Man up

Dave Barry, the straight man’s David Sedaris, once wrote about the ‘Martian Death Flu’*.  A funny column I seem to recall, and an excellent example of the gender that does not have to give birth hugely over-reacting to minor health inconveniences.

Documentation of illness has, naturally enough, evolved over the years, like germs developing a resistance to Lucozade, a bubbling coppery liquid guzzled by wan tots in my youth and, if my colleague who told me this the other day is to be believed, loaded with caffeine, which would explain its restorative effect on the metabolism of a seven year old in 1970, if nothing else.

Dickens wrote movingly of poxes and ailments.  Operas trade in consumptive maids, oddly able to sing about their condition for three hours at a stretch.  In the 1970s there were a lot of films like ‘Love Story’, where a happy, handsome couple started a new life together, until he or she got something cinematic.  Luckily this trend ended with a bang in the 80’s when family members were killed not by a virus but by terrorists, enabling 110 minutes of bloody retribution by the Slow One, the Austrian One or the Balding One.

Journalism has cultivated a reputation for sensitively chronicling illness, and anyone that does so is to be applauded and rewarded, by getting better.  This is because when you feel under the weather, the last thing you feel like being is creative.  I’ve had a cold for the last two days and the only thing I have crated is a mound of crumpled tissues next to my bed that would put the floor of a bedroom of a teenager in a house with no parental controls on the internet to shame.

In the age of social media, people are able to share their experiences of being ill in the short, medium and long term and get support and sympathy.  A word of warning though, if you start reading any post titled ‘does this look normal?’ think twice before scrolling down.  Then don’t.

One of the worst things about being ill is that one cannot enjoy it.  Normally if somebody were to suggest to you that you should spend a few days in bed watching TV† and being brought sustaining broths, you might show an interest.  However, if the quid pro quo is a tickly cough that really gets going a few minutes after you want to get to sleep, you might be wondering if finally getting to see every season of ‘Will & Grace’ is actually worth the cost.

It’s not.  When you have a cold you suffer the double whammy of feeling ill, but not having the flu, the one everyone takes seriously.  Even the name ‘Common’, means that it’s undistinguished.  Best thing to do is hunker down and plot vile revenge upon all those bastards who still insist on soldiering on into work, on public transport, your public transport, instead of taking a couple of days to get better.

And frankly, anyone with the fortitude to successfully write about, photograph, paint, draw, etch, stain glass window or otherwise document their ailment deserves plaudits for being able to condense a cohesive thought in a medicated mind, even if that medication is simply caffeine and about 800% of the RDA of sugar for an adult, courtesy of ‘Lockets’.  This on top of the disturbance to the mental processes brought about by the constant consideration you are giving to spraying your hands with sanitiser, and the face of anyone who sneezes near you with CS gas, the next time you leave the house.

Having learned never to Google symptoms, the internet is, I suppose, a decent place for the snotty and the coughy to exchange supportive messages and a sure sign of mankinds’ advancement to a point beyond issuing anyone afflicted with anything with a pot of paint to mark their door and a bell to ring to advise others of their condition.  Insert topical joke about underfunding of NHS here.

Ironically, it marks a healthy relationship with illness that is very British, such as is not exhibited by tourists you see wearing surgical masks on London’s streets.  Not many haiku about snot.

* Don’t know where he wrote this originally** and for those who have not read the rest of the blog post before skipping to this footnote, can’t be arsed to research it.  However, I can tell you that it’s collected in the Pan paperback ‘Dave Barry’s Greatest Hits’.  This was published in 1988 when the only way to access transatlantic written humour was to go to the US or to buy collections such as this one, lovingly put together by an editor.  This was before the internet, and meant there was a lot of quality control.  The two conditions may not be entirely unrelated.

** Miami Herald most likely, just looked at the introduction to the book.

† Or as it’s known these days, ‘Netflix’.  Being in bed for a couple of days offered an excellent opportunity to catch up on all those documentaries that I have taped‡ and had hoped to catch up on when I had the time.  However, I have discovered that the perfect sickbed viewing is actually horror, specifically anything with a zombie in it.  I love a gory special effect as much as the next man, but nothing I’ve seen on screen compares to the contents of my tissue bin when it comes to biohazard.

‡ Should this be recorded?  Fuck it, I’m going to carry on using ‘taped’ until everyone stops using ‘dialled’.

Sober January? Oh do please fuck off

G&P is the first to admit that the benefits of sobriety, in the short, medium, and long term are inarguable.  The benefits of inebriety are mostly confined to tolerating situations and people, and even then it’s a stretch.  Still, drinking must have some benefits, otherwise why would so many people do it, in so many different forms, so often and for so long?
Having reread that last sentence, one could well ask the same about smoking, the point of which really is lost on me unless it’s to satisfy an addiction.
People drink for many reasons, to relax, because of social convention, or because their universe is a lot better when observed through the bottom of a pint glass that was until recently full of cider.
Drinking, obviously, has its drawbacks.  Too much alcohol prevents one from enjoying many of life’s pleasures.  However, in fairness, it also allows one to enjoy drinking, and beer gardens, and starchy snacks, in a way that just does not happen in Soberland.
Here at G&P, it’s fair to say that we like a drink, by which we mean booze.  We love the idea of situation specific booze most of all, with port on Christmas Eve when listening to a Ghost Story for Christmas, fizz on Christmas Morning, wine with lunch, and spirits throughout the Yule period.  Being visited by spirits at Christmas should not be the exclusive preserve of repentant Dickens characters.  This indulgence, one might argue, is the springboard for sober January.
But it’s not just Christmas that provides opportunities for booze.  Any visit to the theatre requires a gin and tonic during the interval.  Social occasions increasingly rely on fizz.  Wine is appropriate with dinner and lunch on Sunday, although tea remains the only beverage to drink while having a bacon roll, champagne is an option when enjoying fish and chips.  Keith Waterhouse was right about that, at least.  During the summer one can enjoy long drinks, such as a two litre bottle of Strongbow.  And of course the cocktail is the perfect way to mark the transition from dressing gong to dinner gong.
Booze has yet to go out of fashion.
Sobriety is, increasingly, becoming fashionable.
It used to be that the only long term sober people were recovering, lapse free, alcoholics.  Now we witness people giving up booze for a month, ‘going sober for October’.  They profess to feel good, sleep better and have more energy, and yet the day after Halloween they are back on the sauce like an HP quality assurance taster.
January is both the best and the worst month to go sober.  Best because after the Yule period you are probably ready for a few days off the sauce, worst because January is longer than a few days.
If you do decide to go sober, get ready for a long haul through some long dark evenings.  You may not be going to bed when it’s still light out, but that’s only because it’s winter, it’s still seven thirty by the time you are in your jim jams and ready for bed.  This is because sober television is no fun.
If you do decide to go sober, please keep it to yourself.  Vegetarians and their militant wing, vegans, have recently found the confidence to start talking to people about diet at barbeques.  And yet any chap taking a healthy bite of his bacon cheeseburger, while being talked at by some lettuce licker, will notice the way that any veggievegan’s gaze will be drawn to the glorious grease dribbling down your chin, and disquietingly wonder if the fellow is about to crack and lick about 8,000 calories of beefy goodness from your chops.
Similarly, any fellow doing dry January, and letting you know it will, if you are both in a pub, be looking at you taking deep, refreshing, draughts of your pint like a desert dweller regarding an oasis that does both still and sparkling water, and has a lemon grove attached.
Self control is of course laudable.  G&P recommends periods of sobriety, extending to lunchtime in normal circumstances and prolonged if operating heavy machinery, such as a 747.
Naturally, G&P recommends drinking if flying in one.

My favorite roadside cafe

The homogenisation of the high street started with the chain stores moving in and a growing concern that one high street looked much the same as another.  The downside to this was that high streets lost their individuality, the upside was that shoppers could be confident that on a Saturday, they could buy their pick and mix, purchase an LP, rent a VHS or Betamax video, and fail to find the right sized garment in M&S, no matter where they were.
The health of the high street means that comment has turned from condemnation to concern, and the same chain stores that were once criticised are now described as flagships of the high street.  At least you can still be assured that M&S is unlikely to have the right sized trouser for you, as they continue to adhere to the winning business model of making sure their garment rails are fully stocked with unusual sizes and fail to acknowledge entirely the effect that their food range has had on the collective waistline of their clothing customers.
The new uniting factor on the high street is food and beverage outlets.  Where it was once the occasional golden arch or sinister looking bearded fella with a thing about fowls, now it’s coffee galore.  With just so many coffee shops at least the mystery of just why there are so many fucking discarded coffee cups littering the nation is hardly a three piper.
Our food and drink has been homogenised in our town centres, because if you go to a well known pizza place in any town centre you can be reasonably sure you are going to get what you expect when you order, because it’s probably all made and packaged up in an industrial food prep place in Dudley and shipped by artic to the franchise you are in, where it is effectively reheated and presented with a flourish by a local surly teen.
That’s why, if you want individuality, you have to go out of town.  And I don’t mean some gastropub in the Dales where they raise and then bludgeon to death their own goats, I mean roadside cafes.
I love roadside cafes.
My favourite is situated in a quiet layby on an A road not far from a busy motorway junction.  The layby has a screen of trees separating it from the road, but the noise and the pollution are still a feature of the layby.  The café itself is a converted caravan which, like the cook’s apron, probably started life as white.  A union flag flies from an improvised flagpole atop the caravan.
The menu is varied; sausage sandwich or bacon sandwich.  Add egg if you an epicurean or eggycurious.  The bread is white, of a sort not available outside the layby café catering trade.  It transfers the grease from the filling to the fingers, but never loses its consistency, something of a molecular miracle.
If it’s a refreshing drink you require, then you are in luck.  You can have a cold can, not just a can you understand, but a cold can.  You can have tea, or coffee.  Both are served in Styrofoam cups of the sort that were actually banned in 1997 and are not so much non-biodegradable as possessing a half-life.
Sugar if available from a bowl on a ledge.  You can consider the absence of sachets as a nod to the environment if you like, and you can also speculate that the sugar encrusted teaspoon that rests in the bowl is the roadside café equivalent of those lolly type things used to sweeten beverages in hipster joints.  You’re wrong.
The shelf is also where the condiments are housed, and you can tell that this is a classy joint because instead of generic red and brown sauce bottled containing God-knows-what, these bottles are branded, ‘Daddies’.  Possibly like premium brand vodkas in pubs the contents may not match the label, but it’s the presentation that counts.
There is mismatched patio furniture to dine on, but customers prefer to stand, having been sitting all day probably.  There are restroom facilities, just behind that ailing shrub.
You may smoke.
And, naturally, no Michelin stars, two Michelin tyres.

Little Donnie

In the last G&P post there was a thinly (ironic) veiled pop at the sort of people (fat people) who are targeted by those wishing to push New Year diets.  This is because overweight people are easy targets, both for those who would exploit them to make them purchase stuff, or for arseholes like me who mock human weakness.
However, anyone who picks up one of those diet plans has something special.
Self awareness.
Now self awareness is a precious and arguably increasingly rare character trait.  If you have been in a train carriage with somebody that either does not realise that their telephone contains the same technology that allows a whisper on stage to go to the back of the auditorium and so they do not have to conduct their conversation at a volume more suited to bellowing out of the carriage window in the hope their mate will hear them, or does not care that he is sharing his test results with a carriage of commuters slowly edging away from him, then you will know that self awareness, like doffing your hat, is a vanishing art.  I blame social media.  And arseholes.
Speaking of which, L’ill Donnie.
Self awareness appears to be as remote from L’ill Donnie as, well, let’s be blunt about this, gentlemanly behaviour.
There, I’ve said it.
What. A. Guy.
One, occasionally, wonders how the…and here I struggle, he’s clearly no gentleman, he’s not a chap, nor is he a fellow, he is certainly not a bloke.  I think that we shall describe him as a ‘guy’.
We don’t say his name, lest we summon him.
Also ‘that steak of shit that a fox leaves when it has had a bad chicken dinner from the bins’ may be accurate, but is rather lengthy.
OK, so, one wonders how L’ill Donnie got elected.  Surely there can’t be that many racist, sexist, stupid arseholes in the US?  I’ve been there, and the people are lovely.
That said, I was pretty amazed that England voted to Brexit.
I genuinely thought that the only reason you would vote to Brexit is that you had been to an agricultural fair on polling day, and a Shire Horse had shied at a Punch and Judy show, as we all might, happening possibly near a toddler, you had sought to restrain the horse, it kicks you.  Concussed, you fell into a replica threshing machine, more concussion, then you wandered into a polling booth and mark the wrong box.
Now, that might excuse the actions of a couple of thousand ‘Leave’ voters, but really, what were the others thinking?  ‘I can make some money out of this’ will do, if you know you can, but for the rest, really?
L’ill Donnie though, is truly repulsive.  The guy (let’s stick with guy) appears to communicate by social media, Twatter, specifically.  And this is quite appropriate really, because the guy is a troll, and when I say troll I don’t mean the goat loving creatures that dwell beneath bridges, I don’t even mean the lurkers who use the internet to try and intimidate others, I mean the plastic toys that were popular in the seventies and eighties and had crazy hair.
This guy appears to have no self awareness, or wish to improve.
Don is of course the title of a criminal academic at Oxford University who is exposed as a vile and beastly type by Inspector Morse.
Don is also, according to my viewings of ‘The Godfather’, the head of a crime family.  This, I think, is probably the most appropriate analogy.
However, there are noble Dons.  Quixote.  Here was a fellow who was quite delusional and thought himself a defender of the people, but was just tilting at windmills. L’ill Donnie is nothing like the noble Quixote.  Quixote managed to hold onto his loyal staff, and in his heart was a good man.
Don Amott.  King of caravans.  Growing up in the Midlands one had the privilege, if one watched commercial television, of witnessing the magnificence of the adverts for Don Amott.
The most magnificent jingle of all time.  Including that time they hung that peado Morris-man outside the Hop Pole in Droitwich.

Reboots

In recent times, meaning the period in which social media has risen and conquered the recording of history present and past, along with so much else (also known as the New Dark Ages among the enlightened and the Knew Dark Ages among the wits, so called because of the effect that social media has had on truth and by extension knowledge), the time of year associated with rebirth has shifted, from New Year’s Day to Midwinter’s Day.
This is in part because of the association of Midwinter’s Day with the longest period of darkness, meaning that once the Shortest Day is over, the days start getting longer and lighter and generally better, until the wonder that is the Clock Change arrives and everyone is back to commuting in darkness again until summer arrives in England, usually scheduled for late August.
There is something undeniably rebirthy about Midwinter’s Day, the Shortest Day, call it what you will.  Oddly, few if any refer to it as the Longest Night.  This is probably because there is an ancestor-memory aversion to contemplating extended periods of darkness, doing so will lead one to Google cures for Seasonal Affected Disorder, and also give rise to an odd compulsion to light fires in caves, or inconveniently the modern equivalent thereof - normally an airing cupboard, or paint the walls with pictures of woolly mammoths.
There is no doubt that days getting longer and lighter are a good thing, good for those who like to sport shorts, good for those who enjoy outdoor stuff, bad for vampires yes but, you know, everything comes at a cost and since the Brexit referendum those Transylvanian bloodsuckers, literally, can bugger off back to their own country.
What hasn’t happened, yet, is the moneytisation of Midwinter’s Day, with the exception of the National Trust who treble the cost of parking at Stonehenge that day.
New Year’s Day, however, now that’s all about the rebirth.  It’s all about the Brand New You, because the Old You is fucked, let’s face it.
First of all, you’re too fat.  You must be, given the huge number of diets that launch in the New Year.  Possibly the problem is down to the increasing use of fats and sugars in our processed food and food manufacturers not being as transparent as they might be about what’s in the food, while food sellers push two for one deals on unhealthy stuff and fizzy drinks but rarely on lobster.
In addition, let’s be honest, you have just come out of a Christmas where you, as an adult, had an entire selection box for breakfast at least once, and have, if you have the means and are lucky enough, have not stopped eating leftovers since 3:15pm on Christmas Day.  Let us be quite clear, there is no upper limit to the tolerance of the average British male to a turkey sandwich if he is offered one.
Second of all, you’re too stupid.  That’s why at New Year you will be offered the opportunity to begin collecting partworks about WWII, HMS Victory, or Elizabethan knot gardens (free seed packet with first issue).  You may think that you could educate yourself by watching the ‘Yesterday’ channel, a lot, but the real scholar recognises that only by buying what is essentially a collection of Wikipedia articles, printed out in 200 separate weekly magazines, will you become an authority on any subject.
Know a male by his strata of literature.
Lying on his bed, a paperback by Stephen King.
Under the mattress, Razzle (other mags are available, I am given to understand).
Under the bed, 74 copies of ‘History and that’ or similar, collection abandoned when interest waned because they had covered all the good stuff by issue 12.
So the new year can be a time of rebirth or, this being the Century of the Fruitbat, reboot, or even reimagining.
G&P has been on a two year sabbatical, more or less.  There have been some specials, some more special than others, but bluntly there is so much going on that one feels it is almost a moral duty to write blog posts that nobody will ever read.  Time to reboot.  Up the arse.