In Praise of the Printed Page, Magazines

Because of the relatively cheap costs of printing and the ubiquity of decent editing software, there is now more or less a magazine for every interest however obscure, more than that, there is a plurality of magazines for obscure interests that have never been on offer before.

And I’m not talking about weird sexual stuff either.  Well, mainly not.  I’m talking about stuff like traction engines.  Now, I love traction engines, you love traction engines, everyone loves traction engines, except those stuck behind one on the road on the way to or from a steam rally, or somebody who wears loose clothing around one.  But until recently, there was only one traction engine magazine, and you had to get that mail order.  Essentially, people who built their own sex dungeons or had to get their hot tubs professionally sterilised after parties at their place were better catered for when it came to magazines covering their interests than the sort of people who enjoyed mechanised threshing in an outdoor setting.

No doubt there have been cases where a magazine has become magazines because of editorial disputes, and God knows that the world of hobbycraft can be a divisive one, one need only consider the Great Quilting Feud of ’06 and the Homebrew Wars of ’82 to ’87 to know that that’s true, but what the printing revolution has meant is that if somebody on the editorial board of doll collecting monthly does not like the direction that the publication is going in, with recent decisions not to exclusively cover dolls which are really creepy and are collected by adults that should be on some sort of watch list, then they can start up their own publication to cater for the creepy doll collector market.  Niche indeed.

G&P eulogises on a regular basis about fanzines, the privately produced publications of the 80s that were usually mail order and usually just one step up from a John Bull printing set or indeed a potato when it came to printing sophistication.  Now of course the internet allows lots of people with similar interests to get together and share hot tub cleaning tips and so on, but there’s nothing like a magazine to give a hobby legitimacy, and people love to read them.

I think a lot of it is fantasy.  I used to read ‘Canal and Riverboat’ because I like canal boats and can tolerate river boats.  Why not ‘Waterways World’?  Because that publication was a bit too racy for me.  I will never own a canal boat and indeed in reality have no real desire to own a canal boat.  But I like to read about them.  Which is bloody odd when you think about it, why would somebody who fantasises about owning a boat not buy ‘Superyacht Monthly’?  I stand about as much chance of ever owning a yacht with a helicopter landing pad on it as I do owning the sort of thing Rosie and Jim would live on.

I think that most magazines cater for the specialist mundane.  There are many magazines about modelling, not the top shelf kind, the scale kind.  There are magazines about all sorts of hobbies.  There are probably nearly as many magazines about knitting as there are about music.

And all of this while the internet offers endless free information about all sorts of hobbies.

Hobby magazines are supremely successful for a couple of reasons.  The first is that they address their congregation, they are produced for an enthusiastic and knowledgeable tribe who greatly enjoy learning obscure stuff about something they love.

The other reason is that a printed magazine about a subject lends that subject legitimacy.  This is the ultimate triumph of the printed word.  Anyone with the means can epublish, but getting something on a shelf requires talent and effort and is the result of hard work leading to success.

That’s why when browsing for magazines, I usually walk past the endless lifestyle mags all trying to look different and all looking the same, with a matte cover and understated font, and pick up something with a glossy front cover that has a colourful photograph of somebody looking truly ecstatic on a tractor.

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.

ITDB

The chaps who invented IMDB.Com deserve a Nobel Prize.  I’ll get to why in a moment.

The internet has now been around long enough for apocryphal stories to grow up about it.  I don’t mean web pages that record camp fire stories or folk tales or any of that nonsense, or eBay selling haunted crap, I don’t know much about the paranormal but I do know that if there was an artefact that proved beyond doubt the existence of the supernatural, it would not be on eBay.  It would be in the cellar of the Pentagon with all the alien stuff.  What I mean is stories about the internet that are only possible because of the existence of the internet.

One such story is how IMDB revolutionised the dating scene in LA.  Prior to the existence of IMDB, any asshole with a Porche an a wrap of coke could hit on a girl in a club, tell her he’s a producer or something, and try to get her to sleep with him in the expectation that she would get a guest spot on Magum P.I as ‘Pool Girl 2’.  Only afterwards would the ugly truth emerge, that he works in a Porche dealership in Sacramento (should such a thing even exist).

Thanks to IMDB.Com, girl goes back to her place, makes an excuse to lock herself in the loo with her laptop and after a brief search, finds out that ‘Gary Hairful’ has no production credits and so will not be getting sex that night.  He will, however, get tasered in the nutsack while she films it on her ‘phone, or whatever they do in Hollywood.

The International Movie Database, or IMDB, is an internet success story the way that all success stores about tech should be success stories.  Apparently, IMDB was started by a couple of blokes (disclaimer: women can be tech giants too), probably in their bedrooms, that probably smelled of socks and Lynx, and was basically a listing of who starred in what movie and who the best boy, key grip and gaffer were.  I have no idea how they got this information but I really, really hope that one sat hunched over a keyboard and the other one read the credits as they rolled on a TV screen as a VHS tape played/paused/played/paused.  The truth is probably less romantic and no doubt involved less Pot Noodle than I imagine.

Fast forward and IMDB is now the definitive resource of who did what on movies and television.  That’s why the inventors deserve a Nobel Prize.  While others win the Prize for curing disease, these guys have cured the awful suffering of recognising an actor, and wondering where the hell you have seen them before.  ‘The Bill’, it’s always ‘The Bill’.

So, IMDB, is a force for good.

So why not another definitive and comprehensive source of useful information that could be used in social situations?

Why not an International Tattoo Database?

Just a few years ago, tattoos were a relatively scarce commodity per square inch of human flesh.  Before blokes started getting Maori markings to show their tribal allegiance to Oswestry and women started getting Cantonese symbols because they liked Number 38 on the menu or whatever, you got a tat if you were in the military, where part of a tribe, had been in prison or had been in a concentration camp.

Before tattoos became fashionable, they used to mean something.

Now, you’re in a bar, your hitting it off with a young woman and you notice her shoulder tattoo.  Does she like mystical symbols, or hot and sour soup, is she a committed lepidopterist of renown, or a sex worker, or is it a curiously shaped birthmark and she is the rightful Queen of Wessex?  A discreet visit to the ITDB and you can decide whether the evening is going to end with you already thinking about what to name your kids, or exiting the venue now via the lavvy window.

Likewise a lady can establish whether that coat of arms on a fella’s forearm is a distinguished regiment, C Block HMP Chelmsford, or even worse, a minor public school.

ITDB, a force for good.

Man Cave

Back in The Good Old Days when the only qualification required to become an eminent natural philosopher was the possession of a beard so huge, established and respectable that it had its own mistress, Britain’s museums were stuffed with stuff.

Often, stuffed stuff.

The glorious age of Victorian Empire era expansion allowed the British to roam the world, identify interesting bits of it, and then either chip them free for relocation to Islington or shoot them, skin them and then put them in a glass case, in Islington.

This then was the golden age of museums.  Truly, wonder houses, the most wonderous thing about them being that a Briton could see the creatures of the African Interior without risking the twin perils of the age normally associated with seeing a lion; catching something vile and perishing in a sweaty heap of linen in a hammock or, being eaten.

These museums were curated by Men.  Men with beards, men who may have been the most learned of their age, but did not know the word ‘cluttered’, men who, when faced with the problem of housing another thousand startled looking exhibits of creatures newly discovered/slaughtered, would simply add another wing the size of a cathedral to their museum.

Men love stuff.  Men love to collect.

Women do not.  The exception is when certain women do the menopause.  They then start to notice the ads in the back of TV Quick offering them the opportunity to purchase a thimble collection that will be the envy of their friends.  Particularly acute cases collect cats.

Men collect.  They start as schoolboys collecting footie cards, comics, stamps, coins, anything that can be collected.  And they never shake the habit.

Men collect so much stuff that an astonishing 80% of them invest in specialised off-site storage, commonly known as a shed.

A shed owned by a woman will contain: a lawnmower, half a bag of compost, curtains that she has put up at the windows.

A shed owned by a man will contain at least: two lawnmowers (one working, one awaiting repair or resurrection), a dozen tins of paint, each with an inch of paint in the bottom that is now so hard it could survive re-entry, a failed attempt at home brew, a successful attempt at home brew, porn, a Playstation 1, more porn, a collection of ‘Commando’ comics that the missus thinks you threw out two years ago and which she would be more upset about than the porn you still have, a stuffed animal.

This condition has led directly to the creation of the Man Cave.

If you spend any time at the sort of edge-of-town industrial areas that feature DIY superstores, areas of waste ground with weeds pushing through broken concrete, and invariably somebody with a caravan who is selling ‘hamburgers’ and ‘hot dogs’, then you might have noticed self storage units.

Such places are actually mundane.  They are mostly used by businesses storing stock and, depressingly, food banks (surely we all hope for the day when the only food banks in operation are those that supply blokes with forbidden treats that The Wives will not permit them, leading to the glorious prospect of a self storage unity filled floor to ceiling with boxes of Curlywurly) and not, I suspect to the disappointment of those who enjoyed ‘Silence of the Lambs’ a little too much, used as trophy rooms by serial killers.

They are though, apparently, used as Man Caves.  When a woman likes a bloke enough to commit to a long term relationship with him, so that they move in together and she can Fix Him, a chap is often confronted with the bewildering notion that his collection of 120 mint in box Transformers are not welcome, and there’s this thing called eBay.  Or Oxfam.  Or the tip.

Up and down the country, there are men who spend a couple of hours a week just…sitting, in their ‘comfortable’ armchair, amid their collections of replicas (never ‘toys’ or ‘tat’) or vinyl or books or VHS or Betamax or footie game programmes and just…being.

Somebody with a beard should build a monumental self-storage facility, so that we can all enjoy the Museum of Bloke. 

Iain Banks - ‘Troubled teens, turbulent atheists and really, really big guns’

It's been a year since Ian Banks passed.

Did he not get the memo?  His job was to turn out two books a year, one science fiction, the other of a genre of his choosing, until further notice.  Unfortunately it would appear that the universe had other ideas.

I bloody loved his books.  How does one judge what one’s favourite book is?  How about the number of times tou have re-read it?  Or how much you identify with it?  Or maybe you just happened to read it at a special or important moment in your life?  Or maybe reading the book was the special or important moment in your life.  Certainly, my copy of ‘Espedair Street’ looks well loved, as does my copy of ‘The Crow Road’.  Knowing that there are not going to be any new novels published, I’m going to have to slow down on the re-reading.

And god how I loved the sci-fi stuff.  Science fiction as it should be, with spaceships the size of, well, huge space ships, sardonic robots with loads of ordinance packed away in them, and proper aliens, and cool weapons and robots too.  There was probably some stuff in there about using the art form to examine the human condition but fuck that, I’ll save the introspection for the re-read.

I even loved ‘Raw Spirit’, where Banks essentially drives around distilleries, takes the tour, loads up his boot with scotch and, as far as I can work out, bills the lot to his publisher and writes it off against tax as ‘research’.  Cheers!  There’s probably more to it than that  but I’ll save it for the re-read.

I’ll miss Iain Banks.  I met him a couple of times at book signings and, despite the fact he was hugely popular and had probably been signing books for sweating fanboys like myself for days if not weeks, he had great charm and always seemed flattered that somebody was interested in his writing, and wanted a book signed.  And a hardback at that!

Daytime telly

Daytime television is special.

Back in the day, when television was steam powered and ‘pages from Ceefax’ actually appeared in the TV listings as late night programming (given the choice of that or ‘Babestation’, I know what I’d rather watch), daytime television required careful programming.  There were only so many channels and you had to programme for a specific audience, which included children.  That’s why you had awesome kids telly, made by stoners for stoners or by ridiculously gifted artists who were masters of stop motion and with a few bits of card, some crayons, limitless talent and, yes, a shed, produced shows that induce an element of nostalgia so profound in adults of a certain age that there is talk of adding it to the periodic table.

There have been two major changes to daytime television.

The first was the forced resettlement of all children’s programming to their dedicated digital channels, meaning that BBC1 for instance is no longer home to ‘Blue Peter’, the sort of statement that, for some of us, has a ‘ravens leaving the Tower of London’ level of profundity about it.  However, it’s a move that makes perfect sense and not even the most nylon jumper wearing, monster munch eating, chopper riding, developmentally arrested adult would argue that, because those very same adults must remember occasionally tuning in to get their lunchtime fix of Play School only to be confronted with some bald old man in an ill fitting suit spouting Bolshevik nonsense, because back in the day, kids tee vee was regularly bumped so that the BBC could show live and uninterrupted footage of the TUC conference, or the conference of some sort of political party.  It was like the red button for badly dressed adults wanting to spout crap and foam at the mouth – never mind the plight of the workers, where’s Ivor the Engine you bastards?

The second development is the proliferation of digital channels meaning that these need filling.  This means resorting to imports, usually American.  Of all the channels, the most promising and ultimately the most disappointing has to be E4 which, during the day, promises back to back sitcoms.  The reality is somewhat different.  Regular viewing will in fact reveal that the programmers for E4 appear to have obtained their imported sitcoms not in a deal hammered out in the slick boardrooms of New York, but as a result of purchasing a VHS box set in a charity shop.  This is the only explanation for the channel airing seemingly random episodes of a series, and mixing up the seasons when they show double bills of a sitcom.  This is, however, kind of fun, and an insight into what it must be like to be a time traveller, because you get to see the actors as they were a few years ago, and then recently.  Long story short – we all get fat.

The worst thing about daytime television has to be the adverts.  These are targeted at the audience most likely to be watching at the time and so the adverts are, well, they’re, well…  Put it this way, you know how you get KFC, and then you get those wannabe chicken joints, like ‘Tennessee Fried Chicken’, because the guys who run it couldn’t pass the KFC franchise entrance exam or something?  Well, adverts on daytime telly are a lot like that.  So you get adverts for things not available in the shops.  For a reason.

As a nation, we are supposed to be turning to timeslip television, where we pick the best shows, and ones about gypsies, and watch them when we want, without wading through the endless dross out there to get to them. 

Daytime television turns that premise on its head, you can turn it on and just leave it running.  The sitcoms are so samey that the only way you can tell what season it is is the BMI of the leading lady and the ads are trite to the point of dreadful, but it does exert a soporific effect, weakening ones resolve to reach for the off-switch and a decent hardback in that order.

It makes one look forward to the TUC conference.

Culture Corner

Throughout 2013, Gentleman & Player has never been short of an (unpublished) opinion, informed or not, about the cultural landmarks of the year (such as asking ‘is the Costa or the Orange the one for lezzas?’ before not dashing off 700 words on modern literary prizes).  In an outstanding year for the arts, here were some of the highlights.

Television

Reviews and articles about the final season of ‘Breaking Bad’ continued a trend started by coverage of ‘The Wire’ which implied that the audience is somehow intellectual simply because they were watching the thing.

Strictly Come Dancing continued to amaze, Sir Bruce is a testament to either the wonders of animatronics, or the existence of necromancy.

‘Day of the Doctor’ was best enjoyed in a cinema.  Not just because sitting in the dark gave fans a chance to touch a girl, but because the 3D was perfectly realised and there was, appropriately, yet another dimension to the experience by sharing it with others.

BBC ALBA was a revelation.  You can see premiership football and rugby on the BBC.  OK, it’s Scottish premiership football and rugby, and the football is mostly Partick Thistle, but it’s excellent for a couple of reasons.  Firstly, in the world of Scottish sectarian football, Partick Thistle are like a DMZ, wearing a Jags scarf is guarantee of safe passage in Glasgow.  Interesting to see if this continues if they continue to be quite good.  Second major bonus is that all the commentary is a Gaelic, so nobody can understand a word.  But it all sounds poetic and wonderfully passionate.  Blissful.

Art

Manet at the RA was a masterclass in how to do a lot with not very much at all.  Manet was rich enough not to be arsed to finish most of his paintings.  Still, the new audio guides are good, including a little screen where you can see a picture of the picture obscured by the crowd in front of you.  This was a blockbuster and with London so handy for the Eurostar judging by the accents, and the manners, quite a lot of French had made the trip to see the exhibition.

The RA Summer Exhibition 2013 – surprisingly un-shit this year.

Doig at the Scottish National Gallery – confronted by enormous, colourful canvasses of tropical landscapes, the indigenous population didn’t know what to make of them.  Is a blue sky modernist or surrealist?

Theatre

The exceptional performances in ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ underlined the casual cruelty of the fairy folk.  Sheridan Smith deserves special credit for being able to divert attention from David Walliams, who appeared to be possessed by the ghost of Frankie Howerd.  Smith’s legs are even better than her acting talent, which is exceptional.

Jude Law’s stellar performance as Henry V confirmed that it’s always a great idea to put a film star on the boards.  In a spellbound audience, you could hear the collective raising of hairs standing up on end during the ‘breach’ and ‘St Crispin’s Day’ speeches.  The tears in my eyes were due to an excess of dry ice used as smoke for the battle scenes.

Review: The Mousetrap

The good people of Malvern love a murder, by which I mean they love an artfully produced whodunit, which is why on this rainy November night the Malvern Theatre was full, not a spare seat to be had.  Knowing what lay in store, folk were ready for a treat and obviously, those who had enjoyed previous productions and who are intimate with Agatha, were expecting something worth tempting them out on a night like this, something special.  And something special is what they got, because although the place was packed, as it was observed to me afterwards: 'there was not a sniff, cough or fidget the whole way through'.  True enough and no further accolade is required to underline the quality of this performance of 'The Moustrap'.

What I will say is that the individual performances were excellent.  As usual, the stage contained a number of well known actors, by which I mean well known from the telly, and the play gave them the chance to step out of familiar roles into vintage dress, an opportunity they seized with obvious relish.  It's wrong to single out any sole performance for praise but it's fair to say that the spirit of impending panto season had obviously gripped some of the cast, with Steven France and Karl Howman in particular in fine form, giving a masterclass in how to perform at the very edge of restraint, and when to knowingly push things just that bit further.

Indeed, for a whodunit featuring ghastly grisly murder, the entire play was not short of laughs, there were genuine comedic characters and some finely judged comic moments, all of which gave the darker moments of the play that much more chilling impact.

The play is celebrating its sixtieth year, yet still seems fresh.  Partly this is because the set up, strangers thrown together in a country house hotel that is then cut off from the rest of the world by snow, is timeless, or at least has been timeless for the last sixty years.  But also because, unfortunately, some of those darker themes in the play are still with us and, at the time of this performance, still sadly topical.  The audience were watching a play cherished in part because of its longevity that dealt with contemporary themes.

In 'The Mousetrap' four expected and one unexpected guest arrive at a newly opened hotel and, as the snow thickens outside, the plot thickens inside with the discovery that one may be a murderer.  The first half of the play, with the introduction of the characters and the building of suspicion into paranoia, ensures that the audience has a busy time pointing the finger of suspicion first one way and then the other.  'The Mousetrap' is a glorious mechanism, the plots and sub-plots weaving and ticking along but there is more to it than an admirable structure, as the characters come to life, the audience are drawn in.

And what a pleasant place to be drawn in to.  Once they have cleared out the murderer, I'd quite fancy a week at the hotel.  The set was excellent, an unchanging single room that somehow managed to convey that yes, behind this door is a writing room, behind that one a dining room, behind that one a music room and so on.  As important as the scenery was the lighting, which managed to suggest that particular winter dusk you get when it's been snowing and, for one pivotal scene, transforms the stage and the theatre as day becomes dusk.

That 'The Mousetrap' is celebrating its sixtieth year is testament to its quality as a play and this was an exceptional performance, with cast and crew obviously conscious that they were performing something beloved, with national treasure status.  There was an air of celebration to the performance that might not have been there last year and may not be there next year but that does not matter because, at the conclusion of the play and after the curtain call, one is asked not to reveal the plot.  In that one delicious moment there is complete complicity between audience and performer and with a huge collective wink, everyone goes home happy.

Things

BBC radio and the British Museum (could there be a more thoroughly proper combination of bodies? you can practically taste the tea) have combined to bring the listener 'the history of the world in 100 objects'. Essentially this does exactly what it says on the tin (object 74) and attempts to link the evolution of humanity from two million years ago to now to the objects that man has created and used to help this evolution.

This achieves three essential functions, it finally confirms my theory that things are important and can make you happy - geeks everywhere can celebrate that they might not have a girlfriend but they do have an XBox and the latter is more likely to be featured in this series than the object of their impotent lust: the girl who works behind the counter at the newsagents, resulting in a frequency of visits that is borderline stalking and leads to the accumulation of a vast number of unwanted magazines about, for instance, carp fishing (panic buy in desperate attempt to kick start conversation after eighth visit of the weekend).

Secondly, it is one in the eye for creationists. The British Museum is home to a two million year old hand axe, the earliest tool known to man (not counting the ones that do the breakfast show on local radio), excavated from deserts and so on by scientist types. Creationist museums are, if I recall correctly, home to lots of waxworks of bible scenes and pop-eyed loons.

Finally, it delivers the cheery message that we are still evolving. This is not immediately obvious. There's a pretty compelling argument that human regulation peaked in 1974, with space travel and supersonic passenger flight. People in 1974 were actually living in our future (this explains why the sweets were so brightly coloured, now thanks to nanny-knows-best laws about food colouring chemicals, sweets are essentially the same colour as dung. Well, compared to the arrhythmia inducing pallet of the 70s they are).

The objects chosen so far have been a stone cutting tool and a hand axe (described as the Swiss army knife of the stone age and something of an exaggeration, as there is no corkscrew on it) and one of the modern objects later in the series is an Arab credit card. So, essentially, we have evolved from using a rock to chop up antelope meat to using a plastic wafer to chop up lines of coke in a Knightsbridge night club.

The one hundredth object is the subject of a public search and I have no doubt that there will be plenty of nominations. You'll get your environmentalists (or just mentalists) suggesting things that will take forever to decompose in a landfill, like plastic bags, styrofoam burger cartons or Jordan. You'll get organised campaigns to elect some sort of joke object (inevitably, this will involve a facebook campaign. The inventors of facebook must be the most conflicted people on the planet, on the one hand their invention is hugely successful, on the other hand, all the users appear to be enormous gits with too much time on their hands), like anal beads...only to discover these are not a modern invention and were first discovered up some pharaoh (known as 'the smiling mummy') buried three thousand years ago.

There will be many worthy suggestions and I've no doubt that the trend will be modern; somebody will have that 'hey, who could live without one of these' moments and nominate the hat, or the lawnmower or the cricket bail or something.

Me? I'm nominating the ex. In particular the ex you broke up with because, until you found out the meaning of 'passive/aggressive', you simply thought they were immensely irritating. Maybe not an object, but bloody objectionable. And the best thing is, you just know that two million years ago, in a cave in Africa, this conversation took place:
'You're not eating your antelope?'
'I'm not hungry.'
'Oh, OK.'
'OK? OK? That's all you've got so say. You don't care about me at all do you? You don't care about my feelings, what I want.
(Confused) 'I thought you wanted antelope for tea?'
'Oh shut up.'
Thinks: the sooner we evolve beyond this, the better.

Or maybe I'll just nominate the lawnmower.

Life Laundry

Prompted by the horrified realisation that I was turning into my mother in terms of showing hoarding tendencies, (she has the excuse of coming from a generation where you never threw anything away because a) things could be fixed rather than just replaced back then and b) even if something was knackered beyond repair, it could always be pressed into service as part of a barricade against any Nazi invasion) I decided to get rid of some of my stuff, or ‘junk’ as my wife more accurately if somewhat cruelly describes it.

This was prompted not just by the fear of turning into my Mother in terms of hoarding, but the very real possibility of turning into one of those mad old men who start off hoarding magazine collections that week by week build into a treasury of tat that you’ll treasure forever as it collects dust under your bed. Free binder with part two. Then you start hoarding all newspapers. Then before you know it you’re crapping in a plastic bag and hiding it in a cupboard to keep it safe from the Government.

My extensive video collection sat dust covered and neglected. It wasn’t just that my VCR had started playing up about three years ago and I had never bothered fixing or replacing it, nor was it that I was fickle enough to have transferred my attention first to DVDs, then to the internet (video is okay, DVD is better, youtube is hysterical but nothing, and I mean nothing, tops some desperate presenter on BidUp TV whoring himself live on telly trying to persuade you to buy towels and seeing that they have ten thousand of in stock, sit back, ‘phone your friends and start making bets on when his perspiration and desperation will become visible), it was just I had better things to do. Nintendo mainly.

One thing is for sure, anyone going into the local Oxfam will have one hell of an opportunity to get themselves a world class cinematic education on a budget. No longer will they have to feel slightly inferior because they have not seen classic movies. Even better, I was able to group them by genre.

This proved to be a little bit disturbing. There was a hell of a lot of action movies, with Arnie and Bruce very well represented. This is odd, as I always thought that I was a sensitive little soul, but based on the evidence of my movie tastes, my sensitivity extended to thinking it uncouth if a villain was dispatched without a pithy one-liner.

There’s a book by Umberto Eco about a guy who, after losing his memory, returns to his childhood home to re-read all of the books he consumed growing up. The idea is that it will trigger memory recovery but what the guy is actually trying to do is reconstruct himself from this literature. This is something I’ve often considered, and wondered about its effect, but what the book made me realise is that the character had the realisation that he was just as much a product of what he had read as what he had done. This is more than true in my case as I shamelessly plagiarise anything that might make me sound more witty or important than I actually am. So God alone knows what I would have been like if I had tried to reconstruct my character from my video collection – probably that special 80’s action combination of camp and butch and always ready with a one liner and a rocket launcher.

Obviously, there were some videos that I just could not part with. Video diaries from ten years ago, from the Hay literature festival, from the Edinburgh festival and from Sidmouth Folk Festival, back in the days where my mate owned a broadcast quality video camera and I had a jacket and tie and a microphone and you could get away with just about anything. Also, the Star Wars Trilogy that was bought for me for my 21st. Two reasons to keep this, sentimental value and because they prove, like incriminating CCTV footage, that HAN SHOT FIRST DAMMIT! Oh, and my wedding video.