Say it one last time

The flight jacket. Timeless. Classic. I remember when I got my flight jacket. A birthday present, it was everything that was great about a garment, it had sheepskin lining to keep you toasty, and a leather exterior to show I have a grudge against cows. I still have it, even though it has been unworn for twenty years, after an evening where I was thoughtless enough to wear it while also wearing chinos and was greeted with the phrase ‘alright flight commander?’ when I strolled into my local pub.

Two things – at least it wasn’t a ‘Top Gun’ reference but…it’s WING COMMANDER you arsehole!

My plan is to wear it in my old age. I am preparing the mission patches that I will have sewn onto it. I am tempted to get some made up along the lines of ‘Iraq’, ‘Lybia’, ‘Syria’, China’, Syria again!’ and of course ‘Syria…can we bomb it any flatter?’ but there’s also the temptation to have mission patches along the lines of ‘Narnia’ or ‘Mordor’.

The moment, and I mean the moment, I walked out of the shop with my new jacket, I started noticing all the other f**kers with their sheepskin flight jackets. Where the hell had they come from? There had, surely, not been this number of fighter-pilot wannabes when I was walking into the shop.

Once you purchase something, you start to notice others with the same or similar product. Once you start to do something, you start to notice that others do it too. This aspect of human behaviour explains the success of social networking on the internet. And dogging.

Most of us are too busy putting in a dazzling performance in the lead role of the production that is our lives to sit back and scrutinise the background. Once you do though, it’s like the Matrix, you start to notice weird shit popping up everywhere. Actually, it’s totally mundane shit but because you’ve noticed it and because you are playing the lead role in the movie of your life it has to be significant right?

I have, of late, been fixating on chocolate bar wrappers jammed behind a pipe on the train station I commute from. By focusing on this I can distract myself from what others describe as ‘real life’ but what I consider to be ‘a series of situations, problems and experiences so complex and horrible that I feel they can only be solved using an magic abacus made of beer’.

The point is, once you start to notice something, you can’t stop. Take for instance the chocolate wrappers. It’s fairly unlikely that they are actually some sort of message (unless it’s ‘this is the shittest Dan Brown plot ever’) and they are more likely to be a lazy, but tidy, kid placing the wrappers there every morning when he has his 3,500 calorie breakfast shortly before he presents his hyperactive arse at school to be educated.

So, on the train, I notice that there’s a carefully folded wrapper jammed between the table and the carriage ‘wall’. Normally I’d just think litter lout but, lucky me, because I have fixated on the secret society of public transport confectionary communicators, I am now panicking that by sitting next to a folded choccie bar wrapper I am somehow sending a message. I have no problem sending a message, I’d just like to know what it is.

For instance…

Mars Bar - unimaganitive
Chrunchie – your mouth will feel dirty afterwards
Dairy Milk – Oh God, so good, I want more, more, more. Feeling a bit sick now. More!
Marathon – problems accepting change
Curlywurly – eight inches of pure pleasure…but didn’t they used to be longer?
Frit and nut – satisfaction and it’s one of your five
Finger of fudge – too delicious to be used as a sex aid…twice.

Say again?

Back when wireless internet networks were complicated, expensive and rare, they were usually to be found in commercial spaces. Geeks developed a secret code called war chalking to inform other geeks of where they could get free wireless internet. These days, mobile devices that can access wireless internet can also detect wireless networks but back in the day, you’d need some savvy software and a Pringles tube. It’s true, the Pringles tube, an aluminium cylinder, was a sort of cross between a metal detector, a radio triangulation device and a dousing rod. Quite how you mashed it up with your heavy-as-a-housebrick old school laptop I have no idea, but I bet chewing gum was involved.

So, geeks would prowl the streets, detect wireless networks with no security passwords and would then chalk on pavements or walls that a network was available. The war chalking was evocative of the secret signs that American vagrants would leave outside the homes of folks during the recession, signs that could be interpreted by others such as ‘food for work available’, ‘angry dog here’ or ‘wireless network will be available here next century’.

There have always been secret signs. The problem with most of them is that they are a one way thing. One by sea, two by land may be all very well, but does it allow for the recipient of the message to send something back along the lines of ‘I am standing on the beach frantically waving my towel because my cover has been blown and I want to come home right now!’? Possibly not.

Railways, of course, have plenty of signals. Famously, when they go wrong or don’t work at all, this can lead to problems. Just this week some criminals decided to steal a load of copper wire. The problem was that it was live and providing power and information to loads of trains that were supposed to be leaving Waterloo. The result was a lot of inconvenienced commuters. But signalling equipment is notoriously delicate. For instance, it freezes when, er, the temperature drops below freezing. Obviously the design geniuses who keep a national network of thousands of trains running simultaneously are too clever to consider slathering the signals in gose grease between November and April to ward off frosted signalling.

More informal signals have been spotted on the platform of the station I commute from this week. The mysterious message sent via strategically folded chocolate bar has been added to. A lone wrapper has appeared adjacent to, but quite separate from, the original wrapper totem. This, I think, is some sort of coded conversation. What does this new reply mean? Could it be an invitation, a warning or simply somebody thinking that this is how we dispose of wrappers now?

Whatever it means, the effect is that in addition to having to run in a manner so undignified it makes a squid being fired out of a cannon into a brick wall look like an exercise in coordination just to catch my train, I now have to build in time to se if any new ‘message’ has been posted.

Say what?

I am, for the moment at least, currently commuting from a sleepy to the point of narcolepsy station that somehow escaped the Great Beeching Butchery, possibly because of it's very insignificance or possibly because he once has a bunk up in the Gents and formed a ramrod attachment to the place. The station could not be much smaller or simpler unless it was mounted on a board in an attic somewhere with OO scale trains running through it.

It does, however, retain a certain charm and the ability to spring a few surprises if you look carefully. Standing waiting for my train I noticed this collection of chocolate bar wrappers neatly folded and lodged behind a pipe on the platform. My first reaction was that it was a very neat litter lout, or a person too lazy to walk to the bin but with an obsessive compulsive disorder. (Why is it called an obsessive compulsive disorder, surely the condition of somebody who is compelled to have everything arranged just so or is a neatness freak should be an obsessive compulsive order?).

Or even a bored schoolboy.

Other explanations suggest themselves. The first is that it is as sort of message, either simply conveyed through folding the reports strategically to spell out a word on the vertical - this is a great idea but not secure and also limits you to the alphabet available at the confection counter. More probable is that the colours used are some of code, like signal flags.

As to what the message might be about, while international espionage or the doings of a secret order of the Knights Templar are possibilities, more likely is that it is a coded message used by the sort of gentlemen who wish to arrange clandestine meetings in railway stations ('Beechers’) and find simply recording the time and date of their next visit on the back of the loo door too risky, and that arranging assignations through txt, twitter or Facebook lacks romance.

Most likely it is a board schoolboy, but you just know that what started as an absent minded action has now developed into a challenge - how many wrappers can he lodge before they are removed or, worse, replaced in a different order?