Bakelite and telephones

Sometimes the sheer amount of technology that surrounds us makes me reel. This sensation is strongest whenever I decant from my train carriage in the morning into the station, I guess because I’m mobbing from a world that includes me, my book and, if I’m feeling racy, a coffee into a world where you are assaulted with bright, loud advertising and announcements.

Before they banned smoking in public places, people would get off the carriages while simultaneously lighting up. Now they simultaneously light up their mobiles and tell work they will be there in ten minutes – great, just enough time to clear up the party that breaks out whenever the sort of person who ‘phones their work to tell them they will be there in ten minutes is not there.

The sheer number of high tech gadgets is bewildering. Not that I don’t enjoy them, like everyone else on planet earth who doesn’t give their address as ‘Number 1, the jungle’, I’ve got a mobile and an iPod. I really enjoy my iPod, not always playing it but knowing I can use it as a sonic screen if disturbed by conversation on the train that is loud, stoopid or, as is usually the case, both. Of course, using it as a sonic sword would be even better.

All these people on their mobiles all the time – wonder what it would look like if we could see the lines of communication reaching out from ‘phone to ‘phone, criss-crossing the street, penetrating steel and glass and concrete and flesh – imagine, impaled on txt mssges and inane conversation. Certainly in our cities it would be as intrusive as the roads that the traffic pours (or trickle) along.

Looking at the tremendous amount of consumption happening all the time in the cities, you wonder how it’s sustainable – who the hell is producing all that is needed to get a carton of juice onto the shelf at the supermarket – the exotic fruit themselves, juices, then packaged then transported then stored in a chiller cabinet – just so somebody can buy it, schlurp it and discard the package to stay in landfill for a million years. Sometimes I think that humanity at the start of the 21st Century is not at the peak of civilization after all, that we are in fact teetering on the edge of collective oblivion and that out decline into decadence has in fact started but we’re all too distracted to notice.

We’re even discarding modernistic words. A few days ago I read the phrase ’information superhighway’. Once upon a time this was a phrase that oozed modernity, now it’s as dated as the hairstyle of the wife of a Mercury programme astronaut. Other words have gone the same way. Bakelite used to be the apex of modern style, now it’s antique. Plastic is going the same way – once upon a time if something was describes as being made of rough, durable plastic, that would be so cool. Not so sure any more.

Maybe it’s a feature of getting older, being less and less open to the suggestion of ad men who tell you to consume for the sake of it, and the realisation that some things should last longer than a few years. Even royal marriages have a short shelf life these days.

As for suggestions of words that describe modern life now but will date quickly – ‘blog’ has to be a candidate. Surely in a few years the blog will be rolled up with your myface entry and your video log and on-line photo collection in one great big mish-mash that will be your digital reflection on-line. Which means ‘web 2.0’ will probably have faded from memory by then too.

Neither word, of course, is as charming as ‘bakelite’.

New Year – New Nazi?

When you’re a kid, a letterbox is nothing but fun. It’s what brightly coloured envelopes drop through on your birthday – the thicker the better (how many of us learned to hate the padded card at an early age – cards should be thick because of the huge wad of book tokens in them dammit!).

As you grow older, the tyranny of the letterbox starts – exam results, results of interviews and, for my generation at least, break-up letters from that girl you met on a French camp-site who you swore eternal love to but, more importantly, told all your mates you had ‘done it’ with’.

In proper adulthood, with the advent of e mail, we don’t even get break-up letters anymore, just a txt sying ‘u r dmpt’. The bills I can just about handle, because I’m still drinking enough these days to need my credit card bill to remind me of where I was on the night in question. Sometimes a pocket full of loose change and a napkin with a telephone number (that turns out to be an Armenian take-away place) and the message ‘call me, Sadie xxx’ are not enough.

I’ve even learned to put up with the annoying junk mail we get through the letter box – the pizza places, Indian and Chinese places that all deliver. The guys who deliver these are out in all weathers and I have some sympathy. I also have a huge recycling bin and the germ of an idea for a design for an automatic junk mail sorting chute that fits to any letter-box. £99.99 fitted, £109.99 with optional shredder attachment. I’ll get Postman Pat to do the advert.

If you’re a known kiddie fiddler, you get flaming badger-shit posted through your letter-box. If you’re a townie who crosses your new country neighbours, you get a flaming badger, still alive, posted through (to go with the crow nailed to your door). If you live in the Midlands, you get about ten gallons a second of flood water at the moment.

If you’re me, you got, one day in January, on the SAME day no less, a plain white (irony ahoy) envelope containing a glossy leaflet for UKIP and, in a triumph of hope over expectation or reality, a form explaining how you can donate! Using the same gardening tongs I use to pick up and dispose of fox shit, I picked it up off the mat and put it in the recycling, then went to wash my hands. When I came back, there was a leaflet for the BNP on the mat.

I didn’t open it, but the front image was fairly arresting – under the caption ‘do you want England to look like this’ was a scene that wouldn’t be out of place on a box of shortbread – morris dancers, people enjoying a pint and so on. Underneath was the caption ‘OR THIS’ and a photograph of a group of women in burkas.

Folk dancing or Islamic extremism? Tough one. I recycled the leaflet and went for a shower.

What puzzled me was what prompted two right-wing parties to leaflet on the same day? I guess they are both chasing the same vote – maybe they independently arrived at the conclusion that their 2008 offensive (very) should start early, or maybe the BNP guy saw the UKIP guy and mobilised an instant response. Either way, maybe they should consolidate? The second-to-last thing you want to do is split the right-wing nutter vote but the very last thing you want to do is overtax these people by expecting them to read two leaflets on the same day.

The sweet smell of success

In a masterwork of procrastination, I spent the morning watching the video blog ‘RocketBoom’. This 3 minute daily short video discusses techhie issues with a wry, dry and oh-so-amusing spin. The presenter is super-hot, which doesn’t hurt.

Several of the pre-Christmas postings were about ‘memes’ – postings of images or, more recently, short videos - that have attracted gazillions of views and then gigazillions of parodies on video hosting sites – think some freak blubbing over Britney and you’re there.

That so many people could watch the image of somebody blubbing is the last word in the democratisation of celebrity in the internet age. Forget fame, you can now be infamous and you don’t even have to kill anyone to do it.

If you have a video camera and a PC you can have your own television show. If nobody watches it you can just pretend that it’s worthy like they do with ‘real’ telly. If everyone hates it you can feel misunderstood and plaster on the black mascara. So everyone can be sorta, kinda, famous, even if it means that the world doesn’t know your name, but rather calls you ‘blubbing guy’.

This diluting of being in, on or around the media seems to have a pretty profound effect on ‘grown-ups’, so I wonder what it’s like for adolescents? I wonder if the most popular girl in school has her own page or blog or youtube channel that acknowledges she is the most popular girl in school – or is that shot to buggery because ordinary girl has more pokes on facebook because she knows a hell of a lot about Star Trek.

Ordinary people are acting like celebrities by recording their own teevee programmes. Celebrities are acting like ordinary people by getting out of cars without any pants on – this means that here is only one real test of whether or not you are a real live celebrity – do you have your own fragrance?

Because it’s easy to lip-synch to ‘nothing compares to you’ while shaving your own head and so be that day’s hit on youtube, but it’s less easy to market the smell of you.

Which is why the most popular girl in school will always be the most popular girl in school – because if the most popular girl at my school when I was a teen had turned up and started flogging bottles of her own scent, there would be a queue of sweaty adolescents round the block ready to pay good money for a sniff of Jane.

So, this is 2008 then?

The back-to-work blues did not really strike today until about fifteen minutes ago. It was the time of day when, for the last week or so, I’d start the afternoon with a fortifying glass of wine, or a glass of fortified wine, depending on my mood. My fridge at home still contains the odd treat, a mince pie hiding behind something wrapped in tin foil and so on, not to mention a few bottles of something friskafrolic.

By contrast, the fridge at the tea point here contains labelled pints of milk. Luckily it does not contain strychnine.

Actually the journey in wasn’t bad this morning, the trains being mostly empty as people stretch out their festive holidays. Waiting on the platform gave me time to observe the empty cans and bottles decorating the flat roof of one of the station buildings – in the middle of the debris is one miraculously preserved pint glass.

It’s actually been there for a few weeks now and makes you wonder not so much about the mentality of somebody who punted the thing onto the roof in the first place (‘pissed’ should just about cover it) but how it’s managed to remain intact for so long.

Being back at work is, to say the least, not as much fun as watching the ‘Top Gear’ polar special on the BBCi player. That programme has to be the single greatest piece of television ever made. Man on the moon? OK. Thatcher crying leaving office – fine. But for sheer entertainment nothing can beat two middle aged men drinking gin and tonic and driving to the North Pole. Inspirational.

12 days of Christmas – New Year’s Day

Happy new year.

The paracetamol was about as much use as peeing into a volcano. To really sort out the hangover I had to break out the Monster Munch and lots of soup – I just haven’t got the energy to chew.

Party last night was excellent – from what I recall. Champagne was good, as were the black velvets which, in retrospect, is not my drink and may be the reason for my current fatigued state. Either that or the dancing. After last year I went with a list of twenty decent songs for the DJ to play if he looked like he was playing too much bloody youth music. The list was deployed, as were some of my smooth moves. Hardcore uproar on the dance floor ensued – let us hope no photographic evidence exists that could come back to haunt me if ever I seek office or simply to be taken seriously as an adult.

Back to work tomorrow – a prospect I am facing with equal parts dread and resentment. I’ve just got into the swing of wandering into the kitchen any time I like and having a small glass of something to take the edge off while rooting through the fridge in order to see what can be pushed between two slices of bread to form a sustaining snack to tide me over until dinner. I don’t see why I should curb a habit like that – it seems the only sane response in a world gone mad.

Drinking and eating may not be the solution to the world’s problems (well, apart from thirst and hunger, obviously it’s the solution to those) but, with Kenya and Pakistan both convulsing and discord apparently still rife in 2008, it’s not a bad way to occupy yourself while formulating a sane response to a world gone, going or continuing to be, mad.

12 days of Christmas – New Year’s Eve

Is New Year still officially Christmas? Well, I’ve still got leftover turkey in my fridge and until that is finished, then I’m still considering this period as Christmas.

Wandering up the road to get fresh food (a novelty in itself) I saw that a lot of front gardens and houses have jolly Christmas lights. This has been happening for so many years now that what was originally novel a few years ago has moved into a state of post-modern vulgarity and not really noteworthy. What looks like a new and exciting trend is for large transparencies with snowmen characters on them that go in the front porch! Fantastic! I look forward to this trend really catching on next year – and it can go year round for all festivals – I like the idea of a huge St George and dragon for St George’s day.

12 days of Christmas – Looking forward, looking backwards

I’m quite looking forward to 2008. Certainly, it’s good to know that, for instance, there will be no more Star Wars films at the cinema to piss on more of my childhood memories. Good to know too that the Olympics will be happening during the night, meaning that you don’t have to watch any of the tedious crap. The only events worth watching will be the sailing, and only then if they bring in a rule that allows you to launch broadsides.

12 days of Christmas – nostalgia snacks

One of my favourite prezzies this year was a family sized bag of Monster Munch. Anyone of a certain age will remember Monster Munch as a puffed corn snack that must have been invented by a mad food scientist pushing the very limits of how much artificial flavouring you could add to a crisp before it became more practical simply to sell a sachet of powdered taste.

Certainly, pickled onion is not a flavour found in nature, it’s found in jars. Yet it has to be said that pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch, while not tasting anything like an actual pickled onion, tasted exactly like the idea of pickled onion. Eating a bag of pickled onion flavoured Monster Munch was not an act of pleasure, it was an adventure – the additives, flavourings and so on set off a chain of pain on the tongue that had you gasping and pulling a face like a gurning lemon sucker, before going back for more. By the time you finished the bag you were sweating, your eyeballs felt funny and your fingers stank to the extent that you identified easily with Macbeth.

I used to have a bag of Monster Munch together with a plastic cup of instant soup every time I finished a swim at the local pool. What an attractive creature I must have been, eyes red-rimmed from chlorine – hair like straw, skin pruned from prolonged immersion and reeking of pickled onion.

I’m happy to report that the taste met the expectation. Years on, the things are probably manufactured in Pakistan to get around the EU rules that bans food like this but the taste explosion on the tongue and the itchy eyeball sensation is still the same. You can feel it doing you glorious harm. Now that’s a snack!