Then the TV clicked off. I sat up in shock and realised it must have been a power cut. The laptop was still on battery power so I decided to log onto the internet and see what was going on. The modem still needed power, even if the computer didn’t (yet). Also, the wireless network I sometimes “borrow” seemed to have gone down as well.
So I read a book, made a cup of tea on the stove and when it got dark, lit some candles I found from the last power cut we had.
And then the little blinking light came on the TV and I ran around the flat whooping, turning on all the lights in the style of the Blackpool Illuminations.
* A name that oddly, is very similar to my so-called “porn star” name.
I am the greatest self-medicator of all time. Possibly.
I have probably been to the doctor three times in the last fifteen years (first time when I was 16 and one of the teachers thought I was suicidal, that’s a story I’ll tell another time*; the second time when I fell over and sprained my elbow and the third time when I got a chest infection) but I do like pharmacies, as I’ve previously mentioned. I’m not one of those people who won’t have drugs because they build up in your body and then the germs become super strong and you have to go around licking kitchen floors to lower your immune system sufficiently for medicine to work again. No way.
Pharmacies have a certain “vibe” about them. My previous favourite vibey place was those international phone places, but they’ve all turned into internet cafes now. Then there’s second-hand book stores where you are glared at by a middle-aged women for recklessly thumbing through a first edition of Breakfast of Champions, for example. They smell nice, though.
A good example of this love I have for self-medicating is when I ran out of Lemsip when I had a cold, and made my own by stirring honey into boiling water, squirting in some lemon juice and grinding up some ibuprofen in a pestle and mortar and chucking that in as well. It tastes so much better when you make it yourself.
It doesn’t have to be “proper” medication though, I’ve had funny looks swigging back the cough syrup on the tube for one, I also have a range of food and drink and other remedies: for example sore throats usually mean whipping out the blackcurrant schnapps, toothache means a packet of kreteks, liquorice sweets for coughs, caffeine tablets to perk me up, Vaseline for my chapped lips, condensed mushroom soup for cold and so on and so forth.
Getting drunk isn’t usually recommended as self-medication, although it can work as a useful distraction. But if you must, hangovers can usually be cured by copious amount of chocolate, something caffeinated (not coffee as that rots the stomach and that’s the last thing you need in that condition) and gallons of water. My brother swears by beans on toast, which certainly gives you the sugar rush, but is far too sensible to be having for breakfast.
Mmmm… beans
* It is less interesting then you think but it does involve irritating teenage lust, a fire and a tin whistle.
One of the most important rules of my blogging is “no repetition”, an axiom I would add to Tim Footman’s Dogme-esque blogging manifesto, if I had to.
This was part of the reason (as much as there actually was a discernible reason I could attempt to explain) why I deleted my former blog and attempted to start afresh in pastures new. The other reason, if you’re interested was because early posts on the former blog found me still attempting to find my feet and I wanted to start from the top as if I knew what I was doing. Which I still don’t really.
Nevertheless I feel the urge to repeat myself today. Some of you who read my previous blog may recall my Book Dedications.
I bought a couple of books from charity shops which had dedications in. Despite this, the person who received the book felt they wanted to give the book away to raise a few quid for Oxfam or the British Heart Foundation.
I am a keen book dedicator myself, if I ever buy someone a book I will always try and write something in it. The best book dedications should be slightly embarrassing to the person receiving the book, although not embarrasing enough that they feel the urge to give the book away though.
What kind of a person would give a book with a dedication in away? I’m sure some of them the dedicatee died or something, which would excuse it, but this can’t have happened to all of them.
To this end, I have set up a Group on Flickr, entitled Book Dedications and I would like to solicit book dedications from you. They don’t have to be book dedications like the ones I have described, if you have a nice one that you’d like to share, please let me know.
And if you’re on Flickr, please come and join the group…
I celebrated by leaving for work slightly earlier than usual and sat in a cafe just up the road from my office, eating a Danish and drinking tea.
I’m not sure about this, but I suspect this is the worst possible way I have ever “celebrated” being paid, although the time I treated myself to NON-SUPERMARKET own brand tea probably comes a very close second.
What is the most pointless thing you’ve done when in the money?
Writing a newspaper column is a bit like doing stand-up comedy, except that for newspaper columns on both sides of the political divide have an annoying tendency to substitute jokes with outrage.
Writing a blog is a bit like writing a newspaper column too, albeit one with no rules and that hardly anyone reads. This is a good thing because no newspaper would print this what with my writing
PRICKFUDGE
in large letters right in the middle of it all. And that just about sums up my maturity level, I’m sure you’ll agree.
With blogs, newspaper columns and stand-up people prefer to find someone who reinforces their prejudices: “they say what normal people are thinking”, “their skewed view on life” and so on.
As the question of homosexuality and the Anglican Communion seems to be in the air, I read two books to enlighten me. They have had the disconcerting effect of making me revise my judgment about the whole matter.
I used to think that it was intolerable for anti-gay bigots to use their repellent prejudices to blackmail the harmless Anglican homosexuals, many of whom have enriched the Church with their many gifts. But these two American books have made doubt shimmer through me.
Okay… *backs away*
The other side of this can be evidences by my reading of Charlie Brooker, a man clearly on my wavelength, at least I like to think so, writes about how much he hates hats, with particular reference to Ascot.
Every year it’s the same thing: a 200-year-old countess you’ve never heard of, who closely resembles a Cruella De Vil mannequin assembled entirely from heavily wrinkled scrotal tissue that’s been soaked in tea for the past eight decades, attempts to draw attention away from her sagging neck - a droopy curtain of skin that hangs so low she has to repeatedly kick it out of her path as she crosses the royal compound - by balancing the millinery equivalent of Bilbao’s Guggenheim museum on her head, and winds up forming the centrepiece of a light-hearted photomontage in the centre of whatever newspaper you happen to be reading that day, accompanied by a picture of Princess Eugenie in a headdress, and some milky underfed heiress with the physique of a violin-playing mantis, wearing nothing but a diamante cornflake on each nipple and a hat made out of second-hand dentures or something equally avant-garde.
I too have a funny shaped head and hate hats but in some perverse way I like putting them on. Hey, if you’re not doing anything this weekend why don’t we go down Marks & Sparks Marble Arch and I’ll try on all the panamas. I’ll buy you a mocha if you come along.
I have discovered the perfect way of dealing with those awkward silences in the lift at work: eating and drinking.
I tried eating crisps the other day, but all of that crunching and rustling in a confined space annoyed me, so God knows what my fellow lift occupants thought. Shut up, probably.
But yesterday I discovered the perfect thing: drinking yogurt. The brand I discovered comes in a carton with a straw and a rather nice strawberry flavour.
As I walked into the office, I had to lunge for the lift. Normally I don’t care if I miss it the first time, but with one of our lifts out of action, I’d probably have to wait ages as the lift visited every floor on the way up and every floor on the way down.
There was someone in the lift from my floor. Result! I didn’t even have to press the button.
She regarded me quizzically.
What’s that you’re drinking? she said.
Yogurt, I replied. Drinking yogurt.
Oh I don’t agree with that, she said. Yogurt should be eaten not drunk. I don’t agree with drinking food. It’s a bit like that stuff, you know, not really liquid or solid.
I slurped on my drink, unable to think what she meant.
Jelly, she said.
Oh right, I replied. I do know what you mean, and I’m not normally massively into drinking yogurt.
Here I was thinking of all those annoying adverts with friendly bacteria and the like.
But this is nice, I continued. And it’s strawberry flavour.
As we left the lift, I noticed her fingernails were painted with green nail polish. Could she be subconsciously imitating Sally Bowles? Is this a further sign from the cosmos that I should go to Berlin?
I haven’t been to very many wedding, which is just as well as I’m not really a big fan of them. Sure they’re more fun than funerals, but they go on all day and you have to sit next a stranger while you eat 525 courses and then there’s the speeches and so on.
Only two weddings I’ve attended have ended in divorce. I’m not sure if this is a good number or not.
At my brother’s wedding, I was put in charge of music. Thankfully, this doesn’t mean I was on the wheels of steel, I had to do a soundtrack to the early parts of the wedding; the early parts of the reception, the meal etc.
When I finally get to open up my own chemist shop, I know exactly what it’s going to be like: shaped like a human body with the relevant medication located in the appropriate part of the shop.
You walk in and find yourself near the athlete’s foot powders and corn plasters, move up through the knee supports, up to the condoms and constipation remedies, through the cough syrups up to the lip gloss and shampoo. It’s the perfect lay out.
I thought about this today when I was in the queue at Boots. It’s always busy there, mainly because they also do food. Annoyingly, they don’t sell food with crushed-up pills in, this would be quite appropriate.
Yes, I’d like a crayfish and rocket salad sandwich with tons of ground-up valiums in please.
Anyway… in the queue I was stood by the constipation remedies which are right next to the diarrhoea remedies, as they would be in my hypothetical chemist. The promotes a probably unlikely situation where, in a rush you get the wrong one, making an already bad situation even worse.
As far as I can tell, there isn’t another pair of medicines or conditions that would cause this. If I bought some haemorrhoid cream and I didn’t have piles, it’s not going to cause piles to appear although I used to think this happened when I was young.
Say I didn’t want to go to school and I said I had a headache, but didn’t, and was given a aspirin, this would cause me to get a headache, presumably serving me right in a kind of poetic justice type situation.
I’ve long been of the opinion that virtuosity is over-rated - in the creative arts at least.
Take the field of popular music for example. The best popular music is sung about the hopelessness of love, by someone of a slightly androgynous appearance with a beat in the background that goes “boom bap boom-boom bap”. This even goes back to the 16th century, although they didn’t have the drum beats yet as the Africans hadn’t got much involved with popular music as yet. Take John Dowland for example:
Flow, my teares, fall from youre springs,
Exiled for ever, let mee mourn
Where night’s black bird hir sad infamy sings,
There let mee live forlorn.
And so I’ve always been a bit suspicious of prog rock and heavy metal (sorry llewtrah!). Too many times I’ve been promised “epic music that’ll blow my mind” and just heard something akin to, to utilise a common cliché, masturbation*. That doesn’t mean anything complicated is beyond me, it’s just keeping it simple is an excellent philosophy.
That said, one of my favourite things is when a clearly capable artist chooses to eschew their virtuosity and do something really simple, yet you can tell there’s something greater behind that. They just don’t feel the urge to show it off. A few licks of instrument or paint or whatever and you’re done.
It is one thing I have always lacked in my own musical endeavours. I’m probably too riddled with self-conciousness.
For example, I was playing in band a few years back with a friend of mine. He turned up at one practice with a tape he’d made of himself playing guitar (he was the drummer). There were two sections and he indicated that we should play the second section straight after the first. The guitarist and I looked at each other and voiced the opinion that would never work. They were in different keys and had different rhythms. But we had a go and it sounded amazing. Even if I’d managed to think of those particular musical patterns I never in a million years would have imagined putting them together.
Another time he described to me a keyboard part he wanted me to play over a particular section. It sounded good but I was a bit confused. Everyone else is playing in 4 time, I said. And this part is in 7 time, so I’ll gradually go out of sync with everyone else. Once I’d managed to get my head around playing in a different time to everyone else (an effect that is amazingly disorientating) I realise that the 7 time keyboard part came back into time with everyone else at the end of the section. Amazing. Once again, I could never have thought of doing that.
I’m off now to jam down every key of my keyboard and listen to the noise that results. * I’d like to see legendary “found sound” musicians Matmos build the rhythm of an entire track around the sound of masturbation. The sound of semen hitting a piece of paper just doesn’t cut it for me.
