, I’ve probably already told you about it too. Well, it bears repeating.

NO GOOD CAN COME OF THIS FOR US.

BY ‘US’ I MEAN HUMANOIDS.

I could spell out the sinister implications a little more clearly, but I think they are self-evident. We have all, one way or another, sinned against the animal kingdom, or members thereof. And turns out that all this time they’ve been keeping a record of who we are. Biding their time.

When eventually I am called to the Pet-crimes Tribunal and made to atone for my past, I shall have to admit the following.

That, in particular, I would like to return to 1993 and erase the wrongs committed against two mice, Stilton and Cheddar. I will not itemise every aspect of our relationship, because somewhere out there a magpie is probably reading this and taking notes, but it may be fair to say that our interactions were characterised by shamefully asymmetrical power dynamics.

I would like it placed on record that I specifically regret and deplore the invention of a little game we liked to call ‘Shipwreck Shipwreck’, which saw the two tiny rodents set adrift in a bath in a small soap-dish. Their sailing conditions, at first peaceful, would gradually become more inclement, until a final tsunami would see the two capsized and forced to scrabble piteously up the cliff-sized bath walls with their wet little paws desperately seeking, but never finding, traction.

What? It’s not like they died or anything. Not in any manner related to ‘Shipwreck Shipwreck’, at any rate. And they showed every sign of being able to see the funny side when eventually rescued.

Anyway, I’m not the only one. My friend Faith once told me, and I quote word for word, that she “should’ve done time for the things she did to her hamster”.

At least I am publicly confessing, now. Maybe it’s not too late to be taken off the hit-list before the magpies come calling.

Perhaps I am overly cynical about this. Maybe the magpies would only use their memory-and-identification powers for good, like remembering your birthday and how many sugars you take in your tea and stuff. Maybe we could harness their talents and turn them into flying filofaxes. They owe us for all the silverware they’ve nicked.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

But until I’m sure of that, I shall be steering clear of magpies, and would advise you to do similarly.

Goodbye.

Bec vs. The People’s Republic of Yum-Chi

2009-04-17T15:46:00.001-07:00

My girlfriend thinks I should learn Chinese.

“I think you should learn Chinese,” she said, just like that. “To give you a competitive edge.”

My girlfriend is right about a lot of things. This is partly what attracts me to her, and partly what makes me want to gently suffocate her with a pillow while she sleeps.

But I’m pretty sure she’s wrong about this.

Can’t Chinese people speak English? If one of my many fans in the Orient is reading these words right now with total comprehension, I hope you will get in touch to prove my point.

Surely the only people in China who can’t speak English are rural rice-harvesters from Ziaou-Dhong province, who seem unlikely to be calling on my interpretive services to facilitate their video conference-calls any time soon.

All these thoughts zipped through my mind with their usual lightning rapidity when she made her suggestion.

“Okay,” I replied. “I’ll think about it.”

That seemed to be the most time-efficient way out. Especially as the same words also sufficed as response to the question immediately previously, when she had asked me whether I would consider changing out of the fuzzy blue dressing-gown I had been wearing for 36 hours straight.

Anyway, my reluctance to learn Chinese stems not, as she clearly suspects, from laziness and feeble-mindedness. Why, many is the day when I wake up and master a tonal language and its accompanying hieroglyphic alphabet before my mid-morning marmalade sandwiches.

No, the real reason runs deeper than this, and deeper even than the complex linguistic argument for English-as-global-lingua-franca advanced above.

In reality, it’s because of the ongoing war I am waging against Yum-Chi “Meal-in-a-box £2.99” Chinese Restaurant, two doors down from my flat. This fine-dining establishment, which was inexplicably passed over by the good folk at Michelin yet again this year, took the foolish step of rejecting me and my housemate Cristina for the posts of Cashier and Waitress respectively in late 2008.

We sashayed through their doors, flicking back our newly-washed hair, holding aloft our dazzling Curriculum Vitaes, printed on embossed paper dipped in rose-water…to be greeted by a bark of ‘POSITION FILLED!’ before we had even had a chance to adumbrate our sophisticated philosophy of customer-service and its application to the Chinese fast-food industry. Yum-Chi then proceeded to advertise those same jobs for another six months.

It’s not that I’m bitter, you understand. And I maintain a deep respect and love for many aspects of Chinese culture. I enjoy a pork spring-roll as much as the next girl, and, like many of us, keep a copy of Ezra Pound’s translations of the sonnets of Li-Po on my nightstand to dip into before bedtime.

It’s just that I want Yum-Chi to have to think very seriously about what they’ve done, when I march past them on a nightly basis to ostentatiously deposit my hard-earned coppers in the till of Thai Basil, across the road. (I don’t even ask for food in exchange.) As of yet, Yum-Chi appears to be bearing up remarkably well under the strain of my boycott, but it's surely only a matter of time before something gives. And it won't be me.

I assumed that Cristina was my comrade in this righteous crusade. Until two nights ago. When, upon removing sundry offensive items from the lounge sofa in preparation for the visit of my girlfriend, I chanced upon a till-slip. A till-slip clearly marked with the perfidious logo of Yum-Chi, generated to process an order of a spicy beef noodle meal-in-a-box for one.

“Et tu, Cristina?” I whispered softly, crumpling the bill in my fist. “Et tu?”

Since Cristina is currently sunning herself on a beach in Greece, I have not yet had a chance to confront her with this treacherous piece of evidence. But when I do, she can say ‘Sayonara’ to amicable domestic relations and ‘Ni-hao’ to a world of pain.

And yes, ‘sayonara’ may, in fact, be Japanese. I just wouldn’t know. And neither do I care to educate myself. And you know what else, Yum-Chi? I prefer sushi anyway.

The Film That Sucked

2009-04-04T13:39:00.001-07:00

A multitude of strange and wondrous experiences have shaped my fragile spirit and seared my tender flesh in ways too varied to enumerate since I took my last tentative steps out into the blogosphere. But none of these have succeeded in stirring me from my non-blogging torpor. Until last night, that is, when I saw the latest Richard Curtis movie, The Boat That Rocked.

Those who are familiar with Broken Bri'ain in all its erstwhile vibrancy will already be accustomed to viewing Richard Curtis's artistic produce with a jaundiced eye. Curtis's England is populated by jolly toffs and feisty-but-goodhearted working-class folk trading droll one-liners in unrecognisably pleasant environments. Never once, in a Richard Curtis flick, have I seen drunken chavs urinating on a Big Issue seller they have just beaten unconscious, or dead-inside Londoners sitting in mute, intractable misery through a delay on the District line caused by yet another Tube-based suicide, or any other of the daily tableaux which make of modern Britain the fairytale landscape I and so many other dole-claiming immigrants am proud to call home.

Quite clearly, 10 Downing Street has had to have a word with Curtis. Faced with a class-action lawsuit from a million female tourists maddened by the discovery that upon arrival they were more likely to be happy-slapped by a football hooligan than proposed to by a bumbling but foppishly-handsome bookstore owner, Curtis has been forced to transplant the Dream England of his latest film to The Olden Days. 1966, to be precise.

And it turns out that 1960s England was even more magical than late-90’s-2000s England! It was a paradise where fresh-faced maidens and swains spent every minute of every day bopping and jiving and twisting to Rock ‘n Roll while falling in love and eating icecream and braiding each other’s hair and, y’know, laughing a lot.

I myself, as a keen amateur socio-historian, was already au fait with the prelapsarian idyll that was 196Os Britain, thanks to a recent viewing of Of Time And The City, Terence Davies's love-letter to 60's Liverpool. There the them-were-better-days point was subtly brought home by juxtaposing sepia home-video reels of cherubic olden-day kids having good clean fun on swings and see-saws against glaringly-lit footage of modern-day Liverpudlian yoof binge-drinking and vomiting in the streets.

But this is what old folk do. Misplaced nostalgia is as much a part of their daily diet as chocolate digestives dipped in milky tea. It sustains them. It’s their bulwark against the indignities of incontinence and prank phonecalls and ill-mannered youngsters not offering them a seat on the bus. It’s just that most of them satisfy their needs in this regard by nattering sweetly to their grandkids, or strangers on long-haul train trips, rather than blowing £10 million on a movie to make the same point.

This in itself is not particularly what enraged me about The Boat That Rocked. No, what really grated my carrot in this instance was Richard Curtis’s immoral abuse of the soundtrack as cinematic device. (And if you think this is a clumsy topic-shift, it’s as smooth as 1960’s soft-serve vanilla compared to the narrative joltings of the movie’s plot.)

I concede, of course, that music has a rich and important part to play in thickening the emotional porridge of a motion-picture. Why yes. Naturellement. There are countless films where I have been moved to tears by the introduction of a particularly lovely musical leitmotif at a point of dramatic significance. The plaintive pluck of a harp at the instance of a lover’s embrace; the soulful lament of a bagpipe in the slow-motion seconds of a lone soldier’s fall; the heart-tugging sigh of a panpipe at the moment where the crowd turns on the panpiper and beats him to death with (quelle irony!) his own panpipe…And so forth.

But Richard Curtis is a big cheat.

Yes, I admit it: the one thing Senor Curtis and his lackeys can do really shitting well is pick out a powerful piece of music. Which is one thing when, as in the scenarios I have delicately sketched for you above, the events that the music accompanies have some intrinsic dramatic force. But in the movie in question, they don’t.

As a consequence, sitting through the film is a far from restful experience. In fact, it is barely exaggeration to say that you, the viewer, are torn asunder. Torn between your rational mind’s recognition that the scenes you are viewing are banal, poorly-scripted and narratively-illogical; and the betrayal of the pumping of your blood, the thumping of your heart, the stirring of your sweaty loins in response to the DEAFENINGLY LOUD music which carries them.

This is the trick Curtis and the gang pull again and again in the complete and utter “suckfest” – to use the technical movie-critic term – that is The Boat That Rocked.

It’s exhausting, frankly.

Moreover, as I believe I’ve mentioned, it’s cheating. And that in itself represents a grotesque anachronism. Since if there’s one thing The Boat That Rocked teaches us, it’s that cheating wasn’t tolerated in the 1960s.

Happy New You!

2009-01-06T04:16:00.000-08:00

I have quit smoking.

This, though momentous, is not the strangest or most dramatic personal reinvention 2009 has thus far birthed. No, that dubious honour must go to my flatmate, Cristina. Who has overnight morphed from a woman who believed haute cuisine - reserved for birthdays and Christmas - was bothering to heat the baked beans before you slap 'em on the toast, to a deranged Martha Stewart-monster who accosts me as I enter the flat to breathlessly demand if I "found any more coupons to go in the coupon drawer?" We have a coupon drawer now. And a wrapping-paper drawer.

I walked into the bathroom two days ago, where Cristina was undertaking some kind of bio-chemical scouring of the bathtub, and I said in a tone of deep unease, 'Seems like you're doing a good job'. She looked up at me, wild-eyed with terror, and said 'But I'm nearly finished! WHAT WILL I CLEAN NEXT?' At that point I should clearly have directed her to my bedroom, but instead I pretended I heard my phone ringing and backed away.

Yesterday she bought a food-processor. She showed me all the settings. You can grate, dice, chop chunkily, finely pare, shred - I mean, seriously, you'd be amazed at the strides culinary technology has taken in the last little while. Apparently the marinades you can assemble with the aid of this machine are "simply out-of-this-world".

So Cristina has changed. And, I can't lie, this scares me a little. 'Why does this scare you?' my ever-wise girlfriend would no doubt ask if I confessed this to her. 'Why do you need her to remain the slovenly, filthy, domestically-retarded skank she's always been? Shouldn't you be happy that she's taking steps to better herself?'

No! Absolutely not! Because if she's suddenly started cooking and showering and wrapping things and applying for Nectar cards, then clearly I bloody well have to too! The reassurance of my normality within my sample-group of two has been ripped away from me!

Similarly, I am sure that the news that I have quit smoking strikes fear into the blackened, mouldering hearts of those of you reading this who still smoke. You're on your own now, fuckers. Forget those happy fantasies of me in the bed next to you in the Hospice, merrily sharing a tracheotomy pump and swapping copies of Cosmo. Sure, I'll skip in there to bring you muffin-baskets and read to you, but then I'll skip out again, taking deep gulps of God's sweet air with my virgin lungs, gleaming and shiny, like one of Cristina's just-polished kitchen counters.

That thought should console me. In truth, it does nothing of the kind. My life since I "kicked the butt" (an expression so irritating it makes me want to stab a burning cigarette in my eye) has been an unrelenting pit of despair. The joie de vivre for which I am rightly famed throughout two continents has utterly deserted me.

Without my nicotiney epidermis I feel naked and alien. My hands are like two bulbous, fleshy root-vegetables inexplicably attached to my wrists. I don't know what they're for any more. I have only found one replacement use for them: the endless transfer of food to my mouth. Fortunately, in this topsy-turvy new world, there's a lot of food around. Cristina just asked me if I thought 11.15 am was "too early to start on dinner".

I've had to give up coffee too, because the memories of the two together are too closely intertwined to bear, like the song you shared with an ex-lover. I am torpid, bovine, sluggish. My brain doesn't work like it used to, when little bullets of nicotine fired up neurons in a dazzling pyrotechnic chain. I'm like that dude in Flowers For Algernon when he got all stupid again.

I might as well throw in the towel and let Cristina teach me how to julienne vegetables. Without smoke, there's no fire.

The Quiddity of Semantics

2008-10-02T01:56:00.000-07:00

People keep talking about the “Credit Crunch”. “Credit Crunch” this, “Credit Crunch” that, “I got well Credit-Crunched last night”, “You look Credit Crunchalicious in that waistcoat”, and so forth. Initially I assumed it was a brand of muesli, and I resolved to try it at first opportunity, because I’ve long suspected my diet may not be sufficiently fibrous.

Well, the joke was on me when I made my enquiries in the cereal aisle of my local Marks & Sparks. Since I’m among friends here, I don’t mind telling you that they told me to “Credit Crunch off”. Which left me none the wiser, and still somewhat intestinally-congested, to boot.

So I’ve decided not to worry about whatever the “Credit Crunch” may be. Frankly, I’ve got bigger problems on my plate, like how I’m going to make the rent on the Mayfair flat I leased on the strength of my Lehman Brothers’ signing bonus.

And there’s another thing that’s been worrying me sick. What is a “quantum of solace”, please?

The Quantum of Solace is the title of the new James Bond film. Much like the “Credit Crunch”, everyone around me seems to understand its meaning via some kind of collective cultural osmosis from which I am inexplicably excluded. “Ah yes, the quantum of solace,” they’ll say, nodding wisely, if you bring it up. “Yes, I had one yesterday. Picked it up while I was out Credit Crunching.”

I looked up “quantum” in the dictionary. It says it means either something infinitesimally small, or something ginormously big. So if someone offered to sell you a quantum of Credit Crunch for two squid, you’d be in terrible trouble, wouldn’t you? Because you wouldn’t know if you’d be getting a warehouse full, or just a little crumb, see? What a conundrum!

Also, if your partner tells you they have “a quantum of love” for you, you’d either have to dump them on the spot or ask them to marry you right then and there. Bit of a gamble, all things considered. You’d be better off just pretending not to hear and whistling a little tune, like I do when people mention the Credit Crunch.

It’s all very troubling, isn’t it? Life, I mean. Modern Society. It just makes me want to crawl into bed and pull my blankie over my head. That’s my idea of a quantum of solace. Which may mean that I find myself very comforted indeed, or hardly at all.

Credit Crunch on that.

Onomastical Onanism: or, Wanking About Names

2008-08-05T18:56:00.000-07:00

Blogosphere,

I have been away for some time. You may have entertained the expectation that, upon return, I would account for my absence in some way. Well, I've got news for you, blogosphere: YOU'RE NOT MY MOTHER.

About my separation from you I will say just one thing: don't bother faking a canoe-accident death and moving to Panama. Those insurance bastards will always find you in the end.

It will not surprise you to learn that during my blogging sabbatical, my unusually large brain continued to whir and hum as busily as ever. (It has recently been confirmed empirically that my cerebrum is hugundous, by means of a brain-scan undertaken by my friend Lauren during her thesis research. When the bit of my brain that could fit on the computer screen floated into view, in fact, she let out an involuntary gasp and whispered reverently, 'I've never seen anything like it.' Ever since then I have been in discussions with the Museum of Science to make arrangements for its donation to them after my death. They are purpose-building an annexe the size of a biggish airport to house it.)

As usual, I have had a number of primary mental preoccupations. Of late, in no particular order: the Canadian who calmly beheaded the stranger sitting next to him on a Greyhound; Lesch-Nyhan Syndrome, where you are compelled to eat bits of your own body; and teenytiny baby kittens with ribbons on. Oh, and naming practices. I will restrict today's lesson to the discussion of the latter.

You may have read recently about the New Zealand case where a nine-year-old girl won the right to choose a new name for herself after appealing to the courts to rid her of the appellation with which her parents had saddled her from birth: Talulah Does The Hula From Hawaii. Upon delivering his ruling, the judge noted that "in all facets of life, a child bearing this name would be held up to ridicule and suspicion". The judge's statement, though well-intentioned, is not strictly accurate. In many facets of life, albeit primarily those affiliated with the adult-entertainment industry, such a name would be distinctly advantageous to its bearer.

Anyway, subsequent to the Talulah verdict, I have been inspired to investigate the outcomes of other cases brought before the courts regarding potentially "inappropriate" names. American courts were split, for instance, over whether it was acceptable for an appellant to legally change his name to 'Santa Claus'. The judge who initially denied him the right to do so wrote movingly: "The history of Santa Claus — the North Pole, the elves, Mrs. Claus, reindeer — is a treasure that society passes on from generation to generation, and the petitioner seeks to take not only the name of Santa Claus, but also to take on the identity of Santa Claus" . My responses to this are multiple. First of all, does anyone really give a fuck about Mrs Claus? Her role in the rich pageantry of Santa Claus seems minimal at best. Secondly, everyone knows her real name is 'Mary Christmas'. Thirdly, it seems unfair to state that the appellant was seeking to "take on the identity of Santa Claus" as there appears absolutely no evidence from the court records that he intended to devote his life henceforth to the manufacture and delivery of crap plastic toys to children.

In conclusion of that matter, however, I am happy to say that another more right-thinking court ruled in favour of the applicant. Courts in general, in fact, appear to look upon name-change petitions with benign magnaminity. The name 'They', with no surname, got the stamp of approval; an animal-rights activist received thumbs-up on the designation 'Kentucky Fried Cruelty Dot Com'; Kiwi courts said 'no worries, mate' to 'Benson and Hedges' and 'Fish and Chips' for two lucky sets of twin babies.

But my favourite case is that of an American man called Darren Bean, who won the right from the courts to change his surname to Bean! (Bean! with an exclamation mark, to clarify.) The court accepted his impeccable reasoning, which ran as follows: "When saying his name, friends raise the pitch and the volume of their voices above their usual spoken tone." What a fantastic idea! The notion that you can *prescribe* the nature of your reception from others by means of the insertion of a punctuation mark: genius!

Many is the day, for instance, when I wake up consumed with existential doubt and quite fancy petitioning the courts to change my name to 'Bec?' Then people would greet me with that note of inherent uncertainty: 'Bec?', they would say, and I would shrug indifferently, as if to respond 'Who knows, really?' On other days, however, those days when I spring out of bed and remind myself just how gargantuan my brain is by means of the MRI printout I keep under my pillow, I would like to be known as 'Bec.' 'Bec.' Proud, confident, steadfast, resolute in my ontology: that's what that full-stop screams to the world. Bec.

I have lots more to say about all this, but I will leave you wanting and expecting more. That's in keeping with the fact that tomorrow I am applying for the legal right to change my name to Bec,

Rest In Peace, Muffin

2008-06-02T17:40:00.000-07:00

My cat died yesterday. I freakin' loved that cat. Muffin (and yes, that was her name, and no, that is not an invitation to spew forth lesbian sex-jokes) may have looked like any other tortoiseshell tabby, but beneath her demure exterior beat the heart of a tiger. A tiger consumed by pure evil.

Muffin's erratic moodswings seemed to be increasingly conditioned by the moon's cycles as she grew older, giving credence to the notion that her spirit was not of this earth. When the moon waxed full, you knew to stay the fuck out of Muffin's way. Her preferred pastime at this point of the month (and women who suffer from particularly intense PMS may want to jot down a few tips) was to lurk behind doors or in dim corridors, emitting sinister growls, and when you passed by she would let out a banshee-like screech and ankle-tap you with a savagery that frequently drew blood.

Sometimes she would simply sit alone in the dark and howl, a terrifying, preternatural feline keening that induced goosebumps on anyone in earshot. At one particularly awesome stage of Muffin's epic life, she grew a single fang, protruding from her upper lip. It was as if the deep malice which permeated her soul had finally sprung into corporeal manifestation. Then it fell out, which sucked.

Our family dog, Jumble, who is a bumbling fool of a creature who closely resembles the progeny of a night of passion between a Mohair rug and a demented sheep, learned to keep his distance. Muffin would calmly stroll into the kitchen nightly and eat every scrap of Jumble's daily food rations, while he stood by and whined ineffectually. When she had finished, she would yawn and lick her chops meaningfully in his direction, before loping out swishing her tail insouciantly in his face.

Because Muffin was so unarguably cool-as-fuck, though, she found herself also fending off the amorous advances of every other animal who has at one stage or another constituted my family's motley menagerie. Benjy, a long-eared grey rabbit, would thump his way after Muffin around our garden and whenever she came to a halt, proceed to *hump* her in a style so indescribably obscene that I still reget not videoing it and selling the tape on the internet. Fred, our deranged tortoise, would creep after her in a stealthy reptilian manner which spoke of similarly base carnal aspiration, although it was unclear, logistically speaking, in what precise fashion he intended to have his tortoisey way with her.

It seemed unfair that Muffin spent much of her time irritably batting off these interspecies rapists, because it was obvious that all she wished for was a quiet life. Her two great loves were basking in the sun and daintily sipping water from the swimming-pool, two activities in which I was always happy to join her. Once, while deeply absorbed in ingesting her daily chlorine, she misjudged her distance and toppled headfirst into the pool. I have never seen a dog's tail wag with more ferocious enthusiasm than Jumble's at that moment.

Muffin, my little feline friend, I shall miss you. I hope your behaviour in that great cattery in the sky is characterised by as much wanton badness as your time on earth.

Cry, The Beloved Beer Ad

2008-05-26T07:27:00.001-07:00

I am a sentimental fool when it comes to South Africa. I generally approach my homeland's issues with all the critical acuity of a maudlin expatriate Irishman ten Guinnesses to the wind on St Patrick's Day. My favourite thing to do late at night is to youtube South African beer commercials from the mid-90s, and weep into a glass of finest Drakensberg Pinotage* while staring out into the interminable English drizzle.

(*Note for South Africans: SA wines are routinely repackaged here as emanating from areas in South Africa which have never seeded a single grape. I was musing on the weirdness of that just the other night while tucking into a fruity and precocious Mitchell's Plain Merlot.)

In this kind of behaviour I am entirely typical of the vast majority of South Africans I know here. My friend Rebecca told me the following story, which she heard from a prominent South African economist (A) who was at Oxford with a prominent South African activist (B) in the early 90s. A walked into her college common-room to find B suffused with laughter watching a news programme on the white supremacist leader Eugene Terre'blanche. B (who is black) turned to A and said "You know what? I have more in common with that guy than all these Oxford fuckers put together."

It is, in some regards, a touching anecdote. And, to be honest, it possibly says more about the alienation of Oxford graduate life than anything meaningful about South African identity. But it is also, obviously, bizarre, and not a little disturbing. What exactly would B have in common with Eugene Terre'blanche, a racist nutcase, other than a shared topographical context?

Well, clearly the importance of the psychic pull of that topography can't be underestimated. South Africa, as everyone knows, is a land of great natural beauty. I've lost track of how many foreigners have tut-tutted to me something along the lines of "It's terrible what's happening to South Africa, isn't it? Such a beautiful country...", as if spectacular physical aesthetics render humanitarian concerns more poignant and forceful. (This is, of course, a phenomenon amply demonstrated throughout human history, most recently in England when no-one could muster up quite the same degree of anguish for missing-schoolgirl Shannon Matthews as for the Madeleine McCann hysteria, mainly on the basis of Maddie being that much cuter.)

White South Africans are particularly obsessed with nice landscape. Again, I'm as guilty as anyone. I stare out over Cape Town and I don't think: "My, how the brutal narrative of illegitimate appropriation and displacement is inscribed in gutwrenching depth upon this blighted scenery". Instead, I think: "Fuck me, the mountain looks pretty when the sun strikes it on that one spot. Also, my drink is empty. What's with the service in this city?"

Lately I've been toying with the thought that my affection for South Africa, as a conceptual entity, may ultimately amount to nothing more profound than an appreciation of its geographical features. This isn't a very nice feeling, but I feel duty-bound to express it, in keeping with the searing honesty you have come to expect from this blog. But really, what else does it come down to? It is obviously meaningless to say "I love South Africans". I don't. I love about 50 of them, tops, but don't tell the other 300 on my Facebook friend-list. It drives me mad when people say "The people back home are just so much friendlier". What they really mean is, "Back home, I have friends." When people say, "I'm feeling homesick", what they mean 98% of the time is "I miss the people I know in South Africa", or perhaps at a stretch, "I miss sitting drinking affordably-priced wine in a sunny and attractive locale with the people I know in South Africa".

I just wish we'd be more honest about this stuff. Sometimes being a South African at Oxford feels like you're in an endless competition to see who can one-up the others in performing the most exaggerated pantomime of Afro-Optimism, manifested largely by knowing all the words to the latest Freshlyground CD and festooning one's person from top to toe with Rainbow Nation-branded apparel. (I myself regularly wake up in the morning here and slip into a full-length ballgown hand-stitched for me by the Khoisan from an enormous South African flag using grasses and reeds plucked from the summit of Table Mountain.)

Because, when I'm not youtubing beer commercials, I am grappling with serious issues of national identity and belonging at the moment, I looked up the words to Thabo Mbeki's famous 'I am an African' speech. It is an undeniably beautiful text, although bits of it feel suspiciously as if they were spat out by some computer algorithm after feeding it the collected works of Alan Paton, Isak Dinesen, and Laurens van der Post. One particularly dubious line: "At times, and in fear, I have wondered whether I should concede equal citizenship of our country to the leopard and the lion, the elephant and the springbok, the hyena, the black mamba and the pestilential mosquito." Ho hum, Thabo. I challenge you to find me a South African who is not a game-ranger who has *ever* "wondered in fear" whether she should give over her home to allow leopards free reign. Personally I wouldn't be able to pick a leopard out of a police line-up of Big Cats. Also, OBVIOUSLY we shouldn't "concede them equal citizenship". It would take bloody ages to teach them to grip a pen in their paws to mark an X on a ballot sheet.

Anyway, as I read through it I wondered how many of the statements I'd be able to proclaim to myself with sincerity while looking in the mirror. The answer to that is: depressingly few. I quite clearly am not "the grandchild of the warrior men and women that Hintsa and Sekhukhune led" , and it would be equally untrue to pretend that I am "the grandchild who lays fresh flowers on the Boer graves at St Helena and the Bahamas". All things considered, it was an exercise in profound ontological uncertainty.

But then I remembered what Chinua Achebe - who doesn't muck around with Mbeki's questionable theories of genetic inheritance - has said in the past: that Africanness "is partly a matter of passports, of individual volition and particularly of seeing from that perspective". I cheered up after that reminder, since that all seems vague enough to consider all the boxes checked. And then I put on The Greatest Hits of Johnny Clegg, and munched some biltong I ordered off the internet, and I felt the comfortingly bittersweet ache of homesickness settle upon me once more.

Why Soporific is Terrific!

2008-05-17T06:00:00.000-07:00

My housemate Adam suggested to me two days ago in a tone of apparently sincere concern that I may suffer from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. "Nah, I'm just lazy," I replied, since I couldn't be bothered to consider the question more deeply. "No, really," he said. "I was reading about it the other day and they said that people often confuse the symptoms of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome with mere apathy."

Well, this news perked me up no end. The thought that I might have some kind of fashionable hipster disease to blame for my incessant need to nap invigorated me to the extent that I delayed my next sleep for a full fifteen minutes while dreamily considering the implications.

The fact of the matter is, my desire for sleep is unending. Insatiable. I have only met a few people in my life who share the same somnoleptic* hunger, and as a result we have such a deep soul-understanding - and such compatible daily schedules - that I know we will be friends for life, even though the time we spend together while fully conscious may be limited.

I just love to sleep. I like sleeping more than anything else in the world other than drinking and sex and riding my soon-to-be-acquired Segway. If there were a way to combine all four activities - which may well be hazardous, but I intend to investigate - I would exist in a state of transcendental euphoria at all times.

There is literally no time of day at which I could not be comfortably asleep within 5 minutes. No time of day, and no location. Beagle confessed to me recently that she frequently leaves her high-powered corporate job during lunch-breaks to take a nap in the backseat of her car. I could not empathise more. During a brief and exhausting period of employment last year, I was fortunate enough to be working in an office featuring an abundance of fluffy beanbags and luxurious sofas. Every lunch, my colleagues would leave the office and traipse into town to collect foodstuffs or talk about the credit crunch or do whatever people do during office lunch-breaks. I would politely decline their repeated requests for me to join them (OKAY OKAY! They never asked. They hated me. But the point still stands), waiting in quivering anticipation for the door to close behind them, and then take a running jump for the nearest couch and its beckoning catatonia. 55 minutes of deep and restful slumber later, the door would suddenly re-open and I would be forced to jerk myself upright while wiping the drool from the cushions and adopting a facial expression of manic, grim alertness akin to someone on a three-day amphetamine bender. It was worth it.

There are certain environments, to be sure, which by their nature are rendered more sleep-conducive than others. Cinemas, for instance, and Model-Theoretical Semantics seminars. With regards to the former: never, ever agree to watch a movie with me. You will get more engagement out of your empty popcorn tub. Regardless of length, genre, and grippingness of narrative, I will be dozing off as the opening titles scroll. You will exit 90 minutes of thrilling horror-film white-faced and shuddering. I will stroll out alongside pleasantly rested, yawning and stretching.

There are certain distinct advantages in life which accrue to one through being inordinately talented at napping. And yes, I do consider it a talent. People who manage to maintain wakefulness throughout the day, in an unhealthy and android-like fashion, evince a distinct sense of superiority about this fact. I have no idea why, but I attribute it to pure envy - since they perpetually have to find stuff to do, which must be very wearying. I, by contrast, never have to seek out activity of any kind, and am consequently never bored.

But if we unpack this a little more, I think we'll find that I am also just generally a *better* person, empirically-speaking, and I owe it all to sleep. Viz: I am relentlessly cheerful, since napping makes me so very happy; and I also almost never commit violent crime, since I am safely tucked up in bed instead. As the Good Book says: the sleepy shall inherit the kingdom of heaven.

*This is not actually a word. But it should be. I'd write to the dictionary and suggest it, but that seems awfully tiring.

I'm Bringing Segway Back

2008-05-15T16:01:00.001-07:00

I have been informed by concerned friends that my engagement with the Fritzl case has crossed that fine line between "quirky interest" and "spinechillingly creepy obsession". My absorption in this story and related matters is not helped by the fact that my sister appears to have found some English TV channel dedicated to screening round-the-clock documentaries devoted to rehashing comparably perverse cases from history, so I routinely get late-night texts from her urging me to "google 'girl in the box' " or similar. (Seriously, you should google 'girl in the box'. Out of common decency and Gandhi-like restraint I will forbear from giving the details here, but, well, do yourself a favour.)

So I will not discuss Josef Fritzl and his offspring any more. Instead, in a seamless narrative segue, I would like to talk about the Segway.

The reason I have been thinking about the Segway recently - although, in truth, it is never far from my mind - is that I was informed that the guest speaker at an Oxford ball last weekend was the inventor of the Segway (an individual who had been previously described to me by Cristina as "some boring douchebag who spoke about the environment"). My response to this news was one of frantic excitement, which Cristina found bemusing. "Who cares that much about the Segway?", was, I believe, her response. ME! That's who. I care about the Segway, dammit. I care deeply.

The Segway, for those of you who have been living under a rock, and are probably the same people who are utterly unconversant with the finer details of the 'girl in the box' case, is the alternative mode of transport invented by American Dean Kamen and released in an atmosphere of breathless anticipation in 2001. It is a two-wheeled electric vehicle which moves forward in response to the user's leaning stance.

I have helpfully included above a small picture of a daredevil riding a Segway HARD. You can tell that he means business because he is wearing a helmet to protect himself against the high-speed pile-ups which frequently result from the use of Segways in urban centres, and also because the blurred background of the photograph indicates the dizzying velocity at which he is zipping through the city streets.

In truth, this picture takes certain distinct liberties with the cold, hard facts of Segway use. Namely, that their top speed is roughly equivalent to that of a dying hedgehog crawling towards a ditch, and that they are illegal to use pretty much anywhere that is not a theme-park or the set of Arrested Development.

It would be more accurate to say, in fact, that the picture represents the popular fantasy of the Segway's future immediately prior to its release. I vividly recall the suspense before its unveiling. After all, this was the follow-up invention from the man who brought us a wheelchair that can climb stairs! A freakin' wheelchair that can climb stairs!! Dean Kamen, to quote that dude in The Castle, is an Ideas Man.

The day when the Segway was unleashed upon the public was one of the most thrilling of my life. "This will change everything!" I babbled to anyone who would listen. "Bring on the complete overhaul of urban transport systems!" What we were seeing, I believed, was nothing less than a mobile revolution. Man, I was on the verge of selling my worldly possessions (total inventory circa 2001: 1 x hubbly-bubbly and an awesome Zippo-branded ashtray I stole from an undergrad drinking-hole) to buy shares in that shit.

In this assessment I was, of course, not alone. Dean Kamen himself predicted that the Segway "will be to the car what the car was to the horse and buggy". Which, in light of the Segway's spectacular failure, is a bit like me saying "my thesis will be to academia what academia was to scratching in the dirt with twigs".

Because yes, let's not kid, the Segway has failed. It has bombed on an epic scale. They have sold 30, 000 of them to date, in the course of seven years. I'm no mathematician, but that's like three a year.

The reasons for this monumental fuck-up are, with the unflinching clarity of hindsight, not terribly hard to see. The fundamental issue is that nobody, and I do mean nobody, is ever going to look sexy gently perambulating down the road on a Segway. James Dean would look dorky on a Segway. Imagine trying to pick up chicks armed only with a Segway? "Hey baby. Want a ride home? Yeah, those wheels are mine. Pretty pimpin' machine, huh? Hold on tight, now - oh, and I hope you don't live more than ten metres down the pavement, because this'll probably take a couple hours."

And yet, despite this all, I retain a passionate and utterly irrational conviction in the potential of the Segway. I want a Segway reeeeal bad. Part of the reason for my unwavering affection towards this inconceivably nerdy transport-form is that I find its *name* so utterly perfect. It represents brand-naming brilliance. "Segway", from its homophone "segue": a smooth transition. Isn't that FANTASTIC? I'm not being remotely ironic here. Whoever named the Segway needs a special prize, like a rosette or something, or a mug saying 'World's Greatest Namer'.

Anyway, my Segway purchase is going to set me back 4000 squideroos, so feel free to make small or gigantic contributions towards the fund. I promise to take you for a spin when it arrives. And I think we understand that I use the term "spin" loosely.

The Hills Are Alive With The Sound of Incest

2008-05-01T03:52:00.001-07:00

I think I speak for us all, at the moment, when I say the only matter of current global import I am able to focus on for more than 30 sustained seconds at a time is the Zimbabwean election results.

JOKES!

Obviously what I'm really talking about is the case of Josef Fritzl, that Austrian man who kept his daughter in an underground cellar for 24 years and impregnated her 7 times.

When these kinds of stories break, I always find it best to bypass the legitimate news sources altogether - the stuffy old Guardians, the Independents, the Timeses - and go straight for the tabloids, who always helpfully fill in the narrative blanks by just making shit up, which is what you really want anyway.

As example, with regards to the Fritzl case: those forms of media which foolishly rely on the old-school journalistic techniques of fact-gathering and quoting people who have some actual involvement in the case, have stated that the two children kept in the cellar for the last few decades are "remarkably well-educated and well-mannered". How frightfully dull! Who wants to read about two Von Trapp-style youngsters, neatly pressed and combed and never forgetting their bittes and dankes?

The tabloids have gone with a far more thrilling version of events, and created two monstrous, hunchbacked, feral/mole-spawn creatures, toothless and gurning, blinking through their slitty red eyes at the unfamiliar light, communicating in unintelligible growls and probably smearing their faecal matter all over the walls of whatever private clinic is currently hosting them. Now THAT'S more like it.

The Sun has, as always, been particularly helpful in this regard. They printed an assortment of snaps from Josef Fritzl's album of his 1998 holiday to Thailand (a rockin' good time, incidentally). Lest you forget, for two seconds, that what we are dealing with here is a PSYCHO, they helpfully captioned each photo with a tagline like: "DEPRAVED: Josef Fritzl goes windsurfing". "DERANGED: Josef Fritzl about to participate in poolside bingo". And my favourite, in response to a photo of Josef Fritzl consuming what appears to be a fairly modest dinner: "SICKO: Josef Fritzl gorges on Thai food". By the end of clicking through each one I had been worked into such righteous RAGE and REVULSION that it was a physical effort to prevent myself rounding up a neighbourhood lynch-mob and going after suspected paedos with a pitchfork.

The tabloids have been given substantial aid in this regard by the mugshot of Fritzl doing the rounds. You know the one: his bristly eyebrow tilted sardonically; a lopsided grimace; grey hair standing at manic angles. As my dear friend Beagle so rightly put it, "that photo does him no favours". If they were circulating a snap of him all done up in his Sunday best for the Vienna Volkmusik Festival I dare say we'd think he looks quite sweet, actually.

You gots to feel for the Austrians, hey. We all forgave them for the minor blip of giving birth to one A. Hitler because of all the other nice stuff, like Mozart and foot-tappin' waltzes and The Sound of Music. But to produce Josef Fritzl so close on the back of Wolfgang Priklopil (the dude who kept Natasha Kampusch in his basement for 8 years) - well, to misquote Oscar Wilde, that smacks of carelessness.

Now please excuse me, I must get back to trawling the internet for information about the 7th kid whose body Fritzl disposed of in an incinerator.

Child-Prodigy Prostitutes, Pregnant Men, and Primordial Dwarves: Oh, What A Wonderful World

2008-04-28T07:24:00.000-07:00

Blogosphere, I'm back! And oh, how good it feels to be cradled once again in your tender maternal embrace. Over the past few weeks, my urge to address you has been so strong that at one stage it became necessary for me to gnaw off my right arm to prevent myself entering this URL. This proved shortsighted, as I then had to stickytape a chopstick to the bloodied stump in order to complete typing my thesis. But desperate times, desperate measures.

So many wonderful and profound thoughts have struck me over the past month that I wished to share with ye, blogosphere. In particular, I have been obsessed with three main issues which I am now forced to condense into one wholly unsatisfactory blog-compendium, but it seems to me that the urgency of conveying them outweighs considerations of style or aesthetics. Here goes.

Fascinating thing #1: Sufiah Yusof.
In brief: English child-prodigy, joint youngest person to be accepted to Oxford to read mathematics, aged 12, eventually ditched her degree and ran away, claiming her father had kept his kids under reign of terror including no heating in the house so they didn't become warm and complacent. Ten years later (a few weeks ago), News of The World journalist goes undercover/ engages in normal weekend activities, and discovers her working as prostitute in Birmingham. Tabloids claim she recites equations to drive men wild in bed; similarly unlikely suggestion that she brings Maths problems along to solve before appointments.
Why you should google it: Yusof's story has provided hitherto unrealised opportunity for sexist tabloid journalists to compose weak mathematical puns along the lines of "Maths genius calculates that subtracting her underpants equals big money".
Moral of the story: If you want your kids to turn out clever, keep 'em on their toes by depriving them of heat. And affection.

Fascinating thing #2: Thomas Beattie.
In brief: The pregnant man. Pictured above. It's the age-old classic love story: Woman meets woman, woman becomes man, man becomes pregnant. Goes on Oprah to prove to the world that it's not a hoax; close-ups of manly stubble and bulging pecs juxtaposed with swollen belly. Complains about lack of maternity clothes for men. Oprah's response (wide-eyed, slack-jawed facial expressions, turning to audience in chummy consternation) is a master-class in othering, but bless her for trying.
Why you should google it: This changes EVERYTHING! It's now a semantic possibility to speak of a "pregnant man"! What's that noise? Oh, it's the sound of rigid gender binaries collapsing all around. Or not. Since straight, gay and trans communities unite in disapproval and general revulsion.
Moral of the story: You can't have your cake and eat it, apparently.

Fascinating thing #3: Primordial Dwarves.
In brief: The smallest people in the world. I watched a documentary on them the other day and have been hooked ever since. They're a special sub-category of dwarves (only 100 in the world), who only come up to your knee and weigh about 10kgs in maturity. Those at school have special minders to stop them being trampled. They live in fear of dogs, which to them represent a threat approximately equivalent to a normal-sized person facing down a grizzly bear.
Why you should google them: Forgive me for this in advance. But they're just so goddamn cute.
Moral of the story: Think you're having a bad day? At least you can reach door-handles.

Much A-Doo-Doo About Nothing

2008-03-31T08:49:00.000-07:00

Sometimes when I'm feeling a little down I think back to classic situation-comedies like Who's The Boss, or The Cosby Show, and I feel a warm glow of nostalgia. These shows represent a simpler, more innocent, pre-9/11 time. Where men were men, and wore patterned sweaters with pride. Where women were wives and mothers, and tutted indulgently at their menfolk's little quirks while their incorrigible but adorable kids ran amok nearby. The kind of shows where writers could spin an entire episode out of the comedic scenario of coaxing your child to do its homework. They were all so huggable, you know, and lived in these nice warm worlds which echoed with laughter once every 10 seconds. Yes, in many ways those were better times. Nowadays you can barely turn on the TV without being confronted by the sight of a woman wearing trousers, or a gay running for president, or some other abomination against God and nature.

But in retrospect, these sitcoms weren't very amusing, actually. If I had to sit through 30 minutes of the Huxtable family's twee suburban saga right now I doubt I'd even crack a smile. But back in the early 90s they sure seemed funny, right? And this is what has led me to formulate this week's modest hypothesis, which I am tentatively calling the Davis Historical Progression-Funniness Index , or DHPFI for short.

Before I reveal the DHPFI in all its intricacy, let me first clarify: I am no believer in the notion that human society is engaged in one long inexorable upwards trajectory of Progress. I think tons of stuff today is worse than it used to be, like the fact that in England you can no longer take photos at your kids' school play in case you're a paedo and are going home to crack one off over your digicam piccies of other people's children. But what the DHPFI proposes is that there is a direct, unmistakable correlation between chronological advancement and the evolution of humour. Humour is one of the few aspects of contemporary human culture that I can point to and say 'Look! We're still evolving!' In fact, this should be one of the major arguments cited against creationism, since we all know there aren't many other convincing ones out there.

As my principle piece of evidence for this thesis, I have two words for you: Shakespearean "Comedy". Because, let's face it, Shakespeare is about the least funny stuff in the world other than being slapped in the face with a wet newspaper. Anyone who so much as weakly chuckles at the 'funny bits' in Shakespeare is just pretending so that people will think they understand all the thou's and ye's and perchances. My primary objection is not to the full-length comedies themselves, though these are still about as far from funny as I am from finishing my thesis, which is to say an unbridgeable, chasmic distance. No, the worst is the 'humorous relief' in the tragedies. The fools, the jesters, the watchmen, the irascible peasants, all of whom draw heavily on the rich comedic domains of drunkenness, rustic stupidity, and that good old Shakespearean fallback: confused identity.

I mean honestly, you would have thought by the time Wills was churning out his seventh straight play in a row premised on the hilariousness of people falling in love with other people thinking that they're really someone else, Anne Hathaway or someone would've said something. It must have been an awful strain on Anne when William insisted on reading her the drafts of his latest opus by the hearth while she was busy weaving or spinning (which were the only two subtly-differentiated leisure pursuits available to chicks in the fourteenth century other than milking and churning). Imagine the pressure to respond appropriately to the latest blindingly-obvious identity-confusion plot-twist - "What speakest thou to me, William? Gadzooks! Not a sire at all, but a damsel, verily! That getteth me every time!" - while secretly rolling her eyes and making retching noises behind his back.

Anyway, the point is that back in the day, people found Shakespeare plays to be just diaphragm-shatteringly amusing. The Globe Theatre *rocked* with laughter nightly. People staggered out of there clutching their aching sides and thanking the heavens they remembered to bring a fresh pair of underwear to change into during the interval. They simply could not get enough of how funny Shakespeare was. The mere mention of his *name* would set people roaring and mopping their eyes while they thought about the unparalleled slapstick of the garter-incident in Twelfth Night, or that thigh-slapping graveyard scene in Hamlet, or the crude earthy wit of the saucy Nurse in R&J and all her risque talk of tupping and coupling and making the beast with two backs. (Frankly, I blush just typing those words. Humour-wise, he was an envelope-pusher, old Shakespeare.)

But, as I've mentioned, a few hundred years later and suddenly Shakespeare's about as funny as your dad when he's "bantering" with your friends when you're 13. Why? Shakespeare's themes, as English teachers mutter to themselves nightly in their sleep, are universal; his comedic sources are unchanged in western society - people still have sex, people still get drunk, people are still stupid, and people still mistake other people's genders, at least in certain dimly-lit nightclubs of Soho and Sea Point. So what's changed?

This is where the Davis Historical Progression-Funniness Index leaps into the breach to provide answers with all the logical neatness of a latterday Occam's Razor, or Pascal's Wager, or Finkelstein's Cheeseboard. Simply put, as time goes on, our collective sense of humour just gets better.

Shakespeare is far from the only exemplar of the 'historically-funny-stuff-isn't-actually-funny-at-all' syndrome. For much of the twentieth-century people *wept* with laughter watching the Chaplins and Laurel and Hardies hit each other and trip over stuff. Not funny. Then the advent of televisual sitcoms brought the previously unrivalled hilarity of shows like The Brady Bunch (not funny), or I Love Lucy (not funny), or Three's Company (not funny), or Roseanne (not generally funny). And then the graphs which accompany my small monograph setting out the DHPFI in full suddenly spike, because humanity's previously embryonic "sense of humour" suddenly begins to flower in a delightful fashion, and we get The Simpsons, and Absolutely Fabulous, and - the unquestioned pinnacle of 90s sitcoms - Seinfeld. And now that we're in the twenty-first century, humanity's grip on what's funny has reached its dazzling apex - as manifested in Tina Fey's comedy series 30 Rock.

To be sure, there are still blips in the 'progression'. For every Family Guy, we still have to drag along some version of the world's most inaccurately-titled sitcom: Everybody Loves Raymond. But, all things considered, we're not doing badly.

The full PDF version of the DHPFI monograph is available on request for a small fee.

When Nerds Dream

2008-03-27T17:48:00.000-07:00

In the course of my thesis research I came across a news story I'd forgotten about. It's from October 2000 in South Africa, when the controversy over AIDS denialism was reaching its peak and Thabo Mbeki was accepting counsel from a panel of certified nutbags posing as dissident 'scientists'. The dissidents claimed not only that HIV did not cause AIDS, but that anti-retrovirals, in fact, were responsible for the inoculation of the constellation of disease we term 'AIDS'. And to attempt to prove the point, one of these crazies, the norious Californian David Rasnick, challenged a prominent South African public health doctor, Costa Gazi, to a "public experiment".

Rasnick's proposal was as follows: live on international television, Rasnick would be injected with "purified HIV". Simultaneously, Costa Gazi would begin a lifetime course of anti-retroviral medication. Then we, the public, would watch and wait to see which one lived longer and which one developed AIDS and died.

Gazi rejected the suggestion as "absurd", which is a pity, since the concept sounds a lot more gripping than The Biggest Loser South Africa . Endemol must've been gutted.

Anyway, this all reminded me of a little anecdote from 19th century Germany which pleases me every time I think about it. I consider it worth mentioning because when you get down to it, what Rasnick was proposing as "public experiment" was what they used to call in olden daysey times a "duel".

Otto von Bismarck had been offended by a prominent German physician, Rudolf Virchow, to the point where his honour was at stake, so he challenged Virchow to a duel. Virchow agreed - on the proviso that he could choose their weapons. When the two met up to duel, Virchow presented Bismarck with two identical-looking sausages. One had been contaminated with deadly cholera germs, and one was just a tasty piece of bratwurst. Virchow asked Bismarck to choose and eat one, and he would eat the other. Bismarck angrily declined and called off the duel.

Again, a pity.

I met a Bismarck the other day. A real-life descendant, I mean. She's studying to be a teacher at Oxford and simultaneously translating the Bible into some bizarre North African language that I have never heard of with the aid of a single dictionary. Which is a fairly creditable effort, I suppose, but doesn't really compare to the unification of Germany, does it?

Getting back to the far juicier topic of duellery, however: I live in hope that someone will someday challenge me to a duel and allow me to pick the weapons. I already have it planned. We will duel via the medium of Conflicting Proverbs. My opponent shall, perhaps, launch the attack with "Absence makes the heart grow fonder!" and I shall riposte with the rapier-thrust of "Out of sight, out of mind!". Then my foe might opt for the defensive "Too many cooks spoil the broth", which I will destroy with one scathing "Many hands make light work!", and so on and so forth till glorious victory.

I really need to get out more.

How The Grinch Stole Easter

2008-03-20T03:22:00.000-07:00

Beauty fans,

The title above is what we highly-trained scholars of language term a "Metaphor" in our specialised jargon. I am uniquely positioned to state authoritatively that it is a "Metaphor" because I am currently grinding out a thesis on "Metaphor". How the "Metaphor" in the title works is as follows: "The Grinch" represents the personification of "my thesis", and "Easter" stands in a metonymical relation with "the current generalised nightmare of my life".

I am holed up in a flat in South London, immersed in a special academic hell of my own creation. Yes, this thesis-writing is a turbulent business. Daily I run the gamut of human emotions from Y to Z, with Y indexing "suffocating despair", and Z denoting "mere seconds away from severing my femoral artery with the ready-sharpened edge of my USB stick".

I have absolutely no news to report other than the fact that late last night I was gnawing a pen ferociously as an ineffective tobacco substitute, and it exploded. The subsequent eruption was so spectacular that my hair is now sticking out in clumps matted with blue ink, which may be why no-one is sitting next to me in this internet cafe. It's a look I like to call Homeless Person Interrupted Rummaging Through Bins Outside Printer-Cartridge Factory.

I should mention that in order to compensate for this slight tonsorial eccentricity, I did spritz myself liberally with my sister's bottle of 'Unforgivable Woman' before I left her flat this morning. 'Unforgivable Woman' is P. Diddy's entry into the celebrity scent market, so now I smell like freshly-baked ho. Mmmmmmmm.

I must get back to thinking about "Metaphor" now, so I wish you all a wonderful Easter, and ask that you pray for my miraculous re-birth after painful thesis-related death. That is also a "Metaphor".

As my friend Helen is wont to say in her darker moments: "There's a reason 'theses' rhymes with 'faeces'".

Single And Completely Unwilling To Mingle

2008-03-15T11:25:00.001-07:00

I have a new favourite website, and I have Katherine to thank for introducing me to it. In fact, I have Katherine to thank for introducing me to many good things: the comedy series 30 Rock, for instance, and also the idea that turning 30 does not mean you have to have any semblance of a coherent life-plan. I hope to be exactly like Katherine when I am 30, and the good news is that I will have to change almost nothing about my current existence to achieve that. Anyway, the website is jezebel.com, and the article that had me in stitches is at http://jezebel.com/367416/can-you-live-alone-and-love-it.

It's about the re-issue of a book published in 1936 called Live Alone And Like It, which provided sensible tips for women in the unusual position (for that time) of living by themselves. Despite being 70 years old, the book seems packed with folksy wisdom - there's a chapter entitled 'The Lady and her Liquor', for instance. But what's so hilarious about the piece on the Jezebel website is not so much the article about the book, but the 317 comments posted afterwards from female readers giving suggestions for chapter titles for an updated advice guide for women living alone today. When I read it I felt a warm surge of love and solidarity for my fellow womankind, because so many of their experiences resonated so familiarly with every fibre of my being.

When women's (and men's) magazines publish articles on co-habiting (heterosexually-speaking) with one's partner, or even with platonic housemates of the opposite sex, the conventional wisdom is ALWAYS that it is men who leave their towels on the bathroom floor, and empty pizza-boxes and beer-bottles in the lounge, and dirty socks all over the bedroom. Anyone who reads that crap and buys into it probably believes that when women live alone, their apartments are pristine laboratory-like spaces, their wardrobes meticulously inventoried and colour-coded, their kitchens akin to those on offer at a Home Expo display, their bathrooms like something out of a detergent commercial. These same people probably envision these women getting home from a hard day's work or studies and preparing a small but tasty gourmet meal, laying a table for one with crisp linen and polished silverware, and scrubbing their kitchen spotless directly afterwards before perching on an uncomfortable but tastefully-selected chair for an improving read before bedtime.

Well, let me be the first to tell you: you dudes are on crack.

Look, no doubt such women do exist, and such men, too. But the overwhelming majority of the 300+ respondents to the article painted a very, very different picture about what living alone as a woman is like.

Thanks to reading them, for instance, I finally have a word to fill a much-lamented lexical gap in my vocabulary: floordrobe. A 'floordrobe', as you might guess, is what happens when you decide not to bother to hang your clothes in their designated space any more and simply select items to wear from a heap on the ground. The 'floordrobe' in my room at present IS my floor. There is no floor that is not also floordrobe. One woman took this a step further, writing:
"I am having serious issues with my floordrobe. Also floortrash, floorbookcase, and floorrigerator."

The eating habits of single women provided much fodder for suggested chapter titles. Proposals included:

"Every Room Is Your Dining Room"
"Dish Management: When To Attempt Wash - When To Just Throw Out"
"At Least Now There's No One Here to Mock my Plastic Animal 'Silver'ware"
"Nakedness While Eating Is Okay"
"So What If Half My Fridge Is Different Types of Mustard?"
"Eco-friendly vs. Pathetically Lazy: The Paper Plate Dilemma"

Many women expressed defiant pride in their leisure pursuits, none of which, it should be noted, included 'improving reads':

"If The TV Is On You Are Not Drinking Alone"
"The Well-Stocked Bedside Table: Weed, Lube, and a Butcher Knife"
"The Uninhibited Morning Dance Party While Brushing Your Teeth"
"The Joys of Listening To Your Shitty Early 90s R&B Without Your Man Giving You Shit About It," see also: "Coming-of-Age Movie Marathon"
"Drunk Alone - Hide Your Phone"; followed by
"Throwing Up - Wastebasket vs Toilet, When to Make the Trip" ; followed by
"The Morning After - Remembering Where You Hid your Phone"
"Wanna Sleep All Weekend? No Problem"
"Hell, Yes, I'm Watching Top Model"

And here's an assortment of other suggested chapter titles i found miscellaneously hilarious:

"Maybe You're Single Because You Are A Fucking Dyke"
"Asking your Cat's Opinion - How Much is Too Much"
"Hide Your Extra Pillows: How to Get Those One-Night Stands to Leave After the Fucking so You Don't Have to Cuddle All Night and You Can Get Your Beauty Sleep"
"Managing Low Expectations: Train Your Family to Call Before Visiting"
"Late-Night-Lovers" part two: "Oh,Pizza Boy!"
"If You Don't Like My Taste In Creepy Nude Artwork, We Don't Have to Have Sex"
"Why Does My Bathroom Have This Door?"

Of course, it's not all about the fun and games of eating icecream naked while slugging vodka and watching reality TV. Many of these women evinced profound fears about safety concerns attendant with living alone - even though the majority are clearly from the States. (I come from the murder-and-rape capital of the world so I reserve the right to scoff at the paranoia of any other country's citizens, unless you're Columbian.) For example:

"There Is Not an Ax-Murderer In Your Apartment, I Promise"
"Not Thinking About Horror Movies While Showering - A Tutorial"
"Buy Yourself a Pistol and Learn How to Shoot It" and its sister-cousin "Your Friend, the Folding Hunting Blade"
"Someone is Totally Going to Break In and Kill You in the Middle of the Night So Don't Leave Anything Embarassing Out that May Besmirch your Memory When your Family Comes to Clean Out Your Apartment After the Funeral Lest Everyone Find Out what a Freak You Truly Were"
"Don't Be A Moron and Let An Intruder Take Your Gun Away From You and Shoot You With It...Drop That Fucker As He Walks In The Door"

and someone else commented: "I sleep with a hatchet under my bed and a machete by the door. I kick it Rwanda style."

The age-old single-woman fear of choking to death on an uncooked hotdog and having your dog eat your face off three days later as you decompose on the floor also came up a lot. One woman offered this kind reassurance:
"For those worried about choking to death-- there is a DIY heimlich maneuver that requires the back of a chair or a table corner."

But personally I found this the most fitting response to that particular fear:
"Choking to death and having a pet eat my face? Well, I died the way I lived."

I do not live alone, although many of my bewilderingly-tolerant past and present housemates would probably testify to the fact that I behave as if I did most of the time. In fact, I have only experienced solitary living for one six-month period in 2003, when my housemate moved out half-way through the year (for reasons unconnected to my lax approach to personal grooming, I must stress). But boy, was that glorious, because then I got to use HIS old bedroom as my "floordrobe" IN ADDITION to my own! Ahhhh...

You can't put a price on adequate floordrobe space.

In Which Bec Is Academically Ruined, But Savours The Sweet Nectar of Friendship

2008-03-13T05:25:00.000-07:00

I have had a bad week. Maybe one of the worst of my tender young life, which in the greater Rwandan-genocide scheme of things is probably only a reflection of the cosseted existence I have led thus far. The week’s crapness is the result of an administrative academic nightmare which I won’t go into here, partly because it is extremely uninteresting, partly because I will vomit if I have to consider it once more today, and partly because you probably all already know, since I am a complete sympathy whore and in the hope of eliciting comforting responses have told literally anyone who would stay still long enough to listen, including Big Issue vendors and the Pakistani man I buy my rolling tobacco from.

Please excuse the pukiness of what is about to come. I promise tomorrow I shall be back to blogging about how I torture puppies in my spare time and kick old ladies in the shins when they ask me to help them across the road. But on the note of the paragraph above, what I must say is the most enormous THANK YOU to all of you reading this who attempted to cheer me up about my current mess in your own special ways. You truly are the most wonderful friends in the world, and I found your reactions more touching than I can say.

Here is a selection of email responses to my crisis which I considered particularly hilarious:

It is as if there is this little cracked-up fairy from Hades cursing your every move!!

Can’t you get a back-dated sick note?

Just hand it in with a cupcake stapled to it.

Couldn't like Adam represent you?

uh oh. um, that's bad.

I thought maybe I'd reply and be all lighthearted about it and try to make you feel better, but kinda hit a blank.

And my personal favourite, scoring so high in the empathy stakes and so spectacularly low in the it’s-not-that-bad-really stakes:

This is truly the most horrific academic story I have ever heard. I realise this is not comforting in any way, but I am staggered, STAGGERED, by the awfulness of it.

At one point in the course of what history will record as ‘Black Tuesday’, I had decided that if I wasn’t finished writing by a certain time, the only sensible course of action seemed to be to pretend to kill myself and have Cristina pretend to find me. Well, *really* find me, actually, so that I wouldn’t actually die. I decided that my mode of pretend-suicide would be to pretend-eat a cyanide-injected apple. That’s because at that particularly dire point of the night I was reading a serious academic article on how the Apple computer company pushes their covert patriarchal agenda by means of their symbolically-laden logo, heavily resonant with Biblical notions of female guilt and shame, and the author went on to mention that troubled but brilliant computer scientist Allan Turing chose to kill himself by eating a cyanide-injected apple, and is this mere coincidence? I THINK NOT!!

To conclude, since this is rapidly spiralling into nonsense in precisely the same manner enacted by the academic product I have just submitted, I need to mention that I quite literally owe my LIFE to Cristina. I phoned her directly after i found out the extent of my troubles, almost speechless with panic, and was calmly told to meet her in town. After she put down the phone, she did the following, all without any prompting:

- phoned my academic department to get a more coherent idea of the situation and its possible outcomes;
- met me at a library where she took out 20 books in her name because they won't let me borrow any till I have settled my astronomical fines;
- while I went to seek counsel from my college advisor, she took my keys, returned to her house, and packed an overnight bag with every possible academic resource that she possessed that could be of use to me;
- went to a shop and bought me my body-weight's worth of chocolate, energy drinks and sandwiches;
- arrived at my house before me, via taxi because she was so burdened with provisions, and cleaned my lounge to prepare an appropriately well-ordered working space;
- sat up working with me virtually the entire night even though her own stuff has to be about ten words long and is due in a month;
- told me the lamest Greek jokes and the naaaastiest sex stories you've ever heard to distract me from intermittent sobbing fits;
- repeatedly informed me that I was a complete mentalist when I confessed my fear that in a court-room situation all 7 of my previous employers in Oxford from jobs I have left under varying clouds of disgrace will testify to the fact that I am a trainwreck of a human being;
- woke up at the crack of dawn to painstakingly proof-read my paper and give suggestions for improvement;
- and then did NOT punch me in the face when i announced that I couldn’t submit my work and had to take another 24 hours.

Cristina, may every disorganised fool in the world have a friend like you. Exharisto polu, filia mou.

Now I am going to sleep and I may be some time.

This Blog-Post Will Change Your Life

2008-03-09T15:55:00.000-07:00

I accepted the commission for tonight's blog-post from my housemate, so if you find it to be sub-par, blame him. Personally I blame Adam for practically everything, including the death of Christ and the cancellation of "Arrested Development", so feel free to do likewise. I asked him what I should blog about as he was sprinkling parmesan on to one of his gourmet snacks, and he said "Write about the moral conflict that ensues when you accept a job at a company whose corporate philosophy directly clashes with your personal ideologies." I said, "Er, who wants to read about THAT? Also, not *everyone* takes holiday internships at Halliburton, Adam."

"You're right, as always," he responded. (Actually he said nothing of the kind, but I'm not quite done mining the rich comedic seam of putting words into his mouth.) "Also, I am a big homo."

Okay, what he really said was, "Fine, why don't you blog about why Germans are so weirdly obsessed with baby polar bears." Now THAT sounded sufficiently trivial for me to devote hours of research to, so I rolled up my sleeves and got down to it. I started off looking up Knut, the polar bear cub in a German zoo who became an international celebrity last year; and my intention was to move from Knut to the latest apple of the Teutonic eye, a new pup called Flocke. But when I saw the photos of Knut I lost the ability to do anything but stare dreamily at my screen emitting gurgling whimpers of adoration, because fuck me, that bear is cute. I mean like off-the-charts cute. Take the cutest thing you've ever seen in the world, and multiply it by the power of cute times infinity, and you are still no closer to comprehending the epic scale of Knut's cuteness. So I no longer care to consider the question of why the Germans are so weirdly obsessed with baby polar bears, because I reject the "weirdly". I too am now obsessed with baby polar bears, and may in fact move to Hamburg shortly to be among my own kind.

(As an aside, the consideration of matters cute-related got me thinking about those grotesque Anne Geddes posters. You know the ones I mean, with pictures of courtyards filled with hundreds of babies sleeping in flower-pots with watermelon skins on their heads. I find these to be the antithesis of cute. In fact, *bloodcurdlingly* creepy and disturbing. I would rather hang Hieronymous Bosch's most gory nightmare scene over my mantelpiece than an Anne Geddes poster. But the weird thing is that the other night I was in the dorm room of an Oxford graduate student, a strapping young Englishman in his mid-20s who appeared in every other way the epitome of normal healthy masculinity, and he had THAT POSTER stuck above his bed. Without evident irony.

When I saw it I was instantly rendered incapable of making polite conversation because my mind was too busy whirring away at the question of what on earth possessed him to proudly adorn his walls with that monstrosity. I have decided that he possibly hopes for it to fulfil a 'chick-magnet' function; that if he succeeds in luring some young hussy up to his room, she will clap eyes on the flower-pot-babies and instantly assume that he is sweet and sensitive and wants to breed, and promptly rip all her clothes off. He's silly though, because everyone knows that the real chick-magnet is a pet pig. My friend Oliver had one once and he got so much ass it wasn't funny.)

So after I rejected Adam's second suggestion, he made a third: that I talk about fake memoirs.

Just so you know, I could provide a riveting in-depth interrogation of the phenomenon of 'fake memoirs'. I've read James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, okay. I could talk about fake memoirs and why we privilege the "authenticity" of lived experience above other narratives aaaaall day long. I am like the number one world expert on fake memoirs. My phone rings off the hook all day long with people asking for help in detecting autobiographical forgeries. They call me "Fakebuster" when I go to forgery conventions.

But I just don't feel like getting into it.

Which makes this the blog equivalent of a Seinfeld episode: a post about absolutely nothing. Goodbye.

Women, Fire, And Dangerous Things

2008-03-05T18:58:00.000-08:00

"Women, Fire, And Dangerous Things" is the title of a major work in Linguistics dealing with the way we process and classify words in our minds. The origin of its title has to do with the fact that languages find different ways of creating mental categories to store nouns. A language like French, as you probably know, divides nouns into two grammatical gender classes, whereby entities in the world are classified, abstractly, as 'masculine' or 'feminine'. Other languages have far more complex and varied noun categories - like Xhosa, for instance. English, by contrast, basically distinguishes only between plural and singular noun forms. This is why when neurologists cut open an English-speaker's head, all that oozes out is sludgy turnip-broth, whereas if you slice up a Xhosa-speaker's noggin it is like lifting the lid off a minutely-calibrated micro-computer, thanks to all the time they spend mentally assigning all the things in their environment to so many different categories in the brain.

Anyway, there's an indigenous Australian language called Dyirbal which has developed noun categories based around the idea that certain types of things are taken to share specific properties. One of their grammatical classes is devoted to 'violent and scary phenomena'. It includes - as per the book title - women, fire, and dangerous things. Which suggests that all three concepts are associated fairly closely in the head of the average Dyirbal speaker.

Well, I'm on the verge of packing up shop and moving to the Outback to camp with the Dyirbal, because I'm feeling pretty violent and scary at the moment. At least there I'll be accorded my rightful womanly place - to be feared and avoided. (I should mention that there are currently all of five recorded Dyirbal speakers in the world, so I could rise quite rapidly to the top of their social order, I feel.)

Yes, I find myself full of smouldering feminist rage once again, today - and, before you ask, NOT because it's my time of the month. Which would obviously be the usual reason.

No, today's feminanger has two causes. The first is the post-scriptum to yesterday's blog. Charlotte Allen, the woman who wrote "We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?", agreed to answer reader responses this afternoon in a Q&A sesh on the Washington Post website. I was relieved to see that almost every reaction was one of outrage, and also how articulately and intelligently the public expressed their disapproval. I was also relieved to see how badly Allen dealt with them, floundering around messily, claiming at one stage that this all proves that feminists have no sense of humour and can't detect irony; and at another point saying that she sticks by her essential thesis and was serious about her claim. I'll append my two favourite exchanges:
___________________

New York: "Women aren't a historically oppressed minority." Really? So we've always had the right to vote, not to be raped and have control over our bodies? Can I have some of whatever wacky antifeminist weed you're smoking?

Charlotte Allen: Minority? Not when I last counted. And when did women get the vote--1921? 1923? Rape was a capital crime under Roman law. You know--the Romans, 2,000 years ago. As for "control over our bodies," I guess you mean abortion. Wasn't Roe vs. Wade decided in 1973?
_______________________

New York: I get it! Your piece was a stab at Swiftian level satire -- by using clearly flawed logic to assert that women are inferior, you attempted to prove that women are in fact brilliant! Thanks for being such an awesome feminist, Charlotte.

Charlotte Allen: I gather you're making an attempt here to mimic Jonathan Swift.
________________________

I'm relieved by this because if anyone who thought Charlotte Allen had even half a point originally was to read how poorly she handled this session, they would see just how half-baked her thinking on the matter really is. On the other hand, as countless commentators have pointed out, she has lent some credence to her original thesis - that women are dumb and illogical - by coming across as so dumb and illogical herself. Charlotte Allen, I have to say: you really suck.

The second reason for today's fresh rage I once again have Katherine to thank for, since she sent me the article in question: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/02/magazine/02sex3-t.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5087&em&en=fa2b206be30c5e3c&ex=1204866000.

It's entitled 'Teaching Kids Separately', by Elizabeth Weil in the New York Times, and as Katherine pointed out, in some ways it directly embodies all the most problematic aspects of the Allen gender debacle. It's also really really long, so in short - it's about the emerging new trend in the States for co-ed public schools to divide kids into boys-only and girls-only classes, based on the educational philosophy of this nutcase called Leonard Sax.

Sax and Charlotte Allen should really go out to dinner together, because boy oh boy, they wouldn't lack for conversation. Sax (like Allen) is a firm believer in the girls-and-boys-are-just-biologically-different thesis, to the point where he insists that the girls' classrooms be heated differently and painted a different colour to the boys'. His theories are many: baby boys prefer to stare at mobiles; baby girls at faces. Boys solve maze puzzles using the hippocampus; girls use the cerebral cortex. Boys covet risk; girls shy away. Boys perform better under moderate stress; girls perform worse.

In schools where Sax's ideas have been implemented, the boys read stories about hunting and fishing, and keep a classroom snake. (An actual reptile - this isn't some weird metaphor.) The girls are scared of the snake, so they don't have one. (Sorry, this is all sounding absurdly Freudian.) The girls sing songs and do "tidy" science experiments where the teacher points out how the results match what they must have already observed from doing the dishes after their mommas have cooked using heated oil.

This, to me, sounds like something out of an Orwell/Huxley nightmare.

My problem, to clarify, is not with single-sex education. I myself went to a girls'-only high-school and consider myself all the better for it. Although I AM a big old lesbian, so I probably amount to a cautionary tale for many parents out there. Hahahahahaha! No, my problem is with educational methods built on theories of biological essentialism, as Sax's are. No good, in my opinion, can come of a view of men and women which sees them as the vehicles for their biological hardwiring. Please, let's start acknowledging that men and women are actually pretty much the SAME in most ways, stop obsessively looking for goddamn differences, and alter our thinking accordingly. I'm convinced that the moment we begin to do this is also the moment that gender dynamics will stabilise in a healthy way. Mars and Venus se poes.

I'm also certain that the reason that there is suddenly this unprecedented flurry of media attention being paid to issues of male/female difference is thanks to the Democratic electoral battle in the States. I really don't recall a period in recent history where so much media time has been devoted to the question of how men and women are different, and why. The Obama/Clinton fray has opened up this kind of debate, and I'm afraid to say that I'm finding the results disturbing and unappealing.

On the plus side, my homegirl Hillary took Texas and Ohio. Women, fire and dangerous things, indeed.

Women Say The Darnedest Things

2008-03-04T15:36:00.000-08:00

There's something I'd like you to read. It's an opinion piece published this week in The Washington Post, by Charlotte Allen. You can find the article here*: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022902992.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

If you're too busy and important to click through, allow me to summarise. It takes the form of an argument for the idea that women are, on average, stupider and sillier than men. How did that get the thumbs-up from a publication that's not HugeTits Weekly? Because it's actually authored by a woman! BOOYA! Talk about two (intellectually-subnormal) birds with one stone.

The point I'm about to make is what Goldenbeagle is going to call a 'cheap shot', but hey, I'm a cheap ho.

An article entitled 'Why Blacks Just Generally Suck', by a black person, or one called 'How Come Gays Are So, Well, Crap?' , by a gay person, or 'The Overwhelming Rubbishness Of Muslims And Isn't Islam A Bit Silly, Really', by a Muslim, would *really* struggle to find expression in a well-respected mainstream English-language newspaper.

By contrast, I should note, writings on the uselessness of men, by men, are two-a-penny, and I refer you here to the entire back-catalogue of novelist Nick Hornby, as well as any women's magazine that features a token-male opinion column. But that's because when men write about how sucky they are, what it amounts to generally is a thinly-veiled account of how sucky women actually are by implicit comparison. Men are more than happy to admit that they're rubbish at chipping in with domestic tasks, and making an effort when it comes to cookery and personal hygiene, and reading other people emotionally. But that's because these are to do with largely meaningless, uncontested areas of private life. They will cheerfully admit that women are superior at aspects to do with household- and interpersonal-maintenance, firstly because it allows men to opt out of contributing to these boring spheres if they want to. Secondly, because if women feel simperingly proud about being patted on the head for being really-really good at that kind of thing, it will keep them busy striving for further excellence in these areas and keep them out of, you know, politics, science, and the other stuff that men are just better at. Thirdly, it's fine for men to admit they're not that good at various things, because - quite frankly - in a patriarchal global system, they have almost nothing to lose. The same cannot be said for women.

Anyway, I firmly maintain that an article making these kinds of claims - in this kind of tone, crucially - about virtually any other politically-marginalised group on the planet would not have made it past the first sub-editor's desk. And yes, you may argue that, for instance, black stand-up comedians routinely draw attention to what they take to be their race's more absurd tendencies, but I find it hard to believe that they would end off with a statement like "enough of us do these foolish things to make one wonder whether there isn't some genetic aspect of our black brains that turns the pre-frontal cortex into Cream of Wheat" , as Allen puts it, without getting lynched.

Let's not forget the case of James Watson, the Nobel-winning DNA scientist whose career has basically ended in infamy since his statement last year that "all our social policies [towards Africa] are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing says not really." Compare that statement with this one from the Washington Post article: "The theory that women are the dumber sex [...] is amply supported by neurological and standardized-testing evidence". It is right and proper that James Watson is now widely reviled, because these kinds of difference-based scientific tests are problematic for reasons too complex to discuss here. In particular, it's been pointed out that scientific testing designed to get to the bottom of perceived biological differences in men and women carries all kinds of distorting misogynistic baggage with it at every step of the process, from the research question, to the methodology, to the results analysis.

You may point out that Watson is (a) a scientist and (b) not a member of the group he is disparaging, whereas Allen is (a) writing a tongue-in-cheek column and (b) a woman herself. With regards to the former, I fully accept the possibility that I might just need to lighten the fuck up. With regards to the latter, I utterly reject the notion that just because Charlotte Allen is a woman, this either positions her to speak authentically on behalf of her sex, or entitles her to make belittling generalisations about women. Fuck that. Prejudice is prejudice, and internalised misogyny is internalised misogyny.

To move to the substance of the article itself:

Allen itemises the favourite pursuits of the average woman with evident contempt, placing them in (an unstated but understood) negative evaluation when compared with the presumably far worthier, weightier, more cerebral interests of men. She writes:

I swear no man watches "Grey's Anatomy" unless his girlfriend forces him to. No man bakes cookies for his dog. No man feels blue and takes off work to spend the day in bed with a copy of "The Friday Night Knitting Club." No man contracts nebulous diseases whose existence is disputed by many if not all doctors, such as Morgellons (where you feel bugs crawling around under your skin). At least no man I know.

First of all, I should note that Allen does concede that men do stupid shit too, but notes that when they do, it's on a more impressive scale of 'badness' - Hiroshima, for instance, as opposed to nauseatingly dubious taste in movies. But she seems not to consider the notion that men also do the kind of cringeworthy stuff women do, just in different ways. With regards to her list, I fundamentally dispute the idea that every single one of those represents female-only occupations and concerns. But in the same spirit of ridiculous sex-differentiated stereotypes, I would like to take on Allen myself, and offer you:

I swear no woman spends more money on shiny bits for her car-wheels than she does on her kids' education. No woman sees phone-numbers of prostitutes left in phone-boxes and enthusiastically dials away. No woman lights her pubic hair on fire purely to amuse her friends. No woman kills herself out of depression at the outcome of a sporting fixture. No woman dies as a result of accidental asyphyxiation from strangling herself with a tie while masturbating. At least no woman I know.

My point is a serious one. So WHAT if women want to watch sappy shows about ridiculously good-looking hospital staff having sex with each other in ER units? So WHAT if they personify their pets and lavish affection on them to the point of producing custom-made baked-goods? And whatever "The Friday Night Knitting Club" is, I guarantee it's no more absurdly escapist than the gory science-fiction/fantasy novels that so many men eat up. What makes ANY of those things intrinsically less worthy than the dumb shit men spend their time on, and how on EARTH can these be taken as "evidence" that women are fundamentally more stupid or silly?

The substance of Allen's 'proof', when you strip away the bullshit pseudo-science (of precisely the sort I was parodying in my first blogpost) is this: women are more emotionally demonstrative than men. That in itself is a nonsensically culturally-specific and ludicrously-sweeping statement, but that is hardly even worth pointing out. Even if you persuade me over the course of a lifetime that the stereotype holds true on average - and all I will say is that it is not backed up in the slightest by my personal observations of myself or the women and men I know - then the question still remains: so fucking what? You'll have to build me the ladder that leads us, logically speaking, from 'more in touch with emotions', to 'more stupid'. And that will be one motherfuckin' shaky ladder indeed.

Feminazi rant over. Next time I promise to blog about how I wept like a bitch while watching a baby-powder commercial the other day.

*I wish to thank Katherine for sending me the Washington Post article, thereby confirming that she has ability to arouse violent emotion in me first thing in the morning even while no longer living next door to me.

Conspiracy Theorists: Surprisingly Boring, Actually

2008-02-27T12:30:00.000-08:00

I spent a number of hours last night in the same room as the son of God. That's in his opinion, I should clarify; most other people have doubts. And rightly so! If God really did create David Icke in His image, then that would have to mean that God is a widely-published dude with long grey hair who has made his name out of spinning loony stories about who really controls humanity. Whatever!

The Oxford Union hosts a variety of high-profile speakers each term. In my time at Oxford, world presidents, Nobel winners, Hollywood actors and luminaries from every conceivable area of public life have addressed the Union. Not one of them has yet succeeded in getting me out of my jim-jams to go hear their no-doubt awe-inspiring, life-changing pensees on the global system. But when I heard that David Icke was coming, the man who wears only turquoise and believes that the Queen is actually a twelve-foot lizard, well, I was queueing outside the Union faster than you could say 'but Germaine Greer was here last week and you stayed in bed to watch Youtube'.

Some background: David Icke is probably the most prominent conspiracy theorist out there. And I do mean 'out there', because most of his theories imbue the term "lunatic fringe" with fresh resonance. Icke was originally a footballer for Hereford United until he realised that his true calling was to educate the world about who's really pulling the strings behind the scenes. He has been publically endorsed by - among others - the late great PW Botha, and everyone's favourite cuddly African mother, Winnie Mandela.

Icke had a spiritual awakening on a trip to Peru in the early 90s, which should provide reasonable grounds for South American immigration officials to deny entry-visas to hippies in the future. He announced to Britain in 1991 while a guest on the Terry Wogan Show that "I am a channel for the Christ spirit. The title was given to me very recently by the Godhead." Audiences around the country rocked with laughter, since the programme's revelation that a minor-league goalkeeper was a channel for the Christ spirit also confirmed suspicions that BBC2 was a channel for the type of people who see the Virgin Mary in their scrambled eggs, and Icke was forced to disappear from public view for a while.

But in recent years he's been back with a vengeance. His views are characterised as "a mixture of New Age philosophy and apocalyptic conspiracism", which makes him the perfect spiritual guru for anyone who's convinced the world's about to end but comforted by the thought that the result will be a beautiful rainbow-like lentil soup of all our special energies. I can't be bothered to go into the precise details of his manifesto, but probably the thesis that has received the most attention is his belief that the world is controlled by "reptilian hybrids" from the planet Draco. The Queen is a lizard, apparently, and so is George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Hillary Clinton, to name a few.

Various anti-prejudice groups around the world have tried to shut down Mr Icke's speaking engagements on the grounds that he is an anti-semite. They maintain that his talk of the world being run by "lizards" is clearly a thinly-veiled allusion to "Jews". Bless them. What they fail to understand is that Icke is a total mentalist who in fact really does believe that the globe is controlled by 12-foot reptiles. Who may or may NOT indulge in Judaic practice.

Anyway, it is probably unnecessary to mention that I was in a state of high anticipation to see David Icke take to the Union stage last night. And I approached his talk with an entirely open mind, more than receptive to the proposition that I would donate all my sombrely-hued threads to Oxfam and start a new life as a turquoise-clad reptiphobe.

But things got off to a bad start right away. Icke was wearing a sober black suit instead of a purple kaftan. And he had a power-point presentation! What the fuck, I ask you, with tears in my eyes? What next? When lunatic hippies marshall the forces of Microsoft Office, then truly the apocalypse is upon us.

Nonetheless, his patent insanity was enough to keep me engaged for roughly an hour. I really liked it when he mentioned the absurdity of the fact that the Illuminati keep banging on about "Climate Change", when "ACTUALLY we all know it's just THE SUN." I also enjoyed the fact that he paired each crazy point he made with a hilariously literal accompanying image in his power-point display. I thank Cristina for pointing out the fact that when he spoke of the "virus" with which all our minds are infected - and which prevents us all from seeing that there is, in fact, no physical world, only a "hologram" - he matched it with a picture of the cover of the Norton anti-virus software. Deep.

But my unhappiness grew as the minutes stretched on and he failed to mention the lizards. This dissatisfaction was clearly shared by the rest of the audience, since by the 90-minute mark people were either walking out in droves, openly reading books and magazines, or, in the case of me and Cristina, pantomiming the classic old 'blowjob' gesture to each other across the room. He did at one stage produce an organogram of the Illuminati which featured as its top tier the enticing label 'Reptilian Hybrids', but declined to expand upon this.

By the time the two-hour mark had been reached and passed, open rebellion was imminent. One guy stretched out full-length on his now-empty bench and went to sleep. Another started slow-clapping. Icke was undeterred. After a career of being mercilessly publically ridiculed, the pointed applause of some Oxford geek was hardly about to put him off his game. At the point at which he started citing the motion-picture 'The Matrix' as if it were a Discovery Channel documentary - "it's exactly like when Neo found out..." - I was rocking back and forth and emitting gentle moaning sounds. When he eventually wrapped it up, a lifetime later, with the stirring directive to "live in FREEDOM, not FEARDOM", I could only be nudged into clapping by a pointed jab in the ribs from my far more generously-spirited friend Rebecca.

Since he had spoken for approximately six hours, there was no time for questions from the crowd, which I strongly believe to be a deliberate strategy on his part. But the line of people waiting to speak to him afterwards was impressively long. I can only assume that they were queuing to punch him in the face and demand their three quid back. As for the rest of us, as we trudged out of the building in defeated exhaustion, the mutterings of "And he didn't even mention the lizards" could be heard from all quarters.

The world may well be controlled by giant reptiles. Thanks to Icke's reticence on the matter, I'm no expert. But if it is, I'd quite like it if the lizards could clamp down on the disturbing new trend of lunatic public-speakers simultaneously managing to be fucking boring.

Tube-eeee Or Not Tube-eeeee

2008-02-24T19:53:00.000-08:00

I was on the London Underground today. What a slice of life that is! I find a trip on the Tube to be the transport equivalent of visiting the websites I mentioned in my last blog: a morbidly-compelling view into humanity in all its manifold weirdness, until you can't take it any more and turn away in revulsion.

I have many Tube-associated fears. You might think, post 7/7/2005, that most of these would be terrorism-related. Not so. Primary among them, as I never tire of discussing with my friend Tarry, is actually the possibility that some mentalist is going to push me on to the tracks one day in front of an oncoming train. (I use "mentalist" here in the hilariously inaccurate way English people prefer, as denoting 'an insane person' rather than referring to those dudes in the 19th century who practised mind-control.) For this reason I shrink against the platform wall until the last possible minute and then make a hair-raising sprint for the opening doors. It's quite stressful, but enormously exciting at the same time.

Incidents of people falling in front of trains is the reason why the Tube tracks have deep pits beneath them, which are colloquially known as "dead men's trenches". You know when a mentalist has struck because the PA system will apologise for the delay caused by a "customer incident". (This is all true, by the way.) Employees of the Underground refer to this type of event as "one under". They have a special Therapy Unit to deal with drivers' post-traumatic stress after this happens. Feel safe yet?

Second in my hierarchy of horrifying Tube scenarios is the idea that one night I will get trapped in a carriage full of drunken Arsenal supporters on their way home from a footie match which their team has lost. The way my nightmarish version of events plays out, the Tube suddenly stops in a tunnel between stations, as it is wont to do to allow the conductor to scrape up the remains of victims of mentalists. In this liminal space, normal societal mores break down a la Lord of the Flies, and I end up with my decapitated head impaled on one of their team flags.

It is odd that these fears plague me in such terrifying clarity, because in truth nothing remotely bad has ever happened to me on the Tube. Unless you count the time I found myself the only normally-abled person (other than one frazzled teacher) in a carriage hosting a field-trip of mentally-retarded eight-year-old schoolkids, and I mean "mentally retarded" in the clinical sense here. But that's a story I can't tell without crying.

And then there was the time Tarry and I almost got happy-slapped by murderous chavs on a Tube to Putney late one night. (Happy-slapping, if you're unfamiliar with this particularly beautiful aspect of English culture, is the favourite pastime of the common-or-garden chav other than smoking over your baby's pram when you're 14: one of you attacks an unsuspecting victim while your accomplices record it on a camera-phone.) We escaped only by following Tarry's wise hissed advice of "Don't make eye-contact - they can smell fear".

I do find the Tube fascinating, though. Here is an itemised list of things about the Tube that interest me:

1.) My number one-for-fun activity is seeing what my fellow Underground commuters are reading. And everyone reads on the Tube, except me because I'm too busy plotting exit strategies and keeping an eye out for mentalists. I've never yet seen anyone tackling Tolstoy, and in general the literary choices would fail to get an unequivocal thumbs-up from F.R. Leavis, but the point is that they all read. In South Africa you would have to visit a university English Department to find such a concentration of people engaging with written texts at any one time, and even then half the academics would be reading Heat.

2.) Another thing that's interesting about the Tube is how rubbish it is. They've had 145 years to improve the system and it still sucks. In 2006 it's estimated that the average commuter lost three days, 10 hours and 25 minutes on the Underground due to delays. That's a fairly chilling thought, especially when you consider that it takes the average Arsenal supporter roughly three minutes to rip out your internal organs with their bare hands.

3.) If you've ever taken even a single trip on the Tube, you'll be familiar with the female voice warning you to "Mind the gap", and advising you of upcoming stations. The woman behind the voice is a comedy actress called Emma Clarke, who held the contract from 1999 to 2007. Last year she was unexpectedly fired by the London Underground for releasing a series of spoof Tube PA announcements as audio clips on her website. They included: "Passengers filling in answers on their Sudokus, please accept they are just crosswords for the unimaginative and are not in any way more impressive just because they contain numbers." So you can expect a different voice in the future, which saddens me because I find Clarke's well-modulated tones very soothing.

4.) The now-iconic Tube map was designed in 1933 by a dude who was paid the princely sum of five guineas, which even back then wouldn't stretch to a portion of kebab-van cheesy chips for a drunk Arsenal fan. But what's weird about the Tube map is that its design is topological rather than geographical. What this means is that the position of stops on the map bears absolutely no relation to their location in the physical reality of the sprawling, ramshackle mess that is London's urban landscape. You've probably figured this out if it ever struck you as unlikely that London's town-planning design could be encompassed by a perfect rectangle. Since I am cartographically-illiterate, however, and would struggle to produce or decipher a map leading from my bedroom to my kitchen, I never realised this until 2005's Underground bomb attacks. After 7/7, large chunks of the Tube were closed for several weeks, and Londoners who are as thick as me were thrown into disarray, as they were forced to come to terms with the fact that they didn't have a blinking clue what their city looked like without the Tube map as a compass. Londoners wandered the streets lost and confused for days afterwards, slowly grasping the idea that Tube stations marked as falling in an equidistant straight line from each other on the map might be five minutes direct walk away in one case, and a forty-five minute meandering route in another case.

5.) Today I saw a mouse on the Tottenham Court Road platform. It was nibbling a piece of lettuce abandoned by a vegetarian fleeing a happy-slap. And I thought, aren't we all a bit like that mouse, really, when it comes down to it? Then a mentalist came along and crushed its tiny skull with one of his Doc Martens, and ate the remains.

Forgive Me, Interweb, For I Have Sinned

2008-02-21T18:41:00.000-08:00

We've all been there. You stumble home late - drunk, exhausted and frustrated from an evening of mackin' on bitches without success. You want answers. Olden-daysey folk turned to God at these moments. We turn to the internet.

Most people know about Postsecret.com: the website which started off as an art project, with its initiator asking the public to send him their secrets on the back of a homemade postcard. If you've had a look at the site, you'll know that the results are usually fairly horrifying. For every one exclaiming 'I love my beautiful pot-belly!!', there are about 75 versions of 'I walked in on my dad raping my dog'.

I harbour suspicions about the authenticity of the Postsecret project. This is based on absolutely no evidence other than a fundamental disbelief in the possibility that midwest America is really as talented at arts & crafts as the astoundingly creative postcards suggest. You may call me a cynic, but actually this stems from profound optimism: it's just that I'd rather believe that they are all the work of a deranged graphic designer with too much time on his hands than face up to the implication that so many people I pass on the street carry around such unimaginably disturbing personal tragedy.

If Postsecret doesn't fulfil your voyeuristic cravings, there are an abundance of other sites which surely will. Grouphug.us, for instance, publishes daily compilations of anonymous confessions on a rising scale of weirdness, to which readers respond by clicking either 'Hug' (if you're moved to sympathy), or 'Shrug' (if you couldn't care less). Today, for instance, I hit 'Hug' for:

sometimes i wish the house would burn down so i didn’t have to clean it…

And 'Shrug', although what I actually needed was a separate button labelled 'What A Huge Fat Pack Of Lies', to:

I am a famous actress. I’ve been on talk shoes like Oprah,Letterman and Conan. My confession is that during most of those interviews, the funny little anecdotes I tell never actually happened! I make up fun times. I am unhappy and don’t have many real friends.

Er, yes, thank you, "Jennifer Aniston".

Today I found out about Tired.com. Enter that address into your web browser and it takes you to an entirely white screen, blank except for two lines of text:

Are you tired?
Tell us why.

Click on the 'us' and a screen opens for you to compose an email to tired@tired.com from your personal mail account, explaining the cause of your fatigue. When you're so freakin' exhausted, you might well wonder, who the hell can find the energy to respond to that question for absolutely no reason? Tons of people, apparently. Well, roughly 100 per week. Some answers are the ramblings of drunks, some are banal complaints about the drudgery of their daily grind, and some interpret 'tired' in a more existential way. Try this one:

Tired of being in the navy and on a fucking ship in the middle of the god damn ocean with 400 of my not so closest friends who dont bathe as regular as normal folk should. Tired of my ugly little toe. Tired of wonderring why my bellybutton smells like cheese. Tired of masturbating into a pack of bologna. Tired of wondering what my man chowder tastes like and if I did taste it, would anyone think differently of me? Tired of you.

Yeah? Well, I'm tired of you, you jizz-eating warmongerer. I think I've mentioned my fondness for pasta, but I'm not about to make passionate love to myself over a bowl of it.

What's particularly strange about the Tired.com visitors is that they don't have evident qualms about the fact that they're sending a complete stranger confessions from their personal email accounts. Thinking about this reminded me about 2006's internet-privacy scandal, when America Online released the search histories of over 650 000 users. The searchers' names weren't published, but their unique ID numbers were, which meant that it was possible to track all searches undertaken by a single user within one period.

The results were predictably bizarre; a heady mixture of poignant and chilling. If you're in a new relationship but have a nagging feeling that something just ain't quite right, for instance, you might want to carry out the same kind of background check that one female searcher undertook:

los angeles county ca. gang member pictures
orange county california jails inmate information
warning signs of a mans infidelity or sexual addiction
characteristics of a sociopath in a relationship
southern california newspaper stories about woman murdered by boyfriend in pomona december2005
names of females murdered or found dead in pomona california in 2005

Another female searcher logged the following series of queries, clearly in the aftermath of a breakup that makes 'Fatal Attraction' look like 'The Ya-Ya Sisterhood':

revenge tactics
the woman's book of revenge
dirty tricks for chicks
voice changer
how to humiliate someone
bill me pay later for cd's
scams to play on people
how to get revenge on an old lover
i hate my ex boyfriend
how to really make someone hurt for the pain they caused to someone else
advice from women who have seeked revenge on old lovers
makehimsuffer.com
how to say goodbye hurtfully
how to report child neglect in the state of new hampshire
free angry stuff to send to an ex lover
how to permanently delete information from your hard drive
makehimpay.net
women's harley davidson boots
the worst thing to send someone via email
thong dancewear
what can i do to an old lover for revenge
mean revenge tactics
death records in hampstead new hampshire

And the searches for a variety of sexual fetishes are simply too creepy to go into on this family blog. (If you really care, you can find the full AOL search data online.)

So what does this all teach us? It's not a particularly uplifting glimpse into the human condition. What it suggests most starkly is something terribly sad about the loneliness of modern life - both in terms of the devastatingly dark confessional content of what these people are posting online; and with regards to the very fact that they are turning to the internet for the kind of help you need a therapist for, rather than a series of computers linked by underground tubes.

On the plus side, it's a voyeur's wet dream. Which is why I'm changing the name of this blog to TheKindsOfSickAdmissionsYouWouldn'tExtractFromMeEvenUnderSustainedTorture.com, and I'm offering a lifetime supply of tuna spaghetti to the first person to tell me their filthiest secret.

If music be the food of life, I find myself still a bit peckish

2008-02-20T01:03:00.000-08:00

Dear beauty fan,

That is the opening line of a spam magazine that was pushed under our door today. I wasn't going to read it originally until I saw that it was addressed directly to me in this fashion. Oh, red-cellophaned advertorial rag, your insight into my soul both frightens and arouses me.Yes, dammit, I AM a fan of beauty, and I'm not ashamed any more. Not now that I know that there are special niche publications devoted to people like me.

As I was boiling up water for spaghetti this morning, I was thinking about Facebook. It may be of interest to you to learn that I invented Facebook, actually. AGES ago. Except I was going to call it Lacebook, and it was going to be an online community resource for fabric-workers.

Anyway, my tempestuous love affair with the Facebook has waned in recent days, since I started this award-winning blog. (Did I mention that it won an award? Yes, just yesterday actually. Beauty fans the world over voted it the best go-to site for skincare tips.) My friend Cristina pointed out that this is because the obvious advantage of this blog, when compared with the Facebook, is that I no longer have to be confronted with news about anyone other than me.

But I was thinking about the Facebook because yesterday I read an article on the difficulties you face should you decide to delete your Facebook profile. Relax - I have no intention of deleting mine. You might as well suggest that I auction off a kidney online, and we all know that that wasn't a good idea the first time round. But it's fortunate that I don't want to delete it, because you can't.

Up until recently, your only option was to send it into dormancy, but knowing all the while that it still existed, hovering sinisterly just below consciousness, much like the Azanian People's Liberation Army. Now, due to public outcry, you can, theoretically, get rid of it for good. I say 'theoretically' because your chances of success are approximately equivalent to the likelihood that "Climate Change" is real, which is to say laughably unlikely. This in itself doesn't interest me. I find Facebook scaremongering absurd. Personally, I like to think of Mark Zuckerberg as the father I never had, and I know that my daddy would NEVER sell my details to big business without giving me a lollipop first.

But what *did* interest me was that both the articles I read on the subject compared Facebook to the Hotel California. Namely, a bit rundown, exorbitant mini-bar prices, but a very good Continental breakfast. Oh, and you can never leave, obviously.

Why this was of interest to me is because it got me wondering what song in history has the most frequently-quoted lyrics. Hanson's 'MmmBop' was my first guess, but a google search failed to confirm this. Then I got distracted googling myself, so I was unable to complete my research.

So I'm asking YOU instead. Don't look around. YOU. Yes, you. What d'you reckon?

I am woman, watch me cook

2008-02-18T17:41:00.000-08:00

There are two types of days in life. Days when you don’t eat, and days when you wake up, take a deep breath, and say ‘Yup. Today’s a food day.’

Today fell into the latter category, so as I bask in my sleepy post-prandial glow, I would like to discuss some important matters relating to Food and the preparation thereof.

I don’t know about you, but when I eat, I really go all out. Like a python, you know? I’ve been known to consume an entire packet of pasta in one sitting, after which I slept for three days. I’m no fan of food fads, but I’m currently on the Italian Peasant nutrition plan, except I’ve cut out bits of it, like the fresh vegetables, and the focaccia, and the olives. In fact, the only element I’ve retained is the spaghetti. That’s the only thing I eat.

It freaks my housemate out that I eat so much spaghetti. Adam - despite being a redblooded heterosexual, and I can state that with quiet certainty, because he once cut himself and I saw what came out - is something of a gourmet chef. As a twosome we do a LOT to overturn gender stereotypes. They should make a reality show of us and broadcast it to Middle America. Adam's idea of a quick snack is to prepare a lightly-seared fillet of salmon with a side-serving of delicately-seasoned potato gratin, all drizzled with a tangy vinaigrette. My idea of a quick snack is taking a bite out of a block of cheddar.

Adam can also sew. His fingers fly over the fabric with all the nimble dexterity of a pre-pubescent Chinese seamstress. (I did sew something once. It was a charming cross-stitch tableau of two large anthropomorphised teddybears wallowing smugly in the hetero-normative bliss of their connubial love, and under that it said ‘Beary Good Morning!’ or some shit. It was declared by the Needlework teacher to be “not that bad, actually, all things considered”, so yeah, I’m no slouch myself in the sewing department.) But I’m not as good as Adam. Man, the dude can *darn*, you know? He’s always embroidering away at some sock, or handkerchief, or …waistcoat….

I’m going to ask him to sew me something awesome for my birthday, like a kick-ass pair of culottes.

I suspect that Adam may also be better at ballet than me, although in truth I lack ‘hard evidence’ of this per se, unless you count the musculature of his shapely calves and the controlled grace of his movements as proof. (I do.)

And yet, lest you start thinking of Adam as some kind of creepy girly-boy, some effeminate, mincing, lisping, androgynous freak of nature – that doesn’t seem *entirely* accurate. No, what pumps through Adam’s veins is the rich meaty soup of masculinity, only befitting one named for the First Man. But I think he would accept it as truth if I were to say that if there’s a domestic goddess in this household, it ain’t me.

I do have one signature dish, which is widely considered so vile that Adam starts looking queasy if I allude to it in any way. I mention this because I wish to poll the blogging community on whether this really *is* as disgustingly weird as Adam maintains. Also, it may be of interest to you to jot down the recipe if you fancy something quick and tasty tonight:

Ingredients:
Spaghetti
1 x tin tuna
1 x tin chopped tomatoes

Method:
Cook spaghetti and drain. Then empty the cans of tuna and tomatoes on top. Season with salt to taste. Bon appetit!

Once, for the sake of culinary innovation, I added a can of baked beans into the mix. I found this gave an intriguing texture to the dish, but I haven't repeated the experiment. It tainted the purity of the original fishy-tomatoey goodness.

Anyway, if you are unconvinced of this meal's freakin' deliciousness, I urge you to give it a try and not be an ignorant hater like Adam. I am pretty sure the real reason he has taken such violent exception to it is because he may have spotted me on one occasion eating it with my hands directly out of the pot when I couldn't find a clean fork or plate, and he’s anal like that.

But each to her own. Personally, it’s my experience that fork-tines imbue food with an unpleasantly metallic flavour. That’s why if you put a gun to my head and FORCE me to pick up an implement, I’ll take a chopstick any day.

Besides, evolutionary biology teaches us that hunter-gatherer societies ALWAYS ate with their hands, and it’s well known that the human race reached the peak of its mental and physical performance at that time.

BOOYA, Adam.

Is this thing on?

2008-02-17T11:31:00.000-08:00

In the course of the two hours I spent tenderly crafting this cyber-monument-to-myself, I was struck by a wholly unrelated thought. Namely: is the internet making us more narcissistic? (And is that how you spell narcissistic? And is my uncertainty evidence of the fact that the internet is also making me stupider?) In answer to the first question, and in fact the other two too: yes. Yes, it is. DUH.

But HOW has the internet turned me into such a self-obsessed wanky navel-gazer? To answer that question, we must turn to the developing field of evolutionary biology. Although still in its infancy, this academic school has much to teach us about why we are the way we are. (As illustration: why do women always go to the toilet in groups? Evolutionary biology teaches us that this is a throwback from hunter-gatherer societies, where if you went to take a slash alone you would almost certainly be eaten by a mammoth. In groups, however, you stood a better chance of survival if you all scratched at it together with your long nails. This is also the reason why all women have long nails. It also accounts for why all women wear red lipstick, as this was a primitive but effective way of separating women from mammoths in appearance when you were peeing.) Evolutionary biology currently has nothing to say about the internet, so I have taken the liberty of formulating a modest hypothesis of my own. It goes as follows.

Never before in the herstory of peoplekind have we, the species Homo Sapiens, been forced to interrogate aspects of our personal identity so frequently. Yet practically daily - at least if you belong to as many online dating sites as I do, which reminds me that my subscription to hotprisonpenpals.com is almost up - the interweb demands that we find answers to questions about our interests, activities, taste in literature and film, and sexual proclivities. Recent findings in evolutionary biology suggest that before the internet, people did not have interests. They just did stuff. Now, with the advent of cyber-profiles, every loser in town has a freakin' interest. (Except me. Those 'interests' on my blogger profile are a tissue of lies. Please, I don't even know what queer theory *is*. I just saw that on the internet somewhere and thought it sounded clever.)

So is it any wonder that we are obsessed with ourselves, when the internet is so obsessed with us? The fact that the internet really, really wants to know so much stuff about us fosters the forgivable delusion that other people also really really want to know stuff about us, when actually they don't. I don't give a frickfrackin' toss what your interests are, unless they involve queer theory so you can tell me what that is.

And yet this groundbreaking thesis of mine has a fascinating flipside. Because while the internet has turned me into someone who practically orgasms at the sound of my own name, it has also made me a worldclass stalker. I'm a person of few talents, but I think I can state with authority that I'm the best stalker in the business. I could stalk for South Africa in the Stalk Olympics. I could teach you things about online stalking that would chill your blood. I know literally *everything* about you, and I also order shit I don't even want off E-bay with your credit-card details.

So how does this fit the assertion I just made that I'm not interested in you and your supposed "interests"? It doesn't. I'm waiting for evolutionary biology to fill in the blanks. Now please excuse me, I must be off to masturbate over my Facebook page.