Family Monopoly

A few years ago, the people who make Monopoly came up with the genius idea of local editions. You could go round your home town buying up the cathedral, the local footie stadium and so on. It was also, of course, tremendous fun to see if your street was of a high, or low, value – congratulations, you live in a shit part of town and now everybody knows it.

You can even have a truly bespoke edition:

http://www.mymonopoly.com/home.php

Surely this is a fantastic idea for a couple of reasons. The first is that you can have a really, really local version. Live in a tiny village? The sort that only famous folk singers and homicidal maniacs ever come from? Well, why not have a village edition, with local landmarks like the war memorial, church and bus shelter. In fact since they closed down the post office, that’s it for local landmarks, so you have to get creative, ‘that spot where Darren shagged our Sally’, ‘Where Jon was sick after he drank all that scrumpy’ and so on.

But why are we restrained by geography? Monopoly comes out at family gatherings when the usual arguments have been exhausted and everyone needs some fresh material to bicker about. So how about some properties that have a special place in family history, ‘where Cousin Sadie had her first wedding’, ‘where cousin Sadie had her second wedding’, and have the second location cheaper than the first? Or the classic: ‘The house Tom’s bitch wife got in the divorce’?

Or moments or occasions, like your twelfth birthday party could be a low value square because you peed yourself with excitement in front of everyone when you opened your present and it was a Back to the Future toy car, oh the humiliation! Other low value squares: the time your cousin tried to touch you, the time you held a funeral for your pet dog (that wasn’t actually dead, you were just going through a morbid phase). High value squares could be ‘My first drink’, ‘passing my driving test’ or the ever popular ‘out and proud’ (adjacent to ‘dad makes full recovery from heart attack’).

(Best version to unwrap on Christmas morning: family secrets edition. But is ‘Tina’s little problem’ a high or low value square?)

Of course, the real benefit would be to use people, not places. Fed up with having to put up for years with Granma’s sadistic game of arranging family photographs in order of current preference? Then imagine her delight at finding that the least expensive property on the board is ‘Grannie’s Hovel’.

I predict a fist fight before the top hat makes it once round the board.

At least he didn't drop it far

Walking to work this morning I witnessed a small anti-social act, somebody ripping the cellophane cover from a packet of fags and tossing it to the pavement. I suppose pocketing it would have delayed their ripping open the packet itself to get their precious nicotine hit.

Usually I just tut and don’t reprimand the litterer, this is because I know that from psychopaths are more likely to litter than normal folk and I hate being knifed first thing in the morning.

On this occasion though there was absolutely no way I was going to confront the fellow.

This was because he was a dwarf on a mobility chariot.

I did briefly think of saying ‘smoking stunts your growth’ but was worried that his battery might be freshly charged and he would run me down, like Ben Hur, but shorter.

God alone knows why he needed a mobility chariot although with legs that size it must be faster than walking and I have no problem with him smoking, but why litter? Does he not realise that if everyone did that, the stuff would pile up in drifts. Okay for me, but by the time it was up to my thighs he’d need a snorkel.

I think what really put me off remonstrating, apart of course from a paralysing fear of any sort of confrontation, was that there was just no way it was going to end well. Nobody but me had witnessed the litter and folk on their way to work in the morning walk quickly and heads down, so what they would have been presented with was, no doubt, an altercation where a bloke was shouting at a disabled dwarf. There is no way I am coming out of that well.

In fact for the remainder of the walk to the office my rebel brain and sadist imagination ganged up on me. This is the same imagination, by the way, that steadfastly refuses to come up with the plot of a novel that will depose Dan Brown from the top of the bestseller charts and have me acknowledged as the Jane Austin of my generation (or should that be Dickens…which one wrote about bonnets?) Anyway the most likely scenario, according to my brain (which, truth be told has not had a track record of reliability in this sort of thing, especially during my twenties where, despite all the evidence of previous weeks and months, it kept convincing me that that girl over there would dance with me if asked and not result in yet another bout of humiliation) would be me and the bloke rolling in the gutter, my hands round his neck, his teeth clamped on my ear while a selection of collegues who happened to be passing watched aghast as they saw me trying to kill a dwarf, something that is usually the preserve of ringwraiths.

The art of the sale

Something is only worth what somebody will pay for it, and this is usually a lot less than you hoped it would be worth, especially if you’ve been carefully keeping the thing in question in a cupboard for decades, waiting for it to accrue value.

My mother is slowly whittling down her mountain of crap she brought with her on the move by handing it to me and saying ‘put this on eBay and we’ll split the profit’.

In this case it’s a Conway ‘popular model’ camera. It’s actually something of a thing of beauty, a metal and bakelite box with two viewfinders, one for portrait and the other for landscape – you turn the camera on its side! Genius! Take that photoshop.

It is, of course, worth little in terms of money. A little research showed that the camera was mass-produced in Birmingham for the ‘budget’ end of the market, a little time on eBay shows them on sale for a couple of quid. So, it sits on my desk.

The way to sell it is to sell the idea rather than the actuality. Put a dent in the side and it becomes the camera that stopped a bullet for Laurie Lee in the Spanish civil war. Put a scratch down the side and it was the camera that Hemmingway had with him on safari. This camera could have been used by gangsters, bootleggers, lords, ladies, it could have been used to manufacture scandal, it could have been the camera that took photographs of a ghost, of a miracle.


It could even be cursed – because, you see, this camera belonged to Roderick Fanshaw, quite famous in the 1960s as a ghost-hunter and debunker (note to self- set up fake Wikipedia page) who’s last case was investigating a crypt in a church where, local legend had it, something, maybe even the devil himself, was said to appear at certain times. Certainly Fanshaw had been called in by a concerned former school chum, now a doctor in the area that had treated a young girl for shock after she said she saw something. Tosh, of course, but if Fanshaw could prove it was tosh, then it would be good for the village and for the girl. Fanshaw descended to the crypt for the night with some blankets, a lantern, a thermos of tea and his Conway.

When they found him the next morning he was sitting on the floor of the crypt, his back to the wall, a look of utter terror on his face. Stone dead, with the Conway camera gripped tightly in his cold, stiff hands.

There had been one exposure taken. After much discussion it was decided to develop the film, possibly revealing who, or what had literally scared Fanshaw to death.

Option A: a copy of the photograph, the original of which is now in a private collection, is being sold with the camera. Opening bid: £25. (Photograph is actually of Fanshaw in the crypt, already dead but the crypt sealed – whoever or whatever killed him took the photograph – spooooooooooky!)

Option B: When they opened the camera, the film had burned to ash inside the camera, but there was no damage to the camera itself. Did Fanshaw really photograph the Devil himself? Ash included in purchase, opening bid: £25.

The stuff we buy today will not be on eBay decades hence, most likely it’ll be propping up some landfill somewhere. Things that we like to spend money on, like tellys and games consoles and computers have a new problem – obsolescence, they simply fail to work. A few months ago the very last poleroid film made passed its ‘use by’ date. No more poleroids. These days you’ve barely got your computer unpacked before you find it can’t run some application.

100 days of Flickr

Certainly, there’s never any shortage of things to blog about. Pick up a newspaper, turn on the telly or even go for a walk and it’s a pretty good bet that there will be something that will push my outrage levels up from their background state of about 30% of outrage well into the red (quite an achievement to keep things in the visible spectrum I think). At the moment the trees are turning and it’s a gorgeous time to walk through the park. I could do that and try by best to describe the glorious golds and ambers of the autumn and how walking on a carpet of fallen leaves makes the same sort of scrunching noise you would expect from balling up paper with a poem about autumn written on it and flinging it into the bin. The post would probably end with a rant about dog poo.

In order to counter this predictability I wanted, for the next 100 days, to write 100 words a day based on a totally random image. I’d go to Flickr, click on the ‘uploaded in the last minute’ photograph and write 100 words on it. A story inspired by it, or an observation, or maybe just a whole load of questions. Maybe even caption it, like a photo and accompanying piece in a newspaper or magazine. At some point I fully intended to be faced with having to mock somebody’s wedding photographs or make hil-hairy-arse bestiality comments about pet photographs.

So day one, I go on line and the first photograph is this one:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/39909087@N03/4061342088/

It’s from this person’s photostream:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/39909087@N03/

and has, basically, derailed the whole thing. First of all I feel like some sort of cross between a groomer and a stalker for looking at pictures of an adolescent girl who appears to be either in some medical facility or an eccentrically furnished home. Also, writing anything about that could not possibly be as interesting as the truth. Finally, inventing things about women is a great way to start a career not as a lovable Walter Mitty style character but the sort of fellow you see eventually being banged up for breaking into Meryl Streep’s house and insisting that you have been secretly married to her for years.

If it had been a picture of a sulky looking kid standing outside Graceland, I’d be up to 2,000 words by now, so one way or another, I don’t think I’ll be pursuing the idea.

Uncommon acts

How lovely! When stopping to get a pint of milk this morning at the mini-megagrocers on the way to work, I overheard two blokes in the doorway having an argument.

Grooving as I was the some banging tunes I missed what led up to the tense moment of standoff, but it ended with a bloke saying:

‘that’s common assault’.

Putting aside for just one moment that if somebody has pushed you (which I suspect was the case) then preparing your legal arguments is probably not the best reaction, (grabbing a nearby winter root vegetable such as a turnip or swede and battering your assailant with it is) I wondered what might constitute an uncommon assault?

I reckon at least you’re looking at somebody coming at you with, say, a stuffed weasel wearing a little outfit of a musketeer. That would be pretty bloody unusual.

And if you can have common assault can you also have posh assault? Somebody trying to batter you with a crown?

Teen Vogue

Oh my suffering Christ alive! Just what the world needs. Teen Vogue.

As proof that the devil is a real person and probably owns a publishing house, Vogue is pretty good evidence. If you had to sell the idea of Vogue to a Vogueless world then you could either make your pitch that you’d be launching a glossy, classy magazine featuring fashion in order to make the world a better, more stylish place and that hey, women are interested in handbags and shit right? Or, you could pitch that in a world full of image conscious and neurotic zombies that can’t think for themselves and will pay to read something that makes them feel like a fat failure and people would STILL invest.

But Vogue for kids? What the hell? I thought that teenage girls already bought Vogue, how else do they become dysfunctional and have eating disorders? Apparently though there’s money to be made from explicitly exploiting teens. It’s like grooming, but via the medium of the glossy mag.

Teen Vogue is essentially like weaponising anorexia.

But, you know, good luck with that, because I think teen girls have moved on from being impressed by photographs of other teen girls wearing scarfs and being informed that mittens are going to be big this winter. Is this really how teenage girls get their information these days, from a magazine? Certainly when I was a teenage boy they appeared to get their information like some sort of hive consciousness, by gathering in gaggles and chattering just below the range of human hearing, then all laughing at once.

These days I imagine that this has been replaced by texting and social networking, or hanging around bus stops drinking Merrydown cider.

Just what is the point of vogue anyway? To tell you what to wear, right? Okay, so somebody at Vogue thought that they’d be able to tell teens, well, anything? I tell you what, why don’t you have the next issue with a huge gatefold centrefold that has ‘clean up your room’ written on it, see just how much influence you have over the mind of the average teen. Unless your magazine is delivered in text form during the ad breaks for some dreadful ITV talent show, you’ve got no chance.

What are teen girls wearing? Leggings and Ugg boots. Always.