An Afternoon at the Cinema – Conversations with the Bearded Man (8)

…The cinema is ok when you are on your own: it’s dry and warm; you can turn up late, book a seat that has no-one sitting around you, wherever that might be in the auditorium, and enter while the Coming Soon adverts are assaulting the pre-assembled eardrums like artillery shells. Nobody really notices you. It’s not like going into a strange pub: no sudden, uneasy silence, no stares from men holding pool cues, no landlord asking what you want to drink when all you really want to do is get out of there, no lukewarm, cloudy beer in a pre-lipsticked glass, no standing in the middle of nowhere because it’s less risky than accidentally taking somebody else’s seat, no apologising profusely to the walking threat who has just knocked a full pint down your trousers…

But you know how it is, nothing ever goes quite to plan. I saw them walk in, this Amazonian couple and I knew instinctively that they were destined to sit directly in front of me, with their giant tray of nachos, a sack-sized bag of crisps that crackled like a Taiwanese Hi-Fi, a Bucket-A-Coke and an unfinished conversation that was much too good to mute during the film. I craned my neck left and then right before realising that I was not going to see anything in the centre of the screen that had not been filtered through hair-gel unless one or the other of them suffered a major infarction, so I settled down as far as ancient knees in a confined space would allow and attempted to snooze the next hour and a half away in a shape unknown to Tetris when a voice beside me said, “It’s so annoying isn’t it?” and despite a period sufficient for the average couple to have met, fallen in love, rented a flat, fallen out of love and soundly trashed one another on social media having elapsed since the last time I saw him, I knew at once to whom the voice belonged. “There’s nobody sitting on this side of me if you want to sit there,” he said. It seemed impossibly churlish not to do as he suggested and so I bottled all my churl and moved into the vacant seat on the other side of him. I knew that there was no point in asking him how we could find ourselves sitting side by side in a cinema I had only entered to get out of the rain. I knew his answer would only confuse me further.
“I’ll move if anybody has booked the seat,” I said and he nodded quietly, obviously content that it would not happen. His long white hair was, as ever, immaculate and dry, yet he had no coat that I could see; no umbrella or hat. He looked like a man who had just emerged from a hairdryer, whilst I looked like a man who had just emerged from the Thames, cold and not entirely free of effluent.
“It’s quite a comforting place, the cinema, when you’re on your own, don’t you think?”
“It allows me to be anonymous,” I said as the sound and fury of some intergalactic war or another warped speakers all around us.
“Salty or sweet?” he asked, holding out popcorn.
“You have to ask?”
“No, not really. I bought both. Why would you want to be anonymous?”
“Do I mean anonymous? I might not mean anonymous,” I said. “I might mean unnoticed. Most places I go to, people notice a single man.”
“You don’t want to be noticed?”
“I don’t want to be stared at.”
“And you don’t want to be single?”
“Of course I don’t!” I snapped, momentarily flushed with anger. “I hate being alone. I don’t know how you do it.”
“Me?”
“You’re always alone.”
“Only when I choose to be.”
“You came here alone.”
“I was meeting you.”
“But how did you even know I’d be here?”
“I didn’t need to. You didn’t know that I’d be here either, yet you still managed to meet me.”
I stared for a moment before, resigned, I grabbed a handful of popcorn. It is so hard to argue with a man whose version of logic is at once bizarre and irrefutable. “I presume it didn’t work out with Sara,” he said.
“And I presume you already know the answer to that!” I snapped again, feeling both ashamed and frustrated by my inability to control my anger.
“Well, I do now,” he said, sipping Coke through a straw, looking for all the world as if it was the first time he had ever done so. “It’s a shame.”
“Look, I don’t mean to be rude, but what does it matter to you whether I am alone or not? Whether I am happy or not? Whether I am anything at all? I don’t really know you at all. You don’t know me. I don’t really know how, or why, we keep doing… this.” I turned towards him, but found his eyes firmly fixed on the screen. He was distractedly eating popcorn one exploded kernel at a time. Nobody eats popcorn like that! The Sara question hurt because I really liked her, but as I always do, I had let things slide. We hadn’t been in contact for some time and now I didn’t know how to try again without… well, you know. I hadn’t actually done anything wrong had I? I didn’t feel like I needed to lose face, even if Lorelei had made me realise how much I missed her company.
“You know,” he said, not removing his gaze from the screen, “I think I prefer the salty, until I try the sweet and then I’m not so sure.” I knew that there was a point to this, but I had no idea what it might be. He held out the two card containers. “Here,” he said, “see what you think.”
Despite the conviction that I was nothing more than a lab rat in a maze, I took a single piece from each box and chewed meditatively. It was impossible not to agree with him. I took another two pieces before settling slightly in my seat and turning my own attention to the film.
“You know,” he said, “I think I might have seen this all before.”
“I think it’s new isn’t it?”
“Is it? I must be mistaken then. I can’t have seen it before can I? I just feel as though I know exactly what is about to happen.” I struggled to form a clear image of his face in the flickering gloom, but as far as I could see there was no suggestion of irony there.
“In my experience,” I said, “you always seem to be at least one step ahead. It’s like you always seem to know exactly what’s going to happen next.”
“I’m like everybody else,” he said. “I know what I’d like to happen, but I’ve no way of knowing that it actually will… unless, of course, I really have seen the film before. Do you know I think I might have to… I’m sorry. I won’t be a minute.” I smiled smugly, bathing in the knowledge that at least in one way he was no different to me. Drink a large tumbler of Coke and you’re never going to make it all the way through a film. “I’ll leave these here,” he said, placing the two boxes of popcorn carefully under his seat. I watched him wander down the stairs and into the dimly lit entrance, turning back to the film at the exact moment that a silhouetted figure passed between me and the screen catching her foot on the unprotected popcorn containers and scattering the contents for some distance in all directions.
“Sorry I,” she said… “Shit!” The popcorn cascaded out of the boxes and down under the seats ahead. “I… oh bugger,” she kicked away as much of the spilled popcorn as she could and picked up the now empty containers. “I don’t know how I do it. I always manage to turn up just a little bit too late, after everybody else has settled down” she tried to explain “and instead of disappearing into the crowd, I usually find myself treading on toes, making a grand and unwelcome entrance. I’m sorry, I’ll… Jim?”
“Sara?” Of course, it had to be
“Well, I was going to offer to buy you some more popcorn, but you can buy your bloody own,” she said. She was torn, I could tell, between anger and laughter. She looked closely at her ticket and began to sit in the seat beside me.
“I think that seat’s taken,” I said.
She compared her ticket with the number on the seat again. “No, this is mine,” she said.
I wondered what might be said when Lorelei came back before I realised that, of course, he would not be returning to his seat at all.
“Of all the cinema seats in all the cinemas…” I said.
“Here,” said Sara holding out a paper bag.
I took a small handful of popcorn. “It’s salty,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “Do you prefer sweet?”
“No,” I said. “It’s fine.”
We both settled into our seats to watch the film and enjoy the prospect of not actually being alone for a couple of hours. I struggled to find something to say, but decided that silence was the best policy until, hearing a quiet sigh beside me, I risked a quick glance to my side and was shocked to see Sara’s face close to my own. “Do you know,” she whispered, “I think I might have seen this before…”

Author’s note: I’m sorry if this seems unduly long, it’s just how long it took.

If you wish to read earlier episodes of this tale you can find them here:
Episode 1 – An Introduction
Episode 2 – A Further Excerpt
Episode 3 – A Further, Further Excerpt
Episode 4 – Lorelei
Episode 5 – A Pre-Christmas Exchange
Episode 6 – Newark
Episode 7 – Helpline

Friends Like These

As the more dedicated amongst you are fated to discover over the weeks ahead, I have started to revisit some old friends in order to discover how they are faring in this straitened world of ours. Some of them have allowed me back into their lives much more easily than others. One or two of them had locked and bolted their doors so securely that I had to both warm and butter the spoons before I was able to prise my way in. Making new friends is instinctive – the world was built on co-operation – but keeping them is a learned skill. Friendship can, with neglect, all too easily disintegrate into disagreement and, if we’re not very careful, to hatred. Our world will, one day, be destroyed by enmity. None of us want to be BF’s with someone who would seek to conquer the world, but there is, I suppose, a temptation to want to be on their side if they should succeed. My own friendship groups do not tend to contain ‘world conquerors’, most of my friends struggle to get on top of their TV remote.

People rarely change fundamentally. Time brings small changes to us all, but essentially we remain the people we always were. I am a man – I can check if you insist – and I have many of the same friends that I have had for the past fifty years, even if I have never really seen them in those intervening decades. We will not have changed enough to not get along and if we have major differences of opinion, well it’s easy enough to ignore those isn’t it and talk about school. I have friends I have never met but with whom I know I would get along swimmingly if ever I did. I am an open book, a man of bottomless shallows, I do not have sufficient character to make enemies. The worst I normally engender is apathy.

Some of my old friends here require far more time and attention than others. The Bearded Man, for instance, uses far more energy than Frankie and Benny. He needs me to pick over every word and phrase, he needs the kind of precision I do not usually possess, he needs a reason whilst the two elderly besties need me only to listen in every now and again. They will go wherever they like. Dinah and Shaw have popped into these pages more often than anybody else, but I can only ever visit them when I am in exactly the right state of mind and, when I am, I generally have nowhere else to go for a while. The man in the lovat coat* is the man I hope never to be, but I fear, from time to time, that I might become.

I think all of our friends carry with them elements of ourselves: some we find desirable and some that we do not, whilst we carry with ourselves elements of all of those with whom we spend any time. We devote most of our time to those we enjoy, whilst those we try to avoid are those most like ourselves. I wonder if it is possible to actually have nothing in common with anybody, and if it is, I wonder if we could still be friends?

Perhaps I’ll ask around…

Envoi – some of these friends (in particular The Bearded Man and Dinah & Shaw) once they have let me in, do not let me go until they are ready. Their posts are longer and, if I’m honest, there is little I can do about it except release them sporadically and, possibly, on Fridays to give you the weekend. I hope it works…

I will drop the first of these tomorrow in my normal slot – please accept this as a friendly warning…

*The Meaning of Life

An Equitable Universe

Photo by RODNAE Productions on Pexels.com

Trying to define yourself is like trying to bite your own teeth – Alan Watts
I have realised that the past and the future are real illusions, that they exist in the present, which is what there is and all there is – Alan Watts
But we try to pretend, you see, that the external world exists altogether independently of us – Alan Watts
When you’re trying to clear your head, it’s much easier to sweep things under the carpet than to actually throw them out – Me

…It all started with the Oscars. There was no doubting that they were on the way, because the TV had cancelled all other news for the duration and across the Ukraine the reporters were being issued with bow ties (although, as a sign of respect, not the revolving kind). Whilst I have no particular objection to a bunch of very highly paid individuals celebrating their own unrivalled contribution to the world as we know it in an onanistic orgy of botox and amphetemine, I do get pretty cheesed off with them ramming it down my throat for weeks on end thank you very much, and if I’m entirely honest, I really don’t think I need a man in a tuxedo that cost more than my house lecturing me on why I should do more to make the world a fairer place. If the world was a fairer place, they would be wearing a Primark jacket, there would be no hiccups, I would be able to open a packet of dry-roasted peanuts without distributing them over a fifty yard radius, and everybody with a box to call home would have a valeted flat somewhere green and perfumed.

It is a well-known fact that costume-wise a lack of material coverage² = amount of salacious media coverage generated. I have little interest in which next-big-thing actor has borrowed a spangly frock from whom, allowing her décolletage to get far more than the normal amount of air – and TV coverage – whilst she laments the tendency of fifty percent of the species (there are, by implication, no exceptions) to objectify women. I agree totally with a sentiment that is undeniably righteous, and I cannot deny that, as a man, I am apt to get distracted by breasts, but if each and every female nominee (and let’s be honest, proportionally they are frighteningly small in number) is ‘doing it for all women throughout the world’, does that also mean that all the middle aged white men are doing it for me? Because, if so, I don’t want it!

Nor do I really need to be lectured on my myriad shortcomings by a Harry Flash-in-the-Pan who has spent the previous six months building up his media profile by chronicling his sordid history of drug and alcohol abuse in a series of short, amusing videos on TikTok, before landing his dream role of ‘third bystander’ in a deleted scene from a straight to the bin epic about a family of dysfunctional nematodes.

Yet they are the heroes of the red carpet. They are trailblazers. Without their timely intervention it is probable that the rest of us would remain misogynistic, racist, everything-o-phobes and we must all be forever grateful that they have freely given so much of their valuable time in making us aware of the error of our ways… They say. If I gave them an egg, do you think that they would teach me how to suck it?

What films* do offer is the opportunity to look critically at the past and to predict the future although, crucially, only as we see it today. It is inevitable that I view the past and perceive the present differently to everybody else. I have chewed my teeth often enough to know that I am not everybody else. A vision of tomorrow can only be based upon knowledge of yesterday and perception of today: there must be an infinite number of futures and an even more infinite number of me’s to live in them – and all I can do about it is to apologise sincerely to the infinite you’s.

I think it is undeniable that today is altered by yesterday and tomorrow will be shaped by today – even if the man with the Play-Do has lost the little thing that makes the smiley faces. I think we have to accept that we are all part of the one big thing. We are all equal parts of the Universe. In an equitable Universe we would all have equal input and we would all take the same from it – except on a Monday morning when, until the first coffee has been assimilated, there is absolutely no meaning to life. It is not a fair Universe, and even if you think there might be a film in it somewhere, there is absolutely no point in making a song and a dance about it… No-one will thank you for it.

*Movies – Until quite recently I was blithely unaware of what a colloquialism this is – the ‘entertainment’ equivalent of ‘The Hole-in-the-Wall’**…

**ATM

Facial Recognition

Have you ever looked into the mirror and thought ‘Do you know, I’m a pretty good looking guy really’? No? Me neither. My features have, thanks to a life that has featured, amongst other things, a high speed teenage confluence of motorcycle and tree, several mis-placed boots in a feral rugby scrum and a randomly pelted half-brick with my name on it, a certain asymmetry about them that I like to think is pleasing but is actually, truth be told, slightly alarming if you’re not ready for it. I’m a way away from Joseph Merrick, but I’m even further away from George Clooney. On a scale of 1 to 10, I stand just above Blobfish.

Never mind, I’ve grown used to it and mirrors now hold no fear for me: like everybody else, what I see in the mirror is by and large what I want to see. Photographs are not so easily coerced. I realise how far my mirrored view of ‘self’ is slanted towards acceptable when I catch sight of myself in somebody else’s photograph. There is no moment quite like the moment when you are puzzling at why somebody should send you a photograph of roadkill, only to realise that it is, in fact, a photo of your face as seen through a camera lens. It never fails to shock. A portrait photograph always looks like it was taken a split second after I received a blow to the head. Suddenly I realise where Picasso got his inspiration from.

It’s a miracle to me that facial recognition on my phone ever manages to pick me out from what it sees for the long periods of time it spends couched inside my pocket: ‘Used tissue, sweet wrapper, small pallid area of spongy white thigh flesh as viewed through loose stitching, a broken string of plastic beads belonging to granddaughter, face… ah yes, that’s the one, I’d recognise it anywhere: bit cock-eyed, nothing quite where you’d expect it to be. It looks as though somebody has been messing about with my pixels.’ Nothing seems to throw it. That it never fails to spot me, whatever my circumstance merely strengthens my opinion that there is something altogether unique about my physiognomy. Certain aspects of my features are obviously assembled with such abstract abandon that they can never be mistaken.

I thought about it when I visited the barbers today and spent an uneasy twenty minutes swaddled in something that looked like an eau de nil shroud, staring at the alien face that glared back at me through the unfamiliar mirror. I have been going to the same place since my current barber – a similar vintage to myself – watched on whilst his father cut my hair and I have always felt as though the mirror he uses must have been rescued from a circus skip. We had a leisurely chat as he hacked away at my hair with a lack of restraint I have only previously observed when the chips come out at a Chinese Buffet, although I confess that I wasn’t convinced that he was giving me his full attention (particularly during a very long telephone conversation he carried out in shouted Italian with persons unseen – although definitely not unheard – on the other end) until eventually he threw down the shears satisfied, it would seem, that he had reached the conclusion of his toils, waved a small plastic mirror desultorily at the back of my bonce, pocketed my cash and waved me through the door. ‘Your wife will not recognise you,’ he shouted. Well, I’m not certain about her, but my phone certainly doesn’t…

I Wonder, I Wonder

“I wonder, I wonder what you would do if you had the power to dream at night any dream that you wanted to dream?” – Alan Watts.

When I was a child I would choose what I was going to dream about before I went to sleep each night. I planned each dream, each twist and turn and each happy ending. There was always a happy ending. I awoke every morning happy in the knowledge that everything had almost certainly gone to plan. Sadly, it was only ever almost certainly because I very rarely remember my dreams in the morning. I am familiar with the tripping up the kerb thing, the finding myself naked on the way to school thing, the falling thing, the being somebody else thing, but only vaguely. I am certain of pattern, but very lacking in texture. I have no recollection of detail. It is such a waste, particularly given the range of dreams I could set myself these days. They would have made my ten years old toes curl.

It has always been a bit of a problem to me, sleeping. I’ve never managed to get the sleep I am told I need yet I rarely feel tired for lack of it. The hours between my wife retiring for the night and the time being right for my own slide into stygian slumber are spent picking at crosswords, reading books and considering why one whisky is never enough. They are frustrating hours because even after all of these years, I would dearly like to be able to drift off at will as many of my friends are able to do – more often than not when I am telling them a story.

Still, I can’t help but wonder what I would choose to dream about if I had the opportunity? Would I dream about being rich, knowing that I would have to wake up to not being so? Would I choose to dream about being handsome and popular, knowing that I would wake up a schmuk? Would I dream that I was still awake? The obvious problem with all dreams is that you have to wake up at the end of them or risk not waking up at all. Surely if you could choose what to dream, then real life would have to be a disappointment because most of the time, in the waking world, you are firmly stuck with what you have got, and what you have got is not all that it might be.

Perhaps you could dream a world that is more drab than the real one knowing that when you wake, what you have will seem bright and sparkly in comparison, but that too would be a waste wouldn’t it? A third of your life spent in circumstances far more dreary than they have any need to be. While you sleep, you could be a God, a rockstar, a saviour of mankind (peoplekind?). Your world could be filled with colour, a kaleidoscope, a garden in full summer bloom, then surely, rather than the ability to decide what to dream, you would crave the ability to remember it all in the morning.

I wonder, I wonder…

This Charming Man

He was Peter Perfect: Head Prefect at school, fast-tracked superstar at work, ideally partnered with first-love spouse, the only absent father that other kids actually wanted as their own, the man who never pissed in the shower. His eyes were bright, his teeth were gleaming, his balls were golden. He was every mother’s dream, but he was every father’s nightmare, because most fathers, having either known or been one themselves, are perfectly able to spot a shit when they see one. Julian Trite (in real life he was, of course, not named after a Wacky Races character) whilst being superficially exemplary, was actually nothing more or less than superficial. If his visage was very much P. Perfect, then his character was decidedly D. Dastardly. His soul was a black hole that had already sucked the life out of his personality. A flawless smile under a mop of hair that took no more than three hours to primp into shape and could not be allowed out in the rain, Julian had all the charm of a weekend in Chernobyl and the charisma of a whelk.

Yet like a Mr Whippy ice cream on a sunny day, he looked so good from a distance and with the sun behind him he could almost be mistaken for intelligent, or, at least, sentient, although he was in fact neither. He was a vacuum: a perfect hologram in unspotted underwear. To remain engaged in conversation for the full four minutes he allowed himself to be in the orbit of anybody who might see through him (virtually anybody with an IQ above that of a frozen pea) was a Herculean task. He gave ‘small talk’ a new emphasis. He offered the mental stimulus of an evening with Idi Amin and the conversational acumen of Marcel Marceau. In short, his dental implants had greater depth of character than whatever it was that loitered, fecklessly between his ears.

Now, I know that by this point you will have decided that I must have a personal axe to grind with Mr Trite, but I do not. In truth I have seldom been in his company, although we have quite commonly shared the company of others, and I have observed him from afar. You see he is the very quintessence of making the best of his own bad job whilst making the worst of everybody else’s. Men clustered around him because they felt, with some justification, that alongside him they would appear to have the magnitude of intelligence that could not help but persuade any unattached females in attendance to ponder the possibilities of exploring the contents of their trousers. But the ladies gathered around him because – oh what the hell – he looked so good, and when, in the morning, they discovered that he was nothing more than an empty vessel (a married empty vessel) the living embodiment of a Mexican Meal – all about the wrapping – well… nothing ventured… isn’t that what they say?

Well, that’s why you must never feel sorry for young Mr Trite because, deep down inside, he knows that he has a pickled walnut for a brain, but he is bright enough, at least, to know that he can always spend his evenings in the company of men alongside whom he always looks amazing and women (as well as a not inconsiderable number of other men) who may yet be prepared to give him the benefit of the doubt, at least for one tedious, depressing and disappointing night.

Do not feel pity for him: he has more notches upon his bedposts than Elton John has had hair transplants and his conscience, like his IQ, has taken a permanent gap year trekking in Cambodia with a trainee taxidermist from Wolverhampton. Julian is a happy man and as for everyone else… well, he neither knows nor cares.

You may even feel that you know Julian yourself, but if you do, please keep it very, very quiet, because frankly I thought I’d made him up…

Wind and Wuthering*

Having recently scheduled some pre-prepared nonsense and taken a week off from writing, I am finding it very hard to get going again. I have tried using both hands, a variety of pens and a dozen different pads, but inspiration, as yet, has refused to put its weasel face above the parapet. Not that I blame it of course, look what I do to it when it does. My day has become locked into the kind of aimless listlessness that has me wandering from three chords on the guitar to three on the ukulele – not the same three chords, even I am not that listless (it has just occurred to me that when I am not listless, I must be list, and I have no idea what I should do about it) – a half-hearted scan through The Times Crossword, and a change of socks (due to the overwhelming conviction that the previous ones were, for reasons best known to themselves, holding me back).

Having not eaten meat for almost four decades I cannot fall back on chicken soup as a remedy so, in the hope that ceps are not sentient, I resort to mushroom which looks a little similar, but does not contain livestock, and a mug of camomile tea, the look and smell of which always brings hot Baby-Bio to mind. I drink it because, in my mind, it earns me a whisky. It also earns me, because I am driven to a period of cupboard scouring, a rogue Walnut Whip that was orphaned at least two Christmases ago. It probably had a Best Before date, but if I don’t read it, I figure I don’t have to abide by it. It is an immutable law of nature that if you do not read the Use by date, it cannot make you ill.

On days such as these I graze like a Dugong. Like a pigmy shrew, I feel light-headed if my jaw stops chewing for even a second. Bowls of fruit and boxes of chocolate are ravaged like fields of wheat in the path of a locust swarm. I fear that if the food runs out I will almost certainly eat the curtains. I would like to blame lack of sleep, an impoverished upbringing, sun-spots, lay-lines or, preferably, somebody else completely, but the problems are all my own. I constantly boomerang between periods of extreme productivity and the kind of lassitude for which a sloth would seek therapy. I ride the beast of abundance until I can hold on no longer and then I spend a wholly inappropriate period of time down amongst the feckless catching my breath and counting my toes.

Unfortunately for me, when the compulsion to write does return, it almost always does so unencumbered by any knowledge of ‘what about?’ It sweeps over me like a wave, plonking me on my poor, benighted swivel chair and whispers in my ear, ‘Well, I’ve done my bit…’ So, I stare at the paper for a while, I employ each of my favourite pens, I write right-handed and I write left handed (I’m not sure if it’s the curse of the ambidextrous that I never know which is which) I listen to something old and familiar and generally, sooner or later, things fall into place.

Although sometimes, of course, they don’t…

*By Genesis and on the player as I type…

The Re-education of Lancing Boil

At 8.32am precisely, Lancing Peregrine III slipped the bug into his overnight bag and slid, unobserved, from the building. It wasn’t unusual. There was nobody else to observe him anyway, and if there had been, none of them would have cared. Lancing was as unloved as it was possible for a person to be.

Boil they had called him at school: Lancing Boil – as in an excrescence. “A small and extremely annoying accumulation of pus” according to his then housemaster, now headmaster at his Alma Mater, and it was a strange kind of nominative determinism that ensured that Lancing had been a martyr to such pustules all of his life. Pimple, boil, or carbuncle, Lancing had spent most of his life skin-side of them. Barely a day passed him by without the eruption of a new whelk, and boy did he blame that school. The traumas that had been inflicted on his young self had, on occasion, been so extreme that his memory had erased them: locked them away in a mental vault to which he had lost the combination. He knew that the only way he would ever fill these gaps would be by somehow hearing the truth from someone else’s lips.

The bug he had slipped into his case was, he thought, his greatest creation to date. A miracle of miniaturised IT, his tiny listening device lay nestled inside a minutely detailed model cockroach, perfectly formed in every nauseous respect. Anyone finding it would, instead of investigating further, simply squidge it with a boot and sweep away the nano-remains without a second glance. It was perfect. All he had to do was plant it.

Exactly what he expected to discover was, at best, uncertain. He felt sure that the now Headmaster must have skeletons hidden away, but exactly why any of them might feature him, Lancing had no idea. Never-the-less, he simply could not resist the opportunity that the school reunion presented. Even a weekend spent in the company of a band of now middle-aged men that he recalled more as torturers than classmates could not cool his enthusiasm. He knew they would apple-pie his bed; he knew they would put his underwear in the shower; he knew that if they got the opportunity they would leave fake (he prayed) excrement on his pillow. He was ready for it all.

In the event, his contemporaries seemed genuinely pleased to see him and, to his surprise he was not called Boil once; his dormitory bed went unmolested, as did his underwear. He felt a strange contentment. The evening of the reunion ball passed in a rapturous blur. He was part of the gang. They ate, they drank (Lancing himself consumed at least three half pints of shandy and felt decidedly giddy) they laughed and they reminisced. Lancing began to doubt his own recollection of lonely and miserable schooldays. How could he have got things so wrong? These people were not the characters that his fractured memory recalled. Could he be wrong too about the headmaster? He knew there was only one way he could be ever be sure. He would plant the bug as planned.

2am. The dormitory was, save for alcohol-fuelled snoring and the gaseous fallout of a monster meal, completely benign. Lancing climbed silently from his bed and crept stealthily from the room with the night bag over his shoulder. Save for the usual shock of old building creak and groan, the journey was uneventful and his entrance into the headmasters study went without hitch. Now, where to put the bug? After a short mobile-phone lightened skirt around the room he found the perfect spot and returned to the holdall to retrieve his silent little ear-in-a-roach.

Excitement overwhelmed him. He felt as though the bag was alive. He pulled the zip and a thousand – a million – live cockroaches flooded out across the desk, the floor, his feet… Lancing screamed in unadulterated panic and previously lost memories of a deeply buried biology-lab trauma overwhelmed his senses. He put his hand to his mouth as behind him the door burst open, flooding light into the room, and there, silhouetted in the frame were all of his fellow alumni accompanied by the dreaded headmaster. They were laughing fit to bust. “Lancing,” they chanted. “Lancing Boil the Bug Boy,” and Lancing realised, quite suddenly, that for once he had succeeded in his mission. He had filled a gap in his memory…

Things That Should Never Be Taken Seriously

Any poetry that contains the word ‘ain’t’
Politicians who promise to tell the truth
‘Buy one, get one free’
‘Self-made’ millionaires who started off with absolutely nothing – other than the million pounds their parents ‘loaned’ them
Anyone who phones unexpectedly and starts the conversation with ‘Good afternoon sir…’
Actors who believe their work is important
Anybody who tells you how good you look
‘But…’ (‘I don’t mean to be funny but…’, ‘I’m not racist but…’, It’s none of my business but…’)
Anything that offers results without effort
Anything that promises to make you look ten years younger
Politicians who claim to be ‘a man/woman of the people’
The manufacturer’s ‘miles per gallon/miles per electrical charge’ projection on a new vehicle
Anyone who wears a bow tie without being forced to
The efficacy of a baby’s nappy
‘Sale Ends Tomorrow’ notices
Anything that an Estate Agent says, unless you get it in writing
Anything that an Estate Agent says, even if you do get it in writing
Newsreaders who wink
People who dress up pets
Politicians in track suits
Anything that’s ‘foolproof’
Turquoise track suits
Clowns
People who wear turquoise track suits
‘If you wish to stop receiving e-mails from us, just click here’
The weather forecast
The first answer you get on a calculator
Anything that claims to be ‘leak-proof’
Celebrity chefs
Your partner when they’ve had a drink
Trendy vicars
Children who deny anything
Ripley’s ‘Believe It Or Not’
Actor’s who claim to love their co-stars
‘I put in even more hours when I work from home…’
Politicians who say ‘I have been completely open about my tax affairs’
‘It’s a united dressing room’
‘I almost became professional in my teens’
Man Caves
Sweat bands
‘We will take all such allegations very seriously’
Elderly Chinese politicians with jet-black hair
Bidets
The word ‘operative’ when applied to a job description
A Russian promise
Vitamins
Pyjamas
Naturists (particularly those playing volleyball)
72-hour antiperspirant
Apathy
Politicians

You Cannot Be Serious!

What you see is what you get.

I have tried, from time to time, to put something ‘out there’ that was altogether more mature than my normal farrago, actually ready to stand on its own two feet, that was not quite so needy, but inevitably what leaves my head as ‘worthy’ hits the page as ‘trite’ and, by and large, any point that I think I might want to make is probably best served by being made by somebody else. Nobody ever had their viewpoint changed by a sockful of wet fish in the face. Whoever said that laughter is the best medicine has never had a UTI. It might be possible to successfully make a point with a joke, but only if you use a feather duster and not a bludgeon and, let’s be honest here, I’m not certain that I am aware of anyone who has actually laughed so much that it has fundamentally changed their point of view. I don’t think that anybody necessarily likes somebody more because they can make them laugh, although it definitely has the edge over making them feel as though they would like to swallow stones.

Whilst being the butt of a joke is never going to improve anybody’s demeanour, seeing somebody else getting their pants filled with custard may well work a treat. Nothing is quite as cheering as the misfortune of others.

Extreme emotion is incredibly difficult to channel properly. Everyone has experienced that moment at the lowest point of a funeral when grief overwhelms the senses and they find themselves giggling. No? Only me? Oh dear… It is in no way a mark of disrespect, merely a brain that is unable to process what it is feeling and so seeks relief in the first emotion that comes to hand: inevitably the wrong one. This is no sign of flippancy, but the mark of someone with an emotional compass that has been left too near the microwave.

There are times when I feel that the reality I occupy lies just one millimetre to the side of everybody else’s. I am the man who set off to explore the Cosmos and wound up in a bar in Kos. (Or, if my first draft is to be believed, ‘in a bra in Kos’.) On the whole, my world is split into three sections: 1. the huge things that I have no control over whatsoever – these are usually of incomprehensible magnitude and almost always distressing; 2. the usual day to day annoyances which occupy my brain in fevered worry for 99% of the time; 3. everything else – usually composed of sheer absurdity, frustration and chocolate. There is seldom anything amusing to be found in category 1, but if I couldn’t find it in 2 and 3 I would almost certainly be found wandering the Brecon Beacons in a woolly hat and loin cloth shouting ‘wibble’ at unicorns. My default position is always ‘Really? Are you sure?’

Truly you do not have to search to find absurdity, we are surrounded by it, so little of life makes any sense at all, and if you report on it, no matter how microcosmically, you simply cannot be serious…