Brave New Word

I, to a similar degree as anyone else who over the last demi-century has ever attempted to shine a flickering (and lately, dying) light on to the eccentricities of the human condition, owe a deep debt of gratitude to the great Alan Coren: major wag and literary (as well as ‘literally a’) genius – for revealing to me, with frightening clarity and seeming ease, the heights to which I cannot even aspire. His gift for turning the mundane into something quite exotic with nothing more than a few hundred immaculately chosen words is, IMHO, unrivalled in the English language. His mastery in the art of wringing mirth from the bottomless pit of normality is something I have always sought to emulate, but never hoped to match. He was the very best at what I do so inexpertly, but his mastery of form and line gave me the impetus to at least try to, one day, write something worthwhile. He is, along with Spike Milligan, the writer I would most like to be like and consequently the writer I have to try the hardest not to be like.

Of course, his normality was never quite my own. He was a successful columnist, magazine editor and television personality. I am not. Things happened to him – often in exotic locations. They do not happen to me. I cannot relate the story of, for instance, losing a brand new cashmere coat at the Garrick because, frankly, I can afford neither. I can, reveal a little of my skill at losing tickets for things after I have left them to go for a wee, and my subsequent battles to be allowed back in, but it’s not quite the same: such incidents might be normal to me but unfortunately, even with the eccentricities of my telling, they are probably normal to everyone else as well. Nothing special.

A.C. came to mind because I have just realised how I use two of his words – he attempted, and failed, to get them attributed to him in the Oxford English Dictionary – ‘wossname’ and ‘narmean’ far more than I probably should, but they amuse me and they allow me to very quickly portray a character without ever having to actually… describe them. Someone who spends his entire wossname, life, searching for the meaning of it is unlikely to ever find it, narmean?

I started to wonder if I could lay claim to any words of my own. I remember on many occasions having used words that Spellcheck is quite adamant do not exist. The problem is that, in general, I only ever use them once, and the rest of the world not at all. That they are not admissible demonstrates to me a hidebound adherence to outmoded custom that does the OED no credit: that a word once made up on the grounds that it sounded just right at the time, should need to be used more than once and by other people before it can enter the wossname, dictionary, is anachronistic… I think.

…And as I wondered, I began to realise that all this introspection would not put the kettle on the hob: that I had work to do of my own. Five hundred words worth to be precise (or imprecise if I’m honest for, though my aim is for five hundred, my eventual shot normally takes me much nearer to six). It’s all very well recognising my own shortcomings, but it’s far better to do it after I’ve written the post for the day. All I needed, it transpired, was a suitable starting point: somewhere to launch the tarradiddle whence I could watch on with curious detachment as it drifted off to where… and why? Easier said than done apparently. Each attempt to step nonchalantly from the pier-end onto the boat destined to drift me serenely and amusingly to the bottom of the page, left me up to my neck in the rising tide. The surface of a body of water, I have found, is always best when viewed from above. Knowing where I don’t want to go does not make it any easier to get to where I do want to go, especially when I don’t actually know where that is. Great journeys, it occurs, need meticulous planning but, if you’re only going to the end of the road to find out whether last year’s bargain shoes still turn your toes blue, it’s ok to busk it a bit.

I think what I’m trying to say is that I don’t always know what I’m trying to say, but I go ahead and say it anyway… and I think there must be some kind of a word for that.

High Ideals

The songs that flit through my head as I write these little titbits have become a running theme and, because of that, I have started to look far more closely at the lyrics, small snatches of which have rounded off every post so far this year. As a long-time fan of David Bowie I have always been a disciple of the beautifully crafted phrase. (My first Bowie LP – Man of Words, Man of Music – came when I was no’but a child and simply because I had some birthday money left and I loved Space Oddity. I will not pretend that, at that time, I understood what the words were really all about, but I liked the way that they sounded – and I still do.) I would like to put in a word of my own here for the wonderful Guy Garvey of Elbow who writes lyrics that read like the very best of poetry: simple yet affecting. Take almost any Elbow song and read the lyric sheet and you will see. Try Puncture Repair, Magnificent, Weightless, Starlings or even the ubiquitous One Day Like This and you will understand. I digress…

The God-like Alan Coren turned out buffed-up idioms like there was no tomorrow and the young Woody Allen used words in a way that rendered me speechless. I love the simplicity of Orwell’s prose, but I cannot replicate it: somehow I always drift off towards the flowery end of the page. Back in the day I was – I think – the same as all other teenage boys: I knew that I was going to be a professional footballer (I was ok but, if I’m honest, seldom the very best in any team I was a part of) or a rock star (despite the fact that I could not play an instrument more complicated than the G# chime bar and had a post-adolescent voice that was reminiscent of the whine of a recently neutered cat). Punk came along for me at the perfect time, but I turned my back on it because by then I had decided that I wanted to be funny (or, as my then best friend suggested ‘weird’). That I failed on all counts is no surprise. Never mind, I play football with the kids, I sing (very badly) all the time and I scour the twilight zone between my ears most days to write this. Who needs the fame I craved back then?

Of course my vision of fame then was slightly different to today’s. Then it just meant getting girlfriends – which is everything to a pimply youth. It was the only motivation. I must admit that I’ve always been a bit bored by money. I realise that I am exceedingly fortunate in that I have always had just enough to live how I would wish, but I have never had – nor desired – plenty. The thought of all the husbandry that is required to care for stacks of lucre is not at all appealing. Nor, for me, is the thought of spending shed-loads: I hate changing my car and the thought of voluntarily diving into the luxury housing market leaves me breathless (and not in a good way). The thought of fussing over piles of dosh, ensuring that they always grow, is less appealing than an evening with Gemma Collins. And you can’t even give the bloody stuff away: you don’t want to pass the problem onto your kids, but you cannot bypass them for charity as a) everyone will presume that you are the head of a disastrously dysfunctional dynasty, or b) that you are incredibly vain and prepared to part with huge wads of currency in order to buy admiration. High ideals, it seems to me, are incompatible with riches. Fortunately, I don’t have to make the decision…

there’s a laddered tear in my high ideals
like I took a chair on the battle field… High Ideals – Elbow

The Key To My Success Could Open Doors for You Too.

I have entered a very busy spell in McQueen Real World and am managing to keep up the blogging schedule – which my brain tells me is vital for my well-being – only by neglecting the very things that contrive to construct an acceptable blog presence: reading the work of other bloggers, joining in ‘conversations’, generally being part of the community. I am eschewing all of these things that are desirable in a contributor and (temporarily, I assure you) behaving like a git. It would be the work of minutes to go through my reader and ‘like’ all of the contributions that I would normally read, but that’s not playing the game, is it? I ‘like’ only the posts that I have enjoyed reading. I comment if I have something to say (however asinine) only after I have read. I regularly read a dozen or so blogs – you know who you are, it is your curse – and I also try to drop in on other blogs that receive a mention on blogs that I follow or who have read and kindly commented on my own. Common good manners. But I am currently struggling to keep up my end of the bargain and, simultaneously, at a loss for something to say. I think that the two states of affairs are linked, in that I am finding that any pause for reflection I manage to allow myself, is currently very short and generally centres around whether I can allow myself a second biscuit.

Blogging – at least my part in it – is a very self-centred pursuit: this is my world, I will open the door for you and you can look inside for a little while. Even Little Fictions constitute a reflection, no matter how distorted, of the collision of neurons in my head: as if rational thought has played an extended game of Chinese Whispers around the cerebellum. In my own case, what goes in is pretty random – what emerges, more or less so. The Chaos Theory (such is the contents of my head) dictates that inputted scrambled mass might just emerge as an infinitely more scrambled mass, or as a strangely coherent tract. Every now and then, the monkey in my head, by some miracle of mischance, hits exactly the right keys on the old cranial Olivetti and Bingo! something almost readable emerges. It’s like dropping stuff into a soup-maker: occasionally you’ll get minestrone, mostly you’ll get something that only the pigeons are interested in.

In the midst of my current somewhat detached WordPress presence, I have experienced my best ever week for views followed immediately by my worst week in a very long time. I have absolutely no idea of why. My concentration, my entire effort goes into everything I write. It may not look as if I agonise over every word, but I do. It might be tripe, but it is fretted over tripe. I can see no discernible difference in ‘quality’ between what I wrote in my record week and what I wrote in the succeeding ‘week of shadows’. Perhaps I have just been rumbled. Perhaps I need to find something new to say. Not easy. In the cold light of day, I am this blog: it is what I see and think and, well, at my age that doesn’t change much. I have spent a lifetime trying to change the lead character, but nobody wants the role. Maybe (who knows) things might pick up next week. I’m in no position to judge. Nearly all of my favourite posts have performed badly. Very often the posts that I come very close to trashing – and I do trash an awful lot of dross – perform well. My own tastes are clearly at somewhat of a variance to your own, which surprises me: I thought we were twin-like, you and I.

Many years ago I remember a sit-com* written by the late (and very great) Alan Coren and starring the TV ‘box-office’ of the time, Leonard Rossiter. It was in all ways perfect. It could not fail. It did. I loved it, but I had the uncomfortable feeling that I was watching the later episodes alone. Even my wife went to bed. It limped to a finish; no second series was ever made, and it became an indelible stain on the CV of all concerned. Why? Nobody seems to know, but, as a man whose very best can often be charitably described as passable, I can take some comfort from the fact that even the very best can produce work that, for whatever reason, people just do not take to.

However – and this has just occurred to me – in order to not like what I had written for my weekus horribilus people would have had to have read it. They did not. In droves. It therefore occurs to me that they did not like what they read the week before and decided that they would not bother again. The more people that read my drivel, the more they don’t want to do so again. That’s a problem, isn’t it? If I have another ‘best ever’ week in the future, the fallout could be terminal. I may have no readers left. So, for all of those kind people who did start to read me a couple of weeks ago I say ‘thank you’, but I regret that I will not be taking you up on your very kind offers of low-cost advice on how to boost my readership further. Perhaps I, myself, could profitably offer a service advising on how to keep readership unfeasibly low. It would need a really catch click-bait title. Now, let’s see, what about Successful Blogging – The Power of Under-Achievement? No? Not snappy enough? Learn to Fail? No, I don’t think that will bring them in. I’m not even sure that a bit of Dickens could help: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. What’s needed is something that just blatantly ignores the facts and… Oh, I know…

*‘The Losers’, aired November 1978 on Sunday evenings and also starred a young Alfred Molina. All episodes were wiped from the tapes by the TV company for re-use. Alan Coren’s Obituary in The Times (2007) said the series ‘sank with all hands.’