What is the nature of the catastrophe?

I’ll tell you what the fucking nature of the catastrophe is - this morning at the gym I looked up to see a middle-aged bloke staring back at me. The problem? I was looking in a mirror.

Catastrophe, it would appear, is both gradual and sudden. For instance, burning tyres for a few decades in your back garden contributes to the catastrophe of global warming (and your neighbour’s washing always smelling faintly of rubber) but you won’t get a sense of impending dread and doom from it. You probably won’t get a sense of impending dread and doom from the water lapping round your front door, up the stairs and into the bedrooms. You probably won’t be truly worried until you’re standing on your roof and it’s lapping at your ankles. Then two things will occur to you - the first is that you should not have burned all those tyres, the second is that it probably won’t be the water that kills you - what you’re really worried about is the cholera epidemic that will follow because you have a sneaking suspicion that if Boots sell cholera medication at all, it’s only going to be in the larger stores.

Of course, sometimes catastrophe comes with no warning. Amid all the background-level dread and fear of global warming, AIDS, bird-flu and consumer angst there is the occasional surprise - I can remember watching the news on Boxing Day about the Tsunami and thinking ‘oh shit’. Or 7 July in London.

Your basic catastrophe though has a long build up and then - ker-pow. I guess the long build up to this morning’s episode was down to a number of contributing factors. The first is getting old, the second is perhaps not getting a haircut as often as I might (hence rather a lot of grey), the third is choosing clothes for comfort rather than style and the last is that those clothes, when worn together, have the effect of magically transforming me into the very image of a professor of modern languages at a small East Anglian polytechnic in 1978.

I am, without a doubt, fucked.

This was rammed home in grand style when, decanting from the train and bopping through the station concourse listening to ‘House of Love’ (ahhhh, the 80’s, say what you like about heroin raddled bands, they rocked) I saw a traveller - obviously caught in that no-time/no-place transition between one journey and the next, backpack, puffer jacket and sense of going somewhere interesting - chowing down on the biggest sodding burger I’ve ever seen. Christ alone knows what time zone his body was on, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say it was evening for him but looking at him I knew, I mean knew, that I’d never be able to eat something like that.

Not, ‘I can’t drink like I used to’, or ‘who really wants to go clubbing all night anyway?’ - this was me thinking ‘ooooh, don’t fancy that’ about a BURGER!

I put it down to my Old Man’s Jeans. Generous of waist and dark of colour - the only time a young woman is going to be interested in them is when she was finishing hemming the fucking things.

I need some sort of coping strategy. I don’t want to embrace middle age but there’s nothing more pathetic than fighting it. Booze, I think, is the obvious solution.

Lunar light

Now that the office windows have been cleaned I can see the moon rising. Seems odd to see it in a work environment and not, for instance, when outdoors enjoying some healthy pursuit like poaching. Still, no doubt commuters would comment if one got on the train with a dead rabbit or two in your pocket, a brace of deer round your neck and a circus of ferrits down your trousers. Bloody townies.

Branches and roots

Everything is drip, drip, dripping here at the moment. The rain drips from trees, gutters and umbrellas and from the brim of my hat. A hat says something about a chap, mine for instance says: ‘I have a cheap hat’. It’s a green canvas jobbie but its beauty is that it’s easily adaptable. Stick a twig in it and you’re good to go for jungle warfare, stick a few lures in it and you can weekend on the banks of the Tay. Best of all the wide brim keeps the rain off me and decants it onto any passing dwarf - of which there are more than you’d think as it’s panto time.

Rain also means delays on the trains as signals short and rails become slick. This gives one more time to consider one’s fellow commuters up and down the platform and, apart from the obvious thoughts such as ‘is she naked under that coat?’ one does start to recognise familiar faces. Faces such as ‘the professor’, a chap who had been catching the same train for years. The danger is that one starts to fantasise about the home life of these sorts and the next thing you know your imagination is hammering towards the darkness like a roller-coaster cart with a lax maintenance crew and you’re wondering if they are the type to have a dungeon in their back bedroom.

Which is why I’m now convinced that most commuters read the papers to distract themselves from such thoughts. Certainly I was distracted by a genuine WTF? moment after reading that the PM had decided to sort of apologise for Britain’s part in the slave trade. What? What’s this got to do with me? I had nothing to do with it and seeing as it was abolished over 100 years ago I can’t see that there are too many people who are directly involved still hanging around.

If you want to do something about the slave trade then have a go at Nike for running sweatshops and the supermarkets for using gangmasters and illegal immigrants to pick crops - do something in the here and now.

Also - I really enjoyed ‘Roots’. No slave trade - no telly mini-series. Some people just don’t see the big picture.

Quasi listening

Roaming the BBC’s ‘listen again’ schedule, looking for the Shipping Forecast (how like poetry it is) I happened upon a broadcast of a recording of church bells. This is surely worth the price of the licence fee itself, you get a little introduction ‘Today we here from St Mungo’s’ then a history of the tower ‘there have been bells here for a while, then they took them away during World War 2 and melted them down to build the guns on battleships, now they have been restored but still have a range of 27 miles on a clear day’ and finally the tune ‘and today we here ‘a ringing we will go, a dinging we will go, you can’t enforce your ASBO, we ring at dawn you know’. This is followed by, well, bells.

I wasn’t aware there were different tunes. I thought it was like boy band music - all the same. Apparently there are, which possibly explains why campanologists are so highly strung (especially if they forget to let go of the bellpull). I wonder if they have some sort of technical term of dropping a note when clanging bells?

Match report

Make a single child suffer and before you know it it’s social services at the door, blanket over the head for the court appearance and a spell of being horribly beaten every day for your prison term.

Make a number of children suffer at once and it’s called organised sports. Specifically, little league.

Yes, the local footie little league has kicked off again in style. Oh, I know, the season and indeed games started a few weeks ago - but that wasn’t the real deal. That was just kids running about enjoying themselves, booting the ball up and down the pitch and generally doing what they would have been doing on a Saturday morning anyway, but with the added bonus of having their parent scream encouragement from the sidelines before formally assaulting the coach for not giving little Tyler more time on the pitch.

This was the real deal: this was rain. This Saturday saw the little league playing in foul weather. The goalmouth looked like a homage to the Somme and the rain was coming in horizontally, straight from the Urals and fuck the passport control mate.

This of course meant that proper football could be played. This mainly consisted of young children nearly dying of exposure and exhaustion, their only compensation the occasional goal or, more likely, the shocking sting of a football slamming into a wet, cold thigh.

Of course the supporters earned their stripes too. I was wrapped in layers of fleece and gor-tex. Many of the local mothers had taken the precaution of being grossly fat and were able to live of these reserves for the duration of the match. Well, that and pies.

It’s a mixed ability group that play, that’s for sure. Not only that but you can tell who has Sky telly. If there’s some three foot yob who’s versed in the latest punching, pulling and professional fouling, not to mention spitting and abusing, then it’s a certainty their have a satellite dish strapped to the side of their home.

Top marks though go to my nephew. Playing in goal this weekend with a pair of gloves that he had to work harder and harder to keep dry by rubbing on a pair of track suit bottoms that were getting wetter and wetter, he stood in the teeth of a howling gale and driving rain.

None of the kids actually burst into tears because they were so cold and wet, they didn’t really have time between the usual hysterics about falling over, being fouled or going down ten one to a girls team.

As for me, I was just happy to put off having to get back to decorating the bedroom. This weekend was glossing weekend, which traditionally culminates in ‘cut the dried gloss out of your hair’ Sunday.

There has been of late, it’s fair to say, train trouble

On the one hand, things have been going fairly well. Certainly, I’ve broke my own train sprint record. Last summer I could make the train in the morning if I saw it coming over the bridge and I was by the newsagents. God knows what the actual distance is, I prefer to measure it in the time it takes me to recover - which is 20 minutes or four stops. On the plus side, being a sweating heap with breath coming in ragged bursts and eyes practically popping means that I often get a seat to myself.

Recently though, I’ve caught the train from a standing start at the crossroads. This means that for the first twenty yards or so you have to really fly. Then for the next twenty yards or so you settle into a pace that ensures you are not going to shed wallet, phone, iPod or keys. Dignity has been shed about three seconds ago. Past the window of the bakery and you start to accelerate because by now you’ve realised that you’re in a right state and if you’ve made all that effort and you miss the train…there will be a scene of epic emotional outburst that will make one of those Middle Eastern funerals look like a gathering of anal-retentive introverts.

Made the train but it’s not pretty.

The evening story is a rather different one. One can’t run in a crowded station as you might slip, hit somebody or, more likely, be blown out of your socks by the police. What you can do is walk quickly, a stiff legged walk that is not tooooo dignified and only looks a little bit like you’ve poo’d yourself.

If, however, as happened the other night the bastard bastard bastards on the railway platform the train somewhere so far away from the main station you need a ticket and passport to get there and then the driver decides to pull out of the station thirty seconds before departure time - I’m afraid tutting won’t do.

The trouble with leaping onto the first twat in a day-glo vest and pounding their shit-filled skull against the station floor until it splits like a rotten melon is that it can get you into trouble. I waited around hopefully for somebody else to do it before resigning myself to just getting the next train and amusing myself by swapping the model train enthusiast magazines with the porn mags in the station newsagents.

The truth is that I’m getting too old for impotent rage. Oh, don’t get me wrong, internally I was fizzing, but the trouble with losing your rag with faceless organisations is that it’s pointless. What’s the point of abusing some station staff, they are unhelpful, ugly and thick-as-shit sure but look at it this way - they spend all their working life in a shitty environment with a lot of ugly stupid people - they are already being punished for the many thousand slings and arrows of misfortune they shower upon passengers. Of course, if I get a chance to nudge one into the path of an oncoming train, I may, but judging by the size of their arses it will have to be a goods train hauling twenty billion tonnes of coal to have a chance of doing any real damage.

Killing time in the newsagents I was, as always, amazed at the number of specialist magazines on offer. I though porn was big business but jesus Christ have you seen the amount of magazines about modelling there are? Train modelling (of course), boat modelling, military modelling. If I had time to look I’d of probably found magazines about modelling the countryside, ‘tree and hedge modeller’ - not to be confused to ‘hedge and tree modeller’ who think the staff and readers of ‘T&HM’ are a right bunch of bastards who probably paint after the assemble.

If tree and hedge modeller doesn’t exist, I should start it. And sod internet publishing, how the fuck do you attach a free gift to the cover of a web-site. I’d be giving away a leaf with issue 1. Genius, it’s autumn and the place is COVERED in the things. I want a gloddy cover, with a picture of a hedge. Sod actually building a model, just photograph a hedge (or a tree) and photoshop a hand a tube of glue in proximity.

Hummmn, men and porn and modelling - wonder if men just like having something to keep their hand busy. And, you know, tits.

Anyway - who has the time to make models? I’ll tell you who, people who catch their trains. People who catch their trains and people who don’t drink. Hummmn, come to think of it, ‘pissed modeller’ would be a pretty good publication. Each week you get a magazine with a bottle of plonk and a really, really simple model, all painted and - most importantly - with all the transfers and stickers already done! So you go home, open a bottle, read the magazine (hey.,.this is full of porn) and snap part A to part B and ta-dahhhh! A 1/25th scale replica of the Victory, with working cannons!

Next week, scotch and the Lancaster Bomber!

Hell, I’d buy it!

Just say no to telly

There was, I used to think, a faint air of smugness surrounding those who said ‘I don’t own a teevee’ and didn’t exhibit the obvious poverty that seemed to me at the time the only rational explanation for not having a goggle-box.

Adults who did not have a television were considered eccentric and cruel. Eccentric because I couldn’t understand how they filled their time, cruel because they often had children (possibly answering my first point) and depriving these kids of The Clangers and Mr Ben was an act of monstrous cruelty as far as I could see.

Today, television is less widely watched than it used to be. This is because a) it’s shit and b) everyone is too busy firing up the interweb or their Gamecube to bother catching up on the latest developments in Albert Square.

So now, when somebody says ‘I don’t have a telly’ the automatic assumption is that they used to have one, but it got buried one day beneath a mound of consumer durables and hasn’t been seen since.

Certainly now I reflect on those that didn’t have a telly then and those that don’t now, the question remains the same ‘what did you do in the evenings’. Being quite naive I thought that they had interesting hobbies and pastimes. Now I strongly suspect they were involved in folk dancing, choral singing, wife-swapping and other unsavoury pursuits. These are the people with perfect scale model villages in their attics, body parts in their freezers and calluses on their palms. Certainly the telly-nots of a decade ago, living in monastic isolation are different from the telly-nots of today, simply bypassing the idiot box in an orgy of broadband, game console and porn.

The trouble with telly for my generation is that the greatest telly moment in history has passed for us. The moon landing may have defined telly for one generation but for me it was when that second world trade centre tower came down. What is ever going to equal that again?

Mind you, Portillo losing his seat was a pretty good moment too.

Thinking about it, the vital television moments have all been real life ones. (The exception is any Dr Who episode and the Christmas one in particular - but that’s event telly, part of the enjoyment is knowing that millions like you are sitting on their sofas awaiting this moment, and that you’ve stayed sober to enjoy it - an effort you didn’t even make at your wedding!)

I don’t know if telly really is worse* or whether there is just more really cool shit competing with it for our time these days. The alternative used to be masturbation, conversation or model making and an attempt to combine any of the three used to result in embarrassment or a trip to casualty. Now you can access radio from around the world or, if you really are an old fart, watch seven seconds of QVC, think ‘this is shit’ and read a book instead.

* It’s worse. For reasons far too dull to go into I was awake in the wee small hours at the weekend and, surfing for something interesting** came across what can only be described as a camera pointing at a sofa on which were a couple of women who man a chat line. My brand of fascination was ‘horrified’ as I realised that there are blokes out there who will spend pounds a minute just to talk to a woman. I hope, at least, they were talking about model making. Judging from the way the blonde one was laughing, I suspect not. Sordid, just a little. Better than those ‘quiz call’ channels, oh yes.

** Porn

Remember remember

Ancient times - China. In the court of the Emporor the royal artificer is showing off his latest creation. He has just used a bronze barrel full of black powder and a shedload of ball-bearings to turn some test-peasents into a rather unpleasent stain on a nearby wall. He is explaining that this, combined with the reather nifty wall under construction to the East, will put the fear of God into any invader.

‘Oooh’, says the Emporor, ‘let’s have another, but let’s have a drink first and this time let’s let off two at once!’. So the scene is set for every fireworks party since.

There have, of course, been adaptions and refinements over the years. With the invention of silver foil came the delightful process of wrapping a spud and baking it in the embers of the bonfire. This tradition has died off in recent years because as gardens have got smaller, fences have crept nearer to the bonfire. Cresote and flame do not mix. Soup and sausages are staple fare at fireworks parties now, soup because it keeps you warm and sausages because - well, any excuse.

Surrupticiously stirring yout soup with your sausage is a great fireworks night tradition, as is crapping yourself in fear when that cut-price monster you brought back from the cash and carry unexpectedly detonates, while still in a box of fireworks.

The next advancement in firework party fun was the arrival of Guy Fawkes. Recent rebranding exercises have seen Government try to call the 5th of November ‘5/11’. In an attempt to convince us that piling several hundred barrels of gunpowder into the basement of the Houses of Parliament with the intention of lighting the blue touch paper was less a bloody good idea and more an act of terrorism. Naturally, GF is now seen as a national hero, especially by the makers of fireworks and sausages.

In years past one could find out which of your neighbours was an ex-solider simply by letting off a banger or two and watching carefully for any signs of trauma, such as their running screaming into the coal bunker or, if they have no coal bunker, attempting to dig a shelter in their back garden using a spoon as a trenching tool. These days having a squaddie as a neighbour is a much more dangerous business, and letting off a fusilade of fireworks and screaming ‘in the name of Allah’ may provoke terrified, traumatised screams from a nearby house but also, given the amount of contraband weapons our boys are bring back with them from warmer climes, will be a followed by the chatter of automatic weapons fire as your neighbour sprays the garden with fire from his AK47, simply buying time until he can take out the barbeque with his looted RPG.

Finally it’s good to see that China are back in the fireworks game, now with added irony. They produce something with a name like ‘golden shower’ which is, for want of a better term, chaos in a cardboard tube.

That was the backdrop to last weekend’s fireworks party, which I’m just about able to think about now without shaking and weeing myself just a little bit. I knew there was going to be trouble when I saw a couple of my guests for that evening come out of the party shop nearby actually dragging a sack of fireworks. Inside was the sort of rocket that normally has three blokes strapped to the top of it and a firework that was titled ‘lovely sparkle’ but we came to refer to as the ‘dustbin of destruction’. I notched up background worry to real apprehension and went in to buy a couple of packets of something restrained.

Luckily, the rest of the guests had decided that as it was not their house, shed or neighbours that were in danger, they could push the boat out. One came with a selection he had picked up ‘at a newsagents’ including one ‘half price, I think he wanted to get rid of it’. This, we discovered, was because the fuse was about two seconds long.

I decided that sobriety was no state to be in and speed drank a couple of beers before letting off the first salvo of the night.

It all went off rather well. There was oohing and aahing, children cried and adults said ‘christ that was close!’ a few times. We discovered why you should not use display fireworks in a small garden as we were all doused with ash and soot but, best of all, despite firing off nearly a dozen rockets, we didn’t find one tube or stick fallen back to earth in our garden the next day - how odd is that?

Boxing

In the future, alien archaeologists* will wonder about DVD box sets. They mark a particular period in our history, much as cables trailing throughout a house to ensure ‘internet access in every room’ means that your home was built in 2003. People who have enough cable to go round the planet three times in their home just to ensure that they can have internet access in the loo (why? I know why, you dirty dirty sods) must have been tremendously pissed off in 2003, when the same could be achieved, but with much faster bandwidth, by the purchase of a wireless router. Added bonus - neighbours get web access too, until you figure out how to tighten up the security features.

Getting all the episodes of your favourite telly series used to be something of a challenge. Insert tape into machine, set time for programme, go out, hope it tapes. Do this week after week and you’d soon have a mounting pile of unwatched programmes and a warm fuzzy feeling that you would soon have every episode of ‘24’. However, one of two things would then happen, you’d either forget to tape an episode or, more likely, the snooker would overrun. If the former then you’ve probably lost interest anyway, if the latter then at least the impotent rage you’d seeth with half way through your telly marathon when you eventually got round to watching the damn thing would give your heart a workout.

People who buy box sets boil down to two different types. Men and women. Women buy ‘Sex in the city’ or ‘Ally McBeal’. They do this by standing in the queue at HMV with their mother standing behind them, so obviously looking forward to spending twenty straight hours pretending they are part of a circle of sophisticated friends who have romance in their lives and eat and drink in fabulous places rather than, for instance, queue in HMV with their mother and should in fact be buying a tee shirt that says ‘I’m nearly 30, still live at home and am a psycho’.

DVD box sets will be redundant in a few years time anyhoo, as we simply order up telly programmes past and present from a back-catalogue from the BBC or whoever, getting them delivered down the line (or by wi-fi) to keep or bin as we see fit.

The move from VHS to DVD was a painful one for some of us. I paid ninety quid a pop for my X Files box sets - ninety quid. You can now get them practically for free on DVD. And you can’t sell them on eBay or give the sodding things away. Real kicker - I never watch them, I got married instead and somehow my free time now consists of redecorating rather than sitting slumped in front of the telly idly picking bits of myself. On the off chance there’s an afterlife, I’m going to be buried with them as it’s the only way I’m ever going to get to be with the young Gillian Anderson.

Last box set purchase was the excellent ‘Firefly’, bought based on seeing the movie of the teevee show, rather than binge I span out the ples……ure of watching the seventeen episodes for as long as possible.

But surely the best box-set has to be the extended editions of the Lord of the Rings films. Watching these back to back is so near to being in Middle Earth that before doing so you should check to see if there is still an FCO warning about visiting Mordor. Certainly, a pair of those DVT stockings that people use for long haul flights help.

As for watching a box-set of programmes you’ve already seen before? Who’s got the time - women, that’s who. Why? Because women don’t play Nintendo.

* It’s always alien archaeologists and it boils down to two types, both seen in the last panel of a pulp sci-fi comic. The first is a humanoid type (but with alienesque feature such as antenna, tails or something not normally sported by humans outside of the red states in the US), the second is clearly alien - let’s say a blob. In the first case the field party are normally excavating the ruins of an ancient civilization and in the second well, pretty much the same. Both stories end the same way, with the archaeologists looking at a pit containing a television and the skeleton of some sod who was too idle to get up off their arse and feed themselves. The last line is normally something like ‘they had a wonderful planet…but then they covered it in burger wrappers and their civilization perished’. This is followed by a huge exclamation mark - the sign of good sci-fi.