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.