Nonsense, scraps & musings
Despite responding ‘I’m a writer’ when people ask me what I do, I’ve never really been crystal clear on my calling, or known what form most suits me.
Apart from this. Apart from nonsense.
So when people quite naturally follow up with ‘oh cool, what do you write?’, I no longer rally off genres or say something non-committal and unexciting like ‘allll sorts’ — now I just say ‘nonsense’.
And, blessings be to heaven, that’s normally enough to move things swiftly on. From here, we proceed to cover vital and enduring topics such as the weather, the current political climate, the state-of-play across sports, and enjoyable music that we might well have in common. Jolly good show.
The last one: a Great British standoff
There is a sacred ritual buried deep in the British psyche: leaving a single piece of something.
The scene is staggeringly familiar, no?
You’ve got a big packet of crisps.
Maybe some chocolate nibbles. For that matter, any other item of food, ‘sharer’ or otherwise, is applicable, so fill in the gaps as you please.
The foodstuffs dwindle.
The people around you are grateful, gleeful, greedy, gluttonous!
Everyone’s basking in this tight-knit community of consumption.
Then, somehow, miraculously, a sense of unbecoming shame peers its dirty little head out the pack and fends off the fingers of any horrid soul that dares reach for the final one. Imperceptibly but ever-so-powerfully, the last one exudes a fragrance that fills the room — “don’t-you-dare-reach-for-me”. It’s a staggering forcefield, an insurmountable energy.
It’s either that or the old-fashioned, perpetually misguided politeness of every humble Brit. What precisely is going on in our heads?
Well then, I’ve bordered on barbaric for the last three to five minutes in my approach to this food. I’ve dug in good and proper, commenting at intervals on how good the food is, what a brilliant choice it was, thanking them profusely for buying and sharing, and yes, mmm, another one for me., but now — damn — hang on…there’s one left. I’ll be the Good Samaritan. I’ll do the right thing and leave it because there’s someone more deprived and more deserving on the scene, no doubt about it.
Except everyone’s doing it. So it just sits there. Staring back at us.
It’s as though the feast never even happened; as though the packet no longer exists. The people who just moments ago felt like jovial partners in the partake are now head down, either avoiding eye contact or glancing sideways at you, and then at the packet, and then back at you, all as if to say — are you going to be the unforgivable pig that dips in?
Am I ever! I’m leaving that one for any one of you hedonists to take.
And onward rolls the courteous clusterfudge.
No one is safe. Except for that last one.
Forever untouched. Forever victorious.
The Alternative
Couldn’t you have moored that elsewhere?
Did you decide on the name before or after the mooring?
Am I reading far too much into this?
What in the heavens are you talking about?
Well, just across the river from the gymnasium is a placid little boat; probably room for 5-6 at a time on its upper decks, and a few less below so. It’s white and ocean blue with rear doors of wood, and a small ladder of wood, and a rear bumper or ramp of wood, and little darker blue buoys that hang from its side and sway a little if there’s a big ripple or a bigger gust. They are, quite intelligently, not made of wood. It is forever sat dormant in a spot right across from the exercise bikes upstairs, and when I sit on a bike, either before or after a row or a run, it’s normally kissing 6pm, and the sun is obviously cutting through gaps in brick to just the perfect degree, because its remarkable light falls plush on the back window of this boat, and reflects back up to me, yep, me, sat here pedalling. The blinding sun mixes with the sweat on my brow and in my eyes, and forms some sort of medley with the burn in my lungs and the stench from my pits, and just occasionally the boat sways to the point that the furnace ceases momentarily, and I can make out the name scrawled in shit little calligraphy on the bow:
‘The Alternative’.
Thank you very much for that.
Rabbithole
So what you’re telling me is you’ve never just stamped a word into a search engine with the word ‘definition’ next to it and subsequently ended up on a long, meandering journey of loosely associated words and synonyms? One to the next to this that and the other to oh just one more and, by the time you get to the ‘final’ definition, you may well find it interesting but you can’t for the life of you A) remember what it was you were searching to begin with and B) understand why you just spent fifteen minutes looking at incongruous lexicon.
No? Me neither.
Personal branding
Is there anything more infuriating — anything less emblematic of our extraordinary sapien nuance — than the idea of ‘personal branding’?
What the actual bag of shite are we all on about.
Read this. You’re a human being, most likely. Read it.
“Ironically, “brand” is a concept with an identity crisis. The idea of “personal brand” sounds phony because it is. Brands are carefully contrived; they are not real. Brands are flat, soulless, and artificial “personalities” designed to convince others that the brand is something it is not.”
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I am ready to not. You know? Sometimes just to not is more than enough.
Maybe that's my core brand value. Wheeew.
Le Toob
There’s more than something to be said for the varied neuroses of comers and goers on the Tube. People touch their faces a lot and for different reasons. Some apply makeup in flick mirrors, some sniff their fingers whilst stifling a laugh at a podcast, or perhaps just some mid-distance memory that warms them more than the billowing air between carriages. Some wipe away a stray forelock and others ponder or scratch. These are only the face touching types. There are swathes of others, none of whom I’ll ever know; none of whom anyone will ever know. Every glance or cheek twitch or face touch is accompanied by a plethoric medley of thought, consideration, anxiety, excitement, fear, lust, growth. How has that evaded me? Solipsism. Everyone is an impossibly complex cocktail of impulsive observations, of flickering intrigue.
Charting a course across Paddington, for example, takes you past a deluge of people doing just that, wielding a fierce focus, a reluctance to deviate all that much: all sweating over their own swirling lives or plotting their own poignant paths.
There’s an age-old fascination in watching other people exist, in displacing some of your own angst into the mere multitudes of man, woman, of child as yet unburdened or unenlightened by that angst. We’re all mere amoeba, hurtling, anchored, on a big semi-accommodating rock through the infinite nothingness somethingness out there. And we’re all on le toob.
Untitled time nonsense
“Write about time”.
Ask me to write about music and it not be fatuous garble.
Ask me to dance about architecture.
Request, if you’d be so bold, that I match the pulse of a distant star using solely the skin on my pinky.
For that matter, throw the whole sensational smorgasbord together and scribble away.
Fine buildings and musical production are embedded in time, subject to it, abiding by its ceaseless course. By writing about those things you are — as a prerequisite — writing about or at least within the confines of time. Music and dance are hinged on time — they are in time, to time, occasionally (ashamed to say) off-time. Architecture is a marker of and victim of time.
Unless you're the proud owner of an absurd amalgamation of precise scientific equipment, a distant star is too distant to actually discern the pulse of. All this means is that you can shimmy that pinky howsoever you please and claim it’s perfectly mimicking what you’ll never know. It’s easier to do that than it is to write about time. Ah. My pinky wavers slightly as with all its characteristic, trustworthy regularity, blood is pumped into it and around it and slooshes back up to me ticker. This blood and its micronutrients and its silly little composition is the life of time and the time of life. Time is manifest in every pore and fair hair.
The topic of time is represented by titillation and terror on a tandem bike, trying to tread towards triumph. Because I am an ignorant and sometimes smelly swine, I assume a certain understanding of time as linear, pressing forwards from one ungraspable instance to the next. Writing about time is fun because every typed letter serves as an indicator of a vanquished moment, every shimmy never to be repeated before looming bricks, every pinky boogie bidding adieu to a specific caprice of solar systems. YET! Architecture and music and dance and distant stars all transcend time, too, no? They resist it. They gossip and endure and fuck around with time’s path by re-appearing or re-recreating and casting new light on scenes. A building has more business snuggling up to space than it has trying to tackle time. It intersects time and, initially at least, defies time. If organised well enough; if prudent enough to push your buttons and tickle your fancy, music and sound push beyond the constraints of linear life. That’s why when a stone-cold banger comes you turn to your pal and say ‘timeless’.
Why can’t I write about time? Why can’t I abide by it in every motion of my hands on this keyboard and simultaneously, against all odds, escape it for a moment, or an anti-moment? The time has come to acknowledge that sense falls by the way-side not just in the sentences prior to this but more generally in responses to time. To go and back and ameliorate the jumble, or for you, to go back and try to pluck some use from it — well, that would take...you guessed it...
A penny for your thoughts on appearance
Hair and beauty. Haaaaaaiiiirrrrrr aaaand beeeaauuuty. There is the maddest inclination in this so-called developed world to jump on a big juicy bandwagon should it so establish itself, and should it so be seen as worthy. Somewhere, sometime, on the slippery garden path from the Cognitive Revolution until, what? a few hundred years ago — that thing became the promotion of ‘beauty’. And not ‘beauty’ vis à vis our being around other beings. No no no! ‘Beauty’ insofar as our faces and our skin and our nails and our ears and our hair. Beauty in so far as symmetry, staving off wrinkles, starting the day right, mopping pores and popping flaws. Beauty in so far as an unwritten standard, so that should genuinely intelligent life pop down for a visit, our collective stupidity would be neatly masked by our incredible zest and aesthetic glory.
We’ve got creams and balms and treatments and oils and surgeries. We’ve got sprays and layers and masks. We’ve got bleaches, waxes, tanning agents, glow-ups, glow-downs, glow-arounds. We’ve got curlers, twirlers, straighteners, and shavers. We’ve got ourselves some sweet sweet routines!
At the London Science Museum there is a fascinating section called ‘face as identity’. It reinforces the importance of our first point of contact with others; of course, this caters to those with their vision and unbridled ability to perceive emotions, focusing on the complex canvas affront our swedes rather than any jingling medley of body language, attire, preconception and more. It’s fascinating nonetheless. But surely ‘face as identity’ encompasses more so our expressions and responses than the flawlessness of our skin or straightness of our teeth. Our glee or gripe, our resting growl or riled-up glow, over and above our sculpted brows? Maybe I’m wrong. I’m probably wrong. Stick to it. Buy more ointments you little oinker! Across the road from the museum, and on every third bus shelter OOH ad, is an immaculate face and a little bottle of anti-ageing cream.
Blessed be. To each their radiant own.
21st Century Fletcher
If I was an actual Fletcher in the 21st century, I would be an ‘important’ final step in the production line. Absolutely heaps of arrows would work their way to me from the woodsmiths and pointers and other bemused archaic handypeople. Arrows pointing forwards; arrows pointing upwards; more than plenty backwards. Arriving in clumps in wicker baskets or loose and languid, I’d do my part, imposing the final, fabulous flourish — the finest feathers, a smooth selection of aerodynamic apathy.
What else to SAYE?
Here’s a fun one. My first job was in financial services. This is a fun one because I find financial services so insanely inane it’s almost cause for physical discomfort. At the very least a wince. I’m alright at pretending. I was. LOOK I GET IT. Finance and money and benjamins and fat stacks and shrapnel will be the pervasive tour guide to the rest of my time ‘pon planet earth (I estimate 12 years) but my concerns are as such:
1. It is through the necessity of surviving as a semi-independent adult human that I must pursue financial ‘security’
2. If it was not such a necessity I would not be here, writing all the time about finance.
One can only deduce that it is a monumental waste of my disparate interests to be cooped up indoors writing technical garble about share plans. Of course, this is two parts unfounded narcissism, one part realism, and a lovely little sprinkly flourish in the form of hope, but it also prompts me to conclude that:
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1. It is possible to gain ‘financial security’ without the compromise of writing about financial services
2. To do so one must disembark the proverbial high horse, put themselves out there, and broaden their craft with great persistence.
Without these recurrent two-tone lists and their flimsy thinking you will likely end up being here, alluding to interest rates and added value services. And have a good festive season.
Here’s the craziest and most evident thing, though…
This is — to my knowledge — the single little life I am likely to lead. But what bright ideas do I have? What fictions? What philosophies? Nout new. As you can very well tell there are a number of discontented little pebbles stirring and swirling upon the shore of my swede-beach (weird metaphor). Better I just pen a lament than do anything about it.
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HANG ABOUT!
I know a good fiction. Here it is:
There’s a world that spluttered itself into existence entirely by chance, and thereafter it winged it hard, fast, and nasty. But for all the wrong turns and barbarism there was one sweet relief. In this world, everyone — that’s everyone! You, I, them over there, him on the blower, her in the tower — everyone is entirely indifferent to wealth. No-one’s tightly wound and anal about their finances. Stability and security refers to your health and your surroundings, rather than the figure in your account. Excess and avarice are fools staring eachother down across a chess board. But what’s that? The chess board is electronic and it’s programmed for both sides to lose. A ha! Anywho this vast reprogramming, this very relaxedness permits people to be goofy, ironic and splendidly cynical in their daily takings, fearing not the economic repercussions. Banks are still needed but they’re run by cool people saying cool things, and everyone who is dry and dull goes to work for entertainment companies and the world flips on its head and it’s all very confusing but hey that’s the fiction.
Velvet cushion
I walked to Lancaster Priory one afternoon to watch the sunset. From the wall atop the slope, where my legs dangled and the palette changed hues, I could see a woman down on the bench past the cascaded paving stones. I went down and struck up a conversation with her. I looked through her binoculars at the birds on the silvergold horizon. I sat and talked to her for a while. I was interested in her — in her experience and situations, complete with recurrent care trouble and the folly of family laws. I was interested in her — in her past partners and her drug use, in her definition of a heroin high as a ‘velvet cushion that surrounds you and pushes away the undesirable things’. In the fact the NHS told her ‘you’re required to keep on using until we assess you for a detox’. Pinches of salt and pinches of pepper. There must be some failings or falsities, else someone as (seemingly) switched on and engaged with the world would be permitted visitations with their own children.
Beneath the darkening, pretty sky; along the shores of her short stories; down the alleyways of her anecdotes; betwixt the complex histrionics, perhaps it’s all rather simple: someone who longs to return should be afforded the opportunity. Someone who wishes to be involved and educated again should have the right to be so.
Chewin
There’s no time like the present to absolutely savage that patch of appealing skin that lives — but oh goodness me not for long — as the neighbour to one's nail. Go on, go for it. Got a doozy? Don’t settle for a slight and manageable pain. No half measures. Mild discomfort is for the weak and the puny. Drag and nibble further on that there skin, really do it no favours at all. What do you owe it? It’s only the divine design or evolutionary necessity for the containment of blood and the concealment of lower layers of flesh. When you’ve got it between your gnashers, try your utmost to wield that little strip of flesh as far down toward the knuckle as possible. The ultimate goal of this pursuit — and you’ll really be winning if you make this happen — is to make it so sore and to make it weep blood so incessantly that you wonder if any amount of tissue can stem its tide. Go on! There’s no time like the present!
Sign up today for your free self-torture at www.youreasclosetoapathologiccannibalasyoucanget.co.bite
Why did the chicken cross the road?
‘Why did the chicken cross the road?’ said one socio-psychologist to the other.
‘I don’t know, Dirk (we’ll call him Dirk, the joke teller) — why did the chicken cross the road?’
‘Because that chicken was born into the trembling, continuous devolution of current day affairs, Rob — (we’ll call him Rob, the other party) — and the chicken saw the other side of the road as a real opportunity to change his circumstances, to change his scenery and his likely outcomes. Because the chicken had assumed (with a sort of semi-misguided, semi-altogether wise cluck of its little feather-coated-nug) that staying on the same side of the road would make its eventual chicks pre-destined to that side, to its prejudices, to its entitlements and pitfalls and worries. The chicken not only felt willing to navigate the tricky traffic on that there road, Rob, but it had to do so a number of times, having initially and continuously been knocked down, clipped, shouted at, snarled at and made memes out of (something post-ironic, I’ve heard, no doubt to do with the interesting trope of a chicken crossing the road).
‘Right on Dirk, that’s typical of you isn’t it? To pull a switcheroo like that on a classic opening line. I liked it and I think the metaphor you were driving at without subtlety is pretty suitable to your bleak demeanour, but I’ve some queries, if I may?’
‘Oh god yeah sure, go ahead, ask away, we’ll fracture the normal chronology of this joke thing with a healthy back-and-forth…’
‘Ok, so why would the chicken feel inclined to cross the road at all if it could very well see the other side? Its feather-coated-nug (the brain, I assume) being little or not, surely the chicken could quite easily equate — (assuming chickens have the visual apparatus to draw comparisons – do they? A separate point, perhaps) — equate the chaotic, troublesome scenes over there with what it was experiencing on its own side? How different could it be? Why did it allow things like storefronts or street cleanliness to sway it? Those are menial, I’d argue inconsequential things to dictate a decision. Or were there bountiful meadows over there? Then I guess I’d understand, but I can’t think of many instances where the two sides of a road differ so magically from one another to cause a complete uproot’.
‘Important points, Rob, thank you. Unfortunately, your take on inconsequentialism is itself inconsequential, for how would the chicken reasonably know what the other side would be like until it gets there? Aesthetics account for but a slither. It’s evident from the chicken having attempted to cross the road that it has the want and the will to do so (that is, for the sake of this concise and witty joke, that we assume it’s not a capricious decision). Sure enough, too, the hazardous terrain between its current side and its yearnings is not enough to stop it, but is rather seen as a necessary go-between — both for itself and for the liberal state it feels the other side will bestow on any offspring current or forthcoming. And sure as day, if the other side proves ripe with new light on one day and downcast / familiar the next, that chicken may well revert and tackle the deathzone once more, no?’
‘Wouldn’t that render the initial journey obsolete?’
‘No no. The things the chicken learns en route, from A to B, are the important part. The knowledge of the other side not being worth the journey, the joke-negating realisation, if you will, is enough to warrant it having taken place. The total opposite — i.e. the chicken being content on its current side, or fearing too much the consequences of the crossing, or otherwise being struck by overthinking and inertia — well, that would be harmful to the chicken and to the joke beyond acceptance.’
‘No Dirk, you’re right. I’ve got a joke for you as well by the way…’
‘Yeah? Hit me’.
‘A bunch of chickens walk into a financial services workshop…’
Hahahahahahahaha.
Moonlighting as Sinatra
​You know, my good sir, my dearest lout of the Inn, my old karaoke bandit, my old waster, there is every chance that despite you belting it out every other night in the same tone-deaf pomp, despite the guttural passion you throw to its words, you know — my old public nuisance — there’s a very good chance that you did not, in fact do it ‘your way’; or, if you did, that way is now ablaze with stark and irreversible despair, to which you’re either ignorant or apathetic, and there’s something gnawing and nibbling away at a little cluster of your brain cells that tells you moonlighting as Sinatra on ale absolves you of your entirely horrible life.
CAPTIONS
For a few years now I’ve plodded my ungainly frame down the way to Bristol’s M Shed, where for an ecstatic, extended run the museum’s top floor lays host to Wildlife Photographer of the Year — curated and produced by London’s Natural History Museum. Oh it’s a most excellent selection of natural photography, don’t you ever dare get me wrong.
During my visits I invariably find myself imagining the process not just of the photographer — a grasp of their craft so fine-tuned as to capture intimate, stunning, devastating moments, snapshots, fractions of a second so immaculately attuned to a wider sense of being — but also the life and task of whomsoever it was that received, admired and researched the photographs in order to write those lovely little placards beneath each. I’m onboard.
I'm onboard with the brevity, the scintillating jingle of information and emotion, the nod to technical details as well as the subject, its implications, and what, perhaps, comes next. All in about, what — 100 words? I’m onboard. I accept your offer of employment and I yelp into my pillow like a teenage superfan.
Thierry Ennui
The rays fly off every wall and then settle. You’re awake. To stretch, to eliminate the tension of the night, to welcome the limber of the day. You’re up. The frying pan sits on the hob, spitting with appreciation, and the clouds share the sentiment. You sit down languid and sip on something, hankering to energise yourself. You say little. There is little different to say than there was yesterday, last week, a year ago. You’re dressed the same, you’re thinking the same. Does anyone have any zeal to steal? There’s unlikely to be any issues resolved today, is that fair to say? You can crunch numbers, you can crunch words, and you can crunch that lunchtime packet of Hula Hoops — will any of it change that grand old facade often referred to as the ‘big picture’? You sit down. You work. You go for a walk. You sit down. That higher figure at that job you have comes over and pretends to know who you are. The talk is smaller than small. But at least you’re on task. Hey, at least you’re getting the job done and that’s mighty helpful to the grand collective fallacy, the pooled, powerful goal of goodness and change. You champ, you’re contributing. You’re quite content, actually. It’s been a busy day of sitting quite still and your pride gland has swollen to a level a little beyond the norm. You are nearly finished. You are focussed. Everyone around you is sitting down and contributing; they’re doing just what you’re doing. The clock is up. You shake a few clammy hands. Those hands are pioneering, surely, just like yours. The bus seat gives you backache. You labour over opening the door. The keys are flung. I think it’s time to sit down. No real time to stand up for anything today. Maybe tomorrow. No, probably not tomorrow.
A round tuit
Harken me back, good sir, to an assembly we had at St. Edward’s back in Year 8. We were at the pinnacle of middle school stardom, graduating from cross-legged floor-sitting to bench royalty. How old? 12, I think. One particular conclave one particular morning, as we looked down at the snotty little fuckers ahead of us, Ms. McAdam (gah, the rowdy French deputy and certified hardass) put on an assembly that started with an image of what looked like a a lifebuoy. A regular flotation device, all things considered. She started talking about the dinghy, the lifeline, the thrown buoy — referring to it as a ‘round tuit’.
She continually stated that us here species are hardwired to shun action and opt rather to get a ‘round tuit’. Programmed to put things off, in essence. I’m sure the delivery wasn’t as slick or stimulating as the idea itself, but it must have struck some sort of juvenile nerve, given that I’m writing about it now and that it's made its way into this spectacular section of nonsense and nothingness. The point being: I am full of promise. Oh god yeah. Up to my eyeballs in aspirations. And Ms. McAdam was bloody right: I perpetually postpone. When will that no longer be the case? Ever? If you asked all hyper-conscious adults if they’re culprits of the same thing would you anticipate they’d answer to the affirmative? Ah golly, what have you done to me ye olde Ecumenical.